Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson

*Inclusive* economic institutions secure broad property rights, enforce contracts impartially, permit entry, and reward effort across a wide population; they pair with *inclusive political institutions* that distribute power pluralistically and constrain elites. *Extractive* institutions concentrate power and channel resources from the many to a narrow elite, deterring the investment and innovation that drive sustained growth. Key work: *Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty* (Acemoglu & Robinson 2012, Crown).

Differences in physical and human capital and technology are *proximate* causes of income gaps; the *fundamental* cause is the institutional environment that determines incentives to accumulate and innovate. Geography and culture matter mainly through their effect on institutions, not directly. Key work: "Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth," *Handbook of Economic Growth* ch. 6 (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson 2005; DOI 10.1016/s1574-0684(05)01006-3).

Where Europeans could settle (low mortality), they built institutions protecting property and constraining the executive; where they could not, they built extractive states to pump out resources. Those institutional patterns persisted and explain a large share of present-day income differences. This is their identification strategy for the causal role of institutions. Key work: "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," *American Economic Review* 91(5):1369-1401 (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson 2001; DOI 10.1257/aer.91.5.1369).

Regions that were *relatively rich* in 1500 (dense, urbanized) became *relatively poor* by 1900, because colonizers imposed extractive institutions where there was a population and surplus to extract, and inclusive ones in sparsely settled lands. Institutions, once laid down, persist and reverse pre-existing prosperity rankings. Key work: "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," *Quarterly Journal of Economics* 117(4):1231-1294 (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson 2002; DOI 10.1162/003355302320935025).

Institutional trajectories turn on *critical junctures* (the Black Death, Atlantic trade, the Industrial Revolution) interacting with small institutional differences to produce large, path-dependent divergence; outcomes are contingent, not determined. Liberty itself is a narrow, contested *corridor* between despotism and anarchy, sustained only when state and society balance each other. Key work: *The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty* (Acemoglu & Robinson 2019, Penguin).

Whether technology broadly shares prosperity or concentrates it depends on who controls the choice of innovation direction; a thousand years of "progress" frequently enriched narrow elites while immiserating producers. Technological optimism without institutional design is naive. Key work: *Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity* (Acemoglu & Johnson 2023, PublicAffairs).

Acemoglu and Robinson would interrogate any space governance or space-economy claim with one organizing question: *who holds the power to set the rules, and do those rules open access and secure rights for the many or lock in extraction by an incumbent few?* They are skeptical of technological and geographic determinism, attentive to distributional politics, insistent on credible enforcement and constraints on the powerful, and alert to how today's "critical juncture" (the early space-economy build-out) will calcify into persistent institutions.