Economic Principals bungled its preparation and is not writing this week.

In beginning to read Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown, 2012), by Daron Acemoglu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and James Robinson, of Harvard University, I learned that the authors had launched a blog in order to stimulate interest in their book,

Their first post — along with the photograph of rock star Sting and Gulnara Karimova, the globe-trotting Harvard-educated daughter of Uzbeki despot Ismail Karimov, attending a fashion show in Tashkent — conveys some of the excitement of the book.

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