The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Published when Landes was seventy-four, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations was a sweeping global history whose central argument earned him charges of Eurocentrism and whose empirical rigor made those charges insufficient to dislodge it. The book traced five centuries of divergent national economic performance and concluded that the variable explaining most of the variance was not geography, not resources, not even institutional quality in the narrow sense, but culture — the accumulated habits of mind that determine whether a society encourages curiosity or punishes it, rewards initiative or suppresses it, distributes opportunity broadly or hoards it among a narrow elite. The book's provocation was deliberate: Landes understood that polite qualifications would obscure the central insight that two societies with identical access to the same technology produce radically different outcomes depending on the values they bring to that technology.