Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy @JohnsHopkins
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"The Nobel committee is supporting NIE’s legitimisation of property/wealth inequality and unequal development. Rewarding AJR also seeks to re-legitimise the neoliberal project at a time when it is being rejected more widely than ever before." ~ Jomo Kwame Sundaram (co-editor of "Is Good Governance Good for Development?", a thought-provoking book)
A reminder from “Braiding Sweetgrass” 
Much of world assumes anything about China is exceptional & exotic, while anything about the West is universal
The term "rise" must be qualified
Convention 👑
A&R do not define "inclusive" or "non-extractive" institutions
Instead, premodern societies were more “communistic” than capitalist 
So naturally incentives gear toward trivial questions that can be (a) precisely & perfectly answered, (b) accepts conventional wisdom and wins approval.
Classical economists: America's development began with "the European form of good institutions" 
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the good/strong institutional forms found in rich democracies are NOT universal preconditions for development
Complicated objects are made up of many separate parts that do not interact and change with one another (e.g., toasters). 
Endogeneity (mutual causation), like ambiguity 👇, is a fact of life 
A template, like any infrastructure, is a powerful thing, constraining what you look for
Sun's defining thesis, "The International Development of China" (1919), reads like a boring blueprint of what China has been doing since the 1980s. But in those days, Sun was seen as a utopian, even a crackpot, for his vision of modernizing China's infrastructure. 🚆 