Non-Extractive Institutions — What Mondragón, Wikipedia, and the Metro Have in Common
In 2012 the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson published Why Nations Fail, and gave a name to something most people had only felt: institutions built to funnel the wealth their workers create toward a narrow group that controls the gate. They called this extraction, and set it against its opposite — institutions built so that the people producing the value are also the people who keep it, which they called inclusion. The distinction sounds obvious once stated. What’s harder is finding the inclusive kind in the wild, sustained, at any size worth studying, rather than as a slogan painted over an extractive arrangement underneath. …