Acemoglu (@DAcemogluMIT) and Robinson's point is that policies that are counter-productive to development can be optimal from the point of view of political elites. For example, Brazil has been relatively stagnant compared to other similar economies in recent economic history (i.e., China, Korea, India, Indonesia, Russia, Vietnam, et al.). But if you are a top-1% Brazilian household, you are doing great, and fast economic growth involves creative destruction, which means you might end up worse-off (for example, your domestic servants might get too expensive, lowering your real standard of living), so there is no incentive for top-1% Brazilians to have faster economic growth. So, in a political system where these top 1% control politics, is a political system that will implement policies that will not create broad based economic development. Acemoglu (@DAcemogluMIT) and Robinson's critical contribution is therefore that relatively stagnant poor countries like Brazil are not only the result of ignorance regarding the laws of economics (that leads to poor policies), but it also can be, in addition, due to a political system that lacks institutions that fully take into consideration the welfare of the broad base of the population. I think that poor political economy incentives and also the ignorance regarding the laws of economics are both important element in Brazil's failure to develop over the past 100 years. I also think that today that Brazil is a broad democracy, the ignorance aspect is more important than Acemoglu and Robinson's the political economy aspect. That is, Brazilian growth has underperformed in recent decades because our elected administrations have had bad ideas about how economic policy should be conducted (i.e., "expenditure is life"). One can create political economy theories why these bad ideas currently exist in the heads of decision makers, but then, it becomes a Freudian analysis.