But instead the Capitol imposes a single purchaser of mine labor and offers subsistence wages. In a free society, market competition for labor and union organizing would drive wages up. It’s oriented around a coal mine, the kind of facility where unskilled labor can be highly productive in light of the value of the underlying commodity. And while the injustice of it all led to periodic revolutions, the typical pattern was for the new boss to simply seize control of the extractive institutions and run them for his own benefit.ĭistrict 12 is a quintessential extractive economy.
These institutions discourage savings and investment, since everyone knows any wealth can and will be arbitrarily expropriated. They set up “extractive institutions” whose purpose was to wring as many natural resources (silver, gold, food) from the land as possible while keeping power in the hands of a narrow elite. When Spanish conquistadors showed up in the prosperous areas of Latin America, they stole all the gold they could get their hands on and then set about putting the native populations to work. The places that are rich today were poor then, while those that are poor today were generally rich in the past. It turns out that if you turn the clock back about 500 years, the pattern was reversed. If you plot per capita income in the Americas today, you see a clear pattern with the United States and Canada ahead, the southern cone around Chile and Argentina in second place, and the middle portion much poorer. So how can Panem, more than 70 years after the conclusion of its last major battle, be so poor and yet so rich in knowledge?Ī book released this week by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson-the former a professor at MIT, the latter at Harvard-called Why Nations Fail can help shed some light on bleak conditions in District 12 but also why Collins doesn’t attempt to portray everyday life in many of Panem’s other districts.Īcemoglu and Robinson’s general theory can be grasped through the lens of the “reversal of fortune” they observe in the Western Hemisphere and originally described in an academic paper co-authored with Simon Johnson.
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