Ultimately, attempts to engineer prosperity are really based on the misleading “ignorance” hypothesis (the idea that poor countries are poor because their leaders are ignorant or irrational). Acemoglu and Robinson aren’t opposed to good economic policies. Rather, they’re against policy change
as a substitute for institutional change. In other words, they think that institutions have to change
first in order for policy changes like the IMF’s to succeed later on. In Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone, the IMF tried to force inclusive economic policies on an extractive political system. Unsurprisingly, politicians simply distorted the IMF’s policy to make it extractive. This reinforces the authors’ principle that extractive political institutions almost always lead to extractive economic institutions—and building inclusive economic institutions almost always requires building inclusive political ones first.