Two ? academics on the warpath?
Trying to figure out why nations fail is somewhat silly if you begin with a linear model. In any event, for total social failure there is probably a host of small factors that add up to a pretty big whole. All theories are in danger of being speculation because it's very hard to forecast out of the box and sometimes the smallest things really do have a butterfly effect. In any event, chaos is normally on the rise and there is an Achilles heal in almost all life and organic mechanism dependent so much on balance. Disequilibrium rules as Gates well knows, and to live longest you need to have the soundest of moral principles, whatever these might be?
Bill Gates, for an engineer, is remarkable. I don't understand what the Foreign Policy writers hope to get out of criticism. I do know that they are in danger of being seen as fairly unsophisticated come lately's, even in foreign policy issues!