Yes, one bourgeois prejudice per paragraph is the proper rate for a blog on the Economist's website

The first offends my professional judgement, though the second is the more politically virulent by far.

I WANT to elaborate on one particular aspect of the institutional arguments in "Why Nations Fail". In the book, Mssrs Acemoglu and Robinson tell the story of a sad gentleman named William Lee. Lee was an English priest who invented a knitting machine in 1589 that promised to make the production of knitted garments dramatically faster and easier. Unfortunately for him, Britain had not yet evolved the institutions that would support extensive private enterprise. Queen Elizabeth essentially told him where to put his machine, and it would be two centuries more before significant automation came to the knitting industry.

I was thinking of that while reading through Alex Tabarrok's ebook "Launching the Innovation Renaissance". Mr Tabarrok notes that innovation is a critical source of sustainable economic growth, but he argues that barriers have arisen to innovation and entrepreneurship in several critical areas. Teachers unions are one example; a more educated workforce is needed to develop new technologies, but interests opposed to reform of America's school system make it difficult to invest appropriately in human capital.