06/16/2026
This book reached me the way the best ones usually do, handed over by someone whose judgment I trust, and I've been working through it on Audible, a chapter at a time, on the road and on long walks. Somewhere in the opening half hour, at the two Nogaleses, I stopped where I was walking. The authors had taken the largest question in political economy, why a few nations are rich and most aren't, and set it down inside a single border town small enough to cross on foot.
Somewhere in the first hour, it started sending me back to other books...the classics.
It sent me to an old shelf, with volumes I bought years ago and have carried through a few dozen moves. Gibbon came down first, the fall of Rome across all six volumes, the spine cracked at the page where I'd last left off two decades ago. Then Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who sailed over in 1831 to inspect our prisons and stayed to explain us to ourselves. I confess I hadn't opened either in years. But this new book set them talking again, across two centuries and twenty, as though they had been waiting in the dark for someone to put them in the same room.
That's the quiet gift of a serious book, isn't it? When it reaches past its own covers and pulls down the ones that came before it, until you're no longer reading a single book at all.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heroespath/p/the-fence-at-nogales?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
On Why Nations Fail, and the choice that builds or hollows a nation
