New Website Seeks to Educate Americans on Why and How Nations Fail

SAN ANTONIO, November 15, 2023 (Newswire.com) - A new website called Sorting Hat applies the success/failure standard, identified by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail, to current news articles, and then reports the aggregate numbers on its home page along with links to the articles, to inform all Americans about the current health of the nation.

Acemoglu and Robinson define the standard of whether societies succeed or fail by whether their economic and political institutions make either inclusive or extractive actions.

Of the four different combinations, they document only one maintains a healthy nation: inclusive economic and inclusive political institutions.

"Our goal at Sorting Hat is to educate Americans about Acemoglu and Robinson's research, their national standard of success, and then inform Americans daily of our country's actions and policies vis-à-vis their standard," said Sorting Hat Founder Steve Thompson.

"In addition," he continued, "we roll up the numbers into trend charts. We have approximately 275,000 applicable news articles in our database and are working to code them to vastly increase the reporting time period. This effort will provide all Americans with a 10-plus year measurement of the health of our nation using the Why Nations Fail standard."

"Our mission is to focus Americans on building and maintaining a prosperous nation using this standard as a new paradigm for consensus."

Sorting Hat's home page is essentially a report card of each day's applicable news articles scored by the Why Nations Fail standard.

Sorting Hat also provides measurements of the country's health using several other models.

"We also code news articles using Professor Alexander Tyler's Civilization Sequence, Ray Dailo's Sovereign Financial Stages, as well as state and individual Bill of Rights degradations," Thompson said. "More than 10 years of coding news articles using these models documents and confirms Americans' perception of the state of our country.

"Unfortunately, the other models do not provide a way ahead for Americans," said Thompson. "Why Nations Fail does. Hopefully, we can channel Americans' attitudes towards a more common goal we can all agree upon to improve the health of our nation."

Thanks to Sorting Hat, Americans can begin to work towards a common future for the country.

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Steve Thompson is available for interviews. He can be reached at 254-913-8501 or sthompson@sorting-hat.org.

Source: Sorting Hat