I read it near the end of my undergrad and loved it. It’s one of a few reasons I took the path I did within the economics field, using a more political economy based approach focusing on the way institutions structure incentives to generate system level behavior.

If memory serves, it was very non-technical. This is not a criticism, as books that eschew the more formal elements of economic analysis to use case studies and metaphors to explain concepts to people who don’t have experience using formal models is really underutilized in the profession, and an important reason such large gaps exist between the public’s and economists’ understanding of the field.

Much of what it discussed came out of previous papers Acemoglu and Robinson wrote that were aimed at other economists, including detailed explanations of the empirical strategies used to draw the conclusions they do. Economists should find those much more informative and concise than reading a book aimed at non-economists, but the argument they outline in general I find persuasive. Sure, I have my doubts about the way they used things like mortality rates from 400 years ago in colonies to instrument abstract factors like “institutional structure” but I sure as hell don’t have a better research design for such a tricky problem as they were approaching.

In short, I really like and appreciate their work, but as always, trust bodies of literature, not a single book/paper.