UPDATE:  As of 10AM ET on Wednesday, we have our winner!  

Congrats to William of Los Angeles, CA (@HighwayX) for writing in.  You’ll be getting a signed copy of Why Nations Fail, as well as a copy of Greedy Bastards. (Our winner was randomly selected from the pool of entrants.)

Thanks to everyone else who entered our first ever mini-essay contest — we’ll be published a boatload of the (awesome) essays later today, so keep an eye out for those. Thanks to the over one hundred of you that wrote in with some incredible, thoughtful responses.

We’ll run another essay contest soon, so keep your eye on @DylanRatigan and our Facebook page.

On Monday’s show: We had on MIT professor and renowned economist Daron Acemoglu — he joined us to talk about his new book, Why Nations Fail, which hit bookstores nationwide on Tuesday.  In it, he addresses some big questions that we at the Dylan Ratigan Show think are important to talk about — not only why great nations fail, but “are America’s best days behind us?”  Here’s Daron’s interview segment with Matt Miller from Monday: