Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

This is a good way to ruin my day. Laws (and wealth) of nations: A controversial theory blames countries' lagging economies on Napoleon

WHY DO SOME countries prosper while others falter? It's one of the world's trillion-dollar questions.

Consider the case of Malaysia and Indonesia. They are adjacent Southeast Asian countries with similar natural resources (and similar vulnerability to natural disasters), and populations that speak similar languages and adhere to similar forms of Islam. But even before the recent tsunami devastated parts of Indonesia, Malaysia's economy has been prospering while Indonesia's has been floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer.

Economists might explain the divergence by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in Malaysia's powerful community of Chinese immigrants. Historians might point to Indonesia's bloody struggle for independence.

But another fascinating, and hotly contested, explanation lies in the origins of the countries' legal systems. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law -- the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the former British Empire (including the United States) for about nine centuries. Indonesia, on the other hand, was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principals written under Napoleon in the early 19th century.

According to research published by a group of economists beginning in 1998, countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently in creating effective financial markets. The theory has jolted the legal academy and turned the authors -- Rafael La Porta of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes of the Yale School of Management, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard's economics department, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago's business school -- into the world's most cited academics on business and economics topics over the past decade.

What ticks me off is that a group of friends and I came up with exactly the same idea back in 1991 or 1992, when we were in grad school at Illinois. Granted, we phrased it in terms of political stability not economics, and we had had a few beers at the Illini Inn (aka "Willies"), so I'm sure we were less precise and more "fuzzy." But in outline the theory was the same. The thing is, I don't think any of us treated it as anything particularly novel. It seemed rather commonplace, something that any group of political theory and comparative politics students might use as a jumping off point for a lengthy conversation.

Maybe if we had had fewer beers that night we could have made some careers out of that conversation.

The beer was sure tasty though.