So I'm very honored to start this session, which is called "In Conversation with James Robinson." James Robinson, if you don't already know, is the person to my right. So let me introduce him. I think he really needs no introduction at all, so this is going to be a bit redundant, but just for formalities.
James Robinson is a University Professor at the University of Chicago. He's also the director of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict. And probably most memorable is the fact that he was the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Okay. In terms of his achievements, he's written dozens and dozens of journal articles. So you can Google him and have a look at his CV, and you'll see the long list.
I'm just going to highlight probably some of the things that he's more well known for, which is one is his book in 2012, "Why Nations Fail." So it's hard to overstate the impact that this book has had around the world. I think I remember James telling me how happy and surprised he was when he saw the book displayed prominently in an airport in Kigali, Rwanda. Right. So that, I think, tells you the reach of the book. And I just looked at the CV or some information; according to my account, it's been translated into 51 languages. So just a remarkable reach for that book. This was followed up by "The Narrow Corridor" in 2019, which was translated into 26 languages. Okay.
And more specifically about his research, it's really transformed a number of fields. So I was in graduate school right when his research was taking off, so I've seen the change in these fields. Economic history looks nothing like it did 25 or 30 years ago, and I think that's a big part to do with James' research. Political economy also looks very different. It used to be focused on American politics, and now it's very diverse and is more comparative and includes other topics like culture. Economic growth has really changed, and his research has also strongly influenced economic development as well in very positive ways, which I think we'll talk about.
And the other thing that's notable about James is his diversity of methods, ranging from theory to fieldwork to empirics, and the diversity of topics he covers, and the diversity of locations that he works in. So we'll probably touch on those issues in general. Okay. Okay. So just want you to join me in giving a warm welcome to James Robinson.
Okay. So I guess the first thing everyone's probably dying to wonder is where were you when you first learned about the Nobel Prize?
I was in bed sleeping, and my wife, at 4:00 in the morning, my wife, who's an insomniac, woke me up because my good friend and longtime collaborator Ragnar Torvik, who is in Norway, was watching it in real time. So he called her up and said, "Where is he? He just won the Nobel Prize." And she said, "He's upstairs sleeping. So get him up. Get him up." So she came upstairs and she shook me awake and said, "You've won the Nobel Prize, and that's it."
And then what was your first thought?
Actually, the first thing I asked her was, "Did Simon win it?"
Meaning I'd have been very unhappy if they'd given it to me and Daron. Just me and Daron. So, and then that was my first question. Then she said, "Yes." So then I was happy. Yes.
The story I heard was the first thing that you thought was you didn't believe her.
I didn't know why that's true. Yes, that went without saying.
I won't say the swear word you said.
Yes. We can't repeat that in polite company.
I thought it was a joke. And the reason was that her friend, her best friend, who's a former PhD student of mine who works at the World Bank, had called her the evening before and sent her a message saying, "Baby, are you wearing nice pajamas?" So her friends were kidding her about me winning the Nobel Prize the evening before. So I thought she was continuing the joke.
Yeah. So there you go. So what has this past year been like since the prize was announced? And I guess what's, you know, surprised you or different since the announcement?
You know, I mean, it's very like, you know, there's, I mean, it's fabulous, but there's just enormous, you know, the volume of email goes up an order of magnitude. You know, people ask me to do things every day. I don't have, probably like you, I've always gone through life trying to keep things very simple, you know, so that I can focus on what I like doing, which is reading books, doing research, thinking, teaching, whatever. So you just keep all the nonsense constant, you know. I've never had a Facebook page. I'm not on social media. I've never tweeted once in my life. I just don't do things, you know, and so suddenly you have to do things, and it's just, and there's all these things that people are asking you to do.
You know, the craziest thing is you get hundreds of letters from people sending you photographs of yourself asking you to autograph them and mail them back to them. Like hundreds, hundreds. Like just this morning I got three or four emails of people asking me to send them my autograph, and that I just find weird, like really weird. My wife said, like, keep some of those because when you tell that story in 20 years nobody will believe you.
So I kept some of those in the Nobel Prize, you know. So, but obviously it's lots of interviews. And when I was a graduate student at Yale, Robert Solow came and gave these lectures, and he'd just received a Nobel Prize. And I remember very memorably, people were, he told this story, which was the morning he won the Nobel Prize, he called his son, John Solow, who's also an economist, and said, "John, John, I've won the Nobel Prize." And his son said to him, "Don't say anything stupid, Dad." So I've always remembered that, you know. So I kept John Solow's, I've never met John Solow, actually. I should look him up. Anyway, I kept those words in mind.
Yeah. All these people wanting to interview and ask you, and suddenly you're an expert on everything.
Just this morning I got an email from, like, Reuters asking me to evaluate, could I evaluate, you know, the claims that President Trump had solved six civil wars since he's been in office. Like suddenly you're an expert on everything under the sun, you know, which of course I'm not. So you have to get good at saying, "I don't know about that," you know, "that's not my area of expertise." Michael Kremer, Michael told me, Michael says he never comments on anything unless he's written a paper about it. That's a little too much for me.
Well, you've written lots of papers. So still leaves. Okay. So last kind of fluffier question, non-academic. Since we're here in Korea, I think a lot of people who are Korean are going to wonder, have you met Han Kang, the Nobel laureate in literature from Korea?
We did meet. So she was there, you know, in Stockholm in December.
So we hung out, but she's terribly shy. I think she's terribly shy, and I don't know if she's like, she didn't want to take part in the, there's this BBC debate, for example. She didn't want to take part in that because she said she didn't feel confident about her English.
So we interacted a little, but she seemed, you know, very, she's very shy and, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now to some more serious stuff. So the Nobel Prize was won effectively because of research where you advanced our understanding of institutions, basically the causes and consequences of institutions. So I think always with something like the Nobel Prize, it's a chance to step back and reflect on the impact that your research has had and where we are and where we need to go. So basically the question is, you know, what have we learned about institutions, including your own work, where, you know, where did we start, but also what remains to be understood, what don't we know yet about institutions?
Yeah, I mean, I always think like, you know, we just reminded people of things they already knew. I mean, both Daron and I, when we were undergraduates, we read North and Thomas' "Rise of the Western World." You know, that book came out in what, 1973. So we'd already sort of convinced ourselves when we were 20 years old, you know, somehow that this was the right way to think about the world. Of course, North and Thomas' book was very narrow. It was about Europe, it was about Britain, you know, there was nothing about the Global South or anywhere else in there, you know, but so we always had this institutional view, I think, in mind, you know.
And I also think, you know, the first class I took when I was an undergraduate in economics at the LSE was by Hiromi Morishima, who was this sort of, I mean, nobody reads anything by Morishima anymore, but he was incredibly inspiring and he talked about all these big kind of global questions. The first book we read was Weber's "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," and he talked about why did capitalism appear in the early modern period in Europe and not in East Asia, for example. And then, you know, he talked about Weber's ideas about Confucianism and he kind of critiqued those. So I already had the idea, it was completely false advertising that economics was about these big sort of comparative questions about why did the world look the way it did?
And then I kept on trying to find the course, which, you know, like when I was a PhD student at Yale, where, like, who's teaching that stuff? Like I just couldn't find anything, you know. And I think like when I was thinking about this sort of retrospectively, you know, when Jeffrey Sachs, you know, Jeffrey Sachs put up his map of the world and started talking about how the tropics were poor, you know, because, you know, temperate latitudes were rich, and, you know, I think I asked myself like, why did Jeffrey Sachs get so much traction with such ludicrous ideas? And I think it's because nobody actually put up a map of the world and asked those questions, you know.
Like, of course there was sort of growth theory, and, you know, endogenous growth theory was very big when I was a graduate student, but that wasn't really about that either. It was sort of about poor countries are just like us, they're just kind of behind in the game and they'll catch up eventually. And so people weren't really asking these kind of penetrating questions like Morishima had asked about, you know, about culture in that case. Actually, I mean, Weber's whole program, you know, was a sort of comparative cultural program in some sense, and so I found that really exciting. And then it all disappeared, and I kept on trying to find it.
I tried to find it in political science when I was a graduate student. Couldn't find it, you know, where was it, you know, and then I realized at some point it actually doesn't exist, you know. It does in economic history and history and bits and pieces. And that's why I think we were drawn to North, to Joel Mokyr's work, you know, stuff that economic historians were doing. And then we always had this idea of like, how do we operationalize that, you know, where do we, you know, and we were discussing it for years. You have to find a kind of entry point, what's the right question you can get leverage on, or what's the research design, you know. So I think, you know, we wanted to operationalize that kind of institutional approach because we were convinced of it just from case studies, from reading history books and things like that.
And we saw, you know, that was kind of there, you know, Robert Barro was running regressions and sometimes institutional variables appeared on the right-hand side with sort of 30 other things, and so, you know, it was kind of in there, but it wasn't the focus. It was just, you know, let's see what has a t-statistic bigger than two, sort of thing. So we wanted to make it the focus. We thought this is the main story, you know, and we wanted to make it the main story.
But of course, you know, there's hundreds of things we don't understand, you know, in the sense of kind of what sustains particular institutional equilibria. You know, we tried to tell these historical stories about how institutions get created and how they persist over time. But I think we understand very imperfectly, you know, how different institutional equilibria emerge, you know, what sustains them. I think they interact with society much more broadly, you know, with culture, you know, with ideas.
I mean, you know, I think one of the, you know, the embarrassing things, you talk about why nations fail, you know, so why nations fail, we sort of foreground the Glorious Revolution, right? North and Thomas, North and Weingast, you know, this sort of transition towards constitutional rule, the rise of parliament, state building after 1688, and the collapse of this project to create an absolutist monarchy in Britain. But we never mention John Locke, you know. So where are the ideas, you know? Like in some sense the kind of ideational basis of those institutions, I think, is absolutely critical. You know, how could you talk about the French Revolution without talking about Rousseau or Voltaire?
So I think like that aspect of things is very, you know, we're much too materialist, like economics is much too materialist. I think our work has been much too materialist. So I think the cultural underpinnings of institutions, like look at what's happening in the United States at the moment, you just see like the institutions are kind of not sustainable unless people have some broader kind of cultural commitment, you know, to these institutions. So that's, I think there's tons of things, you know, that we don't understand.
Right, right, right, right. So I guess on that topic, so you mentioned, you know, there's cultural norms that underpin institutions. They're important. The experience in the US is telling us that. Then there's formal institutions which you've written a lot about. So you've said that, and then also that previous work, North and Thomas, is very focused on Europe, right? Yeah. So we're here in Korea. So I want to combine those two things, those two thoughts, and think about Korea.
Does the South, so for sure if you look at North Korea and South Korea, that fits your story. That's a famous example. If you just think of South Korea, which is probably one of the most successful economies post-1950s, does that fit the story? Does it have these formal institutions that were great that would predict the phenomenal growth, or do some of these other things like cultural norms come into play as well?
Yeah, I think, you know, if I was going to, if you'll indulge me by allowing me, I guess the whole thing is on one massive indulging me. I've only come to think of it. But, you know, if I was going to use the language from "Why Nations Fail" of kind of inclusive or extractive, I think obviously that captures extremely well the difference between North and South Korea. You know, North Korea is almost like a kind of paradigm of a society with extractive economic institutions and extractive political institutions. And you could say compared to that, you know, South Korea has been inclusive. But characterizing what that means exactly, you know, the great thing about this language of inclusive and extractive is it allows you to sort of say there's a lot of similarity across these, you know, heterogeneous cases.
But of course when you look at a particular case then all the details loom large, you know, and I think it's true, you know, that South Korea was very inclusive, but like what to put your finger on exactly? Was that the sort of, you know, agrarian reform, for example? That's one candidate for what created a more inclusive society, this kind of agrarian reform that took place in the 40s and 50s, sort of expropriation of land from Japanese people who owned land in the colonial period, or this redistribution under the Rhee government. Yeah, maybe that created some sort of basis, you know, you see this immense sort of social mobility.
I read the autobiography recently of the founder of Hyundai, you know, and that story is sort of amazing. You know, he starts out, they're poor kind of rice farmers in the north, you know, he basically has just a few years in some Confucian school. He's just like, there's this huge kind of upward trajectory of mobility. And so there, that is, that's sort of inclusive in a fundamental sense. Like, so what is it about the institutional structure that allows that, you know, that allows him to do what he did, you know, Mr. Chung? And that's harder to characterize, I think.
You know, and I think what's also difficult to think through is the political institutions, you know, in the sense that eventually Korea democratized. And in fact, you know, what our research, you know, the research that Daron and I did with Pascal Restrepo and Devesh Naidu shows is that growth accelerated in Korea, you know, growth was already rapid but it accelerated after the democratization.
But how about President Park and all, how about that sort of period of state-led development, you know, under the one-party state, you know, under the Yushin Constitution? So like how do we think about that? You know, I think that's, you know, it's the R squared has never won in a theory in economics, as you know. And I guess the way I would think about that is, you know, Korea got lucky in the sense that they ended up with a president, you know, a president who was just completely obsessed with developing the economy for idiosyncratic reasons. I think it's very difficult, you know, to have a social science theory about why Korea ended up with a person who is obsessed with developing the economy, but they did, and that was great, you know, and if you can get people like that, great, you know, but we don't have a good theory other than thinking about how the institutions select rulers to explain that.
They got lucky, then they democratized, they got inclusive institutions, and growth accelerated, so, you know, it fits and it doesn't fit.
So purely definitional, can a single-party state or more autocratic regime be inclusive? It sounds like you're saying...
I think it can be inclusive.
Economically. I mean, I think if you look at China, you know, how would you think about the acceleration of growth in China after, you know, late 1970s? It's clear that economic institutions move in a much more inclusive direction. They dismantle the whole socialist system, price controls, you know, collective farming, the household responsibility system, they introduce incentives, people, you know, become the residual claimants on their own efforts. It's like a textbook story, you know. So that, you know, but you know what our theory says is you can't really sustain an inclusive economy without having inclusive political institutions.
Okay, so that's, you know, talking about the cultural underpinnings of institutions. You know, one thing I've realized as I've gone on in life, you know, is that so much social theory is sort of calibrated to the history of Western societies, you know, like Marxism is a sort of classic example, you know, like when I started working in Africa, you know, you sort of, in Africa, where's the proletariat? Where's the bourgeoisie? You know, like the sort of the categories of analysis are just irrelevant, you know, for thinking about African society, it seems, or African development.
And you know, but of course for Marx it made complete sense, you know, he was sitting in, you know, London or whatever, the British Museum, you know, and he looked out his window and he sort of saw what was going on in Britain and he made these generalizations and he turned it into a global theory. And that's what we do in economics, you know, we sort of, you know, we pretend that we have this theory like Newton's laws of gravitational motion, you know, force is equal to mass times acceleration in Seoul and Shanghai and Saskatoon, you know.
But I think that's, you know, going back to Weber's program, you know, maybe that's not right, you know, maybe the sort of logic, you know, that we apply in "Why Nations Fail", I mean this is something I find sort of fascinating, you know, to think about, is, you know, and you and I have discussed this many times, you know, the kind of logic that you apply in "Why Nations Fail" maybe just doesn't apply in China.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this kind of one-size-fits-all fitting models of the world from the West to developing countries, it sounds like the status quo in development economics. Would you say that's the case?
I would say so. I mean, you know, for me, development economics, when I was a graduate student at Yale, you know, development economics was taught by John Fei and Gustav Ranis and T.N. Srinivasan, and their view was sort of like growth theory, you know, which was poor countries, you know, are kind of behind rich countries, they're stuck for some reason, you know, which we need to identify, there's some sort of frictions or market failures or something, and we need to design interventions to sort of unstuck in some sense. That was the kind of view of the world that they projected. You didn't talk about politics, you didn't talk about culture, you didn't talk about institutions, you didn't, you know, so you know, you could talk about institutional solutions to market failures, for example.
You know, so, and I, you know, I think that's sort of the same, development economics is the same now, it's just better standard errors.
Well, I don't know. You know, I let a thousand flowers bloom. I'd be the last person to dictate, you know, what other people should or should not do, you know. I think if everyone did what I did, it would be a disaster, you know. So, you know, I think we all like diversity and we value diversity. So I try not to, you know, with PhD students, I try to nudge, you know, but I don't tell people what they should do. People have to find their own way. They have to find their own curiosity, the questions, you know, they have to build their own agenda, you know.
So, but I think there should just be much more curiosity about the world, about differences between different parts of the world, you know, and just a kind of try to come to a deeper understanding and a deeper respect of other people's societies and other people's values and other people's objectives, you know. Like one thing I've learned, you know, working in Africa is that, you know, people have different objectives than me, you know, like they all want what I have, they want, you know, access to all the life opportunities I've had, you know, all the privileges I had growing up in Britain, but there's other things they want too, and there's other things they value, and there's complicated trade-offs, you know.
And there's lots of unintended consequences, you know, but when you study, like as I've studied these success stories in Africa, like Botswana, you see like what's really significant about Botswana is, yeah, they reorganized their society, yeah, they changed lots of things, but they did it themselves. They did it themselves on their own terms. We didn't do it to them.
Right, right, right, right. So I guess related to that, like we've, you know, there's the experience of the currently rich countries, they followed a certain path. So it seems like part of what you're saying is there might not be one path to development or one path of success, or even that success might not look like one thing for all countries.
Yeah. I mean, there's different versions of that. You know, one of my favorite economic history papers is by Alexander Gerschenkron, you know, his famous paper about there's different ways, basically, if you look at the experience of industrialization, there's different ways to industrialize, you know. The British did it one way, but the substitutes, you don't have to do it the way the British did it. The Germans did it a different way, they had a banking system, they needed to accumulate capital much faster, so, you know, and then the Russians, you know, had to do it faster and they didn't have a banking system, so the state came in, this is late Tsarist Russia. So I always found that sort of fascinating, you know, so there's different ways of achieving the same thing.
But there's also, and this is the question, this is the thing that Gerschenkron doesn't talk about, there may be different things. There may be different things that you want to achieve other than like one thing. You know, you're not just necessarily trying to get to the steady, you know, to K-star in the Solow growth model, you know. So there's different things you might be trying to achieve, and, you know, maybe, you know, different things, you know, may be more appropriate in different moments of history. You know, I always think like, you know, we tend to generalize a lot from the last, you know, from the Western experience, but not even the whole Western experience, just the last 250 years of the Western experience.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've spent a lot of time, well, in many countries, but most recently Nigeria, where you have a position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and also honorary titles and that sort of, you can maybe tell everyone about that. So you're kind of like in some sense embedded in the community.
No, I'm not. That sounds terribly pretentious.
So you're familiar with the community. So I guess just more concretely though, like when you give these examples that different societies have different values or might prioritize different things based on your knowledge, for example of Nigeria, what is it that's the same and different in terms of, you know, the goals they're trying to achieve, for example?
Well, you know, I think, you know, in Eastern Nigeria, you know, southeastern Nigeria, you know, this is a very kind of banal observation in some sense, but that, you know, people like, there's no sense, I think, of like the individual. You know, if I think of myself or when I grew up, you know, you're very focused on yourself and like what you can do and your rights and your options and, you know, whatever. But I think like people don't think like that in Eastern Nigeria. Like everybody's part of this community in some very kind of fundamental way. It's very difficult, I think. Of course, there's a lot of individualism, we could talk about that, you know, but everything is related to the community, you know.
So people have this immense sense of identity, of connection to the community, of collaborating, like the amount of collaboration is just kind of insane. Like everybody's already doing, like just going on all the time, and it's institutionalized in lots of ways, in like age sets and kind of all sorts of different kind of organizations in the village, in these councils. And so this incredible kind of density of social life and the immense importance that's sort of attributed to that.
And I think what you see there is how much the kind of economic and political institutions are kind of connected to that. Like, let me give you, you know, the kind of obvious example, like, you know, for an economist, is like the way land is owned. So land is owned by these kinship groups basically. So in the village where I have this chieftaincy title, there's four kindreds. So there's four extended families, and the land is sort of divided, is owned by these four extended families. So if you, you know, if you're a member of one of those extended families, you have a right to farm the family land. You go petition some elder, and you have a right to farm the land.
But the way those ownership rights work is like really connected to this whole notion of like the community, and it plays a very important role in sustaining the community. So imagine like my friend, you know, Chima, you know, Chima who grew up, he's a professor in the United States, okay, so, you know, he can't liquidate his rights, you know, like when my parents passed away, I went to Oxford, I sold their house, goodbye Britain, you know, I'm out of here. You can't do that in Eastern Nigeria. Like you can't liquidate or commercialize your rights. You're always connected to the land, you know, you're just, that's just, it keeps the community together. There's a good reason why property rights to land are like that.
So if you're an economist, you come along and you estimate, oh gosh, this is terrible for agricultural productivity. You know, there's a beautiful paper, probably people know, by Markus Goldstein and Chris Udry using data from Ghana, sort of exactly on this, you know. Okay, fine, you know, but this institution is fundamental to the way the society functions. So you can't kind of disentangle the economics from that. Now, does that mean you can't change it? No, of course not. They did that in Botswana. In fact, in Botswana, they reorganized the way land ownership and land allocation worked, but they did it themselves, you know. So you see the point?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, but there are a lot of World Bank land titling programs now where they're trying to...
You expect me to comment on that?
Well, what's been the experience of those, would you say?
