If you don't have a good, important question about the world, it doesn't really matter what the methodology is. You find a question and then you answer it the best way you can.
Yes, I think my upbringing probably did shape me, although it's hard to unpack it. My father was an itinerant engineer who actually started off working in the Colonial Service in West Africa, in Nigeria, in the late 1930s, and then he worked overseas until he got married in 1957. And then, as soon as I was born in 1960, we immediately moved overseas. We lived in the West Indies, we lived in Barbados, we lived in Trinidad, and then we moved back to England. My father immediately went overseas again, and so I grew up in a house — he spent the rest of his life basically working overseas — I grew up in a house full of books about Africa and African art and maps of Africa and the world. And so I was sort of exposed to all sorts of things when I was a child.
But I think what really got me — I didn't know what to think about that or what to do with it, you know, that took me a long time to get to that point. I think what really — when I was at, you know, my father was overseas and my brother was at university, my mother was a teacher, she was very politically engaged, she was very concerned about social problems and the world, and I think that's when I really started thinking about economics. It was the 1970s in England, there was the miners' strike and the three-day week, and then there was Mrs. Thatcher when I first got to university. So we would sit around in the evening, you know, every day, my mother and I, and just talking about the world and what was going on and trying to understand it. And I started teaching myself economics when I was at high school, basically taking books out of the library.
And so I think, you know, subsequently, you know, I went off on this track of — I started to study political science at LSE, the London School of Economics, actually, but I switched to economics after about a month because I had this fantastic class taught by a Japanese economist called Mikio Morishima, and it was incredibly inspiring. Of course, we just read these big books about the world — Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Schumpeter, John Hicks — and he would come in and talk about why central planning failed or why Japan had succeeded, you know, after the Second World War, and it was all these big comparative questions. I found it so exciting. It turns out, of course, economics was not about things like that at all. So I got into economics, you know, on false pretenses or something you could say.
And then I went off onto this sort of trajectory of trying to master economics, trying to understand economics, and then when I sort of decompressed from that, when I finished my PhD — it took me a long time, you could say 10 years later — you know, I decompressed and I realized, oh, this thing, economics, is not about these questions at all that I thought it was about or that drew me into the topic to start with. So I think it's funny how the mind works, that your inspirations come from, but it takes you a long, long time to put the pieces together and kind of see how to study something or how to ask a question about it. And so I think if I thought about my influences, it would be: yes, my father, yes, my living overseas, living in the developing world, my mother, Mrs. Thatcher. It's complicated.
You know, what I find most fascinating is just the way that humans created so many different types of societies all over the world. You know, we share this thing in common, like kind of deep evolutionary history, and humans emerged — Homo sapiens emerged in Africa and spread out over the planet — but we created such different societies with such different consequences for human welfare and human flourishing. You know, here we are in Sweden, you know, and I just came from the United States, you know, but in the summer I was in Nigeria and Rwanda, you know, I was in Colombia, you know, like such incredible variation within those human societies. And I think just for me it's just so fascinating, it's so much fun to just kind of engage with all those people from different societies and different cultures, and it's so fascinating to try to understand like why, you know, why and with what consequences. And I think that's, you know, all my work has been about that.
Really, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, Daron and I have told this story a lot in the last few weeks. Daron and I met in 1992. I was a PhD, I'd just finished my PhD at Yale, and I gave a job talk at the London School of Economics where he was a PhD student, and he was sitting in the front row, you know, of the seminar, you know, kind of engaging with everything and contradicting more or less everything, you know, I said. And then the seminar finished, and the chair of the search committee, Kevin Roberts, sort of introduced me to him and said he was Daron's thesis advisor. 'Oh, this is Daron Acemoglu, he's coming for dinner,' you know. So we walked out of the building, and as we walked out of the building, he looked at me and he said, 'Have you read this paper by North and Weingast?' which was a very famous economic history paper published in 1989, and I had read it. So we started talking about it, and then we sat next to each other at dinner, and I think even then we realized we had lots of things in common on a personal level, and we realized we had a lot of things, kind of, we were interested in common, many common interests.
And then it took us a couple of years, you know, I went off to Australia, he was hired by MIT, I moved back to the US, and we were just talking all the time and sharing ideas and papers. And then when we got back, we realized, okay, we should start, we need to start working together. And, you know, it's always been so easy. You know, people ask me all the time, you know, like, how do you work and who, you know, and I find that really difficult to describe because we're so — we just — it was just so easy for us. It's like, you do this, I'll do that, let me check that, let me — it's just we never disagree about anything, basically.
So we started working together, the two of us mostly working on theoretical problems. We developed this theory of democratization and coups and the consolidation of democracy and kind of when democracy emerges, which is kind of very theoretical. Like the first book that we wrote, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, is really a kind of theoretical, like summing up many of these theoretical ideas. But we kept on generating sort of empirical questions. You know, we were also very interested in these questions of comparative economic development, talking about them all the time, reading books. And I think what, you know, then Daron was presenting one of our theoretical papers, and Simon had just moved to MIT, so he was in the audience, and then they started talking, and then Daron called me up, I think if I get this right, and he sort of says, 'Oh, there's this Simon Johnson character, you know, this British chap, you know, he seems really good, I think we can work with him,' you know.
And I think Simon had these amazing kind of data skills that Daron might not admit this, you know, but at the time we were very theoretical, both of us, and we didn't have these. So Simon brought all these data skills, and, you know, and I think he just came on board and it was just seamless, completely seamless. Also, like, the three of us got on incredibly well, and I don't, you know, I just, I don't know, I think that's kind of luck or serendipity or something. I mean, we're just very close personally, but we also have very different skills, I think, you know, so it's very complementary, the team.
Well, I think collaboration is essential, you know. I mean, I find it very lonely doing stuff on your own, and you get stuck, and you get like — I think in academia, you know, it's a very fine line between you want to be self-critical, you have to be very self-critical, but sometimes you get so self-critical it sort of freezes you, and then it's very good to have someone else to come along and say, 'Oh, don't fixate on that, let's just do it like this,' you know. And that is really — I can't tell you how many times, you know, any of us have done that to somebody else, it's really key. So I think so, and I think people just look at things in different ways, you know, people have different ways of thinking about something or ways of making connections, and so I think it's really the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts because you all bring a different perspective.
And, you know, I like a lot, you know, nowadays I like a lot hanging out with non-economists. You know, I'm a professor of political science actually, I'm not in any economics department, and I've sort of tried to embrace other social sciences, anthropology, sociology. You know, I work a lot, I teach in the history department because I just really enjoy the way somebody comes at a question from a completely different angle or with a completely different kind of background or, you know, set of preconceptions. And so I like that you have to sort of disrupt yourself all the time.
Endless, endless failures. I mean, I couldn't get a job, you know, when I finished my PhD at Yale, I couldn't get a job. I went on the job market, nothing, like nobody would hire me. So I went to Australia, you know, luckily I had these friends at the University of Melbourne, they said, 'Oh, we're hiring, you know, go to — the chairperson is going to be at the conference,' you know. So I took this job in Australia, and then I taught in Australia for three years. I went on the job market again, I got one job offer at the University of Southern California, you know, by the skin of my teeth. I thought I was going to be going back to Australia. So I had, you know, I think I was just interested in too many things, people thought I was too flaky and I'd never kind of deliver on anything. And, you know, and economics is very inside the box, you know, so people don't, you know, like that, they like inside the box, you know.
So I had — I was rejected from jobs, I was, you know, endless rejections, journals, conferences, endless, it never stops, you know, just never, like even now we just get everything rejected from journals and just, you know, like failure. Like I think that's one of the things I try to communicate to students is like you just — everyone fails dismally, you know, it's just you just have to believe in yourself and just keep going, pick yourself up off the dirt and kind of struggle. And absolutely, you know, I mean, if you want me to talk about failures and rejections, we'll be here for hours.
Yeah, well, I, you know, I think what I try to communicate is, you know, what I find fabulous about academia is, you know, you're not — this is not about one year or two years or like one success or one failure, or, you know, you'll be doing this for the next 40 or 50 years, you know, so there's a real chance to kind of build something and for knowledge to accumulate and to invest and to just be ambitious, you know. Just for me it's all about the questions. Like a lot of people in economics are very obsessed with methodology, and methodology is fine, you know, but if you don't have a good, important question about the world, it doesn't really matter what the methodology is. You find a question and then you answer it the best way you can.
And I think, you know, what I try to get across to students is just think about the world, you know, like most of our work comes from just looking at the world and asking like, why is the world like that, you know, why does that happen, like why did that happen, like what on earth explains that, you know. And so like that makes it real, you know, it's not about looking at each other's navel, you know, and sort of like that a lot of research is like that, but just like asking questions about the world and then figuring out how to tackle those and, you know, how to get an entry point, how to get leverage on something. I think that's, you know, that's a skill you develop, but I think that's — and then, you know, just be patient, you know, like academia is a marathon, it's not a sprint, you know, and you see that, like you see, you know, people who succeed are people who just kind of believe in themselves and they keep going and they kind of, they're ambitious and they, you know, that's, you know, for young people it seems like so overwhelming, but you just do one step, one, you know, but dream big.
Yes, yeah, no, it was completely life-changing for me. I mean, I started doing that in Colombia 34 years ago. I first went to Colombia, and I finished my PhD, and I just felt like I didn't know anything, you know, I didn't know anything about what I was trying to study. I knew lots of mathematics and I knew lots of papers and stuff, but like I didn't really understand the reality of what went on in poor countries. And you can read books and that's great, you know, but you quickly run out of things to read, you know, about questions you're interested in. So I started, you know, I started working in Colombia 34 years ago, I started working in sub-Saharan Africa, that was — it was completely transformative for me.
I always tell the students about the first day I was in Botswana in southern Africa, you know. So I start with this puzzle, which is how come, you know, no one talked about Botswana, but it turned out, you know, in the late 1990s it had been the fastest growing economy in the world in the previous 30 years. It started as probably the poorest place in 1966 at independence, but it became something completely different. So what on earth was going on, you know. And, you know, you can read all the books in the library about Botswana in a week — I did, I took them all out of the library — and you could see there was nothing like a proper explanation for what had been going on. So then what do you do? Okay, go to Botswana, you know. Just the first day I was in Botswana, I gave a lecture at the University of Botswana, and then I went out for dinner with these two historians, one of them who now sadly passed away, the other retired in London, very good friend of mine still, you know.
And just in one day I had three different theories about Botswana, why Botswana had been successful, but I'd never have thought about if I just sat in my office. And so I started doing fieldwork, and I've just been doing that ever since because it's so transformative, you know. Like I think in economics there's this tendency to think we sort of understand everything, you know, we have this theory, it sort of explains everything, you know, all times, all moments, in all societies, it's a bit like Newton's laws of gravitational motion. In my experience, personal experience, social science is not like that actually. Things are much more specific to cultures and history and institutions, and so I think you need to get out there. What I have understood is, you know, you need to get out there, and also it's just fascinating, you know, to get out there and hear what other people have to say and think about the problems from their perspective and learn about their societies, and, you know, don't presuppose that you know the answer to these problems, you know, because you don't.
I think, see, very curiosity, you know, and sort of empiricism. Like I'm a great, you know, it's a very British thing, you know, but my work is — I'm very inductive, you know. I just like — I don't come with a lot of presuppositions. Of course you always have presuppositions, but you always have to kind of think that you might be wrong, you're not thinking about it the right way, you kind of misconceive what's going on or people's incentives or the mechanisms. So I think that's the way, you know, I think one has to approach, you know, social science, that just, you know, because in so many ways we, you know, like I spent — I did quite a few — I did one project in Haiti and I spent quite a bit of time in Haiti, and I felt I just really didn't understand what was going on in Haiti, you know. I never did any — I wrote one paper about it mostly, I never got the right question. But I think that some sort of humility and just being very open and inductive, and I think that's not the way economists think. Economists love to have their theory and, you know, they impose their theory on the world, and, you know, that's something that it would be good to change.
I think it's very — I mean, I think it's very important. I don't think the professional incentives are really aligned with that. I think it's very important, but I think it's also very difficult, that's the thing. I mean, you know, I think that the traditional way of thinking about these problems in economics has been, you know, sort of poor countries are basically like us except, you know, we're successful and they're not, so they should just be more like us and we will try to help them be more like us. But that's actually not my experience at all, you know. Poor countries are not like us, they're different in fundamental ways, you know, and in fundamental ways that you have to take seriously and you actually have to respect and, you know, and you have to understand that.
And I think, you know, and understanding the challenges of development in a country like Nigeria, for example, or Haiti is a lot to do with the politics of those societies and the cultures of those societies, and that's something very difficult for outsiders to change, you know, and it's also very difficult to do that in a kind of ethical way. There's all sorts of unintended consequences. And so I think, like for me, the way I think about that at the moment is, you know, people always need help, you know. If you think about the civil rights movement in the United States, you know, when the civil rights movement kind of organized, Martin Luther King, 1950s, whatever, the bus strikes, the world boycotts, the outsiders helped. Outsiders came, they gave solidarity, they gave resources, they helped protect, they helped organize collective action and solidarity, you know. And so of course everyone needs help, you know, outsiders can help, but how do you help and in what way? And how do you kind of help the Nigerians solve their problems, you know.
Because like in my personal experience, the Nigerians have a much better understanding of the problems than we do as outsiders, but they can't solve them, you know. And so I think we have to think about the problem in a very different way than typically has been the case in, you know, in kind of the space of economics where we're trying to help poor countries, you know. It's not just about money, it's not just about — no, the society has to change, politics has to change, how do we do that, you know. That's — I mean, that's most of our work is about that, but our work doesn't lead to a simple kind of, you know, magic wand type solution because the world isn't like that, you know.
We — I don't really have free time, you know, in the sense that when I'm in Chicago, you know, or when I'm doing work, you know, fieldwork, then you're just working all the time, you know, from 16 hours a day, you know, from the morning to the evening, you're working, you're reading, you're whatever, you know, you're helping students, teaching. I think what we try to do as a family is, you know, we try to go on fun family holidays, you know, with my wife and son, where we sort of — my wife is also an academic, but, you know, where we sort of try to disengage and we do something really fun, you know. For example, in June we went to Turkey. So we went to some of these Neolithic sites in the south of Turkey, Göbekli Tepe, probably the world's oldest freestanding building before agriculture, about 10,000 BC, it's this sort of temple on top of a hill, beautiful. Then we went to Çatalhöyük outside Konya, which is probably the world's oldest urban settlement, about, you know, a bit more recent, probably 5,000 people, hunter-gatherers living in this. So it's an archaeological site, but we also went to the beach, you know, we went to Troy, we went to Istanbul, we went, you know, so we combine holiday with, you know, history and culture, but also going to the beach and just hanging out as a family. And so we try to do that quite a lot, you know, usually at Christmas, maybe in June, maybe in August, which fits with my son's kind of schedule. And so I think that's — but when I'm in Chicago it's very difficult to disengage, you know, there's so many things to read and so much to do.
I think, you know, like I walk, you know, we live in Hyde Park, so we live 25 minutes' walk from my office. So we live in Hyde Park where the university is in Chicago, so I always walk, I mean unless it's really, really cold. And I think walking is, you know, sort of — you can be — it's like left — it's like one hemisphere of the brain, other hemisphere of the brain, you know. You're in your office, you're thinking about something, you're stuck, you don't really understand something or whatever, you pack up, you walk home, and then you go out of the building and start walking, you immediately understand like what the problem was or whatever, or you just see something. So I would say something like that is very — just walking like that, it is very important. It doesn't have to be in the woods, it can just be around Hyde Park or whatever. But I also think, you know, when you're doing fieldwork you get a lot of ideas because you just see stuff and, you know, that you don't understand or you've never seen before, and it just sets off all sorts of trains of thought and connections, and so that's also very, you know.
Creative. I don't — I mean, I think, you know, I don't know, I think I just find it fascinating to understand stuff. Like for me the thing that really gives me a kind of adrenaline rush is like when suddenly you get something, you get some connection and you understand how that's connected to something else, and you never really saw that before, you didn't really understand that before. That just — I find that still just as exciting now as I did, you know, 40 years ago, you know. So and I feel like there's so many things I want to do, there's so many things I want to study or understand or read, or like life is just not long enough for that, and, you know, hopefully I'll have some left to, you know, there's just, you know, so many things that need to be done for me, you know, to kind of finish the job — of course I never finish the job, you know. But yeah, I just find it fun. I just don't need to motivate myself to carry on doing it, you know, I just — that's what gives me pleasure really, just doing research.
And seeing young people sort of succeed also is like really, really fun. In February it's my 65th birthday, and actually before I got the Nobel Prize, my former students and collaborators are already organizing this conference to kind of bring students and collaborators together. I think there's about 70 people going to show up, and now of course it's going to be even more special. But that's something that really is just incredibly rewarding, seeing some person who kind of came into your office and they were all confused and lacking self-confidence, and then you see them kind of get on their feet and start doing well, and, you know, that's almost more fun than your own successes, honestly.
