Interview with the 2024 economic sciences laureate James A. Robinson, recorded on 6 December 2024 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How did your upbringing shape you? 

James A. Robinson: 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. Then he worked overseas until he got married in 1957. 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. 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. 

I was sort of exposed to all sorts of things when I was a child. I didn’t know what to think about that or what to do with it. That took me a long time to get to that point. My father was overseas and my brother was at university. My mother was a teacher. She was very politically sort of engaged. She was very concerned about social problems and the world. I think that’s when I really started thinking about economics. It was the 1970s in England. There was the miner’s strike and the three-day week, and then there was Mrs Thatcher. We would sit around in the evening, every day my mother and I, and just talking about the world and what was going on and trying to understand it. 

I started teaching myself economics when I was at high school, basically taking books out of the library. Subsequently, I went off on this track. I started to study political science at the School of Economics, actually, but I switched to economics after about a month, because I had this fantastic class taught by a Japanese economist and it was an incredibly inspiring course. We just read these big books about the world; Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Schumpeter, John Hicks. He would come in and talk about why central planning failed, or why Japan had succeeded after the Second World War. 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. I got into economics on false pretences or something, you could say. Then I went off onto this sort of trajectory of trying to master economics, trying to understand economics.  When I finished my PhD, it took me a long time, 10 years later, I decompressed, and I realised, this thing, economics, it’s not about these questions at all that I thought it was about or that drew me in to the topic to start with. I think it’s funny how the mind works. It takes you a long time to put the pieces together and kind of see how to study something or how to ask a question about it. If I thought about my influences, it would be my father, my living overseas, living in the developing world, my mother, Mrs Thatcher. It’s complicated.  

What do you enjoy most about economic sciences and research?

James A. Robinson: What I find most fascinating is just the way that humans created so many different types of societies all over the world. We share this thing in common, like kind of deep evolutionary history, and humans, 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. Here we are in Sweden, and I just came from the United States, but in the summer, I was in Nigeria and Rwanda, I was in Colombia. Such incredible variation within those human societies. 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. It’s so fascinating to try to understand why and with what consequences.  I think all my work has been about that really. 

How did your collaboration with co-laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson begin? 

James A. Robinson: Daron and I met in 1992. I was just finishing my PhD at Yale and I gave a job talk at London School of Economics where he was a PhD student. He was sitting in the front row of the seminar, kind of engaging with everything and contradicting more or less everything I said. Then the seminar finished, and the chair of the search committee, Kevin Roberts – he was Daron’s thesis advisor –sort of introduced me to him. “This is Daron. He’s coming for dinner.” We walked out the building, and as we walked out the building, he looked at me and 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 start talking about it, and then we sat next to each other at dinner. I think even then we realised we had lots of things we had to offer at a personal level, and we realised we had many common interests. Then it took us a couple of years – 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. When we got back, we realised, okay, we need to start working together. And it’s always been so easy. People ask me all the time, how do you work? I find that really difficult to describe because it was just so easy for us. It’s like, “you do this, I’ll do that. Let me check that.” We never disagree about anything, basically.  

We started working together, the two of us, mostly working on theoretical problems. We developed this theory of democratisation and coups and the consolidation of democracy and when democracy emerges, which is kind of very theoretical. The first book that we wrote, Economic Origins of Dictation and Democracy, is really a kind of summing up many of these theoretical ideas. But we kept on generating empirical questions. We were also very interested in these questions of comparative economic development, talking about them all the time, reading books. Then Daron was presenting one of our theoretical papers, and Simon had just moved to MIT, so he was in the audience. They started talking, and then Daron called me up, and he sort of says, “There’s this Simon Johnson character, this British chap. He seems really good. I think we can work with him.”  

Simon had these amazing data skills. Daron might not admit this, 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 I think he just came on board and it was just completely seamless. Also, the three of us got on incredibly well. 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, so it’s very complimentary, the team. 

How important is collaboration?  

James A. Robinson: I think collaboration is essential.  I find it very lonely doing stuff on your own, and you get stuck. I think in academia, 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. 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.” I can’t tell you how many times any of us have done that to somebody else. It’s really key. I think people just look at things in different ways. People have different ways of thinking about something, or ways of making connections. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, because you all bring a different perspective. 

Nowadays I like a lot hanging out with non-economists. I’m a professor of political science, actually not in any economics department, and I’ve sort of tried to embrace other social sciences – anthropology, sociology, 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 set of preconceptions. I like that you have to sort of disrupt yourself all the time. 

Have you encountered any failures? 

James A. Robinson: Endless, endless failures. When I finished my PhD at Yale, I couldn’t get a job. I went on the job market and nothing, nobody would hire me. So I went to Australia. Luckily, I had these friends at the University of Melbourne. They said, “oh, we’re hiring. The chairperson is going to be at the conference.” So I took this job in Australia, and I taught in Australia for three years. Then I went on the job market again. I got one job offer at the University of Southern California by the skin of my teeth. I thought I was going to be going back to Australia. 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. 

Economics is very inside the box. So I was rejected from jobs, endless rejections; journals, conferences, endless, never stops. Even now we just get everything rejected from journals and just like, failure. One of the things I try to communicate to students is, everyone fails, dismally. You just have to believe in yourself and just keep going, pick yourself up off the dirt and kind of struggle. If you want me to talk about failures and rejections, we will be here for hours.  

What advice would you give a young researcher? 

James A. Robinson: What I find fabulous about academia is, this is not about one year or two years, or like one success or one failure – you’ll be doing this for the next 40 or 50 years. There’s a real chance to build something, and for knowledge to accumulate and to invest and to just be ambitious. For me, it’s all about the questions. A lot of people in economics, they’re very obsessed with methodology – and methodology is fine – 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. What I try to get across to students is just to think about the world. Most of our work comes from just looking at the world and asking why is the world like that? Why does that happen? What on earth explains that? That makes it real. It’s not looking at each other’s navels. Just asking questions about the world and then figuring out how to tackle those and how to get an entry point, how to get leverage on something. That’s a skill you develop. Just be patient. The academia is a marathon; it’s not a sprint. People who succeed are people who just kind of believe in themselves and keep going. For young people it seems so overwhelming, but you just do one step. Dream big.  

How important is field work? 

James A. Robinson: It was completely life-changing for me. I started doing that in Colombia 34 years ago. I had finished my PhD, and I just felt like 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 I didn’t really understand the reality of what went on in poor countries. You can read books and that’s great, but you quickly run out of things to read about questions you are interested in. I started working in Colombia 34 years ago, and I was working in Sub-Saharan Africa. That was completely transformative for me.  

I always tell the students about the first day I was in Botswana in Southern Africa. I start with this puzzle, which is about how come no one talked about Botswana. It turned out in the late 1990s, it have been the fastest growing economy in the world in the previous 30 years, of which started as probably the poorest place in 1966 in independence, but it became something completely different. So what on earth was going on? You can read all the books in the library about Botswana in a week – I took them all out in 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? Go to Botswana! 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 now sadly passed away; the other retired in London, very good friend of mine still – and just in one day I had three different theories about Botswana and why Botswana had been successful, that I’d never have thought about if I just sat in my office. It is just doing field work. I’ve just been doing that ever since because it’s so transformative. In economics, there’s this tendency to think we sort of understand everything. We have this theory, it sort of explains everything, all times, all moments in all societies. It’s a bit like Newton’s laws of gravitational motion. In my experience, social science is not like that. Things are much more specific to cultures and history and institutions. I think you need to get out there. Also it’s just fascinating 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. Don’t presuppose that you know the answer to these problems, because you don’t.  

What qualities do economists or researchers need? 

James A. Robinson: I think curiosity and sort of empiricism. It’s a very British thing, but I’m very inductive. You always have presuppositions, but you always have to kind of think that you might be wrong or you’re not thinking about it the right way; that you kind of mis conceptualise what’s going on, or people’s incentives or the mechanisms. I think that’s the way one has to approach social science. I did one project in Haiti – I spent quite a bit of time in Haiti – and I felt, I just really didn’t understand what was going on in Haiti. I wrote one paper about it, and I never got the right question. But I think that  some sort of humility and just being very open and inductive. That’s not the way economists think. Economists love to have their theory and they impose their theory on the world. 

How important is it for economists to address the world’s biggest challenges? 

James A. Robinson: 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. I think that the traditional way of thinking about these problems in economics has been sort of, “poor countries are basically like ours, except we’re successful and they’re not. They should just be more like ours, and we will try to help them be more like us.” But that’s actually not my experience at all. Poor countries are not like us. They’re different in fundamental ways, and in fundamental ways that you have to take seriously. You actually have to respect and you have to understand that. Understanding the challenges of development in a country like Nigeria, for example, or Haiti, is a lot to do with the politics and cultures of those societies. That’s something very difficult for outsiders to change. It’s also very difficult to do that in a kind of ethical way. There’s all sorts of unintended consequences.  

The way I think about that, at the moment, is people always need help. If you think about the civil rights movement in the United States, when the civil rights movement kind of organised – Martin Luther King, 1950s, the bus strikes, the boycotts – the outsiders helped, outsiders came, they gave solidarity, they gave resources, they helped protect, they helped organise collective action. Outsiders can help, but how do you help? And in what way? How do you kind of help the Nigerians solve their problems? The Nigerians have a much better understanding of the problems than we do as outsiders, but they can’t solve them. We have to think about the problem in a very different way than typically has been the case in the space of economics where we’re trying to help poor countries. It’s not just about money. No, the society has to change, politics has to change. How do we do that? Most of our work is about that, but our work doesn’t lead to a simple kind of magic wand type solution, because the world isn’t like that. 

How do you spend your spare time? 

James A. Robinson: I don’t really have free time in the sense that when I’m in Chicago, or when I’m doing field work, then you are just working all the time. From 16 hours a day, from the morning to the evening, you’re working, you’re reading, you’re helping students, teaching. I think what we try to do as a family is, we try to go on fun family holidays, with my wife and son, where we sort of try to disengage and we do something really fun. For example, in June we went to Turkey. 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, a bit more recent, with probably 5,000 people hunting, gathering, living in this. So it’s an archaeological site. We also went to the beach. We went to Troy and Istanbul. We combined holiday with history and culture but also going to the beach and just hanging out as a family. We try to do that quite a lot, usually at Christmas, maybe in June, maybe in August, which fits with my son’s schedule. But when I’m in Chicago, it is very difficult to disengage. There’s so many things to read and so much to do. 

When or where do you get your best ideas? 

James A. Robinson: I walk. We live 25 minutes walk from my office. We live in Hyde Park, where the university is in Chicago. I always walk, I mean, unless it’s really, really cold. I think walking is like one hemisphere of the brain. You are in your office, you’re thinking about something, you’re stuck. You don’t really understand something or whatever. You pack up and you go out of the building and start walking, and then you immediately understand what the problem was or whatever. I would say something like  just walking like that, 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 when you’re doing field work, you get a lot of ideas because you just see stuff that you don’t understand or you’ve never seen before. It just sets off all sorts of trains of thought and connections. That’s also very creative. 

How do you maintain your curiosity? 

James A. Robinson: I just find it fascinating to understand stuff. For me, the thing that really gives me a kind of adrenaline rush is when suddenly you get something, you get some connection and you understand how that’s connected to something else. You never really saw that before. You didn’t really understand that before. I find that still just as exciting now as I did 40 years ago. I feel there’s so many things I want to do. There’s so many things I want to study or understand or read. Life is just not long enough for that. Hopefully I’ll have some left to. There’s just so many things that need to be done for me, to kind of finish the job, because I’ll never finish the job. I just find it fun. I don’t need to motivate myself to carry on doing it. That’s what gives me pleasure, really. Just doing research and seeing young people succeed also is really fun. In February, it’s my 65th birthday and actually before I got the Nobel Prize, my former students and collaborators were already organising this conference to bring the 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. That’s something 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 get on their feet and start doing well. That’s almost more fun than your own successes, honestly. 

Watch the interview

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