Nobel Prize Conversations

“I just think a book can change your life.”

2024 economic sciences laureate James Robinson loves books – he has about 10 000 at home. Growing up without a TV, he and his mother spent evenings discussing news from the newspaper and reading. It’s no wonder his interest for social sciences, politics and economic sciences was sparked at a young age. 

As well as delving into his thoughts on literature and reading, Robinson shares his opinions on field work in this wide-ranging conversation. For Robinson field work provides an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of why problems exist and how they can be solved. 

This conversation was published on 22 May, 2025. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Karin Svensson.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

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James Robinson: I tell my students, I never made a career decision in my life. I tell people it’s like a calling. It’s like being a priest or an artist. That’s not a rational decision. It’s just like a passion. It’s just that’s how you want to live your life.

Adam Smith: When we think about what makes laureates like James Robinson different, one thing that comes to mind is the fact that they really want to know. It’s not just that they’re niggled by questions, but the question that just won’t go away needs answering, and that drives them to dig deeper and deeper and recognise their own lack of understanding. They just have to keep exploring. That sense of an almost unforgiving question, which just won’t go away, seems to be what has driven James Robinson in his research journey that has taken him to so many countries around the world. Please join me for this podcast as I try to explore that journey he’s taken to investigate this most fundamental question of why some countries are prosperous and other countries are poor.

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Karin Svensson: This is Nobel Prize Conversations, and our guest is James Robinson, recipient of the 2024 Prize in economic sciences. He was awarded for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. He shared the prize with Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces. James Robinson is the Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. In this conversation, he talks to Adam about how poverty is a solvable problem, how he approaches his research with a passion of an artist, and the one-time heckler who became a good friend and a co-laureate. First, let’s go back to that early morning in 2024 when he received the call from Stockholm.

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Smith: When I spoke to you in October, your wife had just told you, you got to get up because she’d heard the news that you’d been awarded the prize in economic sciences. I was wondering whether getting up was a good idea, whether the deluge that has hit you since that moment has been worth it?

Robinson: No, absolutely. It is a bit overwhelming. I don’t really have the technology. I tried to keep my life very simple so I can get on with the things that I love. I’m not really used to coping with so many requests, but I shouldn’t really complain because it’s fantastic recognition and so many people engaging with the research and asking about the research and fascinated by the research. That’s pretty exciting, really.

Smith: I read a quote from you that said, you need to disrupt yourself all the time. I guess this wasn’t the sort of disruption you meant when you said that.

Robinson: I don’t know actually, it might be. Something like this, it’s a positive shock. It’s a moment to kind of rethink all sorts of things that you’re doing and prioritising. Negative shocks and positive shocks can all be good for disrupting you.

Smith: It’s an interesting moment to be disrupted geopolitically, especially for those in America, and be thrust center stage, because suddenly I suppose you are more in the public eye than you would’ve been had this not happened in October. How do you take this moment?

Robinson: Yes, I think it’s very interesting from a social science perspective. I spent most of my career studying poor countries. When Daron Acemoglu and I first started working together, we focused on these questions of how politics makes it so difficult to adopt a kind of good policies in developing countries. There was always this assumption that somehow developed countries like the United States. We’re not prone to many of these political syndromes that caused disaster in Nigeria, Columbia or whatever. But now we see they’re just as prone and the politics of developing countries can be just as perverse from an economic point of view. I think what you see at the moment is a completely irrational economic policy making. President Trump is advocating policies that no serious economist would ever argue in favour of. I think it’s pretty disruptive of the paradigm. Developed economics is overwhelmed by this idea that we just need to be generating better information about policies, what policies work, it completely ignoring politics whatsoever. Mainstream public finance in economics completely ignores politics and it assumes that the government is trying to maximise social welfare. The language that economists love is that there’s a benevolent social planner. Does anyone really think that President Trump and Elon Musk are acting like benevolent social planners? I think it’s a wake up call for the economics profession, and for us, it’s a challenge to think about how the ideas that we’ve developed studying primarily poor countries actually apply to countries like the United States or other developed countries, where many of the issues seem different.

Smith: In some ways it’s an unwanted but rather useful natural experiment going on.

Robinson: Yes, it’s unwanted in the sense that it’s rather challenging to be living through it. That being said, for someone who works in poor countries and has done for decades, the challenges that people have to cope with every day in Nigeria, Columbia or the Congo, nothing is like that is happening here. People survive somehow. I’m not feeling too sorry for myself given what I know about other people’s lives in the world. But it is pretty disturbing to see such irrational things happening and such shortsighted things happening. What I find astonishing is the risks people are willing to take with the institutions that this country has built over hundreds of years. They seem to have no consciousness that this could all dissolve and collapse. That’s a bit frightening.

Smith: Precisely. So much of your work has pointed to the importance of institutions and institution building and to see this disruption must be very disheartening in some ways.

Robinson: Yes, it’s disheartening. But I think it’s very revealing about what keeps these institutions in place and what do we have to do to get collective support for these institutions? How you can take these things for granted and not really understand how important they are for your lives? I think this current attempt to basically deinstitutionalise the state, that’s what’s happening. Deinstitutionalise the federal state seems to be happening in a complete vacuum of understanding of these issues, which I find frightening and whether this project will actually be implemented or whether it can be derailed or whether President Trump actually has the kind of attention span necessary. I do think if you look at serious deinstitutionalisation of the state, say in Venezuela in the last 30 years or Zimbabwe or Argentina in the 1940s and 50s, it takes a lot of planning and persistence to deinstitutionalise the state. Usually you need the military on your side also, which I don’t think is true in this country.

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Svensson: Adam, the picture that he paints here seems pretty grim.

Smith: Yes. But perhaps there’s a chin of light in the fact that the establishment of institutions which then lead to prosperity, which is one of the things he worked on, takes a long time. One might hope that it takes a long time to dismantle such institutions, not as long as to build them, but it does take some time and perhaps there isn’t enough time to put it all apart. Obviously he feels it’s a very challenging and dangerous time.

Svensson: Why was he awarded the prize in economic sciences?

Smith: I suppose you could say for asking one of the most fundamental questions in economics and coming to something of an answer about it, which is why some people rich and some people poor, he and his colleagues saw this opportunity to look at the historical record, study countries that had been colonised and see how they had turned out. Then to look for possible reasons for the way that things had turned out. They found some particular aspects of the way that colonising paths had treated countries that gave them clues to the fact that those countries that had built really inclusive institutions that involved collective decision making seemed in the end to fair better than those that had gone in and just taken all the goodness out of a country that they could get without building up any institutions to maintain the more or less democratic running of that country. Broadly it was that finding, I suppose you could say, the connection between politics, prosperity and how essential politics is to prosperity of a country.

Svensson: James Robinson is a bit unusual in the field of economics since he does a lot of his research on the ground in Colombia, Congo and other countries. You’ve also visited many countries in the global south for your work, and I’m wondering why is it important to have this approach?

Smith: Yes. I think it’s incredibly important to be out there in the field, but I would draw no parallel between his in depth visits to these countries and our fleeting educational visits. However, there is a perhaps something that applies to both, which is that you really don’t know what the situation is until you’re on the ground. It’s easy enough to sit at your desk in Chicago as he says, and think you know all the answers. But when you get there, it’s not quite as you thought it would be. It’s easy to get trapped in your own bubble of thinking and understand the world. He found again and again that things work rather differently from the way that was expected. So not just to search the records of these places, but also understand what makes them tick. It’s really important to be out there.

Svensson: It’s really easy to get chopped in your own bubble and to just sort of view the world from your own set of circumstances I think.

Smith: I’m sure I do it all the time. I’m sure we all do it all the time. There was one fairly awful example of that actually, that suddenly springs to mind that we were visiting a lovely group of young engineers in a country where it wasn’t clear that they were going to be able to make their careers and really realise their potential in that country. So they were wrestling with this awful question of should you leave and do better or should you stay and support your country and make your career there? They were talking to a laureate and asking this question that people all over the world always ask, which is how do you cope with failure? How do you cope with everything suddenly just going wrong? He gave an answer which really illustrated that he perhaps hadn’t left his bubble behind. He said, ‘yeah, when this happens to me, I always take a few days off and I go and relax in my vineyard’, which is lovely. But it wasn’t quite an option for these young engineers.

Svensson: I wonder how many people that is an option for.

Smith: It depends how you define a vineyard. My small square of, garden of London perhaps?

Svensson: Maybe that’s the takeaway for these students as well to sort of find your own vineyard.

Smith: If only I’d said that at the time. That would’ve been good.

Svensson: What did you say at the time?

Smith: I don’t know. I think we all just looked a bit baffled. The thing about that comment was it really did illustrate just how there can be a real gulf between one’s understanding of the world and the people you’re talking to. It’s really good to be reminded of that.

Svensson: Especially when you talk about young people in these countries. There is this really sort of tragic element of the untapped potential from these countries. How do you think about that?

Smith: I’m so struck by that everywhere I go. In a way it’s very sad, but in a way it’s very exciting and lovely. If you think about where science sort of comes from in the world when you’re listening to the news and stuff, most of it seems to come from rich nations, but there’s no shortage of brilliant young artists and brilliant young people, full stop. I asked James Robinson why he decided to go out into the world in the first place, let’s listen to his answer.

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Robinson: I think it mostly stemmed from the recognition of my own ignorance, to be honest with you. I was always terribly curious about the world, fascinated by the world and about the differences between different societies and how to think about that and what the consequences were. I didn’t know how to engage with that. It just so happened that I engaged with it through economics. I guess it could have been something different. I started off studying political science at the London School of Economics, and I switched to economics because I had a very inspiring professor, Miko Omashimo. It seemed that in economics there was a machine which would give you answers to questions. I didn’t see that machine in political science. I tend to get very obsessed with things when I get my teeth into them. So I went along this path of sort of trying to master economics and understand economics and then when I decompressed from that, when I finished my dissertation, I realised I still don’t understand anything. I know all this mathematics and I know how to solve models and whatever, but actually that doesn’t tell you anything about what I’m interested in. Daron and I, when we met in 1992, we had exactly the same kind of impulse, like we thought in exactly the same way, which is, we know how to write papers, solve models and publish articles and stuff, but we don’t know anything about what we are really interested in. We’re not studying the real issues.

Smith: It’s fascinating that you weren’t satisfied by kind of going through the form of academia if you like. The what needs to get done in order to make a career in academia that you saw you had to dig down deeper.

Robinson: I don’t think we’ve ever thought of it as a career. I’m not sure. I tell my students I never made a career decision in my life. I’ve never made a rational choice about anything about jobs. I tell people it’s like a calling, it’s like being a priest or an artist. I have friends in England who are artists and that’s not a rational decision. It’s just like a passion. It’s just that’s how you want to live your life and you don’t really think about money, careers or whatever. I think we’ve been very fortunate. People have enjoyed and got excited about what we’ve done and we’ve been successful professionally. But honestly I never really thought about that. You just sort of throw yourself into it.

Smith: What a dream way to live, just to ask questions and find people who will support you to do so. Tell me about your first meeting with Daron.

Robinson: I was giving a job talk at the London School of Economics in March, 1992. He was a PhD student, so he was the sort of star student. He was sitting in the front row of my seminar kind of interrupting me, saying, ‘No, if you change assumption four, that result wouldn’t go through’. I was thinking, ‘Gosh, who is this? This chap is so irritating.’ Then Kevin Roberts, who was the chair of the search committee, he sort of comes up to me at the end of the seminar and says, ‘Oh, let me introduce you to Daron Acemoglu, he’s going to come for dinner’. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, seriously, this guy’s coming for dinner’. Then we walked out of the St. Clements building, I think it’s been demolished now at London School of Economics. He looked at me and he said, have you read this paper by Norton Weingast? I had read that paper, it turned out. We walked off to Covent Garden talking about this paper by Norton Weingast, which was about the economic implications of the glorious revolution in 1688 in England. We sat next to each other at dinner, and I guess we sort of hit it off at a personal level and we realised that we had lots of interests in common. Then I went off to Australia to teach at the University of Melbourne, and email had just disseminated itself in the world in the summer of 1992 so we started talking. Then he got hired by MIT and I came back to the US. We discussed and talked, then we started thinking about ideas and writing papers and that’s how it happened. We just found that we had a lot in common.

Smith: It continues. It never stops. You don’t run out of new directions to explore together.

Robinson: Oh gosh, no. There’s just so many things to understand, so many things to read about, so many things to think through. Absolutely not.

Smith: Obviously there’s a trade off between doing things alone and doing things in collaboration with somebody else and thinking jointly. How do you view that with him?

Robinson: It can be very lonely working on your own. I think collaborating is fantastic in sort of the solidarity and you get stuck on something and somebody else understands how to solve that or what the answer is. It’s not a coincidence that many major works of philosophy are written as dialogues. Plato’s Republic, people are discussing, you discuss ideas, you deliberate. That’s the way you understand things. It’s a collective experience. I think this idea of going off into the Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights and coming back with ideas. That’s not how things work in intellectual life. I think you just get enormous stimulation from other people and different perspectives. Plus different people are good at different things. That’s the truth of the matter. You allocate tasks, you have a division of labour, you do different things. One of the reasons why Daron, Simon and I worked so well was we are very good at different things, but we’re very good at collaborating. We get on very well to personal level. We’re really good at sort of like, okay, you do that, I’ll do this. There’s no egos involved. No one’s trying to take credit for anything. Everything is collective. That’s great. That’s very fun that that it’s a collaborative. I’ve worked a lot with all sorts of people, with students and I’m writing a book on my own at the moment, which is actually fun. But the collaboration is very important and stimulating.

Smith: There are these Nobel Prize laureates in medicine, Joseph Goldstein and Mike Brown, who famously have been a very strong collaborative partnership in their field for several decades. They preach the idea that collaboration is a fantastic way to go. They say exactly what you say, that it’s really important that you don’t have egos and there’s equality. They go so far as to ensure equality by, for instance, accepting invitations to talk one after another so that nobody gets ahead, if you see what I mean. They’ve set up a structure to make sure it works and they co-supervise their groups. It’s a fascinating and perhaps under-researched area how productive collaborative teams can be.

Robinson: Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever worried about somebody getting ahead, honestly. I never worried about it.

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Smith: Back to this idea of going out into the world, you are so active in going and visiting places and being on the ground and listening to people. That’s obviously an extraordinarily important part of your work.

Robinson: Yes, because for me, one of the problems with, it’s not just economics, economics is a particularly kind of egregious example but political science is very similar. There’s this sort of idea that we kind of have this theory that explains everything. Like Newton’s laws of gravitational motion that we have forces equal to mass times acceleration and force is equal to mass times acceleration in Chicago, Lagos, Bogota, Bangalore, whatever it is. Where are the humans? Where are the people? Where are the societies? Where is the history? I just found that that theory, social science is not like that actually. You can have all the data you like and do all the statistical analysis you like, but how do you interpret the results? To interpret the results you need to know about people’s motivation, about the societies and the context. I have a talk I give called ‘What I learned from doing field work’, which is mostly just about all the stupid ideas I had. You can sit in your office, have an idea, write a mathematical model down and you can get some data and test it, but it’s very solitary to go into the field and like ask people does that make any sense whatsoever? I find it just incredibly exciting and fascinating. It’s been very productive. I think just generating ideas, insights, motivation, there should be a lot more of that I think. Astonishingly enough, the professional incentives and economics to do that are basically zero. Most economists, even in development economics astonishingly enough, think that this is a complete waste of time doing things like that because they think they understand everything. They have this general theory that basically explains everything. You could go collect data and whatever, but the idea of like talking to people or even sort of the idea that you don’t have the right theory or maybe you have the wrong assumptions – that never occurs to people. I think in economics you’re just taught, here’s this wonderful thing and that’s it.

Smith: Strange that that should be, when you say it, it seems so self-evident that you should be out there talking to people. But it’s funny how one can miss the self-evident.

Robinson: That’s not what physicists do. That’s the model that economists have taken as the ultimate theory. Why not be like the physicists? But social science is not like that, which is something that Max Weber understood a long time ago, Weber thought that social scientists actually had an advantage over natural sciences because we could kind of understand motivation. We could question ourselves and think about why that had happened or why people had done that. We had a sort of consciousness of social phenomena that physicists didn’t have, but everyone ignored him.

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Smith: What is it that you think is the take home message (if it’s possible to say that) about what does build prosperity as opposed to poverty in societies?

Robinson: I always think the take home message simply is that it’s about humans themselves, it’s about people and the types of societies and institutions they build. This is not about geography. It’s about how individuals themselves shape their societies. This is the big story about homo sapiens. There’s 9,000 species of ants. When ants got to Canada, Canada’s a sort of rocky and inhospitable place, they speciated to be better adapted to the Canadian environment. When homo sapiens got to Canada, they invented igloos and a taste for seal blubber and ice fishing. We are so adaptable. We create technologies, different ways of living, different cuisines and different social structures. There’s commonalities in the human condition but I think that sort of diversity is really about the history of humanity. It is not about succumbing to geographical constraints, it’s about overcoming them. I think that’s a very kind of optimistic message in the sense that the poverty anywhere is sort of solvable by people. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy of course to kind of construct institutions that achieve that or kind of solve the political problems or social problems that stop those institutions being created. I think if you start from that perspective of this is really about the types of societies that humans build or embedded in history and it’s about a political process of constructing different institutions. I think that’s the place to start. That’s the main message. Of course, that sounds very vague. What we did was to put some sort of structure on why do you see these patterns in the world in terms of why is it that nevertheless, some societies systematically seem to have got worse institutions. There we pointed to these historical phenomena like colonialism and the way the slave trade influenced systematically the institutions across many different societies. But that’s not to say that people are trapped in the history. They can reinvent themselves as many societies have.

Smith: As well as the building of inclusive institutions that you stress the importance of, you’d also use this term creative destruction. What do you mean by that?

Robinson: I think that what you see with innovation or the creation of new institutions or the creation of new technologies is that they often have very large distributional consequences in terms of income or wealth, but also political power. In fact, we point to the political consequences actually as being kind of more disruptive to society than the economic consequences. That makes it difficult to innovate because some people are going to lose in that process and they may have incentives to oppose it. It’s sort of disruptive. Institutional change is disruptive, technological change is disruptive. That’s something you have to understand. That creates lots of political challenges to actually moving a society ahead. It’s something that you have to think through if you want to help a developing country. If you look at any successful country, like we tell this story and why nations fail about the history of Britain, the British were very good at devising ways of making sure that creative destruction didn’t create a lot of opposition to the transformation of the economy. Actually Deng Xiaoping did the same thing. The same thing happened in China in the 1980s, a lot of the reform and the transition was designed so that the creative destruction was not going to induce a massive backlash from society.

Smith: Do you think that that now is particularly challenging with some of the technologies that are coming through, some of the disruptive technologies that are appearing on the horizon right now, and the rise of communication platforms that allow people to worry about them more?

Robinson: At the moment, there’s so much uncertainty. It’s not evident exactly who the losers are. Typically for creative destruction to have political consequences, it has to be clear who’s going to be losing who the beneficiaries are and who are the losers. I think it’s so uncertain actually the consequences of this innovation. It’s not quite clear who’s going to be losing from this and who’s going to be benefiting from it. No one can quite figure that out. If chatGPT is going to replace academics and we’re all going to be doing research by pressing buttons, or it’s going to complement and increase our productivity. There’s different views on that. Or if we’re all going to be replaced by robots. I think potentially yes. But I think we’re all thinking that through still, at least I am.

Smith: Given the focus of many of the prizes of October on AI, do you have any particular view on what the dangers of AI?

Robinson: I thought that was fascinating in the sense that the differences of opinion ran the gamut from mankind couldn’t fly so he invented the airplane. Like it was sort of like the toaster. What’s not to like about toasters or airplanes to Hinton scenario is that we’re all basically in 10 years time will be living in a scene from the Matrix with Keanu Reeves and robots will be running the world. But he thought that was just fine. It was just evolution playing itself out. In between with the economists saying, hold on a second, neither is inevitable. It all depends on incentives and what we do with it. I do think, and this is something that Daron and Simon have written about much more than me, I was trying to make the point in Sweden, especially in the BBC Nobel Minds, that the places where I work, there’s basically no electricity, let alone internet. The idea that somehow AI is going to have these kind of tectonic effects on Nigerian or Congolese societies are a little sort of ludicrous. That’s not the world I live or work in.

Smith: It is useful to have a reality check once in a while.

Robinson: Leaving that issue aside, the issue of the millions and millions of poor people in the world who are worrying about where their next meal is coming from rather than whether they’re gonna be replaced by chatGPT, I think it’s exactly right that there’s enormous social consequences of these technologies and nobody’s thinking it through. The tech billionaires don’t care at all. It’s obvious they don’t think about that and they don’t care about it. The US government doesn’t care about it or at least the next four years, it doesn’t care about it. That’s pretty frightening, I think. I think there is an enormously important policy agenda to start thinking about the social consequences of the way these things work, the way artificial intelligence work, what’s its likely impact on employment and wages and there’s nothing inevitable about that. It can work in different ways. It seems like the Nobel Foundation is in a very good position to sort of precipitate that discussion actually, because now you have so many people who are knowledgeable in a kind of definitive way on this topic. To start trying to get people to pay attention to that topic and start thinking about it. I don’t think there’s a magic wand to it. There’s not a magic wand solution to this, but it needs to be discussed. We need to start coming up with real answers to some of these very uncertain issues of the social consequences of artificial intelligence.

Smith: In a way, capitalise on the tremendous amount of worry and activity there is in this space without it being collated into conversations between people that are mostly constructive. It’s a very good point. I wanted to ask a little bit about your childhood because you came out asking very good questions, and that takes some path as a child to learn to be a good questioner.

Robinson: Yes, that’s an interesting question. My father was a sort of itinerant engineer. He worked most of his life overseas. He was a scientist. He loved science. We lived overseas when I was a kid. My mother was a teacher. She was very sort of political, very immersed in social issues, injustices and female liberation. When I was a teenager, my father was working overseas and we were back in England, every evening I would read the Guardian newspaper and discuss it with my mother. We would talk about politics and society. We didn’t have a television. My mother thought that watching television was the biggest waste of time. She used to say, ‘What are you going to say on your deathbed? Oh, I wished I watched more television.’ We didn’t watch television, we read books. We talked about what was going on in society. I think that was very important for me.

Smith: Dare I say, she must have been absolutely delighted with her teenager who read the newspaper and discussed it with her. It’s not a given that you would agree that that was a good way to spend the evening, it’s lovely that you did.

Robinson: Yes, and I was fascinated by history. I was obsessed with history and reading books. I didn’t go to a fancy school. I just went to the local government school. But I had some inspiring teachers and I just loved reading. We had a house full of books. My mother couldn’t afford buying books. My parents were both very working class people from the north of England. She was the first person in her extended family who ever finished high school. She didn’t go to university, she went to teacher training college. For her, education was everything. It was the way out of poverty. It was the way out of the north of England. It was the way out of working class life. So education and books – that was the world I grew up in. I just found it fascinating. I was just curious about everything. Even now when I buy a book, I buy a lot of books, I just think a book can change your life. You open a book and it’s just so exciting, what’s going to be in there. I still have that sense of excitement all these years later.

Smith: There is a thrill of the potential of it, isn’t there?

Robinson: Absolutely. I try to communicate to students that’s a life journey. Just so many things out there that are interesting to read. There’s just such amazing stuff.

Smith: It sounds like you are constantly reminded, as most of us are not, of the privilege of just being able to walk in and buy a book and have it on the shelf.

Robinson: Completely. I have about 10,000 books at home, so that’s my world.

Smith: You must be an ordered person to know where they all are.

Robinson: Pretty organised yes.

Smith: When you travel to many places where people are not so privileged, again, education can be the key, but it doesn’t necessarily lead in the same direction because the institutions are not there to kind of realise the potential. How do you feel about that side of things? It’s something that I think about a lot as we travel the world with laureates and meet people who are brilliant everywhere, but so many times the opportunity to be brilliant in the country and really have an effect is limited.

Robinson: Absolutely. I think that’s why there was a survey recently in Nigeria asking people, what are their motivations for saving money? I think the second biggest motivation was leaving Nigeria. I always say that the one sentence version, or maybe the two words version of world poverty is wasted talent. There is so much wasted talent in these places. It’s true, you can get a great education at the University of Nigeria, but what do you do with it? You can’t get a job if you don’t have the right contacts or you don’t know the right people in the right places. I think that’s right. I think a sort of simple minded, oh yes, you need to invest in education. Yes, of course you do, but other things have to move. Other institutions have to move. You need to create the opportunities and the social mobility that kind of allows that to flourish. It’s an interesting fact that there’s work by Diego Gambetta, who’s a sociologist at Oxford about suicide bombing and also Islamic radicalism. It turns out that suicide bombers and radicals are extremely highly educated. In fact, most suicide bombers have degrees in engineering. Why engineering? That’s an interesting question, but they’re very highly educated because they’re the ones who are most frustrated by the institutional context. I think that’s a glaring example. I was lucky because I was getting all that education, but I was living in Britain and I had access and opportunities. I didn’t suffer from discrimination or marginalisation so I could take that education and I could run with it, but that’s not true in Nigeria or Congo.

Smith: It’s a insurmountably big problem to fix in a conversation for sure. But in your own sphere, as you interact with social scientists around the world, do you think that your profession is doing enough to bring social scientists from elsewhere into the mainstream? I think of the fact that you for instance are based at the University of Chicago, and the University of Chicago has about a third of the prizes in economic sciences to its name. There are centers of excellence, clearly, but are they embracing the rest of the world?

Robinson: Yes, I think that’s not a coincidence. The University of Chicago is a very intellectual place compared to some of the places I’ve taught, without mentioning names. It’s just a place where intellectual life is more important than anything else. It’s really something special. I think that’s the fundamental reason that there’s so many Nobel Prize laureates here. But, the answer to the other question is no. I taught in Columbia and South America every summer for 28 years, in Bogota at the University of the Andes. Now I kind of coordinate a part of a collaborative PhD program in economics with many African universities, which is run out of Nairobi, an institution called the African Economic Research Consortium. You do your best, but the problem is sort of massive. What I see with my philosophy of social science, we desperately need more non-Western people at the table doing research, setting the agenda. One of the most kind of challenging things is that western academic and social science paradigms are so kind of hegemonic that if you are a young person in Africa or India, wherever it is, you feel you have to conform to succeed, to be taken seriously. That means that you can’t be yourself. You can’t express your own understanding of the world and your society you are living in. For that to happen it needs confidence. It needs a critical mass. That’s such a big challenge there. Working in Africa, you teach Africans and Africans don’t tell you what they know. They think, ‘Okay, I have to do this if I want to succeed, I want to impress them.’ No, there’s always this moment when you’re teaching where the kind of blinkers come off people’s eyes and they’re like, ‘What? Seriously?’ I can talk about Maasai society, I can talk about like my own people. And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know I could do that.’ That’s so exciting when that happens. But oh my gosh, there’s so much work to do there.

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Smith: Your new book is called ‘Wealth in People’. That’s a lovely title. I guess that refers back in part to this idea that there is just this enormous talent pool out there.

Robinson: All of my African friends speak five or six languages. Africa is so cosmopolitan, everyone wants to know everybody else and make connections to people. They don’t care about what language you speak or your ethnicity. Africans are just so cosmopolita. Then think about the English people, we couldn’t even stay in Brexit, for heaven’s sake. That’s a completely out of date model of society. This is a 19th century nationalism. The world has moved on from that. You’re never going to survive with that attitude in this globalised world. For me, the Africans have what it takes to flourish in the globalised world and the British people certainly don’t.

Smith: How wonderful. Especially given that they say the three biggest cities in the world are going to be in Africa by the end of the century, don’t they?

Robinson: Cairo, Lagos and Kinshasa, I guess. I don’t know about Dar el Salam maybe.

Smith: This has never happened before in one of these conversations, but just last night, my 19-year-old happened to be asking me, ‘Why is it that African societies have somehow been slower to achieve wealth than places in other parts of the world?’ You have just begun to answer that question for me after the feeble answer I gave him.

Robinson: Yes, the book is about that. I don’t want the book to be centrally about that because I want to emphasise how fantastic Africa is, there is doom and gloom. That’s so inconsistent with my own personal experience in Africa. Africa’s just a very exciting, fascinating place, and I want to communicate that also. But of course, it’s also important to understand that issue of African poverty. The way I think about that is this sort of notion of wealth in people led Africans to organise their societies in ways that made it very vulnerable to the expansion of mercantile capitalism to European colonialism. That wasn’t planned, it wasn’t anticipated, but nevertheless, it led to kind of chaos for several centuries in Africa with very negative economic effects. But the future doesn’t have to be like the past. If you think about China as a sort of fascinating comparison. In 1978 China had been a disaster for 200 years. There’d been state collapse, civil war, communist revolution, warlism. There was a great leap forward. There was chaos for 200 years in China. There was economic collapse, famine, you name it. But then China bounced back. Underneath that, there was all sorts of potential that you’d never have noticed, if you didn’t know how to think properly about the society. For me, Africa is like that. There’s been chaos. It’s been more than 200 years, you could even say 500 years. But that doesn’t mean the future has to be like those 500 years, honestly. That’s part of the agenda with the book too.

Smith: Underneath it all is this very important questioning of what’s going on. Asking the question that is beyond just the obvious surface questions of why institutions aren’t working. Trying to understand. It must be so exciting. Digging out just little pieces of evidence.

Robinson: Yes, modular self-doubt.

Smith: Yes, of course. Much of that. Anyway, what a joy to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed for taking time.

Robinson: My pleasure.

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Svensson: You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about James Robinson, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries. Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize Outreach. The producer for this episode was me, Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart and Olivia Lundqvist. Music by Epidemic Sound. If you’d like to hear from another economist who has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of poverty and development, listen to our earlier episode with economic sciences laureate Esther Duflo. You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.