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James Robinson, a political scientist and economist, is the Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago. Robinson is the co-author, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.
Today, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it would award the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to James Robinson, Daron Acemoglu, and Simon Johnson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
In this week’s conversation, originally released in 2019, Yascha Mounk and James Robinson discuss the importance of political institutions; the roots of freedom and prosperity; and how citizens can beat the historical odds to improve their countries.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: The right way to begin to understand your incredibly extensive work is to understand why, both in Why Nations Fail and in The Narrow Corridor, you focus on institutions. Why is it that institutions are the key to understanding economic prosperity and human liberty? And why have we failed to adequately see this so far?
James Robinson: When I was a student in economics, and I learned the theory of economic growth, or I learned microeconomic theory, I tried to apply that to understanding all the variation that you see in the world. And I just felt the theories don’t contain what’s necessary to understand the variation. Just for example, physical factor endowments—land or capital or labor—you can’t understand the consequences of that for economic development or even politics unless you understand property rights and who has access to land on what conditions and how it can be transferred.
You go to Africa, and you have some notion of what markets are supposed to look like, and you realize that they don’t look like that at all, that the way they’re organized is completely different. That has all sorts of consequences for economics and politics. Incentives function within this kind of web of rules that create very different structures that influence people hugely. This always seemed obvious to me, that mainstream economics doesn’t contain what you need to explain all this variation in the world. And I was very influenced when I was an undergraduate by reading Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas’s book The Rise of the Western World, which is an institutional theory of the Industrial Revolution. And a lot of my early work with my frequent co-author Daron Acemoglu was, in some sense, trying to take those ideas and operationalize them, kind of mathematically and empirically.
Why did we start with all this work on politics? Well, North and Thomas’s book is all about politics. It's all about how political revolutions and political change created the institutional structures that allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen.
Mounk: So to give a very crude summary of a very subtle book, my understanding of the core tenets of Why Nations Fail is that, yes, of course, incentives matter, that people are able to gain prosperity, to produce a lot of goods. But in virtually any circumstance, you don’t have to have the right climate, the right raw material; you don’t have to have one culture or another culture. What you do have to have is a set of political institutions that actually make it worthwhile to invest in things; that make it worthwhile to work hard. And a lot of the time, because of extractive institutions, that’s not the case.
Now, at first glance, somebody who hasn’t read your work might think that this only pushes the level of explanation one level back—because, after all, how is it that institutions manage to create the right kind of incentives in the first place? So what role does history play in helping to explain why some societies have been able to build inclusive institutions that provide the right incentives and others have miserably failed at it?
Robinson: That’s a great question. I think you’re right that the correct way to think about this is in terms of layers. When you’re talking about economics, it’s economic institutions that are important, property rights and things like that. But, in our view, that’s the outcome of a political process. Choosing economic institutions emerges out of a political process. So then you need to understand the types of political institutions that create different sorts of economic institutions. So then, where do these different political institutions come from? And actually, I think in Why Nations Fail, we didn’t do such a great job of explaining that. And really, that’s what the new book, The Narrow Corridor, is about. It's trying to study where on earth did this divergence in political institutions with massive economic and political and social consequences come from?
My view is that human creativity and innovation creates differences. And human creativity and innovation is not closely tied to climate or ecology or culture. It's deeply path dependent. Innovations happen and people come up with new ideas and new ways of solving things, with new ways of thinking about society and people's roles in it—with how you organize it and what's legitimate. And those innovations take off, or they spread, or they don't, or they backfire. You have to look back in history and think about innovation in human society and how that accumulated in some parts of the world, and how it spread to other parts of the world.
Mounk: This is one question I had while reading Why Nations Fail. You emphasize, in my mind rightly, the importance of these historical junctures, those moments when societies start going in one direction rather than another, often because of factors that look reasonably minor at the time. One particularly important one you outline is the Black Death in Europe, which obviously is a huge historical event, but it just has subtly different impacts on the labor supply in places like the United Kingdom on the one hand, and in places like Central and Eastern Europe on the other hand. And that sets those two sets of societies up for more inclusive or more extractive institutions. But I was wondering: To what extent ideas can play a crucial role in those historical junctures?
Robinson: One of the problems that Daron and I have is that we're too materialistic. We grew up in this tradition of economics, a kind of crypto Marxism—which, ironically, a lot of economics kind of imbibed this very materialistic way of thinking about the world. But I think economists have no problem thinking about technological innovation, so why not think about intellectual innovation? It's just very difficult to have a framework for kind of disciplining that in the way that we're used to. You're socialized into a particular way of thinking and doing things. And I think we've always had a problem thinking about how we discipline our work on intellectual innovation.
Mounk: There's been an interesting debate recently between economists and public intellectuals in the United States about the role of slavery in American prosperity. Some of the authors of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and a few others are basically trying to say that slavery was such a huge part of the U.S. economy in the 19th century—that so much of America's wealth was created by slaves—that it really helps to explain both the shape of capitalism in the United States today and why it is that North America is so much more affluent than some other societies in the world.
And I was wondering whether you might have a slightly different perspective on this? Obviously a lot of the wealth we have in the United States does come from slavery. Obviously, some people benefited tremendously from the exploitative system of slavery. But on the whole, it struck me you might think that slavery is an extremely economically extractive institution, that slavery may have actually held the United States back economically, rather than helping it to develop. How do you see the role of slavery?
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Robinson: I don’t think the evidence is consistent with the idea that slavery was good for economic development in the United States. If you look at the U.S. South, it was a lot poorer. It had very little manufacturing industry. It was less urbanized. It was much less publicly provisioned, fewer canals, fewer roads. So the South was much less developed. The slave economy was less innovative. If you look at patenting data, the South was much less innovative than the North or the West. So, I think the evidence is consistent with the idea that the slave economy actually held back the United States, not advanced it.
It also had the benefit of actually being embedded in this bigger society with relatively functional institutions. In other parts of the world, like the Caribbean or Brazil, the slave economy had a much more profound effect on institutions. So I don't think the evidence is consistent at all with the notion that the slave economy was an important positive in American capitalism.
Mounk: One of the things I find interesting about this—and it seems to me that you get that in a lot of economic debates—is the way in which political priors drive what appears to be the most virtuous position politically or morally, and it doesn't strike me to be the most virtuous position at all. Slavery was a terrible and horrendous institution. America should recognize the injustice it perpetrated. But it's sort of strange that in the current debate, there seems to be an assumption that if slavery actually is a lot of the reason for America's prosperity, that somehow emphasizes just how bad it was. Whereas I tend to think of it the other way around: There's lots of hard economic trade-offs we need to make in the world. There's all kinds of circumstances in which something we might like and something that is good for the economy don't go in the same direction. Thank God, slavery is not one of those things. Thank God we can say: Slavery was not only morally atrocious, it was also economically inefficient.
Robinson: I think that's exactly right. What the data suggests is that slavery was very profitable for plantation owners. Exploiting other people turns out to always be profitable for some people. But it had huge negative consequences for the economy. That's what the evidence suggests.
Mounk: We're starting to talk about politics in a way. One of the fascinating ideas that motivates The Narrow Corridor is something that runs a little bit counter to how we tend to have public debates about politics and the economy and liberty; which is to say, we often think of freedom as the absence of constraints. So I am politically free if nobody is threatening to put me in jail for what I say. I am economically free if a state doesn't step in and pass regulations about what I'm allowed to do. Whereas the basic framework of this book seems to me to be importantly different. It is saying: No, actually, you need a strong state in order to have real economic and political liberty. Why this shift in perspective?
Robsinson: We're interested in economics, but we've always been trying to explain variation in institutions, because we think that's so critical. But here we’re also interested in trying to broaden the discussion of what it is that makes for a good society. In a world where the Chinese are putting millions of face recognition cameras on every street corner, it seems that some notion of liberty is very critical for thinking about human welfare. What is it that people are complaining about in Hong Kong? Why is it that people are fleeing Syria? It's not really about living standards. It's about some basic notion of liberty and the consequences for welfare that has. If you think about Syria, there's a very Hobbesian set of issues there, basic order and security. As you see in the first chapter of the book, we start with a pretty Hobbesian sort of discussion, which is, in this very anarchic world, you do need a state. You can't have liberty without a state mediating disputes and providing basic public goods. But that's obviously not enough either. So we try to tap into this very old philosophical debate started by Hobbes about what it is that can promote order in societies.
Mounk: What is the result of the absence of a state? Why is it that you need a constrained Leviathan—a strong state, but one that isn't total—to have liberty? Doesn’t liberty just mean that people leave me alone? And why won't people leave me alone in some of those countries where the state is so weak?
Robinson: I think there's two arguments in the book. One is a sort of very traditional argument, you could say, which is that in stateless societies, there is a lot of Hobbesian war and disorder. Locke said: “Well, actually, it's a little bit more orderly than Hobbes said, but there's some inconveniences in the state of nature.” And in my experience in the world, just reading history and ethnography, there's a lot of inconveniences in the state of nature. It's very difficult to create a stateless society which has high levels of liberty, and that's because of this threat of violence. But it's also because the response to the absence of the state is often what we call in the book the “cage of norms.” Society structures itself in order to reduce the possibility of violence and conflict. And those restrictions, that cage of norms, also puts enormous constraints on liberty. Societies aren't necessarily violent, but they're not necessarily characterized by much liberty, either, because of how they head violence off.
Mounk: So what explains different historical trajectories that different states have? Why is it that you end up with some countries in which the problem is a lack of state capacity, a lack of public order, with all of the horrible consequences that has for human liberty; but on the other hand, you have countries in which the state is so dominant that people are crushed under the weight of the Leviathan? What explains these different historical trajectories?
Robinson: The theory we develop says that what’s crucial is the balance of power between state and society. You need a state to provide order and public goods, but the state has to be “shackled.” It has to be under the control of society. That's very much in the spirit, say, of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, in which he says, essentially, “Look, Hobbes didn't get this right, because you've got to worry about the governance of the state.” But Locke didn't provide a positive theory of under what circumstances do you get a state that is governed in a way that promotes liberty. And so, what we try to do is provide a positive theory of that, and it's these elements of the balance between state and society. So the state can dominate society. That would be the Chinese case. But society can also dominate the state. That is the case in Lebanon, in large parts of Pakistan, in the Philippines and (historically) in sub-Saharan Africa.
Or a balance can emerge. And where does the balance emerge? In the “narrow corridor” from which the book takes its title. That’s to do with historical contingency. How do you think about these Western European or Northern European dynamics? How come they got into the narrow corridor? That's largely historical contingency: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, where the Frankish tribes, especially the Merovingians, Clovis, fuse these very participatory traditions and political institutions with elements of Western Roman state institutions, administrative institutions, legal institutions, the church, etc. So you get this kind of blend of state and civic participation, which turns out to be very hard to achieve.
Mounk: Talk us through this story a little bit more slowly. Why is it that a lot of these Western European states end up with that combination early on? How is it that the tradition of these tribes is fused with Roman law in order to set up these conditions?
Robinson: I don't think we know enough exactly about why Clovis did that. He was a sort of political entrepreneur, you could say.
We understand the ideas better in the Chinese case than we do in the European case. Clovis himself didn't write about this, or if he did, it hasn't survived. But there are some incredible facts which are consistent with this idea. Look at, for example, the incidents of parliamentary institutions in Europe—it coincides almost perfectly with the spread of these Germanic tribes. There's a remarkable correlation in Western Europe between the origin of these representative institutions and the spread of these Germanic tribes at the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
One thing that's very interesting is that if you contrast early legal codes in Western Europe (like the Salic law, which Clovis promulgated) they dramatically differ from Chinese legal codes, like the Qin or Han legal codes. The Salic law is a sort of bottom up codification of social norms. It was actually written not by Clovis, but by assemblies where people were chosen to pull these norms together and write them down. How did they write them down? The Franks weren't literate. Well, with the help of Roman lawyers. So it's a sort of bottom up codification of social norms. If you look at the Chinese legal codes, it's a kind of top-down engineering project to micromanage society. So that, to us, is incredibly significant in terms of just the gelling of this particular type of society in Western Europe.
What we point out in the book, actually, is that you could say in China the pivotal moment is the first dynasty. Before that there's lots of evidence of participation and assemblies. There's a famous kind of aphorism in the Xunzi, which is a third century BC philosophical tract: “The king is a boat. The people are the water. The water can hold up the boat, or it can sink the boat.” So that's a statement about participation. But what you see with the Qin Empire is a sort of intellectual project of how to organize society. And that's what they try to implement. And that sets off a dramatic divergence in China.
Mounk: So that helps to explain why it is that in some countries, the state ends up having all of the power and society ends up having very little power. What about the other end of a corridor? Why is it that in other parts of the world, the state just never gets off the ground?
Robinson: The argument in the book comes straight from the Chinese case. In some sense, the creation of this very centralized, despotic state in China would be very threatening to people's liberty. In fact, the Qin Dynasty didn't last very long, because there was a mass uprising against this micromanagement. If you take Africa—there's a lot of fabulously illustrated ethnographic examples of this—it's the kind of antagonism to hierarchy, and the concern that hierarchy will be used despotically, that makes people very anxious about it and leads them to try to stop it. To go back to Locke, “Should people be so worried about polecats and foxes that they risk being devoured by lions?”
Why is it that African societies are so small-scale? I've been working up in the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria. It's about the size of metropolitan Chicago. There are 68 different ethnic groups on the Jos Plateau. Why did these small-scale societies never accumulate into something bigger? I don't think it's because Africans don't get that there are advantages to this. They just don't know how to control it. So that's the basic argument in the book: what leads you to the other side of this corridor is this inability to create hierarchy and control it. But that doesn't create liberty either, as we were discussing earlier.
Mounk: One feeling that I think readers of your books might get is a slight hopelessness. If the reason why some societies are very prosperous and others poor—the reason why some societies are able to afford citizens a lot of freedoms, and others either are tyrannical or lack for state institutions to make sure that people are protected—has to do with what happened 2500 years ago in China, then does that leave us with any scope for political action today? What does that mean for people who live in societies that are not prosperous, or who live in societies that don't have much freedom? Can understanding these long-range historical, institutional sources of the present condition actually empower us to overcome some of these challenges?
Robinson: I think there's plenty of hope. I got interested in social science because I lived in a lot of developing countries when I was a kid. And I was very curious as to why the world looks so different depending on where you are. But the important takeaway is this balance of power, it seems to me. And modern societies don't have to go through the same process that Western Europe went through. We talk about lots of recent transitions in different parts of the world, where we try to interpret successful transitions through the lens of the theory—in Lagos (Nigeria) or in Bogota (Colombia). They combine this element of building the state and society together. This is a process. You can't generate liberty overnight. It takes a long time. But I don't believe that any society today has to reproduce these historic initial conditions of Western Europe. They're going to have their own conditions and constraints.
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Mounk: I wonder what you have to say about the rise of populism around the world. I'm struck by the fact that a lot of these new politicians in quite different contexts have very similar rhetorical stances. They talk in very similar ways about how they and they alone truly represent the people. They also start to undermine independent institutions in surprisingly comparable ways.
If I'm trying to look at populism through the lens of your work, I guess I would be tempted to say that their impact is going to be very different when you're in a context like Hungary or Turkey, which have always had relatively extractive institutions—whereas perhaps in a country like the United States, which does have inclusive institutions, that does have a very robust civil society, attempts at creating this form of top-down control are likely to be hampered by the kind of virtuous cycle that comes from already being within the narrow corridor.
How do you think your work can help to explain what's going on with populism, and what the likely trajectory of these populist leaders might be?
Robinson: That’s a very important set of issues. One mechanism we emphasize is how, when you're in the corridor, there's this sort of competition between state and society. And in this competition, both the state and the society changes. You could say the state tries to control society, society pushes back and tries to control the state. We call this the Red Queen effect, this kind of competition where you stay balanced, you stay in the corridor. But I think you can also spin out of the corridor. If you start thinking about Germany, to take a random example, you could see there's many instances in history where the Germans jumped out of the corridor.
That's a rather extreme example. But in some sense, populism is a kind of bottom-up disillusionment with these types of institutions. So why is it that people get so disillusioned with institutions? Why is it that some people buy into this interpretation of the world that you just outlined? I'm not sure I have a good idea about that.
But I would say, if you think historically, like I do, you start thinking, well, the U.S. has had bad presidents who wanted to accumulate personal power and undermine the institutions before. And I'm sure you know the Federalist Papers better than I do, but Madison's whole point is that you can't design institutions relying on well-meaning people. You have to design them anticipating not well-meaning—or even incompetent—people.
Mounk: I know that your book is not about lessons, but are there any lessons that the citizens of those lucky countries within the narrow corridor should take from this work?
Robinson: Yes, absolutely. This is not a call for complacency. What I find remarkable is the extent to which there's some common understanding in Germany about how to do things and how to organize things. And that's very much what the book is about, these kinds of low frequency ways in which society conceives of solving these problems. But of course, if that spins out of control in the way that the Nazi state did, it creates enormous misery and chaos. So it's not a call for complacency. It's to say we're all part of society. We have to do our bit in defending liberty and inclusive institutions. And that means complaining, it means protesting, it means contesting when the state overreaches and complaining about inequality and complaining about state capture and worrying about it. So absolutely, I think that's very important.
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