Why do some countries flourish and others fail?

This question has taken economist and political scientist James A. Robinson from England to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond, championing a now-influential theory: that institutions, not geography or culture, determine the fate of nations.

“If you don’t understand the political institutions in a society,” Robinson says, “there’s no way to make sense of the economic outcomes that they generate.”

A University Professor with appointments in the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, Robinson has spent decades making the case for this perspective, alongside MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. The frequent coauthors are perhaps best known for their acclaimed book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Crown Publishers, 2012), which has been translated into dozens of languages.

Robinson contrasts his view with a different approach in academic social science that is exemplified, he says, by Jared Diamond’s popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W. W. Norton, 1997). If you ask Diamond why the Democratic Republic of the Congo has poor development outcomes, he will point to tropical disease, isolation from trade routes, and other geographic factors. But ask Robinson and Acemoglu, and they will point to institutional factors such as authoritarian rule and monopolies on natural resources.

“Geography doesn’t decide anything,” Robinson says. “It creates constraints and opportunities, yes, but what societies do with those constraints—that’s institutions.”

When Robinson talks about institutions, he doesn’t mean organizations so much as the rules and practices that govern political and economic life: who can own property, who can vote, who has access to markets, and the like.

Why Nations Fail challenged both geographic and cultural explanations that treat history as destiny; Robinson and Acemoglu shifted attention to institutions as the products of live political struggle. Some of Robinson’s latest work presses the argument further, asking how political ideas about legitimacy, obligation, and authority shape institutions from the inside. In his account, institutions determine the fate of nations—and ideas help determine which institutions take hold, endure, or collapse.

The power of ideas is a point he is passionate about: “I think we massively underestimate the role of ideas in shaping human society.”

For his colleagues, grounding big claims in a rich body of evidence is key to Robinson’s appeal. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, AB’96, dean and Sydney Stein Professor at Harris Public Policy, calls Robinson’s research “a model of the sort of scholarship I and so many of my peers aspire to do: work that grapples with the most fundamental questions while treating theory, evidence, history, and the real world with the utmost seriousness.”

Taking the real world seriously, for Robinson, means going into the field. “If you’re sitting in your office,” he says, “you can convince yourself of all sorts of things.” Fieldwork is crucial, he says, “because you’re endlessly challenging your preconceived ideas.”

While Robinson was speaking from his office chair on the second floor of Keller Hall, he is serious about the need to get out from behind a desk. He first conducted fieldwork in Colombia in 1992, “mostly because I just felt I didn’t understand anything.” He went on to teach in Bogotá every summer for 28 years, where he was “as much a student as a professor.” Along the way, he visited other parts of Latin America and traveled to Africa.

Robinson has an inborn curiosity about human diversity that he says he shares with Acemoglu. What they find most fascinating is the human capacity to adapt to new environments.

“When ants got to Canada—a sort of barren, rocky, cold place—they speciated to adapt to this new environment,” Robinson says. “When humans spread out from East Africa and they got to Canada, they didn’t speciate. They invented igloos, a taste for seal blubber, and the skill of ice fishing.”

This empirical bent made Robinson something of an outlier in the field of economics, leading him to become a political scientist in the late 1990s. Although he still works closely with economists and draws on his economics training, he makes a point of critiquing his field of origin.

“Economists think they understand everything,” he says. “They think they have a theory which is like Newton’s laws of gravity, but in my experience, that’s just not right.”

To Robinson, economists rely too much on abstract models. This disciplinary orientation may have shifted somewhat since the 1990s. Robinson and his Harris colleague Michael Kremer, a University Professor in economics, have each received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in part for their novel empirical methods—historical comparative analyses of institutions in Robinson’s case, and randomized controlled trials used to test development interventions in Kremer’s. Even so, the field remains short on dense descriptions of local conditions, at least for Robinson’s taste.

Part of the issue is conceptual. For example, Robinson is bothered by what he describes as a common exercise in economics courses: calculating optimal financial policies in the abstract and then treating political factors as a kind of externality or added constraint on optimal functioning.

“You have a benchmark of a politics-free world,” he says. “That’s totally the wrong way to think about politics.”

In Robinson’s view, politics is not a constraint on the economy but the mechanism through which any economic results, whether positive or negative, are delivered. Politics is how anything gets done. The main problem, from this point of view, is not to work out an ideal model but to figure out why, in concrete detail, specific countries deviate from anything resembling ideal.

“If you start working in Colombia or Sierra Leone or whatever, it strikes you that policies are very far from optimal—simple things don’t happen.”

Robinson emphasized this point at a talk he gave at the Keller Center during Alumni Weekend in May 2025, telling the audience they should drop the economic fantasy that we can “cauterize or abolish politics” in favor of a world of pure production, consumption, and markets. “The problem,” he said, “is to change the nature of politics.”

For Robinson and Acemoglu, changing the nature of politics means, first and foremost, getting institutions right.

Some of their examples in Why Nations Fail make the point starkly. North and South Korea were one country before 1945. They share a language and a peninsula. They didn’t start out with radically different cultures or access to resources. South Korea’s much higher standard of living today is explained, Robinson and Acemoglu claim, by institutions like secure property rights, open markets, and civic freedoms, especially after the country began to democratize in the late 1980s.

Institutions like these are what they call inclusive; that is, they promote broad-based prosperity. In contrast, institutions that serve elites at the expense of ordinary people are extractive. Think serfdom, state censorship, and the banning of opposition parties.

One of Robinson’s favorite examples of an inclusive institution is the patent system, which is enshrined in the US Constitution. Patents draw on the ingenuity of the entire population, encouraging what he calls “creative destruction,” or the challenging of existing interests with new ideas. This system was radically different from extractive systems of monopoly in colonial Britain and elsewhere, in which innovation by people not already embedded in elite patronage networks was ignored or actively punished.

While studying how institutions foster economic prosperity (or don’t), Robinson and Acemoglu have grown increasingly interested in political ideals such as freedom and liberty. In their follow-up to Why Nations Fail, titled The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (Penguin Books, 2019), they claim that genuine liberty—the capacity to make choices, participate in society, and influence how one is governed—emerges when a capable state is constrained by an equally empowered society. In this view, liberty is an ongoing balancing act rather than a stable destination a country can arrive at.

The book shows how extraction and inclusion appear differently in different contexts. For example, if the state dominates society, as in China, you can get extractive authoritarianism characterized by centralized power with no independent press, judiciary, or civil society; but if the state weakens or collapses, as in Somalia, you can get extractive domination by informal authorities such as clans, militias, and warlords. The Narrow Corridor also emphasizes that widespread liberty, not just economic prosperity, is a defining feature of inclusive institutions.

This interest in the value of liberty for its own sake is another way in which Robinson’s work aligns more closely with political science than with economic approaches that tend to model behavior primarily in terms of material self-interest. After The Narrow Corridor, Robinson and Acemoglu have continued developing the notion that people—and even institutions—are moved by a willingness to defend and act upon ideas that matter to them, regardless of what economic spoils those ideas may bring.

This talk is going to be about the determinants of institutions,” Robinson told his audience at the David Rubenstein Forum last spring during the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture, an annual event that honors one UChicago scholar for producing work of enduring value. He was signaling a shift in emphasis: Instead of focusing on the consequences of institutions—the work that made him famous—he was examining how institutions themselves emerge and change.

Robinson had already begun to address this question through the framework of colonialism. In Why Nations Fail, for instance, Robinson and Acemoglu show how postcolonial societies have taken up or reformed the institutions of their colonizers—a significant topic, given that most people alive today reside in a country that declared independence from a European power during the 20th century.

A pair of examples from the book shows contrasting postcolonial paths. After El Salvador gained its independence from Spain, an elite landowning class continued coercing labor from peasants and Indigenous communities, fueling civil conflict and war. In contrast, after Botswana gained its independence from Britain, leaders curtailed elite corruption and channeled diamond wealth into public investments in infrastructure, education, and health.

So institutions are inherited—and often externally imposed—yet they are plastic. What decides whether they bend toward extraction, as in El Salvador, or inclusion, as in Botswana?

The hypothesis Robinson defended while standing in front of the towering red stage curtains in Friedman Hall was a very UChicago one: Ideas make a difference.

To argue the point, Robinson described an in-progress research study he is undertaking with a group of colleagues. Their case study for this argument isn’t a contemporary postcolonial state but a turbulent historical era of Robinson’s home country of England. Drawing from parliamentary debates, political treatises, and popular discourse from the 17th century, they are examining the role that ideas—about liberty, sovereignty, and legitimacy—played in shaping the foundations of Britain’s modern political institutions.

In much of modern social science, Robinson said, explanations of political behavior tend to focus on how economic incentives shape action. Culture, when it appears, is often treated as background: slow-moving, inherited, and rarely modeled as something actors deliberate about in moments of political action. What gets left underexplored, Robinson suggested, is how ideas operate as explicit reasons that motivate people to act politically.

For instance, a conventional account of England’s 1688–89 Glorious Revolution, in which King James II was deposed, holds that merchants excluded from royal monopolies—like those James II granted to the East India Company—were motivated to support regime change to open up new trading opportunities. To understand human behavior and historical change, follow the incentives.

It’s a sensible form of explanation, one which Robinson has often used himself. But his point in the Ryerson Lecture was to suggest that it wasn’t just wrangling over material self-interest that limited the monarchy and empowered Parliament during this period. These changes were also caused by persuasive arguments about what kind of political order was just and desirable. Ideas made a difference, in and of themselves.

The study’s main contribution to thinking about historical change, Robinson said, is a new way of “measuring ideas and trying to investigate their impact on people’s actions.”

This new approach has involved using large language models like ChatGPT to go hunting in the historical record for instances of two influential 17th-century arguments about political authority: John Locke’s argument for popular sovereignty in his Second Treatise of Government and Sir Robert Filmer’s argument for the divine right of kings in his Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings. Does political authority flow from the people, as Locke argues, or does it flow from God to the single person of the monarch, as Filmer would have it?

First the team rewrote the two arguments in a clear logical form that ChatGPT could easily analyze and detect. Then they prompted the chatbot to seek out similar arguments in vast troves of historical texts, including parliamentary records. (Their method for determining the similarity of arguments, Robinson said, is the “crux of the technical contribution.”) With these historical examples in hand, the team is now comparing the actions—like voting—of those who echo Locke’s argument and those who echo Filmer’s to see if they put their political money where their philosophical mouth is.

“If I make a Lockean type of argument,” Robinson said, “does that make it more likely that I’m going to vote against the king?” And does it still look this way after controlling for relevant economic and cultural factors, like being a merchant or sharing James II’s Catholic faith?

Robinson’s preliminary answer, while recognizing that there are remaining technical and conceptual problems to solve, is yes: Ideas matter, at least in this case.

Robinson came to the University of Chicago from Harvard in 2015, when he was hired as a University Professor. This highly selective honor is given to UChicago faculty members whose work has proven to be of the utmost significance, earning global renown. Only 10 professors currently hold the title, and only 23 have ever been named.

For a researcher like Robinson, who draws on multiple fields, UChicago provides a unique environment for collaboration. He approvingly cites the University’s long tradition of interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, going back to the founding of the Committee for Social Thought in the 1940s and the extension of economic tools to politics and sociology by Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, among other examples.

“I think that intellectual life is really a priority here,” Robinson says. “It might surprise you to think that’s not true of every top university, but it isn’t.”

The study on ideas in 17th-century England is one example of interdisciplinary collaboration. The research team includes Robinson and Acemoglu; Northwestern business professor Leander Heldring; Steven Pincus, the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and in the College; and Santiago Torres, an economics PhD student at MIT who studied with Robinson as a predoctoral scholar at Harris.

Robinson is dedicated to mentoring young researchers like Torres, says Jennifer Pitts, chair and David and Mary Winton Green Professor in the Department of Political Science and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. “He’s generous with his time and ideas, especially with younger scholars,” she says. “A number of our colleagues have appreciated his mentorship, going back decades.”

“I work a lot with my former PhD students nowadays,” Robinson says. “To start with, they always expect you to tell them what to do. And there’s this beautiful moment at some point where they take over.”

But his most prized collaboration is still with Acemoglu. Born to an Armenian family in Istanbul, Acemoglu moved to England for college and remained there through graduate school. Both he and Robinson passed through the London School of Economics at different stages of their training, but they didn’t meet until later, when they were both early-career scholars working on questions of institutions and economic development. In one of their early copublished articles in 2000, Robinson and Acemoglu describe how political elites can block economic development that threatens their own power, research that set the stage for the pair’s later work on extractive institutions.

Of their longtime collaboration, Acemoglu says, “He and I have been working together for three decades because we are not just coauthors but friends.”

“We talk on the phone probably every day,” Robinson says. “There’s a reason why great works of philosophy are written as dialogues.”

Nevertheless, for the first time, Robinson is writing a new book as a solo venture.

“Daron and I, we sort of share everything,” he says. “But Africa is my obsession, my passion.”

Robinson has spent decades working on the continent, where he is a fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria and at the African Economic Research Consortium in Nairobi, Kenya.

His new book, Wealth in People (Random House, forthcoming), argues that African societies have historically understood wealth not as material assets but as social ties, networks, and human capital. He aims to show how this principle shaped political and economic institutions long before colonialism and continues to influence contemporary African life today. Seen this way, political power and economic life are organized less around accumulating things than around building, maintaining, and mobilizing relationships across families, communities, and generations.

Robinson acknowledges the weaknesses of this model of wealth—like a tendency toward patronage politics and diffusion of power—while also stressing its overlooked strengths, like adaptability and social mobility.

The book fits a broader theme in Robinson’s work, from his writing on institutions to his latest efforts to understand how social ties shape human life: Economic incentives are important, but they aren’t everything. Freedom matters. Ideas matter. Relationships matter. According to African principles, the goal is not to “maximize income or maximize wealth … but to maximize your social connections,” he says. “It’s the key which unlocks African history for me.”