Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - James Robinson, ‘Why Nations Fail’ Author: The World Is Rebalancing

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Join British economist and political scientist, James Robinson, to talk about the six biggest challenges of this century: 1) democratic recession, 2) the corrosive effect of social media, 3) growth vs. green, 4) asymmetry between talent and power, 5) deepening inequality, and 6) lurking danger behind AI. James Robinson is a Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago and the Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He is also the co-author (with Daron Acemoglu) of some influential books and articles, including “Why Nations Fail” (2012), “The Narrow Corridor” (2019), “Non-Modernization: Power-Culture Trajectories and the Dynamics of Political Institutions*”* (2021), and “Culture, Institutions and Social Equilibria: A Framework” (2021). About the Host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian educator, entrepreneur, and currently a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #JamesRobinson ----------------- This Episode's Notes ----------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] admissions.sgpp.ac.id wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: Global Thinkers Wandering Scientists The Take Visit and subscribe: Indonesian Students at University of Chicago SGPP Indonesia Visinema Pictures

You can have great leadership, but unless that least institution building, the great leadership won't last. You can't rely on good leaders. You need to build institutions. You know, that's the keys. I think artificial intelligence is a misnomer, you know, because it's not intelligence, actually. So it's artificial something, but it's not intelligence. It's a mischaracterization. To call it artificial intelligence is a mischaracterization of what intelligence is. We need a fundamental change in the mindset or, our values, you know, about what is it that makes a good life or what is it makes for happiness. Hi, friends and fellows. Welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities

coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far. And welcome to this. special series. Hi, today we're honored to have Professor James Robinson, who is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. James, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. You were born in the UK. You spent a lot of time in the Caribbean and West Africa, and then you found your way here in Chicago. How and why? Oh, but that's a long story.

My father was an itinerant engineer who started life working in the British Colonial Service in the 1930s. So he basically worked overseas most of his life. And then we grew up, you know, when we were, you know, when I was a kid, we spent a lot of time overseas and Barbados and Trinidad. And then, you know, we moved back to Britain in the 1970s. He stayed overseas. And, you know, we moved around in Britain. I went to a London School of Economics. I studied economics, and I tried to study political science.

It's a long story. And then I ended up, you know, in the United – yeah, it's a long story. Ended up going to the United States doing a PhD in economics at Yale. I got very excited about economics, learning economics, trying to master economics. And then I realized that economics didn't actually explain most of what I was interested in. And then, you know, it's been a long story of trying to find a way to do research that I feel kind of serious about on the topics I'm passionate about. And that's taken me to lots of places, Australia, Harvard, you know, and I came here, 2015. I moved to the University of Chicago,

and it's been fantastic. Actually, I love it. Yeah. You've written so many books and, you know, the best one of which for many people is why nations fail, right? And do you think and feel that The success of that is because of your experience in the developing economies, having lived in those areas, to the extent that your personal experience relates to the developing, you know, countries, citizens around the world. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, on the one hand, the book is trying to summarize in an accessible way

a lot of the scientific research that, you know, Daran Asamoglu and I had done in the previous sort of 20 years. But many of the examples in the book actually come from my direct experience of kind of field work also. You know, the first place I started working in in sub-Saharan Africa was Botswana. We talk about Botswana in the book. You know, I've worked for many years in Sierra Leone, we talk about Sierra Leone, and I've worked in Zimbabwe. We talk about Zimbabwe. I've taught for the last 30 years every summer in Colombia, you know. So I've done a lot of research in Colombia. Colombia is in the book. So, of course, I'm English. You know, I grew up in the 1970s in England studying English history and society. And so I think I came to the US, you know.

So I think you're right that a lot of the focus, you know, is comes from, you know, my childhood or, you know, Professor Asamoglu, of course, grew up in Istanbul. He grew up in Turkey. He grew up in the developing world, you know, straddling Asia and Europe. You know, from my, you know, one of the things that I've learned, you know, one of the things that I found myself kind of most out of sync with, for example, as an economist, was it's just obvious to me that you have to do field work. Like, I just don't understand. So many things I just don't understand. And you need to get out there. You need to talk to people. You need to understand other people's perspectives. You need to understand other people's cultures and institutions the way they think about them. You can't,

there's only so much you can learn sitting behind your desk. You know, yes, there's a library full of books, but many things you want to know are not in any book that's in the library. And so I kind of threw myself into that, you know, start in the 1990s, mostly because I felt so ignorant, you know. Of course, I enjoy it terrifically also, but just as a way of just generating ideas and, you know, far too much of economic development also is about, you know, people sitting in their offices in the United States and imagining what might be true in developing countries. and the voices and the ideas of the people in the developing countries themselves and are not on the table. And that's sort of outrageous. It has to change. It will change.

And I guess that's something I've always tried to kind of embrace these other perspectives. You kind of dispelled the theory that geography would determine the fate of a country, right? And you talked in depth about, you know, how institutional buildings. inclusive institutional building would be far more important. And culture would be far more important than stuff like geography. Explain that. Yeah, I think one of the sort of proximate motivations for some of the academic papers that Professor Asamogl and I wrote was, you know, we were at a conference in Boston University

and Jeffrey Sachs, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, remember him. He was talking about how geography is destiny and how, poor countries in Africa and the tropics were intrinsically poor, you know, because of tropical latitude. And, you know, and I sort of thought I knew something about, you know, having lived in places of tropical latitude. I just thought this was complete nonsense, you know. And so Professor Asamogl and I, we went afterwards, you know, to some bar or something. We started discussing it, and we agreed immediately that this was complete nonsense. But like, why was there a correlation between latitude and process? It's true. You know, there's a sort of correlation between latitude and

prosperity. But that had nothing to do with the effect of latitude in any kind of causality. There was no causality. It's just a correlation. It doesn't mean anything. So what could have created that correlation? And that's when we came up with this hypothesis that this is actually related to the nature of European colonialism in some sense. A European colonialism created very different types of institutions in tropical latitudes and it did intemperate latitudes where Europeans were much more happy, much more happy living and, you know, etc. So that was the start of a kind of whole sort of scientific research agenda that we had, you know, trying to look at the effect of colonialism on the kind of modern world income distribution. So, so, and then, you know,

what it, what it turns out that once you think about this properly, geography has no effect on anything, you know. So, so I think this idea, you know, kind of more conceptually, this idea that somehow, you know, human society is kind of limited by geography or ecology. I find that completely wrong. You know, like there's 9,000 species of ants, you know, like when ants moved to Canada, they speciated because Canada was cold and it was sort of margin, you know, like they speciated to kind of be better adapted to the climate. You know, when Homo sapiens got to Canada, what did they do? They didn't speciate. You know, they invented igloos and they developed to taste for seal blubber and they develop ice fishing. And I think humans are just

incredibly creative in terms of technology and institutions and the way they organize their society. So they don't succumb to geography and ecology. I think we overcome it humans. I think that's a big story. So I think a lot of our early scientific work was sort of showing that some of these associations that Professor Sachs and other people had kind of tried to convince people were true just actually were not right once you do. the analysis properly. What do you think is the fundamental cause for the difference between the same people culturally evolving in different manners? Well, you're interested in what outcome and like just like why is it that human societies diverge? You could have the same group of people, right?

And they happen to be living in, let's say, two different geographic zip codes. Yeah. But for some reason, the two of them culturally evolve, you know, in different ways. Yeah. One would be off superiority over the other. I don't know. You know, human society is very complex. You know, I think humans come up with ideas. They come up with, you know, ways of thinking about the world, with culture, with institutions, you know.

And so that can lead societies to diverge. You know, think about New Guinea. You know, in New Guinea, you know, there's hope. of languages, you go from one valley to the next valley and they speak a different language, you know, and they're organized in different ways. And so, you know, societies can kind of innovate and create. And yeah, there are evolutionary processes at work there, I suppose. But I think there's a lot of freedom. And, you know, I don't think human society is like this sort of Darwinian. I don't like this evolutionary idea of like Darwin's finches, you know, like the famous finches of

the Galapagos Islands that they had different beaks, you know, because the food was different on different islands. And so the finches evolved beaks which were well adapted to eating the food. But I think humans create all sorts of institutions and culture. They're not necessarily very adaptive at all. They can be. You know, they can be brilliantly productive. They can lead people to cooperate and invent. But they can also be very different. You know, my experience working in developing countries, I think, is you see lots of things that can't be thought of in a very useful way as being adapted to particular circumstances. So I think that's part of humanity's kind of uniqueness, you know, the emergence of homo sapiens with language and culture and symbolic culture and, you know, we're just very creative.

Right. I want to take you to Southeast Asia, right, and I want to, you know, bring up the topic of foreign direct investment. If you take a look at the different Southeast Asian countries, right, Singapore stands out in being able to attract a massively higher amount of FDI, vis-à-vis the others, right? If you take a look at the FD on a per capita per year basis for the big guns of Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, they range between $100 to $400 per capita.

Singapore does it at about $19,000. then comes the small country argument, right? But that gets displaced also, because Singapore was able to get, in 2021, about $105 billion worth of FDI compared to the next biggest recipient at about $30 billion. This kind of like confirms your theory. Geography doesn't determine the fate of a country, right? It goes back to the institutional building.

how how would you describe this phenomenon of why Singapore is so successful yeah and I want I want you to peel the onion a little bit so that you know at least you know Singapore can be some sort of an inspiration in some context to others yeah it's an inspiration but it's also a difficult case you know it's interesting the Singapore experience I mean the big the big you know the big story we try to tell in why nations fail is this idea that, you know, if you want to have prosperity, if you want to have economic success, then you need to have inclusive economic institutions, by which we mean, you know, economic institutions that create broad-based patterns of incentives and opportunities. You know, like the way I think about this is very simple, you know,

that we know what drives economic development is entrepreneurship, its innovation, its creativity. and, you know, that talent is sort of spread out everywhere in society. I think all the evidence suggests that of the history of innovation. So where do you, how do you find that talent? You know, you don't know where it is. The government doesn't know where it is. You know, you need to create a kind of set of institutions that allow those people to get to the top, that allow them to get credit, to get an education, to have access to markets,

to kind of take patents out, to build businesses, you know, without somebody crushing them. And so that's what, you know, that's what inclusive economic institutions are about. But how do you create such an economy? You know, that's about politics. You know, that's the story here. So we say, yeah, that's the economics of it. But lying behind that is the politics. And if you want to have an inclusive economy, you have to have an inclusive political system. And there's two dimensions to that. One is this state capacity, like having a state which can really enforce the law, which can raise taxes, provide key public goods, you know, that's key. But you also need political power to be broadly based in the sense that I don't

think, you know, you can rely on some autocrat to use state capacity in the interests of the collectivity, the vast mass of people. It can happen in some circumstances, you know, but not in an enduring way. And the reason why Singapore, you know, is kind of a complicated example is that, yes, there is state capacity, you know, there's ability to provide order or provide public goods, invest in education, enforce the law. But the political system has been pretty autocratic. You know, it's not like China or whatever it is, you know, but Li Kuan Yew didn't like opposition too much. You know, you had the same kind of family dynasty running the place, you know, the same party. So that's a difficult thing. And how would I think about that? I think, you know, in society, you know, you know, there's lots of sources of variation. You know, human motivation is very complicated. You know, did Deng Xiaoping do what he did because he wanted to get rich? No, he didn't, you know.

Law about Li Kuan Yu. You know, Li Kuan Yu wanted to develop his country. You know, the guy was charismatic. You know, he was driven. And, you know, he didn't like criticism. But he actually, acted in, you know, what you could say was the collective interest. Like, but my observation as a social scientist is, are two. One, that's a very unlikely type of autocrat to have. You can have people like that. It's unusual. Two, it's more usual in East Asia for a reason that social scientists don't understand, right? You know, so, you know, you've got Li Kuan Yu, you know, you've got Park Chongi, you know, even like Suhato maybe for a bit. You know, There's examples of this. There's no examples in Africa.

You know, maybe you could say President Kagami today, you know, Latin America, name one such person in Latin America. So there's interesting regional differences in the presence of these kind of, you know, enlightened autocrats or whatever, you know. But even, so that's an interesting fact. But even there, how do you find these people? You know, how do we, and I think what we know in social science is the best way of actually finding these people is to have a relatively democratic,

process. You know, how do you know, how can you guarantee that you're going to get somebody at the top who really wants to act in the interests of society? You know, and, you know, when we, when I look at China, I see, you know, what's going to stop presidency, you know, whoever comes after him, behaving like Chairman Mao and destroying the society on some personal whim or some kind of idiosyncratic ideological project. I don't see anything will stop him. So that's the kind of a basis of our prediction. So you can see that Singapore is a difficult case. You know, it's a small country, you know, where one person can have a lot of impact, you know, one personality, but you can't really understand big patterns in world economic history by focusing on individuals like that.

The other thing which is very interesting is that, you know, whenever you meet a dictator, they always say, you know, their model is Li Kuan Yu, you know. So, you know, the former, Kazakhstan, for example, President Nazarbayev announced that his model was Li Kuan Yu. So I was in Kazakhstan talking about my book, and I met the prime minister, and I explained to the prime minister, you know, you don't understand the Li Kuan Yew model. You know, go to the National Museum of Singapore. If you go to the National Museum of Singapore, okay, it's about Singapore. It's about the history of Singapore, Singapore identity, institution.

Yeah, he appears, Li Kuan Yew appears in the 1950s, at his appropriate. place in history and then he disappears. You go to the National Museum of Astana, President Nazabaya, President Nazabaya, President Nazabaya, President Nazabaya, did this president, totally personalized. You know, that's not the Lee Kuan Yew model at all. He built institutions, interestingly enough. So what, okay, you mentioned democracy. It's probably fair to say that democracy is some sort of a recession, right? And we're seeing an increasing number of democracies around the world, where talent has been selected less on meritocracy, more on loyalty and or patronage. Is this, you think, episodic, or this is something that's going to last for quite a while?

I mean, I think there's different things going on. I think, you know, I think, you know, if I talked about the United States, I'd say, for example, that, you know, there's been lots of terrible leaders in the United States, honestly, you know, people who did far worse things than President Trump. You know, Roosevelt, you know, tried to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s. He egregiously violated the norm that, you know, the term limit, the two, you know, term limits in a very sneaky way also. You know, lots of people tried to do that. Grant, Ulysses S. Grant, tried to do it in the 19th century. People have just forgotten these names. You know, they've forgotten. So we, the U.S. people have forgotten. People did much, try to do much sneakier things than President Trump did, honestly. I mean, I think what I'm not defending what President Trump did, you know, but there's a long history of that in the United States, actually, in fact. And one of the things we point out in why nations fail is that, you know, is that there are these feedback loops, you know, there are,

you know, there are, you know, and the institutional design stopped President Trump. You know, he couldn't, federalism stopped President Trump. He couldn't interfere with the vote counting because it's controlled by the states. And, you know, that's why the Constitution was designed. You know, if you read the Federalist papers, which was James Madison's sort of justification for why you have the Constitution, he makes it very clear that you write constitutions exactly because you expect that people like President Trump are going to come to power. You know, he says, you know, if men were angels, you wouldn't need a constitutional. institution. So, so, and if, you know, so that, that's, so that he understood that. So I think the constitution did its job. I think it's actually a big triumph for the institutions, actually. Now, I understand it's still kind of running and whatever, but my sense is that, you know, when President Trump drops out, everything is going to revert back. Now people are scared of him and they're worried about his kind of base. But that's very tied to him personally. I don't think anyone is going to be able to leverage that movement in the future. So I think that, you know, but as I said, so I think that you said, use the word episodic. So I would say, you know, if I, if you look at it historically, you know,

this is actually not so uncommon in the United States, this kind of polarization, this attempt to undermine institutions. You know, one of the point about why nations fail is like, of course, if you're in an inclusive society or a relatively inclusive society, there's always incentives to make it extractive. You know, we give the example of Venice, you know, probably the world's most successful society in the late Middle Ages basically just went completely into reverse and it destroyed all the institutions that had made it so prosperous to kind of cement this oligarchy. So I think elsewhere in the world, you know, what I see in Latin America, you know, I can't talk about everything, but what I see in Latin America is, you know, there was this, you know, this third, this so-called third wave of

democratization, you know, in the 1980s and like, 1990s, you see all of these new democracies kind of created. And what you see is that this creates all of these expectations that can't be met in some sense. Yeah, this has something to do with weak state capacity or the limited ability of governments to actually change society and kind of deliver things for people. So I think there's an enormous disillusionment with democratic practices. I think you see that in Eastern Europe also, like the 1990s kind of, you know, the European integration and of course, which was a benefit that Latin America didn't have. But that brought a lot of benefits to Eastern Europe. But also, you know, there's a lot of problems in Eastern Europe and people,

the same sort of disillusionment, I think, sets in. So that creates instability. It creates instability amongst a party system. You know, people look for radical alternatives. And so, you know, quite how that will play out. I don't know. You know, I think my view of democracy is similar to Winston Churchill's, you know, which is that it's the worst possible political system except for the alternatives. And I've done a lot of empirical work like scientific research on this. You know, what I can say is that, you know, the average effect is democracies associated with better public good provision, you know, better education, you know, it's with substantial increases in prosperity.

But of course, there's a lot of heterogeneity in the sense that, you know, there are the Lee Kuan use of the world, you know, and there are the Paul Kagamis of the world. And that can bring a lot of benefits, but how do you institutionalize? How do you sustain that? You know, maybe they can do that in Singapore. I think it seems likely they'll do it in Singapore, but that's not the general pattern at all. I want to ask you about social media. It seems to have distorted the way people look at things, the way people look at people.

and it seems to have basically caused a discount in the ability to find a proper intersection between power and talent. What we're seeing in many places around the world where for anybody to attain a position of leadership in anything, it's got to do with how much mud you put on your picture on your face when you're on TikTok, as opposed to how well you intellectualize. That kind of inevitably will undermine, right, the ability to intellectualize generally and the ability to choose leadership that's going to be able to intellectualize,

that's going to be able to build inclusive institutions. Is that a right way of looking at this as a systemic risk for a long time? Yeah, I don't know. It's such a fast-moving thing. all of this social media and it's such a recent thing. You know, the academics are scrambling to catch up with it, you know, in terms of trying to understand the research consequences.

And, you know, and the first impulse of academics was to sort of think of this as a positive thing, you know, like Taras Square, you know, people coordinating protests against dictators using Twitter and things like this. Even Facebook, you know, there's research on the spread of Facebook to different languages, you know, and how that's associated with protests, and democratization and things like that.

But I think, you know, the current view would be much more like the view you're articulating, which it's having some very corrosive effect on people. You know, somehow humans, for some reason, are very susceptible to information, you know, which they can't document. And I find it very isolating. You know, I think, like, it's very isolating, you know. You know, one of the hypotheses about why on earth did Putin, you know, launched this invasion of Ukraine when he did and not years before. Whatever is that he got so isolated

in COVID, you know, he got isolated and social media isolates you. And so people are not giving you feedback. You're not talking. You're not, you know, and that's what humans do, you know, it's not a coincidence that like most famous works of philosophy are dialogues, right? What did Plato write? Dialogues, where the Cicero have dialogues, you know, because we need to talk to each other. We need to communicate, you know, and sitting on your phone, it's, I agree. It's sort of, I don't, I'm not sure I have a very intelligent view of this. I think it's sort of frightening what you're describing. I'm not sure I know what the good, you know, as I said, academics are scrambling to get on top of this. But I think the unintended consequences of it are just seem to be huge, you know, like, you know,

And, you know, that's, it's frightening, but I'm not sure I have anything good to say about it. I know. I'm, I'm equally, you know, basic about this. But just within intuition, at the rate that for anybody that wants to attain a position of leadership, it matters more if he or she can dance on TikTok. Yeah. by way of popularizing herself or himself, as opposed to, you know, intellectualizing. And to me, that is a discount to anybody's ability to build institutions,

especially in an inclusive manner. Yeah. Right. And if this thing were to carry on for a long time, then I think there's less hope for institutional building in an inclusive manner. Yeah. that's a challenge. I mean, I think if you thought about, you know, if you went back in the history of political thought, and you thought about, like, you know, some of the great scholars like John Locke,

you know, in the 17th century, look, what was Locke doing? You know, Locke, he starts his famous second treatise in government by sort of characterizing, what are the problems in society? What are the main problems? You know, well, we have this natural law that God gave, you know, but that doesn't work so well in all contexts, you know. And then he sort of says, so here's the problem and here's a solution. We have to design these institutions, et cetera. But, you know, perhaps what you're saying is that, you know, social media creates the world is so different, you know, it creates such a different world that we have to characterize in a different way, you know, the types of problems we're facing in society, and we have to come up with different sorts of institutional solutions. I mean, it'd be sort of

ludicrous to say that the world never changed or, you know, and so if the world changes, the problems are going to change, and the institutional solutions to the problems are going to change. I don't know if there's too many people thinking like that, but it makes sense. I'm just concerned because going back to Southeast Asia, right? I mean, it's a region of around 700 million people. It's about $3.5 trillion economy. I think what's at stake for these 700 million people is not small potatoes, right? The more we need institutions that are inclusive and the more we need to make sure that we can sustain, you know, whatever episodic stresses that could happen politically, geopolitically, economically, socially, culturally. I'm just not sure, but, but I can

say this, though, social media, I think, has changed culture in a big way at the rate that people look at their handphones nine to ten hours a day. And most of what they're looking at is TikTok and Instagram reels and what have you. And whatever they're looking at, for the most part, are not exactly, you know, economics from the University of Chicago. You know, they're just stupid stuff. Yeah. I hate to say that.

And that, I think, is a discount to anybody's ability to build institutions going forward. But, but I want to, I want to take you to the topic of, climate change now. I want to try to bring up what I think is a bit paradoxical, right? I mean, if you talk to the people within the sustainability space, you know, they're all focused on achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, which is only about 27 years away.

But if you take a look at most people on the planet that are living in developing economies, they're more worried about putting food on the table. And for them to understand sustainability, they got to be modern. And if you try to figure out what it takes for a nation to be modern, there's so many metrics, but one metric is electrification. Right. And for them to be adequately electrified, to be modern thinking, it takes countries like India and Indonesia between 90 to 130 years.

there seems to be this awkward, irreconcilable nature between the narrative of sustainability and the narrative of modernization. How do we fix this? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, it's the rich countries that are the big, you know, the guilty parties here in terms of, you know, so, I mean, I guess it seems to me

that it's not the people in developing countries that created this problem. You know, it's the people in rich countries that created this global problem. They're mostly responsible for dealing with. that it seems to me. So, so I would say, yeah, I think it's completely unreasonable to expect people, you know, poor people in developing countries, you know, who didn't create this problem to have to pay for it. So I think, you know, whether or not we can actually organize such a global social contract,

I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, I think it's a sort of indictment in some sense of of this period of economic history, you know, that humanity, you know, for whatever reason, Western humanity became so focused on this sort of economic, materialistic objectives. You know, I just, even the, even the sort of terminology of natural resources, you know, like the world and the nature is a resource, you know, which we can exploit for our benefit. You know, whose idea was that, you know, like we're all on the same planet. We're living together. You know, we're living with these natural ecosystems, you know.

I just, I feel like that has to change. in some fundamental way. I think the very economicistic way of thinking about it with carbon taxes and, you know, like that doesn't resonate. Like we need to find a way of resonating, getting this to resonate with people and seeing ourselves as kind of part of nature

in a much more fundamental way, you know, rather than, you know, just like natural resources. You know, it seems like the whole terminology has to change, you know. But I, you know, just in terms of that, what you're talking about, yes, I think that's, you know, you can't expect people in poor countries to, it's not, they didn't create the problem, you know, so, so it, and they're not, you know, they're not, they're not responsible now for, for climate change and global warming, it's the US and it's China and it's Western Europe and India and, of course, there's a lot of poor

people in India too, but, but, and, you know, that's, so that, that, that's one question, but it seems to me to solve that question, you know, we need a fundamental change in the mindset or, you know, or in our values, you know, about what is it that makes a good life or what is it makes for happiness and kind of, I don't know, it's just like, you know, I work a lot in sub-Saharan Africa and you see, like, there's very different ideas in Africa about, like, what a, what a good society looks like, much more embedded in the community, much more respect for kind of nature and natural resources and, you know, than you have in this Western society with this very kind of materialistic. I find myself personally out of sync with that.

How do we play catch up then? I mean, at the end of the day, you know, if we want to be modern or more modern, we got to catch up, right? It's a question of scale or scalability, right? How do we scale in an environmentally friendly manner when the alternatives are now? sufficient, right? I mean, if you want to go with solar, not adequately cheap. Well, yeah, I mean, the one view is that there's a technological solution. So the economist's view is, well, prices will change and there'll be a technology will solve this problem. And, you know, and, you know, I always like the joke, Jared Diamond has this great joke, you know, that in Jared Diamond's book... I didn't want to mention his name when I was talking about geography.

No, no, but that's fine. He's a very good friend of mine. You know, we edited a book together. We organise many conferences together. So, so, so, you know, we disagree about many things, but, you know, that's perfectly normal. But he has this great joke, you know, which is in East Island, you know, completely deforested. Like, what did the person think who chopped down the last tree, you know? Like, did they say, hey, this is my tree, you know, we have private property here. I can cut it down if I like, you know, and you can't do anything about it. this sort of characterizing a sort of modern Western attitude towards natural resources,

you know, that's kind of put us in this mess, you know. So I think, you know, I think this idea that somehow technology can save this, you know, we can have electric cars or we can have electric airplanes or whatever it is. That seems unlikely to be true to me, you know. And so we need some more fundamental rethink of, you know, what, what modernity is about, I would say. I want to ask you about leadership. What would it take for a country or a nation to have the right kind of leadership?

Oh, gosh, you know, that's a, that's a topic, you know, that's a very hard topic in social science. There's no good social scientific research on leadership to my knowledge. Like, there's no good general, I mean, I think it's just undeniable in reality, the importance of leadership, you know, getting people to work together, to identify collective projects, you know, turning a country around and a society or whatever it is, or a city or a university, even, you know. So, so an institution, organization. So, so I think, but it's very difficult to understand, like, where that comes from, you know, like, and how do I find good leadership if I

don't have it, you know, and why do I have bad leadership? And, you know, most social science is all about kind of structures, you know, it's about, you know, and it's very hard to take into account, you know, what you could call agency, you know, the ability of individuals to impact society or decisions or, you know, and it's funny because, you know, you spend so much time worrying about that, you know, trying to get the right person and trying to find the right person, you know. But there's not a good social science theory about that, unfortunately. You know, it's frustrating, especially because, like, in my research looking at comparative economic development, you know, we were talking about Singapore or, you know, talking about

General Park. You know, so General Park, you know, Park Chong He was a, you know, like, why did he do what he did, you know, and why did he come to the top? You know, when the military took over in Korea, why did he come to the top and not somebody else, you know, and then look at Ferdinand Marcos, for example, or. or, you know, many military governments that I could name when you get some completely kleptocratic or venal, you know, person comes to the top.

Why is it that in one context, you get someone like Part Chong-hee who wanted to really develop his country, or you get Ferdinand Marcos, who was just much more interested in accumulating wealth for himself and his family? That's a huge consequence for those societies, but we just don't understand why that happens in social society. I mean, in history, you've seen cases where you could have the most fantastic set of institutions, relatively speaking, and you could have the most awkward leadership, right?

Whereas, on the other hand, you could have a set of the most horrible institutions, but awkwardly, you end up with a fantastic leadership. who could put, you know, all the pieces of the puzzle together and fix them. Is it some sort of an act of serendipity? Yeah, I think it has elements like that. I mean, I guess my, you know, my emphasis would be you can have great leadership, but unless that least institution building, the great leadership won't last, you know. You can't rely on good leaders.

You need to build institutions, you know, that's the key. So that's sort of the why nations fail perspective. And I think, yeah, it's sort of, you know, it does have that element of serendipity. I mean, sometimes, you know, leaders emerge, you know, to solve a particular problem. And they're good for one problem, but they're not good for other problems also. Like I see that a lot, you know. Like in Colombia, for example, you know, there was this long-running insurgency with these Marxist guerrilla groups. and the government spent 20 years trying to negotiate with them, you know, and it never worked,

and it never worked, and it never worked. And then people just decided, like, this isn't going to work. We need to fight. And then there was someone there, you know, President Alvorebe, who became president, and that's what he wanted. That's what he always wanted. But, like, people, you know, okay, we don't want that. We're trying to negotiate.

Okay, fine. Now we have to fight. Let's get this guy. And they put the guy in power, and he did, that's what he did. And it was fantastic. But he was also a disaster in every other dimension. He tried to undermine all the institutions, the Supreme Court, whatever, you know. So, and then they got rid of that, you know, so good for Columbia, you know.

But I think, like, sometimes people are good for one thing, one task, and they're not necessarily good for everything. Also, that's something about leadership, you know. Like I would say, like, Ellen Musk, he seems like he's very good at some things, but he's not good at everything, you know. So then, you know, Michael Jordan was very good at basketball, but he wasn't good at baseball. You know, so I think that's also, that's also very difficult. You know, not everybody's good at everything, you know. So that's another problem with leadership, you know. So maybe some people, you know, you know, I think like Li Kuan Yew, he was very intolerant

in lots of dimensions and he was autocratic or whatever. But he was also very serious about, you know, building the state and building institutions. And he got that, you know, this was not about him. You know, this was about Singapore. and it was not about his personal aggrandizement, you know. And that was just him. That's just what he cared about and what he valued, you know. And again, so that's great.

But how, you know, how do we know he would have come to power in the circumstances he did? And I don't think it's necessary either. That's what's interesting. You know, if you look at, say, Mauritius, you know, or Barbados or other places that have been terrifically successful under democracy, then, you know, could you name one prime minister of Mauritius, you know, or one prime minister of independent, you know, Barbados, no, you know, but those are, you know, Mauritius has been incredibly successful industrialized finance, you know, it's peaceful, it's been, you know, it's multicultural in a sort of, you know,

you have people of Indian descent, Chinese descent, African descent, English, you know, French people. I mean, it's just an incredible melting pot, Mauritius. It's been extremely dynamic under democracy, you know, and Barbados too. So I always find it curious whenever people tell me the example of Lee Kuanu, I'd say, well, why don't we talk about Botswana, or when do we talk about Barbados, or why don't we talk about all these places that have been successful under democracy? You know, also, like, you know, it's kind of odd, this. Well, I think the reason why people talk more often about Singapore is that

Singapore has been very good and conscious at projecting ideas and soft power, right, to the rest of the world. And they've always consciously made an effort to be at the intersection of ideas coming from one direction and another. Whereas the Mauritius of the world, probably they chose not to do that, not because they couldn't. Right. And one would argue that, you know, as much as many think that Singapore is not a thriving liberal democracy, but you've got to give it to them for having been able to not just distribute, power to the hands of many, to some extent, but they've been very good at distributing other

essential public goods. Healthcare, welfare, education, intellect, integrity, you know, social value. Things that I think matter in the context of, you know, a liberal democracy, right? So I would consider Singapore as, I think, a very good example, you know, for many countries around the world, not just many of us in Southeast Asia, because they've been able to prove themselves to be trustworthy to the rest of the world when it comes to monetary capital allocation. Yeah. No, I agree with all of that.

You know, I think, but as a social scientist, my question is, you know, like, how do you replicate that somewhere else? Like, what is it that allowed the Singapore, Singaporeans to do that? You just pass laws, you know, like Saint-Just, you know, San Just, one of the leaders of the French revolution said, there have been. a lot more good laws than good examples, you know, and I think that, but they have good laws and good examples in Singapore, you know, and that's, but that, where does that come from exactly? Is that to do with Lee Kuan Yu? Is it something deeper in the society and the culture or in the,

I don't think we understand that in social science? So that's my problem. I think I completely agree with all of what you said. My question is, how do I take that and reproduce it in Kazakhstan, or in the Philippines or in Guinea-Bissau or that's the challenge. How do you see inequality? I mean, one would have thought that in developed economies, inequality would be less, but it's pretty stark, right? If you take a look at the genie coefficient ratios or some of the most developed economies, they're not small potatoes.

and from a social scientist standpoint. How is that happening? Is it just because money has gotten a little too elitized? I mean, I would say if I just look at the Americas, the big picture in the Americas is that North America has been much more equal than Latin America for hundreds of years, you know. So it's true that in the last 30 or 40 years, you know, inequality levels in the US have kind of started moving towards Latin American type levels.

Right. But, but, but that, you know, that still masks enormous differences in terms of social mobility and, you know, and I think, you know, that's really a lot to do with globalization. You know, why is it that Zuckerberg and these people are so rich? Because the world is his market, you know, it's not just America with a few exports. You know, Facebook is everywhere. You know, Why are all these people so rich? It's because of this enormous globalization. So I look at that and I think, okay, I don't think that can have all sorts of negative consequences for societies. But fundamentally, those people made that money through innovation.

In the start of why nation sell, you know, we say, if you want to understand the difference between North America and Latin America, look at the difference between Bill Gates and Carlos Slim. You know, Bill Gates made his money innovating. Carlos Slim made his money by getting his friends in the Mexican government to privatize the unregulated telecom monopoly to him. Okay, that's the story of Latin America and end of story. You know, so I think, you know, and I still see that. I still see, you know, in U.S., the way to get rich and be successful and have high status

is through innovation, it's through entrepreneurship. I don't think that's, it's just the world has changed in a way that makes that enormously more profitable. I don't think that's the whole story, of course. There's also a domestic story about the crumbling of kind of unionization and the kind of accumulation of monopoly power within the society, you know, to keep wages down. And so this is being combined with other more cultural things, almost within the U.S., kind of attitudes towards work and the sort of dispensibility of workers. And, you know, I think that's a lot to do with Reagan, the sort of fallout of Reagan, this kind of embracing of free market, you know, this kind of free market view of the world.

So I think that's also going on at the same time. So it's a combination of different things, which is creating this upsurge in inequality. But as I said, you know, I think it's also very different from Latin America. I mean, in the sense, if you look at social mobility, there's still far more social mobility here. Now, there was a recent calculation by the OECD looking at how many generation it takes to go from being kind of in the poorest 10% of the same. of the population to being middle class. And in Colombia, it takes 12 generations. And it was like 200 years or something or 200 and whatever, you know, to get, you know. So the US is not, you know, those places the best, you know, I think it's like Finland and Denmark

are the best, you know, but the US is still up there better than any Latin American country. So, so, and I think, you know, there's, think about the China, again, you know, because China's been an enormous increase in inequality. Well, you know, inequality is enormously compressed under socialism, you know. just take the lid off this thing, all this entrepreneurship. It's about inequality is bound to increase. So I, you know, I think it's complicated inequality, you know. And I see kind of good reasons why it's happening and maybe bad reasons why it's happening.

But, but for me, it doesn't really change my view of, you know, relative degrees of inclusive or extractive institutions. I still see here, you know, the economic institutions as being fundamentally, inclusive. Yeah, by way of the social mobility. Yeah, and, you know, I think people can, you can get to the top. There's enormous openness still for talent and, you know, ability and, yeah. I want to go back to Africa.

I've got a couple of questions on Africa. I know you spend a lot of time there. Where do you see the future of Africa economically in the next? I don't know, a few decades. Because it is the region or a region that I think is large and that continues to be underrated conversationally, right? And where do you see the role of Africa in a context of climate change? Well, I, you know, so I've written a little bit about this recently, about, you know, trying to sort of look at positive aspects, from my perspective, positive aspects of Africa and economic, you know, the potential positive aspects for economic development in Africa.

And one of the things I sort of point out is that, you know, talking about social mobility, there's actually immense social mobility in Africa. You know, if you look at the data, it's probably the most socially mobile place in the world. You know, nobody talks about that, but it's true. You know, so, and my personal experience in Africa also is just there's enormous, you know, anyone can get ahead in Africa. There's no kind of, it's not like the caste system you have in India or, you know, all this kind of inequality in Latin America, like very rigid. You don't have that in Africa.

Anyone can get to the top in Africa. So that's an enormous kind of asset, it seems to me. You know, and I think, you know, the places I've worked a lot in the last few years, particularly in Congo and in Nigeria, you know, I was just enormous amounts of talent and energy and entrepreneurship everywhere. It's just that the institutional quality is so low that it's just focused on rent seeking, you know, or kind of trying to, you know, I mean, Congo is just, so I would say, like, I could imagine, you know, Nigeria, there's 200 million people, you know, like if you told, if you ask me, you know, is there one country in the world that you could see

making a transition, you know, to growing at 10% a year for the next 50 years like China. I say Nigeria, for sure. Like Nigeria, you know, and I think you say, okay, there's all sorts of institutional problems in Nigeria. Sure, you know, but did Deng Xiaoping solve every institutional problem in 1978? No, you know, in fact, he, you know, people in, you know, when they talk about Deng Xiaoping, they talk about, you know, policy reform. But what about, what about trying to introduce a market economy into a society? society where capitalists were evil, you know, where, where, you know, like, he had to, you know, like to get, to get rich is glorious, you know, as he put it, you know. So he had to change people's

culture as well, you know. So, so, so I, you know, I look at Nigeria and I say, you know, we don't, you know, how much do you have to really change things to sort of push all of this talent and energy towards productive things, you know, towards producing, towards, you know, instead of trying to get the oil wealth or trying to, you know. And so I think Congo is more difficult. You know, Congo, again, there's all this talent and energy, but Congo is not really a country. You know, Congo, maybe it's like Indonesia. It's an archipelago.

You know, there's no roads in Congo. So it's just a hundred different societies and different people hardly linked together, you know. So if you could link that together, maybe things could happen. But at the moment, you know, Nigeria's not like that. Nigeria's linked together. People mingle, people, you know, you can get. get from A to B. And so I, so I think this, this energy, this social mobility, that that's an enormous potential asset. And I think also like culturally, Africa is so powerful, you know, like I always

think when we talk about South Korea, you know, South Korea isn't just an economic phenomenon. It's a cultural phenomenon. Just thinking K-pop, Netflix, it's just like, South Korea is just taking over the world. You know, it's just amazing that kind of, in the same way Japan did. And, And I think like in Africa, just all of that, the style, the culture, the, you know, Africa will take over the world, you know, culturally, I think, you know. And so I think there's so much, you know, I always find it frustrating when people talk about industry or whatever. No, that's not what's going to happen in Africa. You know, it's not what's going to happen in Africa, you know. So I think Africans, you know, so I talk about many things in this work that I've been doing, you know.

And, you know, I also find, like, Africa is, you know, it's very globalized. Every African I know speaks five languages, six languages. Maybe in Indonesia, people speak many languages and things like that. But actually, if you look at the data, Africa is the most multilingual part of the world. You know, what do English people speak? Well, the Americans speak English, you know. But the world is, you know, rebalancing, it seems to me. And I think if anyone is equipped to take advantage of that, it's Africans.

They're so used to, like, you know, Africa's so diverse, so many. cultures and histories and everyone is so used to kind of dealing with all these differences, you know, like who best, you know, the English, no, we had Brexit. We couldn't even stand the French, you know, like so insular. It's just, you know, that, for a lot, you know, that mentality is just so outdated, no, in the modern world, that English mentality is pathetic. Africans are not like that at all. So, so I think, you know, as I say, like I think, I don't know when these institutional problems will get sorted out. They're getting sorted out. You know, Kenya is doing very well. You know, Ghana not so well. You know, there's bits and pieces where there's success and there's

economic dynamism and you see things moving in Rwanda, but I don't think that's very sustainable in Rwanda. But there are parts where things are moving. And I think, you know, there's many places where it wouldn't take very much to get things moving. Because underneath it, there's huge potential in society. But, you know, there's still Nigeria, you just need some basic, I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see what President Tinoubu does because he was formerly governor of Lagos State and actually he did fantastic things in Lagos State. So Lagos State is sort of dramatically transformed in the last 20, 25 years in terms of security, public goods, you know, the kind of the capacity of the government to kind of do things, raise taxes. And so, so, you know,

he's got a heck of a job doing that in the national state. But if he could do half of what he did in Lagos state in the national state, then Nigeria could take off big time, it seems to me. Wow. I want to push on social science a little bit here. How do you see the role of artificial intelligence on a future of social science for the better of humanity? Yeah, I, you know, I'm, I don't know.

I don't, I'm not such a... Me neither. I'm just, you know, it just popped out in my head to ask you this question. Everybody's talking about chat, GPT or whatever it is. Right. You know, playing with chat GPT and... You know, the young boys and girls, they can't live a day without using AI. Yeah.

Right. And if we think positively about this... Yeah. For purposes of better humanity going forward from a social... science standpoint, I'd like to think that it's got to be value additive, right? I think so. I mean, but what I see so far in just in terms of social science research is, is kind of very kind of boring derivative things, like just kind of doing something you were already doing, but in a more sophisticated way or just kind of very, you know, I don't see, I don't see

it leading to conceptually different things yet. But I agree, you know, you could say, well, the, you know, but I, you know, I'm not such a, you know, I like technology, but I always think, you know, the consequence of technology depends on the kind of institutional context, you know, like I always like this example of the radio, you know, when the radio spread in the United States in the 1930s, then what you see is that in counties where, you know, they got more radio sets, people were better informed, you know, about politics. And then they got more services because the politicians had to pay attention. to them. But, you know, at the same time, that was happening, Hitler bought every German a radio

so they could listen to his speeches, you know. So the technology is the same. You know, the radio set is the same, but the context is completely different and the consequences are very different. So I think, you know, I think all of this stuff, you know, what are they doing in China, you know, artificial intelligence? They're using that to kind of try to monitor people. You know, Big Brother is watching you, George Orwell said in, you know, 1984. Well, it wasn't technologically feasible for Big Brother to watch you, you know, when Orwell wrote. that book, but maybe it is now. So that's sort of frightening. It may allow a kind of totalitarianism that hadn't previously existed. How do I see it, you know, in kind of scientific research?

I don't know. Like I think, you know, the human mind is not like a computer, you know, like creativity is a sort of emergent, what a physicist would call an emergent property. You know, it's not just a matter of crunching numbers. And it's a matter of putting things together in some kind of network way. And I don't see, you know, AI as substituting for human creativity. And so without that creative input, you know, social science, it doesn't matter how much capacity you have in terms of computing or whatever it is. Social science doesn't go anywhere, you know. So maybe I'm just a dinosaur, but it's kind of like the idea that sort of AI will revolutionize. Yeah, I think it's great for some things. You know, it's great for, you know, like computers can figure out if you come into the

hospital with chest pains, you know, what's the probability you're going to die over heart attack, you know, in the next three days? Well, it turns out that computer is better at figuring that out than a doctor because the computer can just look at much more information than it can, you know. And so that's a great application of like this, you know, these very sophisticated techniques. But that's a very, that's a very, social science is a very different thing than figuring out if you're going to have heart attack. Well, radio was net good for the most part because it brought about democratization of information, which actually led to democratization of ideas. But what we have seen recently with respect to technological innovation is that it brought about democratization of information,

but it led to polarization of ideas as opposed to democratization of ideas. That's, I think, what's paradoxical and also problematic. So I'm okay with any new innovation if it leads to democratization of ideas. To the extent it doesn't, I don't think it's going to help with respect to institutional building in a more inclusive manner. Yeah. Are you suggesting that this could be potentially dystopian? I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I guess my first, you could summarize my first point by saying, I think artificial intelligence is a misnomer, you know, because it's not intelligence, actually. So, so it's, it's artificial something, but it's not intelligence. It's a mischaracterization. To call it artificial intelligence is a mischaracterization of what intelligence is. You know, it's as if intelligence was like being able to do your numbers, doing long division better, you know, something like that. You know, that's not intelligence, you know, intelligence is creativity, it's lateral thinking. It's about, you know, how you put things together. It's about seeing connections. It's about, you know,

So I don't see, I don't see, like, computers could do that, but they wouldn't know what was significant and what isn't. You know, that's the whole, you know, so there's the left brain, right brain, like left hemisphere, right hemisphere thing, you know. So, so I think that's, I guess that was my first point. It's not really intelligence, you know, so I don't feel threatened by computers. None of us should feel threatened by computers. But it's good for some things, you know. I, you know, could it be dystopian? Yes, I think, you know, I think, you know, my view about, our view about China, you know, as articulate.

and why nations fell is actually China doesn't have a model of sustainable economic development. It's all going to end horribly, you know, and it's going to end far more horribly than, you know, than it did in the past because China's so much more connected to the rest of the world than it was at the time of the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward or whatever it was, you know. And I don't know what's going to happen, you know, but I think if you look at human history, you see this accumulation of this personality cult around presidency, you know, getting rid of these term limits and all of this stuff, that can only lead in one direction. You know, power corrupts, all power corrupts absolutely.

You know, that's my sort of simplistic view of the world. But I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that. You know, everyone says, oh, this time it's different or the Chinese are different. It could be. You know, we kind of had a discussion about how Singapore was different. So could be, you know, could be. But I don't see that, honestly, yet, you know. And I say, you know, going back to Li Kuan Yu, you know, what I find striking is, you know,

this wasn't a personalized project. It was not a per, you know, Lee Kuan Yew did not have Singaporean children learning the great thoughts. Right. You know, they didn't have, he didn't have his little green book or his little red book called. That's not, that was not his project. It's all about building institutions. Yeah, but that is presidency's project.

It's all about him, you see, and that's a big, big difference. Yeah. So could it be dystopian? Yeah, I, I, I, I don't know, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's possible. more possible than in the past.

Yeah. You know, but, but, I mean, the interesting thing is, you know, if you look at the Nazi state or going back to Hitler and his radio, even without, you know, this kind of incredible technology, Hitler, you know, managed to basically maybe get two-thirds or three-quarters of Germans to buy into this project. You know, he didn't need to brainwash them. They bought into it, you know, they bought into this cultural project of racial superiority.

And so, you know, so, so, so, so, so. you know, it's, it's, you know, that can happen without AI, it turns out. We got an end on Southeast Asia. Okay. Tell us a little bit about your personal experience traveling in Southeast Asia. You've been to Joke, Jakarta, and other parts of Southeast Asia. How was it? Yeah, absolutely fascinating.

You know, I mean, just, just, just, it's a place with such deep history and, you know, such a kind of innovator historically in terms of culture, you know, it seems to me, like politically, you know, I mean, it's just the sort of dramatic, you know, the gap between like Java, you know, with this kind of Islamic culture and then you go to Bali and then you have this Hindu, Hindu-wise culture, and then you go across, you know, and the next island, and it's come something completely different. It's just that for a social scientist, just that amount of variation within such a small space, is just sort of absolutely astonishing, you know. So, so, so I, you know, I found that incredibly interesting.

And, you know, I think, I think as we were saying earlier, you know, just in terms of the economic potential of Southeast Asia, you know, there's something about, you know, we don't really know how to conceptualize it, but there's something about East Asia that leads to a particular sort of East Asia, Southeast Asia, to a type of dynamics that you don't see elsewhere in the world in terms of sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of, you know, Latin America where I've done. You know, I think a lot of our research, you know, as we were discussing earlier, you know, comes from, you know, you make generalizations based on sort of statistical analysis or whatever,

but also for the places that you know well and you think you kind of understand. But the world is very diverse culturally. I mean, I think one of the things that Professor Asamoglu and I've been working on a lot recently is, you know, trying to think through the different intellectual systems of different parts of the world. know, Confucianism is something very different from the Western tradition. You know, you look at Islam, you know, Islamic political thought, for example, or Confucian political thought, it's very different from Western political thought, you know, where this tradition goes back to Aristotle and Plato, whatever.

They've had this very different idea of the state, very different idea of the relationship between the citizen and the state, very different idea of what the state was supposed to be doing, you know. So I think we've been trying to understand, you know, but that means that your experience is a limit. because they've involved a particular type of cultural context in Africa or Latin America. And so I always feel a little inhibited talking about a place like Southeast Asia where I haven't done research. And I feel, you know, I can read books and I can kind of experience the depth of the history and the richness.

But I don't feel I have much of a handle on how do my concepts travel to Java and how do I think about this? and how do I map that into? I mean, I think, you know, one of the strengths of why nations fail is we came up with this language, which is very flexible, you know, which you can apply anywhere in the world, you know, and, you know, you could sort of say, like, we have this one chapter, you know, why do nations fail today where we kind of go around the world and we say, well, you know, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Colombia, you know, these places are all very different, but they're all poor and what they have in common is extractive institutions.

Okay, great. But the nature of those extractive institutions is extremely different. So for one thing, if you wanted to say something about policy, then all those details become extremely important. And you have to get into them and you have to understand the politics. And I think that's obviously true with Southeast Asia. The details are different. The history is different.

The culture is different. The potentialities are different. Like what's going to happen is going to be different. You know, the way out of where they are. is going to be different. And that's when, you know, as a social scientist, you know, you have to kind of recognize, well, there's lots of things we don't understand.

We don't really understand, you know, why is it that you have all these developmental autocracies in South Korea or, you know, Taiwan, to some extent, you know, Singapore. Look what's been going on in Vietnam, you know, since the 1980s. Also, Cambodia, you know, under Hun Sen, another, you know, again, a pretty successful development, under a very autocratic government, the kind of thing that just doesn't seem to happen in Africa and Latin America.

And you have to admit to yourself, well, I don't really understand that, you know. Last question, James. Do we smell a sequel to why nations fail? Well, we wrote the narrow corridor, you know, I think, I think, I can tell you what we're thinking about a lot nowadays. I think one thing we thought about that we haven't done is to sort of focus much more on these sort of transitions. You know, I noticed like I was telling you that I was in Sudan in January, like talking to a lot of kind of people involved in the transition. They're sort of struggling to create a kind of more inclusive society. And they're very concerned about the details. They just want to pick your brains about these transitions.

What are these successful transitions? Kind of what they look like? What are the problems? And then you see, you know, the limitations of, you know, the limitations of, you know, know, what you did. So, for example, you know, one of the big transitions in the book is this glorious revolution in Britain and the kind of construction of constitutional, you know, constitutional monarchy in Britain. But, you know, in 1688, when that happened, there was no army. They didn't have an army in England, right? So Parliament wouldn't let the king have an army because

he didn't trust the king. But that turns out to be a major problem in Sudan. Yes, there's an army. and the big thing is how to get the army out of power. Maybe that you've heard of that, you know, in Indonesia too. So, so, and I, you know, it was that. So I think we know a lot more than we wrote in there about these traps, like focusing on these transitions. But I would say, you know, the thing that we're talking most about at the moment is, you know, we wrote a lot about inclusive societies, about democracy.

I mean, the first book that we wrote before we wrote Wynation, so it was a very technical academic book called Economic OECN. origins of dictatorship and democracy, which is these kind of mathematical models about the origins of democracy. So we've been writing about democracy and inclusion, you know, for close to 30 years now. But I think, like, we've always, what we've, what we decided is we haven't, we haven't taken a kind fundamental position on, you know, human society at a deeper level, you know, like, are humans really democratic? And if so, where does that come from? You know, yes. And if you go back, you. And if you go back deep into history, of course. You can see that, you know, the primates, primates, you know,

that closest to humans, chimpanzees and gorillas are extremely un-egalitarian. You know, they have these alpha males, they have these silverbacks, you know. And so this is one of the most fascinating transitions in human history that for what we can guess about ancestral human society, homo sapiens, that emerge out of primates, is that they're wildly more egalitarian. than primate society. You know, somehow there's a transition, there's different hypotheses about that. You know, one hypothesis that was advanced by Darwin originally

is, you know, the emergence of language allowed people to kind of communicate better and coordinate and basically kill the silverback or kill the alpha male. So he called this, you know, the execution hypothesis. And then you get actually genetic selection, you get natural selection against, you know, because if someone comes with alpha male genes, the other people gang up and they murder him so he can't reproduce.

And so humans kind of create this more egalitarian society almost through a sort of genetic mechanism. But I think it's also obvious that humans are very good at kind of adapting to hierarchy and fitting into hierarchy. You know, I always give the example of the British Airways Frequent Flyer Club. You know, if you join the British Airways Frequent Flyer Club, you have to choose your title as a pop-down menu, you know, which is now globalized because it has like shake, you know,

know, on it, you know, but it has the entire British social structure in a pop-down menu, you know, and British people love that sort of stuff, you know. So, so I, you know, I think we're thinking about how to think about, you know, I think this is very relevant for thinking about China, you know, is it the case that, you know, Chinese people can just accept this hierarchical, and you look at Chinese history, you say, well, it's been like this since the first dynasty, you know, two and a half thousand years almost. Chinese have fitted into this imperial, autocratic structure. There's no history of accountability or representation. You know, you have this confusion idea of you just kind of rectify yourself and you self-improve and that ripples up to

society and, you know, the state will function well if you just kind of focus on yourself and so, you know, so I think we've just been trying to think, is that, is that right? You know, can the China, you know, is there a sort of cultural system which can assert itself and which people buy into completely, which undermark, which kind of can underpin this, this like, non-democratic world. You know, or do all humans want democracy? You know, I think that's what we're thinking about. Sounds like it's going to be a great book.

I'm not sure it's a sequel to Why Nations Fame. Whatever it is. It sounds really interesting. Thank you so much, James. Okay. My pleasure. For your time. I know you've got to go.

My pleasure. It's been very fun. Thank you. That was Professor James Robinson at the University of Chicago. Thank you. Endgame. But then I think, you know, it's a sort of distraction from academic work. Money.

Okay. The correlation between the two. Ah, okay. For sound invasion. So I think you have to admire that. I think you have to admire that. She changed.