James Robinson on Why Nations Fail

Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. "We're dynamic, very complicated creatures ...  Show more

This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War the economic condition of Back Americans has improved, using as a comparison the presumed status quo population of white Americans. ...  Show more

How can the West learn from Africa? Professor James Robinson, director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, highlights the richness of development in the African region. Robinson has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of ...  Show more

“Get up, you need to get up! You’ve won the Nobel Prize.” That’s how James Robinson discovered he was a 2024 economic sciences laureate, as his wife, Maria Angélica Bautista, woke him up. In this brief call with the Nobel Prize’s Adam Smith he talks about the root causes of pover ...  Show more

Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often requi ...  Show more

Why do some nations fail and others succeed?In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how economists think about global inequality. Their work centered on a powerful — and almost radically obvious — idea: that the economic f ...  Show more