New Releases by James A. Robinson

Pourquoi certains pays sont-ils riches et d’autres pauvres ? Est-ce dû à la culture, au climat, à la géographie ? Ou est-ce le résultat de l’ignorance des dirigeants politiques ? Acemoglu et Robinson montrent à l’aide de nombreux exemples que ces réponses ne tiennent pas la route. L’histoire et l’analyse économique suggèrent une explication différente : c’est la présence ou l’absence de certaines institutions politiques et économiques qui assurent ou empêchent le progrès vers la prospérité. Des institutions «extractives» – protégeant les intérêts d’une élite puissante au dépens du bien commun – aux institutions «inclusives» – qui posent des limites à influence des puissants, éliminent la discrimination et favorisent l’innovation – le passage est parsemé d’obstacles. Acemoglu et Robinson les analysent en détail, s’appuyant sur un éventail impressionnant d’exemples, tirés de l’histoire de l’Empire romain, des cités-états mayas, de la Venise médiévale, de l’Union soviétique, de l’Amérique latine, de l’Afrique et des pays occidentaux. Ils élaborent ainsi une nouvelle synthèse de l’économie politique d’une pertinence indéniable pour les grands défis politiques et économiques d’aujourd’hui.

We document that rules for leadership succession in ethnic societies that antedate the modern state predict contemporary political regimes; leadership selection by election in indigenous societies is associated with contemporary representative democracy. The basic association, however, is conditioned on the relative strength of the indigenous groups within a country; stronger groups seem to have been able to shape national regime trajectories, weaker groups do not. This finding extends and qualifies a substantive qualitative literature, which has found in local democratic institutions of medieval Europe a positive impulse towards the development of representative democracy. It shows that contemporary regimes are shaped not only by colonial history and European influence; indigenous history also matters. For practitioners, our findings suggest that external reformers'' capacity for regime-building should not be exaggerated.

We develop a model of the political consequences of public income volatility. As is standard, political incentives create inefficient policies, but we show that making income uncertain creates specific new effects. Future volatility reduces the benefit of being in power, making policy more efficient. Yet at the same time it also reduces the re-election probability of an incumbent and since some of the policy inefficiencies are concentrated in the future, this makes inefficient policy less costly. We show how this model can help think about the connection between volatility and economic growth and in the case where volatility comes from volatile natural resource prices, a characteristic of many developing countries, we show that volatility in itself is a source of inefficient resource extraction.

We use a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine individuals'' implicit attitudes towards various ethnic groups. Using a population from the Democratic Republic of Congo, we find that the IAT measures show evidence of an implicit bias in favor of one''s own ethnicity. Individuals have implicit views of their own ethnic group that are more positive than their implicit views of other ethnic groups. We find this implicit bias to be quantitatively smaller than the (explicit) bias one finds when using self-reported attitudes about different ethnic groups.

We use variation in historical state centralization to examine the impact of institutions on cultural norms. The Kuba Kingdom, established in Central Africa in the early 17th century by King Shyaam, had more developed state institutions than the other independent villages and chieftaincies in the region. It had an unwritten constitution, separation of political powers, a judicial system with courts and juries, a police force and military, taxation, and significant public goods provision. Comparing individuals from the Kuba Kingdom to those from just outside the Kingdom, we find that centralized formal institutions are associated with weaker norms of rule-following and a greater propensity to cheat for material gain.

Earth has been attacked! In the shadow of the dark forces more powerful than the planet has ever seen, the greatest superhumans have failed. Before all is lost, a new breed of heroes must unite and combat the insidious evil invading the Earth. Who can be trusted?

¿Qué determina que un país sea rico o pobre? ¿Cómo se explica que, en condiciones similares, en algunos países haya hambrunas y en otros no? ¿Qué papel tiene la política en estas cuestiones? Que algunas naciones sean más prósperas que otras, ¿se debe a cuestiones culturales?, ¿a los efectos de la climatología?, ¿a su ubicación geográfica? No, en absoluto. Ninguna cuestión relativa a la prosperidad de un país está relacionada con estos factores, sino que proviene de otro mucho más tangible: la política económica que dictaminan sus dirigentes. Son los líderes de cada país, afirman los reconocidos profesores Daron Acemoglu y James A. Robinson en este libro, quienes determinan con sus políticas la prosperidad de su territorio, y así ha ocurrido en todos los períodos de la historia, como demuestran en este apasionante estudio.

Thomas Piketty''s (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society. We use regression evidence to show that the main economic force emphasized in Piketty''s book, the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate, does not appear to explain historical patterns of inequality (especially, the share of income accruing to the upper tail of the distribution). We then use the histories of inequality of South Africa and Sweden to illustrate that inequality dynamics cannot be understood without embedding economic factors in the context of economic and political institutions, and also that the focus on the share of top incomes can give a misleading characterization of the true nature of inequality. Keywords: Capitalism, Inequality, Institutions. JEL Classification: P16, P48, O20.

Der Klassiker – von den Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträgern 2024, eine Pflichtlektüre! Warum sind Nationen reich oder arm? Starökonom Daron Acemoglu und Harvard-Politologe James Robinson geben eine ebenso schlüssige wie eindrucksvolle Antwort auf diese grundlegende Frage. Anhand zahlreicher, faszinierender Fallbeispiele – von den Conquistadores über die Industrielle Revolution bis zum heutigen China, von Sierra Leone bis Kolumbien – zeigen sie, mit welcher Macht die Eliten mittels repressiver Institutionen sämtliche Regeln zu ihren Gunsten manipulieren - zum Schaden der vielen Einzelnen. Ein spannendes und faszinierendes Plädoyer dafür, dass Geschichte und Geographie kein Schicksal sind. Und ein überzeugendes Beispiel, dass die richtige Analyse der Vergangenheit neue Wege zum Verständnis unserer Gegenwart und neue Perspektiven für die Zukunft eröffnet. Ein provokatives, brillantes und einzigartiges Buch. »Dieses Buch werden unsere Ur-Ur-Urenkel in zweihundert Jahren noch lesen.« George Akerlof, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Eine absolut überzeugende Studie.« Gary S. Becker, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Ein wirklich wichtiges Buch.« Michael Spence, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Acemoglu und Robinson begeistern und regen zum Nachdenken an.« Robert Solow, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Ein wichtiges, unverzichtbares Werk.« Peter Diamond, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Debatte, warum Staaten mit gleicher Vorrausetzung sich so wesentlich in wirtschaftlichen und politischen Entwicklungen unterscheiden.« Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobelpreisträger für Wirtschaftswissenschaften »Diese faktenreiche und ermutigende Streitschrift lehrt uns, dass die Geschichte glücklich enden kann, wenn ihr kein Mensch mehr als Versuchsobjekt dient.« Michael Holmes, NZZ am Sonntag »Anderthalb Jahrzehnte Arbeit eines Pools von Wissenschaftlern, auf 600 Seiten zusammengefasst durch zwei Forscher von Weltrang – und dies kommt heraus: eine Liebeserklärung an Institutionen, die im Sinne ihrer Bürger funktionieren. [...] bestechend.« Elisabeth von Thadden, Die Zeit »Sie werden von diesem Buch begeistert sein.« Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Preisträger und Autor der Weltbestseller »Kollaps« und »Arm und Reich« » Ein höchst lesenswertes Buch.« Francis Fukuyama, Autor des Bestsellers »Das Ende der Geschichte« »Ein phantastisches Buch. Acemoglu und Robinson gehen das wichtigste Problem der Sozialwissenschaften an – eine Frage, die führende Denker seit Jahrhunderten plagt – und liefern eine in ihrer Einfachheit und Wirkmächtigkeit brillante Antwort. Eine wunderbar lesbare Mischung aus Geschichte, Politikwissenschaft und Ökonomie, die unser Denken verändern wird. Pflichtlektüre.« Steven Levitt, Autor von »Freakonomics«

Earth 2: an alternate reality where the Crime Syndicate of Amerika, made up of the world's gravest super-villains, holds absolute power.

"After a brutal attempt on his life, the Shade leaves Opal City to learn which of the many people he has crossed are responsible. Joining forces with allies such as private detective Will von Hammer and teenaged vampire La Sangre, the Shade begins a centuries-spanning quest that takes him from Australia to Barcelona to London, facing off against lizard gods, celestial pharaohs, and even family members ..."--Page 4 of cover.

In this paper we investigate the empirical correlates of political centralization using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We specifically investigate the explanatory power of the standard models of Eurasian state formation which emphasize the importance of high population density, inter-state warfare and trade as factors leading to political centralization. We find that while in the whole world sample these factors are indeed positively correlated with political centralization, this is not so in the African sub-sample. Indeed, none of the variables are statistically related to political centralization. We also provide evidence that political centralization, where it took place, was indeed associated with better public goods and development outcomes. We conclude that the evidence is quite consistent with the intellectual tradition initiated in social anthropology by Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in the 1940s which denied the utility of Eurasian models in explaining patterns of political centralization in Africa.

Nogales (Arizona) y Nogales (Sonora) tienen la misma población, cultura y situación geográfica. ¿Por qué una es rica y otra pobre? ¿Por qué Botsuana es uno de los países africanos con mayor desarrollo y, en cambio, países vecinos como Zimbabue, Congo o Sierra Leona están sumidos en la más desesperante pobreza? ¿Por qué Corea del Norte es uno de los países más pobres del mundo y Corea del Sur uno de los más prósperos? Por qué fracasan los países responde a estas y otras cuestiones con una nueva y convincente teoría: la prosperidad no se debe al clima, a la geografía o a la cultura, sino a las políticas dictaminadas por las instituciones de cada país. Debido a ello, los países no conseguirán que sus economías crezcan hasta que no dispongan de instituciones gubernamentales que desarrollen políticas acertadas. Asimismo, los autores responden a las siguientes cuestiones: • China está creciendo a un ritmo trepidante. ¿Hasta cuándo podrá seguir creciendo al mismo ritmo? ¿Acabará por aplastar al mundo occidental? • ¿Hasta cuándo será Estados Unidos una potencia mundial? ¿Su sistema económico es apto para competir en las próximas décadas? • ¿Cuál es el mejor método para sacar de la pobreza a millones de personas? ¿Realmente las ayudas de Occidente ayudan a erradicar las hambrunas? A través de una cuidada selección de ejemplos históricos y actuales (desde la antigua Roma pasando por los Tudor y llegando a la China moderna) los reconocidos profesores Daron Acemoglu y James A. Robinson harán que usted vea el mundo, y sus problemas, de un modo completamente distinto.

NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek

Originally published in single magazine form in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA (2006 series) #49-53 and STARMAN/CONGORILLA #1.

Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions? More generally, in an interdependent world, would we expect all countries to adopt the same institutions? To provide theoretical answers to this question, we develop a simple model of economic growth in a world in which all countries benefit and potentially contribute to advances in the world technology frontier. A greater gap of incomes between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs (thus greater inequality) increases entrepreneurial effort and hence a country''s contribution to the world technology frontier. We show that, under plausible assumptions, the world equilibrium is asymmetric: some countries will opt for a type of "cutthroat" capitalism that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more cuddly form of capitalism. Paradoxically, those with cuddly reward structures, though poorer, may have higher welfare than cutthroat capitalists; but in the world equilibrium, it is not a best response for the cutthroat capitalists to switch to a more cuddly form of capitalism. We also show that domestic constraints from social democratic parties or unions may be beneficial for a country because they prevent cutthroat capitalism domestically, instead inducing other countries to play this role. Keywords: cutthroat capitalism, economic growth, inequality, innovation, interdependences, technological change. JEL Classification: O40, O43, O33, P10, P16.

"Originally published in single magazine form in Superman secret files 2009 1, Superman annual 1, Superman 692-697, Adventure comics 11"--Tp verso.

In this paper we revisit the central finding in Comparative politics that the greater the per-capita income of a country, the more likely it is to be democratic. We argue that the existing empirical literature fails to treat seriously the fact that income and democracy are jointly determined in a political-economic equilibrium. Based on our previous research we argue that whether or not a country is democratic and whether or not it is prosperous depends on its underlying institutions. We first show that once you control for country-specific variation in institutions using fixed effects income per-capita never plays a role in determining democracy. This finding is robust to different estimation techniques, covariates, and sample. We then try to directly control for institutions by using historical data from former European colonies. This restriction is motivated by the fact that we have exogenous sources of institutional variation for this sub-set of countries. We show that when we use these variables to control for the historical creation of institutions (age of country, population density in 1500, and a measure of institutions at the date of independence) they have statistically indistinguishable effects rom the results with fixed effect. The main conclusion is that we find no evidence that income causes democracy. Rather, different countries move onto different development paths as the results of critical junctures and historical circumstances (such as European colonialism). Different paths are supported by different sets of institutions and the nexus of institutions that promotes prosperity simultaneously tends to lead to democracy.

Abstract: David Albouy expresses three main concerns about the results in Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) on the relationship between potential settler mortality and institutions. First, there is a general concern that there are high mortality outliers, potentially affecting this relationship, with which we agree. However, limiting the effect of outliers has no impact on our substantive results and if anything significantly strengthens them, in fact making them robust to even extreme versions of his other critiques. His second argument that all the data from Latin America and much of the data from Africa, making up almost 60% of our sample, should be dropped is arbitrary - there is a great deal of well-documented comparable information on the mortality of Europeans in those places during the relevant period. His third argument that a "campaign" dummy should be included in the first stage is at odds with the historical record and is implemented inconsistently; even modest corrections undermine his claims

Health Unplugged is about keeping it simple. When you go to your doctor and he or she tells you that you have to lose weight, that’s all they tell you. Then they send you to a registered dietician and they give you a food pyramid chart and you still can’t figure out what foods to eat. They use words like Glycemic Index, Amino Acid, BMI, Carbohydrates, and HDL, LDL. What does all of that mean? So you go out to the book store and buy books written for and by doctors and you still can’t understand the words, a month later you still haven’t lost weight. On my journey to losing weight, I have purchased at least 5 books/dvd’s trying to figure out what to eat and what exercise to do. Half of the books I never finished reading because I just wanted to get to the parts that I needed. Health Unplugged has a grocery list of foods that you can eat and an exercise schedule that you can start today. My book goes straight to the point for people like me that just want to lose weight without the mumble jumble.

We document a statistical association between the severity of the persecution and mass murder of Jews (the Holocaust) by the Nazis during World War II and long-run economic and political outcomes within Russia. Cities that experienced the Holocaust most intensely have grown less, and cities as well as administrative districts (oblasts) where the Holocaust had the largest impact have worse economic and political outcomes since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that these statistical relationships are caused by other factors, the overall patterns appear generally robust. We provide evidence on one possible mechanism that we hypothesize may link the Holocaust to the present--the change it induced in the social structure, in particular the size of the middle class, across different regions of Russia. Before World War II, Russian Jews were predominantly in white collar (middle class) occupations and the Holocaust appears to have had a large negative effect on the size of the middle class after the war.

A key idea in political economy is that policy is often tailored to voters who are not ideologically attached - swing voters. We show, however, that in political environments where political parties can use repression and violence to exclude voters from elections, they may optimally target the swing voters. This is because they anticipate that if they had to compete for the support of these voters, they would end up giving them a lot of policy favors. Hence in weakly institutionalized political environments swing voters are cursed rather than blessed. We illustrate the analysis with a discussion of recent political events in Zimbabwe.

We develop a model to understand the incidence of presidential and parliamentary institutions. Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with respect to their own coalition than prime ministers do. These assumptions imply that while presidentialism has separation of powers, it does not necessarily have more checks and balances than parliamentarism. We show that presidentialism implies greater rent extraction and lower provision of public goods than parliamentarism. Moreover, political leaders prefer presidentialism and they may be supported by their own coalition if they fear losing agenda setting power to another group. We argue that the model is consistent with a great deal of qualitative information about presidentialism in Africa and Latin America.

In this essay, I review recent research on the effects of economic development on democracy. On the theoretical side, for the first time there has been a systematic attempt to bring the types of formal models developed by economists and political scientists outside of comparative politics to bear on the origins of democracy. I present a simple analytical framework that captures some of the results in this literature. On the empirical side, the issue of identifying causal relationships in the data is finally receiving attention. However, the application of techniques adopted from best-practice econometrics shows no evidence that economic development has a causal effect on democracy. Neither does it support the idea that economic development influences the probability of coups but not democratizations. More likely, and in line with the model I develop, income per capita and democracy are correlated because the same features of a society simultaneously determine how prosperous and how democratic it is. There is still a lot to learn on this topic.

The conventional wisdom in political science is that for a democracy to be consolidated, all groups must have a chance to attain power. If they do not then they will subvert democracy and choose to fight for power. In this paper we show that this wisdom is seriously incomplete because it considers absolute, not relative payoffs. Although the probability of winning an election increases with the size of a group, so does the probability of winning a fight. Thus in a situation where all groups have a high chance of winning an election, they may also have a high chance of winning a fight. Indeed, in a natural model, we show that democracy may never be consolidated in such a situation. Rather, democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant. We provide a test of a key aspect of our model using data from "La Violencia", a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946-1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Consistent with our results, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, we show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.

In this paper we present historical evidence and a theoretical analysis of the origins of political stability and instability in Colombia for the period 1850-1950, and their relationship to political, particularly electoral, institutions. We show that the driving force behind institutional change over this period, specifically the move to proportional representation (PR), was the desire of the Conservative and Liberal parties to come up with a way of credibly dividing power to avoid civil war and conflict, a force intensified by the brutal conflict of the War of a Thousand days between 1899 and 1902. The problem with majoritarian electoral institutions was that they did not allocate power in a way which matched the support of the parties in the population, thus encouraging conflict. The strategic advantage of PR was that it avoided such under-representation. The parties however could not initially move to PR because it was not `fraud proof' so instead, in 1905, adopted the "incomplete vote" which simply allocated 2/3 of the legislative seats to the winning party and 1/3 to the loser. This formula brought peace. The switch to PR arose when the Liberals became confident that they could solve problems of fraud. But it only happened because they were able to exploit a division within the Conservatives. The switch also possibly reflected a concern with the rising support for socialism and the desire to divide power more broadly. Our findings shed new light on the origins of electoral systems and the nature of political conflict and its resolution.

This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.