James Robinson on What It Looks Like When a State is Failing

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Podcasts. Radio. News.

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Odd Lots podcast taped live in Chicago. I'm Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Joe, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to institutional failures nowadays.

Yeah, absolutely true. You know, there's a lot of people, they talk about geopolitics a lot. And of course, there's multiple wars going on. But I also think that if you're in the markets these days, Just thinking about the economy, you actually just have to talk about politics, politics.

You really do. And so I'm very happy to say that we have the perfect guest, someone who's actually never been on the show before. But I think a lot of listeners will have heard of him because not only is he a Nobel Prize winner, he is also the author of a very famous book that you and I have probably read a couple of times now called Why Nations Fail. So we're going to be speaking with James Robinson.

He is, of course, a professor at the University of Chicago. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Well, Professor Robinson, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

Why do nations fail?

No.

OK, let me ask the other obvious question right now. I'm just going to get into it. Is the US a failing nation?

How long do we have? I know. Okay, good. Not yet. Not yet. Yeah.

Wait, I have one more random question. Do you call yourself a Nobel Prize winner, or do you say, like, you're a Nobel Prize winner, right? I think it's a real Nobel Prize.

Well, you know, there's some debate about that. I know.

Because Alfred Nobel didn't actually specify a prize for.

Economics, you know, and it came later on. Yeah. So, you know.

It's a Nobel Prize. You're a Nobel Prize winner.

I think you should just go for it.

Yeah. I've got the badge. Oh, there you go. All right. The U.S.

Is not a failed state or failed nation.

Is it failing?

No, I mean, you know, by failure, you know, we're really talking about economic failure, economic success. Failure is a big word. It covers lots of things. So, you know, my work is really about economics and about how society's who succeed economically do so because they create institutions, sets of institutions, kind of rules that channel people's energy in directions which are socially beneficial, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity. But those energies can be channeled in many different ways. And I think what you see in the United States historically is you've had very important what we call inclusive institutions, you know, institutions, rules that are created, very broad-based patterns of incentives and opportunities,

economic success, you know, and poor countries, like Venezuela, say, went into decline because they created the.

Opposite, which we call extractive institutions.

So institutions that don't create broad-based opportunities or incentives. They create incentives of very narrow standards cliques, the chavistas, you know, and.

Most people are just excluded from opportunities.

So I think the history of the US, you know, has been a remarkable success story, but I think, you know, as we point out in our work, in any society, there's always challenges to inclusive institutions. Some people were doing very well in Venezuela out of that system. So I think, you know, there's always challenges, and there's been a history of challenges in the United States, by the way.

You know, it's not a simple... You know, good guy, bad guy story.

But the thrust of your work, if I understand it, is that typically in economics, when we talk about what's good economic policy, it's like, well, maybe we should have an independent central bank. Maybe we should have a tax system that doesn't penalize productivity, et cetera.

And all that may be true. But all of this is downstream, essentially, from politics, right?

Is this the idea that, like, there is no way to just, like, set up, write down a list of good economic policies if the institutions and politics.

Aren't there in the first place to be conducive to it?

Yes, absolutely. Great.

That's right.

I mean, I think all that, you know, that stuff about economic policy and economic institutions are all important.

But the politics has to support that. Absolutely. Yeah.

How did you actually develop that approach? Because when we think about economics, I mean, we often think of traditional economics as a model that says if x happens, then y is the result. It's all very formulaic versus your approach that really emphasizes, I guess, the politics, the institutional strength.

And you also emphasize, I guess, critical junctures in history where things could have gone either way.

I was trained as an economic theorist.

And when I finished my PhD in 1992, I had this kind of epiphany. And I realized I just, I was very interested in these problems, particularly of developing countries. And I realized I just didn't understand anything. And the first place I sort of, so I just needed to start immersing.

Myself in some sense.

And the first place I did that actually was in Colombia, interestingly enough.

And when I got to Colombia, I realized I have no way of understanding what's going on here.

And I just had to kind of back up and start asking myself, why do things happen the way they do? And then the politics just looms incredibly large. I think about Venezuela. How can you understand the economic trajectory of Venezuela or all those mistakes without understanding the politics of Chavez and Chavismo or even before that?

So all of.

This makes a lot of sense, and I find it very intuitive. But I also have an issue with, I guess I would say there's maybe a certain non-disprovability issue that I think about, which is that you say, okay, here's a rich country like Britain.

And the U.S.

That say they must have good institutions.

And then here are some countries that are poor, Venezuela, et cetera, Argentina.

And you say, oh, they're bad institutions.

But if we're only looking at the outcome, how do you actually establish sort of, I guess, a priori that that.

Is the actual thing?

Let's say you didn't know anything about the economy. You were looking at something about a country, but you were not.

Given privy to GDP growth, anything like that.

Are there other ways to know whether that country has good or bad institutions?

I mean, you know, what we got the Nobel Prize for, me and my collaborators, was sort of establishing empirically this connection between institutions and economic development. But, you know, that's a hard question to ask. You know, you could look at life expectancy. You can look at infant mortality. You know, I think when you look at most failing countries failing economically, Yeah, they do badly in terms of income per capita, but they do badly in terms of most socioeconomic outcomes also.

You can even look at night light.

The most famous photograph we have in our book is the Korean peninsula at night.

It's getting brighter, the North Korean peninsula.

It's getting a little brighter. Maybe the presidential palace in Pyongyang. There's a wave pool.

You've mentioned Venezuela a couple of times.

Can you just.

Apply your framework for us to Venezuela under, I guess, Chavez and Maduro and then Rodriguez now.

Well, I think, you know, that comes into path dependence, as you mentioned. Like, I think, you know, if you look at the history of the Americas, if you look at this economic divergence between North America and Latin America, you know, that's very deeply rooted in history. It's rooted in the way very different types of societies got created in the colonial period. You know, in Latin America, you see societies based on coercion of indigenous people, on slavery, you know, and that created hierarchy, you know, it created very extractive institutions, and that led to poverty, and, you know, I think, you know, if you look at the United States, of course, that's a complicated picture.

The U.S.

South had what we would call extractive institutions, but for us, you know, and, of course, the South until very recently was poorer than the rest of the country.

It was less urbanized.

There was less industry, but, you know, the key thing is that When the U.S. institutional framework got kind of definitively set up with the Constitution, it's the North that somehow really created that.

So there were compromises. Actually, can you explain.

This is a little bit of history, because when they landed in the U.S., they were hoping to replicate the extraction of South America.

It didn't work the same way.

Why?

Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating story that with the Jamestown Colony, the origins of the Jamestown Colony, You know, the colonists came with a model of how you colonize the New World, which is actually completely based.

On the Spanish conquest of Latin America.

It's just that you couldn't, there were no indigenous people to exploit in Virginia.

And, you know, there's a whole sort of farcical early history where.

The English settlers tried to, you know, exploiting indigenous people. In the meantime, they didn't bother planting any crops, and two-thirds of them starved to death because their model was, we.

Don't work, we exploit the indigenous people.

And when that model crashed and burned, then they had to kind of experiment with other types of models, including, let's get, we need to get British people to come here. So how do you get them to come? Then they created a much more inclusive set of political and economic institutions because they realized you know of course this was before the slave economy takes off they realized that you know to have a viable economy here we need to get people to come and so then there's this institutional transition you know and virginia creates this legislative assembly with universal male suffrage which is a sort of unprecedented innovation.

Just going back to Venezuela. So with Rodriguez now, is that system still an extractive system?

Absolutely, yes.

Say more.

We're not doing anything about it, and we should be.

Well, this relationship that now U.S. and Venezuela have.

or Marco Rubio and Rodriguez have. Is there an interesting parallel in history? Is this an unusual relationship?

I think it's not so unusual. I mean, I think if you look at the history of U.S. relations with Latin America, you see similar things.

U.S.

In the past occupied Haiti and Hispaniola.

So There's the United Fruit Company. It's not ridiculously anomalous, no.

This is going to be a devil's advocate question.

I just want to make that very clear before I say it. But is there a path where accountability to the U.S. for Venezuela could lead to more domestic, democratic accountability?

In Venezuela? Yeah. I think it's very difficult. for any outside power to sort out these problems, you know, in some sense.

Like, what my research shows is that, you know, countries that make a transition from more extractive to more inclusive institutions, they do it because they find a way themselves or they sort it out themselves, you know, like Chile, for example. So, you know, Chile is by far the most successful economy in Latin America. It has the best functioning institutions. That was the Chileans that did that, you know. So I don't think the U.S. can really solve that problem in Venezuela?

You know, I think they could probably not exacerbate it, but I'm not sure that they're able to solve that problem. And I think it's an interesting question. You know, so I wouldn't say, you know, I wouldn't say Latin America is the way it is because of the way the United States. Sometimes it's interacted in a very dysfunctional way, but I don't think the United States is responsible for the problem.

That's much more deeply rooted historically.

You know, you have a very big fan of these days, the new president of Syria, I believe, who used to be a jihadi not that long ago.

Is now like Mr.

Like neoliberal, like going and like speaking at like, I don't know, like the Atlantic Institute in Brookings. And he's like, I read why nations fail and stuff like that.

First of all, that's, what's that like?

I'm waiting for the call. He hasn't called me yet.

Let's say he does call.

He's like, I really like your book, but now I've got to put some of this institution building into practice. Is there a model for like, okay, let's build some durable, inclusive institutions that he could reach for? Is there another country where it's like, you know what, follow their playbook.

That worked.

I think that's very complicated because I think what our research shows and the way we've approached this is You know, if you want to compare all these different countries and today and historically, you need a sort of– you need concepts which are sort of flexible enough to cover a lot of details. You know, if I talk about inclusive and extractive institutions, of course, the details of those things are very different. But if you're in the business of actually advising Syria, which I'm not in this business of advising– Go to Siri or.

Anywhere else, actually. You know, then all the details become.

If he's listening, your phone line is open.

I'm like, you know, what I'm happy to do is, you know, people want to talk to me and they want to ask me questions about what I know and what models might be helpful for them.

I'm happy to engage at that level.

But, you know, to do anything useful for Siri, you'd have to understand the details of the politics and the institutions and the society.

And, of course, I don't. Well, this kind of.

Gets to one of the criticisms from your famous non-fans, which was Bill Gates. So Bill Gates wrote a book review of why nations fail, and he kind of criticized you for explaining why strong institutions matter, but not explaining how to actually get them. What's your response to that particular criticism?

Well, you know, institutions are, you know, like they're an outcome of a sort of political equilibrium, I would say. So our research has been about trying to describe those equilibria and trying to describe historically why some parts of the world got into the situation that they did. And so changing them, that's something completely different. So we try to describe historically why societies changed and how they changed.

But the idea that there'd just be some lever that you pull in Syria, that seems a bit kind of simplistic to me, you know, so I, you know, I, you know, he has a very simple view of the world, I suppose, you know, he sort of thinks, he thinks like an engineer, you know, but social systems are not like, you know, they're not like computer programs.

So we started off with like the very aggressive loaded question, is US failing, you know.

And now we return to it.

Well, no, yes, kind of. We look at the United States these days, and.

People are certainly, like, you know, setting aside failing. There are institutions, like, people are worried about the future of an independent central bank. People are worried about, like, is our voting system going to be durable and so forth. Like, are there patterns of this? Does this look like anything familiar when you look across the country of, you know, across the landscape of failed nations?

I mean, I think there's lots of problems in this country, honestly. For me, President Trump and all of that, he's a symptom of people's discontent.

If you look at data on people's.

Trust in institutions in this country, it's absolutely horrifying. So there are real problems here. A lot of people are very unhappy with what's been going on, with their opportunities, with the societies. And in some sense, you could think of this as a big failure of inclusion in this country.

I mean, if you don't have a college degree.

which is the sort of narrow majority of people in this country, your income is no higher than it was 50 years ago. It's absolutely astonishing. So that's a failure of inclusion. So there are problems with institutions, and they need to be addressed. And I think he's a symptom of there's problems, and we need to solve these problems, and we need to figure out how to solve them.

I'm not sure that he actually has a solution.

But, you know, in some sense, you have to recognize there's a problem to come up with a solution. And, you know, I don't think President Biden really sort of understood that, you know, and now we see it. And, of course, it's a bit nerve-wracking, you know, because part of this, you know, is a challenge to institutions, for sure.

But then you could say, well.

Institutions aren't working, so let's figure out how to make them better.

You mentioned inclusion just then, and part of your framework is this idea of if political power is broadly distributed or not. What if you get a system where everyone gets a vote, but their political choices are ultimately determined by campaign finance and lobbying and who controls the media and the narrative that's being spinned? How does your framework apply to, I guess, what people would call democratic capture nowadays?

I mean, you know, I think, you know, so I've done a lot of research on this question of, you know, the impact of democracy on kind of public policy.

And economic growth.

And, you know, what we find, I think the evidence is overwhelming that democracy is associated with better public policy, more inclusive public policy, more spending on education, and higher rates of economic.

Growth, you know.

But that's not to say, you know, that there's democracy varies enormously, you know. There's lots of different sorts of democracies and Some demographies have worked very imperfectly. They could be corrupt. They could be clientelistic. They could be captured. I, you know, and I, so I think like, you know, I do tend to think that there are, those are issues, you know, like the enormous amount of money, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars that's thrown into these elections, you know, is a problem. You know, for me, like the biggest problem with inequality is actually the way it spills over into the political system rather than, you know, just in terms of the economy.

Do you think oligarch is a good word to describe– no, a lot of people refer– they talk about Elon Musk and oligarchs.

It's become like a thing in the discourse.

Is that a useful term for when we look at the influence of money or extremely wealthy individuals who maybe are politically active, et cetera? Do you find the sort of oligarch framework to be illuminating?

I'm not sure it is because– The funny thing about Elon Musk is at the end of the day, he's made all of that money through innovation. And I think people admire that. You've got to admire the guy. He's just so ambitious and driven, and he's producing stuff that people want.

And that's distinct from what we would classically call when we use the word oligarch.

Yeah, I think when people start talking about oligarchs in Russia or oligarchs in Latin America or whatever it is, they think about people who've made their fortune by, you know, currying favor with the government or through monopolies and things like that. So it has this pejorative connotation that I'm not sure, I don't think it's good for society that Elon Musk can freely pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections, but I think you have to recognize the way the wealth was made.

Actually, now that we're.

Talking about Elon Musk creating stuff and subsequent wealth, can you talk about, I guess, industrial capacity? So this is This is a big topic in the U.S. The U.S. wants to build up certain industries, certain strategic industries. We seem to be in competition with China for doing things like semiconductor fabs and that sort of thing. In your framework, how do you sort of clarify, I guess, a government that wants to build capacity in a good faith economic, maybe, you know, democratic way so that the gains flow.

To everyone versus.

an.

Autocratic or oligarchic state where the wealth accrues to a select few?

Well, you know, I think there's good arguments for having, you know, various sorts of industrial policies, for instance. And, you know, you see, I mean, there's a lot of economists who say, oh, you know, we can't, you know, the United States can't do that. We can't build up all this industry. But actually, you know, the fact of the matter is, you know, if you look at a place like South Korea, South Korea created from scratch amazingly competitive industry, like shipbuilding industry. Hyundai hadn't built a rowing boat in the late 1960s. And then it started, you know, so it went from nothing to create. So why couldn't the United States do that?

Of course it could, actually. But in order to do it, you need to be immensely serious. You need to plan. You need to have strategy. I don't see that.

How do you ensure that you don't do that in a corrupt way? So for instance, right now, the US government is taking a lot of stakes in different companies. I think it just announced yesterday it was taking a 4% in global foundries.

And that might be fine.

But some people might also worry that maybe the process is corrupt in some way. Maybe we should better understand which companies go up for a government contract bid and that sort of thing. How do you make sure it's fair?

Institutions.

Okay.

Say more.

Just say that it's institutions.

But which institutions?

Which institutions should we most be worrying about, actually?

That's a question I wanted to ask you.

Yeah, I think accountability about, you know, that's really about the process through which this is done, how contracts are allocated.

You know, that process, you know, I.

Think in the Korean example, When that started, that was done under this sort of military government.

But it was a very different context.

It was a geopolitical context where there was this contest with North Korea. It was very pressing for the Korean military to do these things. But it was only sustained because that transition occurred in Korea in the 1980s towards much more democratic accountable governance.

Then you see economic growth is even faster.

I think one thing we point out in Why Nations Fail is all sorts of things can happen in a transitory way. The Soviet Union even did well transitarily, but you have to sustain it, then the institutions become really important.

Well, let's talk about China, because obviously the economy has grown extraordinarily. You said, generally speaking, democracy is good, but it's not.

Always great and there are ways it could go wrong.

How would you describe the institutional preconditions such that China has seen such extraordinary growth over the last few decades?

Well, I think if I look at the economics, then China has flourished because it made this transition from extractive to inclusive institutions you know it's not the genius of the communist party that did that.

But what are the inclusive people would say what did china has inclusive institutions so like what are the inclusive institutions i.

Think there's two things to separate here one is the economics and one is the politics okay so the politics is sort of unreformed you know we would say that's extractive institutions so the paradox is you know how you have that with inclusive institutions i think you know the whole history of the chinese transition from 1978 is the Is the Communist Party kind of detaching itself from the economy to allow entrepreneurship, to allow business to start? So how is that combination possible? And what our theory says is that there's many instances of that historically. Even the Soviet Union, for example, grew very rapidly for 50 years.

So we would say that's a sort of anomalous, it's a kind of, we call that extractive growth. And it'll go off the rails. I don't know how.

It will go off the rails.

You're making a call here.

Absolutely, yeah.

And I think the basic reason for that is obvious, which is power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And you don't have to go very far back in Chinese history to see that.

The argument you make in the book is that if you have maybe more economic inclusion without political inclusiveness, then you get this elite that basically stimmies creative destruction of industries. So you don't get as much evolution in the economy as you would otherwise. And for that reason in the book, you say that you think eventually China's growth is going to slow down. I mean, we're here in 2026. It's below 5% in the first half of 2026, but like, you know, 4.6% or whatever is still pretty good.

What would make you think that.

You were wrong in that creative destruction argument?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.

I mean, you know, I tend to think I'm wrong all the time. You know, I don't admit it in public.

No one's listening to this. This is not being recorded.

I mean, I think, you know, like.

obviously, you know, China is culturally very different, you know, from Western societies. So I think, you know, an interesting line of thought is to say, you know, maybe there's just something culturally different about China, you know, about.

The history of the state.

You know, there's no history of accountability, you know, in China, you go back two and a half thousand years, you know, you don't have anything like that. You know, there's a very different notion of state and society in China. So I think, you know, you could imagine that there's, There's something anomalous culturally about this that keeps it going. But I still think.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It's going to go off the rails.

It's just a matter of time.

It's interesting, though, because, for example, a few years ago, they had the big crackdown on big tech companies. And Jack Ma was put in his place, etc., This, from the outside, and I'm very unreliable here because I consume a lot of Chinese propaganda on Instagram and stuff.

So I just think everything's going amazing there. Just China, Maxine.

This looks like a political system that's anti-capture, that's maybe avoiding capture more than a democratic institution.

That you can get very rich.

In China, but it's not easy for the successful businessmen To have much political influence.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, China does have these advantages. You know, like, I mean, for example, this obsession with meritocracy in China. You know, I see that, you know, teaching Chinese students. You know, if you ask about where are they from, you know, you see this immense sort of social mobility in China. You can get ahead in China. Anyone can get ahead. And, you know, that's very cultural also. You know, that's been for a thousand, 2,000 years they've had this examination system getting on for. you know, where, you know, people got to the top and they worked for the...

You know, the elite were meritocratically chosen. Now, the British elite, they're just a bunch of, like, demobilized warlords, you know.

You know, the creative destruction thing reminds me, I wanted to ask you at least one AI question.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Probably more than that.

But, so.

The creative destruction argument is that if you have elites, incumbents in power, they're going to block new things because they want to protect their own sources of wealth. In a place like the U.S., if a local community votes against a new data center, is that democratic empowerment or is that creative destruction? And how do you tell the difference between the two? Yeah, I mean, I think that's... Sorry, not creative destruction, blocking.

Just destruction. Yeah, I think.

No, I think economic destruction.

I think that's, you know, that's... People are rightfully anxious about the consequences of AI for their jobs and their.

Incomes and standard of living. You know, for me, the whole.

You know, there's an interesting analogy between what's happening, I think, what's going to happen in the Industrial Revolution.

You know, if you look at the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization.

In Britain, for example, the mechanization of, you know, cotton spinning... weaving you know what was the impact of that on weavers wages they tanked by two-thirds you know their wages fell by two-thirds you know what was their reaction the luddites you know they got hammers and they tried to smash up the machinery you know and so isn't that what's happening now and i think The analogy to falling wages.

Is probably pretty apt also.

If you think about that fact that I was talking about earlier about what's happened to people without a college education, the evidence suggests that the biggest factor explaining that is the diffusion of computers, computers displacing relatively unskilled workers. So we're still trying.

To recover from that, and now we're faced with AI.

Well, I'm sure.

Speaking more of AI, you know, in the last several weeks, there's been, like, this sense of dread and despair that's come over the math community because of these breakthroughs and probably math professors at University of Chicago, some of your colleagues. Like, would you be surprised if we had something that truly resembled a big neo-Luddite movement in America or in the modern world?

Yeah, I'd be surprised. I mean, I, well.

Aren't we still the same people, you know, like, Have we changed?

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. It's hard to know what it's going to accumulate into.

I mean, I think there's going to be, science fiction aside, there's going to be big improvements in productivity like there was in the Industrial Revolution.

It's how you spread that.

Benefits to society that's going to be sort of critical.

I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah.

I read an interesting paper of yours in prepping for this, which is talking about the sort of like, maybe it's like the economist obsession with stamping out market failure.

So there are things that economists don't like. They hate rent control. They hate, many of them think.

That like you got to be really careful about like not setting minimum wages too high. Union power, like maybe some of that like isn't optimal. But as you point out, like these... maybe these are like the least worst outcomes. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of this sort of monomaniacal obsession with economists of getting rid of these and how they can be costly?

Yeah, I think the problem there is economists don't understand the politics of these things.

Yeah, say more about that.

You know, I mean, you know, there's an economic argument for having trade unions if you have monopsony power. You know, if employers have market power setting wages, trade unions can actually increase wages But, you know, leaving that aside, I think if you look at, you know, think about Western European societies where trade unions have played important political roles, like in Scandinavia, they've been enormously important in creating and sustaining inclusive jobs.

Political institutions.

So you can't think about the economics without thinking about the politics.

I guess that's a lot of our research.

So, like, you get rid of the union, and maybe you get a brief uptick in GDP, but then a couple years later, everyone is alienated, and then it all falls apart.

That's part of the mess we're in now.

It's not just about the diffusion of computers, but also de-unionization, the sort of elimination of unions in this country.

That's also.

part of what's created this sort of alienation, it seems to me.

We're going to have to insert the monopsony box into this episode. It's an ongoing joke we have on the podcast. Whenever anyone says monopsony, we're supposed to have a sound effect. I don't know if we actually do it, because I never listen to the post-edited versions.

We can't listen to our own voices. It's too painful.

I said that completely independently.

Just in terms of interesting research, is there anything you're working on now using AI that would have been impossible before you could deploy large language models?

Absolutely. Tell us what.

Give us a preview. So one project we're working on is... So one of the things that we're sort of fascinated with at the moment is just trying to understand the role of kind of ideas in politics.

You know, like, I mean, you know....

Economists and even political scientists tend to focus very much on sort of material interests. But I think ideas like your your notion of like how the world should be and what's a legitimate way to organize political authority.

And that's very important. You know, we think so.

So what we're doing is basically using AI to sort of, you know, We've digitized enormous amounts of works of political philosophy, and we're using that to look at the impact of philosophical ideas on action in 17th century British politics. So you might say, 17th century British politics, why the heck are we doing that? That's the era of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and some of these immensely important works of political philosophy.

So we're trying to understand how did those arguments affect the way people acted and argued and behaved. So that would have been impossible without AI.

I'm really excited about this stuff.

I think the opportunity to sort of use quantitative approaches on huge bodies of text and score them on various dimensions is like a very exciting.

Aspect of AI. Yes. No, I agree.

I mean, you know, I tend to think, I'm trying to think of AI as something that compliments me and makes me more productive.

And, you know, I hope that's generally true.

All right, we have one minute left.

Oh, gosh.

Why do nations fail?

Because they create extractive institutions. There's still a minute left.

We didn't even need that minute.

What should we be watching out for in terms of the U.S.? In terms of?

The U.S.

Yeah, what should we be looking out for?

Well, I think we should look at how the election goes next month and how properly things are conducted. And also, I think we should look at whether people try to undermine the kind of you know, the sort of the, you know, undermine, I don't know what.

The right word is, the veracity of the election.

I think what we've seen in this country in the last few years is enormous attempts to undermine, you know, elections. You know, there's very little evidence, for example, in this country that elections are improperly done.

Or they're fiddled or they're fake or they're whatever.

So I think this language attempting to convince people of that is very damaging to the institutions.

Professor Robinson, thank you so much for coming to Odd Laws Live.

It was fantastic. That was another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast recorded live in Chicago. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart.

Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're watching the video, then please like or leave a comment or better yet, subscribe.

Thanks for watching and listening.

Thank you.

James Robinson on What It Looks Like When a State is Failing

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin