A UChicago faculty member since 2015, Robinson said of his time at the University: “I've felt a kind of intellectual home at the University and in the Harris School and in Department of Political Science. I find the intellectual atmosphere so exciting and rewarding.”
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Today, the richest nations in the world are around 30 times richer than the poorest nations. Scholars have long pondered why this disparity exists—and why it persists.
“Economists understand what generates prosperity,” Robinson said in 2019 on the Big Brains podcast, “and so to me I’ve never been interested so much in rich countries ... to me, the puzzle has always been about poor countries and about why poor countries can’t take advantage of all this stuff which is in economics textbooks.”
Historically, scholars have attributed this entrenched inequality to factors like geography, weather or culture. However Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that economic and political institutions—how they are organized and affect the citizens of a society—cause these extreme income gaps between nations.
To understand the tricky question of causality, the scholars traced swaths of history. They specifically looked at European colonization of large parts of the world, which began around the 16th century. As colonizers settled around the globe, they also set up new institutions that governed opportunities and wealth—access to education and land ownership. The differences between how these institutions operate, whether they are extractive or inclusive, have huge implications for the long-term prosperity of a nation.
“We were able to use a lot of techniques from labor economics, and other parts of economics, and import them into studying these issues of comparative development,” Robinson said. “It turned out to be very powerful.”
Robinson is widely recognized as the co-author of the best-selling Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), along with Acemoglu. Translated into 49 languages since its publication, the book offers evidence that nations which create incentives and allow everyone to participate in economic opportunities tend to thrive.
He has also written and co-authored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2005) and The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty (2019, also with Acemoglu).