[Music]

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
As you know, Jim Robison is a renowned academic, and it's along with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the most recent Nobel Laureate. Just almost a year ago, he was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize. Let me take that out of the way. It is really important that we have him. But I want to mention something else. I got to know about Jim many years ago. I think he was a young assistant professor at the University of Southern California. Was that your first post?

[James A. Robinson]
Second. I was at the University of Melbourne first.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Okay. I missed the first part of his academic career. I listened to him during a presentation. I think it was about income distribution of economic development in a LACEA meeting in Bogotá. That was probably in the '90s. That's probably

[unintelligible]
. That was, at the time, a really innovative issue. The idea was that economic performance depends not only on technical issues, but it depends also on distributional issues. When we talk about distributional issues, the issues of politics have coalitions come to mind. One thing that Jim had from the very beginning early in his career, he was not afraid to move into issues that were really important but may not have been in fashion at the time. He has been a trailblazer in that sense. Now, in all honesty, maybe around the late '80s and the '90s, economics start to bring the idea of how to incorporate politics in the thought about economics and economic development. But it was a little bit insulting and patronizing the first efforts. I remember a very well-known Princeton professor, I was attending there at the time, who came to provide a political economy talk. He started saying: Well, now we are bringing ways to formalize politics and to bring models, and that is helping politics move from philosophical issues, a kind of discursive approach, to a much more scientific approach. That is not the way in which Jim Robinson and his co-authors are taking. They take politics seriously, they take seriously the rule of roles, they take seriously the role of what we learn from history, and they incorporate it and they very much enrich the way we think about these issues. This is what we are going to hear in his keynote speech, productive policies, for example. Jim.

[James A. Robinson]
Okay. All right. Thank you very much, Arturo, for that generous introduction. I'm very happy to be here today talking about political economy and coalition formation. But I am going to try to do something a little bit different in this talk in the sense of I chose the title “productive politics.” What I've noticed, and possibly I'm somewhat responsible for this, which is a terrifying thought, is that when people start talking about politics, whether it be at the World Bank Group or the University Chicago, wherever it is, people think of politics as being this evil thing. They think of politics as being something that messes up good policy and blocks reform initiatives, and there's rent seekers and vested interests and all of that. I have done some work on that. It is not that those mechanisms are not necessarily relevant, but what I want to talk about today is actually we should think about politics in a different light. We should think about politics in a much more constructive and productive way. That is what I want to talk about today. Let me have a go at it, and here I go. Okay, no. I have to point this in the right direction, probably. Okay, no. Ah, whoops. All right, that got it going. All right. I'm going to tell you about the birth of politics. I'm making this up. I do not actually know that this is really the birth of politics. But what I have realized is after you get the Nobel Prize, you can basically say anything you like, and everyone has to believe that it is true.

[Audience applause]

[James A. Rosbinson]
But you are all too sophisticated for that to work here, so that is why I'm making fun of myself. Let me tell you about this place. This is a place in Southern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, and it is the world's oldest, to our knowledge now, the world's oldest freestanding building. It is on top of a hill, and it is overlooking that Syria in the background. This is on what the great University of Chicago archeologist, Robert Braidwood, called the Hilly Flanks. The Hilly Flanks, which is where agriculture and domestication of plants first started in the Middle East. You can see these enormous stone pillars. Some of them are 10 tons, they were lugged from several miles away up this hill and stuck there. What is fascinating about Göbekli Tepe is that this thing was constructed before the domestication of plants and animals. These were not even sedentary societies. There was no city in Göbekli Tepe. There were no permanent residences in Göbekli Tepe. I want to talk about what on earth induced people to lug these huge stone carvings, you can see them, and build these constructions on top of this hill, when they were not living there, there was no settlement, there was no agriculture, so people probably were not really sedentary at all. But anyway, they built this thing. I'm claiming it is the birth of politics, and you will see why in a second. There are several enclosures, and different enclosures have different animals carved on the pillars. Here, you can see that there is a fox on the right-hand side. That is in Enclosure B. In Enclosure C, you have boars and snakes in Enclosure A. What the archeologist think is that these are probably clan totems. This is like the fox clan, and there is the snake clan, and the boar clan. What is a clan? A clan is a fictional kinship group. It brings some common identity to people that otherwise would not have it. Okay, I am pointing it in the wrong direction. Here we are. What is Göbekli Tepe a solution to? Well, it is a solution to the fundamental problem of human society, which is how to get people to cooperate at large scale. One way of doing that is to invent collective identities like being English or being a member of the fox clan. You can have a totemic item that you do not eat. I do not know if people eat foxes at all anyway, but you could do. You have greetings and you have names in common and things like that. You devise rituals to fortify. We do things together. We have rituals that fortify this identity as a member of the fox clan. We innovate the notion of a sacred space where people congregate. The fox clan comes, and the boar clan comes and the snake clan, and we congregate, and that helps build these identities. What is so special about ritual, for example? Here is a good question for those trying to understand the political economy of China. What is about ritual? There is very little social science research on ritual, but here is an idea from the great political philosopher J. G. A. Pocock, who now sadly passed away. He actually wrote, he was mostly famous for his analysis of political thought in Western Europe, particularly medieval Florence. But he got interested in Confucianism, and he wrote some very penetrating articles on Confucianism, and particularly on this, why this emphasis on ritual. Here is his idea: “To tell a man to do something is to call to his mind the possibility of not doing it.” If I tell you to do something, I write a law which says you cannot do this. Then that brings to mind the idea of, well, why should I do that? Maybe I will not do it. He says rituals since they are nonverbal, have no contraries. His idea is we just get people going up the hill in Göbekli Tepe, we build these stones, we congregate in the clan, enclosure. It is nonverbal, we just do it, and there is much less of anything that can be questioned or doubted. Pocock wrote about how rituals were a very powerful basis for creating social order. What I want to argue is, who came up with all of these things to help people cooperate? Who came up with this idea of a clan? Who came up with the rituals? Who said “Let's build this enclosure on top of that hill and we'll lug these enormous things and erect it up”? That was the politicians. There was a problem, how to cooperate. What did the politicians do? They came up with ways to get people to cooperate. I think that is what politics is about for me. It is about doing something productive. It is about doing something constructive. It is about solving a problem. We talk a lot about politics as creating problems. I want to talk about politics as saving problems today. As I said, it has become very common to think of politics as a friction. In welfare economics, the first welfare theorem tells you, under certain conditions, a market allocation of resources is Pareto optimal. Then we have a checklist of things that can go wrong. Market failures, externalities, maybe economies of scale that mess up competitive markets, frictions, informational frictions, search frictions, etc. The way that people have studied politics is to think of it as a friction. We have this wonderful, we are calculating the optimal policy, we use public finance to figure out what the best intervention is, whatever, and then politics comes along and messes us up. It becomes a pathology like externalities or market failures. I think that is not the right way to think. Obviously, that is not the way that politicians think about politics, but it is the way that many economists working in political economy have come to think about it. It is something that gets in the way. Who is in the way? Let me give you a diagram that I find very useful for thinking about this that comes from an old book by Everett Rogers on the diffusion of innovation. Rogers was interested in, you invent something like artificial intelligence. How does that spread? Who uses artificial intelligence? Who is in favor of it? Could people be against it? People like university professors who see themselves out of a job because artificial intelligence comes and teaches their class and they do not do research anymore because now you just ask ChatGPT. What is a good research question? What is the research design? Can you produce a regression to show that? There you are. Why do you need a professor anymore? I could be a vested interest there. Rogers produces this diagram, which I'm going to use for talking about examples in the talk, and there is an innovation. But you could think about that in your space as there is a new policy or there is a policy reform or there is an institutional reform. You want to change the way things happen. You want to make the central bank independent, or you want to privatize some parastatal, or you want to reorganize the education system. Who is doing that? You are doing it, the innovators. I am going to say the politicians are doing it. What Rogers said is there is a distribution of people who are... Some are really in favor. The early adopters, they drunk the Kool-Aid. They know how wonderful it is to have an independent central bank or whatever. You do not have to persuade them. They are just on board straight away. Then there is an early majority. There are people who, “Okay, I can see the benefits, but there's problems.” But they can be persuaded. You could think of a whole distribution. At the end, there's what he calls the laggards. Don't take these numbers. They come from some empirical work, but I don't take these numbers too seriously for today. But the laggards, who are the laggards? The laggards are the people who it doesn't matter what you do, they are never going to be convinced. For whatever reason. They could be economic losers from this. They could just have normative preferences. They are just committed to the other way of doing things. It doesn't matter what you do. Some people are always going to be against it, in my experience. That is what Rogers called the laggards. I want to talk about politics as being about how you persuade these people to get things done. I'm always pointing this in the wrong direction. Okay. No, there you go, you see? All right. Oh, my gosh. Come on, seriously. Now, I'm really confused… Okay, all right. The laggards… Okay, so you got the idea.

[Audience laughter]

[James A. Robinson]
Let me talk about a real example. Let me talk about a real example of the laggards. It comes from research I have done on the enclosure of common lands in Britain. Here is a parish called Barton upon Humber in the north of England. This is what it looked like in the late 18th century. There were three big open fields and there were commons, the Ings on the River Humbert, cow pasture, horse pasture. There was some common walled down in the bottom. In these big open fields, the farmers, the people who lived in the parish, had strips scattered across these different fields. This is what medieval, this is what feudal medieval British, much of Western European agriculture looked like. In the 18th century, many contemporaries pointed out, argued this was very inefficient. They actually collected data, they did natural experiments. It's extremely sophisticated, trying to show that this way of organizing agriculture impeded innovation. You had to have a lot of coordination. You have to have local collective mechanisms for getting people to cooperate. There was a mechanism for changing this. If all the citizens of the parish agreed, they could reorganize property rights. You had to have complete unanimity, and then you could take these fields and reorganize them and privatize them. But if you think about Rogers's diagram, there's always the laggards. It's very hard to have perfect consensus, at least in Western society. I'm going to come to that. What happened? It was stuck. Barton on Humbert was stuck. They made people made some attempts to enclosed, but it didn't happen. Because there are always the laggards. The laggards got in the way. What happened? Well, the politicians came to the rescue. What did the politicians do in the guise of the British Parliament? The British Parliament created a new mechanism to enclose. This is what happened. On the right-hand side, you see Barton on Humber after enclosure. All of the Commons disappeared. The three big fields disappeared. All the land was divided up into individual farms for the people who had rights in the commons and the open field. The land was privatized. They built lots of roads and things like that. On the other side, on the left-hand side, they were stuck until the late 18th century. Then when Parliament changed the rules, this happened. What did Parliament do? Parliament changed the procedure so that instead of needing unanimity, if three quarters of the people agreed, you could privatize, you could enclose. They created a mechanism. Basically, they dropped the condition that you had to have unanimity. What was the economic consequences of that? Enormous increases in agricultural productivity, about a 50% increase in agricultural productivity, greater technology, adoption, etc. The economic benefits were real, but there was a political problem that had to be solved in order to take advantage of those productivity benefits. I'm going to call this the reverse image. I gave you an image of politics, and I'm trying to give you a different image, which is here people couldn't cooperate. There were the laggards. The politicians provided a mechanism to solve that problem. What were the laggards worried about? Well, some of them were just committed to the way this is the way we do things. In England, we're obsessed with things that happen time out of mind. This is the way English people do things. The way English people do things should never change. There are people that like that. But of course, there were also distributional consequences. In the research we show, there was a big impact of enclosure on land distribution, for example. There was a significant increase in land distribution. What were the consequences of that? Not a lot. There were some protests, not many protests, because the process was extremely legalistic, very legalistic. There were lots of checks and balances, and people saw it as being legitimate, even if they didn't like the end result. I wanted to think of the reverse image is, politics is mostly not about the objections of the laggards, but it's about strategies to overcome those objections. I like this example because it shows, ultimately everyone bought into this. Yes, sure, there were some losers in different ways, normatively or positively, but there was very little discontent. People moved on. Let me give you some more examples. That's the image I'm trying to get across. Let me give you some more examples. Think about a situation where you're a policymaker and you have to make a decision. You want to implement a reform, build an institution, change something. And there is a distribution like I showed you. There are the early adopters who are all in favor. There's a majority who can be easily persuaded. There are minorities or laggards who might exercise some veto powers or objections. As I say, majority rule is not everything. In Africa, in my experience, nobody ever wants to do something by a majority. You want everybody, you want everyone to buy in. You want to have consensus over a decision. You want everyone to be something close to unanimity. As I said earlier, that's unimaginable in Western society. But in my experience, that's the norm in an African context. What I want to do is just talk about some political strategies that might help you. I do these in the spirit of, here's some real productive politics in action. Now, of course, strategy number one is like something really obvious, which is, can we structure things in such a way as to minimize the number of laggards? Here's an example since I was talking about 18th century Britain. Here's another example from 18th century Britain. The Glorious Revolution happened in 1688, the creation of constitutional government in Britain. It was the first time a modern fiscal system was built. But who did they tax? Not rich people. They created an excise tax system. The excise tax system was tax on the production of bread and beer and butter and things that poor people consumed. Where was rich people's wealth? Land. After the Glorious Revolution, they bureaucratized the excise tax system. They created a modern bureaucratized excise tax system. What did they do to the land tax? Nothing. They left it alone. They never bureaucratized the land tax. Why was that? Because they didn't want landed elites to oppose the institutional changes that they were doing. If you look at the data, for example, very inelegantly scanned from John Brewer's great book, you can see that as excise tax revenues rock it up, the land tax withers away. The tax that was borne by the richest people in Britain withers away, it was never bureaucratized. Why is that? Well, you are trying to keep the landowner happy. This is not the advice you get from public finance. Excise taxes, it's not a progressive tax, it's a regressive tax. But this was somehow what it took to build fiscal institutions and get things going ahead. Another great example. There are lots of examples of this but let me give you a Chinese example which comes from Yingyi Qian’s book on how China reformed. Yingyi has a great table where he compares, looking at the first decade of the transition in China, and he compares what happens to employment in state-owned enterprises. These are state-owned enterprises. State-owned enterprises may be there the laggards. People in the state-owned enterprises might be concerned about market reforms or the transition. What do you do? Leave them alone. In fact, employment in state-owned enterprises actually increases over this first decade. But what happens in non-state employees? What happens in employment in the private sector? It goes through the roof. Here, state-owned enterprises are left alone. They're the potential laggards. Just leave them alone. Like the British aristocracy, they are still left alone, the British aristocracy. But you allow private sector to flourish on the margin. This is like structuring the reform in such a way as to keep the laggards happy. So everyone's on board. So saying, put the laggards at ease, pretend you're not doing anything new. One thing that is remarkable about many of these experiences is the way they're pretty radical, but everyone pretends they're not doing anything. Like the Meiji Restoration. The Magi Restoration wasn't doing anything. It was just restoring the system that had been there before. That was total nonsense. It was a massive innovation culturally, ideologically, institutionally, but everyone pretended they weren't doing anything. The Glorious Revolution, the same thing. We're not doing anything, we're just restoring the rights of traditional English men and English women. Confucius, same thing. Confucius said, I'm not innovating at all. I'm just trying to restore the way things worked in the good old days in China. So one strategy is this, in many examples, is actually pretend you're not doing anything new, actually. No, there's nothing to worry about. This is just the same thing, even if it is radical. Now, that doesn't necessarily work. Often you see the complete opposite of that, meaning if it doesn't work to pretend you're doing anything, you have to really show that you're doing something. If you want to change equilibria, sometimes you have to do something very symbolic. You need to get a new clicker. Here's my favorite example of doing something really symbolic, which is Nelson Mandela supporting the Springboks, getting his Springboks jersey on and showing up when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup. Here is something really symbolic about South Africa. There's a new South Africa. The equilibrium is really changing. I'm going to hang out with the white rugby players. Hard to imagine before that, but there he is cheering for the Springboks. Probably before that, people were hoping the Springboks lost. Like Catalans hoping the Spanish national team loses. Colombia is a great example of doing something visible also. When President Uribe came to power, he had a strategy for trying to convince people that something was going to change. The way he did that was the day he became president, instead of hanging out drinking champagne, as one does, he got on a plane and he went up to Valledupar in the north of Colombia. What did he do in Valledupar? He opened up the roads. The roads at this time in Colombia were extremely unsafe. Nobody drove anywhere. I remember if you drove outside Bogotá, you had to duct tape wads of pesos underneath the wheel arch in case you got stopped and robbed. This went on. They call this in Colombia “pesca milagrosa”, like magical fishing. This is a magical fishing. You stop someone, maybe there's somebody good to kidnap and things like that. That's a magical fishing in Colombia. That's the euphemism. So, President Uribe, killed the roads in Colombia. So, what did President Uribe do? He put the military on the roads. He went to Valledupar and he opened the roads. He put the army on the roads, and the army sat there like putting their thumb up to drivers. I remember everyone saying, he's gone bananas. Shouldn't those people be fighting the guerrilla? What are they doing on the roads? But actually, it was a piece of fantastic politics because suddenly everybody was talking about it. They thought, “Oh, my gosh, the roads are safe.” People went out, they started driving. One of my friends in Bogotá drove to the coast, to the Caribbean Coast, 1,000 kilometers for the weekend, just because he could for the first time in 20 years, just for the heck of it. He went to Santa Marta, he stayed the night, and he drove back the next day, just because he could. It had this enormously symbolic effect. It has all these externalities. People get back, then on the streets, people are out there. Very symbolic. It looked like a crazy thing, but it was easy to do. It was very fast to do. It had a very big effect. This is the opposite. Now I'm going to get a bit more Machiavellian, which is... One of the best books, if you're interested in these ideas, I'm going to run out of time soon, but one of the best books, if you are interested in these ideas, is Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses. Robert Moses was the man who ran New York City for about 40 years and was responsible for enormous numbers of infrastructural projects— Jones Beach, the Lincoln Center, all sorts of things, roads, infrastructure, etcetera. One thing that Caro points out is that Moses was very ambiguous often in what he was intending to do. There is a very nice book by Ronald Archer, the economist Ronald Archer, who compares the politics of Juan Domingo Perón to the politics of Salvador Allende, and he says, Allende's problem was it was so clear what he wanted to do, he mobilized every single person who was opposed to that in a coalition against him. Sometimes you have to be a little ambiguous about what you want to do because otherwise you are going to galvanize opposition. This maybe is a bit Machiavellian. I will not go into this, this is from Caro's book. This is just all the different things that Moses did. One thing you can also do, which you see in many successful examples, I'm going to give some more in a second, is we think of patronage as a dirty word. Think of patronage as compensation. Many examples of institution building feature things that you could call patronage, but you could also call them compensation. For example, I am going to give some more Nigerian examples, but if you go back, now Mr. Tinubu is the President of Nigeria. But back in the day when he was governor of Lagos State in the early 1990s, one of the first things he did was there were massive attempts to beautify infrastructure and beautify the city, very symbolic. Also, great politics. Why is that? You have to hire huge numbers of people. If you want to clear up trash, clear up the trash, you have to hire a lot of people. So, very symbolic, again, but good politics. President Uribe, back to President Uribe. One of the things that President Uribe did was every Saturday, he would take his ministers out somewhere in rural Colombia to some place, mostly where no Colombian President had ever been in the previous 200 years, in helicopters, and set up a stage and hold what he called a Consejo Comunal. What was a Consejo Comunal? On the one hand, it was state building. It was bringing the state to rural areas where it had never been before. It was giving people access to ministers who they had never even seen, unimaginable. But it was also patronage. It was also distributing favors to municipalities. So, President Uribe, yes, there was state building, but there was good politics also involved along with the state building. I could talk about President Park. I have been doing some research on President Park recently. Same thing. Here he is on the right-hand side. Yes, President Park was obsessed with exporting and generating economic development, but he was also very good at distributing compensation, let me call it. There he is, distributing compensation. That is in his own museum in Seoul. So annoying… All right. Here is a strategy also that you see very often. This is super painful, but probably every politician knows this. You let people take credit for things they did not do. Robert Moses was a genius at this. He built Jones Beach State Park, and Franklin Roosevelt at the time, was the governor of New York State, and Roosevelt blocked him. He would not give him access to the land. He would not cooperate with him. Moses hated him. Then he invited him to the inauguration of Jones Beach State Park. Moses stood in front of Roosevelt and said: “Without the genius and insights of Franklin Roosevelt, this would never have happened.” Antanas Mockas, when he was mayor of Bogotá, was very good at this, too. As Harry Truman, former President, said: “It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.” I think you understand that at the World Bank as well. There is also something that Moses called the “Oops Sorry” technique. What is the “Oops Sorry” technique? The “Oops Sorry” technique is, as he put it, once you sink the first steak, they never make you pull it up. Meaning you just get on with it. Unfortunately, that does not always... I'm not going to say what I was going to say. You know what I was going to say, so I do not have to say it. The “Oops Sorry” technique. Sequencing; I talked about design things to minimize the amount of losers, not always possible, but the sequencing is also very important in addition to that. That is something that President Uribe understood very well. If you read his autobiography, he understood that fighting the Farc was going to take years. These people are off in rural areas and mountains where there is no people living, so it is really hard to get credit for that. You need to do something fast that you can get credit for, that people see as visible. I think in Nigeria. This is Governor Fashola who followed President Tinubu as governor of Lagos State. There is also a very sophisticated sequencing in the sense of, okay, we need the Okada's support to win this election. After the election, we get rid of the Okada's from downtown Lagos. Sometimes I put this up here with some trepidation because I have to say I was never a fan of Mrs. Thatcher. Never a fan of Mrs. Thatcher. Never voted for her, would never have voted for her. But I think what you have to say about Mrs. Thatcher is it is really hard to achieve things in politics. She achieved what she set out to do. Sometimes, as I said, there are laggards, and you just have to believe in what you are doing and you have to fight. I was living in England. This is the miners’ strike in the early 1980s. I always remember my mother who was from the north of England, she is from Middlesbrough. She is from an area where there are mines. This gentleman on the left, Arthur Scargill, said, he announced— “We need to protect the mines for our children.” My mother's response to that was— “What parent in their right mind would want their child working in a coal mine?” Anyway, there you go. The lady's not for turning. All right, last idea. Back to Lagos. You need a vision. Where are you going? How are you going to inspire people? Remember, go back to Göbekli Tepe. They must have sold this vision of this temple on top of the hill. It is going to be beautiful. We can look over Syria. There are going to be pillars, and we are going to get together and drink beer, probably, according to what the archeologists say. Utopianism is a bit of a good thing. It is a good thing. You need a vision. You need some project to inspire people. I'm in favor of utopianism. Here's Eko Atlantic City. Maybe there is someone in the room who can tell me where we are with Eko Atlantic City. But this is the attempt to build a mega city in Lagos Island, which received a lot of criticism but for me, I like the ambition. I have just been in Brazil, and Charles de Gaulle famously said about Brazil— Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. Now, that is often taken as a negative thing about Brazil, but I do not think it is a negative thing at all, actually. It means that the Brazilians thought they were going to be the country of the future, and that is actually a good thing. Could you say that about Colombia? I am beating up on Colombia, but Colombia is in the room. They know me. You could not say that about Colombia. Colombians do not think they're the country of the future. I think that is good. It is hard to be the country of the future. So what? It is good to try. What did Eisenhower say? He said: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” Dreaming and ambition are good. I like utopianism. This is my last slide. I am over time. Just to say, do not think of politics as a friction. Do not think of politics as... Politics is the solution to lots of problems. I think that is the way that my friends who are politicians think about things. It is not the way that we in political economy have thought about that. Of course, there are other mechanisms I'm not talking about here. I could have talked about that, but I thought that was going to be boring. It would be more fun to talk about this because it is newer. I could talk about clientelism, and I could talk about rent seeking, and I could talk about vested interests. Yes, those things are there. Maybe they inhibit launching a reform or launching a new policy or something like that. When I talk about that diagram, I'm thinking about we are trying to do something. How do we get round these blockages? Why am I emphasizing that? Because I think in my experience, for example, in Colombia is there is an enormous number of capable, well intention people. Sure, there is politics and there's clientelism and stuff like that, but there is a lot of people trying to do stuff. The problem is, how do you get that to happen? How do you get things to work? How do you get people to cooperate? How do you get people to go along? And that is what I wanted to talk about. Then, once you focus on that, then you see politics in a much more constructive light. That is what I have. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
We are going to open for a few minutes for questions and answers. You could ask whatever question you have in mind, but it has to be brief. Now, if you overextend yourself, I'm not going to shut you down, but I am going to start making funny faces. We are going to take probably three questions, and then Jim will answer the one that he cares. We will start with that one. One, two, and three.

[Ignacio Ibarzabal]
Hi, my name is Ignacio Ibarzabal here. I am from Argentina, a rugby fan, by the way. One question, how do you think about civil society in supporting that politics is more of a lubricant than a restrainer of transformation? Thank you.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Can we take the third? Yes, good. Yes, in the same table, and then there is one over here. Just as the previous guy did it, please introduce yourself briefly.

[Musa Shteiwi]
Thank you very much. And thank you, Professor Robinson, for an amazing and very insightful presentation. If possible, please, I would like you to bring in... My name is Musa Shteiwi. I am from Jordan. If possible, please, I would like you to bring an international dimension to internal politics, if you can. Thank you.

[William Ferguson]
Okay. There was one question. One still here? Yes. Okay.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
There is going to be four questions. There was the other guy, but there is going to be four.

[William Ferguson]
I am sorry about that.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Go ahead.

[William Ferguson]
Yeah, Bill Ferguson, Grinnell College, Iowa. Where does the distribution of power enter into your analysis?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Good question and very brief. That is the kind of questions we like. Go ahead.

[Jael Cervantes]
My name is Jael Cervantes. I am from Mexico. I have a question regarding what is the difference between the rule of law or the enforcement of the law and politics? Because I also see that, for example, in Colombia, putting the security in the roads, I would think that is enforcement of the law, which in

[unintelligible]
, sometimes we see the government as the one who is going to set the rules and it is going to enforce it rather than politics. I would like to know what is the difference between the enforcement and the politics. Thank you.

[James A. Robinson]
Well, I think to go in reverse order, I think enforcement is about politics. The lack of the rule of law or the anarchy in Colombia is a problem of the enforcement, but it is the problem of the state not enforcing the rule of law. I think in the case of President Uribe, obviously, there was a see change in the government's attitudes towards that, meaning that President Uribe passionately wanted to defeat the Marxist guerrilla group. And part of that involved enforcing rules and laws, some, not all, much more effectively. I think politics is about the enforcement. I do not think enforcement is just a technocratic issue. You have to create incentives, you have to get the right people to do things, and that is about politics. You said I could only answer one, but I wanted to answer all of them. I think this question of the international dimension, I think Professor Acemoglu and I were often accused of neglecting the international dimension. I think the reason for that is that any country I have always studied in any detail, the domestic politics always looms large. Of course, it is not that in our theory, there are big global events that shape the trajectory of different societies and institutions like colonialism, for example, which we studied a lot. I think if you thought about the history of the Americas, obviously the different way that colonial societies were constructed had a huge impact on the way institutions formed. But after that, the way I guess I've come to think about it is then it is the internal dynamics of politics that really takes over. What I see also is that no matter what the international environment, countries can fail or they can thrive. Think about South Korea. If you go to Seoul, Starbucks have bomb shelters underneath them. We do not have that in Chicago. Not yet, anyway. You are in Seoul, you are 50 kilometers from North Korea. There was never a peace agreement. South Korea has thrived in these extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I think we just think about Taiwan, same thing. Countries flourish in very difficult international context, or they can fail miserably in extremely helpful international context. Think about, go back to Colombia, 1960s, the Alliance for Progress, the US government was all in favor of land reform. There was money, there was technical expertise, there was everything. What happened? Nothing happened. But that was the Colombian state could not implement it. That was they did not want to implement it. I think reasonable people can disagree on this, and we should discuss any particular case we could… But that is just where I've always been on this. I think civil societies are important part of this distribution of people who can be involved, who can be early majority, who can be really in favor, who you can work together. Like the way I talked about this, I talked about it as there is this distribution that I have to win everybody over. But of course, if I win some people over, that helps me win other people over because that is like you are building a coalition. If I get some people in society will help persuade other people in society. I did not emphasize that, but I think bringing anybody on board like civil society is going to enormously help the implementation of policy and making the policy more legitimate and more effective.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Thanks a lot. Let's go for a second round of questions. Let's try to distribute it evenly. We are going to start here, there, and there. Okay, so we are going to start here. Go ahead.

[Inaudible]

[Member from the audience - 1]
My question is that when the powerful groups block reforms, what is the best way for a government to still move forward?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Okay, then let's have one there.

[Member from the audience - 2]
What makes people choose some of these strategies? What explains that choice?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Let me make sure if there is someone really in the back who wants to ask. No? Okay, then we go to the ones we were here and then here. Okay, we are going to do... Okay.

[Member from the audience - 3]
What do you think about the digitalization and the government reform?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Okay, and if you could just briefly introduce yourself and where are you coming from?

[Member from the audience - 3]
Yes, actually, my name is

[unintelligible]
. I am from the Ministry of Economic and Finance of the Government of Cambodia.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Cambodia. Okay. We are going to go here and there over there.

[Member from the audience - 4]

[Unintelligible name]
, I am from Berlin, but I'm living here in the US. Don't you think that providing service, that solving problem for people, would be the best way to be successful in reforming different systems?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Why don't we give him a chance to answer these ones and then we'll see if we have more.

[James A. Robinson]
Yes. I am not sure I understood the last question.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Let me see if I understood your question properly. He said if providing services to people is a way to move forward. Is that?

[Inaudible]

[James A. Robinson]
What explains the choice of strategies? I think there is probably lots of constraints on the use of different strategies, or some things will be effective and other things will not be effective. I think some of the things are always going to be important, like doing these symbolic things and trying to show people, either pretending there is no change or pretending there is dramatic change. Those things are opposite. You cannot do both of those. You have to decide in the context what is going to be more effective. In the context of South Africa in 1994, Nelson Mandela decided that this was not a context in which we can pretend nothing is happening. Something had to happen. We have to end Apartheid, and we have to show we are ending Apartheid. That is a case where the other strategy of doing nothing is not really on the table. Do you see what I mean? The context is going to determine which strategy you use. I think the Chinese case is interesting. If you read Yingyi Qian’s book about how China reformed, it is actually not clear whether that thing I described was because of some clever strategy. They decided in Beijing that we have to keep these people happy, so we are just going to leave them alone. It could also just be how things were. Those people were too powerful to actually be touched, basically. Those two things look very similar in equilibrium, but one of them is the genius of the Communist Party and the other is, well, that is just the equilibrium we are playing. Those people are too powerful. We cannot touch them. So either way, it turns out to be a good way to transition in the Chinese case without creating losers, but I think that's, again, to say the choice of strategy depends on power relations. I did not answer the question about power relations. It depends on power relations. It depends on the particular context. Some of the strategies may not work at all. Maybe it depends on the politician. This business of giving people credit for things they didn't do, that is hard. That is hard in research. I do not want to give someone credit for an idea I had. That is really painful. But sometimes it actually helps. It helps convince people that actually this is the right way to do research or this is a really good topic. But maybe that is just difficult. It is just difficult for some people to do that. There is a lot of personal variation as well. I mean, that is a great question to which I only have a partial answer. I think providing services, that is more like some people are opposed because they do not understand how good this is. They do not understand how they will benefit from the policy. I think that what you are saying, sir, does fit into this because some of these people who are opposed, they are opposed because you have to convince them that this is going to work. And when they see it works, they are like, Okay, I'm on board. I think that is the way I would think about your comment in this context. I think powerful groups block reforms, I think that's totally context specific. It is totally specific to who the groups are, what the issues are, what the conflict is, and how. I think it is very difficult to give a blanket statement about that, I would say. It is just very, very context specific.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
We have a chance to go for our last round. We are going to hear, she is from Nigeria, and you made several references, so she is really eager to ask a question, and then we go there. Okay, let's start with you.

[Member from the audience – 5]
Thank you very much, Professor, for that excellent presentation. My question is, Is it possible to use civilism and visibility without actually effectuating change? And if yes, is that not in conflict with the analysis of reforms?

[Member from the audience – 6]
Thank you very much. It is nice to see Professor Robinson again. I had an opportunity to moderate a session with you some years ago. Talking from the Nigerian context, I'm Nigerian. You talk very well about the laggards and how to work with the laggards, and I totally agree with that. But what about the political body, I do not know if it is opposition or whatever, that tries to dissuade the laggards. Even like you talked about the Eko Atlantic, which became a very big deal. But what about the political body, the opposition, who for selfish reasons, do not want the laggards to really see the benefits of these very good reforms?

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Okay, let's go take these two. We are going to go with a gentleman and then with you. Go ahead.

[Valentine]
My name is Valentin

[unintelligible]
from Nigeria also. My question is related to the presentation made by the professor. He gave a typical example of a scenario in Colombia where he made reference to the FARC rebels carrying out what he called, in quote, “miraculous fishing”. I wanted to get more insight into what he meant by that, miraculous fishing. Is this similar to the rebels coming to the street onto the road, kidnapping people? I think I want to get a clear perspective on that because these are common, the scenarios we also have in some parts of Africa. I need clarification on that. Thank you very much.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Okay, go ahead, and then we will close with Jaime Saavedra here.

[Jenny Cargill]
Thanks very much. I'm Jenny Cargill from South Africa, and thanks for pulling up Nelson Mandela. He was a master at driving reforms and change in South Africa at the time he came in. But the party he led and leads now today, almost in its entirety, has become a laggard. What we are looking at today is that we're looking at a lot of coalitions and wondering just how you see... The coalitions look very messy and they look very difficult to manage, and how you see your strategies in the light of coalition politics and managing something that looks like you can, with some coherence, drive reforms through the society. Thanks.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
We are going to take our last one here.

[Member from the audience – 7]
Well, thank you very much, Professor Robinson. I was wondering if the right title is productive policies or effective policies. Because with a knife, you can cook a meal or you can kill someone. If you have, say, power captured by best of interest, a group of politicians that wants to just pursue their own interests, they could be extremely smart and follow any of these strategies in order to maintain that and could be extremely effective in doing all of these things or a combination in order to maintain precisely the status quo that they want. And they could be super effective. But then the question would be, yes, those policies would be, or strategies would be productive, but from their perspective, not from the perspective of the common well-being.

[James A. Robinson]
Yes, I agree with that comment. I think I alluded to that a little bit at the end. I think if the government of Venezuela got hold of these slides, they will not be using these strategies to promote collective welfare of Venezuela. If I can say something so controversial in public. But I think that is right. But I think what I want to emphasize is that, okay, yes, there can be problems, but I think political economy is too much about the problems. It is all about the problems. What we do is we say there is this politics-free benchmark which public finance calculates, and then there's politics which comes in to mess things up. That is a very one-sided image. I think I want to make the image two-sided, at least, perhaps you could say. I think on miraculous fishing, sir. Yes, exactly. The problem in Colombia was the roads were completely unsafe. People were being stopped, people were being kidnapped, people were being robbed. Now, if you drive around Eastern Nigeria, you know that you get stopped every couple of kilometers by some police units or by some military unit who want a little something. But let me make an observation about that. Everyone complains about that in Eastern Nigeria, and everyone has a story about that and whatever. But in between Nsukka, I'm a fellow of the Institute of African Studies at University of Nigeria at Nsukka. I've been in Nsukka every summer. In the road between Nsukka and Enugu, that was like that. Then these gangsters appeared, serious criminals appeared. Suddenly, everyone's attitude towards the police changed. And people were stopping and giving the police money and giving them food. And it is very interesting. So somehow that equilibrium is not so difficult to change in Nigeria, where people stop seeing the police and the army as a problem, but actually, see them as a solution to a problem. And it was dramatic, absolutely dramatic. Everybody, we were rolling the car window down and chatting with the military people because suddenly people were more, okay, this is the problem they are solving, actually. I think it is a different scenario. In the Colombian case, these were mafias, or they were Marxist guerrillas or stuff. They were not people working for the government. But anyway, that is what miraculous fishing is about. I think, again, this question of you can have visibility and whatever. The French intellectual, Roland Barthes, many years ago, 50 years ago, wrote an article about politics as a wrestling match, basically. Politics was a wrestling match. In a wrestling match, it is all completely fake. It is totally fake. It is just entertainment. It is not like the spectacle. We do not expect anything to happen. We just enjoy the spectacle. Of course, there is some sorts of politics are like that, unfortunately. But as I said, in my personal experience, people get into politics because they want to change things. They want to change the world. They want to change the society. Yes, you can have theatrics for its own sake. But I am pointing out here, I am trying to point out that these symbolic things are actually very powerful at achieving good things. That is what I wanted to say. I am not sure I can speak to South African coalition, coalition politics. That is a long discussion for sure.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
They are checking if we have time, one more minute or not. We are having a discussion. Okay. I wonder if I could use this to me, actually a question. I am supposed to moderate it, but that's part of the distribution of politics. I mentioned before that last year there were 65 elections around the world, and in 64 of those countries, they incumbent lost a share of their votes. In many of those countries, sufficiently, actually their parties lost power. And this tends to point out to two issues. One is that the citizens are much more proactive now. They found that they have a say through the ballot boxes. But also, they are showing their frustration with the services they are receiving. In the case of the UK, it is associated with the National Health Institute. It is very specific in many countries, but it seems to be a trend. In a context like that, it is politically profitable to polarize so that you could distinguish from the incumbent. Actually, it was very... But once you get into that, it is very difficult to get agreements. In the good old days, once politicians were elected, they very often would say “I'll govern for everybody.” Now it seems that it is a good strategy to keep pulling in different directions. How do you see these ideas and how do you think coalitions could be still pushing in a context of high polarization?

[James A. Robinson]
We are in a moment where there is a lot of polarization in the world. In some sense, democracy is a system which is supposed to deal with the problem that different people have different preferences. Different people have different views about what the priority of society should be. Different people have different views about what policy should be. In a Western-style democracy, there is a winner, and we take it in turns. You are in power now, okay, fine. But I get a chance to be in power next time, and that is somehow the way that you balance these interests. Now, you could say, of course, when it gets more polarized, it is more difficult to sustain that equilibrium. In some sense, Daron and I wrote a book about that 20 years ago. It gets more difficult. Then, sure, democracy stops working as a way of resolving these differences in society. I always like, if you ever read the essays that Julius Nyerere wrote in the 1950s and 1960s about Western-style democracy in Africa, he points that, this is very polarizing. Having these two-party majoritarian systems is extremely polarizing. We do not want that in Africa because it is going to lead to polarization amongst communal lines, amongst regional lines and whatever. Anyway, it is not the way Africans made decisions traditionally. He was opposed to this majoritarian-style democracy for, I think, very good reasons, actually. No one discusses things like that anymore because we are all not allowed to talk about things like that. But if you go back to the 1960s, you were allowed to talk about things like that. I think what Nyerere wrote was actually very insightful and clever. I think what can one do about that type of polarization? I think the answer is you have to find some alternative issue. You have to find something that cuts across the basis of this polarization. You are polarized on particular issues. What cuts across that? Is there some way of finding... Oh, yeah. If you read, for example, which I really recommend it, James Madison's diaries of the Constitutional Convention. When the US wrote the Constitution, they agreed there was going to be no written record of the debate. But Madison, sneaky guy, went home every night and wrote up his notes. Now, he never published it until he died. It was published in the 1840s, and he published his notes. There is a lot of that going on today. In fact, one of the reasons we have the Electoral College today is because that was exactly an issue that was intended to break up polarization. What does that mean? Big states versus little states. Under the articles of Confederation, all the states got the same representation irrespective of what their population size was. The big states like Virginia, was like, “No, we're going to get rid of that.” The little states, like Delaware, said, “No, we need to keep that.” There was this polarization. Think about slavery. The Southern states had slavery, while the Northern states were opposed to slavery. Massively polarized. How do you get these people to agree on anything? Well, Madison spent the whole time throwing in these issues that cut across. He was a master at it, cut across these cleavages, trying to come up with ways of, “Yes, that is a problem. But actually, the real issue is this,” and persuading people to realign. Of course, that is easier said than done. But I think that is the wisdom of political science on that topic.

[Arturo Herrera Gutiérrez]
Well, thanks a lot, Jim. Thanks for this fantastic presentation, and thank you for being here.

[Applause]

[Music]