The lecture, delivered by Professor Simon Johnson of MIT Sloan School of Management, investigates the historical roots of global economic disparities by analyzing the impact of disease environments and institutional strategies during the colonial era. Using case studies like the stark contrast between North and South Korea, Johnson elucidates the crucial distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions and demonstrates how settler mortality heavily influenced the type of institutions that were established in European colonies—either fostering prosperity or perpetuating poverty. He draws on historical data to show persistent correlations between colonial disease environments, institutional development, and today's income per capita, emphasizing the enduring shadow of colonialism on institutional quality and economic outcomes.

This deep dive is especially valuable as it highlights why, even with advances in medicine and widespread health improvements in the 20th century, income disparities among nations have not converged. Instead, Johnson points out that the industrialization of the 19th century and the institutional frameworks established in that period remain the primary determinants of modern-day wealth distribution. The talk explores why extractive institutions persist, referencing the work of contemporary scholars on mechanisms like land tenure, labor systems, and the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, underscoring the complex legacy these systems have left on today’s society.

Main takeaways from the lecture:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. avaricious [ˌævəˈrɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Having an extreme greed for wealth or material gain. - Synonyms: (greedy, covetous, grasping)

They were avaricious, they were ambitious, they were seeking gold and silver, they were interested in capturing peoples.

2. totalitarian [toʊˌtæləˈtɛriən] - (adjective) - Relating to a system of government that is centralized, dictatorial, and requires complete subservience to the state. - Synonyms: (authoritarian, autocratic, dictatorial)

North Korea is also run by a rather brutal totalitarian regime...

3. extractive institutions [ɪkˈstræktɪv ˌɪnstɪˈtuːʃənz] - noun (phrase) - Systems or structures that enable a small elite to extract wealth and power from the majority, limiting opportunities and participation. - Synonyms: (oppressive systems, exploitative structures, repressive institutions)

If you got extractive institutions, you didn't get good outcomes in terms of economic growth subsequently.

4. inclusive institutions [ɪnˈkluːsɪv ˌɪnstɪˈtuːʃənz] - noun (phrase) - Political or economic institutions that allow and encourage participation by a broad population and protect property rights and equality before the law. - Synonyms: (participatory systems, egalitarian institutions, open-access structures)

That's inclusive institutions.

5. industrialization [ɪnˌdʌstriələˈzeɪʃən] - (noun) - The process by which economies transform from primarily agricultural to ones based on the manufacturing of goods and services. - Synonyms: (mechanization, modernization, urbanization)

It was the 19th century and industrialization that was decisive, not the 20th century, for that distribution of income.

6. legacy [ˈlɛɡəsi] - (noun) - An amount, idea, or system handed down from the past; long-lasting effects of previous events. - Synonyms: (inheritance, heritage, consequence)

There is crisis, there's a coup, there's political volatility, sure, but there's path dependence, there's a legacy, there's a shadow of colonialism

7. mortality [mɔːrˈtæləti] - (noun) - The state of being subject to death; the number of deaths within a particular population. - Synonyms: (fatality, death rate, lethality)

And my talk, my lecture, is called Disease Environments, the mortality of Europeans and the Creation of Institutions in the Colonial Era

8. causation [kɔːˈzeɪʃən] - (noun) - The action of causing something; the relationship between cause and effect. - Synonyms: (origination, influence, causality)

North Korea is also run by a rather brutal totalitarian regime, raising the question of are the North Koreans so poor because of the totalitarian regime, or does the causation flow the other way? And of course, South Korea, a completely different country in terms of its characteristics

9. convergence [kənˈvɜːrdʒəns] - (noun) - The process or state of coming together from different directions so as to eventually unite, often used to describe income or economic equality. - Synonyms: (mergence, union, coming together)

That helps a lot of people, but it doesn't transform their economies. It doesn't lead to convergence in world GDP per capita.

10. path dependence [pæθ dɪˈpɛndəns] - noun (phrase) - The idea that historical events or decisions strongly influence current and future outcomes and restrict available choices, especially in institutional development. - Synonyms: (historical inertia, lock-in, historical determinism)

There is crisis, there's a coup, there's political volatility, sure, but there's path dependence, there's a legacy, there's a shadow of colonialism.

Prize lecture - Simon Johnson, Prize in economic sciences 2024

Now for the second lecture, and this is going to be given by the second laureate, Simon Johnson. Simon is the Ronald Kurtz professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The stage is yours, Simon. My name is Sandor Johnson. I'm a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. And my talk, my lecture, is called Disease Environments, the mortality of Europeans and the Creation of Institutions in the Colonial Era.

If you look at the Korean Peninsula from above at night, this is what you see. There is no light, almost no light visible from North Korea. And that's because, as I think most of you know, North Korea is a very poor country. North Korea is also run by a rather brutal totalitarian regime, raising the question of are the North Koreans so poor because of the totalitarian regime, or does the causation flow the other way? And of course, South Korea, a completely different country in terms of its characteristics. A democracy in which a lot of people are included and have rights is today struggling or arguing intensely about the nature of its democracy and the importance of democracy for prosperity.

Now, if you take these two, this comparison between a country with quite extractive institutions, where a small elite gains all the power and all the wealth, and a country that is much more inclusive. Take that idea to the world. You can actually measure, and many people have done this. There are many different indices out there, how countries vary in terms of being either more inclusive or having more extractive institutions. And this is what that map would look like. So the countries have some color coding. There's a variety of, of experiences out there. And if you take this map and compare it to GDP per capita. So GDP per capita is not a perfect measure, but it's the best measure we have for prosperity. You can see there's a very high correlation between more inclusive institutions and more prosperity.

This map shows all the countries of the world. And I've divided them into two colors. One, the red ones are former European colonies, which is about a little bit over a third of all the countries in the world today. And the blue dots are other countries. So you can see that the former European colonies span, roughly speaking, the entire experience of institutions today, how inclusive they are, and GDP per capita today, how wealthy people are. And I am emphasizing European colonies because when we started to think, myself, dorassemoglu, Jim Robinson, about the potential ways to think about causation. Do institutions cause prosperity or prosperity somehow cause and bring with them institutions? Our attention was drawn to the experience of building European empires.

This is a map on of the British Empire actually around the middle of the 19th century, before the so called scramble for Africa. Subsequently, a lot of Africa would have received this red color. But you can see just from looking at the map the broad span of British control, the range of countries that the British managed to run one way or another for a long period of time. And if you know something about the history of these countries, you may immediately realize that some places where the British had control for a long period of time are now really quite prosperous. And other places where the British had control for just as long are now today very poor. And this is not a statement that holds just for the British Empire, although the British Empire is a very interesting, important and difficult part of this experience. But other empires have similar variation in the outcomes across former colonies.

So what's going on here? What explains or what's the history that led to this kind of experience and this range of experience? Well, as I think you all know, and you probably learned this at some point in your education, perhaps even in elementary school education. From about 1500, the Europeans, West Europeans, I attempted to go almost everywhere in the world. I think traditionally these are called voyages of exploration and discovery. But let's be honest with ourselves today. These were voyages of attempted conquest and exploitation, where the Europeans, who were our ancestors, for many of us, they were avaricious, they were ambitious, they were seeking gold and silver, they were interested in capturing peoples. They wanted to get their hands on land and they wanted to. In most cases, their initial thought was, let's bring more Europeans with us. Let's try and extend the presence of Europe. And that is actually the tradition of colonization, for example, around the Mediterranean. You set up a colony and you bring people, and with those people, your people, you try to reshape the land that you have established a foothold on or in your view, captured.

But the Europeans very quickly encountered a problem, a very different big problem for them, which was infectious disease to which they had essentially no acquired or inherited immunity. Those diseases were primarily yellow fever and malaria. And if you want to look at, and to understand the intensity of the experience and the awfulness of what the British and other Europeans ran into in some places, you can think about the attempts to build the Panama Canal, and In the late 19th century, the attempts that were led by French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who ignored all the warnings about tropical disease. His people were the best engineers in France, and there were many, many brilliant intellectuals and practical engineers on his team, but they had zero understanding of effective public health in a tropical environment. Epidemics of yellow fever swept through his workforce 20,000 people died. And the entire French attempt to build a Panama canal in the 1880s and 1890s collapsed because of infectious disease.

And while the Europeans did not have a functioning theory or even a particularly useful theory or understanding of these diseases, they did, because of these extremely harsh experiences, very quickly figure out some places were much less healthy to them as Europeans, as potential European settlers than other places. So we have good data on this from records that were kept by European militaries somewhat in the 18th century and very much in the early 19th century. So this graphic on the right hand side shows one of the basic sources of data. Now, the classification of diseases is not correct. That's not what modern medical people would use. But they did understand what when people died of disease in different places, and they did measure that, they did communicate that, and potential settlers understood that.

So if you sent 1000 young male Europeans around the world in roughly 1800 a year, for which we have very good data, we know that if you sent that group of people to West Africa, 500 of them would die. In the first year, half the people you sent would die. And the second year, you would have a equally high rate of mortality. If you sent the same thousand people to the West Indies or India, the mortality rates were still high, but they were much less dramatic than the West Africa. It would be between 40 to 70. In India, 85 to 130 is what the data say. For the West Indies, if the same thousand people went to North America, Northern United States or Canada, for example, the death rate per annum for those people would be about 15 per thousand. And that's roughly speaking, the same death rate as for people like them who stayed behind in Britain and France. And again, the military records show us similar data for similar people across these very different places.

So if we wanted to sort of summarize this data and summarize what the Europeans understood in this period, we could divide the disease environments that they faced into three groups. One was extremely high, more than seven times what the Europeans faced. One was pretty high. So if you go to these places, you're two to four times as likely to die if you stay in Europe, and one was quite low and really very similar to Europe. And ask yourself the question, if you're being pitched on some potential colonial adventure and you have these data and you're aware of this experience, which of these places would draw your attention? Where would you like to move? Where would you like to take your family?

So the Europeans understood this, and let me be very clear, and it's super Important. We said this very clearly at the beginning of our papers on this topic, and I must reiterate this to you today, that wherever the Europeans went, the outcomes for local indigenous peoples, the people already living there, were incredibly harsh. And I know of no substantial exception to that statement. However, there was a difference between the strategies that were pursued in two sets of countries. In those places where settled mortality was low, where the risk of death from disease was no higher than in Europe, the Europeans established what many people have called settler colonies. So Europeans came and they settled and they tried to bring more Europeans. And how do you bring more Europeans? How do you entice Europeans to come from Europe? You offer them the rule of law, you offer them property rights, you offer them some political voice. That's inclusive institutions.

Now, what happens in the other places, the places where you don't want to take your family, the places where Europeans don't want to settle? Did the Europeans leave those places alone? Did they back away entirely? No, of course they didn't. The Europeans were looking for opportunity, advantage, profit, everywhere. But they didn't want to go in large numbers, so they established a presence. They found ways to build control. They minimized the number of Europeans on the ground, and they extracted value from the local population in every which way they could, creating what we now call and what we now see around the world as extractive institutions. If you got extractive institutions, you didn't get good outcomes in terms of economic growth subsequently. In fact, the effect of this, these institutions, this differential impact of institutions, was so dramatic that countries and places that were initially rich relative to the world when the Europeans showed up, places such as the Inca Empire or much of the Indian subcontinent, these places subsequently became quite poor. The places that have become rich within this sphere of extensive European influence is places not the indigenous peoples, but places that initially didn't have much by way of resources or much by way of concentrated population that the Europeans could capture.

And the key driver of the massive differential in income per capita today is whether or not you industrialized early among the former European colonies. And that's primarily about whether you had inclusive enough institutions. This graph shows the usa, uk, India and China, their share of world manufacturing. And you can see that when the Industrial Revolution starts at the end of the 18th century, the United States is nothing in terms of industrial production. India actually had very substantial and very impressive, highly high quality industrial production. But in the 19th century, as modern tools of industry spread, it's the Americans who are able to take advantage of that. In fact, by the 1890s, the US is the largest industrial power in the world. And look at what happens to India. Losing its share, steadily unable to industrialize because of the institutions that have been imposed and run by and taken over by the British.

So if you look at the data today, you can see a very robust pattern. It really doesn't matter. There's lots of different measures of institutions you can pick and choose. You can run this exercise for yourself at home. Many people have run these regressions over the past 25 years and we should do more of that. It doesn't matter which measure you take. Lower settlement mortality, the places that had that lower initial mortality for Europeans have more inclusive present day institutions. So if you look at the relationship between settler mortality and income per capita day, you get this line. Actually, today's line is the red line, the solid red line here. The line that we originally estimated from our papers published initially in 2001 is the dotted blue line. So to be clear, income per capita around the world does drift upwards over time. That's what you're seeing here. But the regression line, the slope is almost unchanged, which means that the inequality of the ability of settlement mortality to explain differential GDP per capita around the world remains remarkably consistent and soberingly consistent. Despite all the discussion about institutions, all the attempts to reform all the radiogram institutions we've seen over the past 25 years, this regression result remains quite robust.

But while this might be an interesting result for you, I think, and I hope you should also raise a question which is if this is so obvious, if this has been with us for so long, if extractive institutions are so painful, why do they last? Why don't countries and peoples find their way out of it? And I really want to have an important shout out here to some of the scholars who, many of the scholars who've come after us and who have built extremely interesting and I think important work to help us understand exactly how extractive institutions have persisted. So I'd like to mention, and these are just three examples, but three wonderful researchers, Lakshmi Ayya has done work on colonial India and identifying that land tenure, the way the land was held and the rights of people relative to land has turned out to be an incredibly persistent measure or aspect of institutions that has lasted through hundreds of years. Melissa Dell has found in the case of Peru and also Java in modern Indonesia. It's the way in which labor was used and forced labor schemes imposed by the Europeans that have had these long lasting effects and that have proved difficult to shake off. All those legacies remain with US and Nathan Nunn has produced this incredibly important and I think massively consequential work that we should all study and understand and think about the full consequence of the slave trade. The slave trade that was created by Europeans, it was run by Europeans across the Atlantic. The slaves were brought across South America to the West Indies and to North America. And the consequences of this slavery remains with us both in the countries that where the slaves came from and in the countries where the slaves arrived.

And this historical depth of knowledge is important, I think, in part because the 20th century had many amazing achievements and if you like medical miracles, which you might think should have changed everything. For example, this lack of knowledge about yellow fever and malaria, which was a huge deficiency in human understanding. It was fixed by scientists at the end of the 19th century, in fact, Ronald Ross, who had a couple of the most important ideas that helped precisely pin down how mosquitoes transmit malaria. Ronald Ross made those breakthroughs in 1897 as an obscure doctor working in India and some other places. In 1902 he was recognized by with a second ever Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. And by the 1920s, this is a cartoon that shows an enormous mosquitoes are not actually this big enormous mosquito dropping malaria bombs and yellow fever on people. The there was a broad understanding that this is how these important infectious diseases were spread. Sadly, this knowledge was not converted into completely accessible public health until the 1940s.

So that we should ponder that gap between the Nobel Prize and actually making the technology available to people around the world. It took far too long, but by the 1940s there were sustained and well designed public health campaigns to reduce the transmission and where possible, eradicate malaria and yellow fever. And the success of these measures in terms of life expectancy, including in quite poor countries, was remarkable. So on the left here you can see life expectancy at birth. And these are across a range of different countries in terms of their initial incomes per capita. And you can see the poorer countries converging up to the level of the richer countries in the right. You can see, however, that the same was not experienced in terms of GDP per capita.

So in the 20th century, everyone has access to not the same medicine, obviously not the same health care, but to key breakthroughs in public health. That helps a lot of people, but it doesn't transform their economies. It doesn't lead to convergence in world GDP per capita. In fact, the distribution, the inequality of GDP per capita we have today in 2024 in is roughly the same as what we had 120 years ago. It was the 19th century and industrialization that was decisive, not the 20th century, for that distribution of income. And here's the reason. And I understand this is an uncomfortable story for many people, and I understand there are facts here that many people, including people in power around the world today, would rather not confront. But this is what's in the data. Actually. These are data that our colleagues, colleagues in Gothenburg at the V DEM team collect. I think this is some of the very best data that we have that shows what happened to institutions over time.

So I'm just putting three countries on this slide, not to pick on anyone, but they are illustrative. The United States is the green line at the top. That was a low settled mortality place. The blue line is India. That was a medium settled mortality place. The British ruled it, in our view, in a way that was primarily extractive. And at the bottom is Nigeria, which again, was under British control and had extremely extractive colonial experience. And if I take my three settlement mortality groups that I showed you about a few moments ago, low settlement mortality, medium and extreme or high and extreme settled mortality, you see the same pattern that the institutions that you had in 1900. And you can go back earlier in a slightly more fragmented way with the VDEM data, for example, these institutions, they change from year to year. There is crisis, there's a coup, there's political volatility, sure, but there's path dependence, there's a legacy, there's a shadow of colonialism. And that shadow depends on whether that shadow is entirely malevolent or somewhat good for some people. Depends on exactly how the Europeans ruled you.

Now, we did spend. We're grateful to have been awarded the prize for work we did 25 years ago. It feels good, but we haven't been entirely idle over the past 25 years. We've attempted to pursue these issues across a variety of dimensions, including understanding what it means for economic policy, ways in which you can actually find improve institutions or deliver on better economic growth. We also dug more into the history of institutions, including outside the colonial experience. So the colonial experience and these papers were intended to get at causation in a clean way, in a way that you could see the data and where you could understand the causation. But we also looked at the French Revolution. We've also looked at the expansion of Western Europe, the way in which some of the better institutions in the world, including in Western Europe, some of the ways that those were developed. And we've also spent time, a lot of time on the United States because you know if you took our papers seriously, and I'm glad that some people did, the United States looks pretty good. But of course, the United States modern experience is far from, let's say, good for everyone, and it's far from good in every year. So we have a major financial crisis, we've had a slowdown in productivity growth, We've had a repeated struggle to benefit from and continue to invest in science.

And if I could just put these points together in my last nine minutes in summary form for you in a way that hopefully is forward looking, in a way that hopefully drives research agendas either supporting us or go for it, knock holes in our research agenda and our propositions. A lot of people have built their careers on that too, and I wish them well. In summary, if I summarize the history of the entire experience, it would go like this. With a few dozen small wooden ships, some Europeans conquered the world and shaped modern institutions to do what they wanted to do when industry advanced in the 1800s. And of course, the ships became a lot larger. The structure of European empires determined today's global division of labor. Or if you prefer a blunter version of that, whether you live in a country that makes computer chips and software, or a country that primarily exists by sewing other people's clothes, that comes directly out of the 19th century industrialization experience and where you sat relative to inclusive and extractive institutions at that moment. But today, of course, technology has changed even more. And we have machines and we have ships and we have processes that dwarf anything that we've seen in history. And you might think that if you have strong institutions, you're all set because after all, you're well positioned to invent new technology. You can hopefully create more good jobs. And actually, if you're a really powerful country or collection of countries like the European Union, you have a seat at the table to set the global rules to, for example, for trade or for capital flows or for migration or for anything else that you think matters. But there is an important caveat that looms large over us, particularly in this age of the emerging artificial intelligence, AI, which is being recognized this week with the Chemistry prize and the Physics prize entirely appropriately, because these are fundamental and massive transformations of technology. But new technology does not necessarily benefit everyone.

Technology actually over history. And this is a topic that John Asamorgang and I wrote a book on recently. We reviewed 1,000 years of history. We read the history, so you don't have to for a thousand years. You can easily find inventions, and the cotton gin would be one of the most awful, which actually helped a few people. Those were white slave owners in the southern United States, but primarily made it easier and cheaper to expand slave plantations across what we now call the deep South. This is a technology that was made even more valuable by industrialization because now you could sell a lot more cotton to Britain for turning into shirts in Manchester. Now we have had some good experiences, including experiences that centered around automation. Henry Ford automated production of assembly of cars. He brought electricity to the production line, which was a really fundamental transformation. And he created a lot of new tasks for humans to do. A lot of those tasks required expertise. But it's that second piece that I want you to focus on. Because if you just have automation without new tasks for humans, what you're going to get is a lot of unemployment, a lot of deskilling, a lot of people being pushed down to the lower end of the labor market. And the fear that we have, this is work that Dron Acemoglu, David Autor and I do at mit. The fear that we have is that we will now be that we. Sorry, we are already in a phase of excessive automation where we do a lot of automation, we replace people with machines and algorithms, but we don't create enough new tasks that require skills. And if you, if that's your focus and if that's now powered by AI and the machines and the algorithms become so much more potent, then the consequences of this industrial revolution are going to be much more unequalizing and much worse for more people, including in the United States, including in Western Europe. And what will the consequences? The spillover costs, whatever you want to call them be for lower income countries or countries with more extractive institutions or countries where ordinary people have less political voice. It's a good question. You should work on it. I don't think it's going to be good.

So what should we do? Jaron and I work in an engineering school. In an engineering school, certainly a school like mit. You, you look for solutions. The attitude of MIT when we won the Nobel Prize was that's fantastic. What are you going to do now? And that's the right attitude, if you ask me. And so what we do is the following we drawn and David Aldrin and I have a center that works on. It's called Shaping the Future of Work. And we're focused on understanding and trying to help promote and develop what we call pro worker AI, which means artificial intelligence being developed in ways that will help boost the productivity and the pay and the status of people who did not go to four years of college. We're also of course, focused on and emphasizing how the rapid aging of the global total population is going to create new issues and new problems that need to be confronted from this dimension. I personally would like to take some of the lessons I learned from COVID which was an absolute and complete disaster. But. But yet we have the scientific knowledge, we have incredible human capital. We have brilliant people like Michael Minna who had fundamental and important insights into what public health needed early in the pandemic, some of which we used in our work, many of which were ignored by policymakers. We need to do much better. We need to remember that gap between Ronald Ross's Nobel Prize and better health being available to the world. There's no way that for 40 year lag should be acceptable to any of us now. Improving people's health is not enough. It's necessary, but not sufficient. You also need to move the ball on economics, on an economic growth in a sustainable manner in a way that respects the planet, in a way that understands climate change. So these are difficult problems. Work on them and use the brilliant technology being highlighted this week.

So what I. There was a fantastic event for Nobel Prize winners in Washington D.C. a couple of weeks ago, which I attended with the chemistry with John Jumper from Chemistry and the biology winners. And I saw John jumper explain how AlphaFold will transform biological research, how it will enable. I sort of interact with biology winners and pitch them on how it will transform biological research and help creation of new therapies and new drugs. And I understood nothing at all about the technical conversation. But I can tell you buy AlphaFold. No, I'm not giving, I'm not giving advice on buying and selling stocks. I'm telling you there's a technology that is going to transform the world. And you saw it here this morning, not in this talk, it was a little bit earlier. So go review the tape. And I think we should harness this incredible energy behind AI and the capital that's being deployed and the investments are being made to productive purposes, to purposes that help people. A lot of times economists talk about the law of unintended consequences. Well, John Gruber and I wrote a book called Jump Starting America, which I characterize as being about intended consequences. You make 0% of the shots you don't take. If you don't take the shot on goal, you don't score goals. You need more science. You need science for a public purpose. You need to understand and think about the lives you're going to improve. Yes, you should worry about unintended consequences, sure. But if you don't aim to break through and to share the benefits of that and to put money back into communities from that science, you're not going to have the political support for the funding you want. You're not going to have the status you want for science. You're not going to have enough young people going into science. We need to redouble our efforts across all those dimensions.

And finally, it turns out, and you should know this because you should all aspire to win a Nobel Prize. I'm quite serious. When you win a Nobel Prize, you will learn, as I learned, that you are invited to donate one artifact to the Nobel Prize Museum. And I gave them my grandfather's passport. My grandfather's name is Cyril Dadswell. He was a metallurgist. He had a PhD in metallurgy at a very young age. He ran a big steel mill in Sheffield. And in May 1942, he received a passport. And actually the same day he got a visa. This picture is this visa to the United States to lead what was called the British Armor Mission. And my father, Ian Johnson, who is watching today, and I have thought a lot about this experience and the documents, including what's in the historical record. And we are quite convinced that Cyril Dadswell did not travel from Britain to the United States in order to learn from the Americans. He came to the United States to teach the Americans what the British had learned from three years of fighting. So the Americans could apply that because they'd only just entered the war in December 1941. And to me, that's the moment when technological scientific leadership and technological leadership transferred from Europe to the United States. Before 1940, the United States won very few Nobel Prizes in the sciences. Some immigrants did get them, but very few American born scientists. After 1945, the United States has dominated these prizes, including this week. But with that great power of invention and that power over the creation of technology and that power to shape the direction of technology, comes responsibility. And I think that responsibility rests with me as an American, with MIT as a leading American institution, with all of us here in this room and watching this lecture to ask the question, what are we inventing? Why are we inventing it? Whose lives are we improving? How does this lead to shared, sustained prosperity around the world? Cyril Dadswell died when I was two weeks old. And his life story was always told to me by my mother, his daughter. And I am incredibly grateful to be standing here today and to have had your attention and to have had the opportunity to at least attempt with Duron to and with Jim to highlight for you some of what has mattered in history, some of what has helped people, some of what has hurt people. And none of this was ever intended as a passive knowledge acquisition exercise. We want you to have some tools, some ideas, some inspiration to go change the world in a better direction. Thank you very much.

ECONOMICS, INNOVATION, GLOBAL, INSTITUTIONS, COLONIALISM, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, NOBEL PRIZE