James Robinson delivers a thought-provoking lecture exploring the complexity of institutions and their vital role in economic development. He begins by dissecting what institutions truly are, how they differ across societies, and where they originate, using engaging examples from China, Colombia, and Africa. Robinson emphasizes that understanding institutions is particularly crucial for poorer societies seeking change and for outsiders aiming to assist them. He challenges the audience to look beyond simple metrics like rule of law or property rights, unveiling how deep-seated social norms and cultural worldviews shape and sometimes constrain institutional effectiveness.

The lecture is distinguished by nuanced case studies illustrating different forms of rule of law failures—one grounded in principle and familial loyalty (Confucian China), another in naked self-interest (Colombia), and a third reflecting African kinship-based ontologies. Robinson convincingly argues that economic outcomes depend not only on the abstract quality of institutions but on how these institutions mesh with local normative orders and worldviews. He offers examples from the Kuba Kingdom, Botswana, and Somaliland, revealing how successful institutional reform often requires reinventing traditional practices within the modern state, rather than wholesale imported models.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. aphorism [ˈæf.əˌrɪz.əm] - (noun) - A concise statement of a principle or truth, often witty or philosophical. - Synonyms: (maxim, proverb, adage, saying)

Here's a aphorism from Confucius, Analects, okay, Which is relevant for thinking about why the rule of law fails.

2. expropriation [ɪkˌsproʊpriˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - The act of taking away property from its owner, usually by a government or authority, sometimes without proper compensation. - Synonyms: (confiscation, seizure, appropriation, requisition)

A law firm called Brigada Norutia basically facilitated the expropriation of the land, violating many laws in Colombia which govern the allocation of frontier land by creating shell companies.

3. normative [ˈnɔːrmətɪv] - (adjective) - Relating to an evaluative standard; concerning what is considered 'normal' or 'correct' according to a set of norms or values. - Synonyms: (prescriptive, standardizing, conventional)

There's a kind of normative order in this Confucian case, sort of underpinning what we might call the absence of the rule of law.

4. ambivalence [æmˈbɪvələns] - (noun) - The state of having mixed or contradictory feelings about someone or something. - Synonyms: (uncertainty, doubt, indecision, equivocation)

And the ambivalence of this is actually recorded in the oral history

5. ontology [ɑnˈtɑlədʒi] - (noun) - A branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being or existence. - Synonyms: (philosophy of being, metaphysics)

Well, that could be because the Chinese order stems from a different way of thinking about people and society and people's place in society. So a kind of very standard idea about Chinese, or I'll use a fancy, another fancy word here, which is ontology, which is a part of metaphysics, is about what there is, what there is in society, what exists.

6. segmentary state [ˈseɡ.mənˌtɛr.i steɪt] - (noun) - A type of political organization integrating multiple kinship and clan groups within a state, rather than suppressing them as in many Western state models. - Synonyms: (clan-based state, kinship-based state)

That's what anthropologists call a segmentary state.

7. hegemonic [hɪˈdʒɛm.ə.nɪk] - (adjective) - Dominating or ruling, especially in a political or social context. - Synonyms: (dominant, prevailing, controlling, preeminent)

In fact, it's obvious, and this is some work that Daron and I have been doing for the last few years, that any society has multiple normative orders, even if one of them might be hegemonic at a particular time.

8. extirpate [ˈɛkstərˌpeɪt] - (verb) - To destroy or remove completely; to root out and eliminate. - Synonyms: (eradicate, eliminate, annihilate, abolish)

The Bill of Rights, which was passed the year after the Glorious Revolution, states, whereas the late King James II did endeavor to subvert and extirpate the laws and liberties of this kingdom.

9. contested [kənˈtɛstɪd] - (adjective / verb) - Disputed or argued about; subject to a challenge or debate. - Synonyms: (disputed, challenged, debated, questioned)

I won't start talking about that process because it's highly contested in Somalia and Somaliland.

10. deliberate [dɪˈlɪbərət] - (verb / adjective) - To think about or discuss issues and decisions carefully; done consciously and intentionally. - Synonyms: (consider, ponder, reflect, contemplate)

And it was the place where people, adult males, everybody today meets to question officials, question the chief, to demand accountability, to deliberate, to try to understand what's going on.

11. aggregation [ˌæɡrɪˈɡeɪʃən] - (noun) - The process of collecting things together or the state of being collected; the act of combining multiple items into a single group or whole. - Synonyms: (collection, accumulation, grouping, assemblage)

But how do you aggregate that to the national level?

12. accountability [əˌkaʊntəˈbɪlɪti] - (noun) - The fact or condition of being required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsibility. - Synonyms: (responsibility, liability, answerability, transparency)

It was the place where people, adult males, everybody today meets to question officials, question the chief, to demand accountability, to deliberate, to try to understand what's going on.

Prize lecture - James A. Robinson, Prize in economic sciences 2024

So now for the final lecture. It's going to be given by our third laureate, James Robinson, who is the university professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and at the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Please, James. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thank you. I was going to say thank you for inviting me, but I'm not quite. Not quite sure that's appropriate. Anyway, very honored and happy to be here and a little distressed to go last after what you just saw. But let me have a crack at it anyway. Here's my noble lecture. It's called Path towards the Periphery. And you'll see by the end, hopefully what that's about. Oops. Okay, so I'm not going to repeat what Simon and Daron have talked about, about the evidence that we tried to provide on the importance of institutions for comparative economic development and comparative economic growth. But what I do want to focus my comments on and the ideas is to talk about what are these institutions? What do they mean and where do they come from? And I think that's particularly important for the people in societies who are poor and would like to do something about those institutions. How do you change those institutions? How do you do it? And of course, it's also very important for us as outsiders wanting to help people in poor countries. How do we engage in a constructive way with people in poor countries? How do we help them in improve their institutions? And I think, as Simon and Daron both mentioned, we measured institutions in different ways and different pieces of our research. And I'm just going to focus on one of those measures of institutional quality and sort of put pressure on what it means. And this is actually a figure that you've already seen today, which is the relationship between the rule of law and income per capita. So what the evidence suggests, what the evidence we put provided suggests, is that countries with a much better rule of law do better economically than countries without the rule of law. Okay? So I think we all have a kind of intuitive feeling of what the rule of law, intuitive understanding of what the rule of law is. But what I want to start by saying is actually in my personal experience, there's different ways in which the rule of law can fail, and there's different reasons why the rule of law fails. And that turns out to be very important. And let me give you two examples of that. I could do this with property rights. I could do it with other measures of economic institutions. But let me just focus on one to be concrete. So that's the argument. All right, so let Me give you. Here's my first example, which comes from China, or you could say classical Chinese philosophy. Here's a aphorism from Confucius, Analects, okay, Which is relevant for thinking about why the rule of law fails. The Duke of Xi said to Confucius, among my people, there is one called Upright Gong. When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities. Confucius replied, among my people, those who we consider upright are different from this. Fathers cover up for their sons, sons cover up for their fathers. So here Confucius seems to be defending favoritism towards your family rather than something we would associate with the rule of law. Okay, Your first loyalty is to your family, not to some abstract rule of law. So here's a failure of the rule of law. And I'm going to argue that conceptually this is extremely different from another example which I take from Colombia. So on the right, the map of Colombia, there's a black line around. Oops, that didn't work. Okay, I'm coming. There's a black line around that region on the right in eastern Colombia. That's the Los Llanos, it's the plains that run down to the Orinoco River. And that black line is an area called La Antillonora. So it's low lying, it's lots of rain water, very productive, great for tropical palm biofuels, et cetera. So in the last 15 years, there's been a huge land grab in eastern Colombia over this land in the Antigonora. And how has that land grab taken place? Well, different ways. But here's one example. A law firm called Brigada Norutia basically facilitated the expropriation of the land, violating many laws in Colombia which govern the allocation of frontier land by creating shell companies. So Rio Paella Castilla, that's a very big Colombian firm, they make sugar. They created lots of shell companies with the help of this law firm to game the laws in order to acquire enormous amounts of land in the antianora. So Rio Pala Castilla ended up with 42,000 hectares of land in a part of Colombia where land is supposed to be available for poor people, but basically to become farmers, to distribute in the frontier. So one of the lawyers, this became a scandal in Colombia. One of the lawyers appeared on the most popular radio station in Colombia in the morning and was asked by a journalist, do you have to stretch the law? Do you have to stretch the law so you could keep the land? And the lawyer replied, the law is here to be interpreted here in Colombia, they are not white or black. Okay? So this seems to be a violation of the rule of law. And I'm going to argue there's something very different conceptually from my story about Confucius. And there's a general lesson there about the nature of poor, you could say, or institutions that don't promote economic development. Okay? And I'm going to use a particular terminology to talk about this that Daron said I shouldn't, but I'm going to do it anyway, which is, I think there's something conceptually different between this Chinese case and the Colombian case. There's some principle involved in the Chinese case. There's some kind of, what I'm going to call, in the language of economists, a kind of normative principle. There's a sort of. It ought to be like this. Fathers ought to look after their sons, sons to look after their father. So there's some principle involved. So I'm going to call that. There's a kind of normative order in this Confucian case, sort of underpinning what we might call the absence of the rule of law. Okay? But no principle like that seems to be involved in the Colombian case. In the Colombian case, it just seems to be naked self interest, basically. If I can get away with it, let's grab the land, you know, If I can't get away with it, okay, fine, there's no principle involved. It's just naked self interest. Okay, I want to ask the question, since I spend a lot of time in Colombia, since my wife is Colombian, is there a normative order in Colombia? I just argued that it's very hard to sort of think about that example as something as being justified by any principles. And I think the answer is yes, there is. But the equilibrium in society mostly doesn't. Is not consistent with that order. Meaning an order exists, but people are playing a different equilibrium. I illustrate that just with a bit of research that I've done recently about social norms in Colombia. If you ever hung out in Colombia, you get struck as an outsider by. By many perverse social norms. And one perverse social norm in Colombia, which was highlighted by this gentleman here on the right in the costume of super citizen. That's the c. He's the former mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mokos. So he used to go around as super citizen. And one thing super citizen did was fight against perverse social norms like no se asapo. So no sea asapo means don't be a toad, literally. And it's used to correct people who try to Stop bad behavior. So let's say I see someone cutting a red light or stealing something or behaving in a socially inappropriate way, I could say, hey, stop doing that. Don't do that. You shouldn't do that. What would happen if I did that? They'd turn around and call me sapo. Don't be a sapo. You're being a sapo. Mind your own business. None of your business. Okay, so Antanas Mokas had a campaign against, you know, said. He made it, said, let's be sapos. It's good to be sapos. It's good to correct socially inappropriate behavior. So what we found in our research, this is research with Leopoldo Ferguson and Jose Alberto Guerra, two colleagues of mine in the University of the Andes in Bogota. What we found is that when you play a game, an experimental game, and you allow people to appeal to this sapo norm, the majority of Colombians believe that if you correct me, I'll call you a sapo. But what's striking is that a vast majority, 80% of people in our data actually think that's socially inappropriate. They think it's going to happen, but they think it's bad that it happens. So there's a disjunction between the normative order, which is what do you think is socially appropriate, and what actually happens, which is, yeah, sure, they'll call you a sapo if you, if you tell on them. Okay, so, so, so yeah, there is a normative order in Colombia. It's just that the equilibrium is different. Okay, so, so let me talk a little bit about this normative order. And, you know, I gave you the feeling of that in the Chinese case. Where does that, like, how come the Chinese have those principles and, you know, we don't in kind of hyper individualistic Western society? Well, that could be because the Chinese order stems from a different way of thinking about people and society and people's place in society. So a kind of very standard idea about Chinese, or I'll use a fancy, another fancy word here, which is ontology, which is a part of metaphysics, is about what there is, what there is in society, what exists. And the traditional view amongst philosophers would be, well, in Chinese society, they don't think in this very hyper individualistic way people see themselves in the context of relationships and communities. You don't think of yourself as distinct from your family. You're all part of the same thing. It's kind of unimaginable to think of yourself as an individual disconnected from your family. And you could think of that as being the sort of foundations for that normative principle that Confucius outlined. Now, going back to the regression and going back to the data, you might think, okay, there's a lack of rule of law in that context. Couldn't that be bad for the economy? And I think the answer, and that's what our research shows, is, yes, it could be bad. It could be bad. It could be bad for the economy that there are trade offs in that context. Okay, it's bad for the economy in the Colombian case, It's bad for the economy in the Chinese case. So there are trade offs. But of course, underneath it, there's a very different idea of what's creating that trade off. And a lot of my work in Africa in the last 25 years, I think you can think of it through this lens of trade offs. Trying to understand institutional equilibria in African society, Trying to understand the political, the cultural underpinnings of equilibria. Why are African countries poor? What could you do to improve these institutions? What's the logic of these institutions? I think in many cases, when I step back and think about that, there are these trade offs. Okay, so let me give you one example of a trade off from the work that I did in the Democratic Republic of Congo With Sarah lowes, Nathan Nunn, and John Weigel, we studied the Cuba kingdom. The Cuba kingdom was a pre colonial state which emerged in the 1620s. It was created by a political entrepreneur called king Xiam. And I want to talk about the trade off in the institution he created as a way of thinking about why Africa might be poor in many. But to do that, I need to tell you a little bit about African society. I use this complicated word, ontology. Here's a philosopher talking about the ontology of African society. So placid temples was a Belgian cleric who's probably the first westerner who really thought seriously about the way Africans think about the world and tried to understand from their perspective, how does the world look, and in what sense is that different from the way the world looks to us? So here's temples. He says the concept of separate beings which find themselves side by side, entirely independent of one another, is foreign to bantu thought. Why does he say Bantu? Well, he worked in southern Democratic Republic of Congo amongst the Luba people. So he was thinking about people who use Bantu languages who have kind of cultural elements in common, which comes from this historical Bantu expansion in Africa. Okay. The Bantu hold that creative beings preserve a bond, one with another, an Intimate ontological relationship. Okay? So the concept of separate beings is foreign to Bantu thought. It's similar to Chinese people thinking of themselves in terms of relationships and collectivities. Okay? And I think it's very important in understanding African society to understand that kind of worldview, you could say, and how it's institutionalized through kinship groups, through clans, and through this notion of wealth in people, that the most fundamental thing is people. Okay? And I always like to illustrate that with a board game. I don't know if the chemists were talking about board games this morning. They seem very keen on board games. But here's a board game which is common in Congo all over Africa. This is an example from the British Museum. It's from Ghana, where they call this game Wari. In Congo, it's called mankala. And without going into details, you take the cowrie shells, you distribute the cowrie shells. There's two players, and each player has a base. One on the left, one on the right. And the objective is you move the cowrie shells and you capture the cowrie shells of the other player and you put them in your base. So let me put point out a few things about this and contrast it to chess. So first of all, the cowrie shells are all the same. And the objective of the game is to capture the cowrie shells of the other person and bring them into your team. You accumulate them, and you bring them into your team. Think about chess. Chess, you have a hierarchy. There's the king and the queen and the bishops and the knights and the pawns. And your objective is to obliterate the other team, kill them, knock them off the board, and capture their territory. So I always think the difference between mancala and chess is a beautiful metaphor for the difference between African society and Eurasian society. You don't want to kill people and knock them off the board. You want to bring them into your team because people are valuable and there's wealth in people. So let me go back to the Kuba kingdom. Here's King Sham. This is a statue of King Sham. It's called an ndop. And the person who formed the Cuba kingdom in the 1620s, he's sitting in front of a Mankala board. That's his emblem. The great historian Jan Van Cena called it his emblem. Okay, why is he sitting in front of a mankala board? Okay? Because it symbolizes the social contract that built the state in the 17th century. He said, okay, I'm building a state. I'm building a centralized political institution. But I'm doing it in a way which is consistent with the fundamental normative order in society, which is symbolized by the mancala board. Okay, so this was a particular sort of state. It was a state which incorporated this principle. What does that mean institutionally? What does it mean in practice? It means that kinship groups and clans were merged with the state. That's what anthropologists call a segmentary state. Okay. Western society, following the tradition of Max Weber. We think that when you build a state, you get rid of the kinship, you get rid of family, you get rid. No, you don't. You merge it all together. Okay, so did that cause trade offs? Sure. Political science is full of discussions of trade offs. I want to talk about a particular trade off that we discovered in our work in Congo, which is related to the rule of law. So when King Sham did this, it was a very ambivalent event. Okay. And the ambivalence of this is actually recorded in the oral history. So in the oral history of the formation of the Cooba Kingdom, King Sham, first of all has to make himself head of a clan. Clans. Okay? He was forming the clans into a state and merging them. He had to become head of a clan. How did he do that? Well, it was already ahead of a clan. He had to kind of overtake this chap. How did he do that? Well, that person who was head of the clan had to anoint him. So he hid under a rubbish dump. The head of the clan walked past, saw the rubbish, he spat on the rubbish. King Sham was anointed. Then there was a competition. They all had to get a hammer. They were going to throw the hammers into this lake, and whoever's hammer floated was going to be the person who could bring the kingdom together. What did King Sham do? He cheated. He got some balsa wood. He put some foil on top. Everyone else had an iron hammer. They threw the hammers. The hammer sunk, his floated. So the oral history records King Sham formed a kingdom, but he cheated. Now, that's very different from British political history. I don't know about Swedish political history. And it symbolizes the ambivalence that people felt towards this creation of this institution that could have threatened the fundamental normative order of society. And what we found in our research is that Couba people are actually much less committed to abstract rule of law than other people as a legacy, in my interpretation, as a legacy of this ambivalent creation of an institution. Okay, so there's a normative order there. The Cuba kingdom might not be like modern Britain, but there's a logic to the way it was constructed which reflects the principles of African society. Now, that's not to say that African societies are trapped into poverty by their normative orders. In fact, the world changes. normative orders changes. And in fact, it's obvious, and this is some work that Daron and I have been doing for the last few years, that any society has multiple normative orders, even if one of them might be hegemonic at a particular time. There's different ways of thinking about the organization. There's different ways of rationalizing things. There's different arguments you can use. Okay? And in fact, if you look at the emergence of economic growth, whether it be in Britain since 1688, after the Glorious Revolution that we studied in our work on Atlantic trade with Simon and that we studied in our book why Nations Fail, you see a lot of what's going on. There is actually a reorganization of the normative order. It's a kind of reorganization of the principles that justify particular institutions and particular ways of doing things. And what I'm going to show you is it's actually the case in Africa. Successes in Africa, contemporary successes in Africa. Those two are based on reorganizing their normative orders. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about the Glorious Revolution. Okay, so I've been telling this story a lot in the last couple of months, but the first day Daron and I met was probably about March 1992. I don't remember the exact date, and we didn't have mobile phones in those days, so I can't recover it. The first thing we Talked about about 20 minutes after my job talk, unsuccessful job talk, had many of those. The first thing we Talked about about 20 minutes after my unsuccessful job talk was a paper by north and Weingast, Barry Weingast and Doug north, on the implications of the glorious revolution. In 1688, we walked out of the old Saint Clements building at the London School of Economics, and he looked at me and he said, have you read this paper by North? And Weingart? And I had, it turned out. So we've since then done a lot of research with Simon on these political transitions that took place in early modern Western Europe, in Europe, and tried to understand the connection to institutional change and economic growth. And what's interesting at the time of the Glorious Revolution was there were multiple normative orders. So if I just think about the political sphere, there were different ideas about legitimate political authority. There was James ii, who was in power, who was kicked out of England by the Glorious Revolution, who had a model of the divine right of kings. James II claimed he had inherited legitimacy and the throne from God and he didn't have to be accountable to anybody. On the other hand, there was a completely different normative order, popular sovereignty, where people said, no, that's not right at all. If you read John Locke's two Treatises of Government, Locke spends the entire first treatise basically trying to demolish the idea that anyone got any authority to rule Britain from God. So having cleared that out of the way, he moves on to what does popular sovereignty look like and what does the organization based on popular sovereignty look like? So those two normative orders, sort of justifications for how society and how political authority should be organized. They contested each other, they fought, there was a civil war, there was a revolution, and popular sovereignty won. James II disappeared to France and William of Orange became King of England. Okay, now when you look at that, it was a political conflict, but it happened in a very specific cultural context. There was a reorganization of society. It was highly innovative, but it was justified as simply recreating the great myth of British liberty or English liberty. So the Bill of Rights, which was passed the year after the Glorious Revolution, states, whereas the late King James II did endeavor to subvert and extirpate the laws and liberties of this kingdom. So nothing original was happening, nothing innovative, just restoring the traditions of the British people. And what I want to emphasize about that is the way in which this conflict took part, using the sort of tools or the cultural tools that people had in Britain, the parts of the normative order. Sure, they reinvented it, but they had to justify it with the concepts at hand. I think you see that in lots of these instances. You know, even Confucius, for example, if you read Confucius, you read the Analects, you see that Confucius specifically says he's not proposing anything new. He's just trying to recreate the proper way that society should be governed, which goes back to the zoo emperors, the Magi restoration. Another tectonic institutional change in 19th century Japan, faced with the threat of European colonialism and annexation, was a radical change in institutions. But it was made out as just a simple restoration of the monarchy back to its true position. So using the sort of cultural tools that the Japanese had to reinvent their society, to reinvent their normative order. And I think when I look at these examples, when we have studied these examples of successful countries in the world, countries that have changed their institutions and moved out of poverty, as Simon was saying, I think they have a lot of this flavor. So the first country I worked in kind of seriously in sub Saharan Africa 25 years ago was in Botswana. The three of us wrote an early paper trying to understand the paradox of Botswana, because at the time we wrote that paper, Botswana was actually the fastest growing economy in the world for the previous 30 years. Not South Korea, this is the late 1990s. Not Singapore, not China, Botswana, okay? So we tried to understand how could a country in sub Saharan Africa be the world's most successful economy over the previous 30 years. And I think what we discovered is that Swana political elites in the 1960s had brilliantly reinvented many of the traditional institutions and got them to work in the context of a post colonial nation state. And let me just mention one, which is the hotler. So the hotler is the sort of traditional meeting place, council place of the Swana peoples. Okay? And here's a photograph from a Norwegian anthropologist at University of Bergen called Ornof Gulbrandsson, from a recent book of his. And here's a meeting of the Hotler today. So this is a traditional institution. We have observations of the functioning the Hotler back in the 1820s and 1830s from early missionaries. And it was the place where people, adult males, everybody today meets to question officials, question the chief, to demand accountability, to deliberate, to try to understand what's going on. So the genius of post colonial political elites was to take this thing and embed it in the modern state. When they built the capital of Haberone in the early 1960s, it was in land. British had never governed what was then Bechuanaland from the colony itself. They governed it from South Africa. They had to build a capital city. When they built the capital city, they built Khotla's. This is a more traditional one. But who's that chap standing up there with a suit? Okay, that's a civil servant. What's he doing? He's up there being questioned, being interrogated, justifying the policy. What are we doing? So they took this institution and they reinvented it in this post colonial state. And they changed many other things too. Another my favorite example that I've been studying for the last few years is Somaliland. Okay? So Somaliland is the former British protectorate of Somalia in the north of the country of Somalia. So when Somalia became a nation in the 1960s, it merged. I won't start talking about that process because it's highly contested in Somalia and Somaliland. But let me just say, since 1991, Somaliland has basically been Independent, autonomous country. And it's reinvented itself. Okay, it reinvented itself. It innovated new institutions in its own cultural context. Give you one example from the Burama conference 31 years ago, where clan elders met and they built state institutions. They designed state institutions from scratch. How did that work? It worked representing clans. So the senate in Somaliland today, called The Guti, represents 82 clan elders. Okay, so of course, that's. I don't want to say this is all consensual. I talked about the glorious revolution that was a political conflict. So these cases are more consensual. But obviously the world doesn't change in a necessarily consensual way. And of course, one of the most difficult problems that the post colonial world faces today is there may be many, many, many normative orders in a country like Nigeria. Here's two of the local normative orders in two places I worked in Umuchesi and Leja in eastern Nigeria. And here's a quote from Chinua Achebe, the great Igbo writer. The owner of the village, the owner was the village, and. And the village had a mind it could say no to sacrilege. That's the normative order. But in the affairs of the nation, there was no owner, and the laws of the village became powerless. Meaning at the local level there is a normative order, there is a reason, there is a legitimate way things work. But how do you aggregate that to the national level? Okay, I'm not sure I have time to talk about this figure, but let me just say I started to motivate this by asking, how do poor countries with poor institutions, like the weak rule of law, poor property rights, different sorts of property rights, how do they improve those institutions? I think the main point I'm trying to get across here is we need to unpack the logic of those institutions. We need to understand how. How institutions fit into the local society, fit into people's understanding of the local society, fit into their ontologies, their worldviews. And I think that means the nature of the problem to improve institutions is very different. The nature of the problem to improve institutions in Colombia is very different from the nature of the problem in many parts of Africa where there isn't much normative order in Somaliland, in Botswana, at a local level in Nigeria. But that order needs to be scaled up. Maybe it could be in Somaliland or Botswana, much harder to do that in Nigeria, and maybe it needs to be reinvented too. But that's okay. That just has to happen in a legitimate Local context. And I note here, I didn't talk much about politics, but these are all very deeply political problems. And my last slide, I promise. Okay, I think I'm on minus something. What is this talk? You know, path towards the Periphery. I gave a practice talk to some PhD students at Chicago, and they said, what is that about? Like, couldn't you get a better title than that? It's completely obscure. Okay. But there's a point to the title. Okay. And the point is that's my own intellectual journey for the last 32 years. The path towards the Periphery is trying to engage with poor countries, try to understand their institutions on their own terms. How do people think about it? How do they think about the problem? How do you solve those problems? Okay. And I think I've come to kind of unlearn many of the perspectives I had in the past. And I think, you know, if I could make one plea, Simon was giving orders about what you should be doing research on. But so if I could get my oar in the pond or whatever the right analogy is, I would say this is a call for us for some kind of humility and just some kind of grasping how exciting the world is and all the variation in the world. And we're not all the same. We're different. Humans created many different types of societies in different parts of the world. And yes, some of them are poor and some of them are rich, and that's a very compelling problem, especially for people in poor countries. But what we do about that depends a lot on how we understand those institutions. So that's it. Sorry. Oh, thank you so much, Jim, and thanks to Daron and Simon. Please come up here in the front.

ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY, GLOBAL, INSTITUTIONS, AFRICA, RULE OF LAW, NOBEL PRIZE