James A. Robinson
Personal Information
Description
James Alan Robinson (born 1960) is a British economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He also serves as the Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School. Robinson has previously taught at Harvard University between 2004 and 2015 and also at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern California and the University of Melbourne. He studies what makes countries different by focusing on the underlying economic and political institutions that lead some to prosperity and others to conflict. With Daron Acemoglu, he is the co-author of books such as The Narrow Corridor, Why Nations Fail and Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Source: James A. Robinson on Wikipedia.
Books
Balance of power
A debut military thriller that delivers the requisite guts and glory while making a meaningful statement about the ambiguous role of violence in America. Huston, a former Navy F-14 flyboy, bases this intelligent if somewhat wooden page-turner on the scruffy antagonism between Newt Gingrich and President Clinton. His fictional stand-ins lock political horns over the proper response to a terrorist attack on a new American merchant vessel in the South China Sea. After pirates kill the crew, booby-trap the ship, and take the captain as a hostage to an uncharted Indonesian island, gassy President Edward Manchester decides to claim the high moral ground by not responding with force. His situation, we learn through the eyes of his beautiful (and chaste!) aide Molly Vaughan, is that he’s tied by the Indonesians themselves, who refuse to let the US Navy fly over their country. Meanwhile, Molly’s on-again, off-again romantic interest, Jim Dillon, a legal assistant to House Speaker John Stanbridge, points out that the Constitution permits Congress to issue a letter of marque, that is, hire a vessel to make war on another nation for the US. When the terrorists—apparently a group of anti-American Muslims—release a videotape of the captured captain to CNN, Stanbridge, a grandstanding conservative Californian, surfs the wave of public indignation and gets Congress to issue that letter of marque to a bunch of gung-ho Navy brass who want to show the terrorists what Americans are made of. Dillon learns that aggression has its price: To rescue the captain from a pathetic bunch of fake Muslim pirates, 19 Americans die, among them a missionary killed by friendly fire. When motivated by political vanity, are symbolic shows of force worth the cost? Huston’s answer, a qualified yes, is supported by numerous heartstopping scenes of military derring-do, steely camaraderie, and selfless patriotism. [Kirkus Reviews]
Africa's development in historical perspective
This edited volume addresses the root causes of Africa's persistent poverty through an investigation of its longue duree history. It interrogates the African past through disease and demography, institutions and governance, African economies and the impact of the export slave trade, colonialism, Africa in the world economy, and culture's influence on accumulation and investment. Several of the chapters take a comparative perspective, placing Africa's developments aside other global patterns. The readership for this book spans from the informed lay reader with an interest in Africa, academics and undergraduate and graduate students, policy makers, and those in the development world.
Why Nations Fail
Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: Will China's economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? Are America's best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority?