Why do some societies prosper while others fail to create opportunities for their citizens? James Robinson has pursued that question across disciplines, continents, and centuries. His search for answers has reshaped the study of economic development, earned him the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and changed how scholars and policymakers understand the institutions that enable societies to flourish.
Robinson, University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, did not arrive at those questions by following a conventional academic path. Trained in economics, he found that each answer opened the door to another discipline. Economics led to politics, politics back to economics, then to anthropology and history. Rather than staying within a single field, Robinson—who has additional appointments in the Department of Political Science and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought—followed the questions wherever they led.
That intellectual restlessness found a home at the University of Chicago, with its strong interdisciplinary traditions.
“People don’t care about labels,” Robinson says. “They care about ideas.”
Drawing on decades of fieldwork throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, he studies how history, culture, and social relationships influence the way institutions emerge, evolve, and succeed. His recent work argues that understanding societies on their own terms—not through one-size-fits-all theories—is essential to addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including economic development and effective governance. Whether collaborating with researchers in Colombia, working alongside policymakers in Rwanda, or teaching young scholars across Africa, Robinson grounds big ideas in the realities of the communities he studies. His forthcoming book on Africa seeks to replace simplistic narratives of failure with a richer understanding of the continent’s extraordinary diversity, resilience, and potential.
For Robinson, this kind of scholarship depends on an environment where ideas move freely across traditional boundaries. He sees the University of Chicago as one of the few places where historians, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and other scholars routinely pursue shared questions together, unconstrained by disciplinary silos. That culture of open inquiry has allowed him to follow evidence wherever it leads—and to continue challenging assumptions, including his own.
For the next generation of scholars, Robinson hopes to model not certainty but curiosity. “Be curious about the world,” he says. “Be ambitious.” The most important questions, he believes, are often the ones that refuse to stay within a single field.