Why nations fail | James Robinson | TEDxAcademy

Thank you very much. I am James Robinson.

I am going to talk about why nations fail and why nations succeed as well,

which is really about why some countries are poor

and some countries are prosperous.

It turns out you can tell a lot about the answers to that question

by looking at the Korean peninsula at night.

If you look at Korean peninsula at night, you see some obvious things.

That South Korea has a lot of light, electricity.

North Korea, on the other hand,

is rather dark.

There you can see a spot of light.

That's probably the presidential palace in Pyongyang.

(Laughter)

Now, there could be different reasons why North Korea is very dark at night.

It could be that North Koreans have electricity and light bulbs,

but they just think candles are more romantic.

(Laughter)

It could be, on the other hand,

that North Koreans have electricity and light bulbs,

but they are just trying to reduce their carbon footprint.

I think, however, the more plausible explanation

is that actually North Koreans don't have access to the types of technologies

like electricity and power and light bulbs that South Koreans do.

And that enormously restricts their economic potential.

So one thing we know about the difference between poor countries and rich countries

is that poor countries, like North Korea,

tend to have much worse technology than rich countries.

Let me tell you about some other things we know

about the differences between poor countries and rich countries.

Poor countries have much less educated people.

They tend to have much less healthy people.

They live shorter lives.

They have much worse government services, like infrastructure.

So, here is an idyllic Congolese driving scene in a part of the world

where I do a lot of research, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This is what they call, somewhat ironically in the Congo, Interstate No 1.

And you can see that driving on Interstate No. 1,

you spend a lot of time digging your car out of sand and mud.

This is the dry season. If it was the rainy season, forget it.