University of Chicago professor James A. Robinson among 3 awarded Nobel Prize

A University of Chicago professor and two others were awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday morning. They were recognized for their research studying why some countries are rich and others poor and documenting that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper.

James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist at University of Chicago; Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson "demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country's prosperity," the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.

Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robinson has known the both of them for 30 years, he shared at a news conference Monday at the University of Chicago.

As both an economist and political scientist, Robinson has researched political power, institutions and prosperity. He has conducted fieldwork around the world including Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

"James' research really lays bare how inclusive institutions really matter to the prosperity of a society in the deepest way," said Paul Alivisatos, president of the University of Chicago, at the news conference.

Robinson learned the news Monday morning from his wife, Maria Angelica Bautista.

"I was sleeping when my phone went off. So my wife woke me up and said, 'You have to get up. You have to get up.' I said, 'What for?' She said, 'You won the Nobel Prize.' I thought she was kidding," Robinson said.

Robinson, 64, has worked at the University of Chicago for the past eight years in the Harris School of Public Policy and in the school's political science department. He is the 101st Nobel Laureate associated with the University of Chicago and the 34th in the field of economics.

"Since I've been here, I've felt an intellectual home at the university," Robinson said.

"This is a prize that's going to be celebrated not just by economists, but political scientists, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, Africanists, Latin Americanists," said Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy.

"His research on institutions and the political determinants of societal thriving set the general agenda for a generation of scholars who are seeking to understand how to create peace and prosperity where there was conflict and poverty," he added.

Robinson said on Monday their findings offer a useful set of tools for people looking to improve their own societies.

"I'm not someone who thinks that economists have a cure for everything or they have some silver bullet or we just bring some evidence to the table and everyone is going to wake up," he said.

"From my experience working in developing countries and in the Global South is that people are usually much more aware of the problems than Western academics are … These ideas are important in terms of giving people levers or giving people ways to think about the problems in their society."

Robinson isn't the only person with a Chicago connection to win a Nobel Prize this year. John Jumper, who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2017, was last week awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Chicago native John Hopfield on Oct. 8 won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live.

Reached by the academy in Athens, Greece, where he was to speak at a conference, the Turkish-born Acemoglu, 57, said he was astonished by the award.

"You never expect something like this," he said.

Acemoglu said the research honored by the prize underscores the value of democratic institutions.

"I think broadly speaking the work that we have done favors democracy," he said in a telephone call with the Nobel committee and reporters in Stockholm.

But, he added: "Democracy is not a panacea. Introducing democracy is very hard. When you introduce elections, that sometimes creates conflict."

Robinson and Acemoglu wrote the 2012 bestseller, "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty," which argued that manmade problems were responsible for keeping countries poor.

Acemoglu expressed worry Monday that democratic institutions in the United States and Europe were losing support from the population.

"Support for democracy is at an all-time low, especially in the U.S., but also in Greece and in the UK and France," Acemoglu said on the sidelines of the conference in an Athens suburb.

"And I think that is a symbol of how people are disappointed with democracy," he said. "They think democracy hasn't delivered what it promised.''

Robinson agreed. "Clearly, you had an attack on inclusive institutions in this country," he said. "You had a presidential candidate who denied that he lost the last election. So President [Donald] Trump rejected the democratic rule of the citizens. ... Of course, I'm worried. I'm a concerned citizen."

Johnson told the AP that economic pressures were alienating many Americans.

"A lot of people who were previously in the middle class were hit very hard by the combination of globalization, automation, the decline of trade unions, and a sort of shift more broadly in corporate philosophy,'' Johnson said. "So instead of workers being a resource to be developed, which they were in the 19th and early 20th century, they became a cost to be minimized ... Now, that squeezed the middle class.''

"We have, as a country, failed to deliver in recent decades on what we were previously very good at, which was sharing prosperity,'' Johnson said.

One key for the future, Johnson said, is how societies manage new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

"AI could go either way," he said. "AI could either empower people with a lot of education, make them more highly skilled, enable them to do more tasks and get more pay. Or it could be another massive wave of automation that pushes the remnants of the middle down to the bottom. And then, yes, you're not going to like the political outcomes.''

Contributing: The Associated Press