Jean-Paul Faguet

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you, Sean.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the simple one sentence answer is nobody really knows. Sometimes it goes well and very often it goes badly. And kind of the big intellectual project is to try to figure out when and why and how and what variables you can dial up and dial down to generate better governance for better outcomes. And we still don't really know.

We have very highly contingent hypotheses with some some bits of evidence for certain cases, but you know, what happens to be working in modern Germany, but definitely did not work in Germany from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s, or what's been working at least until recently in the U.S., doesn't give you very much information about the rest of the world.

Yeah, it's hard work. It's hard work empirically, and it calls for very different sorts of tools across, in my field, across both heavy econometric, quantitative sorts of evidence, but also qualitative evidence, where you might go and spend weeks or months in the field interviewing people and observing communities and trying to get qualitative sources of information on things like

why some people manage to govern themselves well or badly. At the really micro level, like in a village, can they solve collective action problems around the agricultural cycle? Or at a macro level, like what's going on to democratic institutions in the U.S. today?

Yes, yes. Absolutely. So... Asimoglu and his co-authors, Robinson and Johnson, wrote a paper that re-kicked off, so to speak. It kicked off again a new literature in the political economy of development that had kind of been forgotten. Nobody was working on this in the 1980s and 90s.

When I was a graduate student in the 90s, for example, people were doing much more kind of traditional economics sorts of things. And they brought it back. Now, I mean, kind of a fun fact. I don't know if Duran would agree with this. I kind of think he might. over a beer, but I don't know that he'd want to agree with it publicly in a public picture.

is that he and Jim Robinson in particular, because they've worked together longer in this train of research, they've kind of brought Marxism back into the discussion. I don't mean Marxism as in, you know, Leninism and the Soviet Union. I mean more like classical political economy where economic factors tie up with power and who has power and how that gets expressed in government patterns.

And the two kind of feed back to each other all the time, as opposed to especially North American political economy that tries to maintain the two things distinct. It says you get richer, you don't, and you're a legislator who gets lobbied or not, but the two things don't blend that much. And part of what these guys are saying is these things are completely intertwined and we can't ignore it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so they're not doing that. They're not following down the Karl Marx line of economic determinism or material dialectics. What I'm saying about them, and again, they may not agree with this characterization. They're just showing that institutions are at some level the expression of economic power applied to politics, which then feeds back into economic power.

And the two, it's a continuous cycle. And if we try to ignore that or keep these fields too distinct, then we're missing possibly the key part of what's going on in the world.

That's right. That's right. Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, that's right. Because the institutional literature has been on a a long journey and when the ideas first came up, so one of the earliest but very clearest statements of what our institutions came from Douglas North around 1991 where he published a very famous book, The Great Douglas North, recently deceased. He said institutions, you know, what are they?

It's this fuzzy word that means everything and nothing at the same time. So he said, let's say institutions are the rules of the game. So an institution, for example, is football, let's say, like as in soccer or American football or any sport. And then

Particular teams are organizations that are operating within the framework of the rules that define a particular game where it clearly delineates what is fair and what is unfair play and how you win the game. So you try to get the lowest number of strokes in golf or the highest number of goals in football or whatever it is.

And so there you get a nice delineation between institutions and organizations.

And what we saw almost immediately, and there's a French theorist called Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, operating at about the same time, the 80s and early 90s, is that given rules that you can write down in black and white, like the rules of football or the institution of marriage, my family and your family are organizations within the broader institution of marriage, which are the rules about how people relate to each other and how families interact.

and so on and so forth. You transfer these rules in black and white from one context to another country, another cultural context, and they don't work, or they have completely different outcomes. The rules are the same, right? So to give you two examples of that, most of the Latin American countries essentially copied large amounts of their constitutions from the American constitutions.

So go back in history. The first American Articles of Confederation were a dismal failure. The U.S. was falling apart, not working. And then you got a second convention and you got the current American Constitution, you know, before all of the amendments. And this has been a great success up until now.

So the Latin American republics come up a little bit later in the early 1800s, and they basically copy large amounts of it. And these institutions in Latin America do not work the same way that they work in the U.S., even though articles are copied almost verbatim. Or in Africa, you have countries that were large numbers of countries colonized that had been colonized by the French. and the Brits.