Simon Johnson
speaker
295 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
First of all, Steph, that's a great summary of the research right there.
Yes, so a lot of people had become interested in institutions in the 1990s, including because of what had happened in the former communist world, for example.
Issues of corruption, issues of governance and so on were...
absolutely the forefront.
We thought it'd be good to look into history and go back and see where did these institutions come from.
We spotted something very interesting in colonial history.
Obviously, Europeans didn't take over all of the world, but they almost did.
They did quite different things in different places.
In fact, the British, not to pick on anyone, but the British generate a lot of the data here,
They did remarkably different things in terms of the rules of the game they set up, for example, in North America versus West Africa.
The main reason, Steph, was in North America, the Europeans, after some difficult early years, figured, oh, this would be a good place to bring more Europeans, but we can only get Europeans to come here if we offer them rules of the game that are at least as fair as in the UK and other parts of Europe, maybe a bit better actually for ordinary people.
West Africa, they did actually try to bring Europeans early on.
It was a complete disaster because the disease environment in West Africa was, and actually is, highly unfavorable to people who were born in Europe.
A lot of malaria, a lot of yellow fever.
So the Europeans gave up on trying to settle there themselves and unfortunately, obviously, built a pretty substantial empire at the heart of which was extraction of gold, extraction of other minerals, and of course, the slave trade.
Now, when you're running the slave trade, you want to have...
decent enough protection for your own merchants, and you could do that with some guns and a fort, and you don't really care about local institutions.
In fact, you may favor the local institutions that are, you know, what we call extractive of local people.
So there we have, within the British empire, and the same, almost essentially the same people making these decisions, very different outcomes for initial institutions based on what the preferences and the strategy was for colonization.
And we then argued and established,
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