Professor Robinson, thank you for accepting our invitation. This interview is going to have three types of questions. We begin with some academic issues and then we conclude with more personal and informal questions.

You say somewhere that you usually take a simplistic view of development. We would like to know what is that view.

James Robinson: (Laughing) When I say that, I mean I concentrate on trying to explain per-capita income. It's fashionable to say (particularly Amartya Sen tries to say it) that this is a too simple view of what development is. Development is the "evolution of rights", it's "human development", and we should look at all of these things. But that's all very complicated. We don't really understand why people have certain rights in society or how all of these things evolve. Well, clearly welfare is different from development as high income, but a lot of things seem to be correlated with high income. So, when I say that, I really mean I'm just trying to look at income differences and not trying to start with this very ambitious kind of agenda of simultaneously trying to explain many other things that might be desirable in society. And lots of those things end up being very useless. So, for example, the United Nations proposes a "human development index" as a way of getting "beyond" GDP per capita. But the "human development index" is just an arbitrary combination of different indicators: life expectancy, or literacy, or income. But, how do I know how to weight those things? How do I know if life expectancy is more important than income? I mean, it's very arbitrary the way those things get ranked. So, I don't see the use of that index. Obviously we care about life expectancy and literacy and things like that, but I think it's too much to start worrying about.

When I said simplistic, that's what I mean. I think it was traditional to focus on income and then it became unfashionable…that's what I mean.