Is it failing?

No, I mean, you know, by failure, you know, we're really talking about economic failure, economic success.

Failure is a big word.

It covers lots of things.

So, you know, my work is really about economics and about how societies – who succeed economically do so because they create institutions, sets of institutions, kind of rules that channel people's energy in directions which are socially beneficial, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity.

But those energies can be channeled in many different ways, and I think what you see in the United States historically is you've had VERY WHAT WE CALL INCLUSIVE INSTITUTIONS, INSTITUTIONS, RULES THAT ARE CREATED VERY BROAD-BASED PATTERNS OF INCENTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES, ECONOMIC SUCCESS, AND POOR COUNTRIES like Venezuela, say, went into decline because they created the opposite, which we call extractive institutions.

So institutions that don't create broad-based opportunities or incentives.

Like, are there patterns of this? Does this look like anything familiar when you look across the country of, you know, across the landscape of failed nations?

Okay,

brilliant.

Thank you.

I don't remember that the stage was as small as this.

Okay, great.

Thank you very much.

It's very exciting to be back.

okay?

What are some routines, like things you do every day in the classroom, might not necessarily be a routine, but to help your kids have that feeling of safety, to have that feeling of being valued and supported in your classroom?

I think to start that any routine that I do or any silly thing that I do in my classroom, if my way or my little spot check-in or way of assessing if it's working is if I can get a smile out of a student or a little giggle or their eyes, you know, lie up, that's sort of how I measure if there's been that little bit of impact.

So, I think the first one which I think every teacher does is the morning roll.

Like, yes, that can be a very boring admin task of here, here, say the name, here, here, here, or good morning.

It might take twice the time that a roll takes, let's say, one minute to take in the morning.

But if you ask them a question, and it could be a real silly question of if you could be any flavoured pizza, what would you be? Or if you are going away on the holidays, where are you going? Just like things to really build that connection so they can either be silly or they can be You know, I'm serious about sharing what they're doing.

It might take three minutes to do the role then.

Has there been a time that you can remember where that relationship with a student has really trumped the learning? So, they have felt loved and seen and that's what they're going to remember over the actual academic success in the classroom?

So perhaps I could ask you, what is the fundamental imbalance in Latin America, and where does Paraguay fit within that broader story?

Yeah, I mean, that, that's, you know, th- that, that's a kind of new work that I've been doing, um, with, uh, Jose, uh, Jose Luis Falconi, who's a, a art, art historian, professor of art history and human rights at the University of Connecticut.

And I think that actually, you know, that stems from a long discussion we've been having about things we don't understand in Latin America.

I think, I think, you know, I think when I started, you know, studying Latin America, uh, and trying to understand this sort of divergence within the Americas, uh, you know, you know, my work focused very much on kind of political economy and these institut- like deeply rooted, um, institutional differences.

And I think, you know, if you, if you...

To make progress on something in social science, you have to make things kind of simple, you know.

So you have to sort of shut down other things and sort of say, "I'm gonna focus on the politics, I'm gonna focus on institutions, I'm gonna focus on like power relations." And, and, you know, that's the sort of view that we developed in scientific papers and in, you know, we, we, in Why Nations Fail, for example, or The Narrow Corridor, we sort of tell this story about Latin America and...

Uh, first, what comes first, do countries develop because they have better historical institutions or because, uh, political actors manage to build coalitions that make those institutions, uh, possible in the first place? What, what role does agency play in all of this?

So who is getting recruited to staff this civil service that's doing all these tasks?

Yep.

So that's what's so fascinating about it.

The dominant narrative about British economic history comes from John Brewer's marvelous book, The Sinews of Power, about the emergence of this kind of, you know, fiscal state after the Glorious Revolution in sixteen eighty-eight.

And he talks about raising taxes and paying incentives and, yeah, that's all true for the twenty thousand people who are working in London.

But it turns out, in the rest of the country, where, as you say, there was very few fiscal resources, most people basically worked for free, so all people who worked in parishes were unpaid.

And in our sample of boroughs, seventy percent of people working, providing public goods, judicial services or whatever were unpaid.

Is this paper undermining this? Was 1835 England an exception to the rule?

Right.

... why is that? You know, I think if you thought about the history of the United States, there's such a history of kind of marginalization if you think about the way Black people were treated, discriminated against, kept on the side, wages repressed, politically excluded until the 1960s.

But there's also this, just this kind of culture in the United States, you know, of kind of self-reliance, of...

I mean, I would say it goes back into the 19th century.

There's actually a lot of evidence on this about linking the kind of regional cultures within the United States towards attitudes towards redistribution.

And there's just this idea that you have to make it on your own in the United States and you don't want handouts and things like that.

And that, that, that, that creates all sorts of problems, so I agree with you that there is a distributional problem.

Which we don't reckon with, for some reason.

How do you think brain breaks benefit students cognitively, emotionally, and physically? It's a big question.

Yeah, where we could even be like, break here for part two and then go into part three and make a full series out of this.

I'm a notorious talker, so hopefully I won't talk too much on it and I'll give grace to each part of that question.

But there's a lot with brain break.

As I mentioned before, there's different types of brain break.

So there's obviously whole class brain breaks and then those incidental individual regulatory brain breaks that students can do individually.

And they have... their specific need and purpose and the context they all have different strengths and weaknesses but when it comes to looking at how it benefits students i'm going to talk quite broadly here i think the first thing before you can really tap into the benefit that it has with students on all the different levels is you need to look at how the brain breaks have been say introduced into the classroom once you've started regularly using brain breaks and making them a part of your weekly teaching style you start to build the first tier which is building positive relationships with the students i think there's that quote students won't remember what you've taught them they'll remember how you made them feel and when you have brain breaks it allows you to engage in this sort of safe space with them if you're doing the brain break with them if it is a silly game or an activity they're seeing the quirky fun side of you they're also seeing you model it doesn't matter if i got out or how to be a good sport with different things and how to respond to different situations.

Where are we going to start? Because there's just so much.