Daron Acemoglu
speaker
96 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 16 Jan
Daron Acemoglu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We almost said exactly the same thing, which was like, this is what economists study. But over there is all the things that I'm really passionate about. And then we were like, OK, you know, you only live once. Let's let's figure out how to bring these things together.
The thing that we latched onto is it's got to do with colonialism.
You know, why are institutions in Nigeria, you know, so lousy compared to the United States or Canada? You know, well, that's got something to do with the very different types of institutions that were created in the colonial world.
And so we started reading like mad about colonialism and like trying to understand the incentives and what to explain different institutions. Why did such good institutions emerge in the United States and why not in Nigeria?
The historical mortality environment for Europeans enormously influenced whether or not these places became settler colonies.
But then several early colonizing attempts were basically decimated by tropical diseases and then decided like, OK, forget that. Let's go to Massachusetts. Like it's rocky. It's kind of unappealing. But we're not all going to die of tropical diseases.
The very distinguished economist came in and asked us, so what are you guys up to? And Daron, like all excited, explained this idea of sort of historical mortality of European settlers. And he just laughed himself silly. He thought it was the most ridiculous idea he'd ever heard in his life.
People were just somehow so fascinated by it. And we were like, oh, man, you know, we hit it out the park, basically. It's just like the... You could just see people loved it and they found it fascinating. It was really kind of elating. That's what I remember.
We thought this is just like devastating evidence on the impact, A, of colonialism in kind of reshaping those societies, and B, showing that the geographical hypothesis can't possibly be right, you know, because there isn't persistence. When colonialism comes, it reverses this picture. Then it turned out that's not just true in the Americas. It's true more generally in this colonial world.
One of the things we tried to do in our book is come up with this sort of flexible language to talk about institutional differences, which kind of encompasses many things. Like I can say, your society has sort of extractive institutions, or it has inclusive institutions, and that can incorporate all sorts of differences in the details.
We find very robust evidence that, you know, democracy is associated with better provision of public goods, better investment in education, in infrastructure, higher economic growth. Great. Okay. So... That's true. But he says all democracies aren't created equal. There's many different types of democracies and there's many different types of dictatorships.
So I think that's useful to know just in terms of like, is it a good idea to push for democracy? Yes. You know, is pushing for democracy a kind of magic wand? No.
People are born into this caste, you know, where occupations are rigid and specified. And that enormously holds back social mobility and the potential of the country.
the transition towards economic growth in China starting in the late 1970s is clearly, you know, driven by this move to much more inclusive economic institutions, sort of dismantling central planning and cooperative agriculture, kind of introducing incentives, getting rid of price controls, allowing people to kind of make decisions and start firms.
And, you know, that's exactly, you know, our theory. But what's tricky is how could this happen under a sort of totalitarian dictatorship?
Yeah, I think, you know, this is social science. I think the world is very complicated. So, and our understanding of many things, you know, is incomplete. So we should be humble about that.
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