Greg Rosalski
speaker
658 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Greg Rosalski’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 — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
He did.
But as they all walk out together down the narrow streets of London... James and Daron start to chat, and with just a few words, Daron gets James' economist heart to flutter.
North and Weingast? Of course! This was kind of a nerdy history paper looking at 17th century England, specifically how its economy was supercharged by changes to its institutions. institutions.
And at their very first meeting, James and Duran are already bonding over their shared fascination with institutions. For both of them, this was personal. Duran, for instance, grew up in Turkey during a turbulent time for its institutions.
Meanwhile, James spent much of his youth in developing countries. His dad worked as an engineer in places like Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, places that were grappling with their colonial history.
Right. Modern mainstream economics, it's kind of obsessed with math and data and proving things with statistics, which is why a lot of economics research focuses on small, precisely quantifiable questions. Like, I don't know, how do grain prices change with the weather?
Which is why, for a long time, the popular economic models had focused on factors more directly associated with economic growth. Things that were measurable. Things like population growth, investment in machines and infrastructure, education of workers, technological innovation.
All right, Jeff, YOLO. Let's do some economics research.
Obviously, you and James are, you know, you have this bromance going. At what point does Simon Johnson come in the mix?
Simon Johnson. He's another young economist, a statistics whiz. And together, the three economists start working on this huge project that would eventually win them a Nobel Prize, trying to prove, using the tools of economics, that institutions are the reason why some nations are rich and others are poor.
In an ideal world, the economists could just do what scientists basically do in a laboratory. You know, randomly give some countries good institutions and other countries less good institutions, and then see what happens to their economies. But of course, that's impossible.
So they began searching for the next best thing, a natural experiment, a moment in history where, for kind of random reasons, different countries wind up with different kinds of institutions.
Yeah, the era of European colonization. When starting in the 1400s, a bunch of Western powers went around the world, invading and imposing different kinds of institutions, institutions that the economists believed had lasting economic consequences.
But there were also different patterns in how this all unfolded in different places, which seemed to create the conditions for the natural experiment that the economists were looking for.
At the other extreme were colonies where Europeans did not settle in large numbers, places like the Congo or Bolivia. There, European colonizers set up or maintained institutions aimed at helping a small group of elites ruthlessly extract wealth from indigenous people. Instead of investing there, they sent most of their resources and wealth back to Europe.
These are the places that tended to become poorer countries.
So the economists began searching for some kind of random factor unrelated to a country's potential for economic growth that affected which places got settler colonies.
Then the economists had their big breakthrough. they found a kind of random reason why Europeans put settler colonies in some places and not others. Disease.
The economists go searching for data so they can conduct a statistical analysis of all this. They find it in a set of books by historian Philip Curtin. He had meticulously compiled records on how many Europeans died from diseases in colonies around the world.
That's because the way they saw it, the death rates of colonizers was this kind of random independent factor determining which places got growth-friendly institutions and which places did not. This was the natural experiment the economists were looking for.
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