Justin Wolfers
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
You might think I'm going to say inequality, but I'm not.
We are very well equipped to talk about some issues because they're on the news.
The latest GDP report comes out, CNN calls me, I say blah, blah, blah.
They say blah, blah, blah.
We blah, blah, blah about it.
We even did it at the start of this podcast.
I want you to step back and ask a deeper question.
And that question is why are some countries rich and some poor?
The United States is rich.
I was born in Papua New Guinea.
Papua New Guinea is a country of grinding poverty.
Low literacy rates, very high rates of maternal mortality.
Kids die in childbirth.
People sometimes are hungry.
And economists have asked versions of this question now for decades.
And sometimes we'll look at the experience over as long as a million years, sometimes a hundred years, sometimes a thousand years, sometimes the last few decades.
Sometimes we look at every country.
Sometimes we look at specific case studies.