Simon Johnson
speaker
295 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Simon Johnson’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
hopefully beyond a reasonable doubt, that a lot of those early institutions set up 200, 400 years ago have persisted through the modern time.
They're not exactly the same.
Obviously, things change over centuries, but there's a lot of...
the way these countries are run today that you can trace back to those early colonial arrangements.
And that has a huge impact, a first order impact on productivity, on income per capita, and on everything else you care about and how economies operate today.
Yes, I think that's probably a fair way to put it, Robert.
I don't think it's actually that complicated.
There is at least one place, Botswana, that we've studied where the Europeans had very little impact because, well, they couldn't be bothered to go there.
They didn't think there was anything valuable.
And Botswana is better off.
Botswana is obviously in Southern Africa, not West Africa.
But Botswana is better off than other countries around them and countries that have similar endowments of minerals and diamonds in the case of Botswana and so on.
So yes, I think there is a bit of an edge or a presumption, a reasonable view that Africa would have done better, much of Africa would have done better if the Europeans had never got their hands on it.
Or actually, of course, they didn't initially own and control Africa, but they influenced it through the slave trade, which was even more pernicious.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of the story, Steph.
But remember, it's the health of the Europeans.
So the Europeans didn't care about local health conditions for locals.
And in Africa, where malaria was endemic, a lot of people had got natural immunity or acquired immunity from having malaria when they were young.
There was a high death rate for children, but there was a high death rate for children in Europe as well.
The question was when adult Europeans showed up,
Showing 41–60 of 295 · page 3 of 15
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