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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and for more
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conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music] today I am with Chris blatman Economist and he is at the Harris public policy school in Chicago Chris has worked on most of the central issues behind
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Economic Development thank you for coming Chris thank you I want to start first with your work on cash transfers so say I have some extra money and I want to do the world some good and I'm thinking should I just send money to some individuals in a poorer country go
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to the Western Union office and send it off is that the best thing I can do with my money I think if you don't know anybody in a in deserving of help or that needs something or if you don't have a personal connection to a place as an
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impersonal way to to give effectively it's probably the best way we have I don't do really any of that myself or I do but I'm sending cash transfers in some sense to very specific people there's very Dynamic people I know who are getting through University or or
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going through school and so I but I have this advantage of these personal connections so say I have connections to developing economies I know some people and I'm thinking of not only sending cash but packaging that with some kind
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of complimentary benefit or intervention what's the most effective thing I can package the cash with and say I have some time some resources some expertise what's actually going to help that's a good question I would say if you were a
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larger organization and you're not but if you were a larger organization or a government I would start pointing you in the direction of bigger sort of Public Services or infrastructure like things or things that get delivered to groups
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but that's not really what you're asking um you you give person cash on something should it be cash on a banana cash on a book cash on an Apple Watch I think a lot of people and this would be true even of a young person in this country I
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think don't have a good sense of what their paths and options are and so I think if the time that I've spent helping people think through what their options are and re-evaluating those opportunities suddenly changes all of their returns to investment and so that
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kind of advising and mentoring and connection I think is unusually powerful what's the last important thing you learned about cash transfers we recently went back to some cash transfers that were given almost 10 years ago and following up a randomized control trial
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in Uganda in the north and we're just in some sense putting out those results but what we found is the initial result after two and four years was like other places seeing big advances in income so people get cash they're poor they
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couldn't invest in some of their ideas but they had good ideas and so they they take off and now what we've seen is essentially they've converged with the people who didn't get the cash the people who didn't get the cash have caught up because they slaved and they
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saved and accumulated slowly and got up to the point where they have the same levels of success so they converge to a good level but this means that I think cash transfers are much more of a a temporary acceleration than they are
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some sort of permanent solution to Poverty so after 10 years it might wash out right well this is just one place so we'll see there's a lot of these things around the world but we've we've based a lot of our optimism really off of a
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handful of transfers in Kenya and Uganda so looking back at those I think we're seeing convergence and that's what we'd expect to the extent there's convergence that say a 10-year Horizon what do you think is the mechanism is it the people
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who get the money they work less hard or they they give it away to Kin who expect a form of social insurance or the people who don't get the money become more ambitious just what's your intuition one of the constraints that you you see on
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people's success is that they these are just incredibly volatile lives so if you ask someone to recount the last 10 years of their economic activity you'll just get this incredible Litany of terrible shocks and and unexpected events that
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was really quite amazing and so it's amazing that anybody succeeds at all uh when after you hear this list I think so so a lot of people are just failing but for the most part people are are doing well I think it's just the fact that a
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lot of these people getting cash transfers are young people who have a future and it takes time to get there especially if you have to slowly accumulate capital and so it's just the fact that this it just takes a longer time for everyone else given your
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current income based on tenure of course how high a permanent basic income would you have to get from the world for your life to change you know maybe you feel the same way I'd probably do what I do practically for free but people say that
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but if they had say a billion dollars a year I'm not convinced it would be true so we work downwards from that 200 million a year 1 million a year at some point maybe a little bit maybe maybe if it was a million at some point I would quit my job and just do what I do but as
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a free agent I would probably write books and do media and try to produce ideas outside of the University unencumbered by a lot of the administration the teaching and the things that that just let me sort of focus on the ideas in the reading um but
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I accelerate your career path it wouldn't lead to convergence for you well I mean I don't think I'm yeah you I'm not sure my yeah the question would be would my out put be any greater than in the counterfactual I'm not I'm not sure if
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that's true there would it would be different in an unmeasurable way now Chris also works on violence and War and conflict so I have a whole host of questions for him on these topics and I'll start with a real softball uh there's a a survey article you did and
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it showed in the data that Civil Wars seem to rise from 1960 to 1990 and then after that point they fall dramatically why do they first go up so much in terms of their number and then go down I think especially in subcenter Africa but but
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certainly all over the world you saw this period after the first world war and after decolonization you know it's interesting that the the one of my favorite things ever written about this period is by these Bob Bates and Jeff Williamson and
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John coatsworth are these sort of famous political and economic historians and they compare this period in Africa to the late 19th century and and a period of complete of of war and instability and and grad political consolidation
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after a period of rapid and unexpected decolonization and so I sort of think of Africa which is the site of many of these wars as just undergoing a period of political instability followed by consolidation after a rapid and unexpected
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decolonization at the same time that you're having a experimentation with economic systems and political organizations that turned out to be failures which I think interacted with that to to make it so much worse and so the gradual the end of these wars and
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the political consolidation that comes from essentially identifying I think an economic system and a political system that tends to work a little bit better explains a lot of the piece since then it seems though if you look at Latin
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America they've been independent quite a long time and there were many more civil wars in Latin America say when I was growing up than what we see now or even even the prospect thereof do you think there's some notion to there being a
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general you know Spirit of the world that's either more peaceful or less peaceful Now versus you see independ regions the number of Civil Wars seem to be declining and whether there's any specific theory that would account for
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that or is there some kind of global contagion possibility I think there's always the chance of a global contagion I think I I usually think of the incentives as aligned for peace in the sense that so so war is sort of the puzzle to be explained I I guess I don't
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think of of the how would I say this I guess I see this as maybe a a what happened in your childhood was a reaction to a series of political and economic shocks and and a search for equilibrium after that and it's possible that we'll
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see very dramatic political and equal political and economic shocks to to sort of destabilize that many countries again but I don't see them coming very soon what does the median Economist Global development thinker fail to appreciate
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regarding order and conflict and violence someone who knows a lot about the topic but you feel you have a you know a key or core Insight that they don't so there's sort of if I think of two types if there's sort of the academic Economist or political
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scientist I think they tend to ignore the human and the emotional and the erroneous aspects the things that drive conflict that are mistakes and then at the same time I think that those passions and mistakes and greed are
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vastly overestimated by I won't even say the Casual Observer I would say the very very deep and experienced policy maker and so they they actually look at the problem they're both right they both have like a piece of the puzzle but they
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both only have one piece of the puzzle and so they're not one's not looking at it with enough reason and one's not looking at it with enough emotion why don't economic risk factors matter more for predicting violence and Civil War I think they do a good job of predicting
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how easy it is to mobilize somebody into a conflict and so if you have a a time if there's been some drought or there's been some collapse in trade or or the one commodity that your country produces collapses in price and there's a lot of
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people that have worked and I think it's a lot it's much easier to Temp people away from from whatever middling Economic Opportunity they had to join a a rebellion and and you can get more of them for your money that's a very basic
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intuition but that doesn't tell you why the war broke it in the first place just because the pie grows or shrinks because of economic growth or or collapse doesn't necessarily mean that you have more or less incentives to fight over
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that pie you're still trying to bargain over that pie but wouldn't it be like a standard model there's a country it sells a natural resource the natural resource feeds the budget makes it possible to buy off special interest groups the price of the commodity Falls
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there are no longer the bribes for all the different interest groups someone attempts a cou d'a or a civil war for what is partly an economic reason that doesn't show up very strongly in the data in your papers as I understand it
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and what do you think that model is missing what's the intervening factor or what is that model overestimating well I mean I think all of these models don't really think about you know in the way that that a lot of economists and political scientists think about
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conflict is that it's a bargaining process and so if the pie has shrunk and uh it's true that there's less transfers but then were you to capture that Pi it's you you know you're going to one is that Pi is smaller so perhaps it's less attractive to capture in the first place
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so that's going to be a counterveiling force but you you know the war if you're if you're thinking about the cost of War these wars are so long and so costly that you have have a strong incentive to try to find some kind of bargain and so
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people typically find Bargains you this is why I think you see these broad Coalition governments you see lots of different ethnic groups included in a particular regime very stable regimes bring together lots of people and pay
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them off all of that bribery is a way to keep a peaceful bargain and and when the pie shrinks there's a risk of conflict I think because there's a it it initiates like a new round of bargaining and that's hard and things can happen but
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every most people still have incentives to try to find some kind of peaceful solution as you may know moscona nun and Robinson have a recent paper and they argue that a big risk factor for conflict and violence is when people have many extended relations who need to
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be defended or their honor needs to somehow be held up and this makes it easier in their opinion for conflict or violence to spread what's your take on that so all of this talk of in this case I think they talk about segmentary
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lineages and I you know I've never seen it it's it's one of the things that resonates the least with me any description of African Society or African culture or conflict or politics that relies on this I have to believe it's there because so many people have
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written books but but I it doesn't seem to me to be a first or even second order determine of what's going on when I think about the conflicts I know and the politicians I know and the decisions that get made so could it be a
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non-african or middle eastern effect so if a lot of people have married their cousins then family lineages are are maybe Tighter and they also reach further and there's an honor culture of some kind you know my tuition would have said that the more horizontal ties you
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have to other parts of society that the more you're going to internalize some of the cost of conflict and so in some sense you're going to be less likely to I mean if I if I weren't presented with this empirical fact that those things
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seem to be related to more conflict I would have actually predicted the opposite say I'm a Child Soldier in Northern Uganda what's worse for me being abducted or having to fight in a war well you're usually being abducted
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to fight in a war sure um which of those two experiences is the one that does me the most harm I think it's the transition period it's the preparing I mean it varies from it's you know it's probably different it's certainly different in every in every Rebel
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organization the one I I worked with or studied actually was the was one where it was the transition from abduction to becoming a fighter where was because the training usually tried to dehumanize and desensitize you into committing violence
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and so you you you were often not always you were often asked to commit pretty heinous acts and those had this double it wasn't just to desensitize you that it was to try to convince you that your outside option was really terrible it was the idea was to sort of convince you
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that there's no way you can go home we're going to make you do a set of terrible things right now that will mean that you can never really go back and so like it or not your future is really with us and later on my earnings will be lower you're you know there's this
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famous paper on Vietnam veterans in the US where they where they find that being being conscripted into uh into V into fighting in Vietnam had positive effects on the wages of of blacks and and negative effects on the wages of whites
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and the reason was it was it was really down to like what was your alternative labor market and training experience in the absence of this war and we found something similar in Uganda something sort of eily familiar which is that the
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women economically weren't so worse off than you I wouldn't say they were better off but they weren't necessarily affected adversely in an economic sense or adversely affected in other ways five or 10 or 15 years down the road while
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the men were and it was sort of spoke to just how terrible women's options were I mean being conscripted and abducted to be a rebel wife to some degree wasn't that different than what your marriage opportunities looked like if there
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wasn't a war and so so but for men it just meant that you were out of the late the civilian labor market getting a bunch of skills that had turned out not to be very useful and so it was bad for them but a different War a different context and and and a different labor
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market and that could switch how many Northern Ugandan child soldiers have you interviewed oh at least a couple hundred maybe maybe more I think I maybe you know depends if you count someone who's involved for like a month versus two
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years but the sly the long long-term soldiers who were there for many many years are few and maybe only a couple dozen and those contacts those conversations how have they changed your outlook on life emotionally or intellectually otherwise
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well I mean they they uh I'd never worked on conflict before I went to Northern Uganda I I followed a woman there who later I would marry and we I followed her because we we had this idea for a research project I'd been doing
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some work on on children and after that I just could never do normal Economic Development again it just it just I I I've really only worked in violent context since then because it seemed so so first order important and just so neglected and over all your take is it
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that children you now see them as more resilient than you used to believe or less certainly more I mean I I mean if you're a psychologist you just you just you know that that people are are subjected to horrible things and most people are incredibly resilient this is
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sort of their a big stylized fact but I never knew that before doing this and then you certainly see it firsthand over and over again so so I updated since then I think I've you know there's a lot more nuance and I I tend to think we're
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Maybe bit glib about saying that people are resilient because I think there's a lot of pain or problems that don't necessarily show up in our data but turn out to be really important the Stockholm syndrome some people who are kidnapped
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or abducted start identifying with those who took them how true is this in your experience well I think it takes work I think if I look at the example of the Lord's resistance Army in Uganda or some of the organizations in Liberia that I I
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know people who are a part of they I think the organization this really happens when the organization really really dedicates itself to trying to do that it works better with children too but but they were quite ingenious the
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Lord J assist Army spent a lot of mental energy coming up with they had a lot of time to experiment a lot of people to experiment with trying to actually indoctrinate and they were they were good at it there's now as you know a growing literature on what I call Micro
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violence so studying scenes of crowds when a fight starts and using maybe video evidence to figure out why did the fight start and I was chatting with Mark Lavine a researcher in this area not that long ago and he told me in his research it seems to be the case that
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crowds actually are a force for peace on net that it's not that the crowd eggs people on that bystanders try to stop conflict they don't always succeed and this to him was a kind of Revelation how individual the violent Act is your take
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on that it's interesting so I I don't know this you probably know this literature better than I do I think of I mean when I what I what little I've read sort of thinks of those reactions as very individual instinctive reactions to
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a threat and they invoke the figh ORF flight mechanism and I could imagine a set of circumstances where a non-hostile crowd reduces that that sense of of risk and personal danger but I I imagine a lot probably depends on the context and
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what that crowd is doing or who that crowd is and whether or not you perceive that crowd as your as as part of your ingroup or your outgroup or part of the threat or not true or false most humans are bad at violence oh I think they learn quickly
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probably they're bad at first and the micro evidence on violence and the more individual level evidence and then finally macro evidence like will there be a civil war do you think there's ultimately an overarching theory that
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ties these all together or are they just separate levels of Investigation where you have empirical results and they stand somewhat separate and they'll always be distinct areas I mean how optimistic are you about a kind of grand unified theory of
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violence so I'm op I think I think these individual how I react in the moment fight ORF flight type mechanisms are quite distinct from the way that that small groups or large groups or nations go to war but once you get beyond that
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to the level of small groups and larger groups and Nations I just see a lot of unity in the in the theory and I think this this combin of this more game theoretic view of bargaining where we see conflict is arising from uncertainty
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commitment problems and melded with a set of more psychological issues around emotions and levels of of self versus more social interest and and the mistakes people systematically make I think that framework for me explains an astonishing amop every it continues to
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explain more phenomena as I learn about more phenomena it drug gangs or Urban disorder and I and I can I I see it in more and more places so I'm I'm optimistic Rene Gerard as you know is one of the the best known theorists of
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violence and one of his hypothesis concerns the use of violence for purposes of ritual sacrifice which he then traces throughout myths and literature what's your take on the reneer art worldview so the only reason I'm aware of the reneer Ard worldview is
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because I glanced at the what should I ask Chris blatman questions and I I saw that name and I thought oh I I I don't know who that is and my 10 minutes of Investigation suggest like I just find nothing nothing about this idea
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resonates with my personal experience in in in particular Wars or but this is the danger of you also blogging your uh your your questions or potential questions but I I didn't I didn't go study so much that I have a coherent answer other than
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to say it it didn't strike me as somebody who had spent a lot of time actually in or with people who commit violence what do we know about the causes of the pipian wars so this is this is something that I'm brand new to what you see is a lot of political
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scientists like to write articles about Grand theories of War whatever theory that may be and they like to cite Greek historians talking about things like the grand you know the the you know first of all the Spartans and the Athenians you
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couldn't Hollywood couldn't imagine two more ideal types to to sort of to to talk about and two different more different World Views and and then for them to embark on this you know W end all wars through the period it it people use it to explain to think about
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something that we think of as bargaining and the commitment problem which is that mass of power shifts can can lead to war partly because it becomes difficult for the temporarily powerful person to be paid off not to sort of exercise their
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advantage and through a first strike eliminate and so this becomes a potentially a model of that but then no one has ever gone beyond this and actually I think really tried to see how it works and so I've been reading it and I'm more and more persuaded that that
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it's actually a good example of this but it's a little bit more complicated I asked Charles C man the same question why are so many parts of the new world this hemisphere so relatively violent compared to so many places in Asia also
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in Africa as you know where you can walk around without any thought of violence whatsoever but really a pretty significant part of AR hemisphere that's not the case Canada of course an exception but nonetheless I'm sure you've noticed this difference what what
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ultimately is your theory at the macro level but I think you're talking about personal security and crime personal security crime kidnapping someone pulling a knife on me in cities that's a very a lot of that's not particularly
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violent so I think but murder rates are fairly High murder rates are fairly high so first I'm a little I'm a little skeptical of that that I I I don't totally except this is a stylized fact I think there are other aspects of like
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probably the the actual levels of violence in society are mostly going on in the home and I don't know if so so we're talking about a very specific subset of violence that has more to do with Rogues deciding that they can extract something from a stranger and
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and so my instinct is to say that has a lot to do with policing MH it has a lot to do with the level of policing and the concentration and the dissuasion from a very specific kind of violence and it still seems odd there's this commonality
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across so many countries well you know most of the cities where I think you you see some of the highest murder rates Latin American cities have very few police per capita when you compare them to American cities and certainly if you compare them to
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Asian cities so I don't like to be that crude because I'm actually a little bit of a skeptic of just this sort of knee-jerk to policing and we need more police and we need more exper investment and security resources but as like a
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first order approximation I think I think that's a big part of it but I think you also then have subcultures I think once you have cities that and groups within cities that begin to do this I've seen this in Uganda um it used to be that Nairobi was always a v very
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violent place and so and but people would sort of copy it became like a a thing you could do I now had a model and this was a career or vocation that existed in Nairobi but it didn't exist in kalala or it didn't exist in Alam and
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people just didn't do it and then once you had people sort of prove that they could be it could be done and it it could be profitable then you had this relatively small group who sort of professionalize it and do it and now it becomes a thing and it's kind of
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entrenched but so it it's sort of a multi multiple equilibrial story I've read that murder rates in New York City have fallen by a factor of about 20 from their Peak which was within my lifetime do you think the research you've done
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gives us any insight into that or is is that a fully separate phenomenon I I think of it as a fully separate phenomenon I think of the stories the people tell when they have data or when they tell something convincing just sound very different from the kinds of
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stories that I'm used to thinking about for the kinds of violence I study so the some of the stories that are plausible and have some good evidence are their successful efforts to get guns off the street the police per capita and just
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the and then just also the going back to the old idea of just many eyes and many people people on the street in more neighborhoods so I that just none of that really helps me understand Civil War violence or recruitment of child
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soldiers or any of the things that I worked on in the past 20 or 30 years ago the nation of Colombia was much more violent and dangerous than it seems to be now what has changed there I know there are superficial answers you could
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give while they're fighting each other less Civil War has wound down but at the most fundamental level how how would you explain the the significant decline in violence so I'm still new to Colombia and I spend most of my time in the cities thinking about the kind of
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violence that frankly not even most Colombians think about and less time thinking about the Guerilla violence and the paramilitary violence you know I think of that I I think there was actually a relatively short period where
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the violence was very intense and you had a relatively well-organized Guerilla group the farc mount a credible assault on the state with a reasonable belief that they were going to win and maybe take over and and a state that was slow
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to respond and eventually under this existential threat actually pulled it together with some us support and managed to Counterattack and managed to effectively defeat this force or get it close enough to push them to the bargaining table it seems more deeply
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rooted in their history so there's a period starting in 1948 where 300,000 people die La violencia in Colombian history 19th century maybe we don't have numbers but it has a reputation for being being a violent place well I'm
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trying to draw a distinction between a situation where you have a lot of low relatively lowlevel persistent violence that might have to go with a an Insurgency like that in Colombia but you could said the same thing about Northern Uganda it's not actually that violent in
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the large scheme of things and and just draw a distinction between that and the much more High death high intensity much more violent sort of conventional war that that was fought for a period of time and and so those are those aren't
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like distinct phenomena one one existed as a precursor to the other they didn't have to so I I think of them distinctly in that case like I think so so you know medine is a is is a city I've spent a lot of time in and and so I I don't know
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that this is true but I in my head the analogy is that in medine you had these Elites you had the Colombians in the city at the bottom of the valley with a very nice city was the Industrial Center and as people started to flood in from
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the countryside into to the periphery of the city and they built up these slums on the sides of the mountain slopes the state essentially decided not to govern and so in the absence of deciding to not to govern in the absence of any kind of
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government in the absence of Public Services those communities started to govern themselves and un often that meant criminal groups and it could have been paramilitaries or gorillas or eventually it's street gangs and mafias grow up and they provide order and they
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provide certain services and then eventually the elite and there's a lot of violence and then eventually the elite wakes up and realizes that this is an existential threat and has to fight it and so that in like a microcosm feels
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like the last 100 years of Colombian history where you had Elites in the cities essentially allowing the periphery to sort of be quasi governed by fairly violent actors and not being particularly concerned about it until it got so bad that it threatened them in
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their cities and and and then they they got serious about it and were fortunate to be able to eradicate it to some degree you have a recent paper where you suggest that people being exposed to violence can make them in the longer run
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more Cooperative because they're somehow guard or or scared by the violence and so they want to set things right they cooperate more do you think in general there's reversion to the mean when it comes to violence and thus we should be
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optimistic about Honduras El Salvador and other places and Colombia fits into that bigger story or no so you exposure to a violent act for some reason I think one reason might be a psychological reevaluation it might be a a set of
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interactions you have with with people within your group that that sort of happen to be that that that that are cooperative and and and that reinforces future Cooperative Behavior I think the evidence suggests we don't know the evidence suggests that you're much more
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Cooperative with your ingroup so people who are like you we have less evidence on cooperation with your outgroup the little we have suggests that you're potentially less Cooperative with your outg group and so if you're talking about Community government in a city or
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decisions that you have to make with with people in your region maybe you're slightly more pro-social but but that doesn't necessarily mean you're more peaceful overall if you're on net less pro-social at a at a larger in you know
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political entity where you've got to interact with other groups so it's not clear that there's reversion to any mean there is it possible that the fading of the memories of World War II and also World War I are a reason why previous
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levels of international cooperation can no longer be sustained that reversion to the mean is kicking in again but now against us and thus we're headed to a gz world and World Bank IMF International order as we knew it will become
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progressively weaker because of this mechanism this mechanism that we are that we're reverting to the mean scared anymore we're not scared anymore so the Nazis come Stalin we do wonderful heroic things we cooperate with the British the
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French even the Soviets actually with Stalin and then that sticks for a while we're all committed to the UN the World Bank the IMF but now my goodness things have been so good for so long and pretty peaceful those are all going to decay
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well the so the Richer we are which we're much richer and the more costly war is and war is now much more costly I think the stronger the incentive we have are not we we have not to have war and so I think it actually makes it much
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less likely I think if War happens then it's going to be that much more catastrophic which is maybe a pattern we've seen over the past Century so so but I think it's actually less so I I again but it comes back to this calculus of not feeling that there's some
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equilibrium level of violence that just happens because violence happens but that this is something that is often strenuously avoided because it it just pulls people so far back back to Economic Development what in your view is the most underrated National
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development story pay more attention to which country or region well including me batswana in the sense that this is the growth Miracle of the late 20th century and there's a few explanations but I think there's really only a handful of
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people who have paid any attention to what happened there and so there's a few Pat stories that say well they idiosyncratically established a parliamentary government before they discovered their diamonds and through some magical set of circumstances
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maintain this good governance and and the Diamonds just fed growth and prosperity but that just doesn't seem very persuasive so there's a there's another story that's waiting to be told and I don't know the answer to it many
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people say that for numerous parts of Africa national borders are a problem that they don't correspond to ethnic groups or tribes in the right way if you look at the data as I think Jeffrey haris has pointed out among others there
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are quite a few fairly small countries loto Gambia Guinea basau they're not actually doing that well it's not clear they're doing better than the big countries does this refute the MISD drawn borders story or do you still think there's something to that so I I
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think you know going back to this this question you had earlier about why was there so much instability in the years after the war I think a set of Mis drawn borders and trying to find a political equilibrium where all of these groups
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have to live together is is this is one source of that political shock and instability that said you know and maybe I'm not understanding your correction your your question correctly but I I think that a lot of countries have been very successful at building National
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identities in a short period of time so Jeffrey Herbst is very fond I think of the idea that Rwanda which is a very State and can exercise and project its power into Eastern Congo maybe we should experiment and I don't know if he'd
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Advocate this now but 10 years ago I think he thought this was this was just a useful idea to propose that that maybe Rwanda should be governing Eastern Congo at the same time I'm not sure there are many places on in in sub Africa where
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you would go to a peripheral place and you would find a stronger national identity than Eastern Congo where they really think of themselves as congales and so so there's a bit bit of a paradox here that people so so the national the sort of the national identity project
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has been very successful in a pretty short period of time in a lot of these countries which makes me think that these borders are no longer so unnatural as they were say in 1950 or 60 there's a much longer historical continuity of the
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state in Ethiopia than in almost any other part maybe any other part of Africa how much does this help Ethiopia in development and does this make you more bullish on Ethiopia than most other parts of Africa economically so it helps
34:27
a lot and it makes me much more bullish and how does it help you know if I had to pick one variable for a cross country analysis it's interesting that nobody really does this CrossCountry analysis but if if you ask me like I get to just
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make one bet and to go back into 1800 or something and one bet about where you're going to see development i' probably pick historical levels of State capacity M and so first I can just you know my personal experience whether it's the the
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little regression I get to run by working in places as diverse as Liberia in Uganda in Ethiopia and Colombia that correlation is more apparent than any other correlation and why do I think it's there I think it's there because I mean it partly it's just a proxy for a
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general level of social organization that we as a society have figured out a way to solve certain Collective action problems that we've figured out a way to make certain types of collective decisions in a way that does not have to
35:27
devolve into conflict and as a result we're able to just on some sense do everything more effectively so it's like a general purpose technology where else in Africa would you be especially bullish about given what you just said so I think Rwanda I think you know you
35:44
can look at Rwanda and you can see one of the most longstanding and coherent kingdoms that its borders happen to match its borders today are are are somewhat close I think part of uganda's success has been even though it's a collection you know it's many other
36:01
things but it includes a collection of these these historical kingdoms that that also had like a continuous existence up until the colonial period I think part of its reasonably effective state is is effective that so I'm pretty
36:15
I'm not sure how Uganda and or Rwanda for that matter will manage their next political transitions that to me is maybe the biggest difference between them and Ethiopia is they don't have political parties or political systems to manage these difficult political
36:28
transitions so so they could fall apart but if they manage those transitions I'm very bullish former American slaves as you know settle Liberia in the 19th century with quite a utopian vision of what a wonderful place it will be that
36:42
experiment seems to go badly what's your account as to the fundamentals as to why the evolution of Liberia as a modern nation state failed well until the mid 1970s it was an experiment that was going pretty well I think it was tended
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to be wealthier and better off and on a slightly healthier trajectory than other parts of Africa not dramatically so say compared to you know Sri Lanka silon or the Philippines you it's not obvious it was going I mean that well uhu no I was
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thinking relative to other subaran African countries I mean I put those if we just if we just use the state and and the strength and cohesion of societies an example like we're you're comparing a place that had absolutely no
37:27
Central organization or coherency as a region to places that had hundreds of years of a civil service and and Incredibly developed social structures and integration with global markets you know not to underplay the general integration or state development in
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Africa but if you had to pick if you had to put your finger on a point in the on the continent where all of those things were leased together you could do worse than put your your finger on Liberia in 1821 or whenever they first landed the
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ships and so I think it was just a very naive it it was just a a naive development project about what could be transferred and built in that kind of environment as you may know in all of these conversations there's a segment in
38:14
the middle overrated versus underrated I'll toss out a few candidates of course feel free to pass religion as a development Force overrated or underrated so I I don't think of it as having really probably overrated I don't think of it as having any real
38:31
strong predictive or explanatory power for long run differences in income um if so a region in Nigeria where you becomes either Christian or Muslim you don't feel that change as the long run forecast of per capita income I don't
38:44
have a strong prior for the direction of that effect Fair Trade coffee probably overrated I to but I I don't really have a very strong opinion of Fair Trade coffee it strikes me as one of these things that is more of a marketing device than really an effective and
39:01
large scale strategy for improving the welfare of people the Canadian political system overrated it strikes me as one of the most centralized in in terms of the way the political institutions are set up is strik seem as one of the most
39:16
centralized in terms of power Advanced democracies if you have a you know the Senate the upper house is is almost a rubber stamp is relatively powerless not entirely but but it's it's unelected it's you you have a a prime minister who
39:33
rules the lower house and if he has a majority essentially everybody needs to tow the line but say you have a very open economy don't you want more centralization because the openness of your country is itself the extra check and balance so New Zealand is pretty
39:47
centralized they're quite an open economy us of course is not so open and we need all these layers of nonsense for me the check and balance there that probably makes this work isn't the openness it's the fact that I think they're extremely strong informal social
40:04
norms that govern what the government can and can't do and so this extremely centralized powerful political figure the prime minister or his cabinet is very constrained by the larger populace who have shown an ability to completely
40:20
wipe out an entire party if necessary in within one election cycle if if they really overstep so that's that's this magical elusive ill-defined thing that is is protecting it overrated or underrated United Nations peacekeeping
40:37
I'd say underrated I think a lot of people are either cynical about United Nations peacekeeping and its Effectiveness or just genuinely unsure and then you have certain incidents like the the what's gone on in Haiti with the um the the the spread of uh now I'm
40:56
forgetting the the disease but chalera that have tarnished the name and you a lot of accurate assessments of of the impact on the local sex work trade and and and women in places where there's a lot of peacekeepers so these are all
41:11
problems um but I think they you know if you look at the data they're overwhelmingly effective and if you if I had to say the one thing that really made me a stronger believer in this whole bargaining approach to conflict and the the the kinds of problems that
41:27
actually lead violence to break out the peacekeepers that in some sense the everyday job of a peacekeeper is to solve all of these problems it's to create commitment it's to reduce uncertainty it's to temper emotions and they do that very well I've seen it you
41:41
know I I was in a Northern Town in Liberia trying to do work and a murder of a girl in one little village led to Christian and Muslim hostilities in that Village which turned into Christian Muslim riots in the entire District
41:56
to the point where we're holed up in a a hotel and the building down the street which is where the vice president's giving a talk is being Stoned by an angry mob and a Pakistani Battalion which for some reason took an extra 24 hours to act but nonetheless sort of
42:13
came in and and made that all go away within about 3 or four hours and and and the ability to to do that over and over again there's just a 100 stories like that in Liberia is is we wouldn't have peace there if it weren't for those
42:25
forces right now Battle Star Galactica I guess underrated by uh anybody who hasn't watched it and what are we learn about violent conflict from that show I what I liked about it the most actually was less about what we learned about
42:40
violent conflict than what we learned about authoritarian politics mostly the fact that I think it got the average American reader to get on board with election stealing and terrorist Violence by putting them in the position of the
42:56
either the elite or the subjugated group it depended on the season in in terms of what what they were willing to do what what sort of violent and non-democratic acts they were willing to do to achieve their polit political objectives the
43:10
standing desk over or underrated overrated by people who have standing desks and underrated by everyone else and do you still do it I do both I I sometimes I sit sometimes I stand I probably I would like to stand more than I do but I I uh I don't always sleep as
43:27
well as I once did because of my children so I sit more than more often right now let's say that I'm coming to you and I'm season traveler I've been to a lot of countries but let's just say that I've never been to Africa before and you're giving me your two three
43:40
minute pitch on how to think about where to go in Africa and how to do it what's your take if you can go and spend a long period of time like a couple of months which most people can't then I think trying to find an excuse to live in a
43:52
village is an incredible experience we have there's more ways to do that than you'd think than just volunteerism barring that I would say how long do we have do we have like a week or two weeks two or three weeks trip maybe there'll
44:06
be more if you give good exactly so I would say I would spend one week in Kenyan Tanzania seeing a mix of the large popular and small never visited uh wildlife parks partly because they're amazingly well-run and they deserve to be rewarded with tourist dollars but
44:25
also because they're incredible experiences but I wouldn't spend more than a few days on that and then I would probably send someone to see the thing I haven't seen But even in spite of working in Ethiopia for many years I
44:37
never went and properly saw this 800-year Old State as you've noticed but but seeing a a state and its architecture in in in a in a culture that you've probably never thought about before and and seeing that firsthand is is not only spectacular but
44:56
I think you changed some of your priors Ethiopia you have a famous paper on sweat shop jobs in Ethiopia and one thing you found I believe is how often people quit these jobs or they become unhappy with the jobs why are they unhappy with the jobs so I think when I
45:14
when I first started studying these jobs I thought they were like I thought they were jobs that were a little bit like winning the lottery I thought you they you got paid more than your alternatives as miserable that pay might be more
45:27
importantly I thought you got full employment more naturally than your Alternatives and I thought that there was an upward trajectory maybe that was the most part that it would lead you on this virtuous path towards more productive work and better pay and
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instead I think they turned out to be more like McDonald's or Walmart jobs and why does anyone take them at all then so a large number of people in Ethiopia I think were taking these jobs the the factory jobs were their social safety
45:52
net so they were able to make more money doing the their own business or working for a firm or working even in temporary wage labor but all of these things were risky and volatile and so when that business went South or when the wage labor temporarily went away with those
46:10
three months of your life you'd go work for the factory if you happen to need cash and and then you would go and you'd be looking for something better and you would find it and after a few months you would leave and and this was this was
46:22
the social safety net it was working in factories the field work I once did in Mexico I also found most people didn't want these jobs two factors I found that drove some people to take them the first was just extreme boredom with Rural Life
46:35
the other was women being quite unhappy with all of their options where they were in some cases possibly even being hit or abused and just wanting a way out this was one possible ticket are those possible motives for Ethiopians I think
46:48
those were possible motives I wouldn't say they were the most common motives in this group but but they most of these firms weren't in really rural rural areas so I think a lot of the women and it was 80% women in our in our sample had a lot of other options so I
47:04
maybe the thing I updated on most of all was the higher the high quality of people's options I had a very low opinion of their options and and so the thing that I learned as a result of this was mostly that the options for these
47:15
young women were much better than I than I expected and a lot of typical Economic Development stories you industrialize there's manufacturing then you export and there's some kind of virtuous cycle maybe with increasing returns so if an
47:28
Ethiopian takes a factory job though many of them won't like it as you say Do you think the social return to that decision is higher than the private return or the other way around so at this at their level of industrialization
47:40
I don't think it matters very much I I would say that it's because you don't buy Into The Virtuous Cycle Theory you don't think they're increasing returns something else well I can I think that you would need a at this point it's
47:56
really quite a minor sector uh and the missing ingredient that's leading to any so let's Suppose there are increasing returns to the existence of this sector the the mystery factor that needs to be there to sort of make them successful has almost nothing to do with the
48:12
availability of Labor I'd say it's actually the availability of management Talent the availability of financial like high quality Financial Financial Service things that you need to sort of buy and split and merge and grow businesses
48:26
like Banking and accounting and like I think these are binding constraints on on Industrial Development that that in like going to Ethiopia to be a investment banker or an accountant would probably be a far more individual development strategy than sending
48:42
somebody cash transfers this idea of premature de-industrialization the notion that because of automation manufacturing now creates so few jobs that many parts of Africa perhaps can never build a middle class because they could have factories maybe but it would
48:56
be done by machines and there's no wage differential reason for pulling your factory out of China bringing it to Africa the way maybe there had been in the past what do you think of that are we seeing premature D I mean there's how
49:08
many industrial workers are there in China like maybe 50 million or something or data in China seem to be bad but you look at Brazil India South Africa right they seem to have declining shares of manufacturing employment before they're
49:20
really fully developed Nations the way Denmark US and Germany are so you know going you know come from Canada and you can if I look if I cut up Canada into 20 independent Parts I would find all sorts I would find like 18 prematurely
49:35
de-industrialized places I think and then I would find a couple of places where you have you know like Southern Ontario and where where you have a lot of uh Industrial Development and so I don't I don't think the fate of like every nation in in Africa is
49:53
to absent Prem mature de-industrialization supposingly exists actually actually be highly industrialized so I I would think that I I I can I can see a lot of Africa just sort of ending up like New Finland and irrespective of any of these forces
50:09
Puffin minus the puffins so yeah I don't I don't think it's the I don't think the technological change is the is the first order thing one one way you know I don't know this very well but I would have suspected that one one thing that I
50:20
think might be true is that there is a peculiar set of circumstances that exist in uh in East Asia and and Southeast Asia that have made it hyperco competitive to in this particular sector and you've seen whatever a lot of industrialization that existed elsewhere
50:39
in the world even if it's from other developing countries like the maor region in Mexico relocate there and until the rest of these countries catch up in terms of I'd say their state development which will be a very long time and until real wages rise in China
50:53
I just that to me is like the first order explan explation of why there's less industrialization in a place like Africa and it's not it's not this other set of forces that's talked about Paul RoR Charter cities would you want to try
51:04
them anywhere can they work I you know Paul romor and I had long debates some in private come in public about this I I always worried about the fact that there was some risk maybe a large risk that these would be the Cabrini greens like
51:18
the housing projects of the 21st century so there was some risk that they would go arise so it's just an incredibly I just don't like I'm very suspicious of high highrisk development strategies especially when you're playing with
51:31
someone else's life it just struck me as there's a lot of ways for that to go dramatically wrong uh and and so an attractive feature of a lot of development strategies is is maybe low downside risk as you know if you think about Africa parts of it are quite
51:45
underpopulated you could find an area that had not so many people in it set up a charter City let people choose to migrate inwards if they wanted to other people could leave but it wouldn't cover that many people and if continuity of
51:58
rule is a binding constraint that makes you more bullish about Ethiopia than other places why not import some of that I mean what's the risk really right so so a depopulated coastal area close to trade Network so that has the potential
52:12
to be like a Singapore as an experiment that strikes me as having that's you know that's a fair point uh that that wasn't typically what he was the concrete things that they were looking to do looked less like that than than actually trying to take
52:28
much more established settlements and try to turn them into Charter cities and so maybe so so I I guess I I wonder about the Practical feasibility of redoing the Singapore experiment of building a city in a swamp because they didn't ever seriously seem
52:44
to have a lead on doing that what's it like co-authoring with your spouse passes are allowed of course no uh so I wish we could keep doing it but we went off and at certain points in slightly with slightly different interests well
52:57
we were we were co-authors I guess before we were spouses so it's a good selection mechanism I'm not sure what we would do if we were both economists I think it might have been too close I think it's it because she was AAL
53:10
scientist she's a psychologist housing psychologist and so it's very useful to for that other person to be an complete expert in their domain and so you can essentially defer on all of those decisions to to them on that and and vice versa so you're you're
53:27
complimenting not not competing in the same space you mentioned on your homepage when you were younger you worked two years quote cooking chicken at a vaguely militant KFC Outlet what did you learn doing that so I I had a a
53:43
boss who sort of literally ran the place like a drill sergeant he was this hulking guy who had a big this is in Canada now this is in Canada um so the KF the KFCs in Canada are a little they're run by a different company they're a little cleaner and nicer not
53:57
much but a little cleaner and nicer than the US this big hulking guy with a Hulk Hogan style mustache and would do the white glove test in the kitchen on the ceiling under the machines and you sort of had a so so I guess I'd look at that as sort of
54:14
taking this um kind of lazy teenager who hadn't worked really hard before and getting them to do gruesome things and sort of realizing that you can grit your teeth and and do some some disgusting tasks and get through it uh and that was
54:29
a maybe a useful lesson it either selected me it demonstrated my perseverance to me or created my perseverance I don't know which one what does the University of Chicago do right that's especially important I think the number one reason I was excited to move
54:45
to Chicago and I when my wife and I were deciding whether we wanted to be the one thing that was most appealing to it is that it has this intellectual atmosphere of people are just constantly talking about ideas and you would think you could take
54:59
this for granted in any University environment so I but I you know I was living in in in New Haven and the small community around Yale and in New York and the small community just surrounding Colombia which were you know tremendous
55:12
places full of brilliant people but very seldom was were people always sort of pushing themselves intellectually and pushing you intellectually in conversation and now how they've created that culture I don't know I've haven't been there long enough to to guess but
55:28
the fact that they've created that and it persists is to me the most exciting thing uh about it and it and it's it's it's it's what I thought every academic atmosphere was going to be before I started my PhD and I was surprised that
55:42
it doesn't really seem to exist in any places I think it it survives here a little bit of George Mason but maybe not too many other places what's your favorite Australian TV show it's it's a a a comedy called please like me which is a comedy about mental illness and and
55:59
struggle by a young gay comedian uh in uh in Sydney and it it sounds doesn't sound like the most promising premise for a for for a television show but it's uh it's it's it's genius maybe it just appeals to my I I do think those of us
56:16
in the Commonwealth say share a certain kind of sense of humor that's different than the American sense of humor but I think it travels well final question and I ask this of many guests it has to do with what I call the Chris blatman
56:29
production function so you're still young you're at one of the very best schools in the world some would say the best you're famous people ask me about you all the time you're a very active on social media you have a huge stack of
56:43
very well-sited papers you're writing now a major book on war and violent conflict and if someone was asking you like what is the Insight you have into how to do this or how you did it that maybe other people wouldn't immediately see other than just well I worked hard
57:00
or you know I went to a good school what is in the Chris blatman production function that maybe we don't see so one one part of that so there's an answer to the what I think my production function looks like but you know the answer for most people when I
57:16
was when I was in my maybe third year and you do something as you know in Academia called your third year review where uh your senior colleagues debate what you're doing right wrong and then give you basically no feedback U but I I
57:29
persistently I I plowed into uh a senior call guy named Ian Shapiro was sort of a normative political theorist at Yale to give me the feedback and he refused to tell me and refused to tell me he said well you just need to do what you're
57:41
interested in you're clearly doing something you're interested in you're excited by it um and I'm not going to tell you what other people think you should do because it's different and that's not the secret to your happiness or to your success so so on some level
57:53
my production function was always doing the thing that really interested me regardless of whether or not the people around me told me it was a good idea or not and and in my case that just happens to have been deciding that I like going to a place and
58:11
spending a lot of time there um I I think I've done it three times first I did in Uganda and then I did it in Liberia and now I'm doing it in Columbia and each time I just went somewhere and I spent maybe six months just hanging
58:24
out and talking to people and figuring out how I think things work in a very qualitative way and then usually it was studying something where there was no no data on it and that's been my shtick like I most people look for existing data to analyze and I sort of look for
58:38
data I can create and so then I would go and I would find a way to create data and and then having created data I would try to answer answer this this this question that that interested me in my case it's usually something that sort of
58:51
is the intersection of economics and political science and sociology and and public policy and but then often I would try to find an experiment that I could run just to sort of have an excuse to be there it usually wasn't a very good
59:02
experiment but it was evaluating something that somebody was doing that was obviously common so it was useful to have some data on it but then my strategy in every place is just to go around and try to find some Community organization or bureaucrat or somebody
59:19
who has a good idea who's a True Believer who really believes in whatever cockamamy thing they're doing to make the world a better place most people least of all me don't really believe it should work but then there seems to be
59:30
something going on and it and if it works it challenges how we think about the world and the first time it was Cash G just giving cash to poor people and the second time in Liberia it was a somebody doing something that turned out
59:42
to be cognitive behavior therapy that was trying to take adults and just come have them these criminal adults and totally turn their lives around and in Colombia we've just stumbled upon this little group that's basically trying to take take back governance in their
59:56
communities from The Gangs non-violently just by relentlessly organizing their community and connecting it to the to the city government and and then trying to scale that up and test it and see if it actually works and and then usually
1:00:09
as a result they just change how I think about not just that question but the whole business of violence and development I recommend that you all Follow Chris blatman on Twitter and Chris thank you very much thank [Music] you
1:00:25
thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show