hello everyone and welcome to conversations with tyler today i am chatting with nathan nunn who is a famous economist professor at harvard uh his work is wide-ranging i think of his main areas as economic development history and contract enforcement but
he's worked on many additional issues nathan welcome great thanks for having me here tyler it's great to be here let's start with some africa questions why does it seem that ethiopia is suddenly so successful in nation building um
that's a good question it's a i think the standard answer so i haven't studied ethiopia but the standard answer would be a history of uh state formation and so the you know that there was uh aksum and great kingdoms it was the one country the area that
wasn't colonized and so that would be a a standard answer i think that's a pretty superficial answer i don't think that we know uh intimately or in great detail why is it that a history of state formation or having successful states or empires is
correlated with economic success in state formation today but i think that would be you know the standard answer that your average africanist or growth economist would give and i think there is some some validity to that but does this get
at a broader question about persistence and the importance of persistence so if you look at ethiopia in the 1970s it's a poster child for extreme poverty if we look at ethiopia in the time of the slave trade eastern africa as you point out in your work a very
large number of slaves were taken from ethiopia which is supposed to predict low trust and bad long-term outcomes and now they're good at nation building because of you know events millennia ago over what time horizon does persistence
operator is is it always supposed to be moving in the same direction or is there also some kind of mean reversion uh yeah so that's a yeah that's a great point um i think when you think about persistence one thing that's important is
how much uh of the total variation does this factor in the past explain so and that is going to be relevant for the type of question that you ask if we see in the periods of decades or even centuries a lot of movement that and correlations
are in opposite direction uh that that's fine and that's completely consistent with persistence as as long as persistence isn't explaining 99 of uh of of everything or 97 and so i think the you know the way i think about it and i think um hopefully this is
answering your question you know we're all pretty confident that uh smoking in general causes lung cancer so that's kind of a long-term long-term factor but you can definitely find counter examples of that and so that's individuals who
may be smoked but are healthy and lived lived a lot longer or throughout your lifetime you might have differences in level uh levels of health at one point you could be healthier or less healthy um similar you could exactly similar argument with education
right so we think on average more educated people have uh uh higher levels of income but throughout a person's life there could be ups and downs and the correlation could be different amongst uh subsamples and so so so i think that analogy if you apply
it to any country in any country's experience you know goes a long way to understanding why countries are moving often in opposite directions and what we would think but if you look at a broad cross-section of countries
there is this non-zero correlation that we call persistence but let's say you're in a tournament with a hedge fund manager and you're both having to invest in emerging economies and you understand persistence you and melissa dell probably better
than anyone in the world right and the hedge fund manager hasn't mastered your work so even if persistence is explaining say only five percent of the variation which would be a a modest claim you should be able to beat that person right because you
you and melissa understand persistence and you will pick the winners on average somewhat better than the hedge fund manager or no well it depends if there's a market for if there's others in the world who are also as knowledgeable as us but if we
were the only two in the world i would think yeah that's right um and the one the one thing i would um also point out though is it's important to think about is the persistence based on location or based on societies so i think a lot
of the evidence that we have now so think of bill easterly has a paper or actually you know putterman and wile have a paper where they look at persistence and look at geographies and look at persistence based on societies and there's been a lot of movement
of individuals and persistence based on societies uh basically is very strong based on locations is is not strong so that's the one caveat in you know if we were picking uh you know if melissa and i were picking versus this other person that one would
want to take into account is trace the people and not the places so if you try to think say within africa what would be some places that you would be modestly more optimistic about than say a hedge fund manager who didn't
understand persistence what would a few of those countries be again recognizing enormous noise variants and so on as with smoking and lung cancer yeah yeah so so i think um you know if i'm true to exactly uh what i was just saying so then
southern africa or places where you have a larger population of societies that historically uh were were more developed so um in southern africa or south africa i should say you have the afrikaans and they have a different uh descent than than others so that's if
i'm true to to to what i was saying but that's ignoring that also within africa you had a you know very large number of uh successful uh well-developed states and that was prior to european colonialism and the slave trade and so one could
look at at those cases and so uh one area that i work at in the democratic republic of congo where you had the great congo kingdom the cuba kingdom a large number of other kingdoms of luba for example um and that would probably be
one country that country today is pretty much as low as uh uh in terms of per capita income as you can be right at subsistence uh but if we're predicting just based purely on persistence in historical state formation that would be that that would be one to pick
what do you find to be the most convincing account of botswana's relative economic success um i think there's a few i think one is a few things one is botswana is pretty small in terms of population and so anytime you have smaller
countries you can have more uh more extreme outcomes and so um so that's one is that it's small um but then related to that is it's also uh in general uh ethnically homogeneous particularly compared to other groups uh other countries within within africa
so the swanna are the predominant ethnicity um and they also have a historical social structure and uh you know i think that was pretty well maintained and left intact and i think that's a that's a big part of the explanation
you've argued that in the context of a cross-country growth regression the countries that had many slaves taken from them have done worse in the longer term than countries or what were then regions left more intact you think that same regularity holds true within
individual countries rather than across countries say within different parts of nigeria yeah i think it i i think it does um it's not something that we ever published but we with leonard wanchakhan who's an uh political scientist from
originally from benin um basically we looked at sub-national measures of of the number of individuals of each ethnicity that were taken from different parts of africa and what we focused on there was actually not income although you can you do have
measures of income and you could do that very easily um but i think what you know once we i had established that across countries there is this relationship between income and slave exports it's less surprising or maybe less publishable that within
countries you'd find the same thing so what what we did look at though was distrust and you find a strong relationship uh there and obviously distrust is it's not surprising that that's going to be correlated with income as well but
if i think about west africa for a minute putting aside eastern african slave trade it seems to me the wealthiest areas the places people actually want to live are on the coast and the places that had the most slaves taken were on the coast for
more or less obvious reasons so doesn't that mean that the raw correlation is a positive one between how well a region has done within a country i'd rather live in lagos than in kano within nigeria yet presumably more slaves were taken from the coast
yeah yeah it could be this is um a study someone should do actually um so you know jeffrey sachs has been kind of famous uh or at least when i was in grad school was had famously said things like africans live in strange places uh so they live away from
rivers they tend to live away from the coast they live in more mountainous regions and so what you know which are less fertile so so why would that be so that's true exactly what you said all else equal you want to live next to rivers you want to
live in uh fertile plains you want to live next to the coast except for the for the slave trade and so in the data i've looked at uh your logic is exactly there but then there's the slave trade so in places where there was
a lot of slave trade people are less likely to live close to the coast and in particular what i also looked at was people are more likely to live in mountainous areas as well and so so i think everything you said is exactly right and that's the omitted
factor is that ironically places which otherwise would have been the best places to live we're also the places uh for which you are most exposed to the slave trade and you know my my guess and from the data i've looked at is you you will see persistent patterns
in where people live within africa that is explained by those geographic features and the slave trade they moved away from the coast where there was a slave trade they moved away from rivers they moved two mountains for protection yeah
some remarkably high percentage uh of individuals in sub-saharan africa live in nigeria which is not that large a country how did it work out that way why did that happen that's long puzzled me that's yeah so i think 25 of sub-saharan africa lives in
lives in nigeria um i think that's a good question so i'd have to look at the geography but it must be you know uh the fertility of the soils um the ability to to pro produce um and and that's despite the fact exactly this the stat that we just said
this despite the fact that uh nigeria the bite of biafra was you know one of the areas that that had exported the most slaves so you know the counterfactual of what the population would be must be even higher so so i haven't looked into the
geography but it must be fertility you have to be able to support that that large number of individuals [Music] in uh you know in terms of subsistence and and and eating and this is even despite the fact that the northern part of nigeria
we know is is is much less much less fertile so if you think about the effects of the slave trade on say west africa i mean one measure is per capita income but if you're at something close to a malthusian equilibrium isn't another measure of how well the
places are doing just population that if so to speak the regions consume doing better in terms of higher population rather than higher per capita income it's what you would expect in a malthusian model and you shouldn't just look at income
but look at where the people live and then you have nigeria which was a center for taking the enslave from africa and having this very large population and that seems counterintuitive yeah so it's uh so one would have to look at the data
definitely so one question is um is well are there other factors like geography and we just mentioned we just mentioned that and the one thing with the slave trades i have to think about how this all works out but in the research i've done it's very clear
that there was endogenous selection into the slave trade and you could even think of that as as being strategic by europeans or or slave merchants and it was those those societies those locations that had the most uh densely populated regions or that had
well well-functioning states already in well-developed states and the intuition is well if you're a slave raider or a slave merchant it's going to be much easier to accumulate slaves for export if there's a lot of people around slaves
or people and then if you're thinking of like you know namibia where there's a very low low population density so the way i think of it is those densely populated places those areas um were the ones that were targeted by this
by the slave trade right so that's kind of an omitted factor that you'll you'll want to take into account so what's going on with nigeria i would guess is it has geographic factors geographic conditions that made it very uh densely populated initially so it was
a target of slave exports and that had negative effects on income and also uh population density because we're in a malthusian world but that omitted factor is enough to drive uh nigeria's current population uh you know current large levels of population right and so
so in other words the geography which affects causes more slaves to be which which causes larger population initially causes more slaves to be taken and that means also larger population today right so so you just have to take all
those things into account how do you think about cape verde in your framework so originally those islands were not settled they were a center for the slave trade it wasn't the case that slaves per se were taken from them today cape verde has a vibrant
multi-party democracy free speech hardly a wealthy place but institutionally it seems to be doing pretty well in terms of social and political capital uh what's your hypothesis about cape verde yeah so so this is one thing kind of in
the analysis i did that was kind of hard to think about so there are were places that were initially uninhabited or that didn't supply slave exports so mauritius reunion would be another i think verde fits into this bucket uh so
they imported slaves and didn't export them and so they didn't experience kind of the detrimental effects to indigenous institutions the kind of breakdown of traditional social structures um and they had you know property rights you kind of had established property
rights you had a lot greater inequality so i think of them as more similar to plantation islands in the americas for example um and and then the one interesting fact is there's another set of islands comoros um where you you know they were
initially uh inhabited and that looks more like the rest of africa and madagascar would be than another example so so that's kind of how i think of it is um you know they they escaped the initial you know all of the detrimental effects
of of the slave trade so are you a zanzibar optimist zanzibar well zanzibar had an indigenous population as well that's a great point so so zanzibar would uh look like other you know other small african countries that were uh were that had slaves slaves taken um
and because they had indigenous populations and there was slave raiding although there were that you know that was kind of an entrepreneur but i'd have to think about it yeah so maybe you know there was a lot of wealth historically
because it was this this this trading entrepreneur so if zanzibar was its own country maybe it would have you know much better functioning institutions than tanzania in the last 10 years it's become a fashionable view that east africa or parts of it will lap
west africa because of their location that there's geopolitical competition that china india are all vying for influence in east africa china will invest more in the infrastructure of say ethiopia than it might in nigeria and because of
strategic location we should be relatively bullish on east africa what's your view i haven't so i don't have a strong view i haven't thought about that um but if we're if we're thinking about historical persistence and and going
back to your uh suggestion then it is true that eastern africa uh for example is part of the omani empire there's more trade for long periods of time with with the middle east for example um and across the indian ocean so maybe you know
from that perspective maybe uh eastern africa doesn't does have a leg up uh but i really haven't thought about this uh this at all i think part of this is and i think there's research being done on this is well what are the effects on development of
chinese aid of chinese joint ventures of greater integration with uh with the east i think part of your story or or that narrative rests on the assumption that greater integration with china is going to be relatively beneficial right which which
is very plausible when it comes to your relative optimism for the southern parts of africa how much do you worry about what we call the gravity equation in in trade theory they're just too far from most other places most other countries don't care
strategically very much about them perhaps apart from a few minerals they won't have nearly as much trade south africa in particular has been de-industrializing so what's their engine of growth given their trade possibilities
seem to be more limited because the gravity equation is pretty powerful predictively yes yeah yeah yeah the gravity equation is very uh very powerful and so one thing that one thing to keep in mind is uh with the gravity equation there
are traditional variables that are in there which are distance but then there's been a lot of work actually extending this and putting other bilateral variables in there as well and so for example common language uh common religion so if we think of
south africa obviously uh having common language with european countries is is is going to be important english for example uh and then common religion and then the most controversial is the work by spoilery and vacciarg where genetic distance is a super strong
predictor of uh basically bilateral income differences and and and trade uh and so again uh these kind of uh former settler colonies uh south africa for example is uh are gonna have a leg up in the gravity equation for exactly
yeah uh for for exactly uh that reason if one uh buys the genetic distance story and so what do you think of that story of that so yeah so so it's a strong empirical regularity for sure that you know absolute difference uh or distance
genetically between societies explains the absolute difference in income so you see that very very strongly i think this uh doesn't tell us anything about the importance of genes for per capita uh gdp or for economic success so i think if if two societies are
very similar genetically what it means is they've had a very similar history right so they're like the the time since their last common ancestor split um is not going to be very distant and so they would have experienced a lot of common shocks
would have lived in common geographies would have had similar forces that affected cultural evolution societal evolution and so i think that's what that's picking up basically is the importance of of history and how that affects culture institutions
and so they don't they really don't know in that paper what is it what is this vertically transmitted trait could be genetics but they don't push that and i think you know it's it's it's all these bundles of things that are affected by by history
why does distance from the equator seem to predict gdp per capita so well yeah it's not obvious it should matter at all right yep yeah yeah that's right so there's a ton i think when i was in grad school this was like one of the great questions that
that the profession was trying to trying to deal with um i think if you um so there's a lot of explanations so one is pure geography so malaria is bad for example sleeping sickness is bad and those are more prevalent closer to the equator
that would be the jeffrey sachs view the other one is while history is important and those places for uh you know the asmr johnson robinson view is those places had had less settlement of europeans and so then an extractive strategy was employed
rather than um a strategy where you built local institutions in trying to improve the system so so personally i think there's there seems to be more evidence for the historical view although i don't know that you know that one story explains everything
i think there's a lot of other reasons why historical geography would have been important what can africa do to overcome the limitations of having so many landlocked countries i think that's a good question you know what the obvious thing would be
a transportation network uh that's improved beyond what they currently have particularly railways um so that landlocked countries can transport their goods to to the sea and we know that sea transport is much you know much cheaper
much more effective so even then the final the final country seems to capture a lot of the rents so india takes rents from nepal through transportation networks djibouti captures a lot of rents from ethiopia because the actual relevant port for
ethiopia is in djibouti yeah so that's interesting so it depends on the number of your outside options actually so so you can think of a country like niger burkina faso there are a few different countries which they could go uh you know go
through to get to the coast and so maybe that will you know uh if you had multiple lines a dense railway network then there are going to be outside options and they can capture more more of the rents um so yeah so but but that point is valid that
might not be enough and related to this is well if you also developed a network infrastructure transportation infrastructure that connected different countries within africa better so if so if you look at the network right now what you see is
the railway network which exists which was primarily established during the colonial period is basically meant to get resources from wherever in africa to the coast and then shipped to europe so it's not well established to allow african societies to trade with
one another and so that would uh arguably also be beneficial and this is related to who gets the rents because then you would have more outside options more choices for for each country particularly these landlocked countries
what should say west africa do to overcome the harmful historical effects of the slave trade say on trust uh that's a good question so so that's the big development question what should any developing country do to try and uh develop i think one thing that
problem in particular you must have some implicit theory that's how trust levels are transmitted across generations right and then from the micro elements of that theory you'll have at least potential remedies at the margin but but what are they for you
yeah so so i think one is if you just look at the data although i don't have a strong understanding of the psychology of this if you look at the data trust tends to be increasing the levels of education of of an individual so that would be one
policy recommendation is we can increase increase education levels for low levels of income uh trust is increasing in income is kind of hump shaped but then that's this chicken and egg problems well how do we generate economic development
that spur you know that then results in in greater levels of trust so when you have economic development you're going to have more interactions between individuals you're going to have more successful interactions positive some interactions
people will learn that they can trust one another and i think that that's going to be part of a part part of the benefit um so uh but i think that's you know it's really related to how do you spur economic growth so that lots of activities are positive some
rather than just you know zero-sum and so that we have growth and increasing share of the pie and then we can cooperate and realize there are benefits to cooperation that lead to higher levels of trust why do you think many parts of the new
world and i have in mind latin america have relatively high levels of crime for their per capita income latin america also as you know is pretty high levels of education for its per capita income uh there may be trust at some
micro levels but crime rates in the new world are much higher than anywhere else crime rates in latin america very often are higher than in most parts of africa uh what has gone wrong there in terms of the intergenerational transmission of trust
and of course it's multi-ethnic but so is much of africa yeah that's yeah it's a good question i haven't thought about that um let me you know also i obviously know less about latin america one is i'm not sure that it's related to trust i think it's related to
whatever tools and mechanisms a society can employ to constrain uh activities which we call which we call crime so you know i can tell you more about uh what happens in sub-saharan africa and the democratic republic of congo where i spent
much of my time so there you wouldn't think that the formal institutions are better than in brazil for example right the i think the police force is less well-functioning and but the crime rates we were very surprised when we first went to the
areas where we stay are extremely extremely low right and so what is it it's not through formal mechanisms but it's through informal uh mechanisms such as such that you could almost think of it as mob justice that if one person commits a crime there's
going to be uh informal actions taken to to punish that individual and i think that relies on the strength of indigenous informal institutions or social structures that prevent that so in latin america it seems like the reliance are
on these more modern formal institutions which aren't as good as other as other countries and then the other thing about latin america i would say this extreme inequality so we see this in national genetic coefficients uh and that's different than countries
where you're very close to subsistence and the scope for inequality is much less and so so i'm you know i would just guess that that has a big part of to do with it as well so but those are all just conjectures is it fun to visit democratic republic
of congo yeah it's great yeah yeah it's really really great tell us what's fun i'm keen to go once i can yeah yeah it's really really great so we were you know the first time uh we went as as as a as a team this was um james robinson sarah lowe's uh
jonathan weigel um in 2013 we were pretty apprehensive you hear a lot of stories about the drc uh you hear it's yeah it sounds like a very unsafe place etc um but one thing we didn't realize or didn't weren't expecting was just how
lovely and wonderful the people are and how and it turns out it's not un unsafe in general it depends on different locations so in the east uh definitely near goma it's obviously much much less safe but i think what's what for me is wonderful it's the sense
of community and because the places we go are places that haven't been touched uh to a large extent by foreign aid or ngos or tourism i think we're treated uh you know just like any other individual within the community um and that's one thing i think is
you know in in the psychology literature it's it's often referred as collectivist versus individualist cultures uh so i think it's just a culture where the individual is less important you're more embedded in the community there's social relations
um and know and i think that's nice it's nice to experience that uh coming from a western society for you know for a month every year what's another favorite place of yours to visit in africa uh that's a good that's a good question
i guess you mentioned zanzibar so i've done archival research in zanzibar they have great archives there which are uh funded by unesco and you can do great things like swim with dolphins and turtles and uh you know there's the old stone town there as well so um
yeah and so you know so that's another great place um south africa uh is is also great uh cape town and you know stellenbosch that's a very posh part of africa that's very very pleasant um but you know actually what i really enjoy is yeah
you know just going back to the to the drc um different parts of the drc kind of on a regular basis and that's you know given that you develop bonds with different people uh that's kind of you know uh really nice to to to to see them see how how they're doing
over time and that sort of thing there's a recent online piece by morgan kelly i'm sure you know it's called the standard errors of persistence and it's pretty technical i mean feel free to give us an answer that no one will understand
but he says quote many persistence regressions can strongly predict spatial noise what do you think of his beast um so so i think it has an important um an important lesson which is we have to really be careful uh when we're thinking about societies
uh or people or anything really institutions policies uh because in the cross section especially uh well actually not only cross-section but in the time series there's a lot of correlation across observations right and so you know if you looked at
uh the um for example the drc eastern drc uh those groups those individuals there are going to have a lot of the similar experiences as just across the border in rwanda um and they're going to be culturally somewhat similar the further you move
away the more independent they are but the closer spatially you are um the more correlated they are so if we're looking at any correlations and there are these omitted factors then if you're close to one another then your error terms are going to be more
similar right and so and so that's basically an important point of that of that paper if you don't take that into account and it's hard because we don't really you know um there's a lot we don't know if you don't take that into account you
can get a lot of false positives right and so and you can over kind of and part of that comes from overestimating the effective number of observations that you have your colleague joe henrich has a new book coming out about weird based on
his earlier articles the notion that there's a quite unique western cultural perspective based on a particular notion of rationality and instrumental reasoning uh also belief in democracy particular religious views even if they're
held in a secular manner and as i read him he views that as really the driving force behind western development do you agree yeah yeah i think we don't know the exact details um for for exactly why um but i think there is something about
weird societies uh that led to the rise of western europe definitely um and i think that's the original or not the original because you can always go further back in time that was an important impetus was why did europe diverge from uh the rest of the
world and yeah he talks about the breakdown of clans which i think is important and the breakdown of the extended family unit the church disallowing polygamy uh the church disallowing cousin marriage and all these things helped to to maintain
these lineage structures and that led to individuals being important and that really is kind of the definition of individualistic culture versus collectivist culture i think the one other thing that's important is joel mulcure talks about
uh in in his recent book is that we learned that it was and this is probably related to this to individualism in the and the the uh program of the catholic church is we learned it was okay to break from tradition and to question our the the previous generation
and i think once you do that you can deviate from the traditions from the traditional structures you can have the scientific revolution you can have a lot of innovation and i think that was also important and i think that's important for the
industrial revolution for example and that's something he makes a big point about i think that's very complimentary to uh you know to joe hendrick's view that the policies of the church created the uh society of individualistic uh psychology
how important to roll do you assign to christianity in the economic and scientific rise of the west um yeah so i would say i'm similar to joe it's it's not so much chris christianity well actually maybe i'm not so similar to johann ricketts
is you know i think the biggest uh effect were on these medieval policies of the of the catholic church that broke down lineages uh and extended family units and created the individual um so i think that's important i think you know joe also talks about uh
moralizing gods and an afterlife being important so i'm still undecided about how you know how important that is compared to these policies of the catholic church that created in individualistic psychology and i would also say if we think of just
purely purely economic development today in the contemporary period i definitely don't think it's the case that one needs to convert to christianity uh to be successful i think that would be kind of um confusing causality or confusing
correlations we observe historically with causality today but wouldn't converting to christianity at least predictably be important today in the sense that it would predict ties to the west you could dispute which is cause and which is
effect but if you just saw a particular african country or region have a lot of conversions to christianity as you know happened to say in ghana wouldn't you become more optimistic about that region uh so that's one theory except i think um
one way to think of it is there's been massive conversion within africa so now if you asked in many countries uh the fraction of people that are christian it's going to be like 97 right or if they're not muslim which would be the other uh main religion
so and that's i think without any really deep ties to uh to the west so think of like massachusetts where i live conversion rate is much lower but we'd think that massachusetts is more integrated with europe for example um so so i think the logic of that is
right but i think what we've seen is mass conversions of christianity uh and even the uh development of more indigenous uh christian religion or christian hybrid religions uh which have also taken off so so you don't need actually a lot of connection
with with the western world to have uh the spread of christianity now in the middle of these dialogues we tend to have a section overrated versus underrated are you game for a few sure feel free to pass first one canadian football overrated or
underrated oh definitely underrated why is it better than the nfl uh so it's it's so if i'm trying to remember the field is wider uh the end zone is deeper and you only have three downs instead of four downs so you have much much more
passing so if you like the running game then you'll like the nfl but i think the you know the long bombs are much much more common within the cfl and so and they also had i don't i don't think this is a reason but i remember they had a media campaign
arguing that people should watch the cfl and there's their logo at one point was our balls are bigger which is true so but yeah the city of ottawa in canada overrated or underrated uh it's probably underrated as well so
the big thing it's cold but you have the canal which uh you can skate up and down the canal so many people actually commute into their uh to their government jobs on skates traveling you know five six seven eight miles and so so that would be pretty cool i've never
done that randomized controlled trials in economics as a way of doing development economics overrated or underrated um that's a good question um [Music] so i guess it depends by who so i think amongst those that the perceptions or how they're
rated by those that developed it i think accurately rated i think amongst individuals that like to jump on to the next you know the next big thing like machine learning or rcts i think those individuals are are overrating it
so i think it's a tool that's helpful but it's not the only tool that one would ever want to use for the rest of their life do you worry that rcts are being done in too few locales that there tend to be economies of scale you get teams set up and
people who know how to recruit locals into the experiments and you keep on running trials in just a few places and say india english-speaking parts of africa and so on is that a problem yeah yeah i think that's that's that's definitely a problem um i think
um you know we see this even more in other fields so psychology where you only run experiments experiments or behavioral econ where you only run experiments amongst uh western university students so development you can say oh we're doing better
uh but then like you say it's um you know nairobi a few places in india uganda uh and so there's but there's a lot of africa where there's you know uh where experiments aren't done and the reason is like you say it's huge huge fixed costs to get things set
up and so if you're a graduate student and you want to run an experiment you could go without any connections try and figure things out and set up a a site or you could you know code up a survey send it to ipa or or another organization that's
already somewhere and just run it there but i think the big problem is yeah that we are learning about developing countries but a tiny tiny slice and the other thing is those are the countries that are societies that are uh most ex most accessible so
um so so when we started our work and so i guess i could be preachy and say oh well we went to the drc and that was remote there was no no one had you know had been really working in central drc but now we've been there for seven years
and we're not going anywhere else so we're falling into the exact same you know the exact same trap the use of standardized test scores to help shape or determine graduate admissions and economics overrated or underrated it's very hard
to get into harvard if you don't have an absolute top math qre score um yeah i think that's overrated i think um you know it does measure some some things like your ability to jump through this hoop and learn this information which is pretty much useless
which is how to solve these tricky you know logic or math problems um and so that's useful but i think the problem is in order to do that you have to basically take a summer off and and study for the gre and if you're financially strapped or come from a
disadvantaged background that has a huge huge cost so i think it's there's a a bias socioeconomic bias that is much worse than than the benefit what should graduate economics stress that it doesn't narrow what should it do
more of at the margin uh for me i think what would be and you can kind of see this in my recent research know how to do research that's more descriptive so uh and that's softer or that's or where the data collection is softer so in other words
uh we never learn and i don't know of any courses that teach development economists when you go to a society how do you interact with people and ask questions face to face how do you run focus groups how do you learn uh in ways other than
surveys and so we haven't you know we haven't done that how do you ask questions about the social structure about their beliefs their values norms these things that are kind of invisible unless you ask about them how do we do that what should one think
about uh how are these societies structured uh these sorts of things and so so that we you know we've taken a very scientific approach where what's the treatment what are the outcomes but there's all this contextual stuff which traditional anthropology
looked at where we're just ignoring and that's data and that's super important and we're not taught how to how to do that what's your favorite movie and why oh favorite movie that's that's a good question uh favorite movie
um in the past it was dazed and confused i must have watched that in in universal about 100 times i won't talk about why that was the case more recently uh black panther or there's a show called the i believe it's called the queen of cutway
and one reason i like those is they portray african society in a more positive light which is more realistic i think uh and i think that's that's super important i think there's a lot of implicit bias towards africans african-americans
uh which comes out in in media in movies or television shows so i like those because those were empowering and and showed african cultures in a positive way what do you like best in african music oh africa so i'm not super familiar with african music but
except for the local congolese music well that's one of the peaks right yeah exactly so um so i like it it's fun it you know there's memories that bring me back to the first road trip we did when we went to visit the the koopa kingdom and it
was in this suv that we rented and we had these tapes playing with uh congolese music and that was great we even had air conditioning for about 10 minutes and then the the tape machine caught on fire and then the air conditioning broke down
uh but that music still reminds me of that trip which was a two or three day trip uh actually four or five day trip round trip uh into the interior which was my my first trip to the to the congo uh what i don't like is it's usually associated with dancing
and i'm a very stiff rigid person that's not skilled at dancing now the canadian economy has been very successful right everyone would recognize that people love canada canada has amazing soft power global brand yet there are very few
international brands from canada maybe there's molson beer but hardly any others why is that um that's a good question so i said depends on what you mean so i think um international brands that there might be some brands that we don't know uh
about and so um so the blackberry for example so maybe people do know bombardier uh and so that's one thing um and the other one is whether you include individuals so uh maybe canadians know this but others don't is you know there's a large number
of singers celine uh celine dion for example shania twain particularly um alvaro levine uh which are canadian and so that's kind of one of our primary exports but also comedians so like mike myers for example gymkhana they're often not known as such right no one
yeah no one very few people think of these as being canadian artists yeah yeah that's exactly right and so that's kind of yeah the point i'm trying to make is you know there are canadian products so let's call them products around we
actually often don't know they're canadians because just because we fit in uh pretty well so so even within economics uh you know ariel pecos david carr there are individuals that uh that you know aren't don't have a label as as of of canadian on their on their
forehead and they just kind of uh merge in so so i haven't looked at products but i wouldn't be surprised if you know if if there are more products in than the average american could name that are canadian do you think having a canadian
background has in any way shaped how you approach economic development um a little bit i think it it does affect how i approach economics i think um one thing about having the canadian background and in particular doing uh going through
all of my schooling including grad school within canada is that you're very removed from the centers of knowledge within u.s economics so namely cambridge where where i'm at now so so in some ways that forces you for for better or for worse to
think differently or think independently relative to what's going on uh within within the us so so i think that uh helped uh me during grad school actually and i think the other thing is when you're in this pressure cooker of grad school
within cambridge let's say um you know there's a lot of pressure and so you can't help but to think about your career and you can't help but to think strategically and i think a lot of that often um or that often um goes against uh research so you're less likely to take
um to take risks or to do things that are completely different than what's being done currently and but ideally we want scientists to do that now your phds from the university of toronto correct yep that's right and as you know it's
actually fairly rare for someone tenured at a top five school not to have a phd from another top five school did you feel there were things you needed to extra learn or catch up on because your degree was from toronto that you had to compensate for or you
felt this was an advantage or it was just fine or um i i think so the advantage was so there were things i needed to catch up on the advantage was exactly less pressure and i would have been happy just having a job at any school
so then that really frees one up to just do what they love in terms of research right rather than do what they think has the higher probability um i think in the particular cohorts i was in um i think this has changed for toronto so i don't want to say you know anything
negative about toronto now at the time i think we were a bit behind in terms of applied empirical analysis and in particular you know all the tools that were developed and this was in the early 2000s that were developed recently to deal with causality
so to really be you know strategic and sharp about and creative about instruments and rd and you know all all these tricks we use to identify a causal relationship so i felt i was a bit behind in that actually but why aren't there
more people like you in equilibrium so you managed to do it not to doubt that you're exceptionally talented uh but other exceptionally talented people don't seem to take the path you took sort of what what happened to make your
history different um well yeah so why aren't there people more more like me i think the reason is right now we're in an equilibrium i think although there's policies which are undergoing right now you know that's threatened to change this
where the best talent from all over the world comes to us schools and you know top five schools let's say are these certain uh us schools so there are lots of other canadians uh there's you know great canadian graduate students but they just tended
not to stay in canada and so they would come to for for their phd um to to the united states to harvard mit you know other schools but even within the us you won't find many people at top five schools with phds from ucla for instance or brown
which are very good schools with some fantastic researchers but the top students just don't want to go there was there some breakdown in the mechanism for spotting your talent and we ended up lucky that you were slotted somewhere different got a
different perspective why is there so much concentration yeah that's a good question and then um yeah i don't i don't know the answer to that actually um and you know if there's more concentration than in other fields i think there is
actually so talking to people in other fields economics is extremely hierarchical that the difference between the first and the fifth is huge in other fields it's more horizontal and you would just go to different schools based on maybe focuses
and so i don't know if it's about one could think about expectations um being important that uh perceptions about you know the students that would go to a school that's outside of the outside of the top 10 for example and maybe advisors
being less likely to write really strong letters or to get behind an individual just because you know of perceptions about how vertically structured the discipline is and i think one other thing possibly too which is related to that i think really in grad school you
overestimate as a student the the differences between you know schools of different rankings once you kind of um are are at the stage i am at you realize this amazing research at all all different types of schools and so that this vertical difference
that we kind of have in our minds as graduate students um isn't really you know there and so clean and so strong so but you know i haven't answered your question so i don't i don't know why there's there's more mobility maybe yeah but you
know maybe it is related to your your gre question or the fact that um yeah or or the fact that tuitions are so high in the u.s but i don't i don't have a strong sense gender roles what is the mechanism tying the use of the former traditional plow
in earlier societies to low female labor force participation today yeah so so that mechanism is basically if we look at agriculture historically some societies an implement called a plow and others use a hoe or a digging stick or other
implements so the plow is great you can turn over a lot of soil and that kills weeds aerates the soil prepares it for planting you can do that very quickly but it requires a lot of upper body strength to control the plow or to pull an animal that uses the plow
so what you see because there are biological differences between men and women that that difference even though it might it doesn't mean that women can't use the plow caused men to specialize in uh agriculture and then women to specialize in
home production where you have whole agriculture they you know there was more mixing and so the what the what the data that we've looked at seem to indicate is well that generated norms that it's just natural for men to work outside the home and
women to work inside the home this is over hundreds or thousands of years and then you have industrialization and then those same norms are applied to factories or to service jobs and so so that's the link basically to female labor force participation today
and using the plow thousands of years ago but if i look say it russia or the nordic countries they've had a long history of the plow and now very high levels of female labor force participation right uh doesn't that mean it's not very
persistent or even the united states yep yep yep yep that's exactly right so yeah so it's coming back to like well how much of this is is this going to explain and are there other factors and so um so other so if you go far enough north there's going to be
less plow use so that's one thing to to keep in mind but i think the other one is well there's something else that's been changing which is we've had increased gender equality which is due to echo yeah my view due to economic development
and then women being pulled out of of of the home right uh and so in over the last 50 years there's been this dramatic increase in female labor force participation within the united states within europe right but actually if you actually look
at the data even now the level of uh female air force participation rates which is you know 60 70 percent uh that's actually much lower than african countries which are much much more poor for example so so i think part of the answer to that
question is we really overestimate the amount of gender equality in western societies and so we think you know of course we're developed we're great we must be great on all these dimensions we've made so much progress over over
the last you know since world war ii uh but i think that's kind of overestimating just how great we are and so once you account for these things like income then you know uh why we're not better than we should be i think is is explained by the plow being a former
communist country in eastern europe seems to explain female labor force participation very well in those countries right it's high almost uniformly yeah in your world view is that something we should expect to persist or is that a temporary aberration
and now they're going to return to their older plow-based histories um no i would expect it to persist and there is some work uh so pamela campa has a paper in the review of economic studies that shows persistence at least up until the
contemporary period and um yeah so i would expect it to persist actually and then one thing about that in in this form of persistence which is you know one would have to look at but a plausible story is once you have women participating in
manufacturing low-end manufacturing for example or light manufacturing um then you develop a comparative advantage in that right and so then the norms then affect your comparative advantage which and so the supply of of women working affects the demand because
that's what you're good at that's what you export and then that affects the supply so there's an equilibrium where women work and you specialize in female-friendly products and another equilibrium where women don't work and you specialize
in other products which are less female friendly and so one would be for example eastern europe and the other one could be saudi arabia for example right you've written a very famous paper showing that a society or country's scale at
contract enforcement helps explain a good deal of the patterns of its trade within your framework how would you explain the last 30 years of china do you see it as fitting your hypothesis an exception how good is china at contract
enforcement and indeed how good are they at trade um so they're very good at trade so um but i would yeah i could look at china that would be super interesting to go back and look at china um i think you know what there's two things one is if you thought
that the contracting environment in china was not good which is not a given just because you have an autocratic regime doesn't mean that you have mechanisms for dispute resolution and you're able to enforce contracts uh and that things are dependable and
reliable um but let's say that china isn't as good as other countries western countries at contract enforcement does not depend as as dependable um what what you would expect then is for china to specialize in goods that are not contract intensive
and so they're still specializing in manufacturing so that analysis was only looking at manufacturing but they're going to be producing lower end products right and so i don't think that's that's actually not inconsistent
with what they've specialized in uh historically right and so which is manufacturers but uh low you know lower end manufacturers and um yeah and so so so i think that would be uh my best guess at this point that that issue if i if i think of singapore as a
paradigmatic example of what your theory would explain should we expect skill at contract enforcement to actually explain fdi patterns more strongly than trade because trade at some point you can just take the goods right and you have the
stuff and you can forget about the contract whereas when you do foreign direct investment you're always at the mercy of the other country singapore has amazing contract enforcement they even export it as a service widely and fdi in singapore is remarkably high
so should contract enforcement explain fdi better than trade yeah it might yeah yeah i think you know fdi we have less data less the the data is less precise and we don't have you know trade countries around the world are charging tariffs on these
products so you have imports very very precisely documented uh fdi i think um that's so we broadly know where it goes right now huge mysteries yeah if you don't have exact numbers yeah and then um the one thing you want
one needs to know or keep in mind the research i was doing was about the composition of trade or the composition of fdi so we'd want to know fdi uh that produces which types of products uh but yeah but otherwise i agree completely that the pattern of fdi or
where in foreign investment is and in which industries and which countries should also be predicted by the ability of a country to enforce contracts what did you learn about development that was unusual living for six months south korea
ah that's a good that's a good question obvious lessons right but above and beyond those what really struck you i i think the importance of culture actually uh living in living in south korea um yeah the culture in south korea is
very different obviously south korea is a is a dramatic success story and i think a lot of that has to do with just what what south koreans viewed as important so education working hard uh allegiance to the company those things were all hugely important so
i have a lot of very close friends in in south korea and until recently they would never take vacations so you would get vacation but it would be very shameful or against the norms if you um if if if you actually took them same
with saturdays you would always work on work on saturdays and then just the drive for education was amazing so there was a say there's a saying in korea i can't i might not get exactly right but if a high school student sleeps five hours a day
uh sorry five hours a night they'll fail they need to work so hard they're only sleeping four hours a night and i think these are all just like motivations like they're kind of internally motivated they're norms there's there's uh values and so
you know south korea has these values of individual achievement but then overlaid with values of collectivism like wanting to have individual success go towards the greater good which was the success of the country and so yeah so that i think again
coming from individualistic background was was eye-opening to me but why was south korea then so poor for so long maybe it was somewhat well off under chosen dynasty but if you look at 1960 1900 1800 as far as i know we don't have good data but it had a reputation
for being a place of extreme poverty right yeah yeah but you know but it was it did have all of these kingdoms historically which makes it similar to you know in in terms of its history of state formation to japan or to china and kind of more
similar to that it was kind of you know geographically a terrible place sandwiched between china and then japan um and but it was able to survive actually so that's that's actually a testament to uh to to the korean society and if you
look at things like architecture food academics i think korea was uh has always been extremely extremely sophisticated um and so you know there are periods of colonization um and so i have to go back and look at the data of korea from the you know the
early 20th century or 19th century but i think that you know that explains a lot of it uh i would guess so so i would say there there are these latent characteristics that aren't reflected in per capita income which you know uh are are important for
for subsequent development but doesn't this get us back to some problems with the persistence idea so korea like most places has multiple pasts it has a past of extreme poverty a past of extreme sophistication so you can always pick out one or the
other past and explain through persistence a present you could pick out the past of extreme poverty and explain north korea as a persistence of that but ideally you want to know if there's persistence on net in the whole data set yeah and
then you've got to line up all the pasts but the jeff sacks point that we're just not very good at predicting which countries will do well next shouldn't that just make us outright skeptical about persistence if you go back to 1960
who predicted then which countries would do well even knowing exposed which ones did well it's very hard to find measures that will predict that even knowing the winners yeah so so i think one important thing here is thinking about
levels or growth rates so jeffrey sachs's statement uh it sounds like is about growth rates so we can't predict which is going to be the next country that's gonna grow successfully uh over the next 10 years even even though i don't i don't know if that's true
but let's say that that's true we can predict you know if you had money i'm sure you would bet on certain countries having a higher level of income over uh 10 years from now than others i think we have a pretty good sense of which countries will have higher levels
of income so the persistence isn't about growth rates per you know i don't know of any actually studies that look at growth rates in the past and growth rates today because you're going to have convergence and and all these sorts of things but it's
about levels so we think of it in the solo model it's underlying characteristics which are going to change the steady state uh level of per capita income in different societies so so hopefully that makes sense so i think
we can predict who's going to which society is going to have higher levels of per capita income 20 years from now last question this is a quotation from you i'll read it off quote i've done a lot of different jobs working at a range of places including
automotive stores stock boy newspaper editor photographer great company laborer paint factory built paint and made paint ski hill worked in the office book publisher laborer and private tutoring unquote how has that shaped your worldview
uh not everyone who teaches at harvard has that background right yeah yeah yeah so i think i shaped my world view in terms of um opportunity uh thinking about opportunity thinking about policies that affect mobility thinking about policies that affect inequality
i think the reason is i think i've i have experience growing up in you know a family that was was definitely low lower income or very low income uh and having some insight into you know what that does to you psychologically how difficult it
is to get out of that environment and i was extremely lucky growing up in a country like canada where actually there were many pathways out of for for a family that's very low income after moving to the u.s it's very clear there are many you know
much fewer pathways and i think if if you're you grew up in you know upper middle class upper class family that's something that you you just don't realize is just how hard it is for an individual that's at the lowest rung of the ladder within the u.s
to move up you basically can't make any mistakes right and so so i think that's that's uh one thing that that that my history has taught me nathan nunn thank you very much it's been a pleasure chatting great thank you great to talk with you