YouSaid · the spoken record

Daron Acemoglu

lines on the record: 64
first: 2019-12-04
most recent: 2019-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think advising students is a lot about a human relation. So understanding what it is that people really need at that point is really important. So I try to push my students if they are getting overly confident about the quality of their paper. You really have to push them because no paper is perfect and you can always do better. But if they're getting, as many students often do, somewhat down because the whole research process is so hard, you have to find the right way of motivating them because you're dealing with amazing people who are doing amazing work and putting their thoughts and soul into it. So I think the support from their advisors is the least that they deserve.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at the deep level many of the movies that I watched as a young man influenced many of the things that I have worked on or the way that I've approached. I like the Kuroshawa movies like Ran. There's sort of this historic sort of thing. The Bergman Seventh Seal. But I also like the sort of the more humorous, big fan of Monty Python and such things. And I guess they do give you a perspective about the way that you look at things, but I'm not sure that any specific movie has the themes of the narrow corridor in it.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a productivity trick. Right now, I'm watching Berlin Station, which is a show about sort of spies and spooks, which is one thing I have a weak spot for. You know, none of the new Netflix things have really caught my fancy all that much. The House of Cards was okay. But so I guess one of the things is I still prefer movies than to sort of these very elaborately produced TV shows, but again, that probably shows.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, if you ask me that question eight years ago, I would have said I never, or ten years ago, I never read blogs or anything like that on the internet. And that saves a huge amount of time. Nowadays, I do a little bit more of the internet reading because now everything's on the internet, but I try to protect my time. So I try to remain focused in the office. I meet with people, I talk with people, but when it's time for work, I do the work rather than goof around on the internet.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a word filed by Ken Doc. I use voice recognition software, so Google Docs is not great for that yet, but perhaps one day it will be great. You know, we would really benefit a lot from spending three hour walking afternoons together, but sometimes you do what you can do”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, Jim and I have been working for now twenty two years. We started working together in nineteen ninety four. Oh no, what? Oh my goodness, 25 years. Got time flies by 1995, early 1995. And we've worked, we've written so many papers together that we really sort of, our way of thinking has merged. So in the early phases, we did spend a lot of time together. Jim would come and stay with me. I would go and stay with Jim. But then as we become sort of busier and we're in different cities, we don't do that as much. So there's a lot of email conversation and sometimes long phone conversations. But we're sort of able to understand each other when we write, for example, it's very difficult for people to tell which part of a paper or which part of a book we have written because we've been working so closely together. This is Google.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, that's part of the history, but if you look at the income gaps, they're much, much less than the ones in Guatemala, again, as a result of the much, much lower levels of repression that they've suffered as a result of the history.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Santiago, but the income gaps are much, much smaller because the economy sort of went in a different direction. The extent of repression, especially after democratization and people got the vote and with the secret ballot significantly decreased and states started providing services to in terms of education and health care to these people and those gaps really significantly narrowed so I don't think you can sort of just tell”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are, you know, it's a very, very naked, savage form of repression, no education, no economic opportunities, and it actually goes on well into late 20th century, the military dictatorship in Guatemala and the civil wars. They were all along the lines of indigenous versus non-Indigenous people and the elites that were created by the unequal land distribution versus not. So it is that sort of history that you have to take into account when you say that people with indigenous inheritance and origin are actually poorer. And the reason why I'm saying the ethnicity-based explanation is not as an obvious one. When you look at other areas where economic history has been different, then the role of indigenous heritage is very different. So going back to Chile again, of course, the people with indigenous background in Chile have had a worse time than the elites who live.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so because the reason for that is you know I would say that account that we provide is fairly economical. The middle of the 19th century Costa Rica and Guatemala are not that different. There were recently part of the same empire and all of the economic sort of powerhouse, our economic heartland of the Kingdom of Guatemala is in Guatemala. That's where all the big landowners are. That's where all the big trade associations are. Costa Rica is sort of a marginal land. So it is that political background that really shapes how they react to the new opportunities being made available by the transport revolution and the coffee economy. So they go in the smallholder direction, whereas Guatemala doubles down on repression. So who are the people who are being repressed? Well, the people who are being repressed are the ethnically indigenous inhabitants of Guatemala.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hierarchies in the same way that it affects the untouchables, the Dalits, it also affects the Muslims. So they're part of that social hierarchy and the evolution of their norms, their economic opportunities were very much shaped by that whole heritance.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question, but we have to remember, I don't know enough about Bangladesh to be able to comment on Bangladesh, but in the case of Pakistan, there are two observations that are relevant. One is that Pakistan, of course, ended up with the most feudal parts of the Indian subcontinent in some sense. And the way that its political system evolved was an adaptation to those feudal political social relations. So the strengthening of the army, the alliance between sort of the dictatorial power of army generals and politicians together with a feudal landowners, I think was not something that was invented out of Rockloff. But even more importantly, the sort of Muslims in the Indian history should not be thought of as a separate category. They are part of the caste system, the caste system by creating social hierarchy.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of political change, people protested, they wanted more rights, they wanted more voice, and it was even more importantly was a process of cultural norm change. You know, even after women got the vote in the US and Britain, for example,”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Your new book. It's a separate institution. No, no, it is. It is. It's the part of the process of liberty building. So you cannot, you know, this is one of the things. You can ask me. You can say, you know, you're going to say Britain was getting free or was already free in the 19th century when it was reforming its democratic institutions. Well, what about women? Women didn't have the right to vote. They had no rights. Their assets could be taken away from them. Their children can be taken away from them. How is that a free society? Well, this is one of the things that we try to grapple with in the book. Liberty is a process. It's all of these various social hierarchies and restrictions on what people can do in their economic and social lives being broken down one by one. And women's freedom is a very important element of it. And along the lines of what we are emphasizing, it's not something that was given as a gift by men. It was something, it's not something that naturally came just by and of itself. It was a process.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a huge problem. I mean, you know, if you have a country like Saudi Arabia where women are essentially not part of the labor force for all practical purposes, you're just running a race with one of your arms and one of your legs tied behind you. So it's a huge problem.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the security of the West, especially again, if the Islamic State comes back. So I think the current situation before the Turkish offensive had a lot of problems. But where we're regretting right now is even worse.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, PKK are, of course, terrorists. There's no doubt about that. The YPG's relationship with the PKK, that's much more complex, but it is an arm's length relationship, and they are not independent of the PKK. But the situation, of course, in Syria is much more complicated. First of all, the US, for a variety of reasons, made the choice of working with YPG and going back on it as costly as a signal to US's allies. And the alternative is that creating a vacuum there is not going to help anybody. I think the biggest threats that we are facing right now are Islamic State terrorists getting free or getting a toe hold in that area, or the Syrian and the Russian army now completely controlling that strip, or at least much of that strip. So I think none of those are good for the future of the Middle East, and they're not really good for...”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“institutions, but they are also misjudging the situation in Turkey thinking that he's an absolute dictator. What really distinguishes Erdogan is his weakness as well as his strength. And he really depends on some sort of public opinion and enough support from the public to be able to do it. And many of the worst economic policies in Turkey are attempts to get that and some of the very bad foreign policies are attempts to get that support. So and what we have seen in the latest municipal elections this summer was exactly that Erdogan did not have the power to sort of stop a huge electoral backlash that happened against them. So that says that a way out is possible from Turkey, but it's going to be a very slow way out. And the fact that the opposition itself is problematic, divided, doesn't have a clear ideology of building Turkish democracy.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future Well, I don't think it's easy to be optimistic. I try to be optimistic, but Turkey is going through a really, really bad time. You know, the new presidency with executive powers and no checks and balances is terrible. Turkey has become much, much more polarized over the last 15 years. All of the independent agencies, judiciary institutions have completely collapsed. There is not even a modicum of judicial independence in Turkey. You know, if you can look at the military period and you can say the courts were not independent of the military at the time, that's true, but the extent to which that could happen is not comparable to today. But on the other hand, when the West, especially Europeans, look at Turkey, they misinterpret it. They misinterpreted in the 2000s, thinking, well, Erdogan was a force for democracy. By the time he became the darling of some European media outlets, he was already undermining all Turkish.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated. Getting struck. Why Well, you know, I think economists have to appeal to a broader audience. And our science has to be solid and publishing in the top five journals is a good discipline because it makes sure that we don't slack off, we don't do shoddy research and get the credit for it. But if it becomes an obsession, it is at the cost of communicating with the rest of the world. And that's not healthy either. So since at the moment, all of the incentives in academia and economics depend on publishing in the top five journals, I would say, somewhat overrated because we should also value people who are able to reach a broader audience, think outside the box, and sometimes fads really determine who can get published and what can get published in top five journals. So if you have some big ideas and you're looking at the data, the world in a different way, but your identification isn't”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same thing. I think they were hugely overrated. They have so many problems. But if I say they are overrated, I wouldn't mean to say that you should not look at cross-country data. If your questions are about which countries develop and national development paths, which are just overwhelmingly important for lifting millions and billions of people out of poverty, you have to look at cross-country comparisons.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I would put it is that every tool is useful. You should not overuse and over emphasize any tool. If you think that randomized control trials are useless, that's absolutely wrong. But if you think that they're going to answer the majority of the questions in development economics, that's even more wrong.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I love it, I love it. Again, I'm not sure whether I would say underrated, but yes, I love it, so I perhaps underrated it.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about Lagos. Lagos is a super interesting case because it was the favorite example for everybody who wanted to talk of chaos and anarchy, so there was a Lola city falling into pieces. Gangs were roaming the streets. But then what you actually witnessed in Lagos is exactly the type of thing that our framework suggests is a way out. Some politicians who understood that the only way out of the morass was you're going to promise to offer better state services, better tax collection, better fuse collection, better schooling, while at the same time encourage society to monitor them better. So this sort of dual action of increase the state's”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting the bottom up politics working and a top-down state institutions. They both have very deep conflicts. Chile is a very highly unequal country. Economic inequality, I think, actually understates social inequality. And that is, you're seeing that with protests. We're seeing that with distributional conflicts. But despite that, I think this combination makes Chile unique in many ways. And Uruguay, I think, has attempted to do the same thing. I think Ethiopia is a great example to watch it's been crushed under brutal dictatorships for so long. But it has some of the elements of sort of state institutions that are much stronger than the rest of Africa. And again, what you're seeing with Abiy Ahmed now is this F attempt to bring out the bottom-up element. I think that's very important. You know, you can go a little bit more micro in the book.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a great question. You know, I don't know what non-obvious means, but Denmark may do fine. We can agree. In Latin America, I would pick Uruguay and Chile. I think those are two societies that have made the investments for both...”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tradition and institutions of states, organizing production, organizing irrigation. And in Africa, Rwanda and Burundi, you know, with a tradition of much stronger state institutions that are going to be very different, Ethiopia has some of that also. And those countries can pursue a very different growth strategy than, say, Nigeria. Nigeria is an amalgamation of many, many, many different ethnicities, tribes and nationalities. None of it, well, Yoruba perhaps a little bit have some of these sort of traditions of older empires. But the country is not going to have a top-down growth strategy like the one that Rwanda and Ethiopia have. But these are just very general tendencies. Nigeria can collapse into civil war again. And it's very difficult to predict those things. You can predict the fault lines, you can predict some of the comparative advantages. You can predict what is going to be very difficult, but making very specific predictions is going to be difficult.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I would be that good at it because I think, you know, one of the things that you see when you start thinking about the complex of institutions and norms, details matter. Leadership matters. Collapses matter. You see some elements that can be the basis of some broad tendencies. So we said this in Why Nations failed seven years ago, and we're saying it again, you know, I don't think China is going to seamlessly democratize and enter the corridor and start having very strong civil society institutions. You're not going to be able to build very strong state capacity institutions in places that have a tradition of completely distrusting the state. You also are going to have a very different growth experience in places where you have a tradition of state capacity. So Vietnam is going to be very different than Burma, for example, because in parts of Vietnam you have this...”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Party while at the same time be a leader in digital technology, leader in telecom, leader in AI, and is pouring a lot of resources, it's providing incentives, and the question is whether this is going to succeed. My view is, you know, it is not a complete failure, but it's not going to be a huge success. And you see the problems in it already, and we can go into some of the details. I don't want to keep going on and on, but there are tensions. You really need, you called it individualism. I'm happy to call it that. I would have called it something differently. But you need that individualism spark. You need that experimentation for the most radical type of innovations to take place. And China is missing that. It's going to try to pour more and more resources to make up for it, but I'm not sure whether it's going to work.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work that we're sort of presenting in the narrow corridor, the imbalance between state and society meant that growth went hand in hand with the state's control over society not weakening and in many ways during Xi Jinping getting stronger. But what makes China exceptional is that like no other despotic extractive society in history, it has a complete obsession with innovation and technology. So when you look at other despotic states, they understand they have to use technology. They understand they have to build some edge in some things such as warm making. But they are not pouring resources. They're not trying to reorganize society in a new way in order to bring forth innovation while still keeping that despotic control. So China is the first society that's really systematically trying to do that. China wants to keep the despotic control of the Chinese communist.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think I would say that China is an experiment that we have never seen in the world. So in many ways, if you look at growth of China in the 1980s, it's very fast, but it's not unusual. There are many other countries that grow and more or less the same way, which is that you get rid of the most inefficient parts of your system, the completely regulated agricultural prices that were leading to famines when the country actually had hyper agricultural productivity. In the 90s, you see the state-owned enterprises rationalizing and some private businesses entering into industry. All of those are very similar to what happened with the Prussian growth, for example, 19th century with the Russian growth, but it even has some elements of commonality with the Soviet growth during the 1930s, 40s, and the 50s. But what we are seeing right now is against the predictions of many pundits, but very much consistent with the sort of the framework.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly survive in the forms of culture. It does certainly survive in the form of norms, but its institutional underpinnings are very important. Genetic or some such human capital or idea that surviving. It's those norms and institutions that are recreating themselves in different guises.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think what's very important, and we spent quite a bit of time in the book on this in the context of Chinese history, is not necessarily the notions of liberty or bottom-up politics. What's really very exceptional about East Asia are the traditions of state capacity that go back to the Qin dynasty in China and Confucius teaching as has been adopted by the successive Chinese dynasties is an important part of it, and it spreads from China to Korea to Vietnam. And you have these sort of more meritocratic organization of the bureaucracy, for example, and you have strong states, but at least with some capacity, not just tin pot dictators. But what you want to think about there, again, is not a simply cultural thing. It does”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does some kind of accountability that are not in Christianity. The roots of that are exactly in the mixture of Christianity with the bottom-up politics of the Frank institutions. So you see that, for example, again, in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Britain, or England. So in the case of Anglo-Saxon England, Christianity plays a much secondary role relative to the assembly politics in the way that the Saxon brought to the British Isles. So you see those assemblies playing a role at every stage constraining kings and completely changing the political traditions even after the Norman conquest. Christianity comes in and out into the picture, but it's completely secondary. Now, once, of course, those political traditions become well-rooted and the country is Christian, those two start merging, and some of the exporting of these ideas beyond the boundaries of the Germanic tribes themselves or Britain sometimes have as”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so let's talk about that. We can come back to Islam because we do actually spend quite a bit of time both about the origins of Islam as a state building religion and also how it has been used and abused during recent times. But about Christianity, you know, I would say the Byzantium example says there is nothing exceptional about Christianity in the hands of the Byzantine emperors Christianity was as repressive and as a top-down state religion as any. And examples of that abound from Portugal to Spain, both in their own countries when the monarchs became strong enough or the way that they imposed this in their colonies, Christianity turned out to be extremely consistent with top-down politics imposition stamping out of all sorts of rights and bottom-up.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“political hierarchy created thanks to the Church, and we know that when the church institutions and the Roman institutions meet with other sort of conditions, they did not lead to anything like the corridor that we see starting during the Merovingian and the Carolingian times, you know, the place where the church was extremely strong and Roman institutions were extremely strong was Byzantium. So the Eastern Roman Empire survived and it was actually much better organized in many ways than the Western Roman Empire. Christianity played a very, very important role. Their bureaucratic traditions persisted, but no liberty emerged in the Byzantine Empire because you had the one blade, which was the state institutions, but the other blade, the bottom-up politics, was completely missing.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are rather Those are good questions. So I agree, Sam, and I disagree some. So, first of all, as I said early on, norms are critical. And I said, what are the Germanic people? What are the Franks bringing? Yes, it's the norms. They have some institutions, so the assemblies have become institutionalized, but it's mostly norms, as I said. But the ideas that they are bringing aren't associated with any sort of religious ideology or anything like that. They're just much more practical. And the role of the church is actually quite much more complex than what first meet the eye. First of all, the Merovingians weren't, or the Franks weren't initially Christian. They became Christian as a state-building effort. So Clovis decided to convert to Christianity, but it wasn't a personal conversion. He converted together with all of his warriors, and he wanted to have the additional...”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organizing their politics. This is recognized by Julius Caesar and Tacitus during the times of the Roman Empires and the early chroniclers of the Merovingians and the Carolingians. They had this view that the chiefs had to serve the people. So the chiefs were often temporarily appointed during wartime and out of war held back. They had all these assemblies. So some historians call them the assembly politics of the German tribes. So everything had to be done through assemblies. And those traditions were the ones that they tried to fuse and successfully, quite successfully in the hands of Clovis and Charlemagne, for example, together with the much more top-down Roman empires institutions. So it's the human capital came out of that process, especially with the church's doctrines and teachings as one of the sort of key repositories of human capital around the Middle Ages sort of playing out. But when you look at the Merovingians, they did not have high human capital. They certainly had much less human capital than the”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“at least addressing to some degree why Europe is exceptional, why is it that certain representative institutions develop most strongly in Europe and certain aspects of liberty, they did not only develop in Europe. The demand certainly was there throughout the world, but they took strongest root in Europe. So what was special about it? Culture, Greek or Roman heritage, geography. So we say none of this. It's actually the meeting of bottom-up political participation and the institutions of the Roman Empire.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so let me say the other element, and I'll come back to the human capital. That's a good question, but I'm going to disagree. And then you also need some sort of institutional elements that survive or that are present about how institutions are, how state institutions are run, how bureaucracy is organized, how administration is organized. So let me take a specific example, and then we can talk about human capital in that context. So one of the most, I mean, you cannot talk about liberty without...”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we spend quite a lot of time in the book going through several examples of countries that have been able to do that. And there are two prerequisites. It is that you need to have both an already mobilized society with the norms and traditions of participating politics. And you need to.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“squeezed in between these two things there is this red queen dynamics, the corridor where states and societies sort of support each other and that supporting process is a contentious process. It's not that they are happily cooperating. They are trying to race with each other, each is trying to have the upper end, but as long as that competition doesn't sort of become distractive, it can actually add to the capacity of both of them. So in that sense, it is an institutional theory. It is also about norms and cultures because you really need the right norms and cultures for society to participate in politics and the right sort of understanding of what that participation is about. But at some level, I also don't see it that easily being reduced to other stories because it is exactly about this cooperation and competition dimension of state and society empowering both, which at least to our understanding was not an idea that has received much attention.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically don't. They don't. They don't. So I think just let me build on the democracy question. So I think what's really interesting about democracy and this evidence that I talked about, it's really about society, regular citizens having their voices heard in the political sphere. That's what democracy is wonderful for. But at the end of the day, that translating into better public services like education, healthcare. So that's really what this book is about. That's what the narrow corridor is about. It's how do you make states and societies work together? And if you look at most of human history, it doesn't work. Either you have stateless societies, no centralized law, no third party enforcement, so lawlessness and lots of other costs. Or you have despotic states that don't listen to society and impose their will often very repressively and otherwise on society. But the original part of the book is to say,”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the things that improves very fast. Primary and secondary enrollment thing proves a little bit more slowly, but it improves very steadily.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They collapse and they collapse more likely in the midst of severe economic recessions. So you really have to take care of these things. And when you do that, you find two things. They're both amazingly robust. One is that democracies grow faster. So when a country democratizes, for another three or four years, it takes time for it to get out of the crisis. Then it starts a much faster growth process. It's not going to make Nigeria turn into Switzerland, but a country that democratizes adds about 20 to 25 percent more to its GDP per capita. And then the second thing, again, completely the opposite of what you said from Mulligan's research, one of the most important mechanisms for that seems to be that when you democratize, you tax more, so the taxation, the budgets go up, and you spend more, especially on education and health. So the health of the population improves, so the child mortality.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that's really off the mark. The early work on democracy is such an important topic and people were really excited about understanding what democracy does, so they rushed in with the tools that we had available at the time in the 1990s or early 2000s. But you have to be careful. Of course, if you sort of judge whether democracy is successful or not by comparing China to Switzerland, you're going to get not very meaningful answers. That's like a chief case of comparing apples and oranges. So I have written a couple of papers on this. And the econometrics here really matters for a variety of reasons. So you don't want to compare apples and oranges. You also want to be careful because it turns out that there's one surefire predictor of when a country democratizes. It's economic crisis. Dictatorships don't go often because they decide citizens should rule themselves.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most educated one, and they're not educated in the US. One of the great things about US is actually we attract those talents, again, because of the business environment, because of the institutional environment, as well as the teams that they can form when they come to the U.S.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so for the very, very top the very, very top innovators, there is clearly some externalities. I think the Nortas numbers are probably extreme because there's also a lot of business stealing that's going on at the top, meaning that when people innovate, they actually take other people's markets. So Google has got an amazing value. I mean, it's one of the most valuable companies that human history has ever seen. But some of it came because it actually took the market of other search engines such as Yahoo or AltaVista. It also created value for its customers, but it's also been pretty good at capturing that value. But the important thing, again, is Dals are very exceptional one or two innovations. And when you say the average level of schooling increases from 10 to 11, we're not really not capturing that. Some of the people who innovate and capture such values are not.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. So I think teams really matter. So if you're going to build a new product, you really want the best, very best engineers. But I'm not sure whether I would call that actually an externality. If that happens in the context of a firm, the firm internalizes it. So that's why firms pay really amazingly high wages to teaching human capital, people who make the people around them more productive. And if that's being reflected to wages, that's already in the Minsk returns. So I think it's really hard to cook up stories for human capital externalities that's going to get you anywhere close to the Macuroma and wild type.”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“increasing and that would be the realm of human capital externalities and those could come in one or two forms they could come either through some sort of local externalities meaning that I get more education and I make people around me richer or that I could come through some sort of R&D externalities that I become more educated and as a result of that I invent something and make everybody in the world more productive. Now the first one the local human capital externalities that's something I've actually sort of investigated and for example in my work with Josh Angres then we don't find much evidence for it and it's not so surprising at some level you know there's there could be some small externalities but you know are you going to become suddenly much more productive because a bunch of McDonald's workers suddenly increase their education level by two years sure perhaps when you go to McDonald's you'll get better service there might be some other small externalities but it's not going to be a transformative event to increase your rate of return”
2019-12-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source