YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeffrey Sachs

lines on the record: 90
first: 2015-03-31
most recent: 2015-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Ton after ton of steel rusting away wherever you turned, cement melting away wherever you turned. The place had just been a heavy industrial machine for the military industrial combat.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which had so overgrown the heavy industry and it was in a lot of collapse versus being an agrarian impoverished country as China was in 1978. So the pathways were bound to be very, very different. The geography is different, by the way, because China is just filled with people who could do low-cost labor right at the ports. on the east coast of China. Whereas for Russia, it's almost basically a landlocked landmass that was running off of petroleum, which had collapsed in global price, which had collapsed in the physical facilities in the countryside with collapsing steel mills, collapsing everything. It was a rust. It just looked like a waste dump in 1991 when you went around Russia, absolutely cannibalized airplanes at every airport just rusting away”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often in the historical context to solve a problem, you need more than just You need both sides operating. There are other serious differences, very major differences that are worth just mentioning. We could go into length, but there's a big difference of being an industrial urban industrial, broken Soviet economy”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very bad one. And the same thing had happened in Poland in a different time dimension, but by 1989, so that's why I called for debt cancellation, a standstill on debt payments, an emergency stabilization fund. So the first point is financial crisis is in and of itself a distinct category of pathology. Russia had it. China, thank goodness for them, didn't have it. Russia needed help on a financial crisis. So that's number one. By the time they got out of the financial crisis, which was several years later because we completely stuck it to them in amazing ways. Allowed the crisis to be fulminent for a number of years. The reformers were gone. The corruption was completely out of control. So I don't want to exonerate the Russians for the irresponsibility and so on and the lack of good strategy.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many things, first of all, Russia faced in 1991. Extremely acute financial crisis. If you haven't lived through a deep, deep, deep financial crisis, it's hard to understand what it is. Now, we've lived through something mild like that in 2008, which was frightening enough. But I've now seen them many times and studied them for my whole career. And they're very fulminent. They're like that meningitis epidemic. They absolutely can rip a society apart before you turn around. Russia had that. It had that for all sorts of reasons, but one was that the price of oil had declined to $10 a barrel, and Gorbachev had borrowed tens of billions of dollars from 1985 to 1991. And we run out of money. And so they ran out of reserves at the end of 1991. So this was a macro macro crisis. And it was a...”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 1991, we wanted our unipolar world. I didn't know that at the time. For me, I wanted to help Russia. This is chance for freedom, democracy, market economy, normalcy. Yeltsin defined, he said December 11, when I met him the first time, 1991, we want to be a normal country. I said, I will help you, Mr. President. We didn't want that in this country. So what I didn't understand was everything I said about Poland was immediately accepted because it was good advice and because Poland was going to be a bulwark of NATO. Everything I said about Russia didn't matter whether it was good advice or not. Russia was on the other side.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, how weird it was in the historical moment that things that had worked extremely well had shown themselves where I had had Brent Scowcroft and Bob Dole and others strongly supporting it all of a sudden just no support from Washington. The IMF saying we're not going to do this. And I said, but Barber, Richard Irb, I'm sorry, you did that two years ago in Poland. We're not going to do it. Why? Okay, what's the lesson of this? Quite important, actually. It's a little bit off topic, but very important. We didn't want to help Russia.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many several unusual things like don't pay your debts, get debt cancellation, you need emergency billion dollars on this date and so forth. And everything I recommended actually ended up happening with U.S. government support. Then in Russia, two years later, I was asked by Gorbachev and then by Yeltsin to help them because they saw what was happening in Poland. They liked that. They wanted something similar. So I said exactly the same things. And the U.S. government kept saying, no, no way, no way. And I kept saying, but that kept working there. And I didn't understand it in some deep sense for a long, long time how weird this was. I knew it wasn't the difference of economic advice. I understand what a financial crisis is.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two things. I blame a lot of it on Dick Cheney, so not just on Russia. Russia itself, by virtue of Russia, 11 time zones of the Eurasian landmass, does not have a fixed focal point. And half of Russian history is how we're a unique civilization, the Third Rome, and half of Russian history is being part of Europe and being part of European civilization. They've never settled that question until now. But the other difference which I found I didn't understand it then almost at all, by the way, and it took me 20 years to understand it, actually, was how weird it was that in 1989, and this is geopolitics, which I didn't understand as it was happening, in 1989, I made recommendations for Poland. And I said,”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they are now completely. It's totally normal as one of the greatest leaders of our time in human rights. Adam Micknick said, we're boring. They went from the great drama of revolution to being a boring country in Europe. But the point I want to make, Tyler, is that the end point was clear for them. Well, everything else fits once you have an idea of that compelling focal point. Then I said, okay, like the guy carving an elephant out of ice, take away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. Take away everything that doesn't look like a European normal economy.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, I don't care what you put. I mean, you have to explain it, but this has to be about Poland's return to Europe. That was the message was like given a term paper or one nighter, write your essay on how Poland can return to Europe. Well, for me, that defined everything. First, it was the right idea. It was why I was there. It was why I was wanting to help solidarity at the time. It was what I believed in. But it also defined, they had a clear vision. We want to be a normal country in Europe.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the basic idea, of course, was not mine at all. The basic idea was in the historical moment, and the basic idea was also solidarity movement's idea. And here's what I mean. I was asked at one point write a plan. And it was for me an unbelievable moment, which I remember as vividly as anything I remember because I said, I'll send this to you in a couple of weeks. It was one of Lech Voens's top advisors, said I need it tomorrow morning. And so one of the great life experiences is the lessons of four years of Harvard All-Nighters. So I pulled an all-nighter and I wrote a plan for transforming Poland from a communist central planned economy to a market economy. And if anyone's interested, I'll send you the document, which I recovered from a box some time a few years ago. What he told me was.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say that things I recommended were that was good advice I gave back then. And I'm proud of it. And it worked out. And it was a very... Remarkable period of my life and very remarkable moment, and it was exactly one of these periods when you're just struck at the complexity and the mess and one needed to find a way out of that. And just to tie that strategy in with how I'm explaining my general approach Actually, I made recommendations for a significant rapid change of economic institutions, structure, and politics that had a very big effect in the internal dynamics of what was happening and the international dynamics.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's where we can get to. And don't you see for all of us that's an improvement. That's better than the mess that we're on. And I believe if you say that enough and you're clear enough about it, you'll actually get there. Or not really, but you'll have the best chance of getting there. And that that's a style of problem solving. That we should try to use in these. Non cooperative games that we play so called, which is that there is no magic answer, there is no one leader that defines the solution. We have to actually agree on something. And it seems to me to be a good idea to try to agree on something.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warming, which governments have agreed but not honored as an upper limit of warming. And I'm taking an approach of how I think I can contribute to that in a very particular way. And that way is by helping to define more clearly what that path involves and managing a 15 country project for the UN on defining pathways that satisfy that. So to my mind, that reflects at least my style of what I believe is the way to do this, which is to say, well, what does a solution look like? It comes back to what Shelling called a focal point for bargaining. Here's where we could go. I think that is very important to identify in messy situations.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, the biggest, most complicated mess that we're in that is like the one you're describing is climate change, which in my now 43 years of thinking about economics, so it's a long time, is the most complicated mess that I can imagine. It's got every attribute of just a terrible, terrible problem. It's global, it's long-term, it's uncertain, it's got vested interests, it's got hugely unequal payoffs, it's got everything wrong with it as a problem. And yet, so a lot of people do say there's no chance you can't really do much. If you ask me where do I stand, I say we can solve this problem. There is a way to do it. I would define solving it at this stage as staying below the two degrees Celsius.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real humanity by Kennedy and by Khrushchev. And then they both basically Reach the intuition. This is insane the way we're acting. This is crazy. And they find a way to reach an agreement next year. And it's an agreement in which typically the right on both sides that they face or the hardliners, the nationalists on both sides, say you can't agree with each other. And they find a way to reach an agreement. So to me, it is a paradigm of how we can stay alive in this world and actually get somewhere.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, it also went off in my head as I learned more about this, which is that Kennedy and Khrushchev. Stumbled into nearly the end of the world in October 1962, and Kennedy made his share of terrible mistakes. And our USG, which I'm usually not too much of a fan of, made its share of terrible mistakes, whether it's Bay of Pigs or other things. And one by one, we stumbled not to the desire of either of these leaders to the point where we were within the hair's breadth of total annihilation and so many stupid things happen in this world as almost happened again. Some pilot gets lost over Alaska and flies over the Soviet Union or Russian local commanders in Cuba have the power to fire nuclear weapons. You know, we're so close. To the edge. So the Cuban Missile Crisis is diffused, I think, with.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Affection, as it's called in the prisoner's dilemma, or the non cooperative outcome that's worse for everybody. And the question is what to do about that. And the cynics say, well, the world's bound to disagree. And the idealists say the world will always agree or we should always act that way. And I find fascinating and compelling the idea that we should Try to find ways to move to cooperation, knowing how fragile that is.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a book, yes, of this remarkable last year of Kennedy's life, which included the Cuban Missile Crisis and then negotiating the partial nuclear test ban treaty. And it's basically, I find it a story of... Tremendous insight and very moving also, but it's a story, if I could put it in pure conceptual jargon, it's a story of finding a way to the cooperative outcome of a prisoner's dilemma. And that's, to my mind, a crucial structural feature of our lives, which is that we face constantly this challenge of finding agreement, and we face constantly the logic of.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I believe that knowledge matters and that the more clarity, the more evidence, the more appropriate analysis, the more likely we can find a good outcome to things. So many people are cynical. I tend not to be. sometimes accused of being gullible as a result or being too soft in the face of whatever but I believe that there's a way to reach agreement typically among pretty conflictual and often pretty antagonistic actors. I tend to believe there's a way out of a crisis. And I tend to believe that a lot of what poses as Either pure zero sum struggle or harsh ideological conflict is often Resolvable by good, clear ideas or good clear evidence or good clear game plan.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I get what you're driving at, and I do have a fundamental view of at least how I want to proceed professionally. But it's also based a bit on a theory of change”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poor our profession is at times in having that sense that the problem that you saw over there is not the same as the problem that you're seeing here.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if the mother answers that way, the next point is I'll meet you at the emergency room. Don't stop. Just go because it could be something that is fulminant and life-threatening immediately. If it's not that, then it can go on for an hour. But by the way, it's not just an hour of questions, it's an hour of sequence questions down a decision tree. And it's fascinating to watch. And I wish as economists we had those basic skills in bread. I certainly didn't learn them, and it took me a long time of seeing lots of patients to see that one needs that same kind of approach. So that's what I mean by differential diagnosis and why it's so annoying to me the one explanation fits all viewpoints, because now I've seen a lot of places. A lot of crises. One of the things that I discovered was”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. Let's hear your problem. Oh, you're in a desert. You're here. You're this. No, when it comes to the child, it could be something as normal as a common cold or something as devastating as meningitis. of a differential diagnosis is two things first It is of course to try to get to the core reasons so that you can make a proper prescription based on a proper diagnosis. Second, it's done in a way that you're minimizing serious risk. The first question always that my wife asks is the baby's neck stiff or do you notice that? Because that's one of the symptoms of”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty good, first of all. So I would subscribe to that summary. I should explain this idea of clinical economics, as I've called it, or differential diagnosis. When you're married to a pediatrician, as I have been for 35 wonderful years, you get up in the middle of the night a lot when patients call with a very sick child. And I've listened to my wife take an oral history a thousands of times perhaps. And it's a wonderful art, first of all, because a mother calls with a crisis of a baby or a young child, usually a high fever. And the first thing that is important to know is that there are A thousand possible ideologies of that fever. So my wife doesn't say institutions. She says,”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1.8% per year per capita growth for the last 200 years. Not bad if you do it for 200 years. But if you're an impoverished country today and you say, what's our aim? 1.8% growth? No, our aim is 10% growth because we really need to catch up. And it turned out because of that catching up phenomenon. You can make a very, very rapid advance in a way unthinkable for a country in front. But how do you make that advance through pure government just stepping back and letting things happen? No. Through a concerted policy to close gaps. That's the difference.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic reformers from basically Hamilton on in countries that were lagging behind the lead said, what do we do to catch up? Now you can carry this too far because the insane version of this and the unbelievably destructive version of this was Lenin and Stalin. We have to do anything and no matter what cost of life to catch up or Mao in the great leap forward, which is insanity. But on the other hand, and cruelty. But on the other hand, the idea that you do different things to catch up by accelerating the process or by making the big push in a variety of ways has been shown time and again to have a lot of merit. And so it's a balance once more. The first countries to develop Britain and the United States take the U.S. We've achieved almost continuously.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a difference of growth which we study as an economy. How does it grow from the question of catching up, which is a question for a country that is situated with weak technology, weak infrastructure, weak training and so forth in the face of advanced economies? What should they do? Now that's been a question that's been asked for at least 24 years since Alexander Hamilton sent his letter to the Congress on manufacturing in the United States because he said we have to catch up with Britain and then Friedrich Liszt said we have to catch up with Britain.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was writing during and at the end of World War II when he was saying how are we going to get out of this mess? There are so many pieces that have to be put together. We have to get infrastructure built again. We have to get basic markets operating. There are a lot of interconnected pieces. And so we're going to have to move on a lot of fronts. So he was facing a historical situation. And I would say that his idea, I'd go back even, well, actually it's not back. It was almost contemporaneous with him, Alexander Gershenkron, who was a very clever economic historian at Harvard. I came as a student just as he was retiring. He was a great mid-century mid-20th century economic historian. He observed that what countries do for development depends on”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China has a lot of corruption, first person to say it is President Xi. And the U.S. has a huge amount of corruption, and it has done reasonably well over the last 200 years.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. Some places are so corrupt. You first wouldn't want to step foot in them. And I've had the experience repeatedly when I'm talking to head of state or finance minister and I watch their eyes glaze over and you realize they're not interested in what you're talking about. They're in a different game. And those places can be driven absolutely into the ground by corruption. Other places have been corrupt for a long time. I'm thinking of New York, Washington, Lagos, Beijing, and other places, and you get a lot of economic progress. So in that sense, there is no purity. In the world, and I'm not a fan of corruption for a lot of reasons, starting with the ethics.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps to explain a lot of the post 1960 question that you're asking. The most successful countries in the world in the last 50 years have been basically the East Asian economies and Southeast Asian economies. They don't look very rarely. Do they look like the textbook model of Asimoglu and Robinson of the free market economy and so forth. In fact, the People's Republic of China, they characterize as just, well, that's an anomaly that is going to collapse in the future, so we don't have to explain it now. I think that's a huge mistake and a misunderstanding of the basics. China's in a catching up mode. The institutions of catching up are quite different from the institutions of being the technology leader, for example. Understanding that would give them a little more clarity about institutions per se.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world and say who's doing well, who's doing badly, why, and so forth. And that's what is sometimes called catching up. And the phenomenon of catching up is very different from the phenomenon of forging ahead at the front of the technology horizon. And when you take that simple distinction,”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Asim Oglu and Robinson's book, Why Nations Fail was one of my least favorite books. I think it is just a bad book because it takes one thought and tries to drive it as the only explanation of history. And that's not a good approach, in my view, to history, which is a very interesting, complex tableau. fundamental point right from the start, which is that when you look at development, there are at least two fundamental drivers, not just one. The one that they talk about is innovation. And innovation is being a fundamental driver of growth. And there's a lot of truth to that in the history of the world. But there's a second fundamental aspect when we look out in the world.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, but I think, again, I'll say it repeatedly. I've never said institutions don't matter. I've said institutions aren't the only thing. I find often that people take an idea and carry it to an extreme. This institution's matters idea is one of those that I found taken to extremes by causing a kind of geographic blindness, if I could say it, geography obviously matters a lot. Resource-based matters a lot. Institutions matter a lot. The world's complex. We're dealing with complex systems. And so it's not surprising that different things matter at different times and different places. So of course, institutions make a difference. art of good economics in my view is trying to figure out what's important where, when, and in which context.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resource rich Norway, Australia, Canada, I wouldn't worry too much about them. Their currencies will weaken. They will find other things to do, whereas some of the very vulnerable countries that have never been able to kick the habit of dependence like Venezuela will probably go into a deeper crisis. And the Middle East has been in flames now for years and I don't see any easy way out there either.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, I think one of the things that I've tried to emphasize and that I've learned over time is it's always pretty complicated. So there are resource-rich countries that do very well, thank you. There are resource-rich countries that have fallen apart a long time ago and never gotten out of the mess. So any generalization is fraught with the problems Norway will do well whether the oil price is high or low. On the other hand, last time the world oil price was persistently low, the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia was near hyperinflation. So different countries under different conditions will adjust to these shocks.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a pretty rich subject and not so simple to summarize, but there really is a resource curse for a lot of resource-rich countries. And I would say at this point, looking back, that I would put more weight on the political economy aspects probably than the pure market driven Dutch disease aspects, which I talked about a quarter century ago. The idea at the time was that if you have resource wealth that pulls you away from more labor-intensive and technology intensive industries, so you don't learn as much, you don't develop as much endogenous growth. Now I would say if you have resource wealth, well, one problem is you're likely to be invaded. You have more vulnerability to geopolitics as well as to internal politics to mess things up.”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, let me say thank you for having me, and I'm really looking forward to our discussion. About 25 years ago, I started looking more and more in my own work at how economic structure, geography, resource-based, and so forth affected development. And I've been on a learning curve since then. One of the early works that I engaged in at that point with Andrew Warner and others was looking at this question of how resource wealth and resource dependence, one could say, affected development. And we found back in the 1990s looking for the preceding 25 years or so that the oil-rich countries had grown less rapidly controlling for seemingly other factors that would be relevant. We started to speculate about that. There's now a huge literature from many different Points of view politics, pure economics, and so forth. And I would say that”
2015-03-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source