YouSaid · the spoken record

Melissa Dell

lines on the record: 63
first: 2020-07-15
most recent: 2020-07-15
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

“More broadly, like I'm really excited about unlocking data that not just us, but that lots of other people can use to understand lots of questions, not just about persistence, but maybe there's just some interesting variation in the past and you want to use that to understand something that happened in the past and you're not concerned about if it persisted, but that variation is interesting. And so, you know, hopefully with these tools, it will unlock data. Other researchers can use them to unlock their own data, and that will open the door to lots of interesting questions.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data sets would be too large to ever digitize by hand, and we can get them into a format that can be used to analyze and answer lots of questions. And so one example is historical newspapers. And so we have about 25 million page scans of front pages and editorial pages from newspapers across thousands and thousands of U.S. communities. And newspapers tend to have a complex structure. They might have like seven columns. And then there's headlines and, you know, there's pictures and there's advertisements and captions. And if you just put those”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I have a couple of broad projects which are in some sense both about unlocking data on a massive scale to answer questions that we haven't been able to look at before. And so if you take a historical data, whether it be tables or a compendia of biographies or newspapers and you go and you put those into Amazon Text or Google Cloud Vision, it will output complete garbage. It's just been very specifically geared towards specific things, which are like single column books and just does not do well with digitizing historical data on a large scale. And so we've been really investing in methods in computer vision, as well as in natural language processing to process the output so that we can take historical data on a large scale that would be these”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of what additional math classes do I need to take, or you know, what additional technical skills do I need to learn? But I think almost part of it is just kind of having just depends on how you look at the world. Do you look at things and then try to think, okay, how can I simplify this? How can I take something that's incredibly complex and narrow in on a specific dimension and really understand that in a way that can kind of shed light on the world? And then along with that, also being humble about the fact that, you know, that doesn't mean that you've understood everything. You've looked at one dimension, it shed slides on things, but you need to, you really need to know what you don't know.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think, first of all, just having a curiosity for the world and a drive to discover facts is enormously important to look at the world and say like I want to understand this. And I want to be able to use logic, whether it be with data or with theory, to make sense of what's going on, to try to look at things that are complicated and find a way to simplify them enough that we can understand what's going on. And having that curiosity is just, I think, enormously important. So, you know, a lot of emphasis gets placed on things like, you know, what's your math background? But I think that if you're kind of interested in the right questions, that there's a lot of capacity to make up, you know, a potential deficits and, you know,”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company that wasn't really qualified to produce vaccine and they produced 400,000 doses of polio vaccine that had live virus in it. And so I kind of got interested in reading about that history through just the current events. But then I realized like you look at where they sent this live vaccine to and effectively it seems almost as if it's more or less random because some lots were good, some lots they didn't successfully kill off the polio virus, which means they gave children who were injected with it polio. And, you know, where exactly that went, you know, seems to be something that you could actually exploit. And so we're interested now in looking at, you know, how did that affect attitudes towards vaccination in the longer run? Did it affect it at all? Or do you know, did it, did it not?”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people, but with some small chance it invades your central nervous system and you get paralyzed, but it was very difficult to control with things like contract tracing because so many people are asymptomatic, right? And so I was reading about kind of the push for the polio vaccine in the 1950s, which is this super interesting case because over 100 million Americans donated to the drive by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to develop a polio vaccine. It was developed almost entirely with this kind of private donation-based funding. And so they develop a successful vaccine, but then they're in a big rush to push it to market. And the federal government, the committee that's supposed to license vaccines spends less than two hours reviewing who to license, which in comparative perspective, you know, they spend years and years today typically. And it ended up that there was”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, as you say, a lot of it goes back to kind of, I have a whole list of questions that I'm interested in and that I would really like to work on, but I don't have, you know, the right essentially the right perspective to answer them because I need more knowledge of the institutions. I need data to be available. And so a lot of it comes back to being project driven or sometimes just related to current events. And so, you know, something that I read recently was looking at the development of the polio vaccine. And there's really a lot of parallels to our current situation with the coronavirus. So polio is a disease like that many people don't know. If you get polio about 80% of people are asymptomatic, but then it can be really serious. And so it's not as if you get polio, you're automatically paralyzed. It's probably just kind of a mild stomach virus.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I learned a lot in terms of what my interests are and what motivates me. So my grandmother was a pilot during World War II and was just always very, very interested in learning. You know, back in that time, she didn't never have an opportunity to go to college, but she just like read books her entire life and was so curious and would give me, you know, all kinds of books, especially related to history and related to, you know, cultures and different places and just really encouraged me to be curious and to pursue things and inspired me that, you know, that women can do that.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are. I mean, you know, there's a lot of things that would be, say, different between Lima and Cusco anyways. So I don't know if people have done that, but there are actually studies. But more in rich countries looking at, you know,”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becomes a tricky question. And so we think that there are potentially huge productivity effects of air conditioning. People have done some randomized control trials. But if you go and propose that, then the environmental people get very concerned, right? Because it's bad for the environment. I think even short of air conditioning, which is very expensive, even just things like fans are having access to electricity, you know, having more efficient building standards can make a big difference and is probably more realistic at the same time than getting air conditioning to everyone in sub-Saharan Africa now, which would be very, very costly.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even a fan, and there's been numerous studies both in the field and in labs that when it's extremely hot, you're less productive at physical activities and you're less productive at cognitive tasks. You know, if all of our air conditioning was to go out on a hundred degree day, we would be less productive. And so that comes into play as well. And then finally, there's an impact on political stability. agriculture has much lower output food prices will go up. Oftentimes there's food price riots and that can spill over into more generalized political instability and that matters for economic outcomes as well.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we find that effect in poorer countries, right? So countries that, you know, the way we define that is they're below the median GDP, you know, at the start of the sample in 1970. So I think that part of it, certainly part of it is agriculture. And agriculture is a very large share of those countries' economies. So even if you look at the US, hotter years are really bad for agriculture, even though we have things like irrigation and more resistant seeds and things like that. It still weather has a very big impact on agriculture, but agriculture is a tiny share of US GDP. And so it doesn't really matter for the overall picture that we see, whereas in poor countries, agriculture is a much bigger deal. But as you say, it's not just about agriculture. If you think about t-shirt factories in Bangladesh, like people are working in, you know, pretty bad conditions. They're certainly not air conditioning. Oftentimes there's”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never honestly never heard of it until I went to college. Like I took Oklahoma history and it wasn't mentioned ever. You know, we'd talk a little bit about the trail of tears. And a lot of it was spent on talking about the land run, which is what happened after they had forced the Native Americans off the land. They had essentially a race where white settlers, they shot off the gun and whoever got the piece of land first became the owner. So we spent a lot of time talking about that, about African American history, like totally, totally non-existent.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the reason that I really like running long distances is you can get out, explore nature and in some ways it's like a very almost a very meditative activity. I think that in modern life, we tend to be very focused on what we have to do next on where we're going to. Whereas when you run long distances, you know, I think all of that in some sense kind of fades away and you're just focused on the activity of running on where you are and you stop worrying about what you're going to do next, what happened previously. And that in some ways is a very liberating experience.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the concerns that people bring up are sort of very reasonable. So obviously like from the standpoint of the Rhodes trust, they say, well, this is the person that made it. Other people, you know, say, well, like, look at all these horrible things that he did and his horrible views, which are true. I mean, I think the important thing is that we have conversations about this and the conversations that we have are very useful. And so the more concerning thing is not, you know, to me so much the name, but in what sort of esteem is he held? And if they decided to change the name, like I personally would be, you know, I would be fine with that. But I think it's also important that we have conversations about his legacy and his views and, you know, the role of colonialism more generally rather than trying to pretend like it didn't happen.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that it depends on the way you use it, right? So let's say that you were to just have a cutoff where we're not going to look at anybody who doesn't have a 1600 on the SAT because that's already more applicants than there are spots, then you end up missing like a lot of people who are interested in larger dimensions. But I think if you look at it within the context of the rest of the application, it does have information. If you look at, you know, two students who are similar in other ways and one of them has a much stronger SAT score than the other, that probably tells you something. But I think that we have to appreciate that the SAT alone conflates a lot of different things and not just that student's potential to thrive. But like I think, again, it's one of those things, well, as you point out, what do we really have that's better? I mean, extracurriculars, maybe to an even greater”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that essentially the reason that they have it is when you look at an application, it's really hard to know what to make of grades or other things. And it's, you know, it's a metric on which everybody can be compared. But I think it's a metric that ultimately holds a fairly limited amount of information. Part of what it does is just to proxy for socioeconomic status because ultimately the SAT is a test that can be prepared for very well.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same military doubt. I mean, certainly you don't want to read a link. If you leave a blank, it's wrong. Although, I mean, I've heard basically that the SAT is on its way out anyways.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that that is definitely true. And there is a question of why certain aspects of culture are particularly persistent, whereas others disappear. And economists have looked at this a little bit. I mean, but there's obviously a huge literature beyond that with, you know, historians and people in other fields who've tried to understand what gives some things lasting power, whereas others seem to fade away.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issues related to security, so a paper on the Vietnam War and the effects of bombing versus other strategies and whether or not those were effective for achieving U.S. objectives. Or I've done stuff on the drug trade in Mexico and effects of trying to crack down on the drug trade. You know, and I think like part of my interest in security goes back to the fact that, you know, my parents both worked at an Air Force base when I was growing up and I was kind of surrounded by people in that world or, and I think that there's kind of lots of examples, you know, like that that I could point to that in many ways the things that we as researchers find interesting are product of our experiences and oftentimes experiences that happened, you know, as a kid or in college.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's definitely not orthogonal. And if we were anthropologists, you'd spend like half your paper or half your book talking about your own perspective and your own history and how that influences like, you know, the way that you see things. And we don't really do that as economists. We like to think of ourselves as being, you know, 100% objective and all of that. But obviously like the questions that we're interested in are priors, the way we approach them depends on our backgrounds. And I think that's part of the reason why having like diversity is super important because if you have more people with different backgrounds, they'll ask different questions, which are all sort of quite important. So I think like, you know, sort of in my case, like a lot of the questions that I'm interested in, probably the reason I find them interesting probably does go back to things that happened in my childhood, right? You know, so I have, you know, you know, written about.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think I have to read his books growing up. I haven't read them in a long time from the standpoint of evaluating him as a professional historian. But I think his work has really made people intrigued by history and the role that it plays in people's lives.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just learned that today. And so I assume you're asking that because that's where I grew up. But I actually don't know the answer to that. Maybe I should. Maybe I should write more papers about the persistence of development in Oklahoma.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get the poorest households or the richest households, that's going to look very different. So I think that all these issues are absolutely critical”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, historically, we wouldn't have like per capita income numbers at all. And so I think there's sort of proxies we can use. And so, for example, like rather than looking at, you know, a household survey, you could look instead at like electrification or, you know, access to water. And people have even done that using like satellite data, right, which is kind of crude, but we don't think that that is subject to manipulation, right? And these proxies tend to be pretty highly correlated. So I think you're exactly right to say that we should be suspicious of the data and to try to find, you know, multiple indicators and make sure that they are going in the same direction. That's going to be enormously important. And like the sampling is going to be enormously important, you know, if you will.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's just one mine. All you have to do is get that silver down to the coast where you can put it on a boat and send it to Spain. So there's not much infrastructure built along with that and then sort of in order to make it easier for the government to force people to work in the mines, you don't let other economic activity come into those regions because you don't want competition for labor. And part of that was not giving people secure property rights because they didn't want landowners to come in and be competition with the state for this labor. And that has important effects. Whereas in Indonesia, it wasn't about mines. It was about sugar. And it was very large scale. It was actually a larger scale system than what you saw in Latin America. It was a huge share of Dutch revenue. But sugar has a very different production process. And so once you cut the raw sugar, you can't put that on a boat and send”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad, or you know, to use another example like I've done some work showing that extractive institutions in Peru, so forced labor in mines, was bad for long-run development and trace out sort of the reasons why that was the case, and then have another paper looking at forced labor in Java and Indonesia historically. And the conclusion there is that the places that were more affected by it are actually better off today. So why would that be the case? I think we can all agree that, you know, forced labor was horrible for the people that were subjected to it and were mistreated, but it has very different long-run effects depending on exactly how it was set up. And so in Peru, this is forced labor in mines. They're taking out silver. Once the silver disappears, that economic activity is gone. You don't build much emphasis.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By holding control of land, and that has been bad for economic development, which I think, again, goes back to a point that when we make these sort of statements about how history matters, it's very important to be sort of precise. And so I think if you were to make a statement like land reform is bad for economic development, that wouldn't really be consistent with the evidence because, you know, there's been land reforms and, you know, in East Asia, you know, following World War II that gave people individual property rights, you know, much of the land was land that had been confiscated from the colonizers in the case of Taiwan. And those seem to have been much more successful, whereas when you have this, you know, kind of odd form of community property rights in Mexico that's subject to these political problems, it seems to be pretty.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you look at places that benefited from land reform, which importantly is a very specific type of land reform that gave it didn't give individual alienable property rights, it gave a community right to a certain amount of land. And then the community decided amongst itself how it was going to divide that. And so if you look at those villages that benefited more, you know, 100 years ago, they are poorer today and they're more agricultural today. And a lot of that seems again to go back to this particular form of property rights where community has given land. It can't be converted from agricultural to non-agricultural uses. Households aren't able to buy or sell the land. It belongs to the community. The community decides how it's divided. That creates all kinds of political problems because the people with power in the community can kind of sustain that power.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A worthwhile investment to invest in the things that promote economic growth, whether it's investing in a business, investing in education, et cetera.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Latin America. They were directed towards enriching people connected to politicians. And I think, you know, there's some sense that things like that, that the capture of policies plays a role in getting stuck in this middle income trap. But I think it's not clear at this point what will happen in Vietnam or will happen in China and institutions are a high dimensional thing. And as I said, having a state that's capable does not necessarily mean it's going to be good or bad for economic development. It depends what that state does. But if you don't have like a capable state at all, those places, you know, tend to be disproportionately in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia that are extremely poor. And that really does seem to be a barrier to development because you need property rights or stability, public goods, those things to make it.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuck in the mid 20th century, or you know, is Vietnam going to be more like Taiwan or South Korea and that it can keep sustaining that growth across time. I think that we don't really have like from an empirical sense a great understanding of why exactly Latin America got stuck. I think that there's some sense in the literature that has a lot to do with political economy factors, that there were policies that were captured, you know, by elites. And so if you compare like import substitution industrialization, they had that in South Korea too, but it was actually like the policy was wielded to try to promote economic development and to help companies to develop technologies with some protection. And then they were forced to go out and compete in global markets. Whereas when you look at how those policies were implemented,”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think it's hard to take any specific date and say, okay, this place is doing better in that place because they all kind of, especially for like the middle income type countries today, they all tend to have like a patterns of up and downs. Most of them, they haven't been able to sustain growth over a long enough period yet that they've converged to the global frontier. But if you look at Vietnam, it seemed to get on that path more recently, whereas Latin America has this strong growth performance that happens earlier and then they stagnate. You know, that goes back to this idea of a middle income trap. And people have talked about this comparison between, you know, East Asia and Latin America. So the East Asia, their strong growth performance started later, is China, is Vietnam going to get stuck in the same sort of middle income trap that Latin America has seem to be large.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think Latin America has a relatively high growth performance in the 40s and 50s, which I think is like, you know, playing a role in why they're doing a little bit better at that time. Whereas it's really like it's a fiasco for.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know the lack of democratic institutions may be harmful in other ways, but for economic outcomes, it's not stifling innovation. And that's something that I think is a little bit hard to resolve at this level of development because by and far they're not kind of at the level of development where to keep growing, they have to innovate. You know, they still have some returns that can be made just by catching up with the global frontier of innovation.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Implementing some really economically harmful like force collectivization policies in the 80s and then kind of in the following reform in China, like they start reforming as well. And since then it's been relatively successful. And I think the questions that we have about Vietnamese development going forward in some sense are similar to the questions about Chinese development to what extent is it important to have a democratic state to promote innovation? And these are questions that we don't really, they're very controversial questions that we don't really have the answer to, right? You know, do we think that the policies of the Chinese government are actually bad for innovation because there's not democracy and people are restricted in some ways or are they able to tailor their policies enough?”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think like they have been quite successful economically in recent years relative to where they were historically. And so essentially you have, right, first of all, like there's the Vietnam War, which, you know, if you look at the period between 1955 and 1975, like 3 million people die in a country of 18 million. So it's just an enormously disruptive period. You know, more bombs dropped by a wide margin per capita than in any other context and history. So like the country was just completely devastated by this conflict, which probably wouldn't have happened without outside interference. And so they're completely devastated by the conflict. And then they have this, you know, communist government with an ideology that doesn't really work economically. And so they implement some really, they try to implement but actually aren't successful.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government, if you trust them to enforce your property right, you don't need to go get this thing from the provincial government, which people tend to trust less and it's just not necessary, but that may matter as development continues. And so I think that there's, you know, certainly forces that could lead to reversal and maybe in another 10 years we'll have more data that we can look at that and try to understand that more carefully, but at least in the data that you see through the present, you still see pretty strong economic differences. And maybe they're getting weaker, but we just, you know, the differences across time that we're able to observe, we just don't have really the power to say whether those relatively modest differences are convergence or they're just noise in the data.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are there forces that can make these effects grow smaller across time? And, you know, so one of the forces is in these places that have had a long history of village government that have very, very effective local governments. They have high social capital. You see that they're actually less likely to have loans from commercial banks because they don't need that. Like if you need to get a loan, you can go get it from your friends or family. Whereas in the places that don't have that high social capital, they've actually seen further inroads of commercial banks. Or if you look when the Vietnamese state provides like formal property titles, like people are actually less likely to go and get a property title in the places that have a strong history of village governance. Again, because you don't really need it. If your local”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look across the border of North and South Vietnam, that's not actually where the variation that we're talking about is, like the variation in what was part of the strong historical state before the French showed up, that border is much further into the south of Vietnam. So if you look at data from household consumption surveys today, you still see like a very strong effect. Again, that doesn't mean that it's permanent. And we were kind of interested in looking at how that effect changed across time. And if anything, it does seem to get smaller across time. But then the problem is just your standard errors, right? And so, you know, we don't have really enough data and the changes across time aren't large enough to really be able to establish like if there's some convergence, but this was something that we were actually kind of interested in in the context of this project.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we don't have a great way to measure what economic output looked like historically, but I think it's. In that case, despite what you know, some GDP data may say, we have to be pretty suspicious of that data in that period.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't take the World Bank GDP data like too seriously for kind of anywhere in the colonial slash post-colonial world after World War II, just because it's a very unusual time, right? So there's been these huge disruptions from being colonized by the Japanese. Like they caused a massive famine in Vietnam that killed kind of millions of people. And then you have the independence war with the French and like how on earth any of this is measured. Like sort of, I don't even know. But I think if you go back and you look, for example, at maps that were made in the 1930s by the French, like showing different types of infrastructure, which we think is likely to be correlated with economic development, you see more infrastructure in the north than in the south.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's going to be this sort of push towards persistence because people that benefit from the way things are want to keep it that way”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reproduce itself over time because people don't want to let go of that power and where things were organized differently where it was more about these lords who had power and you paid tribute to them and then they passed that up. Again, they're not going to willingly let their power go. They want to reproduce that power. And that, I think, essentially is like central to leading to persistence. So of course there can also be cultural attitudes and all those things, other things that underlie that. But I think that part of the kind of the dynamic of persistence is that when you have power, you want to do everything, you know, in your capacity to maintain that power. When you have economic resources, you want to do everything that's in your capacity to maintain those resources. And sometimes we get these radical raptures that change things substantially. Other times maybe there's just a gradual wearing away because the world economy has changed or things like that.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enforce laws, etc. And that continues, whereas in places that had not been part of the Vietnamese state that were part of this, they were on the periphery of this very weak Cambodian state, there was no form of village organization to speak of. You might live near other people, but there wasn't a village government that had been elected the way that it had in Vietnam. Instead, the way that that social organization worked is that there is a local lord who owns the land. It's almost like a feudal-like system. And when the French come in, they don't have an interest or they don't have the capacity to essentially change that and kind of that just power tends to reproduce itself until there's a strong force to change, right? And so in the areas that had been part of this strong state, there weren't strong landlords to speak of. There were these village governments and the people who had the power in the village governments, the families, that tends to”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thousand hamlets that were in South Vietnam and say change how you govern yourself. And so I think the persistence is really just about there's not like a force to make a change and maybe things drift a little bit over time. But going further back in time when the strong Vietnamese state comes in and really says, okay, you're going to implement our institutions at the local level because this is the most effective way that we think we have to tax you and to make you contribute to the state, then that's a rupture and the institutions change when there's not the pressure to do that. Then I think essentially like the structure that they have for governing themselves just reproduces over time. And so places that had been part of this strong state historically, the village is the center of government. There's a village government. They organized tax. They organized to”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a village level on the ground. They can show up and take over the top level of the government, but they don't have the capacity to go into a village and say, change how you govern yourselves. And so essentially that means that the way that things work kind of in 1850, that becomes pretty persistent over the next hundred years why the French are there because there's just not really a force to change the village government because the French say, you know, do what you want at the village level, pay taxes to us, but they essentially don't have the same capacity that the Vietnamese state had to conquer places or they don't have the desire to do it and bring them into a central state. And so I think the persistence is largely about that because then when you move into the independence period, you know, South Vietnamese state is also at the national level is a chronically weak state. And so again, the South Vietnamese state doesn't have the capacity to go into the 18.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going and conquered all of what is today Cambodia because they were just a much more sort of effective state militarily at that point in time. But that doesn't happen. The French show up effectively the very kind of southernmost part of what is today Vietnam had just been brought into the Vietnamese state. And the French essentially stopped that process of integrating them. And according to the historical literature, the local institutions, the local customs essentially persist under the French because the French actually don't have a lot of power to change things on the ground. And so, you know, the local norms at the time that the French show up essentially persist. And then we get forward to the period of independence. And that's when we start observing, you know, all these differences in local governance. And so I think essentially like what happens is that the French don't really have the capacity to actually change things.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think that an important part of it just to step back and provide a little bit more history. And so the part of Vietnam that was a colony of China back a thousand years ago, it's kind of almost entirely in the north of Vietnam. And then across time, that state moved down and conquers more and more of the south, right? Because it was a much more capable kind of centralized state than the Cambodian state. So naturally it started eating into its territory across time. And when it did that, it was very good at bringing new territories into the Vietnamese state. And so if you look across other borders that were in effect for like, you know, a couple of hundred years, you don't see any differences in income more recently. But finally, you get to the mid-19th century and the French show up to colonize Vietnam. You know, if the French hadn't shown up the Vietnamese state would have probably kept”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source