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

“So, I think we didn't look at that aspect, specifically more what we were able to focus on is the presence of institutions. And that holds true, like controlling for the percentage of the population that identifies as Chinese more recently. And so I think that certainly the fact that you had ethnic Chinese there, you know, setting up communities and bringing those institutions was important to their persistence. But, you know, I'm not sure quantitatively like kind of how important you would think that is to economic development. And it's actually like something that we can't even really measure, right? So a very small percentage of the population identifies as Chinese. Today, of course, there were far more Chinese that settled and intermingled with Vietnamese. And we don't really have a measure of that.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there's just a massive amount of variation to explain. So, like Nathan Nunn's work on slavery and the role that that plays in explain Africa's longer and under development, he gets pretty large coefficients, but they still leave a massive amount of difference to be explained by other things as well because there's just such large income differences between poor places in the world and rich places. And so I think, you know, if persistence explains 10% of it, that's a case where we see really strong persistence. And of course, there's other cases where we don't see much. And so there's plenty of room for everybody's preferred theory of economic development to be important just because the differences are so huge.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's pretty good because the world's a complex place. So, something that explains 10% of the variation is potentially a pretty big deal, but that means there's still 90% of the variation that's explained by other things. And obviously if you go down to the individual level, there's even more variation there in the data to explain. So I think that, you know, in these cases where we see like 10% of the variation being explained by a historical variable, that's actually really strong persistence. But I mean, there's a huge scope for so many things to matter. I'll, you know, say the same thing when I teach an undergrad class about economic growth in history. And when we talk about the various explanations you can have, be it geography, you know, different types of institution, cultural factors. Well, there's places in sub-Saharan Africa that are like 40 times poorer than the US. And so when you have that kind of, you know, income differential.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so I'll give an example here from a little bit of a different context, but I was presenting some work that I'd done on Mexico to a group of historians. And I think that historians have a very kind of different approach than economists. They tend to focus in on a very narrow context. They might look at a specific village and they want to explain 100% of what was going on in that village in that time period. Whereas, you know, in this paper, I was looking at the packs of the Mexican Revolution, which is a historical conflict on economic development. And this historian who'd studied it extensively and knows a ton was saying, like, well, you know, I kind of see what you're saying and that holds in this case, but what about this exception? And what about that exception? And my response was to say like my partial r squared, which is the percent of the variation that this regression explains, is 0.1, which means it's explaining 10% of the variation in the data.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of monopolizing violence and promoting the conditions that we need for economic development, like providing public goods, that most of those places that have chronically had a weak state are very poor. If you have a strong state, it can be good or bad, kind of depending on exactly what that state is doing. So it's again, it's not, you know, and it can change over time and there can be reversals, but it provides potential opportunities if that state does pursue policies that are helpful instead of harmful for economic development for that to happen. Whereas in the Philippines, I mean, you know, there's some arguments that like Marco actually aspired to be a developmental dictator and he just had no capacity to do that because nobody at the local level would really do what the central government ordered them to do. And instead, it was much easier just to steal things than to try to direct the state towards development.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas, if you go back further in time in the Philippines, they were organized very differently. They did not have a history of a strong centralized state. And that matters potentially for what they were able to do going forward. And so I think also the argument is not necessarily that a strong state is always good for economic development. So there's a huge literature looking at examples like Nazi Germany that shows in places where the Prussian state was stronger, the Nazis were better, you know, at exterminating Jews. And so depending on what the state wants to do, having that state capacity can be a good thing or a bad thing, it doesn't necessarily promote economic development at all points in time. In some sense, it seems to be largely a prerequisite. If you can't have a state that's capable”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it comes down to the fact that the world is fundamentally a complex place. So if you were sitting there in 1960, what is it that you're emphasizing? And I think actually the people that were saying, you know, South Korea is a basket case were emphasizing the current circumstances because, you know, this was the midst of the Korean War, which by the way was more about external influences in Korea than about Korea itself. And it was about the Cold War. And it was a really bad situation. Much of the country had been destroyed. The politics were a bit of a mess. But if you had looked back at the longer history of Korea, you would have seen that they have this long history of having, you know, functioning institutions that are able to provide conditions that promote economic development. And that's important. So in some sense, like the 1950s and the 60s were an aberration in Korea's history.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Governments. And having a local governments that have been effective at providing public goods like healthcare. And so, you know, that has came in really useful in this moment when you really need a strong centralized response. So I think that that's an example where, you know, I don't have a way to prove that econometrically, but if you look kind of throughout Vietnam, the parts that were part of North Vietnam as well as South Vietnam, they've been able to deal with this really effectively. And I don't think that's an accident.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why sometimes things persist and sometimes they don't. So certainly more recent events can matter, and we're not claiming that there's an r squared of 1, that a place's history is its destiny, but that there are these forces. And you might think, I mean, I think that there's ways in which, you know, looking beyond just household consumption today, I think you do very much see the legacy of the historical state in both places that we're part of North and South Vietnam. And so if you look at coronavirus, Vietnam has been remarkably effective at dealing with it. They share a border with China, and yet they have almost no cases. They've been super successful at isolating their outbreaks. You know, life is much more normal there than it would be in the United States. And I think that that in large part goes back to the fact that much of Vietnam does have this history of having a strong centralized state that coordinates very well with local government.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that you could imagine writing papers about different things. And so our motivation was we wanted to think about if the historical state could have a role at all. And in order to do that, you don't really want to compare South Korea to the Philippines, which is what most of the historical literature on this does because they're different in so many ways. We know that South Korea looks really different from the Philippines, but there's so many ways that they can be different. And so by looking within South Vietnam, we wanted to say, okay, these are places that had a much more recent modern history. Can their past history still matter? But we're not saying that, you know, it begins to explain everything. There's other forces that happen more recently that we think are also important. So certainly that there can be mean reversions. Like, and the argument is not that things are always persistent. And I think part of the literature is about, you know, understanding.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More recently, when there were constitutional reforms in Vietnam that gave them a degree of self government, they weren't able to do that very effectively. And so, you know, they weren't able to keep the positions on their local city council filled. They weren't able to provide as effectively local public goods like education or health services. And so really having this long history of governance makes places more able to do that today. And that's relevant because there's been a big push to have local governments provide an important role in providing public goods, et cetera. And if places don't have a history of doing that, perhaps not surprisingly, they tend to be to have a much harder time. And so when the World Bank says, oh, well, we want to give local autonomy to let local governments decide how to provide schools in the way that works best for them. That's going to work in places that have a long history of providing education in places that don't.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More recently, they have better functioning local governments. They're richer, they're better off, which shows that places that have a long history of governance seem better able to do that more recently. So places that going back a long time ago, they were part of the central state, they had to collect taxes locally to send up to the central state. They had to organize military conscripts. The central state mandated that they had certain laws. More recently, those places also have more functional local governments and are also better off economically, whereas the places that never had that structure that comes from a state. It was just essentially, you know, if you were living in that area, there'd be a warlord that you sent tribute to, but there was never any regular taxation, you know, never any organized local government under a central state. Those places.”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I've done some work looking at the persistence of economic development in Vietnam. And so the work I did actually was limited to what was South Vietnam because there's also been huge events, obviously, that have happened in the past 100 years in North Vietnam with a war that destroyed much of the country, was fought over an extended period of time. But when you look in general places in Vietnam that have a similar recent history, but going back in time, one of them was part of a much stronger, more centralized state. The other one was part of what is today Cambodia, a much weaker state, you know, was generally ruled by local lords instead of by a strong centralized state. You see the towns that were part of the stronger centralized state going back before colonialism. So several hundred years ago,”
2020-07-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source