YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathan Nunn

lines on the record: 68
first: 2020-07-29
most recent: 2020-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, yeah, the gravity equation is very, very powerful. And so one thing to keep in mind is with the gravity equation, there are traditional variables that are in there which are distance. But then there's been a lot of work actually extending this and putting other bilateral variables in there as well. And so for example, common language, common religion. So if we think of South Africa, obviously, having common language with European countries is going to be important, English, for example. And then common religion. And then the most controversial is the work by Spalorian Vaxiarg, where genetic distance is a super strong predictor of basically bilateral income differences and trade. And so again, these kind of former settler colonies, South Africa, for example, are going to have a leg up in the gravity equation for exactly.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't have a strong view. I haven't thought about that. But if we're thinking about historical persistence and going back to your suggestion, then it is true that Eastern Africa, for example, is part of the Omani Empire. There's more trade for long periods of time. The Middle East, for example, and across the Indian Ocean. So maybe from that perspective, maybe Eastern Africa does have a leg up. But I really haven't thought about this at all. I think part of this is, and I think there's research being done on this, is, well, what are the effects on development of Chinese aid, of Chinese joint ventures, of greater integration with the East? I think part of your story or that narrative rests on the assumption that greater integration with China is going to be relatively beneficial. Which is very plausible.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zens of our Zenzavar had an indigenous population as well. That's a great point. So Zanzibar would look like other small African countries that had slaves taken. And because they had indigenous populations and there was slave raiding, although that was kind of an entrepo. But I'd have to think about it. Yeah. So maybe there was a lot of wealth historically because it was this trading entrepreneur. So Zanzibar was its own country. Maybe it would have much better functioning institutions than Tanzania.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Example. So that's kind of how I think of it. They escaped the initial, all of the detrimental effects of the slave trade.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is one thing kind of in the analysis I did that was kind of hard to think about. So we're places that we're initially uninhabited or that didn't supply slave exports. So Mauritius Reunion would be another, I think Cape Verde fits into this bucket. So they imported slaves and didn't export them. And so they didn't experience kind of the detrimental effects to indigenous institutions, the kind of breakdown of traditional social structures. And they had property rights, you kind of had established property rights, you had a lot greater inequality. So I'd think of them as more similar to plantation islands in the Americas, for example. And then one interesting fact is there's another set of islands, Comoros, where they were initially inhabited and that looks more like the rest of Africa and Madagascar would be than...”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were the ones that were targeted by the slave trade, right? So that's kind of an omitted factor that you'll want to take into account. So what's going on with Nigeria, I would guess, is it has geographic factors, geographic graphic conditions that made it very densely populated initially. So it was a target of slave exports. And that had negative effects on income and also population density because we're in a Malthusian world. But that omitted factor is enough to drive Nigeria's current population, current large levels of population, right? And so in other words, there's geography, which causes larger population initially, causes more slaves to be taken. And that means also larger population today. So you just have to take all those things into account.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one would have to look at the data, definitely. So, one question is, well, are there other factors like geography? We just mentioned that. And the one thing with the slave trades, I have to think about how this all works out. But in the research I've done, it's very clear that there was endogenous selection into the slave trade. And you could even think of that as being strategic by Europeans or slave merchants. And it was those societies, those locations that had the most densely populated regions or that had well-functioning states already, well-developed states. And the intuition is, well, if you're a slave raider or a slave merchant, it's going to be much easier to accumulate slaves for export if there's a lot of people around. Slaves or people. And then if you're thinking of like, you know, Namibia where there's a very low, low population density. So the way I think of it is those densely populated places, those areas.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think 25% of sub-Saharan Africa lives in Nigeria. I think that's a good question. So I'd have to look at the geography, but it must be the fertility of the soils, the ability to produce. And that's despite the fact exactly the stat that we just said, despite the fact that Nigeria, the bite of biafra, was one of the areas that had exported the most slaves. So the counterfactual of what the population would be must be even higher. So I haven't looked into the geography, but it must be fertility. You have to be able to support that large number of individuals in terms of subsistence and eating. And this is even despite the fact that the northern part of Nigeria we know is much less fertile.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To live, we're also the places for which you are most exposed to the slave trade. And my guess, and from the data I've looked at, is you will see persistent patterns in where people live within Africa that is explained by those geographic features and the slave trade, that they moved away from the coast where there was a slave trade. They moved away from rivers. They moved to mountains for protection.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it could be. This is a study someone should do actually. Jeffrey Sachs has been kind of famous, or at least when I was in grad school, had famously said things like Africans live in strange places, so they live away from rivers. They tend to live away from the coast. They live in more mountainous regions. And so which are less fertile. So why would that be? So that's true exactly what you said. Although SQL, you want to live next to rivers. You want to live in fertile plains. You want to live next to the coast, except for the slave trade. And so in the data I've looked at, your logic is exactly there, but then there's the slave trade. So in places where there was a lot of slave trade, people are less likely to live close to the coast. And in particular, what I also looked at was people are more likely to live in mountainous areas as well. And so I think everything you said is exactly right. And that's the omitted factor is that ironically places which otherwise would have been the best place.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it does. It's not something that we ever published, but with Leonard Wanchakon, who's a political scientist from originally from Benin, basically we looked And what we focused on there was actually not income, although you do have measures of income, and you can do that very easily. I had established that across countries there is this relationship between income and slave exports. It's less surprising or maybe less publishable that within countries you'd find the same thing. So what we did look at, though, was distrust and you find a strong relationship there. And obviously distrust is not surprising that that's going to be correlated with income as well.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a few. I think one is a few things. One is Botswana is pretty small in terms of population. And so anytime you have smaller countries, you can have more extreme outcomes. And so that's one, is that it's small. But then related to that is it's also in general ethnically homogenous, particularly compared to other countries within Africa. So the swana are the predominant ethnicity. And they also have a historical social structure. And I think that was pretty well maintained and left intact. And I think that's a big part of the explanation.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Per capita income as you can be right at subsistence. But if we're predicting just based purely on persistence in historical state formation, that would be one to pick.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think if I'm true to exactly what I was just saying, so then Southern Africa or places where you have a larger population of societies that historically were more developed. So in Southern Africa, I should say, you have the Afrikaans and they have a different descent than others. So that's if I'm true to what I was saying. But that's ignoring that also within Africa, a very large number of successful, well-developed states. And that was prior to European colonialism and the slave trade. And so one could look at those cases. And so one area that I work at in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where you had the Great Congo Kingdom, the Cuba Kingdom, a large number of other kingdoms, the Luba, for example. And that would probably be one country, that country today is pretty much as low as in terms of”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends if there's a market for if there's others in the world who are also as knowledgeable as us. But if we were the only two in the world, I would think, yeah, that's right. And the one thing I would also point out, though, is it's important to think about is the persistence based on location or based on societies. So I think a lot of the evidence that we have now, so think of Bill Easterly has a paper, or actually, no, Putterman a while have a paper where they look at persistence and look at geographies and look at persistence based on societies. And there's been a lot of movement of individuals. And persistence based on societies basically is very strong based on locations is not strong. So that's the one caveat in if Melissa and I were picking versus this other person that one would want to take into account is trace the people and not the places.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longer or throughout your lifetime, you might have differences in levels of health at one point, you could be healthier or less healthy. Exactly similar argument with education, right? So we think on average more educated people have higher levels of income, but throughout a person's life there could be ups and downs in the correlation could be different amongst subsamples. So I think that analogy, if you apply it to any country and any country's experience, goes along way to understanding why countries are moving often in opposite directions and what we would think. But if you look at a broad cross-section of countries, there is this non-zero correlation that we call persistence.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a great point. I think when you think about persistence, one thing that's important is how much of the total variation does this factor in the past explain. And that is going to be relevant for the type of question that you ask. If we see in the periods of decades or even centuries, a lot of movement and correlations that are in opposite direction, that's fine and that's completely consistent with persistence as long as persistence isn't explaining 99% of everything or 97%. The way I think about it, and I think hopefully this is answering your question, we're all pretty confident that smoking in general causes lung cancer. So that's kind of a long-term, long-term factor. But you can definitely find counter examples of that. And so that's individuals who maybe smoked but are healthy and lived a lot.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think the standard answer, so I haven't studied Ethiopia, but the standard answer would be a history of state formation. And so there was Aksum in Great Kingdoms. It was the one country or area that wasn't colonized. And so that would be a standard answer. I think that's a pretty superficial answer. I don't think that we know intimately or in great detail why is it that a history of state formation or having successful states or empires is correlated with economic success in state formation today? But I think that would be the standard answer that your average Africanist or growth economist would give. And I think there is some validity to that.”
2020-07-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source