Joe Studwell: belief

Transcript context

…Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth — he has a famous article where he argues — or some would say shows — that the longer a country has been colonized for, the better it’s likely to be doing. Do you agree with that result? And do you think it’s true for Africa? I think that you can find cases that bear that out, but I’m not sure that it’s a great rule of thumb when you’re just looking at duration rather than also how colonialism operated, what it did. When you look at the qualitative difference, for instance, between French colonialism in West Africa and Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, it’s not just about duration. I don’t have a great answer to that question. And most colonial stories in Africa were pretty short and fairly similarly short, right? Because most colonization happens in the 1880s, and most colonization is over in the 1960s. Do you think the UAE will become a major financial center for much of Africa?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.