Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…In The Narrow Corridor, you’re very critical of the Indian caste system. But if I just do simple comparative analysis, India is wealthier than either Pakistan or Bangladesh, which are largely Muslim, don’t have a formal caste system. So, can the Indian caste system be such a major factor holding India back? That’s a good question. But we have to remember . . . I don’t know enough about Bangladesh to be able to comment on Bangladesh, but in the case of Pakistan, there are two observations that are relevant. One is that Pakistan, of course, ended up with the most feudal parts of the Indian subcontinent, in some sense. And the way that its political system evolved wasn’t adaptation to those feudal political, social relations. The strengthening of the army, the alliance between dictatorial power of army generals and politicians, together with the feudal landowners, I think, was not something that was invented out of raw cloth. But even more importantly, the Muslims in the Indian history should not be thought of as a separate category. They are part of the caste system. The caste system, by creating social hierarchies, in the same way that it affects the untouchables, the Dalits, it also affects the Muslims. So they’re part of that social hierarchy, and the evolution of their norms, their economic opportunities were very much shaped by that whole heritance. Your comparison of the histories of Guatemala and Costa Rica — your book assigns a very large role to the differential histories of coffee plantations in both countries. But if we look also at the distribution of income within countries — who’s wealthy in Guatemala, who’s poor — as a gross generalization, the fairer-skinned people are wealthy. The indigenous are poorer, they’ve been oppressed, they have much worse schools. They may not have schools at all. Why isn’t the difference between Guatemala and Costa Rica mostly a matter of ethnicity and not so much a matter of the differential history of coffee plantations? Isn’t that the more economical theory that also explains distribution of income within each country?…

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