Nathan Nunn: prediction

Transcript context

…Let’s start with some Africa questions. Why does it seem that Ethiopia is suddenly so successful in nation building? That’s a good question. I haven’t studied Ethiopia, but the standard answer would be a history of state formation. There was Axum and great kingdoms; it was the one country or area that wasn’t colonized, 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. I think there is some validity to that. But does this get at a broader question about persistence and the importance of persistence? If you look at Ethiopia in the 1970s, it’s a poster child for extreme poverty. If we look at Ethiopia in the time of the slave trade, Eastern Africa — as you point out in your work, a very large number of slaves were taken from Ethiopia, which is supposed to predict low trust and bad long-term outcomes. And now, they’re good at nation building because of events millennia ago. Over what time horizon does persistence operate? Or is it always supposed to be moving in the same direction? Or is there also some kind of mean reversion?…

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