Daron Acemoglu: evaluation

Transcript context

…How predictive do you think your theories are? Say you looked at Africa, knowing all of what’s in your books and your articles, and you play a Philip Tetlock forecasting tournament. Which countries in Africa will do quite well over the next 30 years? Are you better at that than other people are? I don’t think I would be that good at it because I think one of the things that you see when you start thinking about the complex of institutions and norms — details matter, leadership matters, collapses matter. You see some elements that can be the basis of some broad tendencies. We said this in Why Nations Fail seven years ago, and we’re saying it again. I don’t think China is going to seamlessly democratize and enter the corridor and start having very strong civil-society institutions. You’re not going to be able to build very strong state capacity institutions in places that have a tradition of completely distrusting the state. You also are going to have a very different growth experience in places where you have a tradition of state capacity. So Vietnam is going to be very different than Burma, for example, because at least in parts of Vietnam, you have this tradition and institutions of states organizing production, organizing irrigation. And in Africa, Rwanda and Burundi, with a tradition of much stronger state institutions, are going to be very different. Ethiopia has some of that also, and those countries can pursue a very different growth strategy than, say, Nigeria. Nigeria is an amalgamation of many, many, many different ethnicities, tribes, and nationalities. It had none of it. Well, Yoruba perhaps a little bit has some of these traditions of older empires. But the country is not going to have a top-down growth strategy like the one that Rwanda and Ethiopia have. But these are just very general tendencies. Nigeria can collapse into civil war again, and it’s very difficult to predict those things. You can predict the fault lines. You can predict some of the comparative advantages. You can predict what is going to be very difficult. But making very specific predictions is going to be very hard. If you had to name two or three nonobvious nations to be bullish on, are there any picks you would make?…

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