Chris Blattman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Back to economic development. What, in your view, is the most underrated national development story that people should pay more attention to? Which country or region? Including me, Botswana, in the sense that this is the growth miracle of the late 20th century. There’s a few explanations, but there’s really only a handful of people who’ve paid any attention to what happened there. There’s a few pat stories that say, “Well, they idiosyncratically established a parliamentary government before they discovered their diamonds and, through some magical set of circumstances, maintained this good governance. And the diamonds fed growth and prosperity.” But that doesn’t seem very persuasive. There’s another story that’s waiting to be told, and I don’t know the answer to it. Many people say that, for numerous parts of Africa, national borders are a problem, that they don’t correspond to ethnic groups or tribes in the right way. If you look at the data, as I think Jeffrey Herbst just pointed out, among others, there are quite a few fairly small countries — Lesotho, Gambia, Guinea, Sao Tome. They’re not actually doing that well. It’s not clear they’re doing better than the big countries. Does this refute the misdrawn borders story, or do you still think there’s something to that?…

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