Brad DeLong: evaluation

Transcript context

…But Ireland breaks out, right? I used to argue that divergence worldwide was largely the result of internal and external colonialism plus Lenin. If you were externally colonized, your colonizer really didn’t care about your economic development. If you were internally colonized by, say, an elite that regarded the rest of society as its prey and thought it was separate because they were descended from the conquistadors of Castile, they regarded the rest of the country as not just their prey, but the acquisition of knowledge and social power by the rest of the country is absolutely dangerous. You combine that with Lenin’s extraordinary success at organization, and his pupils and their theological belief that the market must be damned to hell forever, and you get almost all of the divergence that we’ve seen since 1870. Then, in the generation after World War II, I could say, well, failure to converge after the end of colonialism — that’s because they destroyed state institutions, and building a state is a complicated thing. You have to reward your friends in order to maintain control and establish — like Henry VIII stole the monasteries. Stealing entrepreneurial wealth is a good thing to do if you’re trying to maintain a stable state, and things will settle down. Then I could say, well, African retardation — there are special problems of sub-Saharan Africa related to long-run destruction of social trust and so forth. Now I’ve run out of excuses for why middle-income and other traps persist. Maybe the fact that I’ve run out of excuses is combined with the fact that we’ve actually seen substantial convergence in the world since 2000. On the other hand, the coming of Xi Jinping’s new imperial China, and the coming of Narendra Modi and what looks a lot to me like national Hinduist India — those make me think that perhaps the middle-income trap will continue to be much stronger than I would wish, or than I had hoped five years ago when I was in the mood of I’ve run out of excuses. Now, you served in Treasury under the Clinton administration. Let’s say you’re called into the UK, and maybe you have been.…

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