Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What do you mean by work so much better? Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history. ” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right? Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism. It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know. Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.