Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, that’s why I’m saying that the whole European colonization episode has to be taken in its entirety. But it isn’t also a straight line to say that Europeans brought ideas and that’s what really changed the trajectory in a good way. Europeans settled in some numbers in Barbados. In 1680, about 10,000 people in Barbados had European ancestry and probably about 2,000, 3,000 were British. But these people, who benefited mightily from the plantation complex and from about 40,000 people being chattel slaves, did not have any idea of introducing a Declaration of Independence. They actually established a very draconian regime. Executions were commonplace. All the power was concentrated in the hands of about 150 families that were to be plantation owners. And the way that the independence declaration evolved and other things evolved in the US was actually in reaction to British power. The important story, which, of course, everybody knows, is that Declaration of Independence was in order for the Americans to reject the European imposition to some degree. But actually, the story goes much further back if you take the first semi-successful colony in Jamestown. What makes Jamestown unique is not that . . . or actually, very common in some sense, but a first in history. It actually broke completely new ground institutionally to introduce the headright system, smallholder property, to introduce the general assembly. And none of this was because the Virginia Company, who colonized and owned the place, wanted to. They wanted to set up a system very similar to the one in Barbados or Jamaica. It was against the wishes of their British masters because the settlers said, “No, we’re not going to go along with that.” And they had enough political power to do it. Therefore, the story is more complicated. It’s not that the European ideas directly came. It’s the European ideas interacting with the local conditions, and often the success came from local conditions making European strategies of dominance unsuccessful. If we think about the USSR, which has terrible institutions for more than 70 years, an awful form of communism — it falls; there’s a bit of a collapse. Today, they seem to have a higher per capita income than you would expect a priori, if you, just as an economist, write about communism. Isn’t that mostly just because of what is now Russian, or Soviet, human capital? That’s an interesting question. I think the Russian story is complicated, and I think part of Russian income per capita today is because of natural resources. It’s always a problem for us to know exactly how natural resources should be handled because you can do a lot of things wrong and still get quite a lot of income per capita via natural resources.…

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