Nathan Nunn: belief

Transcript context

…What’s your view of that story? It’s a strong empirical regularity, for sure, that absolute distance genetically between societies explains the absolute difference in income. You see that very, very strongly. I think this doesn’t tell us anything about the importance of genes for per capita, GDP, or for economic success. If two societies are very similar genetically — what it means is, they’ve had a very similar history. The time since their last common ancestors split is not going to be very distant, so they would have experienced a lot of common shocks, would have lived in common geographies, would have had similar forces that affected cultural evolution, societal evolution. I think that’s what that’s picking up, basically, is the importance of history and how that affects culture institutions. They really don’t know in that paper what is this vertically transmitted trait. It could be genetics, but they don’t push that. I think it’s all these bundles of things that are affected by history. Why does distance from the equator seem to predict GDP per capita so well? It’s not obvious it should matter at all, right?…

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