Chris Blattman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Minus the puffins. Minus the puffins. [laughter] Yeah, I don’t think the technological change is the first-order thing. I don’t know this very well, but I would have suspected that one thing that might be true is that there is a peculiar set of circumstances that exist in East Asia and Southeast Asia that have made it hypercompetitive in this particular sector. You’ve seen whatever a lot of industrialization that existed elsewhere in the world, even if it’s from other developing countries, like the maquiladoras in Mexico, relocate there. Until the rest of these countries catch up in terms of, I’d say, their state development, which will be a very long time and until real wages rise in China, that to me is the first-order explanation of why there is less industrialization in a place like Africa, and it’s not this other set of forces that’s talked about. Paul Romer’s charter cities, would you want to try them anywhere? Can they work?…

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