Melissa Dell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think that an important part of it, just to step back and provide a little bit more history — the part of Vietnam that was a colony of China back a thousand years ago — it’s almost entirely in the north of Vietnam, and then across time, that state moved down and conquered more and more of the south, right? Because it was a much more capable kind of centralized state than the Cambodian state, so naturally, it started eating into its territory across time. And when it did that, it was very good at bringing new territories into the Vietnamese state. If you look across other borders that were in effect for a couple hundred years, you don’t see any differences in income more recently. But finally, you get to the mid-19th century, and the French show up to colonize Vietnam. If the French hadn’t shown up, the Vietnamese state would have probably kept going and conquered all of what is today Cambodia because they were a much more effective state, militarily, at that point in time. But that doesn’t happen. The French show up, and effectively, the very southernmost part of what is today Vietnam had just been brought into the Vietnamese state. The French essentially stopped that process of integrating them. According to the historical literature, the local institutions, the local customs essentially persist under the French because the French actually don’t have a lot of power to change things on the ground. So the local norms at the time that the French show up essentially persist. Then we get forward to the period of independence, and that’s when we start observing all these differences in local governance. I think, essentially, what happens is that the French don’t really have the capacity to actually change things at a village level on the ground. They can show up and take over the top level of the government, but they don’t have the capacity to go into a village and say, “Change how you govern yourselves.” Essentially, that means that the way that things work in 1850 — that becomes pretty persistent over the next hundred years while the French are there, because there’s just not really a force to change the village government because the French say, “Do what you want at the village level. Pay taxes to us.” But they essentially don’t have the same capacity that the Vietnamese state had to conquer places, or they don’t have the desire to do it and bring them into a central state. I think the persistence is largely about that because then, when you move into the independence period, the South Vietnamese state is also, at the national level, a chronically weak state. Again, the South Vietnamese state doesn’t have the capacity to go into the 18,000 hamlets that were in South Vietnam and say, “Change how you govern yourself.” The persistence is really about there’s not a force to make a change, and maybe things drift a little bit over time. 8,000 hamlets that were in South Vietnam and say, “Change how you govern yourself. ” The persistence is really about there’s not a force to make a change, and maybe things drift a little bit over time. But going further back in time when the strong Vietnamese state comes in and really says, “Okay, you’re going to implement our institutions at the local level because this is the most effective way that we think we have to tax you and to make you contribute to the state,” then that’s a rupture, and the institutions change. When there’s not the pressure to do that, then essentially, the structure that they have for governing themselves just reproduces over time. Places that had been part of this strong state historically — the village is the center of government. There’s a village government. They organize to tax. They organize to enforce laws, et cetera, and that continues. Whereas in places that had not been part of the Vietnamese state, that were on the periphery of this very weak Cambodian state, there was no form of village organization to speak of. You might live near other people, but there wasn’t a village government that had been elected the way that it had in Vietnam. Instead, the way that that social organization worked is that there is a local lord who owns the land. It’s almost like a feudal system. When the French come in, they don’t have an interest or they don’t have the capacity to essentially change that. And that power tends to reproduce itself until there’s a strong force to change. In the areas that had been part of this strong state, there weren’t strong landlords to speak of. There were these village governments, and the people who had the power in the village governments, the families — that tends to reproduce itself over time because people don’t want to let go of that power. Where things were organized differently, where it was more about these lords who had power and you paid tribute to them, and then they passed that up — again, they’re not going to willingly let their power go. They want to reproduce that power. And that, essentially, is central leading to persistence. Of course, there can also be cultural attitudes and all those other things that underlie that. Part of the dynamic of persistence is that when you have power, you want to do everything in your capacity to maintain that power. When you have economic resources, you want to do everything that’s in your capacity to maintain those resources. Sometimes we get these radical ruptures that change things substantially. Other times, maybe there’s a gradual wearing away because the world economy has changed or things like that. But there’s going to be this push towards persistence because people that benefit from the way things are want to keep it that way. But again, how much does that matter in the aggregate? At least according to the CIA, in 1950, North and South Vietnam had the same per capita income, more or less, maybe poorly measured. But very different histories, right? Different ethnic groups, different methods of governance. And yet it seems to wash out. Isn’t that a puzzle for any of you?…

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