Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think it does. It’s not something that we ever published, but with Leonard Wantchekon, who’s a political scientist originally from Benin — basically, we looked at subnational measures of the number of individuals of each ethnicity that were taken from different parts of Africa. What we focused on there was actually not income, although you do have measures of income, and you could do that very easily. But once I had established that, across countries, there is this relationship between income and slave exports, it’s less surprising, or maybe less publishable, that within countries you’d find the same thing. What we did look at, though, was distrust, and you find a strong relationship there. And obviously distrust — it’s not surprising that that’s going to be correlated with income as well. If I think about West Africa for a minute, putting aside Eastern African slave trade, it seems to me the wealthiest areas, the places people actually want to live, are on the coast. And the places that had the most slaves taken were on the coast, for more or less obvious reasons. Doesn’t that mean that the raw correlation is a positive one between how well a region has done within a country? I’d rather live in Lagos than in Kano within Nigeria, yet presumably more slaves were taken from the coast. Yeah, it could be. This is a study someone should do, actually. Jeffrey Sachs has been famous, or at least when I was in grad school had famously said things like, “Africans live in strange places. They live away from rivers. They tend to live away from the coast. They live in more mountainous regions which are less fertile. Why would that be?” That’s true, exactly what you said. Although secretly you want to live next to rivers, you want to live in a fertile plain, you want to live next to the coast except for the slave trade. And so in the data I’ve looked at, your logic is exactly there. But then there’s the slave trade, so in places where there was a lot of slave trade, people are less likely to live close to the coast. And in particular, what I also looked at was, people are more likely to live in mountainous areas as well. I think everything you said is exactly right, and that’s the omitted factor, is that, ironically, places which otherwise would have been the best places to live were also the places for which you were most exposed to the slave trade. My guess, and from the data I’ve looked at, is you will see persistent patterns in where people live within Africa that is explained by those geographic features and the slave trade. They moved away from the coast where there was a slave trade. They moved away from rivers. They moved to mountains for protection.…

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