Joe Studwell: belief

Transcript context

…But say you’re Brazil. Brazil seems to have underperformed for almost 50 years, and they do plenty of industrial policy, and they have actual scale. It’s now considered happy news that this year they might grow at 2 percent. Hasn’t it just failed in Brazil, in addition to Mexico and many other places? I don’t know Brazil terribly well. The first thing I’d say about Brazil is that it’s underperformed for the last 200 years, not just the last 50. And the country is just a mess in terms of development. If you look at the agriculture sector, the dominance of scale agriculture, the appalling way in which smallholder agriculture is treated, and how it’s undervalued. If I knew more about industrial policy in Brazil, I think what I would be saying is that it’s been ineffectively applied, patchily applied, not applied consistently over a long enough period. And sure enough, a large part of it is a total failure, but at the same time, you can point to bits that are clearly a success, and the obvious one that everyone always points to is Embraer. Or take India, now the world’s most populous country. They had plenty of industrial policy — mostly a failure, right? Why be so convinced industrial policy, on average, is a good thing? It works maybe when there’s very high human capital, which would be East Asia, and the rest of the world, it seems to me, to underperform.…

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