Chris Blattman: belief

Transcript context

…Now, in our last conversation, we were both fairly bullish about Ethiopia on the grounds of its high state capacity. That now seems wrong. What do you think we got wrong or you got wrong or I got wrong? Long run, I still have high expectations for Ethiopia. Short run, things have obviously gotten very bad. I have a couple of friends who work very closely there, and so, partly what I know is channeling them. I think what was fundamentally problematic about that — like in a lot of African countries — is that, in spite of the state capacity, you have power that’s very concentrated in a handful of elite groups. These elite groups happen to be ethnic groups, the Tigray, the Amhara, and the Oromo. They’d cut a deal with one another. They’d cut a deal that for a long time heavily, heavily, heavily favored the Tigrayans, and that started to fray, and the other two groups began to demand more, and they fumbled that. What surprises me, and I think surprises also the leaders of those three groups, is that they fumbled it. One thing I’ve heard is that the prime minister was surprised at the time that this suddenly turned into violence, and he continued to be surprised for some time. Maybe people just underestimated the chance that these concentrated elite bargains can go wrong. That’s the thing that I always believed but I never really applied to that case. That, to me, goes back to the first thing I said. The fundamental thing we don’t pay enough attention to is concentrated power and how easy it is, then, for these deals to fall apart. Let me tell you my worry and my account of what I got wrong. I know this theory has only two data points, but I’m struck that Rwanda also has a reputation for high state capacity, which, whatever their failings, is in some sense true. Maybe high state capacity develops from a past where you had ethnic strife or war, and in part, you develop the high state capacity to keep some groups down or enforce some bargains. Maybe, on average, it’s a good thing, but it’s also increasing your variance of outcomes. There’s this new piece by O’Reilly and Murphy in Economica that shows the best predictor of state capacity today is historical prevalence of war. So when you see high state capacity in Africa, you should also be getting nervous a bit intrinsically — and indeed anywhere — because it’s a sign it was needed. It doesn’t come from nowhere. Just like you needed a fragmented Europe to develop a lot of advances in capitalism, but that, too, had a high cost: 17th-century wars, and so on.…

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