Melissa Dell: observation

Transcript context

…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? I wouldn’t take the World Bank GDP data too seriously for anywhere in the colonial/postcolonial world after World War II just because it’s a very unusual time, right? There’s been these huge disruptions from being colonized by the Japanese. They caused a massive famine in Vietnam that killed millions of people. Then you have the independence war with the French, and how on earth any of this is measured, I don’t even know. But if you go back, and you look, for example, at maps that were made in the 1930s by the French showing different types of infrastructure, which we think is likely to be correlated with economic development, you see more infrastructure in the north than in the south. So I think that we don’t have a great way to measure what economic output looked like historically, but I think it’s consistent with what we see more recently. I don’t think that there’s been a reversal in that case, despite what some GDP data may say. We have to be pretty suspicious of that data in that period. But there can be a lot of mechanisms that pretty simply undo a lot of the persistence.…

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