Nathan Nunn: belief

Transcript context

…But why was South Korea then so poor for so long? Maybe it was somewhat well off under Joseon Dynasty, but if you look at 1960, 1900, 1800, as far as I know — we don’t have good data, but it had a reputation for being a place of extreme poverty, right? Yeah, but it did have all of these kingdoms, historically, which makes it similar to — in terms of its history of state formation — to Japan or to China and more similar to that. It was geographically a terrible place, sandwiched between China and Japan, but it was able to survive, actually. So that’s actually a testament to the Korean society. And if you look at things like architecture, food, academics, I think Korea has always been extremely sophisticated. There were periods of colonization, and I have to go back and look at the data of Korea from the early 20th century or 19th century, but that explains a lot of it, I would guess. I would say there are these latent characteristics that aren’t reflected in per capita income, which are important for subsequent development. But doesn’t this get us back to some problems with the persistence idea? Korea, like most places, has multiple pasts. It has a past of extreme poverty, a past of extreme sophistication. You can always pick out one or the other path and explain, through persistence, a present. You could pick out the past of extreme poverty and explain North Korea as a persistence of that. But ideally, you want to know if there’s persistence on net in the whole dataset, and then you’ve got to line up all the pasts. But the Jeff Sachs point that we’re just not very good at predicting which countries will do well next — shouldn’t that just make us outright skeptical about persistence? If you go back to 1960, who predicted then which countries would do well? Even knowing ex post which ones did well, it’s very hard to find measures that will predict that, even knowing the winners.…

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