Daron Acemoglu: observation

Transcript context

…Denmark. Denmark will do fine, we can agree. In Latin America, I would pick Uruguay and Chile. I think those are two societies that have made the investments for both getting the bottom-up politics working and the top-down state institutions. They both have very deep conflicts. Chile is a very highly unequal country. Economic inequality, I think, actually understates social inequality. And you are seeing that with protests. We’re seeing that with distributional conflicts. But despite that, I think this combination makes Chile unique in many ways. And Uruguay, I think, has attempted to do the same thing. I think Ethiopia is a great example to watch. It’s been crushed under brutal dictatorships for so long, but it has some of the elements of state institutions that are much stronger than the rest of Africa. And again, what you’re seeing with Abiy Ahmed now is this attempt to bring out the bottom-up element. I think that’s very important. You can go a little bit more micro. In the book, we talk about Lagos. Lagos is a super interesting case because it was the favorite example for everybody who wanted to talk of chaos and anarchy. It was a lawless city falling into pieces. Gangs were roaming the streets. But then what you actually witnessed in Lagos is exactly the type of thing that our framework suggests is a way out. Some politicians who understood that the only way out of the morass was, you’re going to promise to offer better state services, better tax collection, better refuse collection, better schooling, while at the same time encourage society to monitor them better. So the dual action of increase the state’s capacity while society’s controls get tightened as well. Now in these conversations, we usually have a segment, underrated versus overrated. I’ll toss something out. You give your opinion. You’re free to pass. Orhan Pamuk.…

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