Benjamin Friedman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Aren’t there some reasons to be more optimistic? If we look at Taiwan, where median income has not really gone up since 1989 in real terms — they seem much more tolerant, much more democratic than they used to be. Japanese economic growth has slowed down. They’re certainly no less democratic, probably more democratic, definitely more tolerant. Haven’t we seen a fairly large number of countries with much slower growth, and whatever their problems or flaws, they seem to be more tolerant — gay rights, rights of women, many different issues? Well, there are many aspects of the kind of liberal democratic tendencies that I spelled out in that book, and tolerance is one of them. I was very reluctant then — and I still am — to point to these small city-states as examples. People often threw up to me Singapore as a counterexample to what I was talking about. Look, Singapore is five million people, something like that. It’s really a big city. Taiwan is somewhat larger, I know, but it’s a very special situation because of its fear of the Chinese. I would be confident that in the greater number of cases, those societies which are able to mount serious, sustained, widely distributed economic growth will do better on these dimensions — like tolerance and democracy and generosity and provision of opportunity — than those that do not. In the middle of these chats, we always have an underrated versus overrated section. Are you ready?…

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