Daron Acemoglu: evaluation

Transcript context

…But geography theories don’t, right? Disease burden theories typically don’t. Right, they don’t. Just let me build on the democracy question. I think what’s really interesting about democracy and this evidence that I talked about — it’s really about society, regular citizens having their voices heard in the political sphere. That’s what democracy is wonderful for. But at the end of the day, that translating into better public services like education, healthcare — that’s really what this book is about. That’s what The Narrow Corridor is about. It’s how do you make states and societies work together? If you look at most of human history, it doesn’t work. Either you have stateless societies, no centralized law, no third-party enforcement — so, lawlessness and lots of other costs — or you have despotic states that don’t listen to society and impose their will, often very repressively and otherwise, on societies. But the original part of the book is to say, actually, squeezed in between these two things, there is this Red Queen dynamics, the corridor where states and societies sort of support each other, and that supporting process is a contentious process. It’s not that they are happily cooperating. They are trying to race with each other. Each is trying to have the upper hand. But as long as that competition doesn’t become destructive, it can actually add to the capacity of both of them. So in that sense, it is an institutional theory. It is also about norms and cultures because you really need to write norms and cultures for society to participate in politics, and the right sort of understanding of what that participation is about. But at some level, I also don’t see it that easily being reduced to other stories because it is exactly about this cooperation-and-competition dimension of state and society empowering both, which, at least to our understanding, was not an idea that has received much attention, but when you start thinking about it, it really opens up new horizons about your interpretation of the world. Just empirically, what do you think is the best underlying preexisting predictor of getting into that positive synergistic dynamic?…

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