Daron Acemoglu: prediction

Transcript context

…But if Russians come here, they almost immediately move into North American per capita income levels as immigrants, right? They’re not bringing any resources. They’re bringing their human capital. If people from Gabon come here, it takes them quite a while to get to the — No, absolutely, absolutely. There’s no doubt that Russians are bringing more human capital. If you look at the Russian educational system, especially during the Soviet time, there was a lot of emphasis on math and physics and some foundational areas. And there’s a lot of selection among the Russians who come here. There are a lot of criminal Russian elements who come to Europe, and they do very well, but for different reasons than the mathematical or the physical-sciences human capital that they’re bringing. But I would say, what the Russian scientists are bringing . . . and that’s very well documented. For example, in the case of after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian mathematicians came here, and they took jobs from American mathematicians because they were actually better. Well, that’s both human capital and institutions, meaning that the reason why that’s actually persisting is not simply that the current generation of Russians have parents who are very high human capital. That matters, of course. That matters for the values. But really, Russian educational institutions have persisted. Take away those, they collapse, and nothing remains. And you’ve seen that happen in some of the Russian republics, for example. They had pretty good educational institutions at the time, but then in the context of the civil wars that ensued, for example, some of those educational institutions have collapsed, and rebuilding them has been much harder. I’m sure you know the Mankiw, Weil, and Romer paper. They have a Solow model, but they put human capital in, and human capital has a very high degree of explanatory power. Presumably, you disagree with them, like in the context of their work — a Solow model, a growth model. What exactly do you specify differently than Mankiw, Weil, and Romer?…

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