Chris Blattman: prediction

Transcript context

…What’s important about the thought of Harold Innis? I was really influenced as a college student by these economic historians of Canada and South America, particularly Southern Cone, of whom Innis was very important in the importance of specific commodities and the characteristics of those commodities in determining a country’s development path. I think it’s a really underrated view of understanding different countries’ development paths. Innis would say, if we really want to understand why Canada looks the way it does today, we would have to look at cod, or we would have to look at furs. And in Argentina, you would have to look at cows. And in Colombia, you would think you have to look at coffee, but you actually have to look at all of the things that Colombia cycled through before they stumbled upon coffee as something where they had a global cost advantage. It’s just the idea that if we want to understand the economic geography and political paths and political stability of a country, we need to understand what commodities they started out with. What this led me to do, and how I got started on the path of studying war, actually, is by realizing that some commodities are just hugely volatile in price for various circumstances, and some are not. So, if we wanted to understand long-term paths of development and why some places weren’t prosperous, it’s because they lost the commodity lottery, and they got a volatile commodity rather than a stable one. Not unrelated to Russia, of course. Last question. You teach at the University of Chicago. It still seems, to me, the place has a special ethos, a mix of seriousness, people teaching things to themselves, showing up meaning business, free speech, some cluster of ideas. How has the University of Chicago maintained that? What’s the secret there?…

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