Melissa Dell: evaluation

Transcript context

…But if you select your cases on the basis of having similar histories, aren’t you selecting for persistence because the locales that have reversals of fortune — a big war in North Vietnam, Communism coming to North Vietnam — that’s a kind of mean reversion. It deliberately gives them a not-similar history. Do you then not overrate the degree of persistence in the dataset by just taking the sliver that is indeed continuous with its own history? I think that you could imagine writing papers about different things. Our motivation was, we wanted to think about if the historical state could have a role at all. In order to do that, you don’t really want to compare South Korea to the Philippines — which is what most of the historical literature on this does — because they’re different in so many ways. We know that South Korea looks really different from the Philippines, but there’s so many ways that they can be different. By looking within South Vietnam, we wanted to say, “Okay, these are places that had a much more recent modern history. Can their past history still matter?” But we’re not saying that that begins to explain everything. There’s other forces that happened more recently that we think are also important. Certainly, there can be mean reversions, and the argument is not that things are always persistent. I think part of the literature is about understanding why sometimes things persist and sometimes they don’t. Certainly, more recent events can matter, and we’re not claiming that there’s an R-squared of one that a place’s history is its destiny, but that there are these forces. I think that there’s ways in which looking beyond just household consumption today, I think you do very much see the legacy of the historical state in both places that were part of North and South Vietnam. If you look at coronavirus, Vietnam has been remarkably effective at dealing with it. They share a border with China, and yet they have almost no cases. They’ve been super successful at isolating their outbreaks. Life is much more normal there than it would be in the United States. And I think that that, in large part, goes back to the fact that much of Vietnam does have this history of having a strong, centralized state that coordinates very well with local governments, and having local governments that have been effective at providing public goods like healthcare. That has come in really useful in this moment when you really need a strong, centralized response. That’s an example where I don’t have a way to prove that econometrically, but if you look throughout Vietnam, the parts that were part of North Vietnam as well as South Vietnam — they’ve been able to deal with this really effectively, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Let’s say we take your example of South Korea and the Philippines. If we go back to 1960, as you know, many people in development economics were somewhat optimistic about the Philippines. They have the English language. They had a burgeoning education sector, ties with the United States. And not many people were optimistic about South Korea. It had a per capita income roughly at a central African level. If persistence is so important at the aggregate level, shouldn’t development economics be more predictive successfully than it in fact is? Because few people really predicted the relative fates of South Korea and the Philippines, but we could have read off their entire past histories in 1960.…

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