Daron Acemoglu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why isn’t that the kind of Solow residual of Europe? Those are good questions. I agree some and I disagree some. First of all, as I said early on, norms are critical. And I said, what are the Germanic people, what are the Franks bringing? Yes, it’s the norms. There they have some institutions — so the assemblies have become institutionalized — but it’s mostly norms, as I said. But the ideas that they are bringing aren’t associated with any sort of religious ideology or anything like that. They’re just much more practical, and the role of the church is actually quite much more complex than what might first meet the eye. First of all, the Merovingians weren’t, or the Franks weren’t, initially Christian. They became Christian as a state-building effort. Clovis decided to convert to Christianity, but it wasn’t a personal conversion. He converted together with all of his warriors, and he wanted to have the additional political hierarchy created thanks to the church. And we know that when the church institutions and the Roman institutions meet with other sort of conditions, they did not lead to anything like the corridor that we see starting during the Merovingian and the Carolingian times. The place where the church was extremely strong and Roman institutions were extremely strong was Byzantium. The Eastern Roman Empire survived, and it was actually much better organized in many ways than the Western Roman Empire. Christianity played a very, very important role. Their bureaucratic traditions persisted, but no liberty emerged in the Byzantium Empire because you had the one blade, which was the state institutions, but the other blade, the bottom-up politics, was completely missing. If you think about the longer-term history of Islam, which is in many parts of the world, there are some recent examples of electoral democracies in Muslim countries, but there are actually remarkably few compared to the history of Christianity. Doesn’t that suggest the power of Christianity, as an idea on political institutions, is remarkably strong?…

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