Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
14 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think that essentially the reason that they have it is, when you look at an application, it’s really hard to know what to make of grades or other things.”
02 / belief
“I learned a lot in terms of what my interests are and what motivates me. My grandmother was a pilot during World War II and was always very, very interested in learning.”
03 / uncertainty
“There’s a lot of things that would be, say, different between Lima and Cusco anyways, so I don’t know people have done that.”
04 / belief
“I haven’t read them in a long time from the standpoint of evaluating him as a professional historian, but I think his work has really made people intrigued by history and the role that it plays in people’s lives.”
05 / recommendation
“Let’s say that you were to have a cutoff, where “We’re not going to look at anybody who doesn’t have a 1600 on the SAT because that’s already more applicants than there are spots.”
06 / evaluation
“” The persistence is really about there’s not a force to make a change, and maybe things drift a little bit over time. But going further back in time when the strong Vietnamese state comes in and really says, “Okay, you’re going to implement our institutions at the local level because this is the most effective way that we think we have to tax you and to make you contribute to the state,” then that’s a rupture, and the institutions change.”
07 / evaluation
“In both cases, they didn’t care much at all for the colonial population as long as they stayed alive and kept contributing to the first forced labor — that was the objectives of the colonizers. But because there’s two very different technologies and associated sets of infrastructure that come along with mining versus sugar production, the long-run effects are totally different.”
08 / recommendation
“I think, even short of air conditioning, which is very expensive, even just things like fans or having access to electricity, having more efficient building standards can make a big difference and is probably more realistic, at the same time, than getting air conditioning to everyone in sub-Saharan Africa now, which would be very, very costly.”
09 / prediction
“If you were to make a statement like “Land reform is bad for economic development,” that wouldn’t really be consistent with the evidence because there’s been land reforms in East Asia following World War II that gave people individual property rights.”
10 / evaluation
“I think that’s part of the reason why having diversity is super important, because if you have more people with different backgrounds, they’ll ask different questions, which are all quite important.”
11 / evaluation
“I think the persistence is largely about that because then, when you move into the independence period, the South Vietnamese state is also, at the national level, a chronically weak state.”
12 / evaluation
“1, which means it’s explaining 10 percent of the variation in the data. And I think, you know, that’s pretty good because the world’s a complex place, so something that explains 10 percent of the variation is potentially a pretty big deal.”
13 / observation
“Then you have the independence war with the French, and how on earth any of this is measured, I don’t even know. But if you go back, and you look, for example, at maps that were made in the 1930s by the French showing different types of infrastructure, which we think is likely to be correlated with economic development, you see more infrastructure in the north than in the south.”
14 / evaluation
“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.”