← All source episodes Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence
15 Jul 2020 14 published claims 1 attributable person
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 6belief 3recommendation 2uncertainty 1prediction 1observation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
14 published records
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“” 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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“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.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler