NathanBarnard
Intelligence failures and a theory of change for forecasting
Capital and inequality
How do poor countries get rich: some theories
I think this is complicated. It’s completely fine for the preference relation to be determined mostly or entirely by one person and for the most or all of the considerations to be ideological, and empirically I think the rational-agent IR theory has done quite well (e.g explaining the decline of inter-state wars). For instance Russia-Ukraine war can be pretty easily explained in a bargaining frictions model of inter-state conflict.
The problem comes if the procedure used by all the different power blocs to come up with policy gennerates a non-transitive preference relation in which case a utility function can’t be used to model their behaviour. I think it’s completely possible that this is the case, but I think a rational choice model does explain Soviet behaviour quite well in the Berlin example I gave.
This ignores concerns about reaching equilbiria and computational constraints, although I don’t think the latter should be a signfignt problem in these sorts of contexts.
How do states respond to changes in nuclear risk
The value of x-risk reduction
Yeah the point of this post was conceptual clarity rather than a lit review of the literature on gender realtions. I think this is valueable because I haven’t read something that tries to clearly lay out how empirical postitions on the causes of gender inequality should affect the stratagy that one takes, although I don’t have a deep knowledge of feminist literature.
Could you be more specific?
Feminism and Femininity
Thanks! (both for the comment and the comment about proofreading)
The Cuban missile crisis: the strategic context
The same problem would apply in theory—you’d still have a weakened price mechanism because of the taxation used to fund it. $1000 dollars a month is just a lot.
It might still be worth is obviously—the point of this post isn’t to say that welfare spending is bad just that there’s a tradeoff, outside of the special cases of efficency enhancing taxes for stuff like pollution.
Thank you!
Yeah I think I should have framed this better. It would be very attractive if all inequality was caused by rent seeking and other market imperfections. But if some of the inequality comes intrinsically with a perfectly functioning market you’ll always face some tradeoff between inequality and using the price mechanism.
Inequality is inseparable from markets
How close to nuclear war did we get over Cuba?
Makes me want to do the same thing for markets
This looks so great Ollie! I
The explanation I favour most is the institutional economics explanation. The core of it is that the elites, and potentially other power factions of society, benefit from a politcal-economy which keeps them rich while keeping the economy poor. Classic examples of this are slave and mining societies. In the US south for instance southern slave owners were able to use their politcal and economic power to support a system that kept them personally rich while keeping the US south much poorer than the rest of the US because agriculture is really bad at improving the productivity of a soceity long run, a strong manufacturing sector would threaten the elites politcal and economic power, and slavery meant there were strong incentives to keep a large fraction of the population poorly educated and unable to participate in the wider economy. The Indian caste system is another example of very different type of very destructive political economy in which economic roles are extremely rigid, and European feudalism a third. Acemoglu, Robinson, Johnson and Dell write the leading papers from this perspective.
Alterative explanations that others favour but I don’t are poverty traps and geography. I think the most credible poverty trap explanation is that economic growth is determined by savings rate to a substantial degree and savings rates are increasing in income giving a poverty trap. The Galor-Zera model is another macro-poverty trap based on fixed costs to education but this has been mostly discredited because basiclly people don’t think that there are substantial fixed costs for education. Banerjee and Dulfo and the leaders of this view.
The geographic explanation, which I very strongly disfavour, argues that low income countries have unusually high rates of tropical diseases and very low soil quality making the initial stage of economic growth very difficult because agricultural productively is too low. This based on the empircal fact that being close to the equator and being a tropical country independently account for a large portion of the variance of GDP per capita. This is most strongly assiated with Jeff Sachs.
A final explanation that I’ve heard is that rich countries have, either intentionally or unintentionally, kept poor countries poor. The most credible version of this I think is arguing that promoting free trade encourages low income countries to specalise in raw materials and aragcultural products and these are really bad for helping economies move up the value chain becuase they don’t involve any learning by doing of more technolgically complex things. Ha-Joon Chang is best exponent of this theory.
A view that I haven’t looked into seriously and strikes as explaining a pretty small number of cases is that there’s a middle income trap specfically assoisated with crime and instability. Poor countries are able to get to middle income status without substantially investing in human capital but the jump from middle income to rich does require human capital. However, now that wages have risen above poor country levels you get unemployment as new countries start their growth trajectories allowing them attract low value add manufacturing. Prolonged unemployment of young men combined with a weak states gets you violence and instability which prevents you from going to upper income. I want to empahaise that I don’t know of strong empircal evidnece supporting this and included it for completeness.
Another view I haven’t looked seriously into but strikes me as plausible is that prior to independence colonies were able to grow and post indpendence many countries have been stuck in grinding civil wars and low level instability caused by natural reasouce wealth, proffessionalised militaries able to conduct coups and ethnic fractionalistion. Prior to their colonisation these wouldn’t have been indepdimetns to growth because say, oil wasn’t accessable and valueale in the same way, nationalism wasn’t a thing so ethnic fractionaliatoon mattered less, and proffesionalised militeries were colonial implants. I again want to emphaises the truly vast gulf in the amount of good empirical work that has been done with these last two theories compared to the first three.
These are all I can think of off the top of my head!