Africa: Oh Really..Slavery Is The Origin Of Our Poverty
Sometimes it'd be way cooler, if well schooled economist could answer, " I do not know, and the state of science as it is right now, does not equip us to prove or disprove this thesis, thereby confining such research to pure guess work. The 50-50 domain."
Nathan Nunn finds that "without the slave trades, 72% of Africa’s income gap with the rest of the world would not exist today":
My teacher used to say if one looked hard enough one would find a correlation between any two phenomena. The mathematics is secondary, it does not increase the odds of your theory being right or wrong. I wish economist could be more upfront about theories rather than debate between the siting of an R2 in a graph. Nobody gets grants, prizes and peer recognition for saying, 'I do not know'. I wish this was not the case though, because sometimes the search for an explanation at all cost often lead to papers like this. More interestingly, due to the fact that African economists barely have a voice, reallyimmature explanations for Africa's poverty often gain mainstream acceptance, in academia.
According to my calculations, if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.
Read summary at .
4Comment(s):
ever read the full paper ?
it's quite fascinating.. a gigantic number-crunching effort to achieve the regression.
it has some small methodological issues. or rather there is room for error in the methodology (mainly, choosing modern countries as the unit).
it doesn't really say "slavery is the origin" but rather "slavery had an impact".
how ? i guess the main thesis is "institutions".
availability of natural ressources or exogenous institutions (at some point he gives a positive coefficient to "french colonization") are taken into consideration and yet there's a slavery/non-slavery gap.
Oh random no no no...you are falling for the same fallacy. That is all I am going to say. It takes really stretching ones mind to see my point and I understand.
The methods are irrelevant...
Academic skeptics call it " being a turkey".
and yes Random...in my book &2% explains the disparity means 72% explains the disparity..there aren't more ways to put it. I wont bother too much with this because it is secondary to my idea. The idea is that such topics, though sensational can not be studied and whatever you learn from studying them has zero predictive power. Moreso they can lead to counter policy which are equaly silly. If this dude was my student he wouldn't even start the study in the first place let alone having to come up with an explanations for his findings. Its not the explanation that is dumb..it is the study that is inherently dumb. The need to explain dumb studies lead to dumb explanations. Where the other guys debate the veracity of the dumb explanation. Total waste of time. By the way this isnt a novel idea it is an idea that has been in Econ since the beginning.
what is inherently dumb about the study ?
Or rather which study is inherently dumb ?
is it wondering if slavery had an effect on the devellopment of Africa (and to what extend) ?
is it looking for causes that explain the disparity between africa and the rest of the world (and within africa) ?
if it's the first one, well, like you said it's not a novel idea.. it has been in economics, history, sociology, political science, cultural studies or just politics since forever. isnt it worth verifying ? wouldn't "verifying" ultimately set the debate (because it is a debate) or at least make the debate less emotional ?
if it's the second one, it's even bigger. how do we even start to find solutions if we don't understand the problem ? and there's all sorts of theories around, geographical, cultural, racial, left-wing, right-wing, some blaming this or some blaming that.
all in all, that's the point of science. TRYING, testing and seeing what one can find. intellectual curiosity and all that.
i really don't see how such a question is more inherently dumb than any other question. And many policies have been designed after a shaky statistical regression too (or even without).
i don't see you saying "i don't know" anymore than i see you saying "George Ayittey and them should say they don't know when they talk about the effects of corruption" (which is too a damn near unaswerable question) or the ressource curse or whatever.