Podcasts about asian tigers

Ben, Paul, and Jordan go deep on the color-coded agony machine that is Asian Tigers.  Plus, chatter about Ito, We All Take From the River, and Elder Scrolls.00:00 Intro05:21 Elder Scrolls12:59 Ito33:13 Rail on the Hill38:19 Founders of Gloomhaven41:55 Mr. Pai Pai44:17 Gibberers53:06 We All Take From The River01:05:53 Guards of Atlantis, Land and Freedom updates01:07:33 Asian Tigers review

In news from Ipswich and District Radio Club, WICEN volunteers will head out in the field for the Brisbane Trails Marathon on April 27. It's never too late to offer your services on the day. A minimum of 14 operators are required most with a 4WD and radio equipment to operate in a remote location. Ipswich WICEN also welcomes support from other amateurs in southeast Queensland. Please get in touch with Paul McDonald at VK4PMCPaul@outlook.com I'm John VK4JPM, Secretary of the Darling Downs Radio Club. The Management Committee is busy at work sorting out a few items that need to be addressed - we'll tell you about that at the next meeting, which will be on Monday 14 April. More about that in a second. The John Moyle Field Day was a heap of fun and thanks to all those who came along to help the club get into the history books. It will be a while before we know how we did, but in raw terms, we ran for six hours with four teams across 10, 15, 20 and 40 metres. Given the commercial nature of the site we were on, we also attracted a bit of attention from the public and had more than a few people come over to find out what we were doing. Explaining Amateur Radio to onlookers is one way to increase our numbers. We also had some underbubblers drop by for a squizz: there are members of our club who are on the road to a Foundation Licence, and what better way to get a feel for what structured operating is about than to watch a team of people calling "CQ Contest"? Thanks to Dougal, VK4EKA for being team captain and arranging the main setup - a centre-fed long-wire flown between trees; to Wayne VK4ARW with his quick-erect rotator dipole; and SAM VK4SAM with a most interesting multiband-vertical and an impressive ground plane. The Field Day also gave us a chance to shake out the club's self-contained trailer, designed quite effectively to operate in a mains-free environment. Fortunately, we had good sun and the batteries stayed nice and charged. Redcliffe & Districts Radio Club VK4RC -. Robert Thomson VK4TFN here. REDFEST 25 "Adventures on HF" at 9:00 am on the 12th of April. I'm looking forward to it. Our new venue is: The Deception Bay North State School, Old Bay Road, Deception Bay. Hello, I'm Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I've been thinking. One area of amateur radio that we don't see mentioned often is one that brought many people into the broader compass of “radio”. A lot of people, these days, associate the introduction of the Citizen's Band Radio Service as being the fillip that gave rise to the many new amateurs who entered via the then Novice licence. The value of Radio Australia to introducing our life and perspectives was well recognised as it had a non-partisan policy of providing news and information and it sought to help people in neighbouring countries. Weather reports, farming tips and English language lessons were all grist for the mill until a few years ago when the plug was pulled. As evidence of its effectiveness, shortly after closing its services several of the frequencies that RA used were adopted by one of the Asian Tigers as their own. In this past week, we have seen the current administration pull the plug on one of the most well-recognised international broadcasters when the USA locked staff out of the Voice of America studios and offices and placed the programming on automatic. My introduction to radio was strengthened by tuning around the dial and listening to these various broadcasters and finding other things like marine traffic, police networks and becoming intrigued by amateur radio, particularly 40m. From that I went on to join the WIA as an Associate Member, Short Wave Listener and eventually I became a full member. Shortwave is still with us and along with scanning of VHF and UHF, it makes a great introduction to the hobby of radio. I'm Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that's what I think…. how about you?

On today's show, Brandt gives a recap of the Marvel Champions event he hosted at his local FLGS before we move on to reviews of Finding Calm, Civolution, Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, and Asian Tigers. The d12 of Fate leads us on a journey to destroy the One Ring, and we close the show with our Doubles Review of Wizards and Co. 00:34 - Brandt's Marvel Champions Event 03:19 - Finding Calm 08:12 - Civolution 16:34 - Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era 22:34 - Asian Tigers 34:33 - The Big Roll: Lord of the Rings Games 46:39 - Doubles Review: Wizards and Co. ___ Check out our Sponsor: https://grandgamersguild.com Holliday Hijinks Pledge Manager: https://grand-gamers-guild.pledgemanager.com/projects/holiday-hijinks-collection/participate/ Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/RightBrainRollers Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/914270393090805 Discuss in our BGG forum: https://boardgamegeek.com/guild/4193

Ben, Trey, and Paul go deep on The Lost Fleet, a hot new expansion for Gaia Project.Plus, initial impressions from fresh Essen releases SETI, Asian Tigers, and Shackleton Base.0:00:00 Introduction0:09:45 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence0:30:15 Asian Tigers0:44:50 La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War0:46:15 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon1:03:05 Captain Flip1:03:35 The Gang1:18:15 Gadget Trick1:21:10 Gaia Project: The Lost Fleet2:13:20 Outro-  Find Etamar at kirbooloni.com-  Game Brain Facebook Group-  Instagram

Malaysia is reigniting its ambitions to join the Asian Tigers by focusing on rapid industrialization and technological growth, particularly in the semiconductor and AI sectors. With significant foreign investments and strategic initiatives in electric vehicles and data centers, the country aims to boost economic resilience and global competitiveness. Challenges include addressing inequality, data privacy, and ensuring inclusive growth while leveraging international collaborations and regulatory frameworks.

LinkedIn is launching a free initiative to verify over 55 million users to enhance trust and authenticity amid rising AI-generated misinformation, including verifying corporate employees and collaborating with partners to authenticate government IDs while updating data policies to address privacy concerns. Malaysia is reigniting its ambitions to join the Asian Tigers by focusing on rapid industrialization and technological growth, particularly in the semiconductor and AI sectors, with significant foreign investments and strategic initiatives in electric vehicles and data centers to boost economic resilience and global competitiveness. Waymo has secured $5.6 billion in Series C funding to expand its robotaxi services, planning to enhance technology and enter new markets like Austin and Atlanta through a partnership with Uber, highlighting a strategic shift towards safer, more efficient, and environmentally friendly urban transportation solutions.

For our Sunday podcast this week we look at another new Essen 2024 release, a smaller title from earlier in 2024, and then a BIG game from a few years ago: Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity  by Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade from PYTHAGORAS Alpina by Luc Remond from Helvetiq New Frontiers by Tom Lehmann from Rio Grande Games Thanks as always to our sponsor Bezier Games You can sponsor the podcast directly by going to www.patreon.com/garrettsgames OR check out our list of game that no longer fit on our shelves, but belong on your table: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16ovRDNBqur0RiAzgFAfI0tYYnjlJ68hoHyHffU7ZDWk/edit?usp=sharing  

One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase.Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it.We go deep into the weeds on Georgism:* Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as wages?* Why are land-owners able to extract the profits that rightly belong to labor and capital?* How would taxing the value of land alleviate speculation, NIMBYism, and income and sales taxes?Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow Lars on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:11) - Georgism(00:03:16) - Metaverse Housing Crises(00:07:10) - Tax Leisure?(00:13:53) - Speculation & Frontiers(00:24:33) - Social Value of Search (00:33:13) - Will Georgism Destroy The Economy?(00:38:51) - The Economics of San Francisco(00:43:31) - Transfer from Landowners to Google?(00:46:47) - Asian Tigers and Land Reform(00:51:19) - Libertarian Georgism(00:55:42) - Crypto(00:57:16) - Transitioning to Georgism(01:02:56) - Lars's Startup & Land Assessment (01:15:12) - Big Tech(01:20:50) - Space(01:23:05) - Copyright(01:25:02) - Politics of Georgism(01:33:10) - Someone Is Always Collecting RentsTranscriptThis transcript was partially autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Lars Doucet - 00:00:00: Over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism, so not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book. If you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line. Let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. The income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich. And it's just this horrible burden we have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:00:39: Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Lars Doucet, who developed the highly acclaimed Defender's Quest game and part two is coming out next year, but now he's working on a new startup. But the reason we're talking is that he wrote a review of Henry George's progress and poverty that won Scott Alexander's Book Review Contest and now it has been turned into an expanded into this book Land is a Big Deal. So Lars, welcome to the podcast. New Speaker: Great to be here, Dwarkesh . Okay, so let's just get into it. What is Georgism? Lars Doucet - 00:01:12: Okay, so the book is based off of the philosophy of a 19th century American economist by the name of Henry George from once we get George's and basically George's thesis is kind of the title of my book that land is a big deal. Georgism is often reduced to its main policy prescription that we should have a land value tax, which is a tax on the unimproved value of land, but not a tax on any buildings or infrastructure on top of the land, anything humans add. But the basic insight of it is that it's kind of reflected in the aphorisms you hear from real estate agents when they say things like the three laws of real estate or location location location and buy land, it's the one thing they're not making any more of. It's basically this insight that land has this hidden role in the economy that is really underrated. But if you look at history through the right lens, control over land is the oldest struggle of human history. It goes beyond human history. Animals have been fighting over land forever. That's what they're fighting over in Ukraine and Russia right now, right? And basically the fundamental insight of Georgism is that over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. And Georgism is genuinely pro pro worker and pro business. But what it's against is is land speculation. And if we can find a way to share the earth, then we can solve the paradox that is the title of George's book, progress and poverty, why does poverty advance even when progress advances? Why do we have all this industrialized technology and new methods and it in George's time it was industrial technology in our time its computers and everything else? We have all this good stuff. We can make more than we've ever made before. There's enough wealth for everybody. And yet we still have inequality. Where does it come from? And George answers that question in his book. And I expand on it in mine. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:03:15: Yep. OK, so yeah, I'm excited to get into the theory of all of it in a second. But first I'm curious how much of your interest in the subject has been inspired with the fact that as a game developer, you're constantly dealing with decentralized rent seekers, like Steve or iOS app store. Is that part of the inspiration behind your interest in Georgism or is that separate? Lars Doucet - 00:03:38: It's interesting. I wouldn't say that's what clued me into it in the first place. But I have become very interested in all forms of rent seeking. In this general category of things we call land-like assets that come to first mover advantages in these large platform economies. I've started to think a lot about it basically. But the essence of land speculation is you have this entire class of people who are able to basically gatekeep access to a scarce resource that everybody needs, which is land, that you can't opt out of needing. And because of that, everyone basically has to pay them rent. And those people don't necessarily do anything. They just got there first and tell everyone else, it's like, well, if you want to participate in the world, you need to pay me. And so we're actually the actual connection with game development, actually clued me into Georgism. And I'd heard about Georgism before. I'd read about it. I thought it was interesting. But then I started noticing this weird phenomenon in online multiplayer games going back 30 years repeatedly of virtual housing crises, which is the most bizarre concept in the world to me, like basically a housingcrisis in the Metaverse and predecessors to the Metaverse. And as early as the Alt Online (?)online when I was 19, this is this online game that you could play. And you could build houses in the game and put them down somewhere. And so what I found was that houses were actually fairly cheap. You could work long enough in a game to be afford to buy blueprints for a house, which will be put it somewhere. But there was no land to put it on. And at the time, I thought, oh, well, I guess the server failed up. I didn't really think much about it. I was like, this stinks. I didn't join the game early enough. I'm screwed out of housing. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then 20 years later, I checked back in. And that housing crisis is still ongoing in that game. That game is still running a good 25 years later. And that housing crisis remains unsolved. And you have this entire black market for housing. And then I noticed that that trend was repeated in other online games, like Final Fantasy 14. And then recently in 2022, with all this huge wave of crypto games, like Axi Infinity, and that's Decentral Land and the Sandbox. And then Yuga Labs' Board-Ape Yacht Club, the other side, had all these big land sales. And at the time, I was working as an analyst for a video game consulting firm called Novik. And I told my employers, it's like, we are going to see all the same problems happen. We are going to see virtual land speculation. They're going to hit virtual. They're going to reproduce the conditions of housing crisis in the real world. And it's going to be a disaster. And I called it, and it turns out I was right. And we've now seen that whole cycle kind of work itself out. And it just kind of blew my mind that we could reproduce the problems of the real world so articulately in the virtual world without anyone trying to do it. It just happened. And that is kind of the actual connection between my background in game design and kind of getting George Pilled as the internet kids call it these days. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:06:43: There was a hilarious clip. Some comedian was on Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it was like Tim Dillon. And they're talking about, I think, Decentraland, where if you want to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the Metaverse, it costs like a couple million dollars or something. And Joe Rogan was like, so you think you can afford to live there. And then Tim Dillon's like, no, but I'm going to start another Metaverse and I'm going to work hard. But OK, so let's go into Georgism himself. So Tyler Cohen had a blog post a long time ago who was comparing taxing land to taxing unimproved labor or unimproved capital. And it's an interesting concept, right? Should I, so I have a CS degree, right? Should I be taxed at the same level as an entry level software engineer instead of a podcast or because I'm not using my time as efficiently as possible. And so leisure in another way is the labor equivalent of having an unimproved parking lot in the middle of San Francisco or capital. If I'm just keeping my capital out of the economy and therefore making it not useful, maybe I should have that capital taxed at the rate of the capital gains on T-Bill. And this way, you're not punishing people for having profitable investments, which you're kind of doing with a capital gains, right? What would you think of that comparison? Lars Doucet - 00:08:07: Yeah, so really, before you can even answer that question, you've got to go back to ground moral principles you're operating on. Like, is your moral operating principle like we just want to increase efficiency? So we're going to tax everyone in a way to basically account for the wasted opportunity cost, which brings up a lot of other questions of like, well, who decides what that is. But I think the Georgist argument is a little different. We're not necessarily like it is efficient, the tax we propose, but it actually stems kind of from a more, from a different place, a more kind of fundamental aspect of justice, you know? And from our perspective, if you work and you produce value, your work produced that value, right? And if you save money and accumulate capital in order to put that capital to work to receive a return, you've also provided something valuable to society, you know? You saved money so a factory could exist, right? You saved money so that a shipping company could get off off the ground. You know, those are valuable, contributed things, but nobody made the earth. The earth pre-exists all of us. And so someone who provides land actually does the opposite of providing land. They unprovide land, and then they charge you for opening the gate. And so the argument for charging people on the unimproved value of land is that we want to tax unproductive rent seeking. We want to tax non-produced assets because we think we want to encourage people to produce assets. We want to encourage people to produce labor, to produce capital. We want more of those things. And there's that aphorism that if you want less of something, you should tax it. So I mean, maybe there is a case for some kind of galaxy brain take of, you know, taxing unrealized opportunity costs or whatever, but I'm less interested in that. And my moral principles are more about, let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. And then if we still need to raise more taxes, we can talk about that later. But let's start with, let's start with just taxing the worst things in society and then stop taxing things we actually want more of because we have this mentality right now where everything's a trade off and we have to accept the downsides of income taxes, of sales taxes, of capital taxes because we just need the revenue and it has to come from somewhere. And my argument is it's like, it can come from a much better somewhere. So let's start with that.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:10:39: Yeah, yeah. So I guess if it was the case that we've implemented a land value tax and we're still having a revenue shortfall and we need another kind of tax and we're going to have to keep income taxes or capital gains taxes. Would you in that situation prefer a sort of tax where you're basically taxed on the opportunity costs of your time rather than the actual income you generated or the returns you would interest your generate in your capital? Lars Doucet - 00:11:04: No, I think probably not. I think you would probably want to go with some other just like simpler tax for the sake of it there's too many degrees of freedom in there. And it's like, we can talk about why I will defend the Georgist case for property tax assessments, you know, for land value tax. But I think it gets different when you start like judging what is the most valuable use of your time because that's a much more subjective question. Like you're like, okay, are you providing more value to society as being a podcaster or being a CS computer science person or creating a startup? It's like that may not be evident for some time. You know what I mean? Like I can't think of an example, but like think of people who were never successful during their lifetimes. I think the guy who invented what was it? FM radio, right? He threw himself out a window because he never got it really adopted during his lifetime but it went on to change everything, you know? So if we were taxing him during his lifetime based off of what he was doing of being a failure, like if Van Gogh was taxed of his like wasting his life as an artist as he thought he was, which ultimately led to his suicide, you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily realized at the time. And so I think that's, and you know, it would need a much bigger kind of bureaucracy to like figure that all out. So I think you should go with a more modest. I mean, I think after land value tax, you should do things like severance tax on natural resources and other taxes on other monopolies and rents. And so I think the next move after land value tax is not immediately to capital and income taxes and sales taxes, but to other taxes on other rents seeking and other land like assets that aren't literally physically land. And then only after you've done all of those, if you still, you know, absolutely then, then move on to, you know, the bad taxes. What is this, severance tax? Severance tax is a tax on the extraction of natural resources. Is what Norway does with their oil industry that has been massively successful and a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse? Yeah. Basically, it's, Georgist purist will say it's essentially a land value tax but of a different kind. A land value tax like you can't normally like extracts just like land like on this, in this house you're living on, you're like, you're not using up this land, but non-renewable resources you can use up. Yeah. You know, and so a severance tax is basically, Nestle should be charged a severance tax for the water they're using, for instance, you know, because all they're doing is enclosing a pre-existing natural resource that used to belong to the people that they've essentially enclosed and now they're just putting it in bottles and selling it to people. You know, they should be able to realize the value of the value add they give to that water, but not to just taking that resource away. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:13:53: No that makes sense. Okay, so let's go deep into the actual theory and logic of Georgism. Okay. One thing I was confused by is why property owners who have land in places that are really desirable are not already incentivized to make the most productive use of that land. So even without a property, sorry, a land tax, if you have some property in San Francisco incentives, let's go, why are you not incentivized to construct it to the fullest extent possible by the law, to, you know, collect rents anyways, you know what I mean? Like why are you keeping it that as a parking lot? Lars Doucet - 00:14:28: Right, right, right. So there's a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with, there's an image in the book that this guy put together for me. I'll show it to you later. But what it does is that it shows the rate of return. What a land speculator is actually optimizing for is their rate of return, right? And so if land appreciates by 10% a year, you know, you're actually incentivized to invest in vacant land or a tear down property because the building of a tear down property is like worth negative value. So the land's cheaper because there's garbage on it, you know? Then you are to necessarily invest in a property and you're basically your marginal dollar is better spent on more land than it is on building up. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:15:16: But eventually shouldn't this be priced into the price of land so that the returns are no longer 10% or they're just like basically what you could get for any other asset. And at that point, then the rate of return is similar for building thingson top of your existing land than buying a new land because like the new land is like the, you know, that return has been priced into other land. Lars Doucet - 00:15:38: Well, I mean, arguably, empirically, we just don't see that, you know, and we see rising land prices as long as productivity and population increases. Those productivity and population gains get soaked into the price of the land. It's because of this phenomenon called Ricardo's Law of Rent and it's been pretty empirically demonstrated that basically, and it has to do with the negotiation power. But like why some people do of course, build and invest, you know, there's a lot of local laws that restrict people's ability to build. But another reason is just like, it also has to do with the existing part of it. It part of the effect is partially the existing property tax regime actively incentivizes empty lots because you have a higher tax burden if you build, right? So what actually happens is a phenomenon that's similar to oil wells, right? You have, it's not just because of property taxes, those do encourage you to keep it empty. But there's this phenomenon called land banking and waiting for the land to ripen, right? Sure, I could build it now, but I might have a lot of land parcels I've got. And I don't need to build it now because I think the prices might go up later and it would be better to build on it later than it is now. And it's not costing me anything to keep it vacant now. If I build now, I'm gonna have to pay a little bit more property taxes. And I know in three years that the price is gonna be even better. So maybe I'll wait to incur those construction costs then and right now I'm gonna focus more on building over here. And like I've got a lot of things to do, so I'm just gonna squat on it here. It's the same way I have, I'm squatting like, you know, I bought to my shame, like about 30 domain names, you know, most of them bought before I kind of got ontoGeorgism. And it's like, yeah, I'll pay 15 bucks a year to just hold it, why not? You know what I mean? I might use that someday. Right. And it's like, I should probably release all the ones I have no intent of using because I was looking for a domain for my startup the other day and every single two word.com is taken. Right, right. And it has been for like 10 years, you know, and it's a similar phenomenon. It's just like some of it is economic, rational following of incentives. And some of it is just it's like, well, this is a good asset. I'm just gonna hold on to it because why not? And no one is, and I don't have any pressure to build right now. And this happens on the upswing and on the downswing of cities. So while the population's growing and while the population's declining, people will just buy a lot of land and hold it out of use. Cause it's also just a great place to park money because it's an asset that you know if the population ever starts growing, it's gonna keep its value better than almost any other hard asset you have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:18:16: Yep yep. I guess another like broader criticism of this way of thinking is, listen, this is all, and sorry for using these like podcast lingo of scarcity mindset, but this is all like scarcity mindset of, you know, land is limited. Well, why don't we just focus on the possibility of expanding the amount of usable land? I mean, there's like not really a shortage of land in you. Maybe there's a shortage of land in urban areas. But you know, why don't we like expand into the seas? And why don't we expand into the air and space? Why are we thinking in this sort of scarce mindset? Lars Doucet - 00:18:48: Right. Okay, so I love this question because actually our current status quo mindset is the scarcity mindset. And Georgism is the abundance mindset, right? And we can have that abundance if we learn to share the land. Because right now, you know, why don't we expand? And the answer is we've tried that. We've done it twice. And it's the story of America's frontier, right? And so like right now there's plenty of empty land in Nevada, but nobody wants it. And you have to ask why, right? You also have to ask the question of how did we have virtual housing crises in the Metaverse where they could infinitely expand all they want? Like how is that even possible, you know? And the answer has to do with what we call the urban agglomeration effect. What's really valuable is human relationships, proximity to other human beings, those dense networks of human beings. And so the idea is not necessarily that like, in a certain sense, the issue is that land is not an indistinguishable, fungible commodity. Location really matters. Or America has a finite amount of land, but it might as well be an infinite plane. We're not going to fill up every square inch of America for probably thousands of years if we ever do, right? But what is scarce is specific locations. They're non-fungible, you know? And to a certain extent, it's like, okay, if you don't want to live in New York, you can live in San Francisco or any other like big city. But what makes New York New York is non-fungible What makes San Francisco San Francisco is non-fungible That particular cluster of VCs in San Francisco until or unless that city completely explodes and that moves somewhere else to Austin or whatever, you know, at which point, Austin will be non-fungible. I mean, Austin is non-fungible right now. And so the point is that the way Georgism unlocks the abundance of it, let me talk about the frontier. We have done frontier expansion. That is why immigrants came over from Europe, you know, and then eventually the rest of the world, to America to, you know, settle the frontier. And the losers of that equation were, of course, the Indians who were already here and got kicked out. But that was theoriginal idea of America. And I like to say that America's tragedy, America's problem is that America is a country that has the mindset of being a frontier state, but is in fact a state which has lost its frontier. And that is why you have these conversations with people like boomers who are like, why can't the next generation just pull itself up by its bootstraps? Because America has had at least, I would say two major periods of frontier expansion. The first was the actual frontier, the West, the Oregon Trail, the covered wagons, you know, the displacement of the Indians. And so that was a massive time, that was the time in which Henry George was writing, was right when that frontier was closing, right? When all that land, that free land was being taken, and the advantages of that land was now being fully priced in. That is what it means for a frontier to close, is that now the good productive land, the value of it is fully priced in. But when the frontier is open, you can just go out there and take it, and you can get productive land and realize the gains of that. And the second frontier expansion was after Henry George's death, was the invention of the automobile, the ability to have a job in the city, but not have to live in the city. The fact that you could quickly travel in, like I commuted in to visit you here, right? That is because of the automobile frontier opening that has allowed me to live in some other city, but be able to do productive work like this podcast by driving in. But the problem is, sprawl can only take you so far, before that frontier as well closes, and by closes I don't mean suburban expansion stops. What I mean is that now, suburban homes, you fully price in the value of the benefits are able to accrue by having that proximity to a city, but still being able to live over here, through of course, for Ricardo's Law for it. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:22:37: Yeah, but I feel like this is still compatible with the story of, we should just focus on increased in technology and abundance, rather than trying to estimate how much rent is available now, given current status quo technologies. I mean, the car is a great example of this, but imagine if there were like flying cars, right? Like there's a, where's my flying car? There's like a whole analysis in that book about, you know, if you could, if people are still commuting like 20 minutes a day, you know, a lot more land is actually in the same travel distance as was before, and now all this land would be worth as much, even in terms of relationships that you could accommodate, right? So why not just build like flying cars instead of focusing on land rent? Lars Doucet - 00:23:21: Well, because these things have a cost, right? The cost of frontier expansion was murdering all the Indians and the cost of automobile expansion was climate change. You know, there has to be a price for that. And then eventually, the problem is you eventually, when you get to the end of that frontier expansion, you wind up with the same problem we had in the first place. Eventually, the problem is the first generation will make out like gangbusters if we ever invent flying cars, even better like Star Trek matter teleporters. You know, that'll really do it. Then you can really live in Nevada and have a job in New York. Yeah. There are some people who claim that Zoom is this, but it's not, you know, we've seen the empirical effects of that and it's like, it's the weakest like semi-frontier we've had and it's already closed. Because, because of Zoom, houses like this over in Austin have gone up in value because there is demand for them and there's demand for people to telecommute. And so anyone who, so the increased demand for living out in the suburbs is now basically priced in because of the Zoom economy. And so the thing is the first people who did that, who got there really quick, the first people to log in to the ultimate online server were able to claim that pace of the frontier and capture that value. But the next generation has to pay more in rent and more in home prices to get that. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:24:34: Actually, that raises another interesting criticism ofGeorgism, this is actually a paper from Zachary Gouchanar and Brian Kaplan, where it was titled the Cerseioretic critique of Georgism, and the point they made was one of these, like one way of thinking about the improvement to land is actually identifying that this land is valuable. Maybe because you realize it has like an oil well in it and maybe you realize that it's like the perfect proximity to these like Chinese restaurants and this mall and whatever. And then just finding which land is valuable is actually something that takes capital and also takes, you know, like you deciding to upend your life and go somewhere, you know, like all kinds of effort. And that is not factored into the way you would conventionally think of the improvements to land that would not be taxed, right? So in some sense, you getting that land is like a subsidy for you identifying that the land is valuable and can be used to productive ends. Lars Doucet - 00:25:30:Right, yeah, I know. So I've read that paper. So first of all, the first author of that Zachary Gouchanar yeah, I'm not been able to pin him down on what exactly meant on this, but he's made some public statements where he's revised his opinion since writing that paper and that he's much more friendly to the arguments ofGeorgism now than when he first wrote that paper. So I'd like to pin him down and see exactly what he meant by that because it was just a passing comment. But as regards Kaplan's critique, Kaplan's critique only applies to a 100% LVT where you fully capture all of the land value tax. And the most extreme Georgists I know are only advocating for like an 85% land value tax. That would still leave. And Kaplan doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation. He's making a speculation is good actually argument. And even if we grant his argument, he still needs to grapple with all the absolutely empirically observed problems of land speculation. And if we want to make some kind of compromise between maybe speculation could have this good discovery effect, there's two really good answers to that. First, just don't do 100% LVT, which we probably can't practically do anyway because of natural limitations just empirically, you know, in the signal. It's like you don't want to do 115% land value tax. That drives people off the land. So we want to make sure that we like have a high land value tax but make sure not to go over. And so that would leave a sliver of land rent that would still presumably incentivize this sort of thing. There's no argument for why 100% of the land rent is necessary to incentivize the good things that Kaplan was talking about. The second argument is when he talks about oil, well, we have the empirical evidence from the Norwegian massively successful petroleum model that shows in the case of natural resources how you should deal with this. And what Norway does is that they have a massive, massively huge severance tax on oil extraction. And according to Kaplan's argument, this should massively destroy the incentive for companies to go out there and discover the oil. And empirically, it doesn't. Now what Norway does is that they figured out, okay, so the oil companies, their argument is that we need the oil rents, right? We need these oil rents where we will not be incentivized for the massive capital cost of offshore oil drilling. Well, Norway's like, well, if you just need to cover the cost of offshore oil drilling, we'll subsidize that. We'll just pay you. We'll just pay you to go discover the oil. But when you find the oil, that oil belongs to the Norwegian people. Now you may keep some of the rents but most of it goes to the Norwegian people. But hey, all your R&D is free. All your discovery is free. If the problem is discovery, we just subsidize discovery. And then the oil companies are like, okay, that sounds like a great deal. We don't have to, because without that, what the oil companies do is that they're like, okay, we're taking all these risks. So I'm gonna sit on all these oil wells like people sitting on domain names because I might use them later and the price might go up later. But now because there's a huge severance tax, you're forced to drill now and you're actually, you're actual costs of discovery and R&D and all those capital costs are just taken care of. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:28:26: But isn't there a flip side to that where I mean, one of the economic benefits of speculation, obviously there's drawbacks. But one of the benefits is that it gets rid of the volatility and prices where our speculator will buy when it's cheap and sell when the price is high. And in doing so, they're kind of making the asset less volatile over time. And if you're basically going to tell people who have oil on their land, like we're gonna keep taxing you. If you don't take it out, you're gonna keep getting taxed. You're encouraging this massive glut of a finite resource to be produced immediately, which is bad. If you think we might need that reserve in the ground 20 years from now or 30 years from now, you know, went oil reserves were running low. Lars Doucet - 00:29:10: Not necessarily, you know? And so the problem is that speculation in the sense you're talking about if like encouraging people to do arbitrage is good for capital because we can make more capital. But we can't make more land and we can't make more non-renewable natural resources. And the issue in peer, and I just think the evidence just doesn't support that empirically because if anything, land speculation has causes land values to just constantly increase, not to find some natural part, especially with how easy it is to finance two thirds of bank loans just chase real estate up. And that's just like, if you just look at the history of the prices of, you know, of residential real estate in America, it's like, it's not this cyclical graph where it like keeps going back down. It keeps going back down, but it keeps going up and up and up, just on a straight line along with productivity. And it underlines and undergirds, major issues, everything that's driving our housing crisis, which then undergirds so much of inequality and pollution and climate change issues. And so with regards to speculations, like even if I just bite that bull and it's like, okay, speculation is good actually, I don't think anyone's made the case that speculators need to capture a hundred percent of the rents to be properly incentivized to do anything good that comes out of speculation. I think at some small reasonable percentage, you know, five to 10 percent of the rents, maybe 15 if I'm feeling generous, but I don't think anyone's empirically made the case that it should be a hundred percent, which is more or less a status quo. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:31:I mean, with regards to that pattern of the fact that the values tend to keep going up implies that there's nothing cyclical that the speculators are dampening. Lars Doucet - 00:30:41: Well, there are cycles to be sure, but it's not like, it's something that resets to zero. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:45: Yeah, but that's also true of like the stock market, right? Over time that goes up, but speculators are still have like an economic role to play in a stock market of making sure prices are, Lars Doucet - 00:30:55: I mean, the difference is that people are now paying an ever increasing portion of their incomes to the land sector. And that didn't used to be the case. And if it keeps going, it's going to be, I mean, you have people are now paying 50% of their income just for rent. And that's not sustainable in the long term. You're going to have the cycle you have there is revolution. You know, you, you know, Dwarkesh Patel - 00:31:16: (laughing) Lars Doucet - 00:31:17: I'm serious. like what happens is like you look through history, you either have land reform or you have revolution. And you know, it's, it's either like either you have a never ending cycle of, of, of transfers of income from the unlanded to the landed. And eventually the, the unlanded will not put up with that. You know, there was a real chance in the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century of America going full on socialist or communist and the only thing that saved us. What, and George's argument was like, it's either Georgism or communism. And if you want to save capitalism and not go toTotalitarian, we need Georgismand then what George failed to anticipate was, you, of course, the automobile. And the automobile kicked the can down another generation, another couple generations, right? And it came at the cost of sprawl. And that made everyone feel like we had solved the issue. But basically we just, and the cost of sprawl are enormous in terms of pollution and poor land use. Just look at Houston right now, right? But now we've come at the end of that frontier and now we're at the same question. And it's like, you see this research in interest in leftism in America and that's not a coincidence, right? Because the rent is too damn high and poor people and poor people and young people feel really, really shoved out of the promise and social contract that was given to their parents and they're jealous of it and they're wondering where it went. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:32:36: Yeah, yeah. Actually, you just mentioned that a lot of bank loans are given basically so you can like get a mortgage and get a house that's like towards land. There was an interesting question on Twitter that I thought was actually pretty interesting about this. I can't find the name of the person who asked it. So sorry, I can't give you credit, but they basically asked if that's the case and if most bank loans are going towards helping you buy land that's like artificially more expensive, but now you implement a land value tax and all these property values crash. Oh yeah. Well, when we see just, and then all these mortgages are obviously they can't pay them back. Lars Doucet - 00:33:13: Right, right, right. Are we gonna destroy the banking sector? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:33:15: Exactly. We'll have like a great, great depression.Lars Doucet - 00:33:17: Well, I mean, if you, okay, so like this is, this is kind of like, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to compare landlords to slave owners or something, but it's like, it's like the South had an entire economy based off of slavery. This thing that like we now agree was bad, right? And it's like we shouldn't have kept slavery because the, the South, the, like it really disrupted the Southern Economy when we got rid of slavery, but it was still the right thing to do. And so I mean, there is no magic button I could push as much as I might like to do so that will give us 100% land value tax everywhere in America tomorrow. So I think the actual path towards a Georgist Future is gonna have to be incremental. There'll be enough time to unwind all those investments and get to a more sane banking sector. So I mean, like if we were to go overnight, yeah, I think there would be some shocks in the banking sector and I can't predict what those would be, but I also don't think that's a risk that's actually gonna happen. Because like we just, we just cannot make a radical change like that on all levels overnight. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:34:13: Yeah yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's get back to some of these theoretical questions. One I had was, I guess I don't fully understand the theoretical reason for thinking that you can collect arbitrarily large rents. Why doesn't the same economic principle of competition, I get that there's not infinite landowners, but there are multiple landowners in any region, right? So if for the same reason that profit is competed away in any other enterprise, you know, if one landowner is extracting like $50 a profit a month, and another landowner is extracting, you know, like whatever, right? Like a similar amount of $50. One of them, and they're both competing for the same tenant. One of them will decrease their rent so that the tenant will come to them and the other one will do the same and the bidding process continues until all the profits are, you know,bidded away. Lars Doucet - 00:35:04: Right, so this is Ricardo's law front, right? And there's a section on in the book with a bunch of illustrations you can show. And so the issue is that we can't make more land, right? And so you might be like, well, there's plenty of land in Nevada, but the point is there's only so much land in Manhattan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:35:19: But the people who have land inManhattan, why aren't they competing against themselves or each other? Lars Doucet - 00:35:23: Right, well, what they do is because the nature of the scarcity of there's only so many locations in Manhattan and there's so many people who want to live there, right? And so all the people who want to live there have to outbid each other. And so basically, so like, let me give a simple agricultural example model. And then I will explain how the agricultural model translates to a residential model. Basically, when you are paying to live in an urban area, or even a suburban area like here in Austin, what you're actually paying for is the right to have proximity to realize the productive capacity of that location. IE, I want to live in Austin because I can have access to a good job, you know what I mean? Or whatever is cool about Austin, a good school, those amenities. And the problem is you have to pay for those and you have to outbid other people who are willing to pay for those. And Ricardo's Rolf Rent says that the value of the amenities and the productivity of an area, as it goes up, that gets soaked into the land prices. And the mechanism by that is that it's like, okay, say I want to buy a watermelon, right? And there's only one watermelon left out bid that guy. But the watermelon growers can be like, oh, a lot of people want watermelon. So next season, there's going to be more watermelons because he's going to produce more watermelons. But because there's only so many locations in Austin, you know, within the natural limits of our transportation network, basically it forces the competition on the side of the people who are, essentially the tenants, right? It forces us into one side of competition with each other. And that, and so there's an example of like, a simple agricultural example is like, okay, say there is a common field that anyone can work on and you can make 100 units of wealth if you work on it, right? So, and there's another field that you can also learn 100 units of wealth in, but it's owned by a landowner. Why would you, why would you go and work on the landowners when you're going to have to pay them rent? You wouldn't pay them any rent at all. You would work on the field that's free, but if the landowner buys that field and now your best opportunity is a field that's only worth a free field that will produce 10 units of wealth, now he can charge you 90 units of wealth becauseyou have no opportunity to go anywhere else. And so basically as more land gets bought and subject to private ownership in an area, landowners over time get to increase the rent, not to a maximum level, there are limits to it. And the limits is what's called the margin of production, which is basically you can charge up to, and this is where the competition comes in, the best basic like free alternative, you know, and that's usually, you can realize that geographically, like out on the margins of Austin, there's marginal land that basically is available for quite cheap, you know, and it might be quite far away, and it used to be not so quite far away 20, 30 years ago, you know, and so as that margin slowly gets privatized, landowners can charge up to that margin. The other limit is subsistence, that can't charge more than you're actually able to pay, but the basic example is that, so this is why this is how frontier expansion works. When the entire continent's free, the first settler comes in, strikes a pick in the ground, keeps all of their wealth, but as more and more of it gets consolidated, then landowners are able to charge proportionately more until they're charging essentially up to subsistence. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:38:51: Yeah, does that explain property values in San Francisco? I mean, they are obviously very high, but I don't feel like they're that high where this offer engineers were working at Google or living as subsistence levels, neither are they at the margin of reduction where it's like, this is what it would cost to live out in the middle of California, and then commute like three hours to work or something. Lars Doucet - 00:39:13: Right, well, so it has to do with two things. So first of all, it's over the long run, and so it's like, you've had a lot of productivity booms in San Francisco, right? And so it takes some time for that to be priced in, you know, and it can be over a while, but given a long enough time period it'll eventually get there. And then when we're talking about stuff, it's also based off of the average productivity. The average resident of San Francisco is maybe not as productive as a high, and like basically doesn't earn as high an income necessarily as a high income product worker. And so this means that if you are a higher than productive, higher than average productivity person, it's worth it to live in the expensive town because you're being paid more than the average productivity that's captured in rent, right? But if you're a low, if you're lower than average productivity, you flee high productive areas. You go to more marginal areas because those are the only places you can basically afford to make a living. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:40:06: Okay, that's very interesting. That's actually one of the questions I was really curious about. So I'm glad to hear an answer on that. Another one is, so the idea is, you know, land is soaking up the profits that capitalists and laborers are entitled to in the form of rent. But when I look at the wealthiest people in America, yeah, there's people who own a lot of land, but they bought that land after they became wealthy from doing things that were capital or labor, depending on how you define starting a company. Like sure, Bill Gates owns a lot of land in Montana or whatever, but like the reason he has all that wealth to begin with is because he started a company, you know, that's like basically labor or capital,however you define it? Right. So how do you explain the fact that all the wealthy people are, you know, capitalists or laborers? Lars Doucet - 00:40:47: Well, so the thing is, one of the big missed apprehensions people have is that, when they think of billionaires, they think of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, those are actually the minority billionaires, most billionaires or hedge funds are people involved in hedge funds. You know, bankers and what are bankers, most what are two thirds of banks? It's real estate, you know? And so, but more to your point, like if I, if it is like point that directly into it, it's like, I don't necessarily have a problem with the billionaire existing. You know what I mean? If someone like genuinely like bring something new into the world and like, you know, I don't necessarily buy the narrative that like billionaires are solely responsible for everything that comes out of their company, you know, I think they like to present that image. But I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. I have a problem with, you know, working class people not being able to feed their families, you know, and so like the greater issue is the fact that the rent is too high rather than that Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:41:45:No, no, I guess my point was in that, like, I'm not complaining that your solution would not fix the fact that billionaires are this. I also like that there's billionaires. What I'm pointing out is it's weird that, if you're theory of, like, where all the sort of plus in our society is getting, you know, given away is that it's going to landowners. And yet the most wealthy people in our society are not landowners. Doesn't that kind of contradict your theory? Lars Doucet - 00:42:11: Well, a lot of the wealthy people in our society are landowners, right? And it's just like, it's not the, so the, so the thing is is that basically making wealth off land is a way to make wealth without being productive, right? And so my point is is that, so like you said in your interview with Glazer that it's like, okay, the Googleplex, like the value of that real estate is probably not, you know, compared that to like the market cap of Google. But now compare the value of all the real estate in San Francisco to the market caps to some of those companies in there, you know, look at the people who are charging rent to people who work for Google. That's where the money's actually going, is that, and, and, you know, investors talk about this is that it's like, I have to, like, if you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line, right? You know, the money is going to basically upper middle class Americans and upper class Americans who own tons of residential land and are basically, and also the old and the wealthy, especially, are essentially this entire class of kind of hidden landed gentry that are extracting wealth from the most productive people in America and young people, especially. And, and it is creates really weird patterns, especially with like service workers who can't afford to live in the cities where their work is demanded. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:43:30: Yeah. Okay. So what do you think of this take? This might be economically efficient. In fact, I think it probably is economically efficient, but the effect of the land value tax would be to shift, to basically shift our sort of societal subsidy away from upper middle class people who own, happen to own land in urban areas and shift that to the super wealthy and also super productive people who will like control the half acre that Google owns and like mountain view. So it's kind of like a subsidy, not subsidy, but it's easing the burden on super productive companies like Google and so that they can make even cooler products in the future. But it is in some sense that's a little aggressive, you're going from upper middle class to like, you know, tech billionaire, right? But it's still be economically efficient to do that. Lars Doucet - 00:44:18: Well, no, I don't quite agree with that because it's like, although there are a lot of upper middle class Americans who own a lot of the land wealth, it's not the case that they own where the majority of the land wealth is. The majority of the land wealth in urban areas is actually in commercial real estate. Is the central business district, if you, and I work in mass appraisal, so I've seen this myself in the models we build is that if you look at the transactions in cities and then you plot where the land value is and like a graph, it looks like this. And this is the city center and that's not a residential district. So the residential districts are sucking up a lot of land value and the rent is toodamn high. But the central business district and this even holds even in the age of Zoom, it's taken a tumble, but it's starting from a very high level. That central residential, I'm not residential, but commercial real estate is super valuable. Like orders, like an order of magnitude more valuable than a lot of the other stuff. And a lot of it is very poorly used.In Houston especially, it's incredibly poorly used. We have all these central parking lots downtown. That is incredibly valuable real estate. And just a couple of speculators are just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. And that could be housing, that could be offices, that could be amenities, that could be a million sorts of things. And so when you're talking about a land value tax, those are the people who are going to get hit first. And those are people who are neither nice, nice, friendly upper middle class Americans, nor are they hardworking industrialists making cool stuff. They're people who are doing literally nothing. Now, if you do a full land value tax, yeah, it's going to shift the burden in society somewhat. But I feel that most analyses of property taxes and land value taxes that conclude that they are regressive, I think that's mostly done on the basis of our current assessments. And I feel like our assessments could be massively approved and that if we improve the assessments, we can show where most of our land values actually concentrated. And then we can make decisions about exactly, are we comfortable with these tax shifts? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:18: Yeah, yeah. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. If you are, I would really, really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it. Put the episode in a group chat you have with your friends, post it on Twitter, send it to somebody who think might like it. All of those things helps that a ton. Anyways, back to the conversation. So a while back I read this book, how Asia works. You know,Lars Doucet - 00:46:45: I'm a fan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:47: Yeah, and one of the things, I think Joseph Steadwell was going out there, what are the things he talks about is he's trying to explain why some Asian economies grew, gangbusters in the last 20th century. And one of the things he points to is that these economies implemented land reform were basically, I guess they were distributed land away from, I guess the existing aristocracy and gentry towards the people who are like working the land. And while I was reading the book at the time, I was kind of confused because, you know, we've like, there's something called like the Kostian. The Kostian, I forget the name of the argument. Basically, the idea is, regardless of who initially starts off with a resource, the incentive of that person will be to, for him to like give that resource, lend out that resource to be worked by that person who can make most productive use of it. And instead of what was pointing out that these like small, you know, like these peasant farmers basically, they will pay attention to detail of crop rotation and making the maximum use of this land to get like the maximum produce. Whereas if you're like a big landowner, you will just like try to do something mechanized. It's not nearly as effective. And in a poor country, what you have is a shitton of labor. So you want something that's like labor intensive. Anyways, backing up a bit, I was confused while I was reading the book because I was like, well, wouldn't the, wouldn't, what you would expect to happen in a market that basically the peasants get alone from the bank to work to, I guess, rent out that land. And then they are able to make that land work more productively than the original landowner. Therefore, they are able to like make a profit and everybody benefits basically. Why isn't there a co-scient solution to that? Lars Doucet - 00:48:24: Because any improvement that the peasants make to the land will be a signal to the landowner to increase the rent because of Ricardo's law of rent. Yep. And that's exactly what happened in Ireland when, and George talks about this in progress and poverty, is that a lot of people were like, why was there famine in Ireland? It's because the Irish are bad people. Why didn't they, they're lazy? Why didn't they improve? And it's like because if you improve the land, all that happens is you still are forced into one side of competition and the rent goes out. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:48:50: Yep. OK. That makes sense. Is the goal that the taxes you would collect with the land value tax? Are they meant to replace existing taxes or are they meant to give us more services like UBI? Because they probably can't do both, right? Like you either have to choose getting rid of existing taxes or getting more.. Lars Doucet - 00:49:08: Well, it depends how much UBI you want. You know what I mean? It's like you can, you know, it's a sliding skill. It's like how many taxes do you want to replace versus how much? Like, I mean, you can have a budget there. It's like if you can raise, you know, I show in the book the exact figures of how much I think land value tax could raise. And I forget the exact figures, but like you can pull up a graph and overlay it here of, you know, whether you're talking about the federal level or federal local and state, you know, there's $44 trillion of land value in America. And I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. And we would probably do less than that in practice. But even on the low end, I forget what figure I quote for the low end, like you could fully pay for any one of social security, Medicare plus Medicaid together, so the second one is healthcare or defense. Entirely with the lowest estimate of what I think land rents could raise. And then I think you can actually raise more than that because I think, and I give an argument in the book for why I think it's closer to like $4 trillion. And that could pay for all three and have room over for a little bit of extra. And so I mean, it's up to you, like, that's a policy decision of whether you want to spend it on spending, whether you want to spend it on offsetting taxes or whether you want to spend it on UBI. I think the best political solution, because like if I bite the bullet that there might be some regressivity issues left over, you want to do what's called a UBI or what, you know, in George's time was called a citizen's dividend, right? You know, this will smooth over any remaining regressivity issues. And then, but I very much am in favor of getting rid of some of these worst taxes, you know, not just because they have dead weight loss and land value tax doesn't, but also because there's this tantalizing theory called ATCORE- All taxes come out of rent, which suggests that if you reduce other taxes, it increases land values, which means that if it's true in the strongest sense, it means the single tax,right? Land value tax replaced all taxes would always work. And I'm not sure if I buy that, I want to see some empirical evidence, but I think at least some weak form of it holds, so that when you offset other worst taxes, not only do you get rid of the dead weight loss from those, but you also wind up raising at least a little bit more in land value tax revenue. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:51:20: Yes, yeah. I mean, as a libertarian, or I guess somebody who has like libertarian tendencies, my concern would basically be like, this obviously seems better than our current regime of taxing things that are good, basically capital income. But my concern is the way I'm guessing something like this would be implemented is it would be added on top of rather than repealing those taxes. And then, yeah, I guess like we would want to ensure. Lars Doucet - 00:51:44: I get this one a lot. Yeah, no. And so I have, you know, I've been a libertarian in my past, and I have a soft spot for libertarianism. I used to be a Ron Paul guy, I went back in the day for a hot minute. And so I think the thing to suede your concerns there is what is land value tax? It's property tax without a tax on buildings. Yep. So the natural path to actually getting land value tax comes from reforming existing property tax regimes by reducing an entire category of taxation, which is the tax on buildings. And so that's what I think is the most plausible way to get a land value tax, like in Texas here, if we were to start by just capture the same, like what I actually proposed for our first step is not 100% land value tax federally. I don't know, even know how you get to there. I think what you actually do is you start in places like Texas and like here, legalized split-rate property tax, thus, re-tax buildings and land at separate rates, set the rate on buildings to zero, collect the same dollar amount of taxes. Let's start there. There's proposals to do this in various cities around the nation right now. I think there's one in Virginia. There's a proposal to do in Detroit. I think there's some talk of it in Pennsylvania and some places. And I'd like to see those experiments run and observe what happens there. I think we should do it in Texas. And that would be something that I think would be very friendly to the libertarian mindset, because very clearly we're no new revenue, right? And we're exempting an entire category of taxation. Most people are gonna see savings on their tax bill and the people who own those parking lots downtown in Houston are gonna be paying most of the bill. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:53:14: Yeah, by the way, what do you make of, is there a good, Georgist's critique of government itself? In a sense that government is basically the original land squatter and it's basically charging the rest of us rents or staying on rent that. It's neither productively improving. As much as at least it's getting rents or must work. Like if you think about, even your landlord usually is not charging you 40%, which is what the income tax rate is in America, right? And it's like almost, you can view the land lord of America. Lars Doucet - 00:53:46: Well, I mean, it's like, I mean, if you wanna take the full, like if you're asking is Georgism compatible with full anarcho capitalist libertarianism, probably not 100%, I think we can have a little government as a treat. But I think it's not a coincidence that if you look throughout America's founding, I don't think it's a coincidence that originally, like people talk about it's like, oh, it used to be only white men who could vote. White land-owning men could vote. Like a government by the landowners for the landowners of the landowners, right? And that's very much kind of the traditional English system of government, just neo-feudalism, right? And so I think Georgism certainly has a critique of that, that it's like government is often instituted to protect the interests of landowners. But what's interesting is that if you look throughout history, I'm very much a fan of democracy, rule of the people. And it's like, I think we, you know, I kind of sympathize with Milton Friedman here, where he's like, you know, he might want to have less government than we have now, but he doesn't believe we can have no government. And then he goes on to endorse, you know, the land value taxes, the least worse tax, because income tax especially, I feel like is a gateway drug to the surveillance state, you know, one of the advantages of land value taxes you don't even care necessarily who owns the land. You're just like, hey, 4732 Apple Street, make sure the check shows up in the mail. I don't care how many shell companies in the Bahamas, you've like obscured your identity with, just put the check in the mail, Mr. Address, you know, whereas the income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country, and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich, and it's just this horrible burden we have, and then it'll, it gives the government this kind of presumed right to know what you're doing about everything you're doing in this massive invasion of privacy.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:55:42: Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I speak to you, I have shell companies in the Bahamas, by the way. Yes. There's an interesting speculation about what would happen if crypto really managed to divorce and private, I guess, make private your log of transactions or whatever. And then, I guess the idea is the only legible thing left to the government is land, right? So it would like force the government to institute a land value tax, because like you can't tax income or capital gains anymore, that's all on like the blockchain and the right, right? It's cured in some way. And yeah, yeah, so that, I mean, it's like crypto the gateway drug to George's own, because it'll just move income and capital to the other realm. Lars Doucet - 00:56:20: Yeah, it's just so weird. I've gone on record as being a pretty big crypto skeptic. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism home. I mean, not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book, who's a huge fan of Georgism home. It's like, I'll take fans from anywhere, even from people I've had sparring contests with. I'm generally pretty skeptical that crypto can fulfill all its promises. I am excited by those promises, and if they can prove me wrong, that would be great. And I think there's some logic to what you're saying is that if we literally couldn't track transactions, then I mean, I guess we don't have much the tracks accept land. I don't think that'll actually come to pass just based off of recent events. You know, and that's basically my position on it. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people, just they're some of the easiest people to convince about George's home, which was completely surprising to me. But I've learned a lot by talking to them. It's very interesting and weird. Yeah, yeah. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:57:16: So there was some other interesting questions from Twitter. Ramon Dario Iglesias asks, how do you transition from a world today where many Americans have homes where it really starts sparring to have homes to a world where, I mean, obviously, it would be like a different regime. They might still have homes, but who knows? Like, their property will be just be like, think I thought I'm going to complete a different way. How do you transition to that? Like, what would that transition look like for most Americans? Lars Doucet - 00

My guest on this episode is Stefan Dercon - author of the recently published and most excellent book ‘Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose'. Development scholars have produced many explanations for why some countries did better than others after the Second World War. Factors like geography, quality or type of institutions, foreign aid, and protective trade policies, have been argued as what explains this divergence in national prosperity between countries. Dercon's contribution will no doubt be plugged into this long-running debate - and in my opinion, he comes closest to having a ‘‘first principles'' explanation than anyone I have read on the subject. Other theories leave you with nagging questions - Where do good institutions come from? Are countries condemned by their histories? Why do some countries use foreign aid better? Why are some countries with rich geographic endowments doing worse? Why does protective trade lead some countries toward becoming industrial exporting giants, and some others into a macroeconomic crisis?Dercon argues that countries that have done better do so by working out a ‘development bargain'. This comes about when the people with power and influence (elites) in a country find a cooperative agreement (bargain) to consciously pursue economic development and national enrichment. Development bargains are not simple, they are often messy. And elites are not a bunch of altruistic do-gooders. Rather, through many complicated networks of intra-elite competitions and cooperation, they decide to gamble on the future by betting that economic development will deliver the biggest win. Dercon does not claim to have found the holy grail of development - and there are still many questions to be answered. But his argument does lead to one inevitable conclusion. Countries and their people will have to figure out what works for them and how that delivers prosperity.Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He was the Chief Economist of the UK's Department of International Development (DFID).TranscriptTobi; Was your experience really what inspired you to write the book?Stefan; Well, you know, what inspired me definitely is just the contrast that I've had in terms of things I do. Because I've been an academic for a long time, I have more than 30 years writing and studying and, you know, I was one of these academics who like to, as one sometimes puts it, you know, like, likes to get mud on their feet, you know, mud on their boots. I used to work mostly on rural households and in most countries, these are amongst the poorest people, and you just get to know what's going on there. I have a policy interest, and I was just lucky 10 years ago, a bit more than that, I got a job as a Chief Economist in the UK aid agency, and it's just that contrast of having had the chance and the opportunity to get involved on the policy side, on meeting all the more senior people...and it's just that contrast between still enjoying being surrounded by people and what they do and understands livelihoods of poorer people, combined with being in the policy space, I felt like, you know, I have a unique perspective that I wanted to communicate. And it was just a quest to communicate, actually. If anything, I wanted just to tell more of these stories because I think, from all sides, we tend to misunderstand a lot of what's going on and how things work in practice. And that's definitely the case on the academic side. We're so far sometimes from reality that I wanted to tell that story a bit more.Tobi; And I mean, after you wrote the book, and after publication, I presume from some of the feedback that your book is actually quite successful. I gave so many copies away, right, I can't even count. I think at some point, I temporarily bought out Roving Heights' entire stock. So how has the reception been generally?Stefan; I mean, look, what you just told me makes it much more worthwhile than if white kids in Oxford are buying the book. So what I'm really pleased with is that it appealed to a much broader group of people. And actually, you know, if I'm really honest, I hadn't expected that people like you or I was in Bangladesh last week that young people there would actually appreciate the book, you know, that you would actually get people that think about these problems in these countries are actually interested in it. And I'm very pleased that people find it both worthwhile to read and quite interesting. Of course, I get some academics. One story last week in Bangladesh, I had a question, you know, how Lenin fitted in my book. Now, I had to struggle with the answer of how Vladimir Lenin would actually fit into the book and thinking, you know, that's an academic typically responding to, you know... I don't know, I'm not a deep theoretician but it was written out of a kind of pragmatic sense of what can I learn from economics and politics that actually is worthwhile communicating. So it's well received. And if I'm really honest, I don't mind that there are pdf copies circulating as well and things like that. Actually, as long as it's read, you know, you write a book, not because you want the highest sales, but you actually want it to be read, and that actually makes it really interesting that people seem to be able to relate to it. Another group that, actually, I found really interesting that can relate to it is people that are either civil servants working in governments like - in yours, as well as maybe aid officials and International World Bank officials, IMF officials, who actually find it helpful as well. You know, and there's usually a huge bridge between them, there's a huge gap between how in Washington when we think about these things, or in London or in Abuja, and so that's pleasing as well. You know, I don't give a solution to the things but I think I touched on something of where a big part of the problem of development lies is that actually, we are, unfortunately, in quite a few countries, still with governments that fundamentally are backed by elites that don't really want to make the progress and do the hard work. And that's an unfortunate message. But at the same time, you have other countries that are surprising countries that make the progress. And so clearly, there is a lesson there that it's not simply like the problem is simple. Actually, the problem is to some extent, simple. It's about, fundamentally, do you want to actually make it work, make this progress work? And I think that echoes with quite a lot of people - the frustration that many of us have, that some countries seem to be stuck and not making enough progress and we need to be willing to call it out for what it is that it's not entirely the fault of those people who are in control, but they could do far more for the better than they actually do.Tobi; For the purpose of making the conversation practical and accessible, in the spirit of the book itself, I'm going to be asking you some very simple... and what I consider to be fundamental questions for the benefit of the audience and people that probably have not read the book. So there have been so many other books on development that have also been quite as popular as yours, Why Nations Fail comes to mind, and so many others, The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, some of which you actually reviewed in the opening chapters of the book. And at the heart of most of them is some kind of fundamental concept that then defines how the body of work itself or the central idea itself works, whether it's institutions, or culture, or industrial policy, or whatever. For your book, you talked a lot about the development bargain, what is the development bargain? And how does it work?Stefan; So the way I look at any country in the world, and I mean, any country, rich or poor country is that one way or another, there is a group of people, which I call for convenience, ''the elite.'' It's not like a pejorative title or a title to applaud them, but simply as a descriptive title. The group of people, in politics, civil service, in business definitely, maybe the military, maybe even civil society, key universities, public intellectuals, I talk about the group that I refer to as the elite, these are the people that have power, or they have influenced one way or another, that can be quite broad. Now in every society, I think it's that group that tends to determine what politics and the economy will look like, what the direction of a country will look like, in any society. And I call that underlying idea [as] they have essentially a form of an elite bargain, a bargain between the different people, they don't have to agree on everything, but to have some kind of an agreement that this is the principle by which, you know, my country will be run in politics and in the economy. Now we could have lots of these elite bargains. We could have an elite bargain that, for example, is based on: if I happen to have power, then everything that I'll do is to reward the people that brought me to power. I'll give them jobs in government. I'll give them maybe contracts, I'll do something, you know, technically, we call this Clientelist. You could have another one where he's saying, Look, no, we're going to run this country, totally, where everybody gets an equal right or equal opportunity, and in a particular way. And so you could have political systems that are around this. Now you could have all these things coming together. You could have also regimes that basically say, Well, the main purpose for us is to keep us as a small group in power, you know, he could have a particular way of doing it. Or indeed, to make sure we use it entirely to steal anything we can get and we'll actually put it in our own pockets, you could have a kleptocracy. You could have lots of these different things, you know, you could have different societies. Now, what I mean by development bargain, is actually fundamentally where that underlying elite bargain values, the underlying idea is that we want to grow our economy, and we want to do this in quite an inclusive way. We want to have developmental outcomes as well. And we make this a key part of the elite bargain. So basically, I define a development bargain as an elite bargain - the deals that we have in running our economy and our politics, that fundamentally, one big way we will judge it is that when we make progress in the growth of the economy, and also in development for the broader population, and I call that the development bargain. And I want to actually go a step further and say if you don't have this, you will never see growth and development in your country. You could have leaders talk about it. They could make big development plans, but if underlying all this there is not a fundamental commitment by all these key players that actually it's worthwhile doing, we're not going to achieve it. And maybe I'll make a quick difference here with say, how does that difference...(now, you mentioned Why Nations Fail.) Now, that underlying elite bargain, of course, the nature of your rule of law, your property rights, all these things, they clearly will matter to some extent, but Why Nations Fail puts this entirely into kind of some historical process. And a lot of people that talk about getting institutions right, they say, Well, you need to get institutions right before you can develop, and they seem to come from a long historical process. In my concept of elite bargain, I would actually emphasize [that] even if your country is not perfect in these institutions, even if there's still some corruption left, even if there are still some issues with the political system, even with the legal system, we actually have countries that can make progress if, fundamentally, that commitment is there amongst the elite. So you don't have to wait until perfection starts before you can start to develop. And that actually [means that] I want to put much more power into the hands... sorry, agency is the better word, I put much more agency in those who at the moment are in control of the state. History may not be favourable for you, there may be a history of colonialism, there may be other histories, factors that clearly will affect the nature of your country at a particular moment in time. But actually agency from the key actors today, they can overcome it. And in fact, in the book, I have plenty of examples of countries that start from imperfection, and actually start doing quite interesting things in terms of growth and development, while other countries are very much more stagnant and staying behind. Tobi; You sort of preempted my next question. I mean, since say, 1990, or thereabout, when the results of some of the ''Asia Tigers'' started coming in, maybe also through the works of people like Wade, Hamsden and co., countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, have become like the standard for economic development, and subsequent analysis around issues of development always look at those countries and also their neighbours who have actually made some progress, maybe not as much as those specific countries. But what I want to ask you about in your book is, you talk about some of the works on development trying to reach for some kind of long history or some kind of historical...I don't want to say dependency or determinism, but you get my point. So my point is, if we go outside of these Asian Tigers, if we go back to say, Japan, or even the second industrial revolution, America, Germany, the Netherlands, can we observe the development bargain as you have described it? Is it also consistent through history?Stefan; I would say Absolutely. I mean, one of the things with when we look at these countries with longer-term success, you mentioned correctly, you know, the Koreas and also Japan, or going back in time to the Industrial Revolution, the second industrial revolution and so on, actually, we take for granted that actually they really wanted to succeed. And it's actually one of these things, and especially in recent history, [South] Korea came out of deep conflict, of course, it was also called War so they got certain support as well. But it was really important for both Japan and Korea after the Second World War, for Japan to re-emerge and for Korea to emerge. It was a form of also getting legitimacy towards their own population. So it was a real underlying deep commitment by that elite in these countries to try to make a success of it. We take it for granted, if we go back in history, take England in the 19th century...I mean, it was a very strong thing, it's like, you know, we wanted to show that actually, we are ruling the world on commerce and all the kinds of things, there was a deep motivation. And of course, also the pressures, you know, remember, the society was being very fractured, and we can't call growth in the 19th century in Britain very inclusive. [There was] a lot of change happening, and indeed, you know, very poor people I think actually initially didn't manage to take up. But especially if we come to the early 20th century became this kind of thing surely [where] development in the form of growth was also when it's a little bit broader shared, became quite part of it. And it's one of these things that when you look at politics, whether it's in the 1930s or 40s or 50s or now, whether it's in England or in America, actually growth and development, I won't take it for granted. People are voted out of office because they are not managing the economy well. There is a lot of political pressure in Europe now. And it's really political because ''oh you're not dealing with the cost of living crisis right or you're undermining the real income increases.'' You know, the US election, we ended up interpreting Trump as an election that actually [served] people [who] had stayed behind in the process of growth and development. Actually, in the politics of most richer countries, it's so much taken for granted that that's a big part of the narrative. So it's an interesting one (maybe, if I may) just to [use] China, I find it a really interesting one. Because, you know, the historical determinism is problematic there. And of course, some people would say, China should never have grown because it has the wrong institutions. But of course, it is growing fast. But if you think of a bit of what would be historical institutions that are relevant? China has had centralized taxation for 2000 years, a centralized bureaucracy for 2000 years, a meritocratic bureaucracy for 2000 years, you know, it actually had a history that actually acquired strong institutions. But funnily enough, when did it start? Just at the moment of deep weakness in the 1970s. When the Cultural Revolution had destabilised the legitimacy of the state, ideology was totally dominating, Mao died in the early 1970s and mid 1970s the Gang of Four came up, which was his widow, it was all turbulence. And actually lots of people thought China would disappear. It's at that moment, it picked up that kind of thing, you know, and actually, fundamentally, if you read all the statements of that periods, they became fundamentally committed, ''we need to make progress in our economy, that's our source of legitimacy.'' So even there there, that's where you see that actually really emerges and this became something that they needed to achieve - a fundamental commitment to growth and development as a form of getting legitimacy to the population. So in a very different way, as some of the other countries, but it's the same principle. Legitimacy of a lot of countries is equated with progress and growth and development, which is essentially a feature of a development bargain.Tobi; Obviously, all societies have some form of elite bargain. Not all elite bargains are development bargains. That's the gist of your book, basically. Now, what I'm trying to get at here is elite bargains that are not for development, that do not benefit the rapid progress of a society, how do they emerge? You talk about the agency of the people that are running the country at a particular point in time. To take Nigeria as an example, a lot of people will blame Nigeria's problems on colonialism. And I'm also quite intolerant of such arguments, at least up to a point. But what I'm trying to get at is that how do elite bargains that are not for development, how do they emerge? Is it via, also, the agency of the elites of those societies? Or are there features of a particular society that kind of determine the elite bargain that emerges? For example, sticking with Nigeria, a lot of people will argue that our elites and our institutions will think and look differently if we don't have oil.Stefan; Yes. Tobi; Right. The state will be less extractive in its thinking, the bureaucracy will be less predatory, right? A lot of people would argue that. So are there other underlying factors or features in a society that shape the kind of elite bargain that emerges, or this is just down to the agency of the people who find themselves with power and influence? They are just the wrong type of people.Stefan; So, Tobi, you make an excellent point here, and, so let's take this a little bit in turn. Leonard Wantchekon, the economic historian at Princeton, from Benin… he gave a nice lecture not so long ago, at Yale, it's on YouTube. And he made this very helpful statement, and he said, you know, if it's between history and agency, I would put 50% history 50% agency, okay. And I will actually add to it [which] is that depending on where you are, history is a little bit more or a little bit less. And so clearly, and he was talking about Africa in general, colonialism will matter. It has shaped your institutions and, you know, the way countries have emerged and the way they decolonized, all these things will have mattered, and they make it harder and easier and so on. But you alluded to it as well [that] at some level, it's already a long time ago now. Of course, it's still there, but it's a long time ago. So over time agency should become much more important. The point though, that you raise about oil makes a lot of sense. So the problem with a development bargain is that actually for a political elite, and for a business elite, dare I say for a military elite, the status quo is, of course, very convenient. Status quo is something that is very convenient because it involves very few risks. So the problem with growth typically is that, actually, new elites may emerge, a new type of business elites may emerge, they may question the economic elite that exists. As a result, it may change the politics. And in fact, if you go back to history, as we were saying, of course, that's the history of Britain where all the time, you know, there has been a shift of who is the elite, there's always a new elite, but it's shifting. So growth is actually a tricky thing. Because it actually, in that sense, changes relative positions in society. Now, that's obviously the case in every society. But it will even more so if the status quo is actually quite of relative affluence, if the status quo is actually quite a comfortable position to be. Now if you have natural resources, you don't need growth, to be able to steal. You can just basically control the resources that come out of the ground. And so your supply chain for stealing money can be very short, you don't have to do a very complicated game. If you need to get it from growth in the economy, it's much more complicated, and it's much more risky. Okay. And so it's not for nothing, that actually clearly, more countries that didn't have natural resources in recent times, over short periods of time, managed to actually get development bargains and basically leads gambling on it. Because actually, the status quo was not as lucrative as the status quo can be if you have a lot of oil or other minerals. And so you're right, and it makes it just really hard...and it actually means in fact [that] even well-meaning parts of the business elite in Nigeria will find it very hard to shift the model entirely. Because you know, you are a business elite, because you benefit from the system one way or another. I'm not saying that you steal, but it's just [how] the economy is based in Nigeria on a lot of non-tradables, is helped with the fact that you have so much to export from oil and so you end up importing a lot, but you can also keep your borders closed or anything you feel like keeping the borders closed for. And that helps for a lot of domestic industries, because protectionism, you know, you do all the things. So the system self sustains it. And with oil, there is not that much incentives to change it. So yes, it is actually harder if you have natural resources to actually reengineer the system to actually go for growth and development. So yes, it is the case. But it hasn't stopped certain countries from not going that route. You know, Malaysia has oil? Yes, it's not a perfect development bargain. But it has done remarkably well. Indonesia, in its early stages, also had oil in the 1970s as an important part, it managed this kind of relationship, and then maybe come the agency in it, you know, do we get enough actors that actually have the collective ability to shift these incentives enough to start promoting more outward orientation, try to export some new things from your country, all that kinds of stuff? And that is indeed what happened in Indonesia. There in the early 1970s, they had oil, but they also learned to export shoes and garments early on, they took advantage of good global situations. And Nigeria didn't, you know, and then agency comes into it, you know, the managers of both the politics and the relationship between politics and business, including from the military, they went in a particular route, and they had choices and they didn't take them. I'm pretty sure if you go back and, you know, there will be moments of choice and we went for another - as people call it - political settlement... another equilibrium that actually didn't involve development and growth as the key part. So yes, it makes it harder. But the agency still, still matters.Tobi; From that point, my next question then would be, what shifts an elite bargain more? That's kind of like do question, right? What shifts an elite bargain? These questions do sound simple. And I'm sorry, but I know they are incredibly difficult to answer. Otherwise, you wouldn't have written an entire book about it. Right. So what shifts an elite bargain more towards development? I mean, you talked about China, we've seen it also in so many other countries where the country was going in a particular direction that's not really pro growth, pro-development, and then there's this moment where things sort of shifts. So it may be through the actions of particular actors or events that inform those. So what... in your experience as a development practitioner and looking at all these places...What are the factors that have the most influence in shifting the elite bargain? Is it just luck? I mean, when I think about China, what if Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues had actually lost that particular power struggle after the death of Mao? So did they get lucky? Is it luck? What's going on?Stefan; You know, I wouldn't use title of gambling but there has to be a little bit of luck involved as well, you know, the circumstances have to play in your direction. But it's not just luck. Okay. So it's an interesting thing when you look at a couple of the countries, what were the moments that people within the elite managed to shift it in another direction? So. China is interesting because it was going through conflict, not deep conflict or violent conflict, but there was a lot of instability in China at the time, at the end of the Cultural Revolution in that period. Other countries like Bangladesh came out of conflict. And so conflict, definitely, or coming out of conflict creates a moment. But of course, there are lots of countries that come out of conflict that make a mess of it. It's a window of opportunity. And it probably is linked with something related to it, which is legitimacy. When you come out of conflict, most of the time, leaders need to reestablish legitimacy. This is clearly something that happened to Rwanda coming out of the genocide, Kagame clearly had to establish legitimacy, you know, he represented a very small group of people within the country and he needed to get legitimacy overall and he chose growth and development to doing that. I think Ethiopia is similar, that actually Meles Zenawi coming from Tigray, he needed, you know, post 2000, coming out of the Eritrean war at a time, and all kinds of other crisis that he was facing in his own party even, he needed to get legitimacy, and they thought he could get legitimacy for his regime through growth and development. So legitimacy-seeking behavior can be quite important. Now it has another side to it. If there's a crisis of legitimacy, that's the moment when the leader can actually take advantage of it. A crisis of legitimacy is actually saying, ''Well, look, we better go to something that begins to deliver to people.'' And why I'm actually suggesting it is that actually, there are in certain countries, a bit of pressure from below also seems to be quite useful. But there is a role there and I find it very hard to define exactly because I'm always scared of autocrats and so on. But the point of leadership is there. So I don't mean it as the strong leader, but more to do with the kind of group of people that manages to take other people along and convince them that is the kind of thing that they need to do. So if you go to Indonesia, I don't think it was Suharto personally, who was the great thinker there that did it. But he clearly surrounded himself with a group of people that included technocrats and also other people from politics, that actually managed to push this in a particular direction in doing it. So how do we get it? While it is actually people taking advantage of windows of opportunity to actually nudge towards it? Okay. But it's hard. We're talking Nigeria, other people have asked me questions about Brazil, about India, you know, large countries like yours with very complicated elite bargains that have national and state level things and so on... it's really complicated. Rwanda in that sense is well defined, you know, we have one well-defined problem and, you know, we could go for a particular model. It can be quite complicated to have some ideas on that on Nigeria, but maybe we can come to that a bit later.Tobi; So, I'm curious. I know you didn't cover this in your book. So let me let you speculate a bit on the psychology of elite bargains or development bargains specifically now. Given that I've also tried to look at some of the societies that you described, and even some others that you probably didn't mention, I don't think there's been a society yet where this is a gamble true, but where the elites have sort of lost out by gambling on development. So why don't we see a lot more gambles than we are seeing currently?Stefan; Actually, unfortunately, we see gambles that go wrong. I mean, for me, and I've worked a lot on Ethiopia, Ethiopia as a gamble that went wrong at the moment. And Ethiopia... you know, just think a little bit of what happened and maybe typify a little bit in a very simplistic way the nature of the gamble. You know, you had a leader under Meles Zenawi, under the TPLF - the Tigray and rebel group - where in the end the dominant force in the military force that actually took power in 1991. And they stayed dominant, even though they only represent, you know, five 6% of the population, they remain dominant in that political deal. Though other groups joined, but militarily, it was the TPLF that was the most powerful. So it also meant that the political deal was always fragile because in various periods of time, you know, my very first job was teaching in Addis Ababa University so I was teaching there 1992 93... you know, we have violence on the streets of students that were being actually repressed by the state, they were demonstrating against the government. You know, over time, we have various instances where this kind of legitimacy, the political legitimacy of that regime was also being questioned. Now, one of the gambles that Meles Zenawi took was to actually say, look, there's a very fragile political deal, but I'm actually going to get legitimacy through growth and development. So he used development as a way of getting legitimacy for something that politically and you know, just as Nigeria is complicated, Ethiopia is complicated with different nationalities, different balances between the regions, that he actually wasn't quite giving the space for these different nationalities to have a role, but he was gambling on doing it through growth and development. How did this go wrong? You know, I kept on spending a lot of time, but in the 2010s after Meles Zenawi died, very young from illness, the government still tried to pursue this. But actually, increasingly, they couldn't keep the politics together anymore. They were almost a different nationality, they were always on the streets, there was lots of violence and so on. And then in the end, you know, the Tigrayans lost power in the central government, and then, of course, we know how it escalated further after Abiy. But in some sense, the underlying political deal was fragile and the hope was that through economic progress, we could strengthen that political deal to legitimacy. That gamble is fine. Now it's a very fractured state and unfortunately, all the news we get from the country is that it's increasingly fractured. And I don't know how we'll put it together again. So that's a gamble that failed. Now, we know more about it. And it was very visible because it lasted quite a long time. Many of these gambles may actually misfire if they don't pick the right political moments. You know, if you don't do it at the right moment, and if you're a little bit unlucky with global circumstances, you fairly quickly could get into a bit of trouble politically, and whatever. For example, with the high inflation we have in virtually every country in the world now, it is clearly not the moment to gamble. It's extremely risky, [and] fragile, and your opponents will use it against you. So it's another thing like, you know, we don't see them gambling, you know, there are relatively few windows of opportunities at which you can gamble. And there are some that will go wrong. And even some that I described as successes, you know, we don't know whether they will last, whether they will become the new Koreas. I'm cautious about that. So, we need to just see it a little bit. Although I don't see Nigeria taking that gamble. So that's another matter.Tobi; No, no. I mean, that's where I was going next. Let me talk to you a bit about the role of outsiders here. We're going to get the aid discussion later. So currently in Nigeria, obviously, the economy has been through a lot in the last several years, a lot of people will put that firmly into the hands of the current administration. Rightly so. There were some very terrible policy choices that were made. But one point that I've quite often made to friends is that, to borrow your terminology, I don't think Nigeria was under the influence of a development bargain that suddenly went astray seven years ago. We've always been heading in this direction, some periods were just pretty good. And one of those periods was in the mid to late 2000s, when the economy seemed to be doing quite well, with high oil prices and also, the government actually really took a stab at macro-economic reforms. But if also you look carefully at the micro-history of that period, you'll see the influence of, should I say, outside legitimacy, you know, trying to get the debt forgiveness deal over the line and, you know, so many other moves that the government was making to increase its credibility internationally was highly influential in some of those decisions and the people that were brought into the government and some of the reform too. And my proof for that when I talk to people is to look at the other things that we should have done, which, we didn't do. We had the opportunity to actually reform either through privatization, a more sustainable model of our energy policy - the energy industry, generally. Electricity? People like to talk about telecommunications and the GSM revolution, but we didn't do anything about electricity, we didn't do anything about transportation. Infrastructure was still highly deficient and investment was not really serious, you know. So it was not... for me, personally, it was not a development bargain. Now, my question then would be, could it have been different if some of the outside influences that are sometimes exerted on countries can be a bit more focused on long-term development, as opposed to short-term macro-economic reforms on stability? You know, institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, I know they have their defined mandates, but is it time for a change? I think they actually have a lot more influence than they are using currently.Stefan; You make extremely valid points. And I think I will broadly agree with you with what you just implied. And I'll take a stance on it now. So the first thing, of course, and you correctly saw that something very misleading in Nigeria's growth figures is that periods of high growth are not at all linked to much action by economic policymakers. But it's still largely linked to oil prices. And we have this unfortunate cyclical behaviour in policymaking. Where the behaviour when prices are really good, is just always missing taking advantage of the opportunity. While when things are bad, we're talking about all kinds of things one ought to be doing but then saying, ''we can't do it because the prices are low.'' And so there is this kind of strange, asymmetric thing about policymaking that we always have the best ideas when we can't do them, and then we don't have the ideas we should have when the going is good. And this is in a way what you're alluding to. Of course, the role of outsiders that gets very interesting is what these outsiders were focusing on, actually, I think it was in the interest of the, call them, semi-outsider inside government...some of these technocrats that were brought in. And I can understand it entirely, you know, there were some really sensible finance ministers at various moments and so on. They were focused on actually things that were relatively easy in that period. So they were actually relatively easy, because the going was quite good. And so actually you created that strange impression, and it's a little bit like together with the outsiders, with World Bank, IMF, but actually, we're dealing with something really dramatic but, actually, we were not at all setting a precedent because it was actually, relatively... relatively politically low cost to do these things at that moment. Okay. So it was progress of sorts, you know, getting the debt relief, and so on. But arguably, you know, it's not a bad thing. But this actually was quite a low-hanging fruit and many of these organizations like these ideas of low-hanging fruits, because actually, politically, it played well, it increased the stature internationally of Nigeria...but, actually, it didn't really cost the elite much. It wasn't really hard for the elite to do these things. [If they did] the difficult things, they would really have started to change Nigeria. And so there is something there that I'm struck by the last sentence you said that some of these outsiders may be focusing on the wrong things. I think it has to be the insiders wanting to focus on these things, on these more difficult things. And then I do agree with you, the outsider should be smarter, and better able to respond to this. There's a problem with the outsiders here as well, take something that clearly you still struggle with and struggled forever with - electricity reform, the electricity sector. It's so complicated, and it's set up so complicated in all kinds of ways and whatever. So much inefficiency, so much waste that then it doesn't function and everybody, you know, complains about it. But it becomes politically very sensitive because there are definitely vested interests linked to it now and it becomes very hard to unravel it. Now the problem is if you ask typically a World Bank or an IMF for advice, they will make it very simple and say, Oh, just privatize the whole thing and do the whole thing. Now. You know that in a politically sensitive environment, you just can't privatize everything, so you privatize a little bit, but anything that's really with vested interests you won't touch. But these are the inefficient bits. So the easy prey, you privatize, and that's someone else making even more money off it because it's actually the efficient part of those systems that gets privatized, and then the inefficient part is still there and costs even more money. And so what I think these outsiders could do better is to have a better understanding of Nigeria's political economy, which is complicated at the best of times, but really understand, where can we start actually touching on something that we are beginning to touch on something vested interests that we begin to unravel a little bit some of the kind of underlying problem of, you know, politically connected business, you know, all the way to party financing or whatever...that you need to start unraveling somehow, where actually the underlying causes of inefficiency lie. Because the underlying causes of inefficiency are not just technical, they're actually not just economic. The underlying causes are these kinds of things. So I think why the outsiders did what they did at that time, it actually suited the government at the time, the technocratic ministers, that's the best they could do because that was the only mandate they had. Together with the outsider, they'd say, Well, that's certainly something we could do. But actually, fundamentally, you didn't really change that much. You don't still have then wherever it goes a bit bad, I'll get six or whatever exchange rates, and I'll get all kinds of other macroeconomic poor management, and, of course, nothing can happen when there's a crisis. There's no way we can do these more micro sector-specific reforms than doing it. So yeah, you're absolutely right. But let's not underestimate how hard it is. But starting to do the things that you refer to is where we need to get to to doing some of these difficult things.Tobi; The way I also read your book is that the two classic problems of political economy are still present, which is, the incentive and the knowledge problem. So I want to talk about the role of knowledge and ideas here. Let's even suppose that a particular group of elites at a particular time are properly incentivized to pursue a development bargain. Right? Sometimes the kind of ideas you still find floating around in the corridors of power can be quite counterproductive. A very revealing part of your book for me was when you were talking about the role of China. Also, I have no problem with China. The anecdote about Justin meme stood out to me quite well, because I could relate to it personally because I've also been opportuned to be at conferences where Justin Lin spoke, and I was slightly uneasy at how much simplification happens. I mean, just to digress a little bit, there was a particular presidential candidate in the just concluded primaries of the ruling party, I'm not going to mention the name, who is quite under the heavy influence of the China model. Right? Always consults with China, always meeting with Chinese economists and technocrats. And my reaction when he lost the primaries was ''thank god,'' right? Because what I see mostly in development thinking locally, I don't mean in academic circles, a lot of debates are going on in academics... is that the success of China and Asia more broadly has brought the State primarily into the front and centre. If you look at this current government, they will tell you seven years ago that they meant well. You know, judging by the Abba Kyari anecdotes where government should own the means of production. He may not believe that, like you said, truthfully, but you can see the influence of what has been called ''state-led development.'' In a state where there is no capable bureaucracy. The government itself is not even optimized to know the problem to solve or even how to solve that particular problem. Right. So broadly, my question is, if an elite chooses to pursue a development bargain, how does it then ensure that the right ideas, which lead to the right kind of policies, and maybe there might not even be the right policies - one of the things you mentioned is changing your mind quickly, it's an experimental process - but, you know, this process needs people who are open to ideas, who change their minds, who can also bring other people in with different ideas, you know, so this idea generation process in a development bargain, how can it be stable even if you have an elite consensus is that chooses to pursue development?Stefan; Look, it's an excellent question. And last week, or 10 days ago, when it was in Bangladesh, I was very struck that, you know, as a country I think that has the development bargain, there was a lot of openness. And you know, I was in the Ministry of Finance, and people had a variety of ideas, but they were all openly debated, there was not a kind of fixed mindset. And it is something that I've always found a bit unfortunate dealing with both politicians and senior technocrats in Nigeria. Nigeria is quickly seen as the centre of the world, there's nothing to learn from the rest of the world, we'll just pick an idea, and then we'll run with it and there's nothing that needs to be checked. And, you know, I love the self-confidence, but for thinking and for pursuit of ideas, you know, looking around and questioning what you hear whether you hear it from Justin Lin, who by the way, I don't think he's malign and he means well, he just has a particular way of communicating but it is, of course, a simplified story that you can simply get, and then you'll pick it up. And of course, if you ask the UK Government, the official line from London, they will also tell you there is only one model when they're purely official, but privately they will be a bit more open-minded, and maybe Chinese officials don't feel they have that freedom to privately encourage you to think a bit broader and so you have maybe a stricter line. So how do we do that? I think we can learn something here from India in the 1970s and 1980s. So when India after independence, it had a very strict set of ideas. In that sense, India was as a child of its time as a state, you know, state control, state-led development, there were strong views around it and India ended up doing a lot of regulation. They used to refer to India as the License Raj. Like a whole system based around licensing and everything was regulated by the state. So the state had far too much say in terms of the activity, despite the fact that the underlying economy was meant to be very entrepreneurship and commerce-led, but you had a lot of licensing rules, and so on. And of course, its growth stayed very low in the 1970s and 80s, it was actually very stagnant. It changed in the 1990s. Partly came with a crisis - in fact, a balance of payments crisis - it needs to reform and Manmohan Singh was the finance minister, then, later on, he became maybe a less successful Prime Minister. But as a finance minister in the early 90s, he did quite amazing things. And then during the 90s, gradually, every party started adopting a much more growth-oriented, more outward-oriented type of mindset. Now, why do I say this? Because actually, during the 1970s, and 80s, you had think-tanks, all the time pushing for these broader ideas. It took them 20 years. But there were really well-known think-tanks that kept on trying to convince people in the planning commission, economists in the universities and so on. And to critically think, look, there must be other ways. So actually, funnily enough, in India, it has a lot to do with the thinking and the public debates, that initially the politicians didn't take up, but actually found the right people to influence... you know, you actually have still in the civil service some decent technocrats there, they don't get a chance. But there are decent people, I know some of them and so on. But there needs to be a feeding of these ideas. And actually, this is where I would almost say there's a bit of a failing here, in the way the public discourse is done [in Nigeria] and maybe voices like you, but also more systematically from universities from think tanks and so on to actually feed and keep on feeding these ideas. There is a suggestion [by] Lant Pritchett - you know he's a former Harvard economist, he is now in the UK - [who] wrote this very interesting paper and he said, some of these think tanks who are actually getting a little bit of aid money here and there and he said, that's probably the best spent aid money in India ever. Because the rate of return and he calculates this number is like 1,000,000%, or something. Because he basically says the power of ideas is there. And I do think there is something there that I'm always surprised by that there are some very smart Nigerians outside the country, they don't really get much of a hearing inside the country, then there are some that are actually inside the country, the quality of debate is maybe not stimulated to be thinking beyond. It has to do probably with how complicated your country is, and of course, the Federal status plays a role. I just wonder whether maybe this is something that needs to start in particular states. You know, there are some governors that are a little bit more progressive than others. Maybe it is actually increasing and focusing attention over this on a few states to get the debate up to a high level and to actually see what they can do and maybe it's where the entry point is, but you need ideas I agree with you and I do worry at times about the kind of critical quality... there are some great thinkers in Nigeria, don't get me wrong, but the critical quality of ideas around alternative ways of doing the economy and so on, and that they get so easily captured by simple narrative, simple national narratives that are really just too simple to actually pursue. I mean...yeah.Tobi; That's quite deep. That's quite deep. I mean, just captures my life's mission right there. It's interesting you talked about Lant Pritchett and the question of aid, which is like my next line of question to you. There was this brief exchange on Twitter that I caught about the review of your book in the guardian, and the question of aid came up. I saw responses from Martin Ravallion, from Rachel Glennerster, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing her name right. So it's sort of then brings me to the whole question of development assistance, aid, and the way intervention has now been captured by what works. One fantastic example I got from your book is on Bangladesh, and how both systems work. You know, there's a broad development bargain, it's not perfect, nothing is, no society is. And there's the pursuit of economic growth. And also, it's a country where aid money and all forms of development assistance is quite active, and is quite huge, and it's actually quite effective. Now, my question is that basic insight from your book, which is for aid spending to be a little bit more biased, not your word... a little bit more bias to countries that have development bargains broadly? Why is that insight so difficult for, I should say, the international NGO industry to grasp? Why is it elusive? Because the status quo, which I would say, I don't mean to offend anybody, but which I will say is also aided by development economists and academics who have sort of put methodology and evidence above prosperity, in my view... because what you see is that, regardless of how dysfunctional the country is, broadly, the aid industry just carves out a nice niche where they do all sorts of interventions, cash transfers, chickens and, of course, you can always do randomized control trials and you say you have evidence for what works. But meanwhile you don't see the broad influence of some of these so-called assistants in the country as a whole. And these are institutions who proclaim that they are committed to fighting extreme poverty and we know what has vastly reduced poverty through history has always been economic growth and prosperity. So why is this elusive? Have those agencies and international development thinking itself been captured?Stefan; Look, I think I should make you do my interviews in the future. Yeah. So I've got to hire you to give...Because, look, I've been inside the aid industry and, in fact, the two people that you mentioned, you know, I would call them my friends, although one of them clearly is very cross at me at the moment. But you know, these are people I've worked with, and so on. And I am worried that there is such an obsession within the aid industry to prove their effectiveness. And I know I've been under pressure, you know, I've worked in it and sitting in London and getting your newspapers to say you're wasting all this money. It's really affecting a lot of people. And it was really hardwork for these 10 years that I sat inside it. But it's about just the humility that you just described, you know, and I want to make this distinction between...I'm about to make two distinctions. So the first one is - you made it well, even Bangladesh, something is going on. And you know, with all the imperfections, the government is trying to do something, and largely by staying to some extent out of the way. And there's some good stuff happening. So there's growth picking up and so on. So you can do all kinds of things. And I think aid in Bangladesh has been great at trying to make sure that the growth that was taking place in that country was a bit more inclusive than it probably would have been. I think it's great. And I think the aid industry should be proud of it. There is a great book that I quote as well also by Naomi Hossein and she calls it The Aid Lab and this is a bit like in praise of it. You know, if we do it carefully with some community and complement what's going on in a country that is deeply poor, you know, you can actually do really good things. Because in the book, I also mentioned Ghana that, actually, aid has been pretty effective because something had begun to change in the 90s, and so on. And we can question that to some extent and, of course, it's none of this perfection. But if you then come to a country where, you know... probably the two of us agree [that] there is some form of stagnation in that kind of [country], there's no development bargain, the elite bargain doesn't really push everything forward. Just be humble to say, look, I have a little niche, and there will be some chicken farmers that are happier, we'll do some good things in health... in health, actually, it's quite straightforward to do good things. But they are to call these good things, don't classify this as if you are leading the fight against extreme poverty, leading the fight against the change in these countries. Because, actually, if the local elite is not leading their change, and those people who have the power and influence not leading their change, the best you can do is doing good things. So I'm happy for us to be able to say we do good things. And it led me in the context of an interview to say like in India, as doing a lot of good things means that aid was actually in itself quite irrelevant, because the real change came, as I described in the 90s, actually, there was a real shift in gear, and suddenly their own development spending became gradually more effective. And of course, you can help them then to make it more effective. But, you know, I was a bit sad, and Martin Ravallion now took issue with it and wanted to emphasize... you know, and I don't want us to ever say, look, we did it. I mean, it's such a lack of humility I'll say this. At some point, we may have been supportive of doing it, but it's always the countries that did it. And the people there that did it. And other times just be humble and say, well, we may be doing something reasonably good, we may improve health outcomes, education outcomes, but not necessarily the whole country may do it in the schools that we work in, or whatever. And it's, that's good, you know, that's just as there are Nigerians that do good things via their own organizations and so on, they do good things. And it's probably teachers in the country, within the state schools that do some of these good things in the best practice stuff. And so yeah, they improve things, but overall, have the humility to say you're not changing Nigeria, because unfortunately, Nigeria is not being changed at the moment.Tobi; So my question then would be, is it reflective of the current intellectual climate in development economics where randomized control trials, they pursue...I know Lant Pritchett has really come down quite heavily on this particular movement, though, sometimes he seems to be the only one standing, maybe not quite literally true and I'll give you two examples from Nigeria, right? In 2012, when the anti subsidy-removal protests broke out, when the government on the first day of January removed fuel subsidy and prices suddenly went up. And the labour movement, the student movement, opposition politicians mobilized the population against that particular move. Some form of resolution that the current president at that time reached was to do what they call a partial removal of subsidy, you know, prices will go up a little bit and the government then did a scheme - an entrepreneurship scheme - where you submit a business plan and you're paid to get $50,000 to do a business.And I read a particular study by David Evans of the World Bank of how fantastically successful this particular scheme was, and of course, no doubt, it was successful. I mean, if you get $50,000 to do business in Nigeria, that's a lot of money. I don't need econometric analysis to know that, but maybe some people do. But the truth is, if you look today, I can bet you that a lot of those businesses are probably dead now due to how the economy as sort of evolved after that. Secondly, at the time we were having these debates and protests in 2012, the subsidy figure there was $8 billion annually, today it is $15 billion. So if you say you have evidence that something works, what exactly is your time horizon for measuring what works? And if you say something works, works in whose benefit, really? The most recent example was in 2018, 2019, where the government was given a small amount of money to small retailers, they call it Trader Moni. I'm sure there were World Bank officials and economists (I have a lot of respect for them) who are measuring the effectiveness of this thing. But you could see clearly that what was politically going on was the government doing vote buying. Right? So if you say something work, works for whom? Right? That was my response to Rachel on Twitter, but she didn't reply me. My question then to you... Sorry, I'm talking too much... Is this reflective of the current intellectual climate in development economics? Stefan; So yes and no? Okay. So, well, i'm going to have to be very careful. Of course, Rachel...I know her very well. And, actually, I have not that many gripes with her. She comes out of, indeed, the whole school of RCTs. By the way, I also actually do RCTs. I like it as a tool to actually study things. And I'll explain in a moment a bit more. So I do these randomized control trials as well. But I am very, very sympathetic. And I actually totally agree with your frustration around this idea to creating that impression about what works. You know, I have it in the book, I even mentioned it, there was a particular minister that at some point announced we're only going to spend our money on what works, you know, like a great slogan, as if you have all the answers, you know what to do. And of course, there is a technical meaning to it. Technical meaning would mean, if I do something and if you haven't done it, what would have been the outcome? And the paper that you refer on the entrepreneurship, this entrepreneurship for the $50,000... I know actually the research very well, the original was from David McKenzie and then other people commenting on it. Yes, relative to a counterfactual, yes, it was actually much bigger than an alternative scheme, you know, then that's something. So you could say, well, you know, as a research question, as a researcher, I find it interesting. From a policy point of view, I'm so much more cautious. And I'm totally with you. You know, first of all, in the bigger scheme of things, how tiny maybe it be... now there are some people who would say, well, we don't know anything, really, what to do in this whole messy environment so at least [to] have something that does a bit better than other things is maybe a useful thing to know. I think it comes back to that humility. As a research tool, it's great at getting exact answers. As a policy tool, I think we need to have much more humility. Because are these ideas tha totally transforms everything, that is actually makes a huge difference? Not really. It probably means that we can identify a little bit and I think even Pritchard wouldn't disagree with [that] sometimes a few things are a little bit better than other things. And if we want to do good, maybe it's helpful in medicine whether we know whether we should spend a bit more money on X or on Y, that it actually does a little bit better in the functioning of a health facility or not, if we spent a bit more money on that practice or on that practice, same in teaching in the school, if we do a little bit more of that in a very constrained environment than something else, that's useful, it doesn't change dramatically. And I categorize it with doing good. With humility, if we do good, it's helpful to know which things are a bit better than other things...when we try to do good. It's an interesting thing, even in Rachel's thread, she actually used it, we can still do quite a lot of good with aid. Actually, funnily enough, I don't disagree that deeply with her and say, Yeah, we may be able to do it good, but don't present it as if we, in the bigger scheme of things, which is where you're getting that, make any difference. And this is where I'm also sympathetic with Lant in saying, Look, sometimes we seem to be focusing on the small trivial things and yeah, it's useful to know but meanwhile the big picture is what you were describing, there's so much going on and, actually, nothing changes there. And so I categorize it in a bit of the same thing. Because I'll now give you an account, which is then go to Bangladesh again. Look, I think it was extremely useful in Bangladesh at some point to really have ... an RCT - a randomized control trial. So really careful evidence to show that a particular program that BRAC, the biggest NGO in the world, the local NGO, was actually what it was actually doing to the ultra-poor. In fact, two weeks ago, I was visiting the program again. And I find it really interesting because it's really helpful for BRAC to know that that program, when I do it in a careful evaluation relative to other things, that actually this program is really effective. And that, actually, we know for BRAC that they can have so much choices to spend their money on poverty alleviation, the things that we can dream up, to actually know this is actually a really good thing. And why of course does it work? Well, it works relative to doing nothing, but of course, it helps in Bangladesh {that] growth is taking place and it actually can get people to become [a big] part of it. In fact, I was visiting people that, whether we use a Nigerian or Bangladeshi definition of extreme poverty, they wouldn't have been in that state 10 years ago and so this is their being six, seven years in that program, and it was really interesting that I was sitting into some interviews they were doing, and I looked over my shoulder, and they now had a TV and a fridge. And I say, okay, an extremely poor person in Bangladesh would not have had this. So there's clearly something happening. Now, that's not simply because of the program. It's also because the whole country is improving. But I'm pretty sure and what the data showed is that those who actually had a program would have found it a bit easier to take part in that progress. And I'm pretty sure that the TV, and the fridge, probably was helped, to some extent, by the programme. In fact, we have very good evidence in the kind of evidence that Rachel Glennerster talks about. So again, I think it's all about a bit of humility, and understanding better what we mean by it. And to be honest, I think there are lots of people who work in that field that are careful with it. And that actually will do it, use it well. It gets just really worrying that people, often more junior people than Rachel, they've never really been in the field properly and then they make massive statements. So they work in big organizations, and they use that evidence, overuse it and overstate it. I think Rachel is actually careful, even her thread was very careful, although your question is a very good one. But it's very careful. But it still allows other people to overinterpret this whole thing. And then I get really worried. I'm actually going to put out a thread on Twitter in the coming days where I'm going to talk about tribalism in development economics... where I'm good to deal with your question as well because I think the way the profession has evolved is that you need to be in one tribe or another, otherwise, you're not allowed to function. I think, you know, you need to be eclectic, you know, no one has this single answer. And there's too much tribalism going on, much more than I've ever known before. You know, you need to be Oh, a fan of that, or you need to be the historical approach, or the Political Economy approach, and the whole... we should learn from all these bits. That's the idea of knowledge that you learn from... as much as possible from the progress in different parts of a discipline, or in thinking.Tobi; I'm glad to have caught you on a free day because having a lot more time to have this conversation has made it quite rich for me personally, and I'm sure for the audience as well. So I just have a couple more questions before I let you get back to your day. The first of those would be...um, when I first became aware of your book on Twitter, it was via a Chris Blattman thread. And he mentioned something that I have also struggled with, both personally in my thought and, in my conversation with people. And somethin

The Acid Capitalist and the Alchemist reunited and ready for a magic mystery tour of Asia with special guest Russell Clark. ***Russell Clark on Substack https://www.russell-clark.comRussell Clark on Twitter https://twitter.com/rampagingruss***Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts! Like and subscribe to Hugh's channel on YouTubeFollow Hugh on TwitterFollow Hugh on Instagram***REMINDER: Want to be notified about limited edition hats before they go on sale? Rate, review and comment on Apple Podcasts and send a screenshot to info [at] upsonpartners [dot com] -- the first 100 commentators will get on the list!

Few know as many people in this community as Nick Masee, and being in his circle has been a privilege. Nick resides in Malaysia and maintains the ties nurtured in the Tokyo ex-pat community. Starting as a teenager, interning for a local freight forwarding company in Vancouver, Nick established a career in the moving business. Having built a solid portfolio, Nick was recruited to join Asian Tigers and manage the Japan office, where he devoted 22 years. Nick partnered to establish a company that imports consumer products in the health and wellness industry. He is passionate about philanthropic efforts and joined the FCSC, affiliated with the YMCA, contributing to various charities. Nick is the only non-Japanese recipient of the Japan Philanthropy Association award.

Hoe gaan we naar een wereld toe waarin we meer kunnen bereiken? Die gedachte is de centrale drijfveer van Salar al Khafaji. Ooit was hij tech-ondernemer van een softwarebedrijf, nu bouwt hij metselende robots om de bouwsector veel productiever te maken. Niet omdat hij nou zoveel met robots of de bouwsector heeft, maar omdat Salar denkt in Grote Ideeën. Een optimistisch gesprek over vooruitgang als tegengif, Asian Tigers en waarom we trotser mogen zijn op de Zuiderzeewerken.Alle shownotes en extra leestips van Salar: pom.show/vooruitgang

As one of the four "Asian Tigers," Taiwan's economy roared in the 1980s, but free-flowing money came with downsides such as the exploitation of wild animals, including tigers.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Shelley Rigger, Brown professor of political science at Davidson College and author of the new book The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China's Economic Rise. Shelley recounts Taiwan's rise as an export-led powerhouse and one of the Asian Tigers, and explains the wave of Taiwanese SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that transformed China into the factory to the world. She also opens a window on world-class Taiwanese companies like Foxconn, which employs some 15 million people in China and assembles some of Apple's most iconic and consequential products, and TSMC, the world's most valuable semiconductor company, and discusses how the island's business relationship with China has complicated politics in Taiwan.4:34 - The story of Chen Tian-fu, Umbrella King of Taiwan9:27 - Explaining the psychological distance between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese19:08 - The conditions that created the Taiwan manufacturing boom33:42 - Why Taiwan manufacturing moved to the Mainland48:36 - The vulnerability of Taishang on the Chinese mainland53:03 - Moving up the value chain: Foxconn and TSMC1:07:31 - Beyond business: the impact of Taiwan on Chinese cultural life1:13:52 - Taiwan influence on Chinese institutionsA transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.comRecommendations: Shelley: Giri/Haji, a joint BBC-Japanese crime drama on Netflix.Kaiser: Jonathan Franzen's new novel, CrossroadsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Asad Qureshi is a British filmmaker who was kidnapped on 26 March 2010 by a militant group called the "Asian Tigers" in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghanistan border, where he was making a film in North Waziristan and interviewing ******* leaders. Read 'Eating Smoke: One Man's D escent into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland.' Paperback UK: https://amzn.to/2YoeaPx Paperback US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993543944 Support the podcast at: https://www.patreon.com/christhrall (£2 per month plus perks) https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-our-veterans-to-tell-their-story https://paypal.me/TeamThrall Sign up for my NON-SPAM newsletter and FREE books: https://christhrall.com/mailing-list/ Social media Links: https://facebook.com/christhrall https://twitter.com/christhrall https://instagram.com/chris.thrall https://linkedin.com/in/christhrall https://youtube.com/christhrall https://discord.gg/yqvHRUN https://christhrall.com

South Korea is one of the four Asian Tigers, which have steadily retained a high rate of economic growth since the 1960s. It started as an agriculture-based country and is now the world's 12th largest economy, its GDP worth 1,619 billion US dollars. The value of the country's technology exports has grown more than 20 times since the beginning of the millennium to reach 13.8 billion US dollars. Yonho Kim, associate research professor of practice and associate director of the Institute for Korean Studies at the George Washington University, speaks with Andrew Wrobel about the drivers of the country's transformation, its current challenges, geopolitical ambitions and the potential of its collaboration with emerging Europe and the wider European Union. The discussion is part of the Emerging Europe and the Asian Tigers: Towards 2030 programme, in partnership with Money Today, South Korea's leading business media platform, and the K.E.Y Platform conference scheduled to take place on April 29, 2021. Click here to register and/or take part in a survey looking at the political and economic relations between emerging Europe and the Asian Tigers.

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo on Monday said the federal government had suspended further issuance of licences for the operation of the Free Trade Zones (FTZ).Adebayo explained that all applications for FTZ licences will henceforth not be processed pending the completion of the panel’s assignment.He added that the model was adopted by the Asian Tigers and today most countries, including African countries are beginning to key into the idea.He said the country currently has 33 licensed FTZ operators, and that due to poor implementation, only 12 are operational.

How the Asian Tigers spoke to then finance minister Trevor Manuel about personal savings – a chat with the SA Savings Institute's Gerald Mwandiambira. https://anchor.fm/gerald-chemunorwa-mwandia/episodes/GERALD-ON-MONEYWEB-RADIO-South-Africans-are-Poor-Savers-ecj29f --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gerald-chemunorwa-mwandia/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/gerald-chemunorwa-mwandia/support

The former Managing Director of Frontier Capital, Olufemi Edun provided an insightful tour de force of the intricacies of financing and managing big infrastructure projects and investments. He provides rich historical and political contexts to such projects in Nigeria. He also has an important commentary on development policy towards the end of our conversation.You can listen or download in the player above, all other listening options are here. Or you can can just read the transcript. You can also rate this podcast on any of your preferred listening apps or directly here.TranscriptTobi: Welcome to Ideas Untrapped and today I am on with Mr Femi Edun. Femi Edun is the former Managing Director of Frontier Capital Limited. You're welcome.Femi: Thanks very much, Tobi.Tobi: One thing I first want to discuss with you is public-private partnerships in the finance of big infrastructure projects like monumental projects or special economic zones or ports. What really are the barriers to making them work and why haven't we seen some kind of explosion in its impact in Nigeria?Femi: Perhaps I should start by telling a story. Last August, I was in Togo meeting with the top executives of one of the largest fashion brand companies in the world, and they are considering setting up multisite manufacturing operations in west Africa to support their global business. And they said, "we just want to get comfortable with all the countries that we are planning to locate in". They were in Togo at the invitation of the Togolese president who had met with them in London, as well as in China - and he said, you know, doing large projects and making large investments in a country is like getting married.Tobi: Hmm.Femi: So first there has to be a courtship, and these days smart countries are the ones that go out courting investors and then we get comfortable. And when we get comfortable, then we get married. Because we're going to business together for a long time, and a major investment - whether by a domestic investor or a foreign investor, it doesn't really matter...a major investment like that is in a sense like a marriage. So why are we not getting married in that space? It's a number of things. I think we need to be a bit more deliberate and systematic in our messaging and in the signals that will send out to investors. So on the one hand, we're telling investors that they are welcome and their investments will be protected, on the other hand, they are seeing examples of activity that may suggest that that is not exactly the case. And certainly as far as foreign investors are concerned, one of the things that foreign investors will tell you is that they want to see how a country has treated its local investors in the process of making decisions about whether to invest or not. Then beyond all that, in making the investments, is there a smooth seamless process (going) in these investments? What are the rules, are they well-known upfront? How much work has the government of Nigeria done? Has the public sector side demonstrate its readiness to investors?With all of these projects, usually, there's a significant amount of project preparation that has to be done in order to demonstrate, at least, in an outline and preliminary way the viability and the desirability of these investments. We need to be very clear about the legal and regulatory regime. We need to be clear about how the relationships are likely to be structured. We need to be clear about the extent to which investors will have protection for their funds. These are some of the areas that we need to improve. So we have an Infrastructure Concession and Regulatory Commission, the ICRC, that does a great job, led by very good people. The CEO there is an ex-Shell executive who's got an engineering background, worked on large projects, he knows how the world works. And there are some excellent people working within the ICRC. But beyond navigating ICRC, there's the whole question of how you just deal with the octopus that Nigeria can be - lots of regulation, there are lots of government agencies and entities that have some form of oversight or some form of regulatory role to play in these projects and we've just got to be able to do a better job of bringing all those things together in one place. And it goes beyond lining up 26 agencies in a hall and saying that it's a one-stop-shop. It really goes beyond that. We really need to be a lot more joined-up in the public sector in terms of how we approach the private markets for capital for these projects.Tobi: Is it a failure of communication because interesting thing you mentioned... you can have the Ministry of Trade and Investment that is trying to bring investment into the country courting investors and all that, and you can also have an example of a regulatory agency that is more or less standing in the way of growth for a fledgling sector or industry, so what could better improve this synergy in communication to present a common agenda on the investment front? Femi: Again, I'm a great believer in the power of stories. Let's go back to two examples. Nigeria is a country of interesting paradoxes because one of the most successful PPP entities in the world is in Nigeria. Tobi: Hmm.Femi: Nigeria LNG is one of the best examples that you can find globally in the area of public-private partnerships. That's something that was constructed very very carefully to create alignment between Nigeria and the international oil companies (the IOCs) in the process of trying to exploit our gas resources. Now, if you remember the history of Nigeria LNG, it took a while... it took a number of years for it to actually come out of the ground and become operational. But I think one of the key messages there is that there was a very careful and deliberate process of creating alignment between the public and the private sectors. The public sector being [the] government of Nigeria (the NNPC), the oil industry, at least, the publicly owned oil industry in Nigeria and IOCs who brought in management and capital of this project. So we brought our gas, and for that we got equity. The IOCs brought cash, the knowhow, the management expertise to run these multiple projects over several streams that represent the company to create what is the largest fleet of LNG vessels in the world, to build a company that has paid billions of dollars (tens of billions of dollars) to government in dividends over the years. So beyond communication, I think the real point is working hard to ensure that there is alignment; that's something that we hear a lot in investing, in private equity, in principal investing, in any type of investing where partners are involved - it's critical for you to have alignment between the partners, that's why the analogy of marriage is such a powerful one when you're thinking about PPP projects in Nigeria. So, yes, just as you need communication to make good marriages work, you need communication to make good PPP projects work. That communication is even more critical early on whilst you're trying to find the partners and whilst you're trying to create alignment.Tobi: Hmm.Femi: It's not exactly a PPP project but the process by which we conducted the auctions for the GSM licences that brought private companies coming in to take spectrum from government in what was acknowledged as an open, fair, transparent, very professionally managed process is certainly one of the high points in the history of Nigeria in terms of attracting foreign direct investment; and if we just apply those lessons on a consistent basis to the things that we do, take time to be very clear about our objectives, take time to make sure that we communicate those objectives very clearly, design a playing field, level it, and make it open and use sensible criteria to determine the sorts of partners that you want. One of my old bosses always used to say that one of the things that's important for you to do in life in building a business and selling a product or services is to define your target market clearly. Tobi: Hmm.Femi: Even going into partnerships like marriages you've got to be very clear about it. So we were clear that we wanted investors that had experience in deploying telecoms networks internationally, that had experience in working with the manufacturers, that had experience in rolling out the technology, also evidence of a particular capability to make these things work and that's why we got the results. So if we follow these sorts of processes and we make sure that they're run properly, openly, by people of integrity, then we'll get the results that we're looking for. So we have great people in the ICRC, they are credible, they have character, what we need to do is just add the other bits, then just get our signalling right as a country, get our priorities right as a country and start singing off the same hymn sheet. Tobi: Since we're on the subject, maybe you can help me untangle one puzzle that has personally haunted me for years and I haven't been able to get a good answer. What went wrong with Tinapa? This was a project that had so much promise, there's so much investment and, of course, we've gotten a multitude of answers... some will say "oh, it's because government didn't build the port" or "Calabar did not have the natural advantages" blah blah blah, in your own opinion, what went wrong with that project and would you say we have learnt the lessons from some of our failures?Femi: Well, you're right when you say that, you know, depending on who you talk to, you'll probably get many answers as questions to the question of what happened to Tinapa. In my view, from the perspective of an interested bystander, in the sense that I was somewhat involved in the credit rating process of the project financing that went into that. And I certainly was involved from just my interest in governance and political economy. But my view is that like most other project financings, when a project has lots of externalities - in this case, things like dredging, modernization of the ports, improvement of road, air, infrastructure going into Calabar - were outside the role of sponsors, Cross Rivers state and their investment company. When you have those sorts of things and those who were involved are not tied into the financing themselves with clear obligations in order to make the project go forward. Tinapa was a great project, an interesting location but if they had put it, perhaps, closer to the existing infrastructure in Lagos even as poor as it is and as stretched as it is currently, maybe they would have had a better chance of success. But you see I think one of the issues there is that we've got to realise that it's important for a country of this size for us to, if you like, democratise the development of infrastructure. We roll it out, so that we reduce the pressure on Lagos. But Tinapa was a few years ahead of its time and it was also a victim of externalities that were outside the control it's [indistinct word].Tobi: Would you say we have learnt the lesson from that experience?Femi: Well, I think the way to answer that question is to say that when a project sponsor is a public sector entity or a sub-national government, to the extent that it doesn't try and repeat projects like the one that failed, it learns the lesson, right? But when we see similar projects coming to market and getting broad support across the board? No, we haven't learned the lesson. One of the paradoxes of the financial market especially the banking credit markets which goes through cycles, seven to ten-year cycles, everybody that was involved in the last banking downtown, the last growth of non-performing loans either retired or they lost their jobs and the institutional memory sort of just stays on the shelf and we end up making the same mistakes in different ways. But we forget everything and we learn nothing. That's what the history of the financial markets tells us, that's what the history of the economic cycles tells us. I don't think that's anybody's fault in particular, it's just that, usually, what we end up finding is that there is a triumph of hope and optimism over experience.Tobi: Another passion of mine is special economic zones which I have actually researched quite extensively and there are a number of them in Nigeria. As a matter of fact, we've been doing it for years under different aegis whether industrial parks or export processing zones. Again, why haven't we seen the kind of impact for this idea as we saw in the case of places like China and Korea? What's going on?Femi: Nigeria was actually an early adopter of the idea of special economic zones and our export processing zone decree was written in the Babangida administration, so this is something that we did in the early 90s. The development of Calabar export processing zone, Calabar free trade zone which was the first one which is fully government-owned, I think started in 1993. Kano free trade zone which is also government-owned started, I believe, in 1996. So Nigeria was an early adopter of the idea but when you think about government ownership of special economic zones whatever name they are called by, we've got to look at the fact that one of the drivers of the success of these things is the quality of infrastructure, the ease of doing business, and the cost of doing business. So it's supposed to be a magnet for investment by offering world-class infrastructure that makes it easy to do business and lowers the cost of doing business. What that means is that government needs to make significant amounts of investment in the hard and soft infrastructure, both inside and outside the fence. Outside the fence in terms of the connecting infrastructure - road, rail, air, sea or water transportation, power, these days ICT and so forth. You need to make sure that there is also infrastructure within the fence. You need to make sure that in addition to all the hard infrastructure, there is also the soft infrastructure in terms of the regulatory framework in terms of the supply of skilled labour both operational and managerial. So there's a huge amount of investment that needs to be made in hard and soft infrastructure both inside and outside the fence of these SEZs, and that requires government to come up with substantial amount of money. Now when you think about all of the competing demands on the treasury - for education, for healthcare, for public infrastructure, for the justice system, for the police, for the armed forces, the court system - we will struggle to be able to come up with the amount of investments required to make these projects work, at least, to the standards that are required and to the levels that we see when we go around the world. That is something that we cannot run away from and government hasn't been very successful in being able to attract private investment into collaborations with the public sector in that space. The best examples that you will see in Nigeria of special economic zones are private ones - the Onne free trade zone in the Port Harcourt area is a great example, that's an Intels project; the LADOL project in Lagos is another example; Nigerdock is another example, even though Nigerdock, the basic infrastructure there was invested in by government in the late [70s] and early 80s and it went through a process of privatisation. But the real issue is that government would struggle to come up with the amounts of capital investment required and its patient money that's required to stay there over 15-20 year time frames. So I think until we figure out a sustainable way in which to attract private investment in collaboration with government because there is a very important role that government will play as an enabler, as a regulator, as a facilitator of the operation of these special zones. Until we find that solution, I think we'll continue to struggle.Tobi: Do you think that in making some of these policies, particularly regarding special economic zones, do you think we are pragmatic enough about the economics? And here is why I say this: some of these projects you'll see, at least, in my own reading of some of the initiatives and some of the policy documents, you see things like, oh, wanting to put a zone in all the six geo-political zones and trying to be ethnically correct or politically balanced, where actually in some cases those are not what works. Special Economic Zones primarily should be able to facilitate trade and you have industrial parks located in landlocked places in Nigeria. So are we being pragmatic enough about how we apply these policies?Femi: As to the question of pragmatism, my answer is no. As to the example of locating zones across what we now call our geo-political zones, I beg to differ slightly.Tobi: Okay.Femi: If you look around Nigeria, there is no part of the country, there is almost no state you would look in where there's not some compelling argument for some type of investment. I remember looking at the northwest and a place like Sokoto and you will say it's far from the port, it's landlocked blah blah blah, but what most people usually buy as Moroccan leather is mostly the hides of goats that are killed in Nigeria. If you look in the southeast, some of the best quality lead and zinc on earth is buried between Abakaliki and Ishiagu in Ebonyi State. If you look in the southwest, you look in Ogun State, you will see its ability to support major investments in ceramics. If you look in almost every state in Nigeria, I daresay every state in Nigeria, there is some compelling case that can be made and that's not to suggest that you should put a special economic zone in every state, I think that what is required here is to actually take a regional view and use these things as regional levers for development. Use them to leverage regional development by making them magnets for infrastructure investment, magnets for development of manpower and almost like hubs around which regions of the country can grow. So I think that's actually being pragmatic when you take a regional view of development of Nigeria and I think you will be able to establish viability as long as you do the hard work of approaching it correctly and making sure that they're set up properly. However, that's not to say that generally as a country we approach our economic decision-making primarily from a pragmatic point of view. There's a lot of emotion, there is a lot of emotiveness that goes into our policy-making and there's the diversity of views that complicates decision making in Nigeria. There is the fact that we are a democracy which is a good thing, but it just means that every voice will be heard, every voice must be heard and in the policymaking process, in the context of ideas it seems to be that it is the loudest and most strident, most emotive voices that carry the day rather than the voice of reason. So I really think that we need to bring a lot more pragmatism into our policymaking as a country, but on the specific case of citing special economic zones regionally in the country, I think that's actually a very pragmatic thing to do. Tobi: I agree with you, there's a case for investment in every state in the country, no doubt, given the overall general level of investment. I guess my point is that there should be room for a variety of approaches. You have Ondo state that is building ports, and you have Ekiti State - I've actually had Akin on the show and he says that they are going with business process outsourcing - they are going with services rather than manufacturing. I just think they should be room for a variety of approaches and that leads me to the next question which is, should decision-making on some of these policies be decentralised, either at the region or at the state or whatever unit of analysis we choose?Femi: Absolutely. There is a very strong case for decentralising as long as we decentralise, we also simplify and streamline the process of making those decisions; so that we don't just decentralise for the sake of it and then we end up getting tangled in even more bureaucracy and more red tape, and more complexity as we decentralise. Certainly, there is a good argument for everyone developing according to their comparative advantage and focusing on where their strengths either lie or potentially could lie if they did the right thing to enable those strengths. So, yes, there must be diversity in approaches because there is no homogeneity in factor endowment anyway.Tobi: Yeah.Femi: Different parts of the countries are blessed differently. And speaking to the case of Ekiti, I think it's actually a very clever thing that the state has done to say it wants to focus on services as a pathway to rapid development and job creation.Tobi: I want to hit you with a bit of a curveball here. How much influence would you ascribe to history in our political economy, generally?Femi: Well, history does play a very important role and there is no doubt that history has shaped the political economy of Nigeria. The evolution of political economy is a historical process anyway so history has shaped it. What I quarrel with is, and I'm sort of adjusting my stance to the curveball that you have thrown. What l quarrel with is our using history as an excuse for our failure to perform, our failure to deliver and the abysmal lack of results, the abysmal lack of progress in certain areas and the abysmal deterioration that we have seen in things like the quality of the public service, in things like the quality of the educational system, in things like the quality of public health. Some of the things that should be the building blocks and part of the engine of the development of the country, we have seen significant damage done to those things. That damage we could say, maybe, was inevitable considering our history, but we can debate that for years. Certainly, I think that with all of its imperfections, one of the things that British colonialists bequeath to us was the Colonial Civil Service which became the Nigerian Civil Service and unfortunately that Nigerian Civil Service is now no longer fit for purpose in terms of its ability to deliver on a sustainable basis the, if you like, the infrastructure and the delivery framework for governance, for policy-making, and policy implementation in Nigeria. Tobi: That's interesting and I'm just going to keep them coming, so another curveball - resource curse: does it really matter? Is it as deterministic as some analysts would have us believe?Femi: Well, just look at [the] Scandinavia, look at the North Europeans who have oil and what they've done with the oil, it doesn't have to be a curse. The resource curse is potentially a curse when you allow it to be. It's almost like saying that you have a genetic predisposition to diabetes or hypertension, now you can beat that by subjecting yourself to the discipline of a certain lifestyle or at least you can delay its onset or mitigate its results. So the resource curse is not the death sentence that some of the influential thinkers in political economy and economic history have made it out to be. There are countries that have beaten it, that proves that it's beatable.Tobi: Yeah, so, corruption. How much weight would you ascribe to that? Some people would argue "well, it doesn't matter". Some will say "oh, it is everything that is wrong with us". What's your reaction to that?Femi: Corruption is huge. Corruption is a huge problem. Corruption reduces the amount of money that is available for the important things that we need to do. Corruption increases the cost of doing business. Corruption compromises our institutions. Corruption is like cancer, but side-by-side with corruption is just the frightening level of [in]competence that you see when you go into the public space. There are some amazing people in public services and there are parts of it that work better than others, and this is not a blanket condemnation but certainly, we do need to strengthen our institutions. We need to strengthen the capabilities of the Civil Service to support the development and implementation of policy, to support government, and to ensure that we achieve the objectives of government. That capacity is almost as important as the cleanliness that we need as well. We need both character and competence.Tobi: What about ideology in our politics - do we need more or less?Femi: I'm not a huge fan of ideology. I think we need to be pragmatic. I think many of those ideological arguments are good for the ivory tower, they're good for the think-tanks, they're good for the luxury of being outside the cold phase of making decision in government, we just have to be pragmatic and put the national interest and the interest of the people first. When you want to develop a country as big and diverse and complicated as Nigeria, and you want to develop within a hurry, you have to put pragmatism before ideology.Tobi: But don't you think that ideology can be useful in terms of competition for dominant ideas? For example, at least, in my own, again, reading of the situation, almost every regime in Nigeria since 1999 regardless of political party or persuasion do protectionism and some form of mixed or closed economy model. So some will argue that if we have ideology enough in our politics there will be competition for some of those ideas and we would actually see better pragmatic policies.Femi: I'm not sure the issue is one of ideology, I think the issue is about the choices that we've made. So the big choices we've made in the political economy are choices that have really not been in our best long-term interest as a people. So if we're talking about ideology, I think the debate around capitalism and communism have been won and lost. I think the debates are really around doing what works and if you look at the economic history of the 20th century in particular, there are some ideas out there that have been proven to work. For countries that are in a hurry to develop, there are some things that you do. You've got to go for aggressive, inclusive growth. You've got to go for job-rich growth. So you select the policies that help you to do that and the question really is is that what we have done? You have to go for significant investment in hard infrastructure, you have to go for significant investment in education, have we done that? And have we done that in a way that is in our best national interest? So I think those are really the issues we should be talking about rather than ideology. I think it's really about the quality of the choices that we've made rather than the ideologies that we have followed. What is Nigeria's ideology? We don't have one. We don't have a national ideology.Tobi: Interesting.Femi: We had our national development plans of the 70s that talked about government controlling the commanding heights of the economy and then went through a process of privatisation after the structural adjustment reforms of the 80s and the 90s and the reality is that everywhere you go, China is a communist country but China practices state capitalism. The Chinese state as elevated capitalism to an art form. Few years ago I was sitting in a seminar at Harvard University and the director of the China Centre was saying that western countries are taking delegations to China to learn from Chinese government officials how to court foreign investments and how to form strong public-private partnerships with private investors. Countries in the west after the last big economic crisis nationalised banks, gave bailout to car companies, gave bailouts to all sorts of companies. We're going through a Covid pandemic now and the countries that can afford to give bailouts are giving bailout to countries [companies]. So there is a role that government plays, there is a role that markets play and what we need to do is really to find what works for us and do it. As opposed to having this, as far as I'm concerned, fairly sterile arguments about ideology.Tobi: That's a lot to think about. One final question which is a bit of a tradition on the show, what's the one big idea you would like to see spread all over Nigeria both publicly [and] privately? What's one idea you're passionate about and you'll like to see spread?Femi: There's a few of them in my mind so I really don't know who wins the competition for first place among those big ideas. Certainly one is that the role of government is to be an enabler of the success of its people, its businesses and its corporations. Government needs to be an enabler rather than a gatekeeper or a gamekeeper or someone that shortens the gains against its people. Government should be opening doors and playing a facilitating and enabling role and helping everyone to actualise their potential and we need to go back to our colonial history and just fix that. It's a big mindset thing but it needs to distilled down into the values and ethos and the way that government works in Nigeria. The Colonial Civil Service was designed to exploit the resources of the country and suppress the citizens for the benefit of the crown. We have replaced the Colonial Civil Service but we really haven't taken that mindset out of government and that's a big thing that we need to do as a country. Another thing that I would like to see us just understand is that technology has given us two pathways to rapid development. It used to be from the economic history of Japan, the Asian Tigers, China, the more recent countries that are industrialising, that industrialisation was a pathway to growth starting from the industrial revolution - what happened in western Europe, what happened in America, what has happened across the world - industrialisation is the pathway to growth, and it creates jobs in their millions and raised people out of poverty and you can do that very quickly. China has done the economic miracle of taking most of its people out of poverty in one generation and that was largely through just doing manufacturing investment. But now we can pursue new economy investment in services in addition to old economy investment in manufacturing. So we have two pathways to growth and we need to exploit them quickly because we have a few hundred million young people that we need to put to work. We have an existential crisis that is brewing. It's already upon us as a country and we are not really treating it as the national emergency that it is. So all of the unrest that we see, all the difficulty that we see, all the killings, all of the social vices that we see are really not happening by accident. We need to create opportunity by the hundreds of millions. We have a crisis but we are continuing with business as usual.Tobi: I do hope people listen. Thank you very much, Femi Edun, it's been fantastic talking to you.Femi: Thanks very much, Tobi, it's been a pleasure talking to you. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

I enjoyed talking to Nonso on this episode - and many thanks to him for making the time. This is not part of our COVID-19 quickcast series because we had scheduled this conversation before news of the outbreak and subsequent lockdown. Nonso was characteristically eloquent and got straight at the heart of the questions. We talked about different models of economic development, the Central Bank of Nigeria, and how we are better with a more democratic approach to economic policymaking.The listening options are the same as always(play or download above or do the same via Stitcher here), you can also listen or download all our previous episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.TRANSCRIPTTobi: This is Ideas Untrapped and I am here with Nonso Obikili, remotely. Nonso is the Chief Economist of BusinessDay Newspaper and a non-resident fellow at The Centre for Global Development. Welcome, Nonso.Nonso: Thank you, happy to be here. Remotely.Tobi: [Laughs] So... we're really in the midst of a lockdown, at least the three supposed epicenters of the outbreak...that's Lagos, FCT, and Ogun. So I just want to gauge what you think the effects are going to be from a macroeconomic standpoint. Just a brief overview, for you. Nonso: Well, I think it's important to understand the context. So in this instance, because of the pandemic, we know that from an economic perspective the best thing to do would be to get through the pandemic as quickly and as painlessly as possible. And to do that, it is necessary to shut down some sections of the economy. When we say a lockdown that equivalent to a shutdown of some sections of the economy. So that's a deliberate action to, in a way, shrink the economy to deal with the pandemic. That's the context. If you're deliberately shrinking the economy, of course, you would have a fall in...if you measure it, but you're doing it on purpose. But the whole idea is to respond to the pandemic quickly and then recover quickly. So the real question is how are we able to get the economy started again once we are able to deal with the pandemic and, of course, to deal with the pandemic as quickly as possible? That's one side of things, but from that perspective, you can't really see a slow down in the economy as a bad thing. It's a necessary action in that sense, and we would only see the full impact once we start to try to kick-start the economy again. But in the Nigerian context, there are other issues going on. Now, this is a global pandemic and one of the things that happened is that it has resulted in a collapse in crude oil prices and as we know Nigeria is still very vulnerable to the oil industry. It still accounts for roughly 90 percent of all our exports and it still accounts for maybe 65 percent or so of government revenue. So any decline in oil prices means a real shock to the economy and this decline is particularly bad because if oil prices drop from 100 to 70, that's a drop but there are still inflows coming in. But this is dropping to the 20s and if you add production costs to that then we may necessarily be getting almost nothing to very little in the short-term from the oil industry which is a big, big shock. I think this is probably the biggest shock we have we have seen in a very very long time. I think that's problematic. But it's even more problematic because a lot of the emergency responses that we would have had are unavailable. In the past, we had an excess crude account that we could use to kind of managed through a couple of months until we figure out a proper response but the excess crude account is essentially empty and the replacement which is the sovereign wealth fund has very little funds in its stabilization account, so there’s not much fiscal buffers there. Another alternative would have been to rapidly increase debt to deal with the short-term crisis, but again because this is an international pandemic - it's a global pandemic - the international debt markets are very difficult right now and so it's very difficult to raise funding from there. But our debt position is already very constrained. As at last year, we had about a debt servicing costs to revenue ratio of about 65 percent which, again, implies that for every one Naira of the Federal Government revenue 65 percent went to servicing already existing debts. So we're already kind of limited on the debt front. And as a final kind of option, the nuclear option as we say, you could always resort to monetary financing which is what we are seeing in places like the US, in the UK where the Central Bank just steps into kind of deal with the problem temporarily. But, again, even on that front, we've already been doing that for a while... and it's not clear just how much space the Central Bank has to take that kind of action. So on all these measures to deal with the collapse in oil prices, we seem to not have all these emergency measures available. And so the question now is what do we do? How do we get through? Remember the first part is to get through the pandemic and the second part is to start to recover after the pandemic. So it's not really clear what we're going to do, for now.Tobi: Yeah. So given the tight position we seem to be in from what you just explained, what would be your... I know forecasting is not an exact science, but what would be your prognosis for the economy in the next few months? I think a few days ago with the minister of finance came out and said that Nigeria could be in a recession in six months. So is that accurate? And if true, what do you think really could be a way to avoid the worst-case scenario?Nonso: Well, I think we might already be in a recession. Remember, we are only growing at 2 percent. So you don't need to fall too far to get to below zero. Of course, recession technically is two-quarters of negative GDP growth which means technically you can't get into a recession officially until the second half of the year. But in practice, I think there has been already a big collapse in economic activity and again part of that is on purpose. Remember, we're shutting down the largest state in terms of economic activity - Lagos. We're shutting down Abuja which is also a very big state. So you are shutting down these key parts of the economy which mean that if they are really shut down then you should see slowing economic activity. So I would bet that we are already in a recession now because of the lockdowns. That being said, remember the goal is to lockdown, deal with the pandemic and then recover. Do I think we will recover out of recession in the next six months? I don't think so. Simply because there are already all sorts of other issues that we need to deal with. Q1, of course, is the collapse in oil prices which does not look like it's going to recover soon, but even before that there were already a lot of pressures building in which this collapse in the oil price is kind of... it's kind of like a straw that broke the camel's back to put it that way. So I think we would already be in a recession once we incorporate this lockdown but I don't think that we are going to get out of that in the next six months or even in the next year. Now, what can we do to prevent that? Again, that question is kind of moot because if you're already in a recession, the question is how do you recover? What can we do to recover? I think there are many things. As an emergency thing, one thing we can think of doing is to look for an emergency bailout from somewhere. That would give us the kind of space to deal with issues over the next six months to one year. But barring that, I think we need to move towards a more conventional kind of policy environment. One of the things we've seen over the last few years is that we've gone into all sorts of creative economic policies. You know, things like border closures and foreign exchange windows and all these things. And I think getting rid of some of those things might help the economy grow a bit faster than it was before. But ultimately I think we need to have some fundamental changes in just how the economy works. In terms of government revenue, I think we need more fundamental tax reforms because anyone hoping that the era of oil prices going back to 60, 70, 80, maybe a 100 to kind of save us, I think those days are well and truly over. But it's pretty obvious that there are problems with the current tax structure. So I think we need to start asking that question. I think in general, we need a more open economic policy agenda. Open in the sense of allowing people to trade relatively freely, incentivizing ways to participate in global markets. I'm not a deregulate everything person, but I think we need more flexible regulation to allow people to make decisions and take risks. And so I think if we do all these things in the near-term, then we might be able to start to see the economy pick up again more quickly. Of course in the medium to long-term, it's the big investments that count. The investment in education, investment in health, investment in infrastructure. But that is a medium to long-term agenda.Tobi: Okay. Let's zoom out a bit. Say these were happening like 30, 35 or probably 40 years ago, we can say that China or South Korea could be in the same position that Nigeria is currently. But I think they made some deliberate choices, policy-wise... maybe to industrialize, to open up to trade, be more export-oriented, etc. Why haven't we been able to do that? Where exactly is the logjam in terms of policy in Nigeria?Nonso: I think our political economy has not allowed at that kind of focus. Of course, we can, you know, forget about the dictatorships days... the military regimes. In those days the whole point was how to extract and share oil revenue. But since 1999, with democracy, we've seen a bit more freedom, but we've also seen a bit more (kind of) political misadventures, to put it that way. We've seen a big rise in crony capitalism and the idea of using government to kind of corner market for specific businesses. So that has been kind of something we've seen. We've also seen a kind of short-termism in terms of just government spending. We've seen successive governments think only about the next 3-4 years and how to deliver returns that give political victories. So we've seen government focus on things like fuel subsidies and all these short-term plans that really ignore the key underlying factors that grow economies in the long term. I think from an economic perspective the issue has been that the political environment has not been suitable to make those kinds of long-term decisions and long-term investments in education, in health, in trade, in exports and all that. But again, it's easy to blame politicians. I don't think it's a result of politicians alone. I think just in terms of the development of the Nigerian voters, I think these issues that are fundamental to long-term development have not been the issues that are focused on during elections and I think that's where the fundamental challenges [are]. If you think about the issues that have driven past elections, they haven't been about trying to boost education, it hasn't been about trying to build a proper healthcare system, it hasn't been about how to invest in infrastructure or trade, it's been about other issues and I think that's the fundamental challenge. Because if you don't have a population that puts these major investments as a primary concern, then you end up with outcomes that are not about those concerns.Tobi: But isn't that a feature of the political space itself? Like electorates are usually faced with should I say poor choices in terms of who to elect?Nonso: Well, yes. Our political system is very difficult in the sense that the process of getting on a ballot box is completely useless, for lack of a better word. So you end up with electoral choices that are in many cases not particularly ideal. Having to choose between two candidates that you don't particularly like. That's part of the problem, that's part of the issue...that once it comes to elections, especially at the highest level, the issues that count for getting on the ballot box aren't the issues that are important for policy-making for long-term development. They are other things. And I think that's...again, it's always easy to kind of blame politicians, I think it's a society problem in general. And it's a challenge that we still... as a society, as a country we still haven't found an answer to yet.People who are poor know best about how to live in poverty than people who are not. -NOTobi: You wrote an article, I think [in] January (I'm not sure now) about a rights-based approach to development. Can you expand on that a bit?Nonso: Honestly it's a very simple idea that even though we have a lot of poor people, even though we have a lot of less-educated people, people know best about their situation than anybody else. People who are poor know best about how to live in poverty than people who are not. People who are trading know best about how to trade than people who are not. People who are doing any kind of business know best about their business than most other people. And so the idea that a policymaker can sit down in an office in Abuja and unilaterally decide everything that should be done without taking into account the people who are actually living... who are actually living through this, who are going to implement this, I think that's always problematic. Most people want to get better off in life. Most people have constraints, of course, but I think incorporating the thoughts, opinions and rights of people I think is a fundamental part of any kind of economic development strategy simply because people are a lot more active and a lot more knowledgeable about their particular conditions than most people, especially most economics and policy analysts give them credit for. That's kind of like the basic idea, and you can think of it in very straight forward terms. A very simple example is the decision on what to do with foreign exchange, for example.Tobi: Okay.Nonso: If I am a farmer, I grow ginger and I export that ginger to, say, China and I'm paid in dollars. Who should decide what to do with my dollars from my hard work? Should it be some guy saying I am the CBN and or should it be me? It's a very simple example but a rights-based approach to development says it should be me who decides what to do with my dollars. Of course, you can have regulations, rules and all that. But fundamentally, I should decide what to do with the fruits of my labour after paying in all taxes, of course. And if you have that, then you tend to have foreign exchange markets that are more pragmatic, that are more realistic compared to if you have somebody in an office somewhere trying to unilaterally decide what to do. Because, of course, when you unilaterally decide what to do, you're taking away the rights of the person who actually did the work to use the fruits of their labour. That is also a very kind of simple example, of course, you can see that in many other parts of the economy. Who decides what to grow? Who decides which port to use? How do we decide how to transport that stuff from point A to point B? Do I have the right to decide what to do or do I get orders from Abuja to do what needs to be done? If you think of the border closure, for example... if your exports are sitting down in Sokoto, it may not be particularly useful to have to export through Lagos, it might be better to export through Niger, or through Cotonou or even through Togo and if you had the right to choose what to do then you could choose the best option for you. But if you have somebody who unilaterally decided that the land border should be closed and everybody most export through Apapa, then you end up with a worse outcome. The rights of the person who's trying to export have been ruined over forced-on development agenda...again, which I think is not ideal. So, yeah, that's just a basic idea that "look, the best development policies are those that acknowledge the rights of the people who are the targets of development" and to recognise that they are not mindless chess pieces but they are actually human beings, they actually have rights and they actually want to improve their lives, so taking that into account and should be front and centre of any kind of development agenda. Tobi: Where I really want to push you a bit on this issue is, I don't know... it reminds me of another paper by Easterly "Progress by Consent". I think the basic idea is there. So now, do you think in all honesty that the sort of Adam Smith tolerable administration of justice and other rights-based approaches is enough at this stage in our development and globalisation generally, do you think that's enough to push the rapid income convergence that places like Nigeria need? You have East Asia that went with a whole different approach and so far so good it's worked for them. So what you think about that?Nonso: When you say a whole different approach what do you mean?Tobi: Well, for example, South Korea did unconventional monetary policy for one. They had multiple exchange rate windows, but they were more export-oriented, they were more... they were highly bureaucratic in their approach. We can say that they trampled on people's freedom a bit but they still focused on what I think were the right things which are exports, manufacturing...yes, some of those measures were relaxed after a while and today we can talk about those countries in the same light as the other Western nations. So, yeah, that's what I mean.If you think of most of the Nordic countries, for example, you wouldn't find episodes of 10 percent GDP growth and all that in their history. What you would find is just sustainable growth for 60, 70, 80 years and they are developed as any anywhere else. - NONonso: Okay, well, I think there are many things there. I think one of the things that people try to forget about most of the Asian Tigers, to use that phrase, is that in the 60s there was this rapid improvement in education. Even before you started to see all the rapid growth there was a rapid improvement in the education of the masses and that served as the foundation for most of the growth that we saw in the 1980s. Now if you have a very highly educated population, then even if you end up with a dictator, you kind of have to have a smart dictator to put it that way. And as you said, even given that they were "dictatorships", the policy focus was always kind of outward-looking. More exports, more trade, more interactions with global markets. And then there is the final factor which I think a lot of people tend to forget when we just simplify things as dictator or democracy. I think state capacity itself is independent of the mode of governance and in many of these places you have histories of very long states. Remember the world did not start in 1960 even that's when we started collecting most data. But the world is pretty old and in many of these places you have a history of very strong state capacity, which of course means that even if you end up with a dictator or a democrat, you have some of these elements of an effective state. Now, if you transition to most of sub-Saharan Africa especially Nigeria, for example, they are very few places where you have that kind of history of state capacity. In Nigeria prior to the colonial era, there is no Nigerian state at all, there is just a plethora of smaller states - some bigger, some smaller. In most of West Africa... most of sub-Saharan Africa, you don't have the same kind of historical state capacity that you have in some of these Asian countries which means that the idea of trying to use dictatorial brute force to develop a place was always going to be a bit more challenging. If you think of Nigeria for example, even though one of the things that the literature has kind of seen is beneficial for dictators in terms of promoting development is if you expect the dictator to stay a long time. That is, if you're a dictator, you're expected to be a dictator for 20, 30 years then you tend to do better, to put it that way. But in Nigeria, despite all our history of dictatorships, we've never actually had a long dictator. I think the longest we had was Abacha, if I'm correct? Which was about six years, right? Which is not a long time. So even within our dictatorial past, we do not have like strong leadership or a strong authoritarian government in the sense of longevity. We had a series of coups and a series of dictators come and go, always trying to prevent the threat of another coup and always trying to solidify their regimes to put it that way. I think a big part of that scenario is there is just no history of national state capacity in Nigeria. So the idea that we can, in some way, copy the South Asian path I think is problematic. I think just because of the issues that we have, we have to till towards a more republican, a more democratic structure and we need to find our path in that direction. Everybody kind of focuses on the Asian Tigers that grew rapidly over a short period of time, but the truth is, for most countries who have developed there was no rapid growth. There were just long, sustainable growth for a long time. If you think of most of the Nordic countries, for example, you wouldn't find episodes of 10 percent GDP growth and all that in their history. What you would find is just sustainable growth for 60, 70, 80 years and they are developed as any anywhere else. So rapid growth is nice, it looks cool but for most countries, it's not about rapid growth, it is just about growing consistently for a long time. And I think given our past, given our structure, that's what we kind of need to aim for. Of course, we want to grow as fast as possible but sustainability is just as important. Yeah, I don't think that we can adopt the dictatorial Asian Tigers' model. I think we can adopt parts of it ... which is the focus on education and the focus on trying to participate in the international economy. But I think given our history, given the dynamics of our politics we probably need a more democratic, more rights-based economic path.Tobi: I think Gowon served for nine years. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think Gowon served for about 9 years.Nonso: But a chunk of that was the war, so...Tobi: [Laughs] Okay. Let's talk about the Central Bank, of course. So talking about rights and all that... monetary policy in Nigeria has been, I don't know, unconventional recently. I think you had an exchange with the CBN governor sometime last year and a lot of issues came up. Here is an institution that we would agree functions better when it's independent but there's a bit of a paradox, at least, with the current regime where it's gotten a bit political at least on the currency issue where monetary policy is kind of towing the presidential line from 2016 upward and at the same time there is really no oversight for what the CBN can do. How have we found ourselves in that position?Nonso: Well, I should do the selfish thing and say it's what happens when you have no economists at the Central Bank.In terms of our macro policy space, it has been dominated by FX over the last five years and everything seems to revolve around trying to manage the exchange rates which again has led to all sorts of unconventional policies as we say. - NOTobi: [muffled voice]Nonso: Oh, we have a few economists but over the last maybe decade-and-a-half the Central Bank has been filled with bankers and accountants who have a different background and a different view of economic policy than most macroeconomics will have. That is kind of the fundamental problem to me. Because you will always have issues of Central Bank independence, you will always have issues of Presidents wanting ABC, but what you need in that kind of situation is a Central Bank that can articulate the reasons why ABC are not ideal, not feasible and that can explain an appropriate monetary policy path not just to the Presidency, but to everyone in a credible way. And I think that has been lacking. Once you have a Central Bank where there is not a basic understanding of macro policy, then you tend to have all these kind of challenges. I mean, let me just be fair, there are lots of very good economists at the Central Bank but very few in actual decision-making positions which is problematic. In terms of our macro policy space, it has been dominated by FX over the last five years and everything seems to revolve around trying to manage the exchange rates which again has led to all sorts of unconventional policies as we say. We've seen lots of administrative measures trying to limit demand for foreign exchange. We've seen the bans on the use of FX for importing XYZ, I think there is still a 41 or 42 items list. We've seen all sorts of things like milk being banned. All that to try to limit the demand for foreign exchange and then at the same time we've seen all sorts of policies to try to incentivise short-term portfolio funds to bring foreign exchange, chief of which is the issues in the OMO market with the CBN bills, where the CBN is essentially indirectly kind of borrowing foreign exchange at very high rates 14, 15 percent which is unheard of. But the foundation for all that is an attempt to keep the exchange rate fixed. Not fixed in any particular real sense, but fixed to the US dollar which is a crazily strong currency. And what has happened is you've had all these imbalances kind of build up as a result. Nigeria is not the only country in the world that has its own currency, many other developing countries have their own currencies - South Africa, China, even India. But if you look at the Naira relative to these other emerging markets or developing countries' currencies, the Naira has strengthened a lot over the last 2-3 years. Again, all that is as a result of trying to arbitrarily keep the exchange rate fixed to the US dollar which has been kind of the foundation for most of the macro policy, and all that seems to be maybe indirectly a consequence of a political decision to manage the exchange rate as tightly as possible. So yeah, it's problematic and it's resulted in a lot of heterodox, as you've said, monetary policy. But I think importantly, that kind of environment has proved difficult for economic growth. We've seen growth struggle and I think that is partly because of that macro-policy environment. Of course, there are all sorts of other issues with the Nigerian economy beyond just monetary policy but we've seen investments into short-term securities as the only investment that is incentivized which is not ideal for a country of Nigeria's position. We should be doing what we need to do to incentivise long-term investment (foreign long-term investment). What we are seeing is a push towards short-term securities which has its uses but again it's not ideal for economic growth in a country like Nigeria. So yeah, many challenges, many problems but I think fundamentally the attempts to try to, like, maintain exchange rate stability to the dollar at all cost is kind of like the source of many of the challenges. Tobi: Okay, let's talk about the role of the media in all this. I know you write a weekly column for a newspaper, is part of the problem public discourse on economic issues? What is the role of the media in this? Economists are not really driving the conversation in the media and yes I know there is Twitter and all that...but is that part of the problem? Is economic education broken because the media landscape has been empty in that regard?I think leadership needs to have a proper policy philosophy and get the public to buy into that. - NONonso: In a way, I'll say yes and no. Let me be a fencist on this one, I'll say yes and no. No, because economics is like a very weird field in the sense that for any particular issue, for many issues you have economists who disagree and that kind of disagreement means that there is no consensus on many things. Which, again, means that it's difficult to kind of drive the public towards one direction if there is even no consensus within economists. But on the other side, yes. A lot of the discussions around economic policy seems to be focused on trivial issues without any kind of long-term thinking. A good example we could think of is the discourse during the fuel subsidy debate in 2011 or 2012. I think in that instance the media played a big role in driving home the idea that the issue was corruption, not necessarily that the subsidy itself was not ideal. And that definitely made an impact into the relapse of the policy. So yeah I think the media can do a bit more in terms of driving the debate, nudging the public towards a more ideal kind of position. But I think ultimately it's truly about leadership that needs to articulate that position. Populism is a very common problem around the world, and so if you always follow what people want directly then you end up in difficult situations. So it's not just in Nigeria, it's everywhere. I think leadership needs to have a proper policy philosophy and get the public to buy into that. And from that perspective, the media plays a role, but the media is not the key determinant of the outcomes. I think leadership is a bit more important. If you have a leadership that has a credible economic policy and that convinces people via the media to buy into its policy philosophy, then the media has a role to play there... but if you have the media just regurgitate some of these more populist agendas then you end up being in a difficult situation.Tobi: Okay. Before I let you go... if you had to choose between these three long-run structural forces as one with the heaviest hand in our affairs in Nigeria, which would you choose between institutions, geography or history?Nonso: I think it's obviously institutions. Geography is fixed for the most part and part of the story of human development is being able to overcome your environment, so geography cannot be an excuse. History is history. History has already happened and even though history counts, history matters, nobody is locked into a particular historical path. Every country, every society has the agency to change its direction, erm, so I don't think history is a big constraint. But I think the institutional capacity is where the big challenges lie. So, yeah, I will lean towards the institutions answer...although institution is a very broad term encompassing lots of things but even at that, I think I will lean towards institutions.Tobi: Okay. I want to indulge in a bit of gossip before I let you go finally. Nonso: [Laughs]Tobi: There is an anecdote out there, I want you to confirm whether it's true for me...that the current CBN governor actually said "I'm not your mate", is that true or not?LaughsNonso: Well, I think it will be unfair to only pick out a part of what was a much longer conversation. So I would decline to answer that. But of course, I'm much younger than the CBN governor, so, technically I'm not his mate.Tobi: Okay, but you're not going to get off that easy. What was going through your mind at that exact moment? What was going through your mind?Nonso: To be honest I was just excited to be having that conversation in the first place. So for me, I think getting my message across was for me the most important thing and I think I was able to do that. Everything else was just secondary. But, I mean, it was an interesting event, to put it that way.Tobi: Alright, thank you very much, Nonso.Nonso: Thank you too. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

The Global Development Institute is pleased to present Prof Franklin Obeng-Odoom, University of Helsinki, talking about: Property, institutions, and social stratification in Africa While it is intrinsically important to explain and, ultimately, try to address social stratification in Africa, these aspirations have not yet been satisfactorily executed. Human capital explanations can be enticing, especially when they appear to explain the meteoric rise of the Asian Tigers in terms of their so-called cultures of hard work. Attempting to explain Africa’s unequal position in the world system this way is common, as is conceptualising the problem in terms of the absence of physical capital and the presence, or dominance, of natural resources. In turn, it is quite usual to posit the need to reduce the transaction costs of transnational corporations, which presumably work to resolve the challenges of development in Africa. In practice, however, neither African culture, poor human capital, inadequate physical capital, nor the natural resource curse explains Africa’s underdevelopment. None of these can sufficiently explain the startling economic inequalities in Africa between various social groups, nor those between Africa and the rest of the world. In this regard, the idea that certain cultures of land either hinder, or would enable ‘Africa’s catch up’, are also mistaken. Although the reverse case – that African cultures are pristine – is sometimes used to counter this central thesis, it is similarly unconvincing. The spectre of Manicheanism, that is, expressing the African condition according to a dichotomy of either cultural pessimism or cultural triumphalism, is limiting. Franklin Obeng-Odoom is with Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, where he is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science. He is also a Member of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, where he leads the Social Sustainability of Urban Transformations in the Global South theme. Previously, he taught at various universities in Australia, including the University of Technology Sydney where he was Director of Higher Degree Research Programmes.

Investment fads are nothing new. When selecting strategies for their portfolios, investors are often tempted to seek out the latest and greatest investment opportunities. Over the years, these approaches have sought to capitalize on developments such as the perceived relative strength of particular geographic regions, technological changes in the economy, or the popularity of different natural resources. But long-term investors should be aware that letting trends influence their investment approach may be counterproductive. As Nobel laureate Eugene Fama said, “There’s one robust new idea in finance that has investment implications maybe every 10 or 15 years, but there’s a marketing idea every week.” WHAT’S HOT BECOMES WHAT’S NOT Looking back at some investment fads over recent decades can illustrate how often trendy investment themes come and go. In the early 1990s, attention turned to the rising “Asian Tigers” of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. A decade later, much was written about the emergence of the “BRIC” countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China and their new place in global markets. Similarly, funds targeting hot industries or trends have come into and fallen out of vogue. In the 1950s, the “Nifty Fifty” were all the rage. In the 1960s, “go‑go” stocks and funds piqued investor interest. Later in the 20th century, growing belief in the emergence of a “new economy” led to the creation of funds poised to make the most of the rising importance of information technology and telecommunication services. During the 2000s, 130/30 funds, which used leverage to sell short certain stocks while going long others, became increasingly popular. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, “Black Swan” funds, “tail-risk-hedging” strategies, and “liquid alternatives” abounded. As investors reached for yield in a low interestrate environment in the following years, other funds sprang up that claimed to offer increased income generation, and new strategies like unconstrained bond funds proliferated. More recently, strategies focused on peer-to-peer lending, cryptocurrencies, and even cannabis cultivation and private space exploration have become more fashionable. In this environment, so-called “FAANG” stocks and concentrated exchange-traded funds with catchy ticker symbols have also garnered attention among investors. THE FUND GRAVEYARD Unsurprisingly, however, numerous funds across the investment landscape were launched over the years only to subsequently close and fade from investor memory. While economic, demographic, technological, and environmental trends shape the world we live in, public markets aggregate a vast amount of dispersed information and drive it into security prices. Any individual trying to outguess the market by constantly trading in and out of what’s hot is competing against the extraordinary collective wisdom of millions of buyers and sellers around the world. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point out the fortune one could have amassed by making the right call on a specific industry, region, or individual security over a specific period. While these anecdotes can be entertaining, there is a wealth of compelling evidence that highlights the futility of attempting to identify mispricing in advance and profit from it. It is important to remember that many investing fads, and indeed, most mutual funds, do not stand the test of time. A large proportion of funds fail to survive over the longer term. Of the 1,622 fixed income mutual funds in existence at the beginning of 2004, only 55% still existed at the end of 2018. Similarly, among equity mutual funds, only 51% of the 2,786 funds available to US-based investors at the beginning of 2004 endured. WHAT AM I REALLY GETTING? When confronted with choices about whether to add additional types of assets or strategies to a portfolio, it may be helpful to ask the following questions: What is this strategy...

Mike Best (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Launch of the Schumpeter Prize 2018-winning Book "How Growth Really Happens. The Making of Economic Miracles through Production, Governance, and Skills". Achieving economic growth is one of today's key challenges. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Best argues that to understand how successful growth happens we need an economic framework that focuses on production, governance, and skills. This production-centric framework is the culmination of three simultaneous journeys. The first has been Best's visits to hundreds of factories worldwide, starting early as the son of a labor organizer and continuing through his work as an academic and industrial consultant. The second is a survey of two hundred years of economic thought from Babbage to Krugman, with stops along the way for Marx, Marshall, Young, Penrose, Richardson, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Abramovitz, Keynes, and Jacobs. The third is a tour of historical episodes of successful and failed transformations, focusing sharply on three core elements—the production system, business organization, and skill formation—and their interconnections. Best makes the case that government should create the institutional infrastructures needed to support these elements and their interconnections rather than subsidize individual enterprises. The power of Best's alternative framework is illustrated by case studies of transformative experiences previously regarded as economic "miracles": America's World War II industrial buildup, Germany's postwar recovery, Greater Boston's innovation system, Ireland's tech-sector boom, and the rise of the Asian Tigers and China. Speaker biography: Michael H. Best is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he was codirector of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness. Today he lives in Oxford. He has held numerous academic fellowships and participated in development projects with the United Nations, the World Bank, and governments in more than twenty countries. He is the author of The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring and The New Competitive Advantage: The Renewal of American Industry. Speakers: Mike Best (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Released by: SOAS Economics Podcasts

Taipei’s MRT System is super efficient and very easy to get around on with all stops and information in English. If you’re staying in Taipei for more than a day make sure you get an Easy Card pass from the vending machines at all stops or pick-up a 1, 2, 3 or 5 day Taipei Pass at information counters. In this podcast we will make 3 stops on Taipei’s MRT Red Line. First from Main Station we’ll head for Yuanshan stop and the Dalongdong neighborhood, next a ride all the way to the end of the line at Xiangshan for a hike up Elephant Mountain, then back to finish off the afternoon at Liberty Square and the final Honor guard of the day at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.Yuanshan is the first elevated stop on the red line that finishes in the riverside village of Danshui. All stops before Yuanshan are underground.This is the old Dalongdong neighborhood with many historic buildings and quiet lanes to explore. Our destination here is the Confucious Temple and the Bao An Temple. Like most sites in Taipei there are English signs everywhere leading you in the right direction whether you look up or down.Confucius was a Chinese teacher, philosopher, editor and politician born in 551 B.C. Confucius was a champion of strong family loyalty, respect of ancestors, and respect of elders by their children among other things. Confuciunism is said to have played a big role in the successful economies of the 4 Asian Tigers. Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan all have had educational programs that taught the values of Confucius-hard work, respect, loyalty, and respect towards authority figures. Excerpts from "Taipei, Taiwan's Top Sites In One Day, On  One MRT Line".

Chinese culture can contribute significantly to a country's success, according to William Ratliff, research fellow and former curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution and research fellow at the Independent Institute. Dr. Ratliff argues that culture in general and Chinese culture in particular matter a great deal to a nation's economic and political development. He spoke about the role of culture, the resounding success of the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan--in the latter half of the 20th century, and the unfulfilled expectations of the Arab Spring. Dr. Ratliff has written and lectured on the politics of Asia and Latin America and how traditional cultures and institutions influence modern conditions and prospects for political and economic development. Within these regions he has focused on China, Vietnam, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, and Nicaragua. He also writes on Chinese relations with Latin America and on US foreign policy.

Chinese culture can contribute significantly to a country's success, according to William Ratliff, research fellow and former curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution and research fellow at the Independent Institute. Dr. Ratliff argues that culture in general and Chinese culture in particular matter a great deal to a nation's economic and political development. He spoke about the role of culture, the resounding success of the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan--in the latter half of the 20th century, and the unfulfilled expectations of the Arab Spring. Dr. Ratliff has written and lectured on the politics of Asia and Latin America and how traditional cultures and institutions influence modern conditions and prospects for political and economic development. Within these regions he has focused on China, Vietnam, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, and Nicaragua. He also writes on Chinese relations with Latin America and on US foreign policy.