Quick thought on the tangent, which I’d also love to hear more thoughts on from other people.
I’m skeptical that corruption is a big obstacle to growth and development. Measurement and historical comparisons are tricky here, but corruption seems to be a pervasive feature across many societies.
Even the United States had its local political machines and share of bribery before the Progressive Movement in the 1920s tried to filter it out. And conventional wisdom credits the Industrial Revolution (of the 19th century before the US reduced its corruption) with our modern wealth.
I suspect if we applied our same concern of corruption to currently-developed countries to their past, we’d find they (1) would fare just as bad and (2) had their development periods before they dealt with the corruption
The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang has some great work addressing this neighborhood of intuitions. Her view is basically that “corruption” is decomposable into a several distinct types of phenomena, and some of these can be growth-promoting (as in China during the period between, approximately, Deng and Hu), whereas others can be fairly extreme impediments to growth.
Thanks so much for this! I don’t know why I ever thought about decomposing the idea of corruption but it seems like a really obvious framework now that you’ve mentioned it. Hoping to give that a read sometime.
Thanks Geoffrey it’s and interesting discussion. I have mixed thoughts about this. There’s a great section in the book ” bad Samaritan’s” by the awesome economist Ha Joon Chang which makes this argument very well.
Quick thought on the tangent, which I’d also love to hear more thoughts on from other people.
I’m skeptical that corruption is a big obstacle to growth and development. Measurement and historical comparisons are tricky here, but corruption seems to be a pervasive feature across many societies.
Even the United States had its local political machines and share of bribery before the Progressive Movement in the 1920s tried to filter it out. And conventional wisdom credits the Industrial Revolution (of the 19th century before the US reduced its corruption) with our modern wealth.
I suspect if we applied our same concern of corruption to currently-developed countries to their past, we’d find they (1) would fare just as bad and (2) had their development periods before they dealt with the corruption
The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang has some great work addressing this neighborhood of intuitions. Her view is basically that “corruption” is decomposable into a several distinct types of phenomena, and some of these can be growth-promoting (as in China during the period between, approximately, Deng and Hu), whereas others can be fairly extreme impediments to growth.
Thanks so much for this! I don’t know why I ever thought about decomposing the idea of corruption but it seems like a really obvious framework now that you’ve mentioned it. Hoping to give that a read sometime.
Happy to recommend her work highly.
Thanks Geoffrey it’s and interesting discussion. I have mixed thoughts about this. There’s a great section in the book ” bad Samaritan’s” by the awesome economist Ha Joon Chang which makes this argument very well.