Thread by @arctotherium42

Because there's an obvious answer that will get you fired (and sometimes beaten in the streets) for saying: Koreans are (for genetic reasons) a lot smarter than Bolivians.

Why did Koreans being smarter than Bolivians let them became a frontier economy? Should be obvious: far more people with the ability to become engineers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, and even manual factory workers and janitors and farmers are much more competent.

This is not just retrospective; race scientists in the early 20th century saw East Asians as highly intelligent and the non-white parts of Latin America as not really capable of civilization. Here's Lothrop Stoddard in 1921.

And of course, in the early 2000s Richard Lynn correctly predicted the high-IQ post-Communist (most importantly, but not exclusively, China) world would outperform the Third World, while institutionalists predicted the opposite.

Two caveats: everyone starts poor before the Industrial Revolution for Malthusian reasons, which is why LatAm used to be rich relative to the Old World (high land/person thanks to disease) and sufficiently bad policy (Communism) can make anyone poor.

Cognitive Capitalism (Rindermann) and Hive Mind (Jones) both make this case at book length, but it's really very simple.

(Before anyone brings up land reform: most major Latin American states, including Bolivia, have done land reform not once but several times since independence.)

To the extent development economics even needs to exist as a field, it should be concerned above all else with "how do we exterminate the Communists and adjacent groups."

Maybe deliberate tech diffusion and policies to promote saving (such as little welfare) as a distant second. Sort of the opposite of what most 21st century Western countries have done.