"Have OK institutions but do get lots of engineers" is the East Asia recipe missed by economists obsessed with exotic institutions & policy distortions; sociologists with embedded autonomy of Weberian bureaucrats; & political scientists with pro-growth settlements & coalitions "But but but education is not fundamental, it's endogenous to institutions and policy", quoth the Preacher, whilst staring at China which opened up to the world market with a massive endowment of technically competent people at such a low level of income.

An extraordinary paper on the long history of the Sino-Indian divergence in human capital investment & attainments & their development consequences. @Nitin_K_Bharti and Li Yang. There's so much information crammed into this!!!

congress-files.s3.amazonaws.com/2021-12/Human_… h/t @paulnovosad who had a thread on this paper with very well chosen graphics.

https://x.com/paulnovosad/status/1852701664966566034

In a book edited by Douglass North (et al), Mushtaq Khan presents an interesting mix of arguments of diverse ideological flavours to explain the ‘rise of Bangladesh’: Pakistani industrial policy + domestic primitive accumulation + IMF structural adjustment + Multi-Fibre Agreement Argument goes: (1) Pakistan’s (corrupt) industrial policies had enriched 22 families from the west but also created industrial assets in the then East Pakistan which in 1947 was basically the half of Bengal without much industry (West Bengal got most of it)

THREAD (again! so sorry!) on inclusive & extractive property rights.

It's been long argued contra AJR & others that it is inaccurate to call property rights which emerged in the Global North 'inclusive' because they depended on violating the property rights of others ( This is a reprise of a thread from 2019, but with modifications. )

I've been holding back on this. But this is my last comment on the matter.

The worst thing that ever happened to economic history & economic historians is AJR. People now think their crap history is economic history.

https://twitter.com/FT/status/1848230772601237843

I said the last word but I must add: above is NOT a full endorsement of Greeley's article. He does add to the accumulation of selective readings of the historiography by AJR. But he does not fully understand the AJR model. Below is a point AJR themselves made in AJR 2005 & WNF !!

THREAD (~50 tweets)

My potted history of institutions in macro-development thinking, at the time of the AJR intervention.

I had most of these thoughts earlier, but this week they have crystallised. I don't discuss AJR specifically, but I do have brief thoughts on their impact 1/ Economists’ *own* sense is that AJR made institutions visible, teachable, testable, & analytically tractable. Before that, economists knew about the work of institutional economists, but it was not a central area of research. North was never terribly influential.

¡¡¡ A L E R T !!!

MAJOR NEW CONTRIBUTION

TO

ECONOMIC HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT

https://twitter.com/oliverwkim/status/1830985359687327919

Oliver & Jen-Kuan are too polite to say what a troll this paper is !