Rapping about economic gangsters
Economic development blogger Chris Blattman has posted an interesting interview with Raymond "Ray" Fisman and Edward "Ted" Miguel, authors of "How Economics Can Defeat Corruption" in the September/October issue of FP: [Chris]: Economists are fond of saying that strong institutions are at the heart of American economic growth. I say they should watch ‘Gangs of ...
Economic development blogger Chris Blattman has posted an interesting interview with Raymond "Ray" Fisman and Edward "Ted" Miguel, authors of "How Economics Can Defeat Corruption" in the September/October issue of FP:
Economic development blogger Chris Blattman has posted an interesting interview with Raymond "Ray" Fisman and Edward "Ted" Miguel, authors of "How Economics Can Defeat Corruption" in the September/October issue of FP:
[Chris]: Economists are fond of saying that strong institutions are at the heart of American economic growth. I say they should watch ‘Gangs of New York’ — Scorsese makes Lagos and Nairobi look like kindergarten by comparison. Do we underplay violence and corruption in our own history, and overplay it in Africa today?
Ted: Yes, we could easily have written a book about violence and corruption in 19th century America or Europe. And there are surely lessons to be learned about present-day problems from looking at that earlier era, and vice versa.
Ray: But there are some highly instructive differences. In the 1970s, Sierra Leonian President Siaka Stevens destroyed the railroad in his country’s southeast as a means of weakening an opposing ethnic group, the Mende. Contrast this with the equally corrupt robber barons of 19th century America, who used their power to build railways instead of tearing them down.
Fisman and Miguel have also started a promising-looking blog on the site for their new book, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, on which their FP article was based.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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