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When the Nobel economics prize is awarded most years, I imagine the news-following public to simply nod in silent acknowledgment over their morning coffee as they listen to the radio or read the headlines. Economists speak in their own language, they figure, and the substance of their work is just too narrow or arcane to justify questioning the judgment of the Swedish Academy.
This year’s prize-winning work is different. The research of the three scholars who share the award—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson—readily lends itself to boiling down. Indeed, the title of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 book, which partly earned them the award, is Why Nations Fail. (Johnson did not cowrite the book, but the three are frequent collaborators.)
When the Nobel economics prize is awarded most years, I imagine the news-following public to simply nod in silent acknowledgment over their morning coffee as they listen to the radio or read the headlines. Economists speak in their own language, they figure, and the substance of their work is just too narrow or arcane to justify questioning the judgment of the Swedish Academy.
This year’s prize-winning work is different. The research of the three scholars who share the award—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson—readily lends itself to boiling down. Indeed, the title of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 book, which partly earned them the award, is Why Nations Fail. (Johnson did not cowrite the book, but the three are frequent collaborators.)
It’s not just the title, though. The broader thesis of much of their work also lends itself to fairly neat summary: As Europeans extended their grip on the world in past centuries, places where colonizers settled and built robust and lasting communities—think the early United States—have tended to prosper; places where European settlement was much more precarious—notably, most of tropical Africa—have not.
The reason for this, the economists argue, is that the former formed strong political and economic institutions, while the latter settled into extractive patterns of economic activity that have endured into the independence era, long after European colonizers relinquished direct political control. And as the three wrote in a 2003 paper, these settlement patterns were often driven by epidemiology, with fewer Europeans settling in places where deadly infectious diseases such as malaria were prevalent.
This year’s award has elicited unusually strong criticism from within academia. This has laid bare a stark and long-standing divide between economists and other social scientists, from historians to sociologists to political scientists. For many years, each has regarded the other with a degree of scorn; social scientists often argue that economists masquerade as scientists, while economists retort that specialists in the other fields have scant appreciation of the measurable factors that go into the economic life of a nation.
What is different about Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson is that in their newly awarded work, they have pretended to understand history far more than they deserve to claim. This has aroused particular derision from historians. One of the most dismissive comments about the use of history in their work was that it read like “Wikipedia entries with regressions.”
As both a lay historian and a journalist who has specialized in Africa and worked in nearly region of the world, it is easy to find exceptions to the trio’s proposed scheme. Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) comes immediately to mind. The country had a long-established white settler community, some of which remains in the country. And compared with many of its neighbors, and indeed sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, it has a favorable tropical disease environment, with less malaria and other old infectious pathogens. Yet Zimbabwe has often flirted with failed state status.
Some readers may find it unfair of me to tick off an exception like this, saying that it isn’t enough to invalidate the economists’ general pattern. But I have broader problems with their thesis, starting with the fact that some of its main elements are strikingly unoriginal.
When I was getting my start as a reporter in West Africa in the early 1980s, one of the most common observations I heard from scholars in many fields, as well as from diplomats in that region, was that the disease environment was devastating for Africa. For the most part, they weren’t talking about the lack of European settler communities. What they meant was that infectious diseases exacted a huge toll on Africans themselves, massively sapping the productivity of adults and harming the cerebral development of children. The punishing disease environment also inflicted high rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality, robbing women of vital portions of their productive lives by obliging them to bear many children just to be sure that some would survive into adulthood.
Epidemiology is not just a matter of human disease, either. As many scholars have pointed out, throughout the ages, sub-Saharan Africans have largely lacked the labor of humankind’s most important draft animal and source of fast overland travel: the horse. That is because of the widespread presence of the tsetse fly, which transmits deadly diseases to livestock. For a different set of reasons, South America, itself a site of great historic empires, also lacked this crucial beast of burden.
Even some sympathetic economists have criticized the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, for example, recently wrote that their “idea that institutions matter is at least as old as Douglas North if not Adam Smith; their insight that colonisation shaped the evolution of institutions is neither novel nor historically textured nor even accurate; their strategy of teasing causation out of the natural experiment of colonisation is debatable because it cannot distinguish between the places that colonisers went to and the human capital they brought along with them; the data for their key variable, namely ‘settler mortality,” is flawed and selectively chosen; and finally, for some of these reasons, the empirical findings … are shaky and non-robust.”
Another type of criticism takes the trio to task for not highlighting the ways in which European exploitation of the so-called New World, and of enslaved Africans in particular, fostered European wealth and the very institutions that the prize winners often treat as somehow innate qualities of that continent. This strongly accords with my own findings in my most recent book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. In it, I argue that it was precisely extraction that drove Europe’s economic ascent in the 16th century and beyond. Not the kind of extraction that the Nobel winners—or most readers, for that matter—probably had in mind but rather the high-volume traffic of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to be put to work in the production of history-changing commodities such as sugar and cotton.
My book argues that these products and the revenues they generated drove social and political change on a huge scale in Europe. By making Europeans’ settlement of the continents on the other side of the Atlantic both demographically feasible and economically profitable, this kind of extraction forged the very creation of what we think of when we speak of “the West.”
I am not one to bash Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. I have read much of their work, and I have taught Acemoglu and Johnson’s most recent book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, in public policy classes. Ironically, I drew on another of their studies, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” in building the argument at the center of Born in Blackness. The data from that article shows that Europe’s Atlantic-facing nations that participated in the African slave and commodities trades not only rapidly prospered but have enjoyed lasting economic advantages over other parts of Europe.
What is more, the three authors credit the early development of democratic institutions in these countries to the prosperity and class dynamics driven by the exploitation of Africans:
[T]he rise of Europe reflects not only the direct effects of Atlantic trade and colonialism but also a major social transformation induced by these opportunities. … Atlantic trade in Britain and the Netherlands … altered the balance of political power by enriching and strengthening commercial interests outside the royal circle, including various overseas merchants, slave traders, and various colonial planters. Through this channel, it contributed to the emergence of political institutions protecting merchants against royal power.
In the latest Nobel prize, which seems to ignore the trio’s work on how Atlantic powers grew strong and prosperous, we may therefore have a case of the West succumbing to a kind of self-flattery—a credulous belief in the virtues of its own people in determining the fates of nations while forgetting how the labor of the people whose lands they settled, colonized, or conquered may have been the modern era’s most decisive factor.