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Showing posts from October, 2024
  Is this the Nobel Prize for property rights --- or for how  genocide  is the pre-condition for economic growth? Acemoglu Johnson & Robinson  https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369   seem to argue that in those countries where colonial settlement having  followed genocide  in replacing the native aborigine, public institutions were set up mirroring those back home, thereby ensuring life expectancy outcomes for their descendants comparable to their own countries of origin. These were markedly superior to the populations of other countries where by contrast, insalubrious conditions having made settlement unattractive for European settlers,  aborigine populations were allowed to survive.  Yet since democratic representation & welfare measures towards that end were  not considered necessary for subject peoples, the colonial powers employed such territories purely for the purpose of the extraction & the transfer of the surplus to the metropolitan centres of