My conversation with Dani Rodrik

Here you will find the transcript, video, and podcast.  The summary is this:

Tyler and Harvard economist Dani Rodrik discuss premature deindustrialization, the world’s trilemmas, the political economy of John le Carré, what’s so special about manufacturing, Orhan Pamuk, RCTs, and why the world is second best at best.

Here is one excerpt from Rodrik, on why Turkey and some comparable countries did not fully modernize:

…my general sort of question would be 50 percent structure, 50 percent agency, which is to say you start with a lot of initial conditions that aren’t very favorable. Going back to the 19th century, you start on the wrong end of the global division of labor. Everybody else is industrialized and you’re not, plus, then, the British come and they open up your trade regime and all the craft industries you have in the 18th century are just decimated because of imports from Britain and other Western Europeans.

Then you get defeated in a world war. You start in very inauspicious circumstances.

Then agency. What happened, for example, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was the leader who made Turkey, who took Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, erected the Turkish republic on top of that. He did a lot of very good things and a lot of very silly things, and we’re still living with the consequences of many of those things, including the good things.

I asked him this:

You were born in Turkey, you grew up in Turkey. I have so many questions about Turkey to ask you, but let me just try two or three. Let’s take the Turkish city of Konya. I’ve been to Konya. Outsiders sometimes call Konya the bible belt of Turkey. I’m not sure that’s a good comparison, but it’s a more religious city than Istanbul. It’s a kind of heartland city in Turkey.

Just a little simple question. I would put it this way. Do you trust the median voter in Konya?

And a short one from Rodrik again:

Culture is back in economics. I still have to be convinced that it’s actually adding a significant amount to what we learn.

In terms of economic prospects, he picks Brazil as the most underrated country and India as the most overrated.  And you can see what he thinks of the idea of an independent Catalonia…

You should all buy and read Dani’s new book, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, which I can recommend wholeheartedly and which I wrote a blurb for.