From Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wocziarg
one may erroneously infer a major role for specific national institutions in Africa, even though, as shown by Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2010), national institutions have little effect when looking at the economic performance of homogeneous ethnic groups divided by national borders.
The survey article focuses on very long persistence in differences in productivity across different ethnic groups. Pointer from Jason Collins.
Cf. Edward Banfield.
“Development” can be seen (as in this study) as principally material(istic?).
Grossly under-considered are * how * co-operations come (or fail to come) about and * why * , including why co-operations take their particular forms.
When those scholars who examine the external determinants of (including constraints on) human actions, also conjecture on their effects upon “motivations,” their fields of enquiry will yield more than they presently
find.
I predict that this gutsy paper, and those like it…will be ignored. If the social planners had a time machine they could use work like this as an excuse to go back and impose a Greg Clark style downward mobility system on the forebears of today’s lower productivity populations. Alas, there is not much to be done about it now so best to ignore and name call as needed.