Eve is here. To be honest, I don’t pay as much attention to the Nobel Prize as I should. The Swedish Central Bank’s copycat Nobel role in promoting elite-serving legitimacy has managed to disgust me with the real thing. Here, Jomo provides an excellent commentary on the latest selections.
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development. It was first published in Jomo’s websitee
New Institutional Economics (NIE) receives new recognition so-called Nobel PrizeOstensibly to reassert good institutions and democracy. governance Ensure growth, development, equity and democracy.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (AJR) are well known for their influential cliometric research. AJR details previous winners douglas north‘s argument is that property rights are critical to growth and development.
But the trio ignores North’s later, more nuanced argument. For AJR, “good institutions” were transplanted by European English-speaking countries (“Anglos”) settler colonialism. Although perhaps methodologically novel, their approach to economic history is reductionist, biased, and misleading.
NIE caricature
AJR reveres property rights as essential to economic inclusion, growth, and democracy. They ignore and even deny the very different economic analysis of liberals such as John Stuart Mill, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Hobson, and John Maynard Keynes, among others.
Historians and anthropologists are familiar with the various claims and rights to economic assets such as arable land, such as usufructs. Even property rights are much more diverse and complex.
The legal creation of “intellectual property rights” confers exclusive rights by denying other claims. However, NIE’s Anglo-American concept of property rights ignores the history of ideas, sociology of knowledge, and economic history.
More nuanced understandings of property, imperialism, and globalization in history are conflated. AJR makes little distinction between different types of capital accumulation through trade, credit, resource extraction, and different modes of production, including slavery, serfdom, the peony system, indentured servitude, and wage labor.
John Locke, Wikipediafather of liberalism”, also drafted the constitutions of the two states of Carolina, both American slave states. A.J.R. Treatment of culture, beliefs, and ethnicity It’s reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s The Unnatural Clash of Civilizations. Most sociologists and anthropologists would be disgusted.
Colonial and postcolonial subjects remain passive and unable to create their own history. Postcolonial states are treated similarly and are seen as incapable of developing investment, technological, industrial, and development policies.
Thorstein Veblen and Karl Polanyi, in particular, have long debated institutions in political economy. However, the methodological opportunism and simplifications of NIE have pushed institutional economics backwards rather than forwards.
Another NIE Nobel Prize
For AJR, property rights created and distributed wealth in British settler colonies, including the United States and British dominions. Their advantage is said to be due to Britain’s “comprehensive” economic and political system of property rights.
Fluctuations in economic performance are attributed to the success of transplantation and the political control of settler colonies. More land became available in sparsely populated temperate regions, especially after genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement reduced indigenous populations.
These areas had a much lower population density for thousands of years due to their lower “carrying capacity.” The abundance of land allowed for extensive property rights, which were considered necessary for economic and political inclusion. British settler colonies were thus ‘successful’ in institutionalizing such property rights in land-rich temperate environments.
Such colonial settlements were far less likely in the tropics, which had long supported denser indigenous populations. Tropical diseases also prevented new migration from temperate regions. Thus, the life expectancy of colonists was both a cause and a consequence of institutional transplantation.
of difference betweengood institutionThe “bad institutions” of the “West” and the “rest of the world,” including the colonies of British settlers, are central to AJR’s analysis. The short life expectancy and high morbidity rates of white settlers in the tropics are thought to be due to their inability to establish adequate institutions.
privileges of British settlers
However, it is important to correctly interpret the statistical results. sanjay reddy provides a completely different understanding of the econometric analysis of AJR.
It is also possible that the greater success of the British settlers was due to colonial ethnic bias in their favor rather than to better institutions. Naturally, the imperialist racist Winston Churchill History of the English speaking world celebrate An English-speaking European.
AJR’s evidence has been criticized as follows: misleading in other respectsdoes not necessarily support the idea that the quality of institutions (equivalent to the enforcement of property rights) really matters for growth, development, and equality.
Mr Reddy points out that international economic conditions that favor Brits are shaping growth and development. The British Empire favored such settlers over its tropical colonies, which were subject to extractivist exploitation. The settler colonies also received most of British investment from abroad.
For Reddy, enforcing the private property rights of Anglo-Americans is neither necessary nor sufficient to sustain economic growth. For example, East Asian economies have made practical use of alternative institutional arrangements to encourage catch-up.
He points out that “the authors’ inverted approach to the concept” confuses “the property rights-enhancing ‘inclusive’ economy they favor as opposed to the resource-based ‘extractive’ economy”. .
Property and civil rights
AJR’s claim that property rights guarantee an “inclusive” economy is also far from obvious. Mr. Reddy points out that Rawlsian property-owning democracy, where property rights are widespread, stands in sharp contrast to plutocratic oligarchy.
Nor does AJR convincingly explain how property rights secured political inclusion. Protected by law, settlers often violently defended the land they had acquired from “hostile” indigenous peoples, denying them land rights, and claiming their own property.
‘Comprehensive’ political concessions in the British Empire were mainly limited to settler colonial rule. In other colonies, autonomy and popular franchises were only reluctantly conceded under pressure.
The prior exclusion of indigenous rights and claims made such inclusion possible, especially when the surviving “indigenous peoples” were no longer seen as a threat. Traditional indigenous rights were restricted, if not eliminated, by the colonizers.
The entrenchment of property rights also reinforces injustice and inefficiency. Many such rights advocates oppose democracy and other inclusive and participatory political institutions that have often helped to defuse conflict.
The Nobel Committee supports the NIE’s justification of property and wealth inequality and unequal development. Rewarding AJR also seeks to relegitimize the neoliberal project at a time when it is more widely rejected than ever before.
