July 20, 2006
From the desk of Winterspeak:Why can't we all just get along?
U Chicago prof Austin Goolsbee has a nice article in the NYTimes about how wars have little impact on a nation's economic well being, but internal ethnic divisions retard growth.
He cites studies looking at how more heavily bombed towns in Vietnam, Germany, and Japan have recovered and now are at the same level as less heavily bombed towns.
By contrast, countries with squiggly lines (natural) do better than countries with straight (artificial) lines, especially where multiple ethnic groups are put into the same country.
The implication of the above is that if we just split all countries into fairly homogeneous ethnic groups, then war and strife would go away. But I wonder about countries like the US, India, and China though, that have heterogeneous populations and have managed to grow economically despite some internal strife. And there are numerous perfectly homogeneous tribes throughout history that went to war with other tribes and never developed much at all.
People are very good at drawing divisions between themselves and then fighting over those divisions. I think the idea that "dealing with people at the community level will reduce strife" is bogus -- the community leaders and activists I've dealt with in the US have tended to have radically different ideas from the communities they claim to represent, and they are often more belligerent as well.
Posted by Winterspeak at July 20, 2006 11:45 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksNot much of a paper.
On the effect of a "former colony" dummy variable:
"... it is difficult to identify separately the effect of colonial status and straight-line borders, since one led to the other."
On the effect of a "sub-Saharan Africa' dummy variable:
"The results are definitely weakened by including the Africa dummy, which is always significant.
The only result to survive with FRACTAL is for democracy (still significant at the 5 percent level)."
So really, this paper tells us with statistical significance only that countries with artificial borders tend to be former colonies and African countries. Great insight.
The ethnic partition independent variable seems to be somewhat more useful, but a lot of their significant results disappear after introducing those two dummy variables. It could also be that it was in the areas with the least development potential that borders were drawn with the least care. I'm just not sure what we're supposed to learn from this.
Oh, and the study specifically did NOT make any claims about the effects of artificial borders and ethnic divisions on war, so I don't know who claimed that an implication is that ethnic homogeneity reduces war.
"One type of variable is conspicuously missing in our analysis: wars, both inter-national and civil. Our reason for not discussing it at length is that we found no effects of artificial borders on war. We did find an effect of artificial borders on a subjective measure of political instability and violence, as described above,
but clearly it would be desirable to study the objective outbreaks of wars in addition to this variable."
"countries like the US, India, and China though, that have heterogeneous populations and have managed to grow economically"
China is mainly Han Chinese (although one reason for it to want to continue to occupy Tibet and other outer regions is so that the Han seem more alike, relative to the non-Chinese groups).
And anyway, China's secret of high growth rates involves first pounding oneself into the ground through many years of painfully negative growth. The huge growth that began under Deng wouldn't have been possible if Mao hadn't been so incredibly bad for the economy that the country had a small base from which to begin growing again.
Posted by: Ann on July 20, 2006 02:05 PMWait, doesn't the US have a long straight line from Minnesota to Washington, and some more straight segments from California to Texas? It may be only one exception, but it's a big exception.
Posted by: Mitch on July 20, 2006 03:08 PMIn the first place the paper is highly racist and deeply insulting to Native Americans. It says the border between the US and Canada was drawn when the area was unpopulated. Hello! The are was at maximum population density for a hunter gatherer ecosystem for over 25,000 years. Humans lived there. They just were native Americans. They were killed off to make room for non-Americans.
The guys who wrote this work missed the most important lesson of nation building. Properous countries got that way by killing off everyone who didn't fit - as did the Americans and Canadians when they "won the west".
Squiggly lines exist when borders need to be defended and generally show the location of the last front line in the last war. Straight lines exist on borders which have no particular importance or which have never been fought over.
Proof is the US-Canadian borders in NW Wasington and in NY, VT, NH, Maine all of which were fought over.
Their statistics are laughable and these guys are not historians. They should have used Greco-Latin squares and done better historical research.
Posted by: sol vason on July 20, 2006 03:17 PMThe major portion of native deaths seemed to be a result of smallpox introduced by early explorers/settlers. Not genocide, but an epidemic with death rates similar to the Black Death years in Europe. I have read one short account (the reference escapes me) of a visitor traveling upriver and seeing the derelict structures along the banks, where some years before he had seen thriving villages.
Posted by: rmark on July 21, 2006 09:55 AMComments are Closed.