Why the Owl of Minerva Doesn’t Get Party Invitations After Dusk

I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to get a bit aggressive about disciplinary expertise for a second.

William Easterly has an interesting post about the “mystery of the benevolent autocrat”, observing that while the highest growth rates in the world between 1960 and 2008 are all in autocracies, so are the worst growth rates over the same time period. Easterly concludes that autocracy is a high-risk choice for producing growth, that “for every Lee Kuan Yew, there’s a Jean-Bedel Bokassa”.

Good point. Except that like a lot of policy wonkery informed by economics and quantitative political science, both Easterly and the people he’s criticizing are acting as if autocracy is a discrete choice made primarily for the sake of growth off of a menu of possible options or alternative choices. I know Easterly doesn’t really think that, but life is not a game of Civilization V.

The thing is, both the character of government and economic growth are the products of histories both particular and global, and the moment where leaders sit down and make a clear choice about either never comes.

This is pretty much what drives me up the wall about the cottage industry that’s grown up in development circles that aims to identify the magic variables that have allowed Botswana to have a positive trend line in so many areas. Here’s how I see it: you can list all the variables you like, test them out in the data, and probably identify many valid contributing factors. But as a historian, I have to tell you that a lot of it goes back to subtle contingencies involved in the manner of Botswana’s incorporation into the British Empire, the particular political and cultural leadership of certain 19th Century Tswana chiefs, the complicated social history of many Tswana communities in relation to Christianity, and the proximity of industrializing South Africa. And then from that, diamonds and a single major ethnicity and a rather enlightened postcolonial elite and so on.

So: history. And non-reproducible history at that. Not a strategy chosen off of a menu of options in an abstract setting.

This is why historians aren’t generally a big presence at the policy-makers’ table.

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5 Responses to Why the Owl of Minerva Doesn’t Get Party Invitations After Dusk

  1. Alan Jacobs says:

    Great post, Tim, as usual. But I wonder if a policymaker might say, “Yeah, we know all that, but we have to pretend we don’t in order to make policy. Comprehensive historical knowledge breeds despair. We have to focus on the variables we can account for and respond to, and ignore the ones we can’t; otherwise we’ll just sit around and do nothing.”

  2. nord says:

    Nice post, for a second I thought this would go down the Guns, Germs and Steel route. I think it is easier to change our policies responses to a crisis than to change our understanding of history…

  3. alex.o says:

    – I don’t think Easterly is at any point “acting as if autocracy is a discrete choice made primarily for the sake of growth.” Easterly and the people he criticizes are merely exploring whether a solid statistical link may be established between a couple of variables (economic growth, how democratic a country is).

    – Yes, history is subtle, complicated, and unpredictable, but people have established relatively clean links between some “magic variables” and some outcomes, see for example…

    http://timharford.com/2010/03/the-hidden-histories-that-shape-the-way-we-live-now/

    ..which is why this sort of exploration has the potential to be enlightening.

  4. Doug says:

    Just as there is no single choice that makes autocracy, there is no single policy table at which historians do not sit.

    And a great deal depends on how historians who would like to sit at the various tables approach the challenges. If the general tendency is that life cannot improve because of subtle differences in choices during the reign of Queen Victoria, then no, it’s not likely that historians will get much of a hearing. If, however, the general tendency is that such-and-such an approach is more likely to succeed than thus-and-such because of x y and z in an area’s history, that is likely to be useful in a policy setting.

    One of the key themes of teaching university-level history, as I understand it, is getting students to grasp the contingency of past choices. Historians who want to be active in development policy (or indeed policy more generally) do well when they bring that sense of contingency to today’s choices.

  5. great deal depends on how historians who would like to sit at the various tables approach the challenges. If the general tendency is that life cannot improve because of subtle differences in choices during the reign of Queen Victoria, then no, it?? not likely that historians will get much of a hearing. If, however, the general tendency is that such-and-such an approach is more likely to succeed than thus-and-such because of x y and z in an area?? history, that is likely to be useful in a policy setting.

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