Letošnja podelitev nagrade švedske centralne banke trem ekonomistom (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson, AJR) za prispevek na področju razumevanja vpliva institucij na gospodarski razvoj je svojevrsten akt cinizma komiteja, ki pri Riksbank izbira vsakoletne nagrajence. Brendan Greeley je v Financial Timesu čudovito pojasnil kontroverzno izbiro kot “nagrado za uporabo ekonomije prav pri tistih stvareh, kjer je ekonomija sama po sebi slaba pri razumevanju“.

Ekonomija je dobra pri številkah, toda določenih stvari, v bistvu velike večine, ni mogoče pojasniti s številkami. In tukaj se ekonomija zateče k mehkim konceptom, kot so denimo institucije, da bi z njimi pojasnila tisti del, kjer pojasnjevalna moč v statističnih modelih na podlagi korelacij med številkami kaže velike škrbine. Toda problem ekonomije je, da je pri tem standardno površna. Ekonomistov ne zanima kompleksnost medsebojnih odnosov in historična evolucija, ki je pripeljala do te kompleksnosti odnosov, pač pa iz celotne zgodbe izberemo eno ali nekaj anekdot, ki nam “pašejo” v naš reduciran empirični koncept. Ne preberemo celotne zgodovinske knjige, pač pa nekaj strani, in na podlagi teh nekaj anekdot zapolnimo škrbino v naših “empiričnih”, no statističnih modelih s korelacijami med številkami.

In točno to Greeley očita AJR v njihovem opusu. Ko so se odločili, da bi razvojno uspešnost držav “pojasnjevali” z razlikami med “inkluzivnimi instititucijami” v uspešnih državah in “ekstraktivnimi institucijami” v manj uspešnih državah, so to naredili na tipično ekonomističen površen način. V britanskem imperiju z Britanijo, ameriško Virginijo in Barbadosom, naj bi bil uspeh prvih dveh posledica inkluzivnih institucij, neuspeh slednjega pa posledica ekstraktivnih institucij. Toda to je bil enoten sistem, ki so ga postavili Britanci kot imperialisti. Pri tem so podjetni Britanci iz matične Britanije prek ekstraktivnih metod črpali bogastvo (prek pridelave in trgovine s sladkorjem) iz Barbasosa in na tej osnovi izgradili svoj finančni in ladjarski kapital. In na drugi strani so v Virginiji ustvarili rasno segregacijo in apartheid model, kjer je bilo belcem dovoljeno uporabljati blagodeti inkluzivnih institucij (zaščita njihove lastnine, demokracija za belo raso) za gospodarski razvoj, da bi lahko ekstrahirali premoženje iz dela brezpravnih sužnjev na njihovih plantažah. No, slednje, trgovina s sužnji kot brezpravno delovno silo, je bila v funkciji tega britanskega modela rasti.

Problem AJR je, na primer, da so, ko so si ustvarjali svoj miselni okvir, iz Morganove zgodovinske knjige o razvoju kolonialne Virginije vzeli samo pasus o oblikovanju Skupščine naseljencev, kar naj bi bil zametek kasnejše demokracije v ZDA, niso pa želeli vzeti celotne zgodbe. Ta pa je, da sta se instituciji demokracije in suženjstva razvijali skupaj in da je bela, “demokratična” elita svoj uspeh izgradila na oblikovanju drastične institucije sužnjelastništva. Inkluzivne institucije za bele Virginijce niso postale možne navkljub ekstraktivni instituciji temnopoltega suženjstva, ampak zaradi nje. Gospodarskega uspeha podjetne bele elite ne bi bilo brez hkratne ekstraktivne institucije suženjstva.

Torej, za pojasnjevanje vpliva inkluzivnih in ekstraktivnih institucij na kasnejši razvoj v skladu z zgodbo AJR je pomembno, v kateri časovni točki naredimo presek (kdaj naj bi prišlo do preskoka iz ekstraktivnega v inkluzivni sistem) in kako dobro abstrahiramo kompleksnost celotnega sistema oziroma odrinemo “moteče dejavnike”, kot so rasna segregacija, apartheid, genocid ali samo razredna družba. Ali drugače rečeno, odločiti se moramo, v kateri točki je elita, ki za svoje prosperiranje koristi inkluzivne institucije (zaščita lastnine, demokracija itd.), postala dovolj dominantna, da ji lahko pripišemo zasluge, da je (na podlagi ekstraktivnih institucij nasproti preostalemu delu prebivalstva) naredila razvojni preskok. In nato proglasimo, da so zaščita lastnine in demokracija tiste univerzalne vrednote, na podlagi katerih je gospodarski razvoj bolj verjeten.

__________

In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 summary of their work on institutions, they use late 17th century England, Barbados and Virginia as examples. England and Virginia became inclusive: property rights, legislative assemblies, limited but slowly expanding franchise. Barbados became extractive, relying on enslaved labour to produce profits for a small elite.

These descriptions are true but insufficient, because England, Barbados and Virginia were all part of the same system. The same captive domestic market, protected by tariffs, sent slave tobacco and slave sugar through factors in the colonies and merchants in London and Glasgow.

…

London merchants and Barbadian planters, well represented in Parliament, became powerful advocates for inclusive institutions in Britain not in contrast to the extractive institutions on the other side of the ocean, but because of them.

It is easy to pick on Nobel Prize winners from afar. If they’re so wrong, it should be easy for you to prove it and claim your own trip to Stockholm. This question of just how much extraction contributed to England’s financial and industrial revolutions, though, is one of the most openly and furiously contested problems of early modern Atlantic history.

It offers another well documented, compelling explanation for the inclusive institutions of early-modern Britain. Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have encountered this question — it’s right there in their footnotes. They just don’t seem to think it matters.

They are by all accounts nice, thoughtful guys, so the problem doesn’t seem to be arrogance or wilful blindness. Rather, this inability to see how London, Virginia and Barbados function within the same system is, ironically, an institutional problem within the profession of economics.

Economists are really good with numbers. This is important. Numbers matter, and the ability to infer how they affect each other matters, too. Some things, however, don’t seem to respond in obvious ways to numbers, or sometimes the numbers are constrained by things that are hard to measure.

It’s helpful to think of these things as institutions, the habits of mind and the state that shape markets. Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are right to see the importance of institutions, and they were right to drag the rest of their profession in their direction. The problem is that institutions are exactly the parts of markets that are inherently resistant to discovery through numbers.

Luckily, there are other professions that find, train and accredit the kinds of people who are good at understanding the political and cultural forces that drive institutions. These professions are the rest of the social sciences — sociology, history, anthropology, political science.

Economists are socialised to look down on the rest the social sciences as unserious, but it’s a funny ol’ thing when you reach the end of numbers and bang into an institution. You need new tools, exactly the ones you were told lacked rigour. This week economists have been congratulating themselves on following Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson into institutions. They are, in effect, proud to have discovered the rest of the social sciences.

…

Economists would never dream of approaching the nature of the firm without explaining carefully where they stand on Ronald Coase, for example. But this is exactly what Acemoglu and Robinson do in the opening chapter of Why Nations Fail.

They argue that the Virginia Company began with an extractive model, looking for gold, and then by the 1620s had begun developing inclusive institutions, such as Virginia’s General Assembly, “the start of democracy in the United States.” The footnotes reveal the source to be Morgan (1975). Edmund Morgan published in that year what is still today the single most important book about early colonial Virginia. But the name of that book is, unfortunately, American Slavery, American Freedom.

Morgan argued that the institutions of democracy and slavery in early Virginia developed together, driven by the same events. For about the first 30 years of Virginia’s development as a tobacco plantation, enslaved Africans and white indentured servants were treated with similar disdain, worked together in the fields, often made common cause and even married.

When white Virginian servants started to live longer, however, they rebelled and demanded curbs to the privileges of the big planters. Virginians created their slave code over the same period, outlawing intermarriage, writing a womb law that tied the status of a child to the status of the mother, confirming that slave status was permanent, and discouraging white women from having children with Black men.

Morgan argues that the extractive institution of Black slavery had changed by the end of the century, becoming even more draconian and brutal, as the democratic institutions of colonial Williamsburg became more representative. Inclusive institutions for white Virginians became possible not despite the extractive institution of Black slavery, but because of it.

You don’t have to agree with Edmund Morgan when you’re writing about early America. But you do have to respond to him, in the same way you respond to Ronald Coase when writing about the firm. This is not a niche reading of an old work. It is one of the central theses of the historiography of early American institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson read a book called American Slavery, American Freedom, used the bits about American freedom and tossed the bits about American slavery. The new economic institutionalists treat work on institutions by a celebrated historian not as a coherent argument, but as a source of anecdotes. If they did this with data, you’d call it p-hacking.

There’s more historiographical p-hacking in Why Nations Fail. They quote Sheridan (1973) on conditions in Barbados. But Richard Sheridan’s Sugar and Slavery argues in part that the English didn’t just profit from slavery in the West Indies, they gathered both capital and competence in shipping and finance.

This is not hard to find in Sheridan; he frames his entire work around a late 18th century argument between Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Smith argued that the sugar colonies had been an expensive mistake. Burke pointed out that the sugar colonies had become a crucial destination for English exports. Sheridan moves this argument forward, all the way to the big Atlantic question of growth.

Neo Smithians, he said, “tend to focus on such indigenous [British] forces of change as science and technology, entrepreneurship, and capital formation, acting and reacting in such a manner as to lower the institutional barriers to economic growth.”

The Neo Burkians saw in the Atlantic empire an “important source of wealth for the mother country,” one that “supported, and in some cases directly financed, the infant manufacturers who launched the Industrial Revolution.” The empire created new wealth, which paid for new landed estates and Parliamentarians who “influenced imperial policy in their own interest.”

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are neo Smithians. That’s their right; most economists are. But again, if they’re interested in institutions and they’re going to use Sheridan, why not actually take Sheridan seriously?

You’ll find in Sugar and Slavery an account of the same accumulation of the skills in finance and the trade laid out in John Mair’s textbook. Sheridan offers an uncomfortable origin story for the institutions of British finance, which among other achievements produced the Financial Times. If you’re going to study institutions, you have to be curious about all of them.

Vir: Brendan Greeley, Financial Times