Nobel laureate in economics explains why African societies are ready for rapid economic development

My pleasure.

Thank you. That's amazing.

Well, that's a good question. You know, I think when I was a kid I was very interested in the world. My mother, she was a sort of socialist, she was a teacher, she was very actively engaged in social issues and political issues, and we used to sit every night discussing what was going on in the world and what was going on in Britain. So I was always very passionate about social issues and thinking about why did the world work the way it did. And then I went to study political science at the London School of Economics, and I switched from political science to economics because I had a very inspiring professor called Michio Morishima, who was a Japanese mathematical economist who talked about everything. You know, like the first book we read was Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. So he just talked about all these big questions about world history and comparative development: why Japan had succeeded, why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain. And I got very excited about that, and so that set me off on this path, I suppose, and I've never looked back really. It's been so much fun.

I'm not sure I ever chose to be a scholar. I just found it so fascinating and interesting, and you just sort of take one step at a time. I mean, when you're young, you have no idea what it even means to be a researcher or a scholar. I mean, I didn't. You just sort of see, okay, I just want to keep on reading books and thinking about these things. So the next thing I do is a master's degree, and then the next thing I do is a PhD, and then I need to get a job, which was very difficult, by the way. But so I just went along this path. In some sense, I never really thought, like, 'scholar, I'm going to be a scholar.' And I think that's sort of the way I operate. Think about Africa: so my father used to work in Africa. I grew up in a house full of books about Africa and maps. But if you think, 'I'm going to start studying Africa,' you think, like, 'how on Earth can I do that? Where do I start?' Well, you start, you just pick up one book, and then you just read one book, and then you pick up another book, and you read another book, and then you read another book, and then you go to Africa, and you go to... so you just one step, and then it accumulates. So I think, why did I choose political science? I chose economics because I had this great teacher who sort of made me think that economics was about all these big questions. But then it turned out economics wasn't mostly about those big questions at all, and economists ignored tons of things that were relevant, like politics. So I became a political scientist kind of accidentally because I realized that the political science profession was actually a much better place for me to be intellectually than economics. So I bailed out of the economics profession. But honestly, most of the time nowadays I read books by historians and anthropologists. So especially if you're studying Africa, like for me, you know, most of the wisdom about Africa, African society, African history, African institutions is actually not in economics books or even political science books, but in books by historians and anthropologists.

Well, what I was trying to do in that paper is just to get people to take seriously the ideas and political philosophy of Africans. You know, if we were talking about the difference between the nature of state institutions in the United States or France or Sweden or Britain, we'd take seriously different people's ideas about the role of the state in society and people's attitudes towards redistribution, etc. But when we start talking about Africa, like, who cares? We don't pay any attention to what the Africans think or like what their ideas might be. We just sort of say, 'Oh, you know, they're poor countries, blah blah blah.' No, you should be taking seriously the ideas of Africans. So that was really a plea for doing that and trying to distill some lessons from the history of Africa that might explain some otherwise curious evidence from the Afrobarometer about people's attitudes towards taxation. And I think the answer to your question and the Sustainable Development Goals is you don't necessarily need to do things with taxation. Let me give you an example, which is Rwanda. How does President Kagame implement policy? A lot of policy is implemented through basically, you know, what I would describe as reciprocity by using traditional mechanisms like Umuganda, which is the biggest system of policy implementation they have, and many of these other what they call homegrown initiatives where people voluntarily contribute labor, voluntarily contribute resources. You know, if you want to get your street paved in Kigali, the government will give you money, but you have to contribute money as well. So I think there's many ways of doing things that don't involve a Western-style fiscal state.