DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

Soraya: So Ann, to dive right in, can we start with understanding the core question, Why does South Africa a country with so much potential still flounder? 

Ann: Let me say how delighted I am to be here and thank you for the invitation and lots of friends in the audience. That’s great to be interviewed by a South African. So South Africa is one of the few mineral rich countries that is middle income, and we are a society with enormous potential.  We were a democracy with a constitution that works pretty well. There are few countries in the world developed or developing, whose President is called up on National Tv at the Zondo Commission and asked to account for his actions as President of the Anc. As Deputy president of the Anc. And as leader of the country.  We have an independent judiciary. We have an enormous country, really a very big country, with very beautiful, enormous potential for tourism. And of course we have lots and lots of minerals, what you might call some of the old stuff, or what Ricardo would tell us some of the new stuff for growth. We have one of the developing world’s.  Most effect of financial sectors, and We have a system of cities that is unusual in the developing world. Most developing countries have one big city that’s kind of overwhelmed, as the country urbanizes. South Africa, has eight metropolitan areas, of which at least five or six or reasonable places which absorbing people in different ways. So we have a lot of advantages, and of course we have great people, i’m not so sure about the politicians. 

Soraya: South Africa is mineral rich. We’ve come through a peaceful democratic transition. We have a few strong institutions like our financial systems and private sector companies. However, on many global indices like inequality, one hundred and fifty education, unemployment, health and housing. South Africa is falling wealthly short. Why are we in this position? 

Ann: So this is an important question, and they are probably different answers. Let me start by saying South Africa was always going to be a hard place to govern after apartheid in centuries of discrimination, a very powerful and terrible system of apartheid that affected millions of people’s lives.  This was always going to be difficult. On the other hand, I think there are three reasons why we are in the terrible situation we are in now.  He first is what our President likes to call the nine wasted years which are the nine years under his predecessor, President Zuma, who,  Protestations of black economic empowerment, notwithstanding, enabled a family from India to come and, together with South Africans, black and white, essentially looted the State on an industrial scale, and in so doing their undermined institutions. That’s his explanation. But I don’t buy that. I think he neglects to remind everyone that he was deputy president of the Anc. At this time he was chairman of the Deployment committee for the five years at the height of State capture, when people were put into think it’s in an inadequate explanation. Nine wasted years as the that was somebody else, and I i’m the new guy, and I think in some respects you have to say we’ve had for the last five years a flailing reformer. He raised hopes he seemed to want to do the right things. He has done some things. We are now starting to see a range of people who participated in destroying institutions being charged with fraud and other crimes. Nobody yet in orange overall overalls, but i’m hopeful. But the process is starting, and I hope a lot of people are getting very worried.  So he has done that, and he has what’s been people who are not correct to do that. He has also made one or two policy decisions that potentially really important in the energy area, for example, with South Africa is in deep trouble. Um. We are now allowing beginning to allow a market to for energy to appear, but we’re very, very. We’re at the very early stages of that, and no guarantees. We’ll get there erez agmoni. I think so. We’ve had a flailing reformer who has failed to do a a range of things from improving education to having people in his Cabinet who are both corrupt, and some are completely incompetent. One who knows the marriage of the two, or what that means. But at the top levels of government. Increasingly.  There are people who it’s hard to ask a South African audience name me a minister you respect who can actually do their job outside of some pockets of excellence which are the South African Reserve Bank and the National Treasury, and perhaps parts of the Presidency. But The third reason we are in deep trouble is, whatever the Harvard technical term is bad policy decisions. They are bad policies that have come out of the Anc. And have been implemented, of which the most important cadre deployment, where they’ve appointed people to key positions to this day because of loyalty to the party rather than competence to do the job, and then the other. 

The thing, I think, has been absolutely critical is they fail to appreciate. Never mind, understand the power of markets and firms to help transform South Africa. And so, even when famously, Nelson Mandela came back from Davos in the Ninety S. And said, I’ve been persuaded  We have to understand markets, global markets and deal with global markets and essentially move towards a social Democratic rather than a Communist position. At no time did he or his successor and Becky two Persuade anyone else of why they had changed their minds. So there wasn’t a big campaign to explain to members of their party or their government why they had moved to a very different approach to how to govern South Africa’s economy. So to this day. We have Marxist language, and we have far too much faith in a developmental state whatever you might think of this ideologically, is just a joke. When we have a weak and corrupt state. So the Anc. To this day and the President want the the State to lead the State to direct the economy. And this is just ridiculous. The current level of capacity, competence, and integrity of the State from top to bottom.

Soraya: Those outcome sound bleak, and I think, despite those big outcomes, perhaps you and I share some optimism about our country. You recently shared in a talk that South Africa is one of the top three countries after the US. And Canada in its Coquit citizenship. And I’m curious, what then is the role of South African business to maximize the corporate citizenship for the development of South Africa?

Ann: You posing to three very important questions. Let me take the easier one, which is, I have very strong views on the role of business in society, in any society. I think the most important place to start that conversation is not where most people start it. Most people want to start with, what more are you going to do for our society? And they take for granted the running of a profitable, legally compliant institution? I want to start the conversation with any successful modern business, and most of them do comply with the law. Any company or firm like that is providing a service to society already, otherwise no one would buy their products.  But they do much more than that. So, being a profitable company, means you’re providing careers for the people who work for you. Probably health care, unemployment, insurance pensions for them and their family. You pay taxes. These are the most legally compliant institutions in the history of humankind. That’s where the conversation should start. That is their most important contribution to society, whether it’s through innovation or the corner store that I could go to, or the pharmacy in the middle of the night. So that’s I think, really important. Before we start the conversation about, what more can you do for society? And a lot of the time, like companies all over the world, this involves ad hoc projects. It’s kind of nice picture opportunities for the Ceo to open a new school or do something like that. It has started to change in the biggest companies who are trying to collectively have a bigger impact systemically on, say, education, one hundred and fifty. But it’s not nearly advanced enough, and my guess is that’s the case in many other countries. So I think corporate’s investments. Social investment is a really important. It’s free money. It’s money that doesn’t have to be spent on teachers, salaries, or all the things that public money has to be spent on, and that’s then one hundred and fifty implies much greater thought about how to use that money strategically and to have a real impact and the best advice I ever heard on this, which it’s easy to say, but harder to do. Is there is an American who said to me,  You know, if you think of education, however generous the American private sector, Canadian or South African, which at the time were the top three in the world terms a proportion of money donated to social investment one hundred and fifty.  It’s less than one percent of the National Education budget. So, according to this person which I agree with private dollars, should be used to influence how public dollars are spent. That’s how you have 
impact in society, and that’s easy to say as I said, it’s harder to do, but it is possible, and it requires a different kind of approach to how most people think about this, and i’m not talking about. Let me be polite. Um. The current debate on Wall Street and elsewhere about Esg funds. A lot of this is marketing. A lot of it is hype coming out of companies and the industry around social investment Shouldn’t believe anyone don’t believe all their reports destroying many trees on inputs. They tell you all, we spend this one on entrepreneurship, and that on something else.  And then, in case I want to know about output, and most of them never tell you about output. So this is a much more complex area than I think is often allowed. Lots of let’s just call it marketing that goes into this rather than reality, and we should be pushing much harder for serious engagement on serious issues, and to pretend that E. And S. And G. Can all be being together in one little happy phrase, ridiculous. And so i’m opposed to this glib sort of staff. But it’s very important kind of precious money. In a society it should be used much better.

Soraya: In addition to the the dollar contribution, one of the ways that business can make a meaningful social impact is on job creation. And so this is an area that is a lot of sleep, particularly in South Africa, one hundred and fifty. And if we were to matter in on that topic specifically. How can businesses make more meaningful contribution to job creation and gift people onto that first run in employment?

Ann: Sure with respect to the where you phrasing the question. South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, So there’s a lot of chatter about job creation as though business people get up in the morning and say, how many jobs can I create today? Most business people, ninety nine percent of them don’t get up and think that they get up And think, How am I going to make sure my company survives and we can make a profit? That’s what they’re thinking about. Jobs are a consequence of growth and firm development. So it’s important to think about this properly, and I wish South African business would push back more with the Government for this loose talk about this. So one the real issue in South Africa, I think, is it’s twofold. You have to create an economy, but And you facilitate economic development that deals with the the workforce we actually have and not the skilled workforce. We we think we have, or we wish we had. So you need jobs for the kind of workers that we have. How do you do that? Well, Firstly, you have to one hundred and fifty facilitate it. You have to make it easier to create firms. And now i’m going to reference Ricardo in some ways. On the one hand, you have to think about South Africa’s spatial legacy, and how expensive it is for poor people to get close to economic opportunity. Apartheid was all about keeping people away from the centers of economic growth, and inadvertently, not deliberately. The democratic government has Erez Agmoni had a housing policy that has pushed the poor further away and not brought them closer to economic opportunities. So that’s so. Transport is clearly one big issue. The labour market is a second issue, where one the government, when the ends he came to power. They wanted a high-wage, high-skill sort of economy, which is fine, but they didn’t bother to train the workforce. They have not improved basic education in any significant way, and our skill system, vocational skills is expensive and and doesn’t produce the numbers. 
People trained to do what our economy needs. So we haven’t done that. But we also have encouraged, 
if you like, the top end of the economy, to do deals in a factory or an earth, a workplace where the urban elite in the workforce make a deal with the employers, and then the Minister of labor extends the wages and conditions and hours, and so on to everybody across the country. 
And that’s very harmful. So we don’t create nearly enough low-skilled jobs for the population that we have one hundred and fifty, and we keep talking about as to people in America and elsewhere, and the Eu they want decent jobs. I just want jobs for people to get a first foothold in the modern economy, and I think the more adjectives you put in front of the word jobs, the less jobs you’ll get.

Soraya: If we then abstract the questions a little bit. I’m wondering about what preconditions are required for business to co-author, a prosperous future for South Africa, or our preconditions of policy?

Ann: So co-author is an interesting way of putting it South Africa needs a very different approach to how we run our economy. That requires a very different understanding of the role of the State. The so current South African State is struggling to do the basics that any State should do protect people’s, lives, protect property, small businesses are destroyed when crime happens and they’re broken into and so on. So I think the South African State should concentrate on rebuilding professionalized, and focus on the basics, fix the roads, or or get someone else to fix the roads but the basics, and they should free up as much of the country as possible, and as much of the economy as possible for private sector actors to operate in competitive rules. 
The enormous opportunities to do that. The the rest of Africa is Some parts of it are really growing fast, and South Africa can play a really important role there in some ways, like Hong Kong did for China. That should be how we should be thinking about South Africa for the rest of Africa. 

But we have to stop monopoly provision of very basic services for the economy. It’s one thing to be a monopoly, to be a useless monopoly to not allow competition to not provide services, and the few services you provide you provide very at a very expensive rate. That’s electricity. Our ports are some of the worst in the world, and they should be some of the best. And our railway system, which was a real asset, is, is not working very well, so there are a whole lot of things that need to be fixed, and, in my view, so one of the South African dilemmas, and then our stop is a lot of people know we have to reform. The conversation goes like this. We have to do the following kinds of reforms: You’ve got to reform monopoly, provision of railway power ports, etc. We need to fix the roads. We need to do change the education system. We need to the telecommunications needs to be completely modernized and much more competitive, and so on. 

But they said, the State is very weak, but we all not our heads, and then five seconds later, they tell us the State must do the following things to reform, and i’m the voice in the room that says, Hang on this State is going to really struggle to manage the reforms we need. The only capacity in the country of real significance lies outside the State, mainly in the private sector, which is an impressive private sector for a developing country, and they could do a lot more if the Government would open up the seriously open up space for South Africa’s, some of our world-class companies and our financial institutions to play a much bigger role in. Yes, to make profits, but to help rebuild the country, and that’s I think, the key variable.

Soraya: Thank you.  I think, before we turn to questions from our audience. I’d like to end with a broader question. We’ve got many students in attendance who will work at the intersection of the public and private sectors after leaving HKS. What should these future policymakers do to unlock the potential of private sector in driving national growth?

Ann: Well, let me restrict this to I don’t know the way. It’s a big question, so think the history of the last period globally has shown the enormous power of markets operating in competitive circumstances in imperfect countries. You, don’t need perfection. I think that people who go into the State Should understand the power of markets, and how to use that to help develop countries. On the other hand, you know, after all, if a clever state can get the markets to do all sorts of things, or enable them to do all sorts of things, and then claim this as their victories. It’s not as though you have to you. Then say, look what we’ve done. It’s not that you’re giving credits all the time. So there clever ways to do that. On the other hand. I think that people who go into the private sector dealing with the dreaded e is. G. I think you need to be strategic. You need to think about the real role of companies and the enormous power of markets, core companies not. And then what else you can do as corporate citizens in a particular country, and I don’t know, Don’t believe anyone sort of do your own work and be skeptical about. Hi, but think hard about the role of the market and the state, and how you can use that to change, to improve things for the better. But don’t be fooled by a lot of the I don’t know the chatter about all of this. I’m not sure if that’s what you were looking for. But thank you, Anne, thanks so much. We’d like to welcome questions from our audience. Thank you. I believe we have a mind. 

Attendee: Thank you, Ann, for a very informative discussion. Um, i’m also South African. So probably a little bit biased in terms of my questions. But I hope to. The first is um related to States and the private sector. I think I feel like there’s an inherent distrust between the two, probably along political and racial lines in terms of the private sector being inherently white because of history in the country and government being historically black because of new emerging transition. That’s happening. And how do we break down that barrier and create more trust between the two, so that we can actually overcome some of these blockers. And then the second question is related to the State itself in terms of government. I think we seeing such an amazing emerging class of well-educated South Africans across all spheres and how long the anc continued to have a hold In terms of old ways of governing with such young vibrant energy coming through. And what does that look like? 

Ann: I think there are two things about business and government. I’m very hesitant about using the word we need. Three years ago people would say, Oh, we need greater trust between business and government, and I was on a platform the other day, and I heard someone say that. And I thought, Yeah, a lot of crooks in government. I don’t want business to have greater trust between with them. We know what happens then. I think there is an ideological issue. The ruling Anc. believes in a developmental state, a sort of fantasize about an East Asian State, but they aren’t one until you break that fantasy. In my view, it’s going to be very hard to make real progress. That’s the one issue. The second issue is the business sector is obviously not perfect, and there were leading companies involved in State capture leading international companies from Bain to Mckinsey. 
Don’t go and work there, everybody. If you behaved appallingly Um and other companies S. And P. And others, they should be charged, and people should go to jail if they broke the law. And I support the South African Government, saying they are not going to work with being in future. And the yeah Uk Government. Perhaps you could talk to this government. So there’s an ideological issue, and it’s our history, and it’s almost like you want to say things are so bad. Can we talk about the future? 
We’re lucky as a country to have the private sector that we do with all its imperfections when covert hit. The South African business community responded so quickly, and I have yet to find another country where the business community responded in the way that they did. They put up enormous sons of money for the public good. They organized themselves to help deal with, remember the days of PPE, and so on, and then the vaccine. Without them we would not have been able to vaccinate the percentage of the population that we have. Not that it’s fantastic. So I think they did an incredible amount. They also pulled together a whole lot of people to write the world’s longer strategy document for the economy of one thousand pages. But you know the enormous detail and commitment and seriousness.  This needs to be recognized when there needs to be a whole different attitude. Our business also needs a different attitude to government. They think what’s wrong with these people. Governing is easy, and it’s not so. There is some fault on either side. Um, which I think needs to be dealt with, and how you cut through that. Well, of course it’s always the option of a new government. You can throw the rascals out and put a new bench in. 

Sorry. What is your second question about? Oh, right? What about young people? Well, you have to stop cadre deployment first and foremost. So cadre deployment is the term in South Africa for the Anc. Government and C Political movement. Having a committee chair by the deputy president of the Anc. Who’s normally the deputy president of the country, who sits and they discuss. Who are we putting up for the judiciary? We have an independent process to choose judges, but this committee decides who they are going to put up who they’re going to put up for top positions. Head of Escam, head of the ports of everything you can imagine. Now they say, this is just like any other country, the ruling party We’re making suggestions. And then in the government there is an independent process of recruitment. But this is doesn’t hold water. Why would you have such very senior Cabinet ministers, deputy ministers generally of the country chairing this political parties Committee on who should get which jobs it’s just, you know, doesn’t matter. I don’t believe it. Nobody believes it. And, in fact, the deputy, that Deputy Chief Justice of the country, now the Chief Justice of the country, in his report on State capture, said that he thought Cadre deployment was both illegal and unconstitutional. 
There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s been a key factor in undermining state capacity, because it would be. Are you loyal to us? Will you give us a cut by making it up of the loot you get? Will you make sure the procurement goes in a certain way you can imagine the conversation that takes place and not. Are you a competent engineer? And how many years of experience do you have? And why should we put you forward for a very important position? 

So you have to cut this, and the answer is divided on this. See some leaders saying we should cut it now. But the key for South Africa is to hold the educated people that it is training, and we now have many more black South Africans coming through our universities. More black engineers, more black teachers we’re doing, not fit. Consider our past. We’re not doing badly. It’s improving. So there are lots and lots of people coming through the system, but they need to. Then, like all of us work well-run institutions where you can learn on the job. This is the home of know. How do you get know how you watch? And the people running the engineering firm or the legal firm actually do their job, and you put in your years learning and then improving as a professional. And that’s not happening well, partly because of carto deployment, and partly because one, I think, a very badly implemented approach to black economic empowerment. 

Attendee: I’m originally a Brazilian, But in the summer working and I also a venture capital fund in the city, and one of the notice. It was very hard for the fund to make investments that want right men to be Africans, and it also used to be on their second or third entrepreneurship endeavor. And I think that there is a lot of conversation in the country at least, that I participated this summer. That spoke a lot about how entrepreneurship can move the country forward. I’m curious on your thoughts about how you can be able to leverage entrepreneurship that goes beyond The Africans white Western Cape kind of uh environments. And if you have any thoughts about how the private sector can do more things to do that beyond. Like Allen Gray founders and that kind of stuff.

Ann: Lots of layers here. Great question. I would stop the way it’s currently legalized and implemented. I would fix education, you can start making a difference in six years. But it really makes a difference. Some seventy percent of South African learners in our schools can’t read right? Add up in any serious way at all, so we can’t discuss entrepreneurship within. We should stop talking in my view. Nonsense! Which is, we look at a whole lot of unemployed young people, and we say you should all become entrepreneurs, and they are people who generally come from homes where nobody works, or a community where nobody works. You just set them up for failure very bad strategy. So we should stop wasting time there. One hundred and fifty, I think we have a reasonable, but i’m not an expert sort of venture capital sector, and it’s growing, and there’s lots of money in the banks and financial institutions to invest. So we need to allow the real entrepreneurs to emerge without preconditions with the bee kind of preconditions, and then we have to fix the environments in which they would operate. Okay, maybe sort of people don’t know enough about this. These are an ever-expanding set of regulations which to new investors, for example, you’re about. You’ve discovered you want to explore for minerals in South Africa, and you’d like to set up a mine. You have to give away half your profits before you have any by finding a black partner. It doesn’t have to contribute anything. They just have to be black before you can get funding before you can conform with the government’s laws. So that’s just one of the issues um, and they they’re a range of other. Be constraints that hold back new investment and new invest tools. There are other issues. So, leaving aside that take minerals. Okay, South Africa has not invested in new exploration for the last. I think it’s twenty years. It could be at least fifteen. Why, there’s real possibility for all sorts of minerals, but there is dispute about the property rights system, and what rights the mining companies will have their disputes about who owns which piece of property And because we don’t have an effect of cadestral system. The mining sector has said, We’ll pay for another one. No, it says the department will do it. But there, one hundred and fifty incompetent. They have vested interests. They all sorts of swirling accusations are not competent to assess. Why does this all take so long? So there are there are a range of issues. They’re told back entrepreneurs, I think, in some respects at a big level. There is a lack of confidence in how the country has been governed a lack of confidence in where it’s going. We don’t have a vision for the future that’s plausible, and the politics is unstable. So they are big factors. The economy is generally stagnant, and that’s partly because big investors are not seeing.  The environment is one in which they can risk their money. So that’s a part Answer to your question.

Attendee: Hello! My name is Douglas Barrios. I’m the Director of Policy Research at the Growth Lab so many here, or several here are in their training students, and one element that, at least in the MPA/ID  program they share about thinking about policy design is that good policy. It needs to consider what is technically correct, what is administerably feasible and what is politically supportable. And I think we’ve heard a a lot of the direction in which how policy making could improve in technical terms, and where a state capacity could grow. But I was wondering if you have some inklings inside thoughts about what are elements of a political equilibrium, or in a political narrative, or a political coalition that would support these types of reforms, eh? As Lant Pritchett would say, the current equilibrium is an equilibrium for a reason, because there is political support to what has happened. So what what could be some ah ideas about an alternative political equilibrium that would favor it.?

Ann: It’s a vital question. Let me start by saying I run a non-party political organization. So bear that in mind, and one of the hopeful things about South Africa is that until about two thousand and sixteen our elections were racial referendum because of our apartheid past you could predict how people were going to vote. And it was race. It was the past, and it was race two thousand and sixteen, a whole lot of mainly Anc voters stayed home. They didn’t vote about three million, which is significant in the country of ours. The number of people who vote in our country. And this phenomenon has increased to last year’s two thousand and twenty-one municipal elections with they will run. It’s really a referendum on the president his face was all over the country. It wasn’t like the local candidate. It was the President. They got less than fifty percent of the vote. They’ve lost the big cities, the current government, the electorate. 
So we are entering an era of much more competitive party politics, which is healthy after all. We Haven’t had a change of government which some of the theorists would say is the key marker of a really democratic society. We have had a change of government in. We have provinces or states. We have nine of them, and in one the Anc. Has lost power, and what happened there is, they lost power initially by a very small margin, and it just gets, It’s big now, but in no other part of the country, except in the Metro governments and some smaller towns as well so much more competitive politics. We are heading towards a general election. One scenario is that the current ruling alliance really, which is the Anc. The Communist party and the one of the the biggest trade Union movement, although that’s now split in two directions that they retain a very small majority. But they will lose seats which won’t make people in their party happy. So that’s one scenario, probably the most likely. As we sit here today, there is another scenario which is that the Anc. Goes below fifty percent. Now, if they go below forty, five percent, they’re going to struggle to form a government unless they go in with the the third party in South Africa’s system, which is the economic freedom fighters which sits at about ten, eleven percent of the electorate and are a very bad party make me just say they have a style of politics. That’s fascist. They are racist. They’re violent, often, not all the time. But these are not a model Westminster-style party. Um, Now there are many people in the Anc. Who fear getting into bed with the ef is young and quite. They’re smart, as many Populists are. They’re smart, energetic, and I think it would lead to a breakup in the Anc. That’s one possibility, and I think it’s it’s a possible alliance, but it would. It’s unlikely, in my view, one that it’s possible. So if the Anc. Doesn’t get into bed with them, what about the opposition. Now, if they around forty, five percent or less, if they’re above forty five percent, they can do a deal with. They’re lots of little small parties, and we have a Pr. system for a whole lot of reasons, which unfortunately, is not a great system for South Africa, but it encourages smaller parties, so above forty, five you can find smaller parties to align with below forty, five, and you don’t go in with them then what happens? That’s the big question, so could there be an overture to the official opposition at twenty five percent as we sit here today, Will the official opposition get into bed with them a dying party correct? What are the pros? What are the cons? What’s the deal? Or can the official opposition be the anchor for an opposition alliance that can take over government, perhaps as a minority, And that is not laughable. A few years ago you would have told me to get out of here. It’s a really ridiculous idea, but it’s not laughable. So South Africa does have more competitive politics, which is good. Our good constitution has some imperfections. There’s a big debate at the moment about whether or not independence should be allowed to stand for election, and how you do that in a Pr. System too complicated to explain. I think the Government has backed this issue. Unfortunately, because there is a solution. There is a was a committee appointed a few years ago, which many and then another committee recently that supported a mixed-German type system which more or less, would in most People’s view, be a much better alternative, but we don’t have that for two thousand and twenty. Four. Constitutional reform is on the table now. So there isn’t a simple answer to your question. But I think this: the situation in eighteen months time is going to be worse than it is today. The politics of that start looking interest the politics not living there, but the politics start looking much more interesting. I think there are going to be at least one new political party early next year of reasonable. Social Democrats, let’s call them, which will be a break with the Anc. And it will be black. So this is the space to watch. It’s very hard to predict as we sit here now, all right quickly. Thank you. Sorry for the moderation.

Attendee: Thank you. Ann. I’m Mark from Haiti. I’m a mid career here. I’m more curious about the role South Africa can play in the region you mentioned a little bit Asia Um. So today we’re looking at Nigeria, Egypt. We’re actually ahead. Now. What rule And how do you think South Africa could actually help shape the continent?

Ann: Second, look at how they calculate that they’re ahead of us. But leave that aside. Um! I learned really Key, i’m not an Africa specialist, but I think there are enormous opportunities. 
One of the issues about South Africa. The region is migration, which I think is a really important issue. The country needs South Africa needs skilled migrants, we have an ambiguous policy on that. But it’s ironic. We have so much unemployment, and we desperately short of skills, even when we’re growing at one percent. If you give to three, then we really need many more skills. So I think South Africa should be much more open to skilled people. We can discuss where you draw that line and where we make it as hard as possible at the moment. On the other hand, our borders are porous, more porous than they need to be in a policy area that’s hard to have perfection. We make it pretty hard for unskilled people to come in legally. 

Of course, these corruption, so you can buy your papers. Who knows how many? It’s very murky area? We also don’t know how many people they are in South Africa. So we’re talking. I don’t know who to believe. If you believe anyone in the state they’re generally angling for more, a bigger budget for the police or the Border Patrol, or the this, or the that, or home affairs. And whenever you talk to the Academics the number is dramatically lower. So I think we don’t really know if we’re honest. We did a lot of work on this about ten years ago, and was quite clear that the numbers were vastly exaggerated in the media one hundred and fifty by interests, who want more money from the budget. 

But I don’t know how much things have changed. Really, it’s bigger. I don’t know about how much the migration is clearly a critical issue in terms of the region. That’s the one thing i’d say. The other thing i’d say is that the future of Satsar and Africa will be drastically affected if South Africa goes bad and that should be prevented at all costs. So that’s you know. I think we’ve not been very effective on trade, and so on. But i’m really not an expert. I’m afraid in that area I can’t help much collective business initiatives to address systemic challenges, and it’d be interesting. You mentioned that sort of Covid response in business for South Africa. What other examples are you seeing of sort of large-scale collective and industry, efforts and education, or the national business initiative are These are These affect a farther as a model that could be relevant elsewhere. South Africa’s business sectors got become more organized. As the situation has got worse, they’ve got more organized. They also speaking out more than they used to. They tend to do a lot behind the scenes, trying to influence the Government policy I personally have advocated. They should do a lot more in public, and ensure that they are their voice and their vision; for South Africa is communicated much more effectively to the society as a whole rather than behind closed doors. They are collective efforts of different kinds, the covert one, notwithstanding. We put a lot of energy into trying to get South African business to spend the vast majority of their social investment on education, to move away from Ed Hope projects about ten years ago, and we’ve They have been movements and significant initiatives set up to do that They’re different ones. His debate about effectiveness, this debate about have you made the State more dependent on the outside players rather than a stronger state, which we know is a danger, and we would argue that too few of the business initiatives are independently evaluated. So there’s lots of hi, but very few independent evaluations. So it’s hard to actually comment with with famous lots of energy, lots of marketing, I think, in in education where we have done a lot of work they has. They are really significant initiatives. There are also a lot of questions about them, and this. It’s really hard for me to take it further than that in public. Ah, because I don’t know enough Now the other people who would come here and say to you, the national business initiative is doing a great deal of work on climate change. It’s not my area. Don’t know anything about it. They people who would say that individual companies, big South African companies, are doing an enormous amount, and one of the points I wanted to make about a comment earlier is oh, very simplistically. talk about white capital, And you know the black government. I think the government is predominantly African now, and the Anc. Is ninety nine percent An African party now, which most people don’t talk about. It is increasingly, racially exclusive. But you know, I go to talk to a lot of boards in corporate South Africa, and a few years ago I was caught short because I just assumed I would be talking to a lot of white men, and I walked in. It was very clear. I’ve made a mistake, and I was changing my talk midway because I hadn’t appreciated how much corporate South Africa has integrated. 
So there are big companies now where the mid-level of the company is ninety percent black not through affirmative action, but through internal training or just pressure of numbers, and people are starting to come through the ranks in a normal way which is fantastic. They are useless at communicating this to the rest of society. So I think there’s lots happening, training and all sorts of things, but it’s hard to be authoritative on a lot of it, because distinguishing he from reality, is very difficult.

Soraya: Thank you, Everyone on that note more close of the talk. Thank you so much, Anne. It’s been a delight to speak with you and to your insights. Thanks very much. 

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

Eliana LaFerrara: Hello, everyone, Welcome to Dev talks. I am Eliana LaFerrara, and I’m a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. It is a great pleasure today to be welcoming Dr. Joe Henrich from Harvard University for a session that will largely revolve around his book, titled the weirdest people in the world how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.

Joseph Henrich: Thanks to the Growth Lab for having me and for being flexible on the format. So in the the initial there was going to be more discussion. But one of my goals here, and and why I’m. So excited to be talking to a diverse group with policy interests and interest in economic development is that I come from the field of cultural evolution, which is a a kind of newly emerging discipline, and I think it can provide a valuable framework. But most of you are probably unfamiliar with cultural evolution. So I wanted to do a little bit of groundwork and kind of lay some of that out, so i’ll be drawing on both books, and we’ll spend some time on the weirdest people in the world. But this book really provides the framework for thinking about culture and cultural evolution one.

Now, I thought, since the group is maybe half economists, I would make this my outcome variable and just start thinking about the things that influence economic growth, and my kind of ah prelude or preamble is going to be based on a new paper where we just try to establish a simple and robust connection between family structures around the world, traditional family structures and economic growth. So i’m, drawing here on a a paper with Duma and Barani, Rod Jonathan Beecham and Jonathan Shilts.

And we’re going to argue that we should think about kinship norms as kin based institutions so cult fully transmitted social norms that shape things like marriage, the organization of family. Some societies have clans, kindreds, different marriage systems, and different forms of customary inheritance.

I’ll be talking about this more, But the key dimension we want to try to measure is kinship intensity. And this is actually a concept from anthropology. So we’re going to combine an economic problem with an idea from anthropology, and see if we can look for a link here.

Ultimately I’ll be arguing that economic growth is generated when there’s a fit between informal institutions, like kinship and the psychology, that they produce the kinds of social networks they produce in larger scale impersonal institutions, things like democracy or the organization of business firms.

So, as a as an outcome measure as an initial outcome measure, we’re going to use this nighttime satellite luminosity which has been widely used. Now it’s. Ah, you know, it gives us a fine-grained pixel level measure of economic prosperity that correlates strongly with other measures of economic growth and prosperity, and in the paper I’m. Referring to, we also use regional Gdp measures from genioli, twenty, fourteen, which gives us over one thousand five hundred different regions in eighty four countries, and we perform a bunch of analyses linking these two in the paper.

Now, kinship intensity, As I mentioned many of you. If You’re from societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. A lot of this talk about kinship may seem strange because those societies are at the extreme end of low kinship intensity where the family has been suppressed and doesn’t play an important role in distribution. Consumption networks, all kinds of things like that.

So we’re going to measure kinship intensity by looking at the presence of Clans cousin. Marriage rules about post marital residents where you live. After you get married you live near uh the bride’s family, or the grooms family. Uh, do you have polygeny? And what kind of inheritance system do you have patrilineal matrilineal inheritance by Testament.

So we’re going to measure this kinship intensity from this anthropological data source composed in the nineteen sixty S. Um. Which is going to has a whole bunch of information about kinship, and when I first went to graduate school I was like, Why are anthropologists so obsessed with kinship?

and then I went to do research in the South Pacific, and i’m like Oh, because the people are obsessed with kinship. And so they write about what the people obsess about. And So there’s lots of data in the ethnographic atlas on that the year which most of these observations refer to as one thousand nine hundred. So it’s going to precede our satellite observations, our nighttime luminosity measures, which are two thousand and ten we’re; also going to be drawing this kinship intensity Measure from a a paper by Jonathan Schultz, myself, and others. Actually, it’s the same Co. Authors uh that we published in science. So in that sense we’re going to tie our hands right. We have to use the exact same measure that we use in the science paper, so we can’t kind of fudge around with the index at all.

Ah, and we’re also going to take data from genetics. So my colleague, David Reich, who’s over in the department of Human Evolutionary biology, has put together the largest data set of human genetic data, and these kinship practices leave an imprint in the genome, which is one way to kind of assess that what these anthropologists report is actually affecting things because it’s going to shape the the lengths of runs of homozygosity, both polygeny and cousin marriage and other kinds of endogamous marriage preferences should do that. So we’re going to use that, and we’re just going to substitute this in sometimes for that.

Okay, So a standard issue economic regression table. Hopefully, at least half of you are familiar with these. I’ll just walk you through some of the key insights. So we’re trying to predict this pixel level luminosity. So the logarithm of pixel level luminosity we’re using this kinship intensity index from the anthropologists in the nineteen sixty s that we’ve used to assign ethnic groups all around the world a measure of of kinship intensity.

And so, by putting this here and noticing that this is about one, this coefficient. Here we can interpret this as a as a prosperity per capita, so it’s luminosity per capita.

So that’s that, And then this is our coefficient here. So a one standard deviation increase in kinship, intensity across societies results in a forty percent decrease in luminosity. So if you buy that as a measure of economic prosperity. There’s a relationship there now. We estimate a whole bunch of different specifications, different models We always. We put in country fixed effects. So we’re comparing only ethnic groups in the same country.

We can’t. We control for a whole bunch of the standard geographic controls political hierarchy and malaria index stuff from other other work that could be leading us astray.

And then we take that out. We use the exact same model, and then we stick in our f value, and we’re able to show that that gives the same result. And then we do the same thing with our satellite luminosity. We take that out same specification plug in the G, and only regional stuff.

You have to make a few adjustments. But you get basically the same. Answer. So that’s that’s suggesting that There’s this robust linkage there.

There’s some details about how we match the ethnographic Atlas that i’m going to pass over for our purposes here. 

Now the other thing we did that helps us, maybe think that this is. There’s really something to this: this ancestral kinship intensity affecting contemporary economic outcomes.

We do what’s called a spatial regression, discontinuity, analysis. So we look at the borders between our ethnic groups, and we only focus on groups within countries, So there’s no country level differences here, and we compare, and we look at what happens when we move from a a population that has a low kinship intensity so small, maybe monogamous nuclear families to a group with clans or something like that, some intensive group.

And what we find that you can see pictured here is that there’s a drop in ah in luminosity. So you have less economic prosperity as you move from groups with hot, with low kinship, potentially to high intensity. So that’s consistent with the other results.

We can, you know, do the full analysis. And that’s the basic answer. We get these coefficients here are just the Ki when you cross that uh the effect there.

Okay. So that suggests that there’s a linkage here. Now, why is that the case?

Lots of economists and others have argued that. Well, it has to do with differences in innovation, specialization, political institutions, trade. And so there’s a causal relationship there. Potentially. I leave that to other people. I’m. Interested in how these affect this.

So in the weirdest people in the world, I make the case that different kinship norms create an environment that leads to different ways of thinking about the world, and then that leads to more or less innovation, specialization, different functioning, political institutions, and more or less trade.

These can also be seen in social networks. So these have a huge and direct effect on your social networks. And so these two co-evolve.

Where’s my arrow? Okay, there it is now. I’m also going to think about where kinship norms come from.

So there’s a lot of reason to think ecology matters, and that’ll pop up at one point, but I’m. Mostly interested in the historical effect of religions. Religions have been very opinionated about marriage in the family, especially as you move through time over the last few millennium, so we’ll get into the Catholic Church. But other religions also have opinion, so we can think about how different religious traditions may have affected things through kinship. Mars.

One of the challenges. If you look across the social science, I think, is how people think about culture.

When I first started in anthropology. Culture felt like this sort of murky thing, that sort of looms almost like a haze around people. It’s hard to get, you know my my background is aerospace engineering that I was an engineer for a while before going into this business, and so I want things to be concrete and measurable.

So I found this work by. Ah, yeah, I ended up working closely with Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson, and also there’s other work by two biologists, cavali, sports, and feldman. And they said, Well, culture is this stuff that resides in individuals heads, and it gets transmitted from one person to another.

Why, you’re growing up, but also why are an adult? So it’s about how you learn from people. So you can build models of cultural evolution by understanding how people learn from each other and then cobbling up thinking, Okay, people interact, They learn, they do stuff, they interact again. And how can that get us to explain sociological phenomena, and what we know from a lot of research now is people automatically and unconsciously learn all sorts of things. So they learn motivations, valences, ideas, beliefs, and values. They also learn decision, making biases and heuristics and the kinds of things that directly affect people’s decision making.

So culture Here is information stored in people’s brains that got there via social learning. And so with that definition, technologies fall into this. Languages fall into this fertility, preferences, or any traits that influence fertility. I’m just throwing those out there, because often some people try to carve those out of culture.

So anything we socially learn from others we acquire while growing up. Of course, institutions are shaped strongly by social wars.

So now, where the evolution comes in, and why, I think that’s really important is, How do we decide how people learn from each other?

Well, I mean, when I talk to economic theorists who think about this, they’ll just make an assumption or or assume people are rational. What we do in the cultural evolution field is, we recognize that we’re a kind of ape, and that natural selection has shaped our minds to be good at learning from others.

So, more than any other species, we’re awesome at imitation. We’re awesome at inferring the underlying ah motivations and strategies that others have, and we copy those all the time. And outside of conscious awareness we’re particularly tuned into copying some kinds of people and not other kinds. So we use cues of shared dialect or prestige to figure out who to pay attention to.

So we can use evolutionary theory and build formal models that tell us what this should look like. And then, of course, we have other features of our evolved psychology that are going to affect behavior, and this is going to be really important for kinship.

Now, the product of this cultural evolution creates things like complex tools, rituals, and practices, but also social norms at institutions as well as languages. And this is the world in which kids are evolved in.

And so the argument that’s in the secret of our success is, we have these big brains, and we have a great deal of plasticity, because we need to learn how to navigate the world built by cultural evolution. And of course, cultural evolution has built lots of different worlds, and it’s been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, so our minds have evolved to figure out how to navigate these worlds and some things we know. We know that the illusions that people see across societies vary. So if you read a look at a textbook on cognitive psychology, you might see something like the molar allusion which has the arrows in or the arrows out well, and if you’re in Chicago you’ll you have to see. One line has to be twenty five percent longer than the other line before people perceive them in Chicago as the same length. If you study hunter-gatherers, they don’t see the illusion so basic. Visual perception. Depends. On the world you grow up on. Self. Regulation is affected by religious devotion. People who engage in daily religious devotion have greater self regulation. It’s cultural practice, same thing with the others. I could go into secret of our success gets into something.

all right, and the last thing i’ll mention is that we’re at the stage, and the evolution of the social sciences where we have to get rid of the the dualism, the you know, culture. On one hand, biology, on the other hand, when we grow up in these worlds it changes our brains. So you can take genetically identical twins. Raise them in two different societies. They end up with different brains.

So that’s just that’s just a fact.

Okay. And then my interest is actually, I think this has been going on for a really long time. So i’m interested in how this has shaped features of human psychology.

All right.

Okay. And i’ll just make a comment on the culture and institutions question. Just because this seems to be an ongoing issue in economics from the perspective that I’ve tried to lay out here There’s no Is it institutions, or is it culture? Because institutions are a product of cultural evolution?

So people learn from each other, and this gives rise to social norms. What are social norms?

So they are. Ah! You acquire both the behavior. Don’t, eat pig, and the rules for judging other pig eaters or bad news. And so then you get a social norm that prevents some group from eating pig. It’s it’s enforced. It’s self-reinforcing, and you can build game, theoretic models it’ll remain stable that sort of thing, so that gives rise to norms collections of norms that govern a domain or institution.

So marriage societies have had marriage institutions, for as long as we can figure, and marriage is governed by where the where the couple lives after they get married. Who pays bride price or dowry? There’s all these rules surrounding marriage. It’s an institution so formal institutions. The only difference is there you can write stuff down, and then future generations can interpret it all right now. Kin based institutions, i’m going to argue are special as institutions go, because we have an evolved psychology that we share with other animals to preferentially be altruistic towards those who are genetically related to. So those who have a probability of sharing the same altruistic genes.

It’s quite a bit of research on that. But kinship systems extend that so lots of societies will call cousins, brothers or sisters, and you’re supposed to treat that person like us like a classicatory sibling. You’re also not supposed to have sex with them, if you call them sister, and you’re a male, or and vice versa mit ctl and um. We also have a pair Bonding instinct, and marriage builds on that so like gorillas, who also have a pair of bonding instinct. We form long-term emotional bonds for the purposes of child rearing and protection. And then marriage formalizes that reinforces it et cetera, one hundred and fifty, and then finally incest aversion. Like other animals, we have to avoid inbreeding with close relatives. So we have an in a diversion that we develop towards siblings. People will grow up in the same household with, but that can be extended and created an incest taboos, and apply to in-laws apply to cousins other other members of the group,

and even hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari would, if you asked him about sex with a cousin they’d be like. Well, that’s like having sex with my sister, and they’ll they’ll actually make the link, and everybody knows what that sounds like. The sibling of what that feels like.

So Anyway, these structure human social networks, and they’re highly variable across human societies. It’s good to ask why. And that’s one of the things I want to do.

And then, finally, one of the arguments and the weirdest people in the world is that the emergence of pre-modern States were really built on the logic of kin, based institutions so lower strata and upper strata. Think about kings and queens, and marrying cousins and lineages, and all that stuff, and of course, the lower strat. It worked as a productive unit. They’d re, you know, arranged marriage, that kind of thing, and it was really this thin layer of, and in personal institutions sandwiched between two versions of complex kinship that made pre modern states work mit ctl. And and it’s hard to get to modern states. If you have all this complex kinship operating in the background. So part of this is an argument about where modern states can come from one hundred and fifty.

Okay, Now, all of this talk about kinship and clans and stuff may seem unusual to at least some of you. Ah, because you come from these weird societies, and just to give you a sense of how  unusual it is. These are a set of kinship traits that vary around the world and bilateral descent. So tracing descent through Mom and Dad. Most societies Haven’t had that they’ve had something else. Patrilineal descent, matrilineal descent. So that’s rare cousin marriage seventy five percent of societies have some form of cousin marriage. In some places it’s preferred monogamous marriage.

Eighty five percent of human societies have allowed high status elite males to take additional lives. Nuclear families rarer yet ninety two percent of societies. Haven’t had nuclear families. They’re organized in some kind of extended family and near local residents. So that’s when the bride and the groom lives separate from either the bride or the groom’s family, and that’s even more rare if we look at the world as presented in the ethnographic Atlas.

Most societies have none of these weird traits. So fifty, one, fifty point, one percent of societies have zero. If we look down at other societies that have five. They’re either European descent societies that appear in the ethnographic Atlas, or they’re places where usually Spanish missionaries have arrived early.

So I actually found there’s this island of Sebu, which has weirdly five of these, all five of these traits. So I went and did research on it, and I went to Antonio Pig fed his journal of Magellan’s Chronicles, and he records polygeny like crazy and cousin marriage, and all that stuff in Sabb. But then the Spanish Dominican missionaries got there, and by the time the anthropologist wrote stuff down, the Spanish missionaries had done their bit, kay, So families are a great place to start, because they’re where children are born into. So they’re the first institution kids encounter, and they’re historically the oldest institution. So everything we know is that some societies only have kin based institutions.

All right. So where did they come from? A common assumption is that these come from wealth? People get rich, and then they start living in monogamous nuclear families. That’s what everybody wants to do. Right?

Um. But there’s good reason to believe in. Historians and anthropologists have long argued that it was actually the action of the Roman Catholic Church, one branch of Christianity that dissolved the complex kinship networks of Europe into monogamous nuclear families,

And one fun piece of evidence is that you know all of us speak English. We know the term for affine, so that’s the anthropological term. But if you where does the in-law come in? Sister-in-law, or brother-in-law or father-in-law, it comes from in canon law so every time you say sister-in-law you’re channeling the Catholic church’s taboo on sex with your sister-in-law or sex with your brother-in-law, because that was supposed to remind you treat her like a sister you can’t marry her.

Important, because even in the Bible there were forms of marriage, where, if your husband died, you’d marry his brother so like Leverett marriage so oral marriage very common across societies. Church does away with it.

You’re also, maybe familiar with the common thing in marriage ceremonies. Oftentimes the priest or preacher will say something like if any one here can show just cause why this couple should not be lawfully joined together in holy matrimony, let them speak now or forever to hold their peace. That comes from the caroling gene. Empire’s effort to root out incest meaning marriage with cousins, and you get everyone together, and you say, Ok, are these two related in any way? Does anybody know how they might be related? And that’s essentially what that is?

Ah! So eventually the church begins in late antiquity bands first cousin marriage, but it eventually goes out to six cousins, and then it contracts a bit in twelve, fifteen. Ah! Down to third cousins, but still pretty broad incest taboos, Remember, most societies have cousin marriage. Seventy five percent of them.

Polygamy also is banned. Europeans had polygamy like crazy secondary wives all that kind of stuff before the church.

Um no arranged marriages so very common cross-culturally the church required bride to the the Christian marriages still have. The bride has to say I do. At one point Most societies don’t ask the bride her opinion. Ah, but so the church forces that, and the priest is supposed to be checking. Right? Okay, you’re good with this right?

And the church also discourages corporate ownership. So they wanted people to be able to give the church land, and if the uncles can get a hold of the land after their brother dies, the church can’t get their hands on it, so they they try to confine ownership to the individual and prevent collateral inheritance.

So the a great book to read about this is Jack Goody’s development of the church and family and marriage in Europe.

Oh, gosh! What happened to this slide? Um. Okay. So this is just the same thing I was showing you before, and i’m going to focus on this link and this link, all right. So the first thing that I may need to persuade you of is that there’s a lot of psychological variation around the world, and if you didn’t know about this, you’d be forgiven. Because if you take a course in social psychology, there’s a social psychology text which presents it. As if this is how people think, when actually it to how weird people think uh. So just to give you a sense. This is a measure of individualism around the world. Ninety-six percent of psychology studies are with European descent populations, the Us. Primarily. So they’re studying some of the most psychologically unusual populations around the world. Similar things with differences between trust in your out group versus trust in your in group.

This affects beliefs and preferences. So here i’m thinking of economists. But if you’re a cognitive scientist, it also affects attention, memory, perception, reasoning, decision, styles, and and a challenge. I have yet to find a decision-making heuristic, prevented by the found by the behavioral economist that doesn’t vary across societies. There’s either no evidence or I can show you there’s a variation.

And I’m going to focus on individualism in personal trust conformity and and patients which, at least to an intuitive first approximation, might affect economic outcomes.

Okay, Now, one thing I have a caveat, which is that people from societies tend to think traits that promote success in their society are good. Ah! And so they tend to negatively balance things. And some people think you know. Why are you saying bad things about these people calling them conformists?

You know it’s thinking of a more conformist society. But in those societies being a conformist, is good, so um conformity is well-studied. So if you show Americans parents with their child behaving in a conformist way in a Nonconformist way. The American parents like the non-conformist They’ll be like that Kid’s smart, you know, we we like that kid. Whereas if you go to other societies and show a conformist and a non-conformist child you know same videos, they pick the other kid Mit.

Okay, Now, I want to give you a sense of why our psychology would vary. So i’m going to think about an intensive tin based society and a weak kinship society.

So in an intensive kinship society you get your relationships at birth, and a lot of life is about figuring out how to navigate those relationships live up to your responsibilities.

You can form to the roles and obligations of this society might be. Why, conformity is good? Because you’re trying to. You know not shame anybody Now, in a weak kinship. Society, you don’t have very many family connections. You have to find your ah mates and friends and partners and all that kind of thing by cultivating a set of attributes that make you interesting to other people. So maybe you want to be creative or trustworthy or honest mit seek. Others based on attributes and mutual interests, seek new relationships based on existing network connections. So in lots of places you’re not worried about whether someone has a trustworthy disposition.

You want to have a lot of social connections to them, because if you do, you know, they’ll behave in a business relationship, say, and and other kinds of relationships. It’s the linkage between ah people. So trust is based on embedded embeddedness and trust, based on dispositions.

Ah, these these tend to be shame oriented. So you’re trying to not violate social norms. If you do, other members of your family could experience shame so social standards here. Here. Guilt is often your personal standards, so I might feel guilty for not going to the gym, because i’m trying to stay in shape. But my neighbor doesn’t care about that. And if they find out my brother’s not going to experience shame. But i’m feeling guilt, something like that.

And here your identity is based on relationships and network. And here it’s that set of cultivated traits on the scientist. I’m a kayaker, that sort of thing.

Okay. Now, empirically, the case we set out for ourselves in the science paper was we needed to connect the church to kinship. We need to be able to connect kinship to weird psychology, and if both of these hold we should also be able to do this.

So. Ah! We have the kinship, intensity, index, which I told you about. We also got a lot of data on cousin marriage. We can do that within Europe based on dispensation requests. And then we also have measures from this biologist in bittles, and then we have measures of the duration of the church’s marriage and family program which we can calculate globally or within different European regions based on the diffusion of bishoprics.

I’ll say more about that in a second. So this just gives you a sense of cousin marriage around the world. One in ten marriages even today, is between cousins, the pashtun in in Afghanistan, fifty, two percent cousin marriage. That’s the Taliban as a pashtun organization.

So I want to avoid doing. I can show you I can show you seventeen different plots like this for seventeen different psychological variables cross nationally.

But let me summarize all that, and it summarizes nicely by this plot more centuries under the church for a population less cousin marriage. The same would be true if I put kinship intensity as measured from the ethnographic atlas, so that link holds cross nationally, more cousin marriage, less individualism and impersonal psychology. So people are less individualists more relationally oriented. And then, finally, we can go this way, and in all of our analysis we always do. The Eastern Church, which had a kind of a soft, less enthusiastic version of the marriage and family program that the Western Church imposed to dismantle the family structures in Western Europe. So you often see a weak but positive correlation with the Eastern Church, and then the strong result with the Western Church. So with the crossnet we see lots of variation cross nationally it roughly seems to pattern how we think it might pattern.

But we want to dig in and see if we can get closer to you know, build more confidence in that. There’s really a relationship here.

So my collaborator, Jonathan Shilts, created a database of the diffusion of Catholic bishoprics through Europe. So we have a Gps location and a year, and so we can use that to assign a dosage to each place, and this is actually spiraling through time. So it just started. You’ll see certain places turn gray.

That’s because that part of the of Europe was under a political power unfriendly to the Bishop of Rome. So the Pope in Rome you’ll see. Southern Spain deal is so Sicily. Well, Sicily’s under Islamic powers.

Okay. So you get this variation in dosages. We have the Carolingian Empire here, which which may come up later, and we have also the the Iron Curtain, both of which we have to deal with in the analysis.

But just ah! To to measure psychology. We use questions from the European Social Survey. Um, I won’t. Go into the detail, but they asked about conformity and obedience, individualism, independence, impersonal fairness, and in personal trust. So we get variation around through hundreds of thousands of Europeans. Ah, contemporary, and we see if we can explain the variation, and what we find is that regions. So we have four hundred and forty, two European regions that had more exposure to the Church mit ctl, and have greater impersonal fairness, greater impersonal trust, less conformity and obedience, and greater individualism independence. So we’re only comparing Europeans and Europeans. Here we’re just doing it within the same country. And so we’re comparing different regions of the same country two.

We can hold individual demographics, so sex, age, h squared income and education are important ones. They don’t seem to do much work at all.

Geography, climate, the influence of Roman roads, initial prosperity. We also put in medieval universities, monasteries, and the Carolingian Empire. One of one of the most persuasive analyses for me was when we threw out Western Europe, and we just do this analysis on Eastern Europe, and we find we can explain this variation in these aspects of psychology within Eastern Europe.

Okay, Um. We also managed to get some cousin marriage data. And so this is the percentage of cousin marriage on a log scale, and that’s conformity. So more cousin marriage in Italy, Spain, France, and Turkey, we get greater conformity and obedience, less impersonal trust

and less individualism, independence, and less impersonal fairness. So interestingly, Turkey, which actually has a very different history right from places like France, they fall right where they should be on the plot. Once we know the rates of cousin marriage, so one of the differences could be this shift in kinship.

Um, i’m actually going to just really short-circuit this because i’m looking at the clock. But we did this trick, which is a fantastic trick from economics, where we look only at second-generation immigrants. So these are people who grew up their whole lives in Europe, but their parents come from somewhere else, and we can actually tag them to an ethnic group.

We tagged that individual who grew up entirely in Europe with a kinship intensity, or a cousin marriage rate from where their parents came from, and then we can predict aspects of their psychology and control for their income and all that sort of thing all right.

Okay, Now, one of the things I wanted to explain in the weirdest people in the world was that industrial revolution simple topic, because it shouldn’t take long. Ah! And i’m interested in this idea of the collective brain which I develop in the secret of our success. And there the idea is pretty simple. It’s that most innovations are recombinations of different ideas. So the things that should feed into that you want larger populations. You want more cognitively diverse populations, and you want more free flow amongst individuals. So we can get together and swap ideas.

So that’s the basic idea of the collective brain, and I apply it to you, fluid social interactions among cognitively diverse individuals. And I look at the institutions, and I also look at the psychological relationships between innovation and and those psychological traits, but something like the journeyman phase. And an apprenticeship means You’ve apprenticed under a master, and you’re probably he’s probably not your father, which is unlike many places or another kin kinfolk, and then you have to go to somewhere far away. It’s. Like a post-doc, go somewhere far away and hang out with a bunch of other people who apprentice under somebody. It seems like a perfect environment for creating recombinations of diverse ideas one hundred and fifty.

But in elsewhere. If you look at India, you read the literature on apprenticeship. There you look at China. Their clans wanted to keep secrets, or there were regional specializations. Nobody wanted to share information.

And then, finally, the psychological factors that’ll create this recombination. Of course, the crucial here is is tolerance.

Okay. So to try to put this to the test. Uh, I started working with Slava Savinsky, who’s in the crowd, and Jonathan Schultz, uh former postdoc in my lab, and we took the patent database from uh one thousand nine hundred and eighty to two thousand and fourteen, and that gives us a Let’s see. This gives us a measure of patents across Europe, and the idea is, is, we think, that you know, the social networks which allow people to swap. Ideas are going to promote more patent and greater individual, is a nonconformity and impersonal trust. Those same measures that I just told you vary around Europe should lead to more patenting. So does all this psychology stuff I’m talking about on this survey, which you know just could be a bunch of survey answers, but as a cash out and more patents, and we also have the same measure. So again, our hands are tied right. We already tied our hands in the science paper.

So these are the new patent database that Slava put together. You can see It’s these very small nuts, three regions in Europe, so over one thousand four hundred regions, and then we have our measures of ah trust, fairness, individualism, and conformity. And the basic question is, is, Can we explain the patents using those as a first step, and what we find is that we can take each of these pieces of psychology, and each one of them will explain patents in a regression holding the country constant and and other stuff. So a standard deviation increase in weirdness, or in in any of these four traits, will lead to between a point two, seven, and point four, three increase in patents. So that’s a pretty good increase in patents and patent. Here is my measure of innovation. There’s lots of interesting arguments about how good a measure that is. But it does seem to have some some value if we do a principal components on these four pieces of psychology and get a single dimension. We get over half a standard deviation increase in patenting across these different regions. So just a quick look at the standard economics table. So this is each of the four, and the weird psychology with the principal component um country fixed effects, so only comparing people in the same country all the standard battery of of geographic controls and things like that, so that suggests that innovation might be related to psychology. We can do the same thing with our nuclear families. They still vary across Europe, and and we have a measure of that. Or we have this measure of Facebook friends. So what percentage of Facebook friends are over one hundred miles away, And we use that to explain the patents. So, just to give you an example of the kind of result a one standard deviation increase in far away Facebook trends increases. Ah! By a quarter of a standard deviation. Patents per capita across these different regions. So this network thing seems to hold, and we think they’re co-evolving with the psychology right? So so those are correlated. But can we go from the church. So this is our medieval church exposure. Bin scatter plot. So each of those dots is a combination of of dots and patents per capita. So it’s a partial regression plot, more church exposure, more patents per capita.

Okay, and just the the long arm of history here. So patents per capita is the thing we’re trying to explain. And medieval church exposure is Ah is we? Can. We can still pick up that long arm, and i’m making the case that this is due to its effect on psychology and families.

This holds even when we use small administrative regions. So these are subnational regions. So we’re really only comparing people that leave which in some small part of Germany rather than all of Germany and all of France, those kinds of things.

Okay, um. I took this out, but somehow I must have not saved that version of the Powerpoint. Ah, so this I just find it amazing, and i’ll just mention it here because it’s the slide is here, but we have our centuries under the medieval church, and that predicts patents.

But then Jonathan Shilts had gone through the records. You know some historians had helped them a lot, and he found that at these different Bishop Bricks they took attendance when they had a big meeting, and we know all the issues. They talked about. The church keeps good written records at the meeting, and we know who attended. So we have an attendance list.

So Jonathan was able to put together a data set that has, whether the bishops in different parts of Europe actually attended the meetings where incest legislation was discussed, and that picks up some additional variation in patents. So the idea is, the Bishop goes to the meeting. He gets fired up about stamping out incest  mit Ctl, and people believed it was causing all kinds of problems, right? So people were marrying their cousins, and God was angry. And so he was sending plagues and ah, economic hardship and things like that. So it’s like a public health campaign. So we had to get rid of the incest one.

Okay, Now this. Uh i’m always nervous when I present Iv regressions in front of economists.

So here here the idea is, we think that there’s a case that can be made that medieval church. The Church is kind of expanding ideosyncratically wherever it sees a a chance to to kind of get a foothold, and wars are one in law, sometimes by a single battle due to luck. So maybe this is exogenous. But so we use medieval church exposure to predict aspects of psychology which it does nicely. I already do that from the science paper, and then we use the predicted values uh to predict patents per capita, and it comes out. It comes out very nicely.

Maybe there was the ah, maybe this fits the required restriction. Um, exclusion, restriction. Maybe it doesn’t, but we did that, and we can show the same thing if we do it this way, where we’re looking at the social network data, the Facebook friends or the um nuclear family households, so that seems to make the connection there and then. Finally, I’ll just very briefly touch on this.

There’s a bunch more analyses in this paper, but One of the things we did was that Carolingian Empire. The historians tell us that the the Carolingians So this is Charlemagne, eight hundred Ce. He. He teams up with the Church and the Popes, and they really try to impose the marriage and family program within the boundaries of the Carolingian Empire.

And if that story holds, we should be able to find that there is a drop off in patents when you cross the border of the Carolingian Empire. So if we can do it for the full sample, but we can also do it for different parts of the Carolingian Empire around Europe, and we get the same result in each piece of Europe.

Um. And again, you know, keeping country constant, at least for those first.

Okay, All right. So that is the basic picture. So there. I’m. Making the case that events that happened with how the Church transformed the family led to differences in psychology and social structure that have implications for innovation today

in the weirdest people in the world. I try to look at different places as well. So kinship intensity varies a lot within China, and even among high Han Chinese and researchers. I’m. Here I’m. Drawing mostly on Thomas Talhelm, but but others have argued that Patty Rice, agriculture, and also environmental risk based on monsoons has affects the presence of clans, and these lineages that spread after one thousand Ce.

So Paddy rice leads to greater kinship intensity, and Thomas has shown by collecting data all around China that that’s associated with ah, greater analytic thinking, more individualistic self-concept and less in group loyalty. So it fits the same pattern of psychological variation. If you just look at Han Chinese within China, and it’s based here in kinship variation, but not due to the church due to ecological factors that affect kinship, intensity since the book. Ah, Augustine Bergeron, an economist who who graduated from Harvard economics. He has looked at the way in which he’s looked at the democratic Republic of Congo, and he has people living in the same city of Conanga,

and he traces them back to their natal villages, and then he asks how close those Natal villages are to historical Christian missions, and the closer the Natal villages are to the historical Christian missions, the lower the kinship, intensity of the individuals, and the higher they are on moral universalism and lower on in group loyalty. So to see the same pattern just analyzing populations within the Drc. Where here it’s through Christian missions.

And then, finally, this recent paper by the folks at the University of British Columbia, Goshen colleagues.

What they do is they look at State law. So European populations are expanding across the Us. And some of them are isolated. Their cousin marriage crops back up because the Protestantism didn’t embody the same taboos as the Church. Uh cousin. Marriage spreads a bit, States imposed laws that banned cousin marriage, and he’s able to show that that reduces the amount of cousin marriage, and then that leads to a greater income and urbanization in the longer run. So that’s the ghost paper.

Okay, so ah, final take-home messages is that i’m making the case that we can think about culture systematically. It’s something We can measure shapes, economic and political outcomes.

What I actually presented is not a story of historical, of historical persistence, but is actually a story of historical change. So the Church gets these different peculiar views about marriage in the family, and they then use that to T, or that ends up, leaving them to transform the families of Europe, and that change, then leads to different cultural evolutionary trajectories and economic growth.

Um, Okay, Crucially, here is the idea that institutions and psychology co-evolve. So our minds have all that plasticity because we’re a cultural species, and we’re responding and and learning ways to better navigate the cultural worlds that we confront, and it affects lots of features of our our psychology.

And then, lastly, ah! You know the the place where we’re coming from takes evolution very seriously, so you can’t get kin based institutions correct. Unless you realize we have pair bonding, We have kin based altruism, and we have incest avoiders which gives incest taboos their power psychologically. And it also means that kinship institutions will always reassert themselves. So they’re somehow more natural than anonymous and personal institutions where you have to be nice to strangers and things like that one.

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

Nikita Taniparti: Today I am truly thrilled and excited to welcome our speaker, Professor Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section.

Her research lies with the intersection between economic history and labor economics and her first book, Competition of the Promised Land, Black Migrants and Northern Cities and Labor Markets, examined the impact of the great migration from the rural south of the United States during and after the World War II.

Her recent work including her new book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success is co-authored by Ran Abramitzky and is on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Professor Boustan is also co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she also serves as the co-editor at the American Economic Journal of applied research.

She was named in Alfred P Sloan Research fellow in two thousand and twelve, and won the ICA Young Labor Economist award in two thousand and nineteen. And very recently she was also named fellow to the Econometric Society. Very importantly for us, we’re welcoming her back to the Harvard campus, because it’s also the one place that you called home when you were doing your PHD in economics here.

So we’re going to start, we are presenting some context, setting data points to kind of get us on the same page. And then hopefully, we’ll have a conversation with some questions from the audience as well. But we are over to you.

Professor Boustan: I’m really delighted to be able to share some of the findings from my new book Streets of Gold here at the Kennedy School, which, in addition to the Economics department, the Kennedy School is my Alma Mater. I was part of the inequality program here when I was in grad school, in two thousand and two and two thousand and three.

So I wrote this book with Ran, my long-time collaborator, and we were inspired to write the book, because we believe that national conversations about immigration and immigration reform are driven mostly by myths rather than my fact and data.

And so we set about to share some of our findings to be part of this conversation.

One of the myths inspired our title, Streets of Gold. This idea that anyone can come to the U.S. with just a few dollars in their pocket, and they can quickly make it here. But the truth is a lot more complex.

So I think it’s well represented by this quotation. It’s painted on the wall of the Ellis Island Muse, and it’s attributed to unnamed Italian Congress, saying, “I came to America because I had heard that the streets were paved with gold. But when I got here I found out three things: First, the streets were not paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.”

So we ask ourselves, how would American history change if we listen to these millions of unsung migrants. Note that this was an unnamed background we never know is full story. So we use data on millions of such immigrant families, both in the past and today, to rebuild what we know about immigration from the ground up. That’s our goal.

So where do these findings come from? In the historical case, we’re using the U.S. Census records which become a following after seventy two years and has been fully digitized, and we can use these to follow an immigrant as he lands in the Us, and then spends more years in the country over the course of his career. We also can see children living at home with their parents and then follow that child into the labor market.

So you can think of us like curious grandchildren who are using ancestry.com, the genealogy website. And in fact, that’s where we started with our work, and from there we build algorithms to follow more than just a few family members to really scale this up to thousands and then millions.

What I’m showing you here is one of the sense of manuscripts not selected at all at random. This is my grandfather, Matthew Flatt, who’s circled at the bottom, living at home with his parents, who were immigrants to the country, and his seven other brothers and sisters in the one thousand nine hundred and twentys census.

It turns out that my family’s story is very representative of what we find in the broader data. So my great grandfather, the immigrant generation never moved up the occupational ladder. And that’s something that we see very commonly in both the Ellis Island period, and today that the first generation, the immigrants themselves, move up pretty slowly. So where they start ends up determining when there is a their trajectory will be – if they start with a lot of skills, and they come already Seek a Phd, then that determines one path. If they start coming from a country with less opportunity for education, and they’re entering into a low scale of profession, that determines that path.

But the second generation, the children of immigrants rise. And you can see this with my family. The older kids in the family enter into white-collar positions in offices, or retail jobs and stores, and the younger kids, my grandmother and his younger brother enter the professions.

So what i’m hoping to do today is reassess some immigration myths. Is it really true that there’s an unprecedented flood of immigration today, and the answer is, no, we’ve been here before. Did the Ellis Island generation rise quickly with rags to riches and immigrants today are not as successful in moving up? The answer is, No, and we see this from my family. But we also see this when we scale up, and our immigrant families, their children today stuck in a permanent underclass.

And of course the answer again is not so just freely delay the groundwork for discussing these myths

to start off with. Are we in the midst of an unprecedented flood of immigration? We can see here the long history, one hundred and fifty years of immigrant entry into the country, and recently that fourteen percent of the population is foreign born.

If you ask Americans on surveys, they’ll tell you that we’ve never before had such large numbers of migrants. But of course that’s not true. We had fourteen percent of the population foreign born one hundred years ago, and in between we see this immigration valley. This dip which is policy-driven with the border closing in the nineteen twentys, and bottoming out at four percent.

Of course these waves are very different, and I wanted to show you that the earlier wave immigration, one thousand eight hundred are primarily immigrants from Europe. That’s the yellow part of this graph, whereas today immigrants are coming all over the world.

So there are many reasons to expect that there might be a quite different path today for immigrants. The past doesn’t necessarily have to represent, and so, when we end up finding that there is a common immigrant experience. It’s really quite surprising, contrary to some of our own expectations going into the research.

So second myth, did the Ellis Island generation rise from rags to riches? This myth is wrong in two different ways, kind of interesting. First of all, a lot of the Ellis Island generation migrants were not arriving in rags. So what we’re looking at here the zero line would be earning the same amount as the U.S. foreign born.

And if you see above the zero line. That means that you have immigrated from starting more than one, and the black arms are recent arrivals. The white bars are after we follow these migrants for thirty years. You see immigrants from many Western European countries already earning more than the Us.

So this would be the equivalent of the skilled engineers from India, China, Japan, from Germany. Today we also had many immigrants arriving in poverty, and four of arrivals did not move up to riches within one generation. So the black bars that are below the zero line we see There’s some progress by the time you get to thirty years out, but no one is converging to the earnings of the U.S.

Finally, our immigrant families stop at a permanent underclass today. What I’ll show you is what happens to children and immigrants for children of white U.S., for parents who are raised with similar resources, similar finances to our childhood, and I’ll show you patterns for the twenty fifth percentile of the income distribution. But this pattern is the same If you look at the thirty bit from the fiftieth, and what we’re going to find is that the children of immigrants, raised at the same point as the children of the U.S. – born and achieved more economic mobility over their lifetime.

So this is the picture for today. Each one of these dots I know it’s very hard to see the collections, but the point is, each one of these dots were black children’s parents were born in a set of different the purple dot with the honor our children, whose parents are white and we’re in the Us.

And those kids raise a twenty fifth percentile reach around the forty fifth percentile and adult. On average, children of immigrant parents reach the percentile. And you can see the dispersion around that average with with with kids of income parents from some sending countries reaching the sixtieth or sixty fifth percentile, even though they’re raised in China.

Same patterns in the past is our kids from one thousand eight hundred and eighty on the left hand side kids from one thousand nine hundred and ten on the right hand side. The Us dot, which is the purple dot, is always for the bottom of the picture, and we see the children of immigrants rising.

Nikita Taniparti: Thank you, Leah. I actually wanted to start with that graph and the idea of where do these myths come from, and what consequences do these myths have? Right? So we all live in the U.S. Many of us are immigrants. Do we hear the narrative of immigration that’s unreasonable?

And also in a way you’re telling us that that influence is policy where the tension between immigration patterns actually influences the policy debate and the policy decisions in the mid, when you’re actually influencing the ability of migrants to actually enter. So can you tell us a little bit more about some of those patterns and the underlying causes of how those two things talk to eachother.

Professor Boustan: So I believe your questions is where do these myths come from? And starting with the myth of an unprecedented flood of migration. Where do we get this within the lifetime of everyone who is in the country today? What they have experienced is a rise from the bottom of the immigration valley There were people who were kids in the nineteen, sixties, Nineteen, seventies and they looked around and saw four percent of the population foreign born. In many parts of the country that meant very close to zero percent more and more so.

And now they look around when they see fourteen percent more and more depending on where they live, and that seems like a first up to some people a frightening or dramatic change.

So we don’t have anyone who’s really, you know we can from their whole life experience. We’re back back on the one hundred and fifty years, and I think we have a lot of amnesia about how extensive migration was during the Ellis Island period.

We also have a lot of focus on what’s going on in our southern border, and the discussion of the prices as our quarter. The numbers that we regularly seem scary. Two million contact points at the southern border over the course of this year to date were only in September.

Those long-term points does not be individual. Sometimes there’s going to be more than one, or, you know, up to ten, up to fifteen contact points for a single individual, especially   under Covid, under Title Point. But that number seems quite frightening as well and contributes to this sense of crisis. If you think about the other myths, the   the ragged to richest idea that that’s actually very widely shared. I mean, there’s almost nothing that we can agree on in the Us today, and that’s around you.

But what we can agree upon is that the Ellis Island generation was good.

You hear President Trump talking about this when he talks about why, we have more migrants from Norway, and that sort of targeting back to one hundred years ago, saying the miners were better back then.

We also hear President Obama talking about this, not in contrast to immigrants today, but just really holding up and valorizing immigrants of the past. So this it comes from our families, you know, the selective memory of.

I remember my grandfather. I don’t remember my great grandfather. He’s the one who struggled didn’t. You know we never really spoke English. I never moved up the occasional matter. But I remember my grandfather became a doctor, and that’s the stories that we tell. It’s the stories of great success in our own family. We also hear this in high school there are many cases that were pulled out from the records selectively anecdotal cases of people who came with nothing, and eventually became CEOs,

and we often hear the story of history high school as well. We might explain something different when we tell it to each other and what we actually see. So zooming into this wrath to rich a story where you differentiate between It’s not really the first immigrants who come to America who experiences immense and quick ladder of growth, but it’s the their children. What does the American dream mean to us just in general. And then how do we understand the American Dream for immigrants?

Well, I think the use of the term American dream is very contentious. We perceive our book as teaching us that the American dream is not dead. It’s just as alive today as it was one hundred years ago. We can understand it as the idea of moving to the country to provide better opportunities for our children, even if we, as the immigrant generation might have to sacrifice and suffer in order to do so. But other people have very different and interpretations and meetings of what the American training means. So while we do embrace that term in the book, and if you see the cover image that I showed you on the very first slide, It has a very optimistic, a depiction of immigrants sort of in gray scale in the front, looking forward to what might be New York harbor, and seeing a rainbow above the country.

So there’s a very optimistic take that we embrace in the book. At the same time we recognize that the term American dream is very contentious. It means different things to different people. It might be something we can, you know, discuss further. People have a particular reason on that.

Nikita Taniparti: I’ll just kind of go over a quick question. So. Ah, we are looking your book. This book looks at immigration from out of the Us. But a lot of your other. One looks at internal migration. It’s hard to study that, but we also see a lot of mobility happening even in that valley of immigration, the twenties. So how has your other research trying to understand how mobility and economic outcomes were reshaped in America? How many in economic outcomes were reshaped in America. How many in economic outcomes were reshaped in America? How many in economic output structures change? Is it about agglomerating people as well?

Where people went? What are some of the factors at the beginning? What we observed?

Professor Boustan: Well, one thing that’s really interesting about our predators on the children of immigrants is the underlying mechanisms behind them.

You if you chat about this at the dinner party people will tend to say, well, that’s not surprising to me, because I know immigrants work harder, they have a better work ethic, and more persistent, and they care more about education. So people have in their mind a sense of immigrant values that they think would then be their kids. What we found in the data is that there’s another aspect of being an immigrant that matters a lot and can explain everything that we find in the past, and it’s still an important contributing factor today, and that is where immigrants choose to settle.

Immigrants move to the parts of the country that are the most dynamic, and provide the most pathway for upward mobility to anyone.

So what that means is, if you compare an immigrant family to a us-worn family living next door. The children actually don’t do any better in the immigrant house? What   How immigrants do better on average is that they tend to find themselves in those places that provide a ability for all in the past. It’s quite simple.

Immigrants avoided the U.S. South almost completely so at the time that fourteen percent of the country was foreign born. Only two percent of the population in the South was born, and the sound was an animal’s whole region, and cotton growing did not provide good upward mobility for either white or black Americans.

But even if you’re living outside the South immigrants went to particular states and cities that had a lot of upward moment  industrial jobs, and that provided pathways for their kids. So when you think about what is that special about immigrants? It’s that they reveal themselves willing to leave their homes in order to seek opportunity. They’ve already broken family ties. They’ve already left their home country, and once they get to the Us. Then they end up seeking out places that are very dynamic.

But there is a set of American us foreign who also do the same, and those are people who move across state lines. So if we look at us, foreign parents who are living outside of their state of birth.

Their kids look much more similar on average, to the children of immigrants. So really it’s this willingness to move. Crossing borders matters a lot. But even internal migration   matters as well.

Nikita Taniparti: And how do we think about moving for economic goals? But then, social integration, How do you create a sense of home in a new place, whether it’s moving from Texas to Massachusetts or India to Boston.

Professor Boustan: Well, a couple of things there, I mean. First, I didn’t mention anything in the really short presentation about some findings in our book about cultural integration. So we’re economists. We started out by looking at how our commitment is sharing the labor market, and what’s going on with their earnings. But when we talk to people they said,

Well, it’s all very well good, you know. Immigrants move up in earnings, children, immigrants, children, the children, and your parents do well know our immigrants really ever becoming American, and it’s hard to define what that means, but the there’s a whole set of practices that we can observe in data that will give us some clues here.

So we looked at everything that we could that we could measure both in the past from the present, and that includes food immigrants. Mary. What neighborhoods they live in? Are they surrounded by other immigrants in their neighborhood? Or are they living in more integrated areas? Do they learn English, and what names do they give to their children.

And along all those dimensions we see that immigrants do take steps to change the norms and behaviors as they live in the us, and they start. They end up at the end of their life, or even more like the U.S. born than they do than they did when they first arrived.

So that’s how we think about integration, is. It’s a very empirical question. If there’s no values based upon it not better necessarily to choose names that look like the names of he was born. But let’s just watch and observe what immigrants do, and we see that immigrants do start to change their behaviors as they spend time in the Us.

And at the same pace now as they did in the past. So I mean, this is one of those cases where my priors were really changed, I thought, Oh, in the hill this island period there was a lot of pressure from Normandy, and also immigrants were buying for a bureau, which is sort of more similar in cultural dimensions. So immigrants sort of became American very quickly in the past. They’ve jettisoned their whole language, They, you know, told their kids. Let’s only speak English at home, and these days it’s very different. Well, these days. It’s actually not that different in the data.

But there’s another interesting part of this question, which is sort of like underneath the surface, and I just wanted to to mention it. There. There could be trade-offs here where you know, for example, I mentioned immigrants moving out of neighborhoods with high foreign war, and share that some mitigated good, you know, for an immigrants who leave what you know what people would call on-splayed neighborhoods sometimes that comes along with earnings, but it also comes along with cultural loss.

And so we were able to look at this in a really interesting way. With one particular community, we were looking at Jewish immigrants who were moved out of the city of New York, around one thousand nine hundred to cities and towns all around the country through a volunteer self-health program to disperse the Jewish population.

Many of those immigrants did very well, leaving, but also many of those immigrants chose to move back to New York, and the immigrants that chose to move back to New York were different.

Initially, they had more Jewish sounding first aids they had more to resembling last days. So by at least that measure we could see, they were maybe more connected to the whole set of cultural and religious amenities that they would have received in a large immigrant area. And I really want to just make sure that I emphasize that point as well that you know there is going to be an element of loss and trade off when we see immigrants changing their behavior as they spend more time.

And I think that’s a really interesting note of optimism that you present in the book, which is how much people actually integrate. And then you say a point of not not so much. Optimism is segregation of African-american communities or Mexican and hispanic communities.

Are there some lessons that you’ve learned about from a policy perspective. What can you do to facilitate it? A little bit more to a valer to be support convergence of that upward mobility for these left behind communities.

Well, I was thinking about this. You know the connection between my first book and this book here, and you mentioned competition in the Promised Land. One of my main insights in writing that and getting started on the research that led to that book was that African-americans in the us are also an immigrant population. So in one thousand nine hundred around ninety percent of African Americans lived in the South by one thousand nine hundred and seventy. It was more like fifty over fifty, and in order for that rebalancing to happen across regions that represents the movement of millions of people.

And so, If we start to think of African Americans as an immigrant population, we can apply the same lens that we would use in thinking about the various immigrant groups that I showed you on this slide, and in some ways the African-american migration produced very similar results. And In Some ways. It produced very different results.

I would say that the first generation experienced a pretty similar pattern, where, by the meaning of the those black migrants who moved from south to north, doubled their earnings, and that’s the same as the European migrants in the Ellis Island period doubling their earnings by beefing Italy by leaving Norway and moving to the us.

When African-americans arrived in industrial cities in the North, they did not earn as much as the existing black population.

And there was convergence over the course of their lifetime. So it wasn’t complete convergence. But there was movement in earnings for the first generation. What’s really different?

So has been the experience of the second generation, the children of the great black migrants,

and I didn’t realize this how profound this was, until the work of a Laura Drennan or my colleague at Princeton, who was able to look at the second generation of children who were being great, of, of course, or in the early nineteen eighty S. In cities that had high or not as high inflows during the great black migration period. And then the children that were a part of that   second generation.   who lives in high grade black migration areas did not aspire as much upward mobility at all. So that’s where the difference really lies, and you dig below the surface. It’s the boys from that generation, and not the girls that were really experiencing this damper on Hubble mobility.

Now put that in touch with what we’re finding in the dot box that I was showing you. I showed you a dot plot for the sons I called them the children of, but they were the sons of foreign-born parents. We have a similar plot in the boat for the daughters, and we see a very different pattern for  . The daughters of immigrants from the Caribbean from majority black countries than we do for the sons. It’s quite similar to what a lure is found for the second generation of the great black migration. So here i’m starting to see some echoes.

It’s not true for all majority of black countries. We only have five of those sending countries in our data and due to privacy restrictions.

But for Nigeria and Dominican Republic the sons are also doing very well what I’m thinking about. Here are the data for Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad, and tobacco there. The sons are the one exception to this role that I told you that the children of immigrants out reform the children of white us for the children from those whose parents came from those countries. The sons are around to connect with the white Us. Form, but they’re not out remarkable.

The daughters are doing spectacularly well. So there is intersection here between race and gender,

and it’s showing up for whether your parents are foreign born, or whether your parents are part of this internal migration wave from south to north and I, you know certainly there’s some suggestive evidence. And all this paper that is incarceration and policing.

How is the earnings of someone who is incarcerated measured in our data?

If you’re incarcerated, you’re still in the dataset. But you’re if you have essentially zero learning, and that’s really pulling down the average, and we were able to take that group out now. I’m not saying we should, because they’re a meaningful part of the average.

But if we were able to take that group out, my guess is that the sons from those three countries I mentioned Jamaica Trend at to Vega and Haiti would be helpful for the Hawaiian restaurant. And so there is this over-policing and incarceration in Caribbean neighborhoods, as well as in the Neighborhood of the initial of great black Migrants, and that is something that primarily affects the sons of outdoors, and that’s one more question that I know the audience of questions, too. But so you’ve told us about how everybody’s trying to point them to the Us.

You sacrifice everything for your children. You really really try to make it, and then people leave and go back home. So migrants return, and I think the folks that both put it at about twenty, five to thirty percent.

Why do people return home? How do we understand what they do when they return home. How can you amplify the positive benefits of return migrants?

So we had just talked about how some people, some Jewish migrants, were sent to cities and towns around the country, and returned back to New York City. Part of what they were attorney for is a sentence of cultural and religious amenities in this large Jewish economy.

So now not to find that find your home country versus the United States. Some people are returning home because of the full of their home country. But they’re not moving to the Us. Necessarily, you know, out of some kind of misunderstanding or mis oppression of what they’ll mind here. I think the term migrants are often very strategic.

They understand that by moving to the Us. Like I said, you can double your earnings. And today, actually, in many cases it’s more than double your earnings.

So doubling your earnings was for the internal migration south to north that didn’t face any mobility barriers as well As for the Ellis Island period, where there were very few migration restrictions today with so many migration restrictions, the return to migration is actually elevated, and you might even trouble or quadruple your money.

So imagine that in the long run you do want to live in your home country. But you know that there’s this opportunity to move to a place, take it for three to five years. Earn a lot, and if you come home you end up deep frogging over some of the people from your from your local area that did not be. You can use the money that you’ve saved up to buy land. You can use it to build a house, you can use it to start a business. You can import some of the knowledge that you have that you’ve ah acc ulated and acquired here in the Us as well back to the whole country.

So we actually have seen this in the case of the Princeton area. We have a large Guatemalan community, and there were there was a a a guy who went to bed through our public schools, Princeton High School, and while he was at Winston High School. He was working at the local pizzeria, and he learned about bring up and pizza, and he brought and imported some ovens from New Jersey back to Guatemala,and he started the first, for out of Korea in his whole country, and it spreads around the country. And so That’s the kind of local knowledge that you might get. And i’m not only talking about, you know the science technology like the high skill you may be able to import a problem of knowledge across. And in many industries. So people come to gay knowledge also to gain savings and intentionally.

No, that’s not everyone. Some people return because of employment shops, health shops, family  , unexpected events when they need to return. But for many people return migration is part of a strategy, and really has always been around twenty five percent of the term migration in Ellis Island period and around twenty, five percent today.

I think we’ll take a few questions, but maybe for honest, you can have a hand the mic to people. And as you’re doing that I would really love about the focus, how it talks between data and these stories. So it will. The average story, not the Elam.  . I don’t think there’s a question over here first, that okay second room a registered name, and you

Hi   My name is Karissa. So i’m wondering if you managed to identify whether the upward economic mobility and information between Tommaker and Joe Taylor, because there’s a notion that migrants are taking American jobs, and i’m wondering whether it’s true.

I mean this is an enormous question, so I could go on at late. I want to make sure we have time for everyone else, but it’s,

I think, very hard to differentiate and put a label on someone as a maker or a jobmaker. Certainly we have this sense of high-level immigrants are creating jobs for others by opening businesses by patenting and invention and science, and that’s one. But we also have for low, skilled immigrants all sorts of ways in which more skilled immigrants are contributing to job creation and expansion of industriesSo I’ll give you a couple examples. One is markets that just simply wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have immigrants here working in those areas. People often say, Well, if if immigrants weren’t here, then the wages would rise, and us foreign would take the job, and we would just continue as always.

I’ll think about how this works in agriculture. For example, in the one thousand nine hundred and sixtys, we had a strong guest worker program in Mexico called the Brassero Program. President Johnson ended it, and his thought was, Well, if we don’t have the restaurant workers, then we’ll have to   agricultural jobs for investment. Kay was around a dollar an hour at the time, and farmers started to raise pay a little one dollars twenty five. Us home workers still did not come to the field, and so farmers decided well at that pay dollar twenty five. It might be worthwhile to be instead to invest in new machinery, to harvest or awesome. They shut down the production of these crops that have to be   tended by hand, and instead, i’ll shift into crops that could be harvested by the machine, so that market the market strawberries, asparagus,   micro greens, avocados, those   you know, free soapy and vegetables that we enjoy today.   dried up, and the types of fruits and vegetables that we had in the late sixtys early seventys for the types that you could easily harvest by machine, so that industry just simply shut down and shifted away from hand-harvested for sessions. Think about what would happen if we didn’t have immigrants entering in hair salons and managing.

I would simply paint our meals at home, and that is what I used to. I mean. I’m like a child in the seventys. We didn’t have   really an iceberg wet and frozen fruit and vegetables. We painted our nails at home, an idea that you would go and like get a manager was just

like something that only the very rich would do. And now it’s an enormous industry that’s available to many people. And so that is the kind of job creation for others that even lower skilled immigrants can provide by creating markets that said they were not there. Think about childcare. Many, many people would want to pull out of the core, pay market work in order to care for their own day full time and with childcare, and we now have an expansion of job opportunities for others, because we thinking the same.

Thank you so much for having me. My name is Carol. Let me see if I must be better so. One of my questions was around   using saving engagement as a key indicator of integration is wrong. There’s sometimes a notion that you parents. Don’t like to get involved in seven, five

But I actually used to work for the city of Boston, and we were at the Civic Academy, for I mean grandson.

We’ve always got applications for it, right? So i’m just really curious to see if you use that as a key indicator of integration, you know, around the country as well.

That’s a great idea. I have not, and thank you, though, is also asking me a little bit about immigrants and patriotism. And I’ve actually thought to myself, Well, it’s really hard for us to measure such a thing. But in the past hand today, today we have really good surveys, surveys of trust and institutions and attitudes towards American ideals and immigrants were higher than the Us. Warrant on all of the development. So immigrants are more patriotic Americans than us four, and J. But I have no idea what this would have looked like in the past. We don’t go back and do attitudinal surveys. But then I was thinking about it in more detail, and I was like, well,

I mean we can look at registering and enlistment for World War, One World War II. We can look at registering as a border, and that’s something that I actually supervised a senior basis for someone who was working on the Cps voter supplement on both Asian, American and Hispanic American voter registration. So there’s a lot that we could have done. We didn’t do by I’m Kate Jenning, who shared the growth up, and I was wondering do you immigrants who come to the Us as children and They look more like first-generation rooms for second generation.

So that is a really good question. The one point. Five generation are included as children of immigrants in our data. And so they’re contributing to the n bers that we see.

So if you break them out of in the data, they sort of look halfway between the the first generation and the second, but they are included in our social mobility N bers There tends to be sort of a rival Age cut off, after which the ah first the one point. Five generation looks more like the first generation, so they do face more barriers, and that tends to be at around like twelve years old, and so it has to do with learning English fluidly. And spending more time in American schools and public schools. And so they you can think of them as sort of in between. So if you’re interested in what the social mobility of the second generation, purely like people who are born in the country. Then you would have to script those folks out, and my guess is that what we would find would look even more startling in terms of we’re mobility that the and but I was wondering if it then in the add to the diversity of the place, for would there be reverse consolidity, et cetera, or some self-sustaining process, that if you look at all into that and the second one is I.

After I read your book. I saw another woman that we reached coming with a little bit of the idea that you know immigrants bring a lot of Ah, I don’t know what to call it main to the trains, and so on. Heard that, and and I mean that has been used by in some papers. By. I think about this and others on on, you know, attitudes towards their ability or marriage, or whatever that that come with immigration. And I can Guest done, thought that all Catholics were drunk, and it imposed restrictions on alcohol and whatever. So I was wondering, What can you say about this concerning the you know values being, you know, the challenge.

Oh,so on the first question. I think you’re really undoubtedly right that if there weren’t immigrants in those places, and those places wouldn’t look as dynamic as they do   in terms of the density of industrial jobs. Let’s say nineteen, ten or twenty. There’s some decision on the parklands where to locate, and they’re from located places where they have access to a strong and robust labor force. So what we’re saying here is morally descriptive, just in a very mechanical sense. Once we account for geography, the advantages that we see for the second generation children dissipate and think of it, just as I described that if you compare the next door, neighbors, we don’t see this immigrant advantage anymore. But there it is.

It’s certainly possible that one of the elements that makes those markets   more advantageous is because they have immigrants in them.

Yes, it could be so. Connor and Michael Stewart had a paper of pnas a couple of years ago, where they tried to understand in the past what makes a market more dynamic? What makes for all remote, and they basically do a horse race between public schooling and industrial jobs. And in the past, at these industrial jobs mattered a lot more and interestingly, the children of immigrants that we’re looking at in the past have fewer years of education than the children of the Us. Born, raised at the same point in the income distribution, despite earning more

So they’re earning more, even though they’re acting at the educational Spanish. So they’re in markets that had a lot of industrial and manufacturing job opportunities. And therefore, if you’re thinking about the opportunity, cost of staying in school for an extra year, i’m losing out

on the possibility of starting work. So people tended to leave school a little bit earlier, and in fact, it was in some of these more rural areas where public schooling really began and took off as sort of the work of.

So, at least historically, these areas were not necessarily the places with good public schooling, and they were, instead places of with really industrial powerhouses, possibly also with immigration, and the diversity of place contributing to that advantage

On the second question about bringing negative traits, whatever the trade might be, that trait disappears very quickly. And so it is not entirely clear from the question or the the work that you’re citing, which trades people have in mind. But whatever it is, they see that immigrants are race around half of the gap between their own behaviors and the behaviors of the Us. Born in the first generation, and by the second generation those gaps are almost entirely closed, if not entirely so. There are newspapers by R Kel, Fernandez, and others that show that there is some long term vestige of the country that your parents came from.

It’s a long-term vestige in terms of you can pick up as a a statistically significant effect of where your parents had been born. But it’s not important in an our spirit sense. It doesn’t explain very much of the difference between behaviors according to where your parents were based. So if you have enough data, you can certainly pick up this association, whether it’s women’s, labor, force, participation, or fertility, behaviors, or what have you? There are some immigrants coming from countries where women are less likely to work where it’s expected that you would have five or six children instead of two children, and you can pick off vestiges of this in the second generation. But it doesn’t explain very much. The overall pattern is really one of.

I think that it’s also interesting because I mean when people talk about we should only allow high-school workers, or and say no it always sense, because a lot of your findings are about it. Actually doesn’t matter, because, you see, it has been all of that kind of converging to this integration of our mobility, and really just positive followers.

I want to. You just say one big thing on that which is, there was a really truly excellent piece, very much engaging with the ideas and streets of gold by Raymond Salam, that just came out in Foreign Policy Magazine, and I don’t know if you guys have great han. He’s the president of the Manhattan Institute.

He’s often on fox news. We don’t agree on everything.

But there’s a lot of scope for overlap and places of agreement where we disagreed was really on this question of how selective immigration should be, and the way I see it, it’s a question of how many slots we have available right now. We have seven hundred thousand visa slots and around a million if you count direct spaces that come in without being part of that quota. So around a million interests a year, sure if we cut that number to one hundred thousand. I don’t think we should, but if we did, and that’s what happened during the one thousand nine hundred and twenty four to closure, Maybe we would want to prioritize the response to the scientists and engineers who contribute a lot in terms of economic growth in the first generation.

But if we have a million slots, or if we have a million, three hundred thousand songs, which is what some think tanks in Dc. Are suggesting, we need to keep up with the demographics and the slowing down in population growth, you know, like adding three hundred and about slots. We’re not talking something incredibly dramatic here. But we’re talking about one point, three million slots. Well, then, let’s think about what the labor market means are currently.

Do we need agricultural workers? Do we need child care? Do we need elder care construction? Do we need other personal services? There are many ways in which immigrants who did not get a chance to even go to high school, or did not get a chance to finish high school in their home country many ways that they contribute to the economy today, and then what we’re adding in streets of gold is to say that their children are not always going to be doing the same job, same occupations as their parents. The children have the opportunity, once they are educated in the Us. And fluent in English, to move up above the Median.

Thank you very much. I have a follow-up question on the discussion that we just had a record also on cultural assignation.

So following what you explained earlier about how my word is to let into more dynamic communities. And how does kind of someone observe over time? I wouldn’t expect that these communities culture also?

Ah simulates more to an international culture in a way right, so that the effect isn’t necessarily only driven from migrants as stimuli to Americans. But the Americans becoming more international in a way, right? And so along these lines.

I wonder if there is some observed pattern of polarization, cultural polarization, where, on the one hand, you have this culturally diverse environment where people, you know, immigrants move to, and then kind of the opposite.

I think that it’s very profound, and that’s undoubtedly going on. We do talk about it around the edges. It’s about about the different contributions that immigrants make it’s, not just economic contributions. It’s also bringing their foods, their music, different aspects of their culture with them, and the opportunity to live in a state like New Jersey, where I live, which is one of the most immigrant densities in the country, and you know to me it’s a really incredible set of opportunities for cultural exchange.

And that’s a preference that I hold, but not everybody. And so there may be continued sorting along those lines geographic sorting, or even if you all live in the same area, there might be my overall sorting where you go to different churches where you go to different restaurants, and I think that that’s like Seems like it’s certainly going on at an anecdotal level. But I think it’s okay.

I think it would be great to get a handle on and measure and  , and and have some ways of getting out of quantitatively the way that we talk about it. And I think that makes sense to me is that assimilation is a two way street. You know that immigrants change to become Americans, but us foreign also change   when immigrants right for course, migrants or minders that are going to be distribution on the basis. But do you see the success? That because it’s lower the barrier of my patient because that area so do you see any success?

So are you talking about refugees? And yeah, they used to display right?

So I mean, this has been really fascinating. There is good work done on refugee population in the Us. And also around the world in the modern data. But no one has ever come back to think about people who would be classified as refugees. One hundred years ago our refugee system was established in one thousand nine hundred and eighty. Before that we had some refugee act that designated particular populations as refugees going back to one thousand nine hundred and forty eight. But before that we had an

There were many immigrants from Europe who arrived due to a flight of persecution. So we wanted to look at that group as well, and we were able to do this, using some world histories of immigrants, who arrived between one thousand eight hundred and ninety, and one thousand nine hundred and fifty; and we found that these immigrants classified as refugees by us, according to the stories that they told for their reason for moving, were ah assimilating more fully into us Society, as measured by their details of their ability to see English.

We had one hour’s speech of these folks like that. When we had a audio tape we could classify their accent. We had a transcript. We could classify their vocabulary, and we found that refugee immigrants were more successful at integrating, and can think about the economic explanations. For this it makes a lot of sense. If you have no expectation that you’ll be able to go home.

You talked about the twenty five percent, which for migrants, then you have a stronger incentive to start investing in learning English, embedding yourself into labor market adwords, social networks.

We also looked at this in today for the modern data with using the new immigrant survey, and we see the same matter.

Other people have done similar work on refugees, modern data and find that refugees might start out with working staff, but they move up very quickly, and so I think all of the evidence is starting to line up that immigrants who feel like they have no home to go back to are those that actually is similar to that.

Thank you. Thank you for the talk, and uh for the very nice Ah, Kevin session, my question is related to Ah, what used to work in the past that may or may not be working today. And I can think of several, just you know, listening to you. One is the role that industrial employment has played in the past.

If the factories now are either in China, or at least in Alabama and rural parts.

Other things also that we go wrong or may have. But we are maybe, uh, just have of housing in these particularly dynamic places, and and so as an immigrant to have access to these places today. And the third thing is maybe the cost of education. 

So we have limited ability to really answer carefully, because our historical data is incredible. We have millions of people exactly where they’re living or their neighbors.  , We know their education level and their industry and their application. The modern data that I showed you comes from the opportunity, insights lab, and when we’re lucky enough to get attitudes from them of how children will raise a different income distribution there later in life according to their parents.

But we do not have the money or data, so we don’t know education. We don’t know occupation. We don’t even know exactly where the schools are living. 

Which is a lot smaller and doesn’t. Have good geography, anyhow, and we found that geography matters today, but not as much as a day of the past, which means a lot of scope for other explanation. Just because we see similar matters of over mobility doesn’t mean that the mechanisms have to be exactly the same in the past. Geography was just overwhelmingly a factor that mattered today. It may not matter as much, but we still see that it does matter, and I think that housing markets are somewhat of a key here.

The most productive areas in the country are now obscenely expensive to move to,

and immigrants seem to have a comparative advantage of moving to these high expense places relative to the Us. Born in part, because they’re willing to live in smaller housing units and double up in part, because they actually send some of their budget back at all through remittances or saving to go home. And so they don’t spend as much of their budget on the high cost of living location, whereas the Us. Foreign are spending their money almost entirely locally.

And so these reasons immigrants are sort of on this edge and getting into the most productive places still today. But I think there’s probably going to be a lot more scope for education mattering in the modern data than it did in the past. And we just we love to be able to work with the micro data. Maybe one day we can, or maybe that will be another source that will allow us to do that.

I think I’m going to actually go ahead, and i’m so sorry to be able to ask the questions. Maybe you didn’t come to the ah right now. If you haven’t read the book, or any of the s work. We’ve focused on one of our characters book around people. So you can be tested on what you learn today, but kind of reframing. As a lot of countries are in political type of ideological models of a very complex multi-passeted thing, or As you were saying, you might see similar trends, but the nineteen essence can be very different.

So there’s a lot of things I think, for us to be into, as there are policymakers of people who work policy papers by doing research.     So I really want to say thank you for starting the conversation here today. And hopefully, we can really about to continue this.

Thank you, Nikita. Thank you to everyone for your questions. I really appreciate it.

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

José Morales-Arilla: Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Growth Lab’s Development Talks seminar series. Thank you all for being here. And I’m Jose Morales-Arilla. I will be moderating today’s seminar. The Growth Lab’s Development Talks is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics for international development, and the seminar provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to discuss both the practice of development and analytical work centered on policy. Today we are thrilled to welcome Chris Blattman, Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy. Chris will discuss his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Thank you so much for joining us. And so the first question I wanted to ask and I think it’s a fantastic book that presents a cogent framework for why the war should be rare and a rare alternative to conflicts. Now, right before the book was published, Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. How would you perhaps outline very quickly the framework that the book presents? And how would you describe the event from the perspective of the book.

Chris Blattman: Okay, first, thanks for having me. It’s been 20 years since I was a student here, so it’s nice to back and talk. It’s a chance to transform. But I always knew that a war would break out. Sometime around. I mean, unfortunately, war breaks out and something what happened when the book came out and I knew in my heart of hearts that it was going to be a part of the world that I knew precisely zero about, because that’s how things work. And so I don’t think I knew precisely zero, but like most people in this room, I probably couldn’t find Donbas on a unlabeled map six months ago. So I just want to be clear about that. And so and it was a weird moment to come out with a book that I, I didn’t write a book called Why We Don’t Fight. But chapter is in chapter one. It’s called Why We Don’t Fight because that’s the right starting point, because most of the time we don’t. And but that was also true. So everyone says, well, this war breaks out right. When the book came out. Yes. But two weeks later, India accidentally lobbed a cruise missile at Pakistan. And so we but we pay attention to as we should, like a medic pays attention to the severely ill, the direly ill patient. Right. And we pay all that attention as we should. But we can’t forget that the normal thing to do in these circumstances is not to it’s not to fight. That’s even true of Ukraine. For 20 years, Putin tried every other thing possible, from dark money to propaganda to assassinations, to attempts to co-op the government. Invasion was the last resort. And it was a resort he didn’t need to use against most of Southern neighbors. He didn’t need to invade Kazakhstan or when he did send in the peacekeepers. There was no resistance. And he didn’t need it to subjugate villagers. So. But I didn’t write about it. And I think, you know, the framework works reasonably well. If anybody remembers one thing when they leave the room. It’s that war is ruinous. We can see that, right? War is ruinous. And every reason we fight is the reason that one side or the other ignores those costs and goes to war in spite of spite. And so why did Russia ignore the costs and the ruin of war decided to do this. One is the person in charge didn’t pay for most of those costs. That’s what happens in autocracies. It can even happen in democracies somewhat, but that’s what happened. So we’ve unchecked leaders, so they’re too ready to use violence. They might even have a private interest in going to war. In this case, we definitely know Putin is not hearing most of the costs, but here you make it. What’s his private interest? Well, I don’t think it’s particularly strong, but I do think that Ukrainian democracy was a threat to his regime in the sense that Russians identify with Ukrainians more than anybody else on the planet to be tossed out to Russian leaders in the last 20 years. This is a dangerous example, not a life-threatening example for him, but a dangerous example where there’s a benefit to extinguishing that flame. The second. The two explanations you hear a lot in the media is that Putin is cabal, i.e. the Russian people, sort of there’s this vision of national Russian glory and, and, and coming back from past affiliations and getting the game back together with the Empire. Those are all stories of there’s some ethereal thing that they get through a war that they can’t get out of. Right. So they’re willing to pay some costs to go to war. And those kinds of intangible those are often really important. I think we exaggerate that in this case, but I think they’re part of it. The other story you hear is about Vladimir Putin and his regime’s misperceptions, how they got it wrong. I mean, they erroneously believe that they’d be able to sort of sweep it almost like an intelligence operation. And replace the government with public. Frankly, it could have happened, I think wasn’t totally out of the realm of possibility. He could have got on that plane. I think he’s just surprised everybody, maybe even so. So that’s certainly true. Isolated, insulated leaders sort of made the wrong people. But that. That I think understates what I think is the fourth root of a lot of wars is just sheer insurgency like we emphasize or exposed to. Got it wrong. So it must have been this proceeding. But actually, it’s really hard to get these things right. Like, think of this how many people think of the strength of Western unity on this, the pluckiness and the effectiveness of the Ukrainians, and then the inefficacy of the boldness of the initial Russian invasion. So all three things were like within the realm of possibilities. Right. But nobody predicted that Putin would get a bad draw on all three. Least of all, Vladimir Putin. So this was a gamble or always a gamble of uncertainty. So it’s not just misperception. The last is sort of I make an argument for the previous commitment problems so it’s hard to vote to trivial. I think that’s the least important stuff in the most important. A lot of countries, especially long ones. I think it’s we can talk more later in questions about why having commitment problems can be very hard in the war. But you can think of commitment problems is you just don’t trust the other side to hold up to a deal. And I think Ukrainians have been unable to make a deal that would satisfy Russia and its rising is far more powerful is in a position to do that for Ukrainians were unable to implement those records and I think Putin couldn’t trust them to implement anything because they perceive it as unjust, would say screw this and likewise no interest Putin because of his ideological stance. And so we’re I think there’s also an ideological problem at work here that that contributed. But for me, most of all, it’s the unfairness of Putin uncertainty. And it’s less about those intangible glory incentives and these perceptions.

José Morales-Arilla: Fantastic. And as I was reading the book and in all this was I was reading it as the conflict was happening. And I took issue with this with the idea of tinkering that that’s the best to building things. On the one hand, there’s this sense that, you know, you should go in any policy realm, with iterative adaptation, scientifically, you know assigning books to Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett, I prefer that the view and all that kind of thing. But at the same time, it’s like a sort of almost kitchen sink reaction of the West and the invasion of Ukraine. And not only seems inconsistent with the idea of tinkering, but at the same time, when I was seeing those reactions, I was like, yes, yes, this is right. This is how you react to something like that. So how do you balance that? What’s your opinion of the West reaction to the invasion of Ukraine? And what do you think should have been done?

Chris Blattman: The last chapter of the book is called Piecemeal Engineering. After this, I do a beautiful Karl Popper, but the piece fell short of social engineering. But I make quite a little bad joke and I spell “piece” p-e-a-c-e and but it’s very much the book actually probably shows my Kennedy school roots. It’s not just that Andrews and Pritchett, Merilee Grindle, Dani Rodrik and like so many other so many. I actually teach a class on this and this. And it was only when Lant Pritchett, I said in my syllabus is like, Oh, I didn’t realize it was a Kennedy School school of thought until I saw the syllabus. And it’s about this piecemeal approach to poverty, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s Jane Jacobs and it’s James Scott and it’s so many great. Everyone has figured out why some policies work and some policies fail. I think have stumbled upon the fact that if you try to do grand things, they all go wrong. Now, what do you do in the middle? Well.  I’m not going to tell people how to fight a war. A kitchen sink approach to fighting. Maybe that’s the right approach. Maybe peace works. I’ve never been on a battlefield, so I don’t want to say. I think that you have to. I wanted to finish the book in a way that says, okay, I’m not going to give some big like Steven Pinker style, “everything is going to be better.” And I didn’t, you know, and he’s someone I admire, but I just don’t agree with that in this situation. At least Julie’s a good friend of mine, and I didn’t want to end on, “we’re done, what can you do?” Right. And, you know, as much as he would like me to handle it that way, I wanted to be constructive. So imagine your. But you have to think what can one individual or one institution. So if you’re the Turkish president. Right, or you’re the Israeli prime minister or something, what can you do? Well, I think you need to work on the margins. You need to think about what’s the one or two actions I can invest in that are going to solve one of these five problems here? Or what can I do to solve them? There’s a lack of dialog and the lack of trust that’s contributing to certain commitment problems. Or I’m in a position to actually try to reduce some of those tensions. Grains not getting out? Well, I’m just going to focus on trying to get the grain and trying to cleverly find a deal or a set of incentives or reinsurance or I’m the head of the Treasury Department. I’m going to try to make the sanctions regime that much more effective. I’m aware of all the limitations of both targeted and generalized sanctions. So I think that’s just how any individual or organization has to act. And anyone can try to act more boldly or probably than that would be in that. And you’re probably not going to be very effective at your piecemeal approach either. It’s just super hard. But it’s your pain, your only hope of, like, making any kind of difference in that kind of situation.

José Morales-Arilla: One of the points that highlights also is this idea that economic interdependence is about peace. And I saw a reaction to that from some of you later. Okay. In the nineties, we had these views of the paths for Chinese democracy, or the path to civilized prosperity is by connecting oil imports from Germany. Right. But then now, you know, 30 years later, we find that, you know, it is American firms that are needing to commit or censorship guidelines from the Chinese government just to be able to supply the market or, you know, it’s Germany, the one that is relatively tame in responding to the Russian invasion. Right. So on the one hand, maybe that’s the point is whenever you have economic interest, things are fine with a rival then you’re more cautious on how you respond. But at the same time, it also feels like dictatorships are always more foolish, a bit more hawkish in that interaction, which, you know, maybe that means that it doesn’t qualify as a kind of speech that comes out as one that is perhaps an enabling the democratic side of things. So. So. Yeah. So how would you think that, that democracies should be reacting in a way that prevent that from happening without compromising economic interests?

Chris Blattman: Yeah. So one thing I’m really careful to emphasize in the beginning is that peace isn’t necessarily just. And when I talked about peace, especially the first part of the book, I don’t label it as such. But there’s this idea of a negative peace that exists in like a peacebuilding. Like when someone says negative peace, that just means you’re not fighting hate one another, you may be on the cusp is just sort of brinksmanship, but you’re not fighting. This doesn’t make sense. You just love and peace and you struggle for it. And that’s kind of the world we live in most of the time, especially with the most serious adversaries. And that peace can also be not only is it hostile to be unjust in the sense that a powerful actor can get something that seems like an undeserving share, or they can do things that seem morally outrageous to many of us. And we kind of have to live with it because that’s what keeps me right. So in a way, to overcome it, we’re like when a cabal removes a country and subjugates all the serfs or all of the commoners or whatever, or a minority group exploits a majority group or majority group exploits minority group. That’s and that that exploitive group doesn’t revolt. Which is most human societies for most of history, that’s peace. But that’s not just. Being entwined with a dictator. Someone who’s not encumbered by the can sort of take aggressive actions without bearing the cost. That’s a bargaining chip in their favor. Right. They have more power than you do in some sense, because they can threaten to burn the house down more credibly than you can. And so that’s always going to be a bargaining chip in their favor and that’s going to lead to a split in the world or in your society, whatever we’re talking about, that that gives them an advantage. That’s tragic. I mean, but it’s how it is economic interdependence in those situations. First approximation, it’s not a magic solution, but the first approximation is like speed bumps for them on the road to using violence. Right. So they’re going to wield lots of tools to gain advantage. And what economic interdependence does is it says I’m less likely to use the tools that are going to blow up the thing that’s pumping money into my economy and my pocketbook. And so I’ll use assassinations and dark money and propaganda and political finagling and rhetoric. And instead of violence. And that’s a that’s an improvement, I think. But it’s not like that’s not happening. It’s not a happy message towards Carrington. That’s good enough. But it’s important.

José Morales-Arilla: It’s hard to put in a bumper sticker book, but it’s good. Oh, I understand. Another thing I really enjoyed about the book is that the underscoring of the concept of 20th-century, this idea that maybe there are institutional arrangements that can organically come about …  And then you make this fabulous discussion of it as the case of the gangs emerging, which is also a thing that you’ve done some fantastic research about. And I find that strange. But at the same time, A, I feel like it’s often the case that the Colombian case is used in conversation to kind of underscore a different kind of more Hobbesian kind of narrative, right? Of the importance of having the primacy of status and monopolies, the violence in a country. And then it’s actually one the policy say that a person that, you know, it’s only because the government gave war a chance that, you know, things kind of start to improve and that actually a meaningful negotiation with the guerrillas could start to happen because events the negotiation have in the past and they had broken down. So so how would you respond to that tension of should we aim or like state monopoly and which again, these view of like messy a, you know, transformational like chain of things or from the perspective of arguing for or pandering? And how would you react to that in that particular setting of economics?

Chris Blattman: So I think I need to clarify. So, I mean, when you say give or chance, I mean, they fought a 50-year civil war. It’s one of the longest civil wars in the history of the world. So. And are you thinking like that helped make the state stronger?

José Morales-Arilla:I’m not saying “I think” I’m saying it’s a narrative that’s out there about Colombia that says until the early 2000s that an effort to overpower areas.

Chris Blattman: Yeah. I mean, for me, Colombia’s like one of the great tragedies because here it’s one of those successful, dynamic places on the planet. It really is. It’s a thriving democracy in so many ways, so much to potentially export to. It should be this marvelous economic, and political, marvel for the whole atmosphere. And it is getting to that now. It’s kind of underperformance reasons it understands. And yet it wasted 50 years in this sort of low-scale, occasionally intense insurgency. So. So what would I say? I would say we shouldn’t mix up things you do to win a war versus things you do to find peace. Right. So one side won. The government basically won and the question is, what was the alternative path that could have could have ended this conflict? I don’t know this for a fact, because when I work on organized crime and crime laws. I don’t work on this sort of history. But one thing that happened repeatedly over 50 years and this Colombia is like a poster child for the commitment problem and why it’s hard to have a civil war. Because in a civil war, unlike an international war, any kind of internal war, one side has to put down their guns at least. Right. And then decide to join a political process. That’s usually what happens. And when you put down your guns, you have to trust that them, especially if you’re a smaller group, that the larger group is not going to murder you. Every time. I mean, there were horrible many, many ways. But every time they tried to put down their guns, either the government or some splinter faction within the government and military tried to assassinate them. And they went, “Right, I guess we can’t do that.” Again and again and again. And then they finally put down their guns. And what’s happened in the last few years? How many thousand leftist leaders have been murdered? Secretly. No, they don’t. Is there a serious investigation? I mean, it’s astonishing. So the continuation of that is I just think a self-inflicted wound. And I think Colombia isn’t Costa Rica partly because of that today. So I see it as big failure in that sense.

José Morales-Arilla: I guess we have time for one more question before we move to questions from the audience. The book makes a very nuanced point about the merits of foreign intervention, on the one hand highlighting the potential concerns about side effects on the population whenever they see the results. But at the same time, highlighting the promise of incentivizing a peaceful solution between potentially warring parties or preventing a massacre when our politics starts. So so that to me seems kind of nuanced. And I was wondering if you could perhaps highlight or elaborate a bit more on your views about like the role for foreign intervention in building peace. What’s the point that it would make?

Chris Blattman: Yeah. I think when you emailed me this question, you asked me what’s the Blattman Doctrine. Which is a great question. So on the one hand, I say like that is, you know, that whole piecemeal engineering approach sort of says, well, there is no one size fits all solution. And that’s like the classic mistake that we make. So I think it is a mistake to think that there’s one doctrine and that we can apply that to Syria and that which is, you know, which is a very different kind of political conflict than like what should the international community or the United States do in Colombia, where you have sort of a drug paramilitary fighting a government. So I don’t know that there’s a single, there’s not a single doctrine and unsatisfying answer, but I think there are some principles. Let me just say a few things that I think are not talked about, but I think would be huge if progress was made. One would just be I’d like to see a lot more supranational institutions. All right. Some people think multilateralism. I don’t like that word. Doesn’t really mean what I mean. So what do I mean? I mean, an easy one is I’d like to see the United States sign on to things like the International Criminal Court. Right. I would like to see a more sanctions response. Right. Which was not rules-based and not predictable. I would like to see more rules-based, predictable, institutionalized responses to specific kinds of crimes and invasions. Right. So International Criminal Court is one, but something that sort of institutionalized. It doesn’t have to be everybody. You just need a cluster of people to start. And I would like to see more, because the more predictable it is, the more it’s going to, I think both more effective a deterrent. But I’d also like to see, we should be pushing we should be encouraging this movement towards an East African Union, which is happening regionally. But we should be encouraging that because that’s going to be credible in that region. It’s also going to create a lot of checks and balances and otherwise highly centralized regimes which are fundamentally unstable. We could see Uganda and Rwanda implode, and I think the more supranational union there is there, whether it’s currency unions, trade unions, political union would be very stabilizing. The same thing in West Africa, like take these nascent movements and rather than have all of our development, diplomacy and humanitarian organizations push them in an individualized nationalistic direction and disincentivize them towards this natural, seemingly very popular path forward, you may actually try to point in the other direction. So I think that would be hugely stabilizing. So that’s one thing nobody talks about, but I just think would be so. So important for a lot of things good policy. But also these. And then. The second thing is, I’m very I used to be very optimistic about the ability to wield military power to end civil wars. Because I worked in Liberia and I witnessed things happen in Liberia next door in Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, like all these huge success stories of military intervention that don’t get talked about because they were over in a few months and didn’t lead to a 20-year conflict. But despite that, I’ve tempered my enthusiasm because I think it’s super unpredictable. And so the other thing I think about is and it’s linked to my first point about predictable rules-based orders when there are violators, when there are people fighting civil wars or there’s a Bashir in Syria, I think my instinct is the thing that might be productive is just to you might not be able to stop that conflict. I think there’s lots of things you can do and I would advocate for that. But I would just make life miserable for those people, for those leaders who made those decisions for the rest of their lives. Even at the risk of extending that civil war. Again because of a non-evidence-based faith in the deterrent effect of that for the next Bashir. I just think it’s this terrible trade-off. Well, it has to be. But I do think that makes me that sort of rules-based, predictable order that if you go that route, we’re going to make this we’re going to all that all those incentives you have for your private benefits and the costs, we’re going to zero in on that and you’re just going to really regret this no matter what. I think I would like to change the calculus of future.

José Morales-Arilla: So very interesting that once you make it a rule, there’s no going back and then it’s like maybe they’re right thing. If you want to make the point for another point, it’s like your decision on this is the rule.

Chris Blattman: And the problem, though, is that when that works, because when wars will break out still. Right, because it’s going to look like your rule has made no sense because you’re going to only see the cases where it failed to deter the war. So there’s a real selection problem and how we evaluate it, is this a good idea or not. And then it’s going to make it harder. And those conflicts, because ending those conflicts means going to the Bashirs and saying, you know what? You’ll do fine. You just…, we’re going to take care of you. If you can just stop fighting. That’s a really tough screw.

José Morales-Arilla: I think we’re gonna open it up for questions from the audience. Yes.

Attendee: Thank you. And I just want to say, I hope I’m not the only person in this audience situation of not having read the book yet. But now I really want to read the book, but it is useful for other people. Just if you could give like a thumbnail sketch of your argument about what are the roots of war and what is the past, the peace, and then the kind of the follow-up question is about this notion of something I very much agree with the need for a rule-based, predictable international order. But you didn’t say, haven’t said anything really about international law. The truth is, there is a rule-based international order. It’s called martial law around aggressive war. It’s been constructed very slowly since the interwar period. Okay. And it’s very hard to produce a new one. For example, the US will never ratify the ICC. As a political scientist, I promise you that two-thirds of your Senate or presidential system will never do it. So some of those suggestions, it’s not going to work. Politically it’s not going to work. And so I’m kind of stuck politically with some of you know, the Security Council is not going to go away, that the Security Council makes decisions about war and peace is not going to disappear. We’re not going to be able to create a new body that can do that. So from a political point of view, you know how you yeah, I completely endorse the idea that there are things that can be done, but some of them, like us, ratify ICC or change the Security Council aren’t going to happen.

Chris Blattman: So great. So what can I say? So thumbnail sketch. Well, let me give the. And because I’m here at Harvard. Let me give a slightly interesting thumbnail sketch of the interview, the academic version, which will resonate for some people. What I tried to do is sort of take the book. It’s not really about my ideas. The book is my attempt to synthesize 50 years of both like psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and make the game theoretic approach to thinking about conflict talk to the non-game theoretic approach which often does not. And so and the starting point is the idea that there are whether it’s Schelling or a whole body of labor economics or law economics. And eventually the study of conflict by people like John Kerry was to say, well, starting point is that we shouldn’t fight it because it’s costly and this is a powerful incentive. And then two of the reasons we are fighting are these sort of classic what we call rationalist bargaining failures of commitment problems and the role of uncertainty. And then I said, well, that’s great. And for the average person, a normal person has never heard these things before, which is a travesty because they’re like some of the most powerful ideas about science and game theory, and people should at least be aware of them. And for the political economists and some political scientists, they just never synthesize and really thought carefully and tried to organize and systematically think through the other reasons for it. And unchecked leaders, it’s basically actually kind of theoretic in saying this principle. These are problems like the person who’s making the decision is accountable. And then the other two, which are these are painful sounds and misperceptions is the way. So how would behavioral scientists think about that and say, well, we are not standard preferences? Meaning we might value things that are having utility function that has more than just territory that we value or anything. And then we also have misperceptions, which are the systematic ways in which we get that marketing calculus wrong. Most of all, we miss estimating the probability of winning, or we miss estimate the actions of. And so I try to walk through carefully. So it’s in a way, it’s trying to popularize a lot of social science on this. And then the path to peace is like, what do we know concretely by rolling those things back then? Some of the things that I talked about are a lot of things I talked to that are very hard to do. Like East African Union, there’s lots of just as there is like domestic political forces in the U.S. that prevent any international cooperation of this nature. That’s fundamentally why I think the East African Union may not emerged in my lifetime as a real political or discourse, for that matter. That said, I do think there’s things on the margin that one could do to at least disincentivize that so much of the international community and actually distort domestic incentives in the wrong way. And so on. So I think that would be something to think about shifting of the margin over a decade and then the US well. So I both as pessimistic as you but more optimistic in the sense that I don’t believe that the UN Security Council exists in order. And I don’t I’m not sure our current system of government in the United States is exact. I think it will probably exist in 100 years but there might be some changes on the margin. But dysfunctionality and our inability to have anything level of international agreement because of this system is really deeply rooted, problem at least the way the parties have a set of political coalitions that are formed. I think the only way this happens is the political coalitions in this country change for some reason, which and so in a hundred years I think it’ll be different. So I don’t think it’s going to happen next year. So that’s not a very so that’s kind of pessimistic. So there’s some of these things. But I you know, I do think we’re going to see some real movement on these over the span of decades. I agree. Some of the Latin doctrine was super pie in the sky long term, and I actually think those things will come about. I think I can imagine. I’d be very surprised if in 100 years. We don’t have a set of European Union-like regional units rather than just more atomized sort of system nations. I just don’t think sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world will be able to advance without incentives. 

Attendee: Since Jose mentioned cost, I want to ask you a question that came up to me when I read the book, which is how, you know, from this perspective, moral or political philosophy stemming from a corporation, if you are a rule based international order, is impossible without an authority or will, but this is impossible without its ordering or authority to actually enforce that rule, and that has to do. So what do you think of that? How is it possible and how you know, how do you answer to that? Um, and this also has to do with the fact that for me, any, no other way of thinking or because of my ignorance of that literature of treating conflict in war the same as conflict within a state or within a civil conflict, you know, against a or, you know, war between states. In the end, from this perspective, empirical perspective can be understood with a similar lens, with the same bullets. But, you know, absolutely no, that’s completely different because war doesn’t happen within a state and that’s security issues or is between these nations. And that that has consequences for how to understand peace and how to build peace and if it’s needed and what authority or otherwise they both. So yeah.

Chris Blattman: Hobbes wrote Leviathan after experiencing from the English Civil War. It was very friends of mine that said my understanding I might be wrong, I’m not a theorist. What he calls war, he doesn’t actually mean fighting, right? That’s inclusive, but he actually means the sort of tense posturing, the sort of hostility that’s like the natural state of humankind. And fighting is not necessarily so there’s not so much inconsistency in that sense between what I’m arguing. But certainly, um. And then so the question is then how do you have within that? How do you have more, more in the sense of hostile posturing and less violent fighting? And I think of both the leviathan, the overarching ruler was like his idea of what he was he was pushing. And so how would we do that in a rules based international order? So I’m not a scholar of international order, international law. And I’m only learning that. So where do I. What do I see? Let me give you the example of the international order in managing a world where you have 400 in the analogy and the way in which I think these ideas operate at different levels is really, really important. And of course, like the criminal groups and nations are super different. But I think we can learn a lot from seeing what they have in common sometimes. So for ten years, there are 400 street gangs and maybe 17 higher-level mafia-like organizations, the city, 12,000 armed, mostly young men. And the homicide rate currently is about a third of that in Chicago. They’ve managed to establish or appease the court to seal the back of Washington for a decade. And it took them a long time. There have been repeated bouts of war and when managing goes to war, it becomes the most violent place on the planet, literally. Homicide rates in the 1990s reached 400 per 100,000, which is about ten times that of the most violent American cities right now in multiples of civil wars. Okay. How did they do it? They built they’ve constructed all sorts of norms. Right. So, for example, early on, they tried to put the higher-level mafia-like organizations helping Arizona and the combos tried to establish a set of norms that they would follow and then try to force enforce through essentially neutral sanctions. One of those norms was we’re not going if every person has a bunch of affiliated combos. We’re not going to steal your cause. We’re going to create a norm. But you don’t steal another because that just creates. Not only does it create like a lot of unstable shifting coalitions, right? Which can create lots of weird, interesting dynamics that can be strategic or just sort of destabilizes any prior agreement. Interestingly, like the oldest peace agreement, one of the oldest peace agreements we know of the 30 years peace that tried to avert the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, that was like rule number one in there, which was, we’re not going to steal each other city states. Okay. So there’s some basic principles, like we’re going to try to maintain stable coalitions because it’s easier for stable coalitions to bargain than for unstable coalitions. Or they tried to instill norms of you’re not allowed to kill somebody without asking permission. You have to kill somebody because you have to kill people a lot of the time. But you have to ask permission at least through your side of all right. So they do that. They also establish what in international relations they would call hegemonic alliances, meaning the result would have a bunch of combos underneath it in that stable coalition and the person with direct the political activities of the combo so that they can negotiate on their behalf. Right. In international relations, we have had the moderate alliance with the United States of the Americas. We have another hegemonic alliance such as China. We have a hegemonic alliance in Russia. We have had a hegemonic alliance in the European Union. And that’s a much more that’s much easier to find stable bargain than oh, and then 200 allied countries just like this, it’s easier to find stability than 400. So I could go on and on. But they’ve constructed a bunch of formal and informal rules and institutions and norms that have made it easier to look to basic and constructive sanctions regimes and the targeted sanctions regimes. And, and. Peacekeepers and all sort of analogs to all the tools we use. They have mediators. All right. And the government facilitates this. All right. So when a war started to break out in 2019. All the leaders are in jail, by the way. This is useful because it means they’re on the same cellblock to put them in the same cellblocks. And they can be useful for peace. Useful for making them less powerful. Useful for peace. Because they can negotiate really easily and they can make long-term commitments to one another that they trust more. Because you can go across the hallway and at least talk about it or, you know, will some consequences. But when war was breaking out, the government transferred all of the leaders on the same day by coincidence, and they all ended up in the same building. But because they’re scattered across different prisons, there’s so many of them. And they all live in the same holding block. And then they arrest a mediator, sort of the equivalent of, like, Jonathan Powell or something of the criminal world. And he accidentally gets sent to the same holding cell. And a week later, the homicide rate is back down to its normal level. And they have a new you know, they’ve reinforced the convention center. So there’s lots of little things that are on the market to establish peace in a super fragile and imperfect, just like our international institutions are. And so that’s kind of like the. Piecemeal engineering? I think so. Trying to construct these things. And it’s better, frankly, it’s easier when it isn’t international.

José Morales-Arilla: In the context of piecemeal interventions. Something that I found supremely interesting in the book is the bringing psychology and this idea of therapy and actually a, you know, prevent the worst tendencies … and actually a lower participation. And I think that this seems like especially relevant in post-conflict settings where you have, you know, large amount of young, otherwise unskilled males that became really good at one thing. Right. And then how do you prevent them from exploiting that economic opportunity to rekindle conflict? And so so I was wondering if you could talk about what the book discusses on these things but also like what your research says on these things say on post-conflict settings have a transitional policies and also like the cycle of the psychological interventions to moderate the sentences.

Chris Blattman: Yeah. So, so some of my own work has been in West Africa and now Chicago. And this very micro-level. So I don’t usually operate at the level of Ukraine and Russia. Very, very micro-level. How do you stop? Smaller groups are fighting and how do you stop individuals from fighting? And one thing that seems to be very effective. It’s one of many tools, cognitive therapy, which is doing two things. One, it’s, I think, helping people reduce their misperceptions. Certain types of misperceptions, automatic misperceptions are slowing down the thinking, making sure mistakes. And it’s also helping people transition to social identities that with their existing norms of nonviolence, you don’t have to create norms of nonviolence. That’s super hard. You harness the fact that they exist as sort of chimps. We will adopt the but we will just sort of inherently sort of strive towards whatever is valued in our group. And if you just get them to think they belong to this group, then the idea is that people will change their behavior to conform to the forms better. And what kind of behavioral therapy is what we do that. Now, the implications are not that far. Vladimir Putin probably does need cognitive behavioral therapy. Most of us can benefit from this. But that’s not the international relations or the broader insight. The broader insight is what is this a microcosm? This is a microcosm of the fact that our misperceptions we do have a capacity for misperceptions, not only as individuals and groups, as we have slightly different misperceptions and groups that make us think as individuals. But the fact is, is that. Organizational rules and structures and institutionalized rules and norms, I think, are the way that. The human societies have successfully. Minimized or reduced our capacity for misperceptions and curb decision making and norms help enforce certain behaviors or sometimes for the opposite, but norms can shape them. And so I think that’s the insight we get that’s sort of common across all these things. And so so I, I tried to illustrate some of the commonalities, and it’s not a book about individual violence, but I sometimes use that because we have a lot of evidence at the individual level of how to solve misperceptions. And we have really limited evidence at the group level. So it’s almost like we have to try to learn something about the groups by taking what we know about individuals and extrapolating with causal.

José Morales-Arilla: We have a great question from the Zoom audience. And so what you mentioned about the social leaders in Colombia as the flagship or the commencement program is very interesting and provoking when implementing based on possible future agreements or subjugation loss. But at what level does coordination fail? We are seeing the Colombian government within the military and paramilitary results allegedly behind left based on environmental resignation.

Chris Blattman: So I think that’s a great yeah, we’re definitely getting to like that. But if the book is like 101, actually the book is 201, and then this is like a 301 question. One of my favorite books, there’s a political scientist at Northwestern, Wendy Pearlman, who actually my favorite book of all-time, she has written a book about Syria, which is just the dialog that she received from her, the graphic interviews, and just to write it, it’s just structured beautifully. But a really deep book, her first book is about Palestine. And it’s fundamentally about splinter groups and the difficulties of holding together a stable coalition and how that is inherently a persistent source of violence. And I see this as a little bit of a commitment problem and a little bit of the principal age problem, the unchecked leaders. Right. It’s sort of an amalgam of these things. And it says that. Two unified groups have a very easy time of very, very clear incentives to not fight. But if one or both of those groups has fragmentary groups with private interests, whether they’re any logical or material keeping the fight going, this could be people who make their money to warlords and they make their money through fighting. Or they could be any illogically committed to sticking it to the other side. Or they could think they can seize power in this group by sort of exploiting certain popular sentiments. Right. So you can see this on both sides of the coming public, see this on both sides of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That’s much less stable. And what she traces out, I think, really persuasively is that she says, well, actually, this is a 100-year dispute. It’s only been extremely violent in maybe a fifth or fewer of those years. So it comports with this idea that most of the time we don’t fight. We don’t. Of course, we focus on all the fighting, but mostly it’s a negative piece and that it’s like low-skill violence. It’s not actually the actual worst in very brief, but maybe two weeks long. And what she traces is maybe from 2000, 2015, which is the most violent period of this hundred years, and she traces that to this fragmentation of control on one side or the other. She’s mostly focused on the Palestinian side and how that undermines the basic incentives for peace. I think that that is that’s a big risk and in political science we talk with those spoiler problems and splinter groups and this is like a fundamental and it’s this basic problem of unstable coalitions. It’s really hard to avoid.

José Morales-Arilla: There are these calls that I have seen in some of these contexts like and you know the leader will retreat and in the ways that you know heroes in so many of these conflicts I saw one where the ones that were put in a position of authority by a group and now they’re following this convention by betraying the reasons that they put you there. So and that maybe that opens that room for others like below to build, to challenge or position that leadership in that authority position. So it’s like bringing a stable of a reforming leader that wants to find a compromise whenever what I would say is such that reaching to the authority level what based off together is like actually challenging the other side or.

Chris Blattman: So it’s even worse than that. Okay. For the following. So let’s think about this current conflict consideration. But you could, you can imagine this happening. Any number of conflicts on each side, Zelensky and Putin, has incentives to infuriate their own coalition. And make them so livid and outraged at what the other side is doing that they refuse to compromise. All right. Now, partly this is a way to get people to fight. It’s a way to sort of strengthen your bargaining power views of your adversary. Because ideological rewards for fighting are cheaper than material rewards to pay them as much. But what it also does is this is part of the cost of working in this bargaining space between the two sides, where both sides for something within that bargaining means to fighting. But there’s a whole set of those bargains are unfavorable to you. If you can make people willing to fight just to stick it to another person or so outraged, I will never reward Russia. I will not give them one inch of territory. Because otherwise it’s just on principle. I only encourage people to talk just out of principle. I’ve been convinced that if you foster that, then you can go as Zelensky at the negotiating table, which eventually may happen and say, Look. What can I do? Well, we could agree on this, but on the original never happened. They’ll still overthrow. It’s a way to tie your hands. So it’s actually a strategy. And it’s one that is used at every level. Ethnic groups, civil wars, international wars. And both sides often do it. And the side that’s most effective at it often gets the better deal. Right? And not only because they set off all sorts of bargains, but because it strengthens their military capabilities. In the West, both sides overshoot the mark. And there’s zero room for compromise that anybody would accept. And I think some of the most intractable conflicts in the world, like Israel, Palestine and maybe Ukraine, Russia, have reached a space where for any logical, justifiable reason, they could all be totally reasonable. I’m outraged. They’ve eliminated the space where they will actually bargain because some compromises are to abort. That’s a psychological explanation for conflict that I don’t think we’ve explored enough as a profession. And I think it’s so important for these intractable conflicts and it’s such a psychological explanation that’s strategic in the sense that we have as leaders incentives to create it.

Attendee: I had a question. So. Because from what I understand, the, you know, they talk a lot about how this is a violent conflict has gone down a lot. Right. And they link a lot of this to the rise in democracy. So I’m wondering, because there is a lot of, I guess, backstepping, I don’t know how to put that. There’s a lot of where there used to be Democratic gains, there is kind of a loss at the moment. Do you say anything about that and that like how that’s connected to conflict also? Because when you look at like the great powers in history, you know, you talk about the text Britannica. There is a lot of challenge to the US as the hegemonic power. Right. And that has a lot to do with the Russian conflict as well. I just wondered if you had any insights about that.

Chris Blattman: I didn’t understand the second question.

Attendee: When you talk about great powers in international affairs, right, the United Kingdom and then the long peace of the UK. Right. And then now you have the US as supposedly the hedge on winning power in the world and what with the US kind of reneging on a lot of international fora and you have non-US powers trying to kind of challenge that. Do you think that that would be more conducive to conflict.

Chris Blattman: I mean, so in some ways I think the two answers are linked. Where violence is clearly headed to go down over time is within societies and especially within societies where there is a leviathan, but maybe not just a leviathan state and order, but as you say. More.. I would say Democrat in the sense would be more check and balance. Elections may be important, but check and balance societies are stronger. States have managed to drastically reduce violence within their borders. And then the Pax Americana or the Pax …. You know, but probably you know. But there’s been lots of empires, history, not all the facts. The world, Mongolia was not particularly peaceful, but they act a little bit like that. But then their sphere of influence. They tend to occur. They create order. It’s not necessarily just. But. But they do so. Then there’s violence between these societies, whether it’s these empires or between nations or between political factions within a nation. And that has not clearly declined over time. We actually have more civil wars technically right now, I think, than we ever had in recorded data, even the 1990s. On the other hand, almost all these wars are small insurgencies, so they’re not particularly violent. So but it’s just it’s not really clear that that violence is declining. I do think, though, that in this age, when we have more rules-based orders of which states are and when we have more checks and balances. I think we tend to have more peace about like an automatic recipe. And so that is why I think you’ve seen a trend towards fewer conflicts within these more balanced, strong state societies. And why, if we do have more checks and balances in the world and we do have, I think, stronger institutions, even informal ones. That’s why I think even if we have many conflicts, they tend to be low-scale. And then what does it mean to have a much more multipolar world and a weakening of super hard to predict? I mean, I think I think I think to the extent. Except it leads to less of like more checks and balances. And I think and the minute where the main players are checked and balance, I think it’s fair to say what fortunately the other two of the four big gorillas on the globe are not particularly checked and balanced, and they’ve been doing the opposite direction. Russia has personalized. And Xi Jinping tried to do the same in China. And that to me the personalization of power. China is the most worrisome thing on the planet. And we don’t talk about it.

José Morales-Arilla: We’ll have time for one more question.

Attendee: Hello. And thank you for your talk. I’m making my way thru your book. I’m curious about two points you make in the book and you brought up today. One is you talked about how peace doesn’t always necessitate justice. And the second point I think you make about negative peace, right, that we can go through years of brinksmanship and sort of other forms of other activities that are not exactly physical violence, but might be some other ways of showing your strength and such. But I mean, one might say that societies that grew up in such prolonged brinksmanship are also maybe not as doing as important, but they’re also suffering through a lot of negative consequences of groups that are systematically oppressed to nonphysical violence, stripping away of rights and human rights. So my questions are 1) Do you see if there’s a way to have justice and peace, both of them? And second, you know, war isn’t always just physical violence that breaks out ultimately with guns and cannons. But what about the violence that may not be as visible?

Chris Blattman: Yes. I saw the first half of the book is about negative peace, even if I didn’t use that jargon. And it’s about. How are we going to lose that negative peace and get the violence because of these psychological and strategic failures? And then the second half of the book, I don’t call it The Path to Peace, is about how you create a more positive peace, which is the jargon people use for this. We’re united in this brinksmanship where there’s basically lots of padding around you, where you don’t actually want to go to war. You’ve got this sort of brotherhood and sisterhood and harmony, which is the other way we think of peace. Right? And I try to sort of talk about what have society’s done over the long run a micro-scale microscale to build that installation. And so we talk about this not just economic interdependence with social interdependence, but also, I think cultural maybe logical interdependence. So us just the idea of human rights and that idea which would have to be created and promulgated and picked up is the fact that I, you know, some person on the other side of the planet, I actually give a whip for their well-being, especially if my government invades that that’s should be inherently pacifying, because now I’m internalizing the cost to the other group, which I don’t even need to get to. So there’s that there as well. What I think this was an enforcement of rules-based orders. There are checks and balances. And then I talk about some of the intervention. So so it’s by of sort of saying how what are the common threads? And that’s you know, it’s an incomplete list of ways that societies have achieved this. But to me, they were maybe the most important and the book was already too long. So a limited list. But basically, part two is like the possibilities.

José Morales-Arilla: Well, while we could stay hours discussing we’re out of time, so join me in giving our speaker a round of applause. Thank you..

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies. 

Nikita Taniparti: Welcome to everyone for joining us today. We have a truly global audience with us and I’m very excited if this is your first time joining us for a development talk. Welcome to everyone else. Welcome back. My name is Nikita and I’m a research manager at the Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. But most importantly, I’ve had the privilege and honor of working with the Government of Namibia since 2020, with the Growth Lab, and in particular, it’s been a pleasure to work with Nangula Uaandja and her team. The title of our talk today is A Journey of Impact in Namibia, and you’ll hear questions from me about Nangula’s professional and personal journey, as well as the broader impact that the Namibian Investment Promotion and Development Board is having in the country. I just want to start a conversation by kind of going back to the beginning. So you were born in Namibia before it was independent and as a teenager in the eighties, you studied in Sierra Leone when you were in exile. How did that influence your worldview at that age and in particular your understanding of your home country of Namibia?

Nangula Uaandja: Thank you very much, Nikita. It’s great to be on this Development Talk. And yes, it was a times of excitement, but also times of challenging in the media at the time. You have mentioned, for example, that the first Namibian female, black female to qualify as a chartered accountant. I think maybe just to give context as to what was happening in Namibia at the time, I’m not the first because other women or other black people did not want to become chartered accountants. I’m the first black female and one of the first few black Namibians to get that qualification because pre-independence black people were not allowed into that profession. So the racial segregation that was practiced in South Africa, in Namibia then meant that black Namibians, there was certain qualifications and certain careers that were limited to them and therefore that is one of them. And those we went through education system that was not the most opportune for the time and that was one of the reason why I felt like I needed to join Swappable at the Image School and get the opportunity to study for the years. Of course, when you join as a teenager, you may end up studying for that, but if you are a bit older you may end up of course having to fight for Namibia’s struggle. So I was lucky as and I was within the age group that still needed to study further and I ended up in Australia. My world view has been impacted to number one by bringing in Namibia by my parents, by what I faced in Namibia, the injustice at the time, but also by what I experienced in Sierra Leone, the loving of a nation and a people that are appreciating and welcoming people who are not of their own. But they took us into their homes. The United Nations at the time is the one who funded our studies and they found homes and families for us. So, yes, while there was injustice, on one hand there was welcoming. And and whether it is the UN, it was made up of many organizations, many people, many countries, many cultures that supported the cause for Namibia and also the country where we went. It was families that looked after. So looking at that, therefore my focus is not about injustice or whatever. It’s about the angle and where everything misses. That is why there might be challenges in the world. On one hand, they are also good people and solutions that people and humans are finding for each other and for themselves.

Nikita Taniparti: I think that’s especially important not just to focus on the injustices that might have been an obstacle, but on the perseverance and the places that did serve as motivating factors to keep going. And so Namibia is even today still a young country got independence in 1990 and it has a strong presence of the public sector. And your personal extensive experience in the private sector, how do you merge and blend the best of both worlds today?

Nangula Uaandja: Yes. I think as you have indicated earlier, that is really where I ended up here probably is because I’ve been in the private sector. But being in the private sector, I think, yes, these are things that they say in the right place at the right time and taking a course of action, probably not because you thought about it, but because that is the way you are led. So my background is when I was at high school, I never knew accounting. So what I’ve studied is science. So I did physics, chemistry, additional mathematics, mathematics. And I thought, I will become somebody in the lab, in the laboratory or a scientist. And it’s for two reasons that I thought I would become a scientist. Number one is I was definitely good at science and I enjoyed it. Number two, I was not very good with people and I wanted to stay away from them. So because of those two reasons, I decided I will definitely become a scientist and be in the laboratory and mind my own business. But then there was a time for family and reason. My father was a business person, a small owner of a small businessperson, and yes, he used to pay taxes. And I thought, okay. Me being the figure person, I think the responsibility is on me to study whatever course it is that I need to do to help my father with his business. And I thought that was economics. It’s the only subject I’ve heard about. So when I applied to university, I applied for economics. And then when I was at university, I kind of find out. Now it’s only economics I need is accounting. So then I got accounting. I said, okay, chartered accountants. Okay, it’s not bad chartered. It’s like a charter plane. So you charter person. So I don’t need to work with people. I think I can still do my figures and everything else in the laboratory or in whatever I need to be to work on my figure. So it’s probably still going to be me and the figures, definitely not people. So that is where I started. But when I started working I was thought, no, that’s unfortunately, that’s not the way it works because we are sending you to clients and you need to be nice to clients and you actually need to work with people. So that was one of the challenges I faced earlier and therefore I kind of developed myself as in as I went on in that process of development and personal growth, I realized, okay, there’s a lot of cost to develop as a person. And then I consulted then. So being in that role, I ended up having clients from all walks of life international development agencies, government clients, and then private sector. And then I actually found out in Namibia that, yes, these everybody was playing a role and everybody want to do the right thing. But because of a bit of the past and some of the challenges that we have, we are not collaborating as much as we should. And I believe that I need somebody to help me get a formula on if we collaborate between the public, private sector and development partners, I think we can grow this economy. So then what happened in 2011 when I became a businesswoman of the Year, I was asked which kind of social responsibility project I wanted to do. I was already doing a lot in that angle, so I decided to do something. But I started working on how what do we need to do to grow and increase the trust between the public and the private sector and development partners so that they can work together to grow this economy? Because the challenges we are facing can be solved together when they realize that they actually all want the same thing and we need to work together. So that journey started in 2011 and then yes, because of that, I registered a few years later for my master’s degree. I’m currently busy doing my doctorate in business leadership so that I can just find a formula on how can we as a country of Namibia, bring better collaboration between the public and the private sector? And of course, with the support of our development partners, to make sure that we can utilize our resources better. Now, the private the public sector is the custodian and the stewardship owns the stewardship of Namibian resources. But many times we do know that the private sector has got complementary assets that can bring much of value to those assets. So where we are is how can we bring the strength of but the profit motive of the private sector and the social motive of the public sector? How can we bring it to the table and collaborate better for the for the benefit of our people? And that is really where the journey started. And that is what drove me to where am today. And I’m excited because I can see that we definitely have a public sector that has got a political will in everything that is necessary to do what needs to be done. And we’ve got a private sector that has the same feeling.

Nikita Taniparti: No, I think that’s very helpful. As you said, there’s a right time and the right place sometimes for this nexus of collaboration to happen. So for people who may be listening from other countries who are struggling with some of those same challenges of how do you bring those complementarities together? What have you learned about some of the obstacles you faced in trying to foster this collaboration and what’s worked well? What are the successes as you started to do this?

Nangula Uaandja: Something that we discussed is diversity is important and therefore bringing together diverse teams. And when you talk about diverse team, it’s not just in terms of ethnicity, it’s not just in terms of gender, but it’s also of background. What I see with my team today, we have got a team of blend, people with public sector experience and people with private sector experience. And I had this discussion with a colleague some time ago, which is the almost that cross we call it cross-pollination, cross-pollination of experience of private sector and experience of public sector. So where we are, for example, I do not have sufficient experience in public sector, but I need to make sure that I understand. What does policy mean? What is the importance of setting policy? And therefore and therefore I need to work with our ministers, I need to work with our executive directors in various ministries so that I can gain that from the experience. At the same time, I’ve got private sector experience and I know how the private sector works, how the private sector things. And therefore, when we bring the two parties to the table, that communication of having both of us. So I think one of the reason why I took up this role, I said we need a few people that understand what is driving the motive of government and also the ones that understand where the private sector’s coming from. And I actually said I’m probably one of the few in why I’m one of the few is because I’m a Namibian that was still born before independence. I went in exile. Yes, not for a long time, but I went in exile. So I understand the government and the people that went in exile. What were we fighting for, what we were fighting against and what we want to achieve from a social, national and other development perspective. So I have got that understanding, but I have worked in the private sector for more than 20 years. So, yes, I understand if you are a business person, what are you interested in? What are your objectives? What do you want to hear? What is on the table? So I think I have got at least, although I do not have sufficient public sector experience yet, I have got the heart of a public servant from where the background comes. And I will definitely be able to hear the side of the government and the side of the private sector and see how do we marry the two. And therefore, you need to bring people together that have got experience on both. And those people, what they’ve got experience on both. Those are the ones that will then almost like start the journey and start conversations and make sure that you bring together things that will bring solutions that consider the needs, the challenges and the objectives of both the public and the private sector.

Nikita Taniparti: Right. And Namibia is no stranger to facing a lot of challenges in the past and the present. So and today, how do we think about the link between attracting investment and solving Namibia’s current challenges of inequality, unemployment, and poverty? How do you see that playing out from your very pivotal role in that?

Nangula Uaandja: Yes, so I think if I can touch a little bit on the work that we did together with you, I think the work that we did together with you, we identified, for example, Namibia. So if we look at Namibia, we said between around about 2008 and about 2014 or 15. Namibia grew quite well. Our growth averaged to 4%. There was a time that it went as high as 8% and so forth. However, we noted that during that period, yes, we created employment but not sustainable employment. And also we did not it was not inclusive growth. So what were the challenges? I think the challenges that was highlighted through your study is, number one, it was driven by commodities and therefore, at the moment, commodity prices went down. Then the opportunities were also lost. Number two, it was driven by government by government spending. And the moment government spending was reined in, then we did not have so much opportunities available. And then number three, it was non-tradable. Therefore, where we have to come as a nation now is if we are going to look at growth going forward, we need to look at inclusive growth. So our current president, when he was elected a few years ago, which is probably seven or eight years ago, that he came into office, he said, I, our first president brought us peace. Our second president brought us stability. And therefore, what he’s aiming to do is to bring us prosperity, but it must be inclusive prosperity. And therefore, his mantra is, no one should be left. Out. And that is what actually what the first thing in Namibia for our covered you is leaving no one behind, no one left out. And therefore, when we evaluate investment and analyze investment that are coming before us is how will this investment help us address the challenges of Namibia? What is it? What are our national priorities? Our national priority is job creation. Our national priorities is yes, it is to reduce unemployment and to fight poverty. So if you are coming to us and you say you are an investor or we are attracting you as an investor, we need to know that is the something in for you as an investor. But what is it for Namibia and how inclusive will this project to be? So when we have that conversation then we have really, really good conversation because every investor will also want to make a difference to the extent or be seen to make a difference if they don’t want. So every investor that I meet actually wants to make a difference or they want to be seen to make a difference. And therefore, when you have a conversation with them of saying, how will your project help us solve these tribal challenges? So and then one of the things that then our president did is when he gave us the mandate of investment promotion, he also gave us a mandate of MSME development. And therefore, that mandate is really saying the really the reason why His Excellency elevated the role of investment promotion in MSMEs the to his office and to that to the office of the President is because he believes that MSMEs have got the greatest potential to create jobs. While large projects are important and they provide opportunities, the more job creation will actually come through the multiplier effect. And if we, as Namibians are not ready to be plugged into the value and supply chain of those projects, then we will not benefit. And therefore the challenge then that last bit before us as an investment promotion board is how do we support MSM is to make sure that they have got the relevant information, to make sure that they have got the relevant mentoring, training and development that can help them or that can enable them to access opportunities that are offered by investors. So yes, one conversation is with investors saying, can you support our development objectives and our national priorities? But then the other one is, MSME, are you there? Do you have the capacity to deliver? And so forth.

Nikita Taniparti: Yeah. And speaking about delivery, how do you see the relationship when you get pressure from the public sector to deliver results of investment and you get pressure from investors to deliver results to make it a better place to invest. How are you trying to mediate and negotiate that?

Nangula Uaandja: Yes. I don’t think we have won that battle or I’ve got the right answer, but I think we are making progress. And the progress that I say we are making is number one. There is great political will and therefore the support and the welcome with which we have received as newcomers to the public sector in US and new entities is actually overwhelming. So whether it is the support of His Excellency, with the support of Cabinet Ministers, whether it’s the support of officials, we have received actually good support. And therefore what happens there is, yes, we make our lists and how we are engaging investors. It’s actually we have been very, very practical. So we when you take a project and say, okay, yeah, investor, this is the project and this is what you need. We need to do for the project to succeed. What do we need to do? Number one, it’s probably just services, licenses and so forth that are required from government that are easy and therefore we work with the various respective government entities to sort that one out. Number two, it could be a policy vacuum. And therefore what we are doing currently is then working and setting up a committee that has got private sector players and public sector players to identify the vacuum in the policy environment so that we can fill in the gaps that are there. So the good thing is that I said we have received the support from government of saying and that is one of our mandate that has been given by His Excellency is that we can make recommendations on improvements to policy. So we are now working and reporting back to Cabinet of saying these are the policy gaps and this what needs to be done. And we have seen actually good support in that area and then from the private sector, we then making sure that we are giving constant feedback and we have got the investment facilitation office that is keeping them updated. So it is not something that you do in a day or in a week. But the good thing is the willingness of both parties to keep the dialog open and the channels of communication open is helping us to make sure that we achieve our objectives.

Nikita Taniparti: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s very important because sometimes you need to zoom out to see what impact might mean to a certain entity. And depending on the time, it also can be zooming out a lot or zooming in. And I want it to zoom in to think about young and female entrepreneurs. How can a group like them contribute to creating a sustainable future for Namibia? So how do you balance an institutional way to create impact and promoting entrepreneurs to be uplifted and do that themselves?

Nangula Uaandja: Yes. So if you look at especially for young and female, our president is very much number one. He’s very much committed to the diversity and he’s very much committed to the young people. So I think he’s one of the first presidents on the continent who appointed a youth advisor. So President Mitchell is a youth advisor on youth matters and in U.S.. So and that I think is a big message that we have. And then secondly is then what we do. It’s any way you look at everything that he’s talking about or cabinet discussions is about what how which we how many women do we have? What is the inclusion of them of of the young people? But then what we need to do is then, of course, how do we support the young people? So for example, what we are doing is as a board that we are with our programs, they are some programs that we have designed and said this program is definitely for female entrepreneurs and this program is for the youth. So we have got, for example, a next gen affair that is coming up sometime in September is the first time that we are going to do it is a next gen being that as it may also, yes, I know that there is a history of exclusion from for women and so forth, but I’m sometimes a mother of three boys, so I am concerned that sometimes we are leaving our boys, especially in Namibia. So Namibia is one of the countries in them, one of the countries in the top ten countries that are doing well with females. And actually we have got university ranking and so on. We have got quite good female representation in many, many areas. So we are doing well. So I’m actually afraid of our men in Namibia of saying if they don’t start pulling up their socks, I think it will be a women country very soon. So I need to make sure that projects and everything that we need to do is diversified and with means. Diversified is make sure that we include women, but not at the exclusion of of of of male counterpart.

Nikita Taniparti: Definitely. And when you think about this spatially, when I visited Namibia, it’s very obvious there are many parts of Namibia that you think you’re in five different countries. So how do you think of integrating spatial? Discrepancies are bringing empowerment to different places in the country.

Nangula Uaandja: That is a is a very, very challenging one. And I think that one is really where we need to pull our heads together because the one thing is these many people with many objectives and you have to work with partners in one thing that one always does in life is one institution or one person is too small to make greatness. I think somebody like John Maxwell says one is too small a number to achieve greatness. So if you want to achieve greatness, then you need to start a movement. And a movement gets started by a small group of people and it’s just by leading by example of making sure that you bring in diversity. So, yes, the country and the government is putting policies in place that are going to that are driving and supporting inclusivity in all sectors of our lives. And therefore, normally, whatever policy or whatever proposal, for example, we take to Cabinet, the question always comes. We have got a minister of gender and that minister always looks at it from that, from that angle. And also that ministry also deals with poverty and marginalized communities and they look at it from that angle. We are making sure that we are inclusive. And that is the question then normally that all of us, when we vote, we are engaging. So for example, one of the engagement at the board is many times we communicate on social media, but when we communicate on social media, we are being very, very exclusive because is many people that are in the remote areas of Namibia, they’ve got a phone and they actually have got a cell phone and they’ve got access to a 2 to 2 cell phone network, but not necessarily on Facebook. So normally we then react to what is coming through on Facebook, Twitter and so forth. But there’s actually many people that we are not reaching. So what medium of communication are we using? And those are some of the questions that we are asking. Are we on radio? Because actually then radio is still one medium of communication in most areas in Namibia. And are we on television and BBC because many people still watch NBC. So we need to challenge ourselves in everything that we are doing from medium of communication and reaching out. And when we started with our team that is dealing with Msomi that the first thing that they did last year and they produced a report is go to all the regions of Namibia, all 14 of them, and make sure that before we do anything, understand what are the people saying with regard to the MSME mandate? What are the challenges? They put their report together and that report is helping inform our responses to the challenges that we are facing.

Nikita Taniparti: Yeah. And even though, as you say, one institution might not make the difference of a full movement in the institution of, for example, the Investment Promotion Board, how do you, as a leader go about crafting a workplace that fosters innovation, risk-taking, collaboration, and a reward for finding new ways? Or, we call it positive deviants for breaking the rules?

Nangula Uaandja: Is it always challenging that one? So when we put our core values together, we actually really spend a good time thinking about our way, our how and what. And we had a good weekend that we had, almost like with all our staff, with all our management, with the board at the beginning to discuss that. And we came up with our core values, which means which we call Namibia. So the acronym for our core values are Namibia. And we say that if you are an employee of the board, you must be like a true Namibian and a true Namibian and the kind of stands for no one left behind. And therefore, inclusivity, of course, is important, and then it stands for accountability. So we must be accountable in everything that we do. And M stands for making a difference. And I stands for integrity. We must be, of course, we are dealing with information and data from investors, their business plan and so forth, and that is important in Namibia. And then B stands for Brilliance. We must act with excellence in everything that we do. Another eye for innovation. And then lastly with agility. And what I tell my people is this one If if a problem lands on your desk and that probably goes with what if you have things in my life. So let me kind of come back to the message that I tell them. But let me say something. Yes, anomaly. In a few years or month ago, I was asked to go and talk somewhere on responsibilities or something like that. And then I started by looking on Google and the responsibilities of in Namibia and I could not find any sites. Okay, let me go to the Constitution and find that in the Constitution. What is the responsibility of an amphibian? I didn’t find anything, so I actually found that the responsibility of an American. I think America is the probably the only country or one of the few countries where the citizens have got responsibilities. I think it’s almost like a responsibility to take up to do. Go and fight or so on. I looked at a few, so I know that America has got some things. I use this example and I thought, I think now this is why we have challenges. We have challenges because we have got people with too many rights and fewer responsibilities. So what happens is I looked in our Constitution when I typed in write, I could not count with the right but responsibility. There was nothing. So then I think that is one thing. If you ask me, life is and somebody said, complete that sentence. Normally I completely say life is a responsibility and that is maybe how I was raised. That is my perception in life. Life is a responsibility we are here to achieve and we need to be accountable. And one day there will be questions as to what did you do with the time, with the hours, with the talent and everything that it interested in to you and I must be able to answer that question. So having said that, now what I tell our people is if a problem lands on your lap, then it is yours. It does not matter if it is not your department, if it is not, whatever. It is your problem. Until you find somebody who has dealt with it. So let’s call it. You are in a department. We call it up talking and somebody calls you and they are asking about msomi. You cannot tell that person and said no, I am from aftercare. The person is not from whatever it is, become your problem. So now what you do is you go to somebody in Msomi and tell them, I have got this call and this person, you refer them and then you follow up with them, have you address this problem. And therefore what we really look in innovation is being resourceful in providing solution. And many times when people looking at look at innovation, they think innovation is a technology matter. Innovation is not a technology is about solving problems. And those problems can be solved in a matter of technology. They can be solved in another way. But I think it starts with looking at problems, looking at challenges and saying, how do I solve that problem? And therefore we need to create a culture of solve problems for all of us. And that is normally the skill I teach the people. So yes, I normally have good conversation with my children and they tell me, Money, please, for now, just be a mother. Don’t be the teacher and the coach and tell me what other good I will try. I don’t know if I know the difference, but I will try because any conversation with me, it’s a conversation about challenging your thinking, your way of thinking, and the action you’re going to take. And I think once you do that, then you can help people to think differently and you can help to people to find solutions to the problem. And once you are able to find solutions to problems, you can innovate. So that is the approach and that is the kind of so it is in our core values. And we demonstrate and again probably come from the environment where I come from a chartered accountant, we go through three years training and coaching and therefore we say 70% of our job of development is done on the job coaching, 70%, 20%. It is more like peer group learning and 10% in classroom. That is the profession where I come from and I believe that it has helped me grow in areas where I never knew I could do. I always thought I’m not an innovative person, I’m just a good auditor. I will not lead the company, I will not become a CEO. I think that training has helped me to think differently and that is how I engage with my team.

Nikita Taniparti: I think I was going to say it’s easier said than done to challenge conventions, but you’ve made it obvious that actually it might be easier. And thinking about the core values. Sometimes there is a tension, especially women leaders today, who sometimes find. I find it hard to find that balance between creating success that society might expect and creating a holistic life that is about a lot more so. From advice that you have gathered over your career and your life, what advice would you give to other women trying to find that balance?

Nangula Uaandja: I think two things. Number one. And this is courtesy of Anna Marie Slaughter. I think she’s an American lady who works at the university. And she worked, I think, with Hillary Clinton in the State Department at some point. And she wrote something on women can still not have it on. So, number one, I think as women, of course, accepting that we can still not have it all. You cannot be a full-time mother and a full-time professional. You will die. I’m sorry for the use of a better word is you cannot. But I have seen, especially in our culture, that women are still in a place where they are forced to do it all. So I’m sorry. I used to I kind of used a few examples, but here comes my 11-year-old son, who’s now 11. But at the time I think he was seven and so on. So he was telling me, Mommy, I think our teachers favorite mother is so and so’s mother. And I say, Why is so-and-so’s mother your favorite friend to the teacher? Because she comes to the school, then she brings cookies and she feels whatever. And I think maybe my face looked a little bit this one did because I just realized I will not be able to measure up to this mother. And then you look, the thing is, is a no, don’t worry, mom, you’re still my favorite also. So that was good to hear that I’m still his favorite, although I’m not the favorite of the teacher, which says that the main message. So I have to accept that I cannot be leading an institution of being there and at the same time baking cookies and taking them to school. I might try, but it’s not my strength and I don’t want it to be the area of my focus. I need to accept that that is not what I need to do. Of course, I need to accept that I need to be a mother. I need to accept that I need to be there for my children. But I need to also accept that I will not be able to compete with the perfect mother who is full-time at work, at home, and who’s choice. It’s also a great and brilliant choice. Just like that, mother will not be able to compete with me in the professional area. We are making a difference. We need to make peace with that. And I think many times and that is a conversation I had with young ladies at BWT one year ago saying, I think many times the pressure comes from ourselves, the pressure sometimes comes from our families, but then the pressure comes from society. So number one, me as a person, I need to make a decision. Number two, me and my family need to sign up to that decision. And then number three, we need to kind of allow society things so that that’s what you think. But in our family, it works differently. We need to make peace with that. So that is the first one. The second one, which is then two. That one is then you must have a good support structure and support structure is there support structure is because you and your spouse have decided that you will be the career woman and he will be at home or the support structure is both of you are career people and therefore you need other people who will fill in. And I think that is one thing that I’ve been blessed with. I’ve been blessed with people in my life that have been there for my children. I’ve been blessed with brothers, sisters and friends who are able when I’m traveling to pick up my children, sometimes I travel and I forget to tell my sister I have trouble. Then I desire her calling me. Have you made arrangements to drop kids to school? No. Sorry. So. So. So I have got people in my life who will help me to make sure that I do not drop the ball. And therefore that support structure is very, very important. So those are the two things. Number one, accept that you cannot have it all. You cannot be 100% in both. And number two, have a good support structure. I think that has worked for me and that’s what I would recommend for other women.

Nikita Taniparti: I will definitely keep that in mind. I know I could talk and ask you questions for the rest of time, but I know we have a lot of audience questions coming in, so I want to take a step back actually, and ask more about your role at the NFB, because something we talked previously about was some of the obstacles and challenges you faced. But in specifically getting a true investment, what’s the biggest challenge? Is it getting investors to be more aware of where Namibia is? Is it the commitment device of going from interest to investment? Is it the aftercare? Is it making sure that investment brings about then the downstream societal benefits? Also, what keeps you up at night?

Nangula Uaandja: So I think maybe let’s start with Namibia. Yes, there are places where we need to make sure that we put Namibia on the map. It is not probably the first country in Africa that people think about when they want to invest. So there is that portion, that portion of investment promotion. But what I’m saying, currently, we made the. Presentation to Cabinet. And we are seeing that the effort that is being made in that effort is not only being made by the media investment, promotion and development, but actually we said that the chief promotion, the Namibian promoter is our president. He’s the head of the Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board. And yes, he’s the head of Namibia. And wherever he goes, he makes sure that he takes a team with that is meeting with business delegation. And he has been doing that for years. And I think that message is there. And yes, we are seeing quite a number of investments. So where we are currently standing right now, we are standing at a place where we are not putting together projects enough for people to invest because we have got enough investors that are coming in with their project. So I think that is a good place to be. So facilitating impact is what we have. So yes, we need to get Namibia on the map, especially in one of the diversified in some of the diversified industries and sectors that we want. We are promoting Namibia and we are going on investment promotion effort then. Then beside doing that, then what we need to do is the facilitation. One of the challenges that we face is if you look, Namibia is ranking on the ease of doing business even though that report is no longer the we were ranked at number 104. So when the president appointed me, one of the two of the things that he gave me as the mandate is, number one, we must improve Namibia’s ease of doing business ranking and Namibia’s competitiveness ranking. So those two, it’s internal work that we need to do. Namibia So while investors are there, what they were doing before is the institutions that we have in place. They were not empowered and capacitated enough to solve the challenges and support investors. And I think that is the one difference that we have. So with the board now in place, we have been given sufficient resources that are necessary for us to facilitate investment. And therefore, therefore the speed with which we implement is actually what is keeping me up at night saying as a people and as a country and as a public sector, will we respond to the requests before us with enough speed? Because these are a few things that we need to correct among us. So with a presentation that we made to Cabinet, we identified, these are the investments, for example, that we have. Some of them could be stalled. Some of them are taking time. And for each one of them, this is the reason. Yet some of them are in the hands of the private sector and the project promoters. But some of them is because we are awaiting a policy that need to be finalized or some of them we are waiting for license to be issued. The good thing is that when we made the presentation, government made a commitment of saying come back to us and on a monthly basis give a report on this committee on how this is progressing. So, yes, I think most of what was keeping me awake at night was our own coordination. But I have got the support that is necessary for me to do that coordination, bringing investors. I think we are doing well as a nation to make sure that we promote Namibia and especially with our current green hydrogen potential, the current oil discoveries. I am feeling like we need to promote and that maybe are not as a country of saying these Namibia, I think we are now getting there on the map. To promote Namibia as an investment in other sector than other than natural resources. It’s one thing that we are now doing as a board. And then when investors come to make sure that we facilitate investment and yes, the aftercare, that is the challenges that we need to address.

Nikita Taniparti: Yeah. And just to probe a little bit, when you talk about the rankings of the doing business or competitiveness indicators, what are those rankings not capturing? If you could change those, kind of that’s what the world looks at. But there’s more to the story. So what do you think needs to happen beyond just those rankings to create that investor confidence in the country?

Nangula Uaandja: Yeah. So I think maybe from a competitiveness report, for example, what it’s not capturing. So Namibia is a country with 2.5 million people. So everybody kind of tells you are a country to make 2.5 million and therefore they tell you market size is one of the determining factor. But then we say, okay, Namibia, a country with 2.5 million. Yes. If you want to come to Namibia as an investor and still to Namibians, we do not have sufficient market size, but we have got great market access. So what about the fact that we are part of SACU and therefore if you invest in Namibia, you’ve got unlimited access to South Africa. But on the letter to Swaziland in Namibia, what about the fact that we are not part of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement? They are the access that we have got to then a market in the US and EU. We are probably the only African country that is exporting meat to China, EU and America. So that is the example. The other one that I think does not happen is always sometimes speaking to the right people. So somebody issued a report the other day, and I’m wondering, this person didn’t speak to me and they’ve got views on Namibian economy. I wonder how can that view have that view if I am having this whole list of investment projects and nobody spoke to me, so identifying who they speak to and having a balanced view about who they speak to in-country, I think that is. But so who do you speak to in-country? Do you have a balanced view? Do you only listen to one or two players in the private sector and make up your mind? Or do you really speak to private sector players more than one public sector players? And then, of course, make sure that every you are not only keeping to your last year list, you find out if there is a new kid on the block and also speak to that kid on the block and say if they have got hope, what is that hope based on? I think that is probably one of the two things that if you ask me now that we will change. I am not saying that the reports are completely wrong. I think the report there’s a lot of truth in the rankings from what of some of the items that we are experiencing that yes, as a country, there’s a few things. We have got the will, we have got the intention. But what was missing was the coordination. So we have got many, many institutions, and each one of those institutions was acting in isolation. So from the ease of doing business and therefore we need to work on manners, on how can we bring about coordination and how do we make sure that these who like one point of entry, that an investor can speak to one person and they will be able to be linked to all of public sector in public service. So, yes, they are not saying that the report are incorrect. I think there is a lot of truth to the report. But yes, there is one or two things that can be done.

Nikita Taniparti: And if we think about maybe a sector like green energy, that’s everyone’s trying to understand it as it evolves. It’s not the same as maybe a conventional sector where investors know what to look for. So how do you mobilize the resources or the information regulation ideas to help promote investment in something new like green energy?

Nangula Uaandja: So the good thing with green energy, I think that His Excellency did very well at the beginning, is made sure that he’s economic advisor, was almost like taken away from many other responsibilities and given the role of green hydrogen commission saying this is a new sector, we know nothing about it, we want everything and this is the timeline. And, that green hydrogen commissioner spend his time understanding what is this green hydrogen sector? Who is the best? What drives it? And I think by the time we got to the table, I think we were probably faster than any other country in the world. And I’m not saying we were the first. I’m saying we were faster because other countries were ahead of us. Other countries came after us. But I think something that was done is we were really, really fast in coming up to where we are. So because of that, we have gathered materials, we have reached out to players in the industry throughout the world and we have got quite significant interest. And yes, for that one. Then we have got the green hydrogen commissioner. Then what we did, what the President did, and also is to set up a structure, an inter-ministerial committee, so that in the ministerial committee bringing all the kind of type of organizations that are required to drive this together. And they are having a meeting every two weeks to discuss green hydrogen, and it’s called the Green Hydrogen Council. And what are we going to do with that? And because of that, I think we have got a good strategy that is being driven right from the top. And I PDB had the role of saying, how do we bring the private sector in and what is their role? And the green hydrogen commissioner is bringing it all together. So the setup and the structure was great from the beginning. It had quite good focus. And because of that, the promotion is is being actually led by His Excellency and the Green Hydrogen Commissioner and then specifically the Investment Board, providing the support to the investors that are being invited to the countries, making sure that we support and making sure that we bring our private sector in and making sure that we are taking along our president in green hydrogen commissioning effort.

Nikita Taniparti: Right. And I think while it’s challenging to have so many voices in the room, have to agree to something to make it a reality, that’s how you might meet, get the necessary buy in to make a theory, a reality. And so we we talked a little bit about the goals of investment promotion on the social development side. And there is a question from the audience about how the government thinks about more conventional, traditional systems of taxation with the idea of social investment. And they ask, for example, instead of having a large investor paying taxes on profit, what if that amount of investment was specifically invested towards an upskilling program or kind of a more direct channel for that profit to go in the country? So how do you think about this, how Namibia thinking about this?

Nangula Uaandja: Yes. So we are not there yet. And I think, of course, where we are not yet that there yet is because for example, our physical budget at this stage really funds a lot of social programs. You had probably, for example, Namibia has got the best-ranked roads in Africa. So investment in infrastructure comes from government and government entities. Our education system is a universal education system which is free. We have got a medical that is free, for all people, except those that belong, of course, to medical aid. But even if you belong to a medical aid, you can go to state facilities for free. So government is really, really supporting a lot of activities. And we have got training programs with vocational training. And because of that, for a government to reduce their physical at this stage is a little bit limited. But what I know the Minister of Finance is doing is with our promotion effort, we need to almost come with the link of saying how do we increase our kind of base, our tax base, so that we can reduce the rate? And when we do that, we will be able to have conversation then that the type of conversations that you are having. So yes, they are, for example, strategic project that we are talking about currently about how do you incentivize strategic project is a conversation that we are having and in incentivizing strategic project is for example, we had a regime called the EP Z Export Processing Zone. If you are an investor that is coming to Namibia and 95% of your products or 90% of people that are going to be exported and not be put in Namibia, then you will pay zero tax. Unfortunately, with that one, we know that there is also a world. That is going against texts, heaven have beens, if one can put it that way. So we as Namibia was blacklisted by the EU because of a program like that one. So when we come up with nice incentives and text for so forth, we sometimes face challenges. So we had to pull out our epithet because we were listed by the EU as a tax haven, because our tax rate, we’re kind of making entities move from countries and they end up paying tax somewhere at all because they can come to Namibia in the pretax. So we have to make sure that we work with the global community in coming up with taxes that actually respond to the needs of order to the fairness in the system. So having said that, and therefore then kind of saying it’s a zero tax forever, it’s probably not going to do two to play. But we need then we are now busy now studying saying, okay, if we are blacklisted for that, does that mean no incentives or is there some incentives that are working and we are busy finalizing.

Nikita Taniparti: And there may be some sequencing element to that as well. Exactly. And I think throughout our conversation and also having the privilege of knowing many people that I BDB, you have a very strong team and you obviously think very deeply about who you have around you working with you. So who do you look for when you recruit people? What are the skills and personalities and people that make your team a success?

Nangula Uaandja: Yeah. Thank you for that compliment for people. I actually think I’ve got a great team. I tell people I think we have a great the best team in Namibia, but I’m sure that it’s open to debate. But yes, the one thing there’s many people that’s so many things about hiring. So for example, somebody like Simon Sinek will probably say high-level attitude and you can always develop the skills and some other people will say, have you slowly and fail fast, and therefore you kind of have to make sure that you learn from that. And therefore, yes, normally what you do with the hiring is that skills is critical and skills is important. But many times when we hire, we focus too much on skills and we be less attention on attitude and other aspect. So one thing I have learned and from the many mistakes I have made in my career and in Journey, is hiring just for skills and hiring the top student at university is all good and well, but that person must have a adaptability, adaptable kind of personality, and they must also have a learning ability. And of course, my own example is one, if I did not have adaptable and learning ability, John Maxwell says, when our ability, our distances or when our attitude, our distances, our ability, even the impossible become possible. I had abilities, but I think what helped me more was my attitude because first I am I was not the right person, but my attitude was attitude of learning. And because it was attitude of learning, I developed from a laboratory loving person to somebody who can actually lead people. So we need to make sure that when we hire our team, they must be good at what they do. And therefore we need to set the quota of things from a skill perspective. This is where you have to be. And then number two, it’s then from an attitude and psychometric assessment level of saying these people, which kind of people are we having on the team? And the good thing, I think that we have and having an inclusive team is when we hired a team, I was concerned that what if all people come out are black females? I cannot have a team of black females only. I cannot have a team of me as a black female and all the other people are white males. So I was concerned about that and I thought, okay, do I go to one of the panel and tell them, please know this is your first candidate. But no, we have to go for your second one because my diversity numbers are not working. Luckily, I did not have to do that. So I think I prayed and I got the answers and they point that out. And so it all worked out very well. But I think at least in the beginning, I knew what I wanted. I wanted people that have got the right skillset and that right skill set is the technical skill set, but also the attitude and the soft skill set. I wanted those people. Then number two is those people must be a diverse team. And because of that, whenever we are looking through everything, we knew that we are making sure that we are getting that.

Nikita Taniparti: Yeah. Yeah, no. And I think you’ve learned a lot from your past. And I wanted to kind of close out our talk by asking you to reflect a bit on your past and look ahead to the future. So when you look back, what would you tell your younger self, your 18-year-old self, ready to take on Namibia and the world? And maybe this even includes an example of a mistake that you are about to make because we talk a lot about achievements, but maybe what’s a mistake or a failure that has really shaped who you are today?

Nangula Uaandja: Yeah. So you know what I look at in life now? I have very, very few regrets. And it is not because I have not made mistakes. It’s because I think I am the sum or the product of my experiences, the bad ones and the good ones. And I’ve had my fair share. I have had my fair share in my personal life, whether it is tragic loss and so forth. And I have had my fair share of my career where I was probably always ranked the number one and ranked one and being one at university. And I came to a place where I’m told, you are not the darling here today, because although you are good, technically you are not good with people. And if you don’t sort that one out, irrespective of your good technical, we will fire you. So, so I have got those experiences, but I believe that those experience of this. So normally people ask, what will you change? And I’m saying, I will probably not change anything because I love what I’m doing. I love where I am. And it’s because I’m a product of my experiences. What do I need to do more? As I look forward, they say, Look, I need to listen more. I am not a very good listener. And the none of the mistakes that I’ve made in life is because. And it is because before I put the problem on the table, I probably interrogate the problem. And because I think about the problem long before I brought it in the table, I always believe I have analyzed it in all angles. And when I come, I know what I what needs to be done. So but then sometimes I leave other people behind because when I come I have thought about this for the last year and the next person is new and that person may actually look at it from a different angle than mine because my judgment might become a little bit kind of biased because of that experience. And that is one of the items that I’m continuously learning and continuously developing. It. Been with me for life, and it used to be with me. I think I accepted that every day to listen to the other voices in the room and consider what I’m suggesting. Is that still the right course of action or do I need to change that? So. That is. Though. Tell. My younger self. I think. Because my younger. So forth. Not that it might kind of match as a. Accepted the weakness among black people alive. I leave to challenge myself. It starts with being honest about who you are. Be my team. My team are not very good. At least you are allowed to call me up and said to the other person. So if you are not that person in the room and you think I’m not listening to the other person, call me out and say No black, give the other person an opportunity. And that is holding myself accountable in that regard.

Nikita Taniparti: I have no idea what you’re talking about because you are a wonderful person and I learn from you all the time. And that’s actually going to be the theme of my closing question is, looking forward, you’ve now become a role model for me. Who are the role models in your life? And also you’ve worn so many hats throughout your life. The scientist, accountant, private sector. Public sector. What’s next for you?

Nangula Uaandja: So role models. I’ve got so many. So of course, it always start with my parents. What my father and my mother taught me is what keeps me to date. We used to say that if you get in my car with my father from there not to win, because about 800 kilometers he will start preaching by the time you get into the car and he will a bridge and if you to. So it’s all. Oh, my God. This will. We are in the car with my father again trained us and therefore he is my role model. He was not educated, but for that he has achieved a lot. So my parents, my mother is strong women who have achieved a lot. I’m a role model so I have got quite a number in Namibia. Whether it is the First Lady, whether it is our Prime Minister, whether it’s our deputy prime minister. Women like Hillary Clinton, these women that I admire a lot. And then, of course, these leaders, whether they are male and female, David Fourie, the guy who recruited me to Namibia, I think is the most brilliant person in the world, somebody like John Maxwell, who just writes and I am who I am today because of reading his work. And then other leaders whose work I follow, like the Simon Sinek, have talked about Patrick Clancy on him and a few other people that if I needed to develop in my people management skills and in my leadership, I, I read a lot of their work and then of course I am very much good on the Bible so that I believe it’s the top leadership book. I have read it every year from Genesis to Revelation, and every year I find new leadership tips that helps me on this journey. So that is where I draw my inspiration. Those were my role models. What next for me, I think. Normally I tell people one thing that I’m very good at is being focused on one thing. So when people are used to ask me, Where will you be in five years? I say, I’ve got no clue because right now I’m here and this is what I am doing and that is the only thing I’m thinking about. So when the next opportunity comes, God will open the door and when He opens, I know that is the door and I will enter. And I think right now here is the news, the tuition we entering my second year and I’m seeing that we need to take this institution to a level I am committed here for a five year contract that I have been given beyond the five years. I have got no clue to whatever happens the door, the right door will open. And when I win that, when I’m shown it is the right door, I will enter that right to do so. Normally. That is the I for that question. And it’s not because I’m being trying to be funny. It is really because I’ve never ended up where I thought I will end up. I have ended up where I did not. Like I told you, I thought I would be a scientist right now in the laboratory or maybe working somewhere at like an engineer at Nassau or something like that. But I guess you look at where I am…

Nikita Taniparti: So it can still happen.

Nangula Uaandja: and where I plan to end up. So I am looking for the door that will be there after five years.

Nikita Taniparti: No, it can still happen. No, we are very, very we learned a lot during this conversation. I especially think you left me with a lot of practical and professional and personal advice, and I’m sure people listening even later will gain a lot of wisdom. And I’m very excited that the growth lab gets to come and continue working with you and your team. I think we’re very privileged and honored to be able to know so much about Namibia and help the country at this time of transition. And I wanted to say thank you to all the participants and the people joining this call. If you have any questions, please reach out to us and let us know. And Nangula, as always, it’s been a complete pleasure to get this time with you and we really appreciate it.

Nangula Uaandja: Thank you very much and thank you for a good talk. It’s a pleasure to be with you. And it’s a pleasure to work with the hub of the growth lab. We are doing great work together. And together we can make a difference for our country.

Nikita Taniparti: Absolutely. Absolutely.