8 korrents from this piece · 1 of them a turn
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsAt independence, South Korea and Taiwan had far higher rates of primary education than most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Their wordsCatch-up growth in the 20th century was almost entirely state-led.
Their wordsThe Japanese empire reached far deeper into its colonies than any European empire ever did in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Their wordsThe fact remains that without a stock of capable administrators, industrial policy and export targeting and infrastructure-building—or even Adam Smith’s minimum of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”—are a nonstarter.
Their wordsPrecisely how much the ancient continuity of East Asian states matters for development is still a little murky, and the delineation with colonial legacies is still an area of active debate—but the balance of evidence suggests that the legacies of these pre-colonial states stretched through the colonial period, extending even into the post-independence era.
Their wordsThe relative absence of pre-colonial states meant that the newly independent African states were largely European inventions; modern Kenya, for instance, inherits the boundaries of British East Africa, which was created by pulling together the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and Kamba ethnic groups.
Their wordsAfrican states formed where it was rational to do so, in places like the Ethiopian highlands where population density was high and the disease burden was relatively low.
Recalls holdingHaving fallen into the East Asia - Africa Trap before, I can tell you precisely why so many people make this mistake.
Their words nowThe author, of course, was me, in a coauthored paper with Jen Kuan Wang on Taiwan’s 1950s land reform. Mea culpa! We’ve since revised it.