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The assumptions of settler colonialism need Mickey Mouse numbers: Joseph Francis, ‘How to Win a Nobel Prize Using Mickey Mouse Numbers: We Need to Talk about Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’, The Poor Rich World, 27/05/26

27May26

Excerpt: Even when awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conceded that the key data in AJR’s most widely-cited article were “sometimes sketchy.” In their 2001 American Economic Review article “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” AJR had used the mortality rates of European settlers as an instrument for good institutions. Because they could not regress modern wealth on institutions directly (since wealth also affects institutions), they needed a variable that affected wealth only through its historical effect on institutions: an exogenous source of variation to identify causation. Settler mortality was supposed to be that variable. According to the Swedish economists, AJR’s data used “rough estimates on initial settler mortality,” but they still seemed to have successfully demonstrated that favourable disease environments allowed Europeans to establish good institutions with strong protections for property rights. For this reason, AJR argued, those former colonies where settler mortality had been low are wealthy today.


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