Wed 21 Nov 2012
My effort to get an economist to understand geography…
Posted by Ed under Academia, Delivering Development, development, environment, research
[2] Comments
Update: 11/22: So, after seeing Tom Murphy’s Storify of the twitter exchange, it is now clear that Sachs was on fire – the man was engaged in several conversations at once along the lines below…and he seems to have been responding to all of them pretty coherently, and in real time. I admit to being impressed (No, seriously, click on the Storify link there and just scroll. It is boggling). So recognize that what you see below is what I saw in my feed (his other conversations were with people I don’t follow, so I didn’t realize they were ongoing). Still, glad to get geography’s foot back in the door…
So, quite by surprise, I found myself on the end of an extended twitter exchange with Jeff Sachs. I’ve hassled him via twitter before, and never had a response. So, I was a bit taken aback to see my feed light up about 30 seconds after I tweeted with @JeffDSachs at the front end! To give Sachs credit, he stayed quite engaged and did seem to be taking on some of my points. Granted, 140 characters is hardly enough to really convey the issues at hand, but I did the best I could to represent contemporary human geography. Y’all be the judge – this is the feed, slightly rejiggered to clarify that at times Sachs and I were crossing each other’s messages – he was clearly responding to a previous message sometimes when he tweeted back after one of my tweets. Also, Samuel Danthine was also on the conversation, and I kept him in the timeline as it seems he and I were coming from the same place:
Of course geography matters. But it also isn’t something you can change. No matter what the geography is like the country will benefit from inclusive political institutions. One can argue that it’s very difficult to change institutions as well, but it is certainly more likely then moving mountains. No matter what geography is like your country will benefit from inclusive political institutions. The inverse is not true.
Hunter, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what I mean by the term “geography.” What you are talking about is physical geography, the biophysical world. That certainly matters, but it does not matter outside of human processes – and that is what geography really is about, how human beings apprehend and live in the world around them. Coastlines only matter with regard to the forms of shipping we have come to privilege, the types of commodities we desire to move around, and the borders we have drawn and now reify via various contemporary geopolitical conventions. Access to a coastline has nothing to do with physical geography – it is a completely human artifact. The same could be said for natural resources – sure, some places have more than others, but those resources only matter insofar as people use them. Oil is great (or awful, depending on the situation), but if someone invents fusion tomorrow, oil won’t be worth much anymore. My point is simple: “geography” is not an independent variable in any analysis of development. It is as much the outcome of various human processes that are often already being independently measured. So any analysis that hinges on a simplistic construction of geography as location + physical characteristics falls apart. This is well understood in geography, and has been since the 1930s-1940s. That’s why we stopped trying to explain things via “geography”. And that is one reason why Sachs’ efforts to use geography as an explanatory variable are hugely problematic…