Three cheers for the Democratic Republic of the Congo [formerly known among colonialists as "darkest Africa"]

Tyler Cowen has a conversation with Nathan Nunn, a development economist at Harvard. Among other things, the conversation touches on the Democratic Republic of the Congo which, as some of you may know, is the locus a series of posts on something I call Kisangani 2150. Take world Kim Stanley Robinson established in New York 2140, run it forward a decade, and imagine what Kisangani would be like. Key post: Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model.

COWEN: If you try to think, say, within Africa, what would be some places that you would be modestly more optimistic about than, say, a hedge fund manager who didn’t understand persistence? What would a few of those countries be? Again, recognizing enormous noise, variance, and so on, as with smoking and lung cancer.

NUNN: If I’m true to exactly what I was just saying, then southern Africa or places where you have a larger population of societies that historically were more developed. South Africa, you have the Afrikaans, and they have a different descent than others. That’s if I’m true to what I was saying. But that’s ignoring that, also within Africa, you had a very large number of successful, well-developed states, and that was prior to European colonialism and the slave trade. So one could look at those cases. 

One area that I worked at, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where you had the great Congo Kingdom, the Kuba Kingdom, a large number of other kingdoms, the Luba for example — that would probably be one country. That country today is pretty much as low as — in terms of per capita income — as you can be, right at subsistence. But if we’re predicting just based purely on persistence and historical state formation, that would be one to pick.

On crime – and fun:

COWEN: Why do you think many parts of the New World — and I have in mind Latin America — have relatively high levels of crime for their per capita income? Latin America also, as you know, has pretty high levels of education for its per capita income. There may be trust at some micro levels, but crime rates in the New World are much higher than anywhere else. Crime rates in Latin America very often are higher than in most parts of Africa.

What has gone wrong there in terms of the intergenerational transmission of trust? And of course, it’s multi-ethnic, but so is much of Africa.

NUNN: That’s a good question. I haven’t thought about that. And also, I obviously know less about Latin America. One is, I’m not sure that it’s related to trust. I think it’s related to whatever tools and mechanisms a society can employ to constrain activities which we call crime.

I can tell you more about what happens in sub-Saharan Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I spend much of my time. There, you wouldn’t think that the formal institutions are better than in Brazil, for example. The police force is less well functioning, but the crime rates — we were very surprised when we first went to the areas where we stay — are extremely, extremely low.

So what is it? It’s not through formal mechanisms, but it’s through informal mechanisms such that you could almost think of it as mob justice, that if one person commits a crime, there’s going to be informal actions taken to punish that individual. That relies on the strength of indigenous, informal institutions or social structures that prevent that. 

In Latin America, it seems like the reliance are on these more modern, formal institutions which aren’t as good as other countries. The other thing about Latin America — I would say there’s extreme inequality. We see this in national Gini coefficients. That’s different than countries where you’re very close to subsistence, and the scope for inequality is much less. I would just guess that that has a big part to do with it as well. But those are all just conjectures.

COWEN: Is it fun to visit Democratic Republic of Congo?

NUNN: Yeah, it’s great. Yeah.

COWEN: Tell us what’s fun. I need to go once I can.

NUNN: Yeah, it’s really, really great. The first time we went as a team — this is James Robinson, Sara Lowes, Jonathan Weigel in 2013 — we were pretty apprehensive. You hear a lot of stories about the DRC. It sounds like a very unsafe place, et cetera. But one thing we didn’t realize or weren’t expecting was just how lovely and wonderful the people are.

And it turns out it’s not unsafe in general. It depends on different locations. In the east, definitely near Goma, it’s obviously much, much less safe. But I think what, for me, is wonderful is the sense of community. Because the places we go are places that haven’t been touched, to a large extent, by foreign aid or NGOs or tourism, I think we are treated just like any other individual within the community.

In the psychology literature, it’s often referred to as collectivist versus individualist culture. I think it’s just a culture where the individual is less important. You’re more embedded in the community, their social relations, and I think that’s nice. It’s nice to experience that — coming from a Western society — for a month every year. [...]

Actually, what I really enjoy is just going back to the different parts of the DRC, kind of on a regular basis. Given that you develop bonds with different people, that’s really nice to see them, see how they’re doing over time, and that sort of thing.

COWEN: There’s a recent online piece by Morgan Kelly. I’m sure you know it. It’s called “The Standard Errors of Persistence,” and it’s pretty technical. Feel free to give us an answer that no one will understand, but he says, “Many persistence regressions can strongly predict spatial noise.” What do you think of this piece?

NUNN: I think it has an important lesson, which is, we have to really be careful when we’re thinking about societies, or people, or anything really — institutions, policies. Because in the cross-section especially . . . well, actually, not only cross-section but in the time series, there’s a lot of correlation across observations.

If you looked at, for example, the eastern DRC, those groups, those individuals there are going to have a lot of similar experiences as just across the border in Rwanda, and they’re going to be culturally somewhat similar. The further you move away, the more independent they are, but the closer spatially you are, the more correlated they are. So if we’re looking at any correlations and there are these omitted factors, then if you’re close to one another, your error terms are going to be more similar.

That’s basically an important point of that paper. If you don’t take that into account — and it’s hard because there’s a lot we don’t know — if you don’t take that into account, you can get a lot of false positives. And part of that comes from overestimating the effective number of observations that you have.

Music:

COWEN: What do you like best in African music?

NUNN: I’m not super familiar with African music, except for the local Congolese music, which is —

COWEN: Well, that’s one of the peaks, right?

NUNN: Yeah, exactly. I like it. It’s fun. There’s memories that bring me back to the first road trip we did, when we went to visit the Kuba Kingdom. It was in this SUV that we rented, and we had these tapes playing with Congolese music, and that was great. We even had the air conditioning for about 10 minutes. Then the tape machine caught on fire, and then the air conditioning broke down.

But that music still reminds me of that trip, which was a two- or three-day trip, or actually four- or five-day round trip into the interior, which was my first trip to the Congo. What I don’t like is it’s usually associated with dancing, and I’m a very stiff, rigid person [laughs] that’s not skilled at dancing.

There's much more at the link.