December, 2006

Final Reflections

by James A. Robinson

December 27th, 2006

Lawrence Harrison doesn’t have a hypothesis about culture and economic development. He has a hypothesis about the interaction between culture and institutions. Though he is not clear about this, this is what his argument implies, and this is the only thing that could explain why Chinese people have a good culture, yet China is extremely [...]

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Final Comments

by Lawrence E. Harrison

December 24th, 2006

For Gregory Clark
Your repetition of the assertion “in 50 years the agenda of introducing culture into analysis of growth has not advanced one step from the state of the art of the 1950s” suggests that you may not be aware of the following books, which I commend to you:

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (1989)Francis [...]

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The Basques and Chile

by Lawrence E. Harrison

December 20th, 2006

One factor in Chile’s exceptionalism that has not yet been mentioned is the profound Basque influence starting in the eighteen century. Arnold J. Bauer in Chilean Rural Society (Cambridge University Press, 1975) writes:
Between 1701 and 1810, some 24,000 immigrants arrived in Chile from Spain [about doubling the number of Spaniards] and forty-five percent of these [...]

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