You have Died of Dysentary

As I write this, I am sitting on a small bed in the Parkside hotel in downtown Nairobi, underneath a massive mosquito net. It consists of a tightly woven white mesh that resembles a wedding veil, suspended from a large wooden hoop above my bed, covering the perimeter of my sleeping area like some kind of “Dream Princess Daybed”. Upon noticing that were a few dime-sized holes in the net, I was careful to patch them up with some electrical tape. In addition, I’ve covered all of my exposed skin with a bug spray that is nearly 100% pure pesticide, producing a vaguely medicinal scent and making my arms feel simultaneously oily and “burny”.

Why these dire measures? I’m in a mid-range hotel in a big city, not camping rough in the middle of a dense forest next to a brackish stream. However; compared to the hotel where I stayed for my first three nights; this is “roughing it” somewhat. My room at the $60 dollars a night Hotel 680 was equipped with the luxury of a oscillating fan meaning that I could keep my windows sealed shut at the same time; upon relocating, I discovered (in line with my expectations) that the Parkside possessed no such amenities. Almost immediately, I became rather worried about coming into contact with the dreaded anophales mosquito (and the malaria that it caries) for the first time in my trip. Indeed, within a few minutes of settling down at the desk in my room to do some reading, I saw a solitary mosquito buzzing around the room; that was enough to send me scurrying for cover.

My ongoing “Malaria Terror” over the last few days lead me to become increasingly skeptical of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s (hereafter AJR) contention that the rates at which European settlers died of tropical diseases is not correlated to current levels of economic growth. For those of you who don’t closely follow the literature on the Political Economy of Development, I’m referring to a paper by three economists about the effect of institutions on economic performance that has received a considerable amount of attention over the last few years. They argue that the problem with studying institutions and economic performance is that it is difficult to make sense of any relationship that you might observe: are countries rich because they have good institutions or does wealth allow countries to create institutions that protect property rights and encourage investment? The novel aspect of this paper is that AJR use the fact that the extent to which potential colonies became heavily settled seems to correlate heavily with the extent to which initial settlers died due to tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Areas in which Europeans did not fall ill in large numbers became densly-populated settler colonies (like Kenya), with attendant European-style institutions, while areas with high rates of settler mortality became “extractive colonies” which were governed with minimal concern for property rights, a pattern which AJR argue persists to this day and can explain differences in economic growth across the post-colonial world.

Pretty cool, right? Except for one thing, which I alluded to above- the extent to which this logic works depends crucially on the fact that settler mortality isn’t related to economic growth today (other than through the way that it influences institutions). Discounting the fact that I am overly frightful, the fact that I’m this worried about getting bit by a mosquito indicates that the problem of tropical diseases such as malaria is far from gone.

The millions of Africans that die from this disease every year are even stronger evidence than the paranoia of one American grad student. Moreover, as Bono and Angelina Jolie (not to mention slightly more reliable sources such as Jeffrey Sachs) tell us every day, Malaria is a huge economic problem that helps to perpetuate poverty around the world by decimating workforces, ripping apart families, and clogging the healthcare system. I haven’t gotten out into the most affected areas yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, the impact of malaria on every day life of many Kenyans (let alone other diseases such as AIDS, Tuburculous) is impossible to ignore. Thus the fact that the continuing worldwide malaria epidemic calls AJR’s empirical strategy is trivial; however even after spending only a few days here, its impossible to ignore the fact that Malaria is an enormous social and economic problem and to see that any attempt to understand and alleviate poverty and promote economic growth in Africa must take that fact seriously.