J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School, has posted When Economic Performance Turns on the Colonized Rather than the Colonist:
Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson posit that colonizing countries promoted growth in places where their citizens planned to live by introducing rational economic and legal institutions. By contrast, where they faced high mortality rates, they introduced only "extractive" institutions. They took what they could and left. The former places thrived; the latter failed. Disproportionately, Acemoglu, et al.'s countries with high settler mortality rates were places that had only recently made the transition from hunter-gatherer economies to settled agriculture, if they had made it at all. Unlike agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers generally lack any sense of private ownership over the most obvious capital asset-land. Not owning that capital asset, they have little reason to defer gratification and invest in it. And for the most part, they relentlessly fight each other over resources and women. With no tradition of capital ownership or long-term investments but with chronic and lethal violence, most hunter-gatherers would not have been able effectively to exploit rational legal institutions anyway. I illustrate (only illustrate; I do not claim to prove) this intuition with the example of the Japanese Ainu. As of the mid-19th century, most Japanese lived either in settled agricultural communities or in booming commercial cities. The hunter-gatherer Ainu, however, lived in the northern-most island of Hokkaido. When the Japanese government introduced western legal institutions at the turn of the century, it applied the new rules both to the agricultural and commercial regions outside of Hokkaido and to the hunter-gatherer communities within Hokkaido. Over most of Japan, men and women quickly learned to exploit the opportunities presented by the new legal system. In Hokkaido, the Ainu failed to do any of that. In time, they simply intermarried with the other Japanese and disappeared. The innovation and investment that would eventually transform Hokkaido came instead with immigrants from the rest of Japan.
--Dan Ernst
