Brad DeLong: Understanding the Latin American Economy, 1850-1950

Recorded November 3, 2014

Below is the original description of the event.

The Spain and Portugal that conquered what is now Latin America were the most productive and sophisticated societies in 16th-century Europe — certainly more so than any rain-bound island populated by Saxons pretending that their grandmothers hadn’t been Welsh. But Latin America never realized its utopian New World-promise. Why, exactly? And are those blockages now gone?

Brad DeLong is a professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.