Jeune Street

Lant Pritchett, one of the most interesting and original international development scholars, replies to the question: "Is Microfinance a ... dead end?":

What I worry about development is that there are two ontologically different categories to which the word is commonly applied. One is an individual human being for whom when his/her well-being is higher we say they have more “development” and when we add people up we say this group of people have more “development” than another group of people. In this respect the HDI is one of many indicators of “human development” and no one defends GDP per capita or any narrow measure as being the ultimate metric and “development as freedom” I suppose is a good a starting rhetoric for groping towards measures of this as any other.

But tadpoles become frogs through development, acorns become oaks through development, that is it generally refers to a dynamic process in which things do not change their fundamental nature. In this sense most of “development” is really about some larger aggregate which casually some might call a “country.” There is something to the “development” of a “country” (some social aggregation) that is more than the adding up of the well-being of the people in it and this development has multiple strands (of which I identify at least four, economic, political, administrative, and social). The old fashioned view was that the dynamic and systematic improvement in the economic, political, administrative and social capabilities of “countries” was what led causally to the betterment of the development of its people measured as well-being. But the two are not the same. One can, as external actors, do things that better the “development” measured as human well-being that does not lead to “development” of the “country.”

Of course, what Pritchett doesn't say is that the human development approach arose in response to external actors doing things that may lead to "development" of the "country" (eg. the 'big push' projects of the 1960s and 1970s) but do little for (or even harm) "development" measured as human well-being. I think Pritchett is right to insist on his definition of development (I agree with him), but arguing for ontological separation from human development isn't the way forward. One might more effectively approach the problem by asking how investments in human development should be targeted to achieve the greatest collective benefit. Education (including higher education) and health systems are good places to start. So is providing essential public goods, like peace and security.

HT: Chris Blattman