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

There is widespread and growing skepticism about foreign aid that I believe will lead in a few years to radical changes in the development policy of many Western governments. This debate will likely come to a head around 2015, when most of the Millennium Development Goals are not reached. The big question will concern how to ‘do development’ in a post-aid age. Michael Clemens has an idea in his new Center for Global Development Working Paper:

Rich countries have made efforts for half a century to help people in poor countries catch up to rich-country standards of living. Those efforts have included giving foreign aid, encouraging overseas investment, dismantling trade barriers, and spreading ideas and institutions. That is, their international development policy has been to encourage the globalization of almost all factors of production—except labor. So far, this policy has failed to cause the living standards of most people in most developing countries to converge with living standards in rich countries. But the globalization of labor—greater mobility for workers across borders—quickly and massively raises migrants’ living standards toward those of rich countries.

This paper argues that every rich country should consider its immigration policy to be part of its international development policy, and vice versa. A development policy that includes migration will be more effective; an immigration policy that includes development will better serve rich countries’ ideals and interests

As the immigration debate heats up in both the US and the UK, Matthew Yglesias advocates focusing on principles rather than minute policy details:

When the topic comes to immigration I’m much more interested in that more abstract level of conversation than in narrow debates about forging a legislative compromise. The bottom line, for me, is that this is an issue fraught with misunderstandings. People wildly underestimate the extent to which immigration is a positive-sum interaction that leaves almost everyone better off. It’s true that as is typical in life some individual people are harmed by high levels of immigration, but those people are a distinct minority. It makes dramatically more sense to try to improve the living standards of native-born Americans through higher taxes to finance more and better public services than it does to try to improve the living standards of native-born Americans through trying to prevent people from moving to the United States to do work in exchange for money.

The debate on immigration, it is often said, generates more heat than light. It is so wrapped up in xenophobia and fear that the core principles relating to human dignity are often forgotten. This debate is not going away, as least as long as our discourse on the subject is so immature. I can’t agree more with Yglesias:

We’ll be talking about migration in 2020 and 2030 and 2040 and 2050 and beyond and it’s important to not just promote good bills, but sound, humane ways of thinking about the issue.

Andrew Sullivan points to John’s Gray’s review of a book by philosopher A.C. Grayling:

When Grayling condemns religion on the grounds that “a theory that explains everything, and can be falsified by nothing, is empty,” he takes for granted that religions are primitive theories, now rendered obsolete by science. … But what if science were to show that religion serves needs that do not change with the growth of knowledge—the need for meaning, for example? In that case, it would not be religion and science that were at odds, but science and atheism. The upshot of scientific inquiry would be that religion is an ineradicable part of human life. Atheism—at least of the evangelical variety that Grayling promotes, which aims to convert humankind from religion—would be a supremely pointless exercise.

(click image for more details)

Phil Hogan reviews The Selfish Society by Sue Gerhardt:

“We are rich in material comforts at the price of having become self-centred, self-interested, self-absorbed and self-regarding. Self-contained, too – though also not in a good way, says Gerhardt, as late capitalism succeeded in rotting our emotional links with community, neighbourhood, family and outer world and forced us into making free-market, gimlet-eyed competitors of ourselves. Our relations with one another – in which our forebears found, if not happiness, at least a proper sense of belonging – are shot. Where “selfishness” might once have evoked someone using up the last of the milk, now those proliferating “self” prefixes have eaten away at the moral fabric we used to snuggle under together.”

See: http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/18/selfish-society-sue-gerhardt

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Bono learns a lesson:

“Over long days and nights, I asked Africans about the course of international activism. Should we just pack it up and go home, I asked? There were a few nods. But many more noes. Because most Africans we met seemed to feel the pressing need for new kinds of partnerships, not just among governments, but among citizens, businesses, the rest of us. I sense the end of the usual donor-recipient relationship.”

Says one economist to the New York Times: “We don’t understand how interconnected we are until you can’t do it anymore.”

Departing from the usual themes of this blog, I thought this analysis by Robert Nozick (picked up from Clive Crook’s blog) was very interesting. It answers the question of why academics cluster around the ideological left:

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.

Thoughts?

Stanley Fish summarizes the publication of a series of exchanges between über-philosopher Jürgen Habermas and four Jesuit academics. This is worth a long excerpt, and I would recommend reading the entire column.

The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”

The consequences of this “motivational weakness” can be seen all around us in the massive injustices nations and tribes inflict on one another. In the face of these injustices, a reason “decoupled from worldviews” does not, Habermas laments, have “sufficient strength to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven.”

So what will supply the strength that is missing? The answer is more than implied by the reference to heaven. Religion will supply it. But Habermas does not want to embrace religion wholesale for he does not want to give up the “cognitive achievements of modernity” — which include tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement — and risk surrendering to the fundamentalisms that, he says, willfully “cut themselves off” from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”