Hold the Bacon, Please

If you're interested in the sorts of things that I'm interested in, then seeing another article about assistance for Africa set in a "Jeffrey Sachs versus William Easterly" framework is about as remarkable as flipping through TV stations and finding that some version of Law and Order is on. I actually found this one to be pretty good and I'd say I generally agree with this author. But it also falls prey to a really irritating habit among people who write about this stuff. After a rather lengthy discussion of what's wrong with the paternalism of the Sachs approach, he concludes that aid policies should rather be informed by the ideas of Francis Bacon, Hernando de Soto, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith. In other words, just let capitalism rip and everything else will sort itself out. This kind of market ideology is every bit as simplistic and foolish as the paternalism of Sachs, Bono and Madonna. And it's not like it hasn't been tried, either. A generation of (failed) World Bank and IMF policies were borne of exactly this idea that you just had to get the broad, macroeconomic conditions right and growth and prosperity would follow.

The irritating habit I refer to isn't the right-wing tilt of this guy's perspective, it's the notion that there's an alternative set of "good ideas for development" that we're just not putting into practice. Yes, it's stupid of somebody like Sachs to argue that, essentially, we've figured out how to make development happen and the current challenge is merely mobilizing the resources to carry it out. It's equally stupid to argue that the solution to global poverty is for everybody to read a bit more Bacon and Hayek.

The unfortunate truth is that nobody has really figured out "development" or how to bring it about. The healthy, vibrant, wealth creating, poverty reducing economies of the world are the exceptions, not the rule.