Lant Pritchett on Why Foreign Aid Misses the Point

I'm much more worried about the loss, about the waste of effort on ideas. So we have geniuses, just truly stunning geniuses, devoting themselves to charity work as opposed to thinking about development strategy. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Why are some countries poor and others rich? What can we do to help poorer countries become more affluent?

And why is it that development economics has taken a wrong turn in the last 20 years, becoming obsessed with questions about whether this small intervention or that small intervention might be more effective while missing the big picture about the actual internal changes that have put countries like China or South Korea or Vietnam on the path to much greater affluence. Well, this conversation is all about the fate of billions of people in the world and as you will see, it is full of interesting and provocative ideas. Land Pritchett is one of the most influential development economists and also a kind of bad noir of the profession.

He has taught for many years at the Harvard Kennedy School, at the Blavatny School in Oxford, at the School of Public Policy, at the London School of Economics, and he's also the co-founder and research director at Labour Mobility Partnerships. We talked today about what the basic requirements for economic growth are. We talked about why GDP per capita is actually an incredibly good predictor of people's well-being and why criticisms of that metric are often short-sighted, why political factors like a competent state bureaucracy and the rule of law are so important to the development process, and why the obsession with uh RCTs, with randomly controlled trials that has taken over development economics is, according to Land, a very much mistaken, ontologically mistaken, as he insists. And finally, in the part of the conversation reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about two important questions.

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