Lant Pritchett on development

There is an excellent interview of Lant Pritchett here. I'll quote at length because even by Lant's exceptional standards, this is full of wisdom on several areas. It packs so many invaluable insights into a brief interview. 

He identifies four transformations a country should make - to a productive economy, to a capable state, to a government responsive to the needs and wishes of citizens, and to a society where equal treatment of all before the law and of each other is a bedrock principle. 

He finds the modern development discourse as being detrimental to realising these transformations,

Yet the current focus in development is on what I call ‘kinky development’, which involves tinkering on the margins to help the poorest of the poor. That is the wrong focus. If you achieve national development, you will solve poverty and provide prosperity for the general population, whereas focusing on poverty alone often is at odds with getting you to desirable levels of prosperity. We should ask ourselves with everything we do: “Is this contributing to one of the four transformations we need to do, and if so, how?”... Given limited time, resources, and attention, it sometimes seems reasonable to prioritise by focusing on small-scale stuff, but a series of small-scale interventions doesn’t add up to real transformation and often presupposes that the big changes are already in place. It presupposes a capable state, for example, which is often lacking. It also presupposes that the government is responsive and is concerned about the problems that you want to address. 

This problem with the obsession with evaluation 

I object to the current trend that says large-scale change is too difficult to assess scientifically, so we should focus on small changes. That’s not how the rich countries became rich. They went through a messy, difficult, extended, contested process regarding the four transformations. No country has high levels of human well- being without having achieved national development; and every country that has high national development achieves very high levels of human well-being. So, the only path to high human well-being is through national development...

Doing rigorous experiments to figure out how much further you can travel with an extra gallon of gas is meaningless if the transmission is broken and the tyres are flat. Things work as systems and thinking that you can solve them piecemeal without a diagnostic of the overall functioning of the system is just madness.

This on the problem with the prevailing practice of education, 

... ‘spending ain’t investment’. It is only ‘investment’ if it works. If I worship a god of the ocean, and I throw gold into the ocean, and call that investment in my prosperity, I have made a mistake because there is no causal link between my spending and my prosperity. Unless you are causally right about the chain of events that leads from your spending to the desired outcomes, you can spend all you want and not actually improve outcomes. In Indonesia, which is a reasonably well functioning country, teacher’s pay was doubled and the amount of spending per child tripled over the past 20 years, yet learning has not budged a bit; if anything, it has deteriorated. I think people have confused ticking the box of spending money on a budget item called ‘Education’, with true investment in human beings.

On the comparison between education in India and Indonesia,

India never changed its mind about having a selection system rather than an education system. A selection system is where you put all children in a classroom, but provide a poor or indifferent environment for learning, and see what happens. The students that learn in that environment must be brilliant. As for those who do not learn, teachers will say they must be the type of children who cannot learn. India took that option because they expected that 2-3% of the population would be an educated elite, and that would be good enough. And so, they committed themselves to selection rather than education. Things will only change once they fundamentally change their ideas, which they are hopefully in the process of doing now.

Indonesia was different. They decided to provide a standardised product for all learners at a fairly low level, and they reached a decent level of learning where most kids learned some basics. In fact, they were superior to India. Many people think of India as doing better, but India does worse for the average person while also producing a smart elite whose members sometime win a Nobel Prize. Indonesia did far better at covering the basics for everyone as a way of building national unity around a common language. But they never really provoked themselves to go further. Now, they’re stuck at this low-level equilibrium of mediocrity, and they haven’t been able to budge past it in spite of making an important transition to democracy.

The fundamental issue is commitment. Do we have a clear vision of what we expect every child to know and do? Is it a reasonable set of commitments? Can we actually achieve it with the resources we have and the teaching force we have, and what we know how to do? And are we really committed to achieving it? Are we going to hold ourselves to account for achieving the reasonable and important objectives we’ve set? Once you get that right, there are some other things that need to happen, but those are minor details.

On the importance of place in the productivity of people, the "place premium",

The productivity of a person is therefore influenced by the person’s characteristics, skills, capabilities, ambition, and so on; but is also limited by the productivity of the place they are in. So, when you take a worker from a low productivity place and you put them in a high productivity place, their productivity goes up by a factor of four, simply because they are now in a productive place.

On corruption

Hyper regulation necessarily creates corruption. If you create a set of laws that people cannot abide by, you will generate corruption, because you basically create an environment in which the state, and whoever controls the apparatus of the state, can sell differential enforcement to the highest bidder. Thus, corruption is the natural result of a set of laws that are beyond the capacity of a state to enforce. If you borrow best practice law from a country that can enforce it, and you put it in a place that cannot enforce it, corruption is guaranteed... The problem is that there are two bad things about deals: that they are not honoured and that they are closed to some people – not everybody can access the deal – and by being closed, they are not transparent. If the goal is to create more openness about the deals that are being cut, then any deal, to survive scrutiny, will have to be done honourably. The tendency to prioritise laws over practice should be reversed, in other words.

On evolution of policy making,

Often, protecting labour or the environment can be better served by a more realistic set of policies that grows endogenously and organically out of the processes of experimentation. I think good policy comes from good practice rather than good practice coming from good policy.

This about the perils of imitation and transplantation,

The AK47 is the world’s most popular weapon. The M16, which is the standard weapon in the US army, is far and away a more accurate weapon than the AK47, which beyond a few hundred yards, cannot hit a thing. The AK47 emerged from the Soviet Union, where they designed their weapons for the soldiers they had, low capability with little training. They also designed the AK47 to be unbelievably robust; no matter what you do to it, when you pull the trigger, it fires. You can basically hand anybody an AK47 and it will be a reasonably effective weapon. The United States took the opposite approach of designing the best possible weapon and training soldiers to match the weapon. It is an excellent weapon, but if you do not keep it clean and in good functioning order, it will misfire.

The problem is when you give the M16 with its perfect design to a poor soldier it won’t work. This mirrors a lot of what has happened in development – the desire to adopt best practice, leads to a gap between practice design and the capability for implementation. Rather than organically building designs that work in a low- implementation environment, policymakers have tried to borrow designs and fit them into countries, and it just does not work. When well-designed programmes are poorly implemented the reason is obvious, but the problem repeats itself, because no one ever admits that what they need is an AK47. You need to design the programme for the soldiers you have.

This is just a brilliant conclusion that goes to the heart of development,

You should nominate and work on problems that people really want to solve. The way you build capability is by solving problems. The way you get ahead is by working on problems where there is a broad consensus about what needs to be solved, and then you get people to work on that problem. Once you have a well-defined problem, then you can begin to work organically on a solution. In every historical example I know of, countries became successful by means of an ugly, messy, contested, hard slog that took decades. And then, after they become successful, they create myths about how wonderful it was and the reasons why they did it, when the reality was just that it was a hard slog.

Once the problem is clearly defined and there is collective commitment to the cause, there is just no substitute for plain simple hardwork and persistence.