The misleading theory of doing development

From an FT Alphaville column,

There’s a fellow called Telfer who makes more pork pies than anybody else in the bloody world, old boy. So the Americans went and asked him how he did it — incentive schemes, graduated bonuses, productivity scales, vacation benefits, you know the kind of thing. “No,” he kept saying, “no, I never do anything like that, no, I just let ‘em turn the bloody things out as best they can. Oh, now I come to think of it, there is just one thing — every so often I goes down to the yard and I bawls, ‘Faster, you fuckers!’”

Terry-Thomas, as quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)

There is so much earthly wisdom here. It's obviously provocative, and that's the point given the pendulum has swung universally to management driven narratives on execution. And nowhere is this more relevant than in development and public policy. It started with the private sector based new public management approaches and now represents the innovation and disruption discourse of technology start-ups. I have blogged on multiple occasions on this issue. 

It's natural for outsiders, especially those working in the private sector and in the academia, to be attracted by these narratives. There are three biases at play here. One, human mind is seamlessly attracted to logically consistent analysis of problems and solutions and struggle to comprehend and accept idiosyncratic explanations. Second, human mind tends to find new ideas as attractive as they find old and current practices boring. Three, we have an innate tendency to want to solve all our problems and that too immediately, or at least in some finite time.    

The nature of private sector activities and incentives in workplace environments allow these biases to play out. Besides, the nature of the problems as well as the general environment and incentives in the private sector (for-profit and non-profit) are suited to respond effectively to the lingo of management theories and startup innovation. Therefore, like in the private sector, it has become an entrenched belief that development problems and their solutions too should have logical basis and these problems demand disruptive and innovative solutions. 

For sure, as I have blogged earlier here and here, in the case of common public policy challenges we face innovation can help. But it's relevant mostly only at the margins. Similarly, idiosyncratic factors arising out of context, local cultures and practices, behavioural biases, and political economy are critical in solving development problems. Worse still, many of these problems have no immediate solutions. Meaningful enough solutions lie in development and economic growth. 

Precious little has changed over time in how we teach kids, acquire skills, treat patients, acquire nutritional food habits, maintain cleanliness and hygiene, adopt good farming practices, control traffic congestion and so on. Solutions on all these problems have to account for their idiosyncratic factors. Technology innovations can generally help only in marginally supporting the traditional approaches of development. Further, many of these problems will get resolved gradually over time and new solution approaches will become possible on the way. 

These are really hard insights to comprehend, much less internalise. In its absence, we'll be led by our biases in applying misleading approaches to development problems.