Lant Pritchett's ideas about development economics
I came across Yascha Mounk’s interview with development economist Lant Pritchett this morning, and it highlights several of Pritchett’s ideas that align closely with the Outcome Evolution framework.
1. Root causes vs symptom mitigation
When discussing foreign aid, Pritchett draws a key distinction between dealing with root causes (the lack of development in a country — what he calls ‘national development’) and mitigating surface problems (addressing the consequences of that lack of development).
2. Models, not just policies, drive outcomes
Pritchett locates the source of many problems not just in policies themselves but in the models underlying those policies.
As he says in the interview:
We have geniuses—truly stunning geniuses—devoting themselves to charity work as opposed to thinking about development strategy. Ideas are supremely important to the fate of nations, and the ideas that get transmitted via a global discourse of research and practice, to government officials, to people in power, to people who have influence—that is a huge deal…
By losing the plot on national development in favor of mitigation, we also draw the discourse, the research, and the ideas away from big questions: How do we get states to be more capable? What is the right sequencing of state capability and democracy? How does democracy interact with the creation of economic growth—does it impede it or not? The number of people in the world who can produce new, original, and correct ideas is very few, and drawing those people onto small issues is a huge loss.
This directly corresponds to the role of models within the FMORB model. Flawed models lead to ineffective policies.
3. The need to identify assumptions
Pritchett talks about the importance of understanding the assumptions underlying interventions. A randomised controlled trial giving an intervention to one group of people and not to another group rests on the assumption that causality operates at the level of individual agency rather than being primarily shaped by system-level conditions.
As he says:
[T]he problem with the world is not poor people. The problem is that people are in poor places. If you are studying the dynamics of how to make people less poor, you have to be ontologically studying the characteristics of the system, not the people. The methods being deployed by economists to study how to make people better off are focused as if the person were the unit at which we should be studying this. That is ontologically wrong.
The inability to question deeply held assumptions can lead to a faulty understanding of the structure of the system that an intervention is taking place in.
The interview contains many other insights, and Pritchett’s work appears to offer many ideas that intersect with key OE concerns. I will be exploring his work in more detail.