Last updated on May 24, 2015
Jeffrey Sachs … holds to a model of economic development in which poverty cannot be broken piecemeal, but must be attacked on all fronts at once. Perhaps people cannot save for the future because they are too poor or too unhealthy, or both; perhaps they cannot improve their health or their productivity without the investments that depend on saving; or perhaps their productivity is low because they are not adequately nourished which, in turn, comes about because their productivity is so low. These vicious circles cause “poverty traps” from which people cannot escape except through a “big push” from outside. “In order to make lasting changes in any one sphere of development, we must improve them all”, argues the website of the Millennium Villages, where “all” comprises eight categories: education, mother and child health, business and entrepreneurship, gender equality, technology, the environment and intervention, water and energy, and food. (Note the “we”, which presumably means the western visitors to the website.)
These arguments have some plausibility, but they are not endorsed by many economists today who, to be fair, do not exactly have a stellar track record in promoting development. It is also hard to avoid the fact that the now rich countries of the world escaped from poverty without even a small push, let alone one delivered from abroad. One might also ask whether gender equality was really a precondition for the Industrial Revolution, or exactly what role it played in the recent poverty reduction and health improvement in India and China which were among the most spectacular in human history.
That’s Angus Deaton, whose intellectuel heirs most of today’s development economists are (he wrote the Bible of field data collection, back in 1997), writing about Jeffrey Sachs’ new book in The Lancet, making a point similar to the one I made in my “Development Bloat” article on the Foreign Affairs website a few weeks ago.
(ht: David McKenzie.)