{"id":9865,"date":"2014-01-31T05:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T10:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=9865"},"modified":"2015-05-24T11:39:02","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T15:39:02","slug":"development-bloat-angus-deaton-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/9865","title":{"rendered":"Angus Deaton on Development Bloat"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Jeffrey Sachs &#8230; 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 \u201cpoverty traps\u201d from which people cannot escape except through a \u201cbig push\u201d from outside. \u201cIn order to make lasting changes in any one sphere of development, we must improve them all\u201d, argues the website of the Millennium Villages, where \u201call\u201d 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 \u201cwe\u201d, which presumably means the western visitors to the website.)<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>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. <strong>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.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s Angus Deaton, whose intellectuel heirs most of today&#8217;s development economists are (he wrote <a title=\"Deaton (1997)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0801852544\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0801852544&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=marfbel-20&amp;linkId=7SIPE5FQDQYFWS6I\" target=\"_blank\">the Bible of field data collection<\/a>, back in 1997), <a title=\"American Hubris, African Nemesis\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(14)60092-1\/fulltext\" target=\"_blank\">writing<\/a> about Jeffrey Sachs&#8217; new book in <em>The Lancet<\/em>, making a point similar to the one I made in my &#8220;Development Bloat&#8221; <a title=\"Development Bloat\" href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/articles\/140624\/marc-f-bellemare\/development-bloat\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> on the\u00a0<em>Foreign Affairs<\/em>\u00a0website a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n<p>(ht: David McKenzie.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeffrey Sachs &#8230; holds to a model of economic development in which poverty cannot be broken piecemeal, but must be attacked on all fronts at<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/9865\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Angus Deaton on Development Bloat<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2z7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9865"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10950,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions\/10950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}