How, Mr. Easterly?

In preparation for our last lecture in my module “Poverty and Development”, we were asked to submit questions which would then be taken by a panel consisting of David Hulme and Caroline Moser (both staff at the Institute for Development and Policy Management). One of the questions dealt with Easterly’s book, reviewed by Kurt in last week’s post. The question asked: “Is it time to consider a more bottom-up, piecemeal approach to combat global poverty, as proposed by Bill Easterly?” Good question.

David Hulme responded by saying Easterly’s ideas are great, apart from the fact that Easterly does not flesh out his idea of “searchers” with theory. How would a strategy favoring searchers actually work? Would governments still have a role? Our lecturer for the course, moderating the panel, gave his view that Easterly is actually a free-market libertarian and doesn’t expand on his theory of searchers because it has long been discredited.

An important point that Easterly makes, however, is that rich countries need to be held accountable for the promises they make to the rest of the world. Searchers are accountable to the market, at least. For example, in the panel discussion today, it was pointed out that of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the only one that puts an onus on the rich countries to do something is the one that is not subject to Results-Based Management (RBM). In other words, while the poor countries are held to account for meeting MDGs one through seven, the rich countries will not be held to account for whether or not they reach their goal.

So, does Easterly’s idea, that searchers should replace planners in international development, hold any promise? Like Kurt, I think it does. But I agree with David Hulme that the question, How?, is not answered by Easterly. I also agree with David Hulme in his assessment of Easterly as overly pessimistic in asserting that Development has done no good. In fact, many things have improved for the majority of the world’s population in terms of incomes, average life expectancy and infant mortality. That should not be discounted, even if the Development model is fraught with difficulties.

How, then, do we move forward, as a rich world, trying to do something about the huge disparity in incomes, living conditions and opportunities (freedoms) between our countries and most of the other countries in the world? This is essentially the question that at least two of my modules ask at their conclusion. And this is the question that we are left with at the end of Easterly’s book.

I come back to the idea that I put forward in my last post, that top-down and bottom-up have to work together. There is a role for planning at the state level (though maybe not at the global level), and there is a role for the entrepreneur and for the grass-roots civil society. How these work together is not straight forward and it’s unlikely that what works in one country or region can be duplicated in another. One thing is certain, however, strong, free civil society, effective institutions and transparent, competent government cannot be manufactured or planned. They must grow organically (as has been the case in all of the richest countries) through a long-term, risk-laden process. The questions we (the rich) should be asking ourselves are:

1. Is anything we’re doing right now likely to help such a process? and

2. If not, why are we doing it?

Jordan (Manchester)