Cage Match: Third World Development

I’ve been wanting for a few days to post on the high-saliency dustup between William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs on first-world aid and third-world development. For the moment, I don’t suppose I can do much better than to link to this excellent post from Economist’s View, with a link back to an earlier post on Easterly (don’t overlook a better-than-average comments thread). Easterly is the proprietor of the shop that says we Never Seem to Get it Right, and Sachs of the one that says We Must Try Harder. Sachs certainly is the flavor du jour—he is presenting the BBC Reith Lectures this month (and next), which is about as near canonization as an American academic can get (link).

I agree with the commentators who say that Easterly is kind of a one-trick pony—his latest book is an awful lot like its predecessor. And that Sachs means well (ouch!). But the shorter Jeffrey Sachs says: okay, we did badly before, but we’ve learned our lesson, we will do better now.

It seems to me this misses the point. The real question is whether there is something about the structure of first-world governments such that they will screw things up not just incidentally, but systematically and predictably and incurably. I wouldn’t want to oversimplify here but—oh heck, let me go ahead and oversimplify. It seems to me the issue here is a lot like the issue with first-world warmaking—not just that we didn’t get it right in (Vietnam, Iraq, whatever) but that the system is so skewed that we can’t get it right. Big bureaucracies have a life and a logic of their own—sooner or later they choke up on their own fluids and suffocate from a kind of institutional edema.

Okay, I do exaggerate. I don’t really believe my own assertion. Or not entirely. But I do think it is a worthy approach to inquiry—whether it is true that institutions suffocate on their own juices and if so, how to avoid it.