What must we do to end world poverty? At last, an answer

OK, that’s too good to be true. There has been a search for sixty years for the right answer. Now most economists confess ignorance how to raise the rate of economic growth -- how to progress more rapidly towards development and the end of poverty. To get out of this dead end, I would respond to this question with more questions.

First, who is “we”? It seems like whoever “we” are, “we” must have unconstrained power to implement “the answer”, so “we” sounds like authoritarian leaders (national autocrats or World Bank officials dictating conditions).

Second, are “we” going to allow poor people to choose their own paths? Of course not, because “we” already know the “right answer” for them.

So this question only makes sense in approach to development that is authoritarian and paternalistic, using Top Down Planning, which in fact has been the prevailing – but unsuccessful – approach to development for six decades.

The paradox of development economics is that Development does NOT require any one person (Expert, Leader, or Aid Official) to have a comprehensive understanding of how to achieve Development (sort of like how evolution managed to happen on its own before Darwin).

(I am drawing on a lecture I gave here at NYU.)

Why is it so hard to figure out how to raise growth? Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek once suggested a possible answer:

The growth of reason is based on existence of differences. . . . {between} individuals, possessing different knowledge and different views. [I]ts results cannot be predicted . . . . [W]e cannot know which views will assist this growth and which will not.

Growth is innovation, and you can’t know in advance how to do the innovative thing, or else it wouldn’t be an innovation. Development is BOTTOM-UP outcome of lots of unpredictable individual successes and failures.

But this is not a counsel of hopelessness; in fact, it means economists can still say lots of useful things. You want an environment that is favorable for “searchers:” the private and social entrepreneurs who figure out these innovations. You want to create as many opportunities as possible through comparative advantage, gains from trade, and gains from specialization. This means individual rights, property rights, and not too much interference with markets or free trade. Public goods like infrastructure, health, and education are necessary, but arise best in response to demand, not determined by bureaucratic supply. This means a democratically accountable government. Individual freedom and democracy also allows social entrepreneurs to flourish.

Institutions are necessary to make markets work, but institutions also evolve from the Bottom Up, with pro-market institutions arising from values like individualism, trust, and respect for others.

So the paradox of development economics is that it’s the study of how to get rich without knowing how. As Hayek put it:

It is because every individual knows so little and… because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.