Excerpts from Lant Pritchett interview with Shruti Rajagopalan-1

Excerpts from the Lant Pritchett interview-1, posted below:

“ Anyway, my super strong view is that growth is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving high levels of human well-being.

I think all of the evidence is completely consistent with that. No, you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity at below-average levels of GDP per capita. Because in the end, the average is what would happen if everybody had exactly the same. Well, if your average is, as most countries are, well below the 10th percentile of a rich country, well, you’re not going to redistribute your way. Now, that said, my second strong view is we have been perhaps too dogmatic, not about the in-state, but about the transition path for my take . . .”

“ RAJAGOPALAN: It’s a little bit like the “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy kind of development story. All happy families are alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a little bit of that going on here, which is, all rich countries—

PRITCHETT: You know that I have that as an epigram for my first growth episodes paper.”

“ Because by about the late 1990s, early 2000s, nearly everybody who had been in development as a field since the 1980s, and had really worked in countries and in the trenches, were convinced that a, if not the, major problem with the effectiveness of development as an endeavor and development assistance as an endeavor, was that it was inadequately political—inadequately embedded in a realistic, positive, political economy of how positive change actually happened, and therefore, inadequately embedded in history, society, politics.

The way the field was headed was that even to do a successful World Bank project and even if the World Bank was forbidden from doing politics, you had to be embedded in a more realistic politics. That you couldn’t fix the problems that were made to be fixed in a purely technocratic intervention mode that “Seeing Like a State” wanted you to, and that we had to grapple with that.“

“ I have to say, people in the field were stunned by this level of naivete. How could you imagine that the problem with our failure to achieve takeoff and growth or to achieve adequate development outcomes was merely the result of this one tiny little technocratic fix? It was just stunning. It was just so ludicrous on the face of it that I think one of my main regrets is not having devoted more time to pointing out how ludicrous on the face of it their fundamental claims were.”[rct]

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