Lant Pritchett - a professor of
the practice of international development at the
Harvard Kennedy School - has been leading a
campaign against the election of Jim Yong Kim to
the World Bank presidency.
Although he
isn't the only critic of Kim's nomination, he is
among the most vocal and prominent. Many of his
criticisms have been amplified and echoed by other
leading development economists like William
Easterly at New York University and several people
associated with the Center for Global Development
in Washington, DC.
The World Bank's
executive board on Monday selected Kim to be the
Washington-based agency's next president.
Over the past few weeks, Pritchett has
questioned Kim's
qualifications, saying a
lack of training in economics and experience in
world finance should disqualify him from
consideration for the post. He has further
suggested that the nomination is about the
arrogance of US power and hegemony over the
institution and that he should step aside for a
merit-based election in which the Nigerian
candidate for the post, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a
World Bank, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology alum and finance minister of Nigeria
would sweep to victory.
A few days ago,
Pritchett wrote an article in The New Republic
(TNR), which finally comes clean about the real
reasons for the escalating campaign of opposition
to Jim Kim. The piece for TNR is called "Why
Obama's World Bank Pick Is Proving So
Controversial." The title again is an overreach:
it should really read "Why Obama's World Bank Pick
Is Proving So Controversial to Me and My Friends."
Kim has extensive support around the world
for his candidacy, but Pritchett's objections to
him all really boil down to an understanding of
"development."
Two kinds of
development Pritchett in the TNR posits two
kinds of development: national development and
humane development. National development "would
involve the natural replication of the four-fold
historical transformation of the developed
nation-states: Economies would become more
productive and hence support broad-based
prosperity, polities would become more fully
responsive to their citizens, administration would
become more capable, and societies would become
more equal as birth-based distinctions (such as
class and caste) and divisive identities (of kith
and clan) faded in favor of modern social
relationships. Note that each of these was
something that would happen not just to
individuals but to a country."
Pritchett
goes on to define humane development as a kind of
philanthropy, where people step into the breach
when national development has failed, when "these
idealists and the organizations they run have
helped to mitigate famines, pandemics, poverty,
violence, and lawlessness in some of the poorest
areas in the world."
Kim is a humane
development type in Pritchett's eyes, not fit to
run the World Bank, which should focus on national
development alone, an approach that Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, a card-carrying economist would
bring to Washington, DC.
A leader in the
field of modern national development, Pritchett is
deeply myopic. First, although economic growth has
lifted many people out of poverty over the past
century, inequity is pervasive, leading to the
creation of a new transnational economic elite or
rich people without borders. Class-based
distinctions are rapidly replacing the birth-based
distinctions and divisive identities that
Pritchett rightly decries. A focus on growth in
the aggregate often overlooks the little people.
Second, political responsiveness and
accountability as well as better governance and
administration have been integral to work on
health and other issues that are not directly
about economic growth. Achieving the aims of
national development can come through work on
things other than economics and democratization in
the abstract.
The fight against AIDS has
been transformative in this regard. As the South
African journalist Jonny Steinberg has said in his
book Three Letter Plague: "The idea of
demanding that a drug be put on a shelf, or that a
doctor arrive at his appointed time, is without
precedent. The social movement to which AIDS
medicine has given birth is utterly novel in this
part of the world, the relationship between its
members and state institutions previously unheard
of."
Pritchett has vociferously complained
about the provision of anti-retroviral therapy in
the developing world as a prime example of
palliative humane development and misguided
philanthropy. But in fact, this approach to AIDS
treatment and prevention has all been about key
aspects of national development, about "polity,
administration, and society", as Pritchett himself
terms it.
For Pritchett and his peers, Kim
is a crazed, leftist charity worker who pushed
pills on Africa - this is why they dislike him so.
They refuse, again and again, to see what Kim did,
what we all did, as critical to their own
self-professed goals around democratization. The
push for AIDS treatment was not charity or
mitigation. It has been about what governments
should do for their citizens; it has been about
redefining citizenship and state responsibility.
Redefining the state Over the
past several decades those working at the highest
levels of economic and social policy around the
world have sought to redefine state
responsibilities downward. The historian Tony Judt
described this well in his book Ill Fares the
Land the post-World War Two social contract
enshrined a system of social protections around
the world, in Europe, Canada, and Australia and
even in the United States, which offered a safety
net for the poor and the sick as a core
responsibility of the state.
This social
contract has increasingly been under attack. From
Clinton's "welfare reform" in the 1990s to the
current, slow dismantling of the national health
service in the UK by David Cameron and Nick Clegg,
states are getting out of the business of helping
the poor and the sick.
These political
choices derive from larger intellectual frameworks
constructed largely by economists who do not
consider things like healthcare to be a "public
good" and believe that states should only invest
in broad-based benefits, key among them economic
growth and defense.
Lant Pritchett and a
generation of development economists like him, all
heirs to the economist Thomas Malthus, promote
growth and democratization, even if it creates a
new caste system based on inequities in wealth
within countries or a new-class of have-nots, as
in have-not healthcare or have-not education.
''AIDS is a catastrophe,'' Pritchett told
The New York Times several years ago. ''And it's
not fair, if treatments exist, not to give them to
all these people who are dying. But it's also not
fair that more than a third of children in Africa
are malnourished. It's not fair that maybe 140
babies in every 1,000 will die before the age of
1, and more than a third will never learn to read.
All of it is unfair. Unfairness is not the test
for action.''
For Pritchett, the test for
action is about economic growth. AIDS drugs or
better schools will come along like manna from
heaven only as a result of growth and
democratization.
Kim's work in AIDS,
tuberculosis, and the like has been about
transforming the world for the better. It has not
been out of some charitable impulse but derives
instead from a vision about what the world should
look like, about what governments should and
should not do for their people, about the delivery
of public services, and about our role as active
citizens.
Challenging economics
Economists have gotten a bad rap lately. So
many have been so spectacularly wrong about the
origins of the current worldwide economic crisis
and its aftermath. Some of this in the end is
about the status of economics as a science, about
protecting a discipline that is deeply political
but strives to cloak itself with objectivity.
Kim, trained in the biomedical sciences to
rely on hard endpoints, is a threat in a more
fundamental sense. He doesn't take the laws of
economics as equivalent to the law of gravity or
the germ theory of disease.
To be fair,
some economists are raising serious questions
about the rigor of their assumptions, an
over-reliance on models, and the need for a far
better quality of evidence, far beyond the
sub-specialty of global development. Kim would
bring such fresh voices and thinking to the World
Bank. Trained as an anthropologist as well, Kim
knows there a variety of tools with which to see
the world as long as you know their limitations.
Pritchett and his colleagues don't have this
humility.
In the end, Kim represents a
national development perspective, but a critical
one. For Pritchett, national development is about
economy, polity, administration, and society.
Kim's work has certainly centered around the last
three of these, and he will bring a critical eye
to the first.
I am sure Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala is brilliant. I am not quite sure
that she represents much more than a reinforcing
of traditional ideas about development or offers a
sufficient critique of the system. She is the
establishment's choice, even if she hails from
Africa.
As others have said, including
economists like John Bates Clark medal winner
Daron Acemoglu from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, the opposition to Kim all seems like a
strange defense of business as usual from people
who have been critics of the World Bank in the
past.
Gregg Gonsalves is a
leading HIV/AIDS activist, an Open Society Fellow,
and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.
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