"The Elusive Quest for Growth" by William Easterly
Subtitle: An Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002:
The Roman philosopher Seneca defined luck as the moment when preparation meets opportunity, and in this excellent book Easterly analyses some big-bang moments of development luck, and even extends the concept to include the possibility of unpreparedness meeting opportunity—for instance when not being held down by merely recent technology allows for a better use of the very latest.
The book makes a great case for PPPs Private Public Partnerships or, as one famous president of Venezuela would have put it, “It is not the private sector or the public sector but just the opposite.”
The book explains very well the need for developing the right incentives for development, although in doing so it might not emphasize sufficiently those other variables that help the sustainability of development, such as a reasonably equitable income distribution.
Also, a book that discusses the benefits which development receives from “knowledge leakage” but also promotes strong intellectual-property rights as incentives must, obviously, enter into some contradictions. But, then again, with no contradictions, what would be the role of luck?
The book is crystal clear about the destructive role of bad governments. When Easterly calls for banning the concept of a financial gap, I feel much at home with my arguments against debt-sustainability analysis.
When the author writes, “Thinking about luck is good for the soul. It reminds us self-important analysts that we might just be totally witless about what’s going on,” I know that William Easterly is one of those rare Ph.D.s whom I could gladly consider inviting to my “Guaranteed Ph.D.-Free University.”
PS. A quite interesting spin on the issue of whether “To write or not to write … by hand” is made by William Easterly in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth. In it, when he argues, “the productivity gains of the computer are slow to be realized . . . because there are still too many traditional people out there with ink and paper,” he is actually making the point that perhaps we should prohibit handwriting as such, so that the world can move forward.
[Jim, my editor: “Plato suggested—I suspect jokingly—that the invention of writing was a bad thing that ruined human powers of memory.”]
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