Culture shock: what is ‘development’ again?

Balloon Kenya encourages “entrepreneurial thinkers to imagine the solutions that will not only create new avenues for growth and prosperity, but also recast the course of human development”. After previous posts gushing about the freshness and coherence of the Balloon approach, the ‘d’-word appears and it all gets messy.
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Balloon Kenya foregrounds the entrepreneur as a primary agent of social, economic and technological change, transforming the society around her. Here in Kericho, aid is dead, replaced by youthful exuberance and Business Model Canvasses. The talk is of empowerment, of young people undergoing transformative processes that give them the confidence to unleash the creative, innovative potential inside, and improve their own lives through doing so. Four weeks into the process, the stories of personal-level development are emerging, both from international participants, and from Kenyan entrepreneurs; hearing Everlyne remark “I have never thought about that” when working with us to come up with a tutoring business to operate alongside her small tea shop was quite momentous, even for a cynic. And the implicit point is that the benefits for the individual spill over to the surrounding environment (“...recast the course of human development...”).

This makes me jumpy. When we’re talking about the concrete case of the individual, the benefits are palpable, even if their sustainability is uncertain. Of course Balloon Kenya isn’t claiming to have all the answers; its approach to bringing about social good is inevitably partial. But the seductive slide, more or less present, into thinking that we have found a new model for societies to develop on a broad, macro scale is troubling.

Because “development, when you get down to it, is a political process”. As Guillermo Toro points out, whether you adopt the right-wing version of this (think Easterly) or the left-wing (i.e. From Poverty to Power) is less important than accepting the basic concept. Which means that encouraging enterprise carries ambiguous benefits, because the private sector emerges and evolves within the context determined by a number of groups, businesses, citizens, states and all. We’ve seen this at a macro-level recently in the criticism of the turn to the private sector of a number of development agencies.

Part of this unease is definitely about culture: coming from an NGO-, blogosphere-background, used to academic debates about power and institutions, an unapologetically pro-enterprise attitude grates, even if I often agree with the ideas. To be jolted out of your comfort zone is no bad thing: as the great Chris Blattman puts it “If you work in international politics or development and do not have an intellectual and existential crisis every year, then something is wrong”.

Kericho: causing me headaches

But, coming back to the micro-level, one of our entrepreneurs’ businesses is to act as a middle man between tea farmers and factories; tea farmers individually do not produce huge quantities of tea each day, meaning that factories often subcontract out the management of the plantations. So the middle man acquires a contract from a given tea factory to supply a certain weight of tea per month, earning significant profits working relatively few hours, once he has the all-important license. The process smells a lot like rent-seeking, and the benefits to society seem debatable. You don’t see many rich tea labourers around despite them putting in the hours, rain or shine. And this isn’t the only example: the difference between moneylender and loan shark is a thin one. These are, at least partly, questions of political economy, where the focus on entrepreneurship and innovation has to be complemented by a look at the social, political and economic context.

I guess I am asking too much. During the programme, the word politics is not even mentioned but that’s because we are not here to ‘do development’ (not that that exists), we are here to help individuals. The broader effects of that on society could be positive or negative. We shall see.

Left wing? Right wing? It’s complex.

In ‘The Origin of Wealth’ (see initial review here), Beinhocker has a long section where he applies his ideas about complexity and evolutionary economics to more practical contexts. He’s a McKinsey man, so one is obviously business strategy and organisation. Another is politics, where his ambitions are humble: “the Complexity approach to economics has the potential to make the historical framing of politics obsolete”. And we aren’t just talking “mushy” (his word) Third Way, New Labour pragmatic populism here.

"Nail them, even at personal cost to yourself" credit: SenorGif

He characterises the dominant Left-Right distinction as based on two disagreements: 1) how to view human nature (Left: humans are essentially altruistic and bad things are society’s fault vs. Right: humans are essentially selfish and pursuing self-interest is an inalienable right). And 2) the role of states vs. markets. According to complexity economics in both cases they are both wrong. On human nature, it turns out we are “conditional co-operators and altruistic punishers,” that is to say we operate according to a (hilariously) modified Golden Rule of: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you... but if others don’t do unto you, then nail them, even at personal cost to yourself”. Which has an intuitive resonance given my childhood Monopoly-playing experiences. Anyway, that nugget should be the foundation of policymaking (and Beinhocker shows how in welfare debates, for example), not outmoded conceptions based on Left/Right distinctions.

More interesting are his ideas about states and markets. I’m summarising horribly but basically, strong government intervention in the economy as advocated by the Left is misguided because, 1) faced with the vast complexity of the economy, human rationality is hopelessly inadequate - as Orgel’s Second Rule states “evolution is cleverer than you are,” so don’t try to be a market. And 2) if the arbiter of economic fitness is some politician or party at the centre (in Beinhocker's terms, 'Big Man') then the economy is likely to start to orientate itself towards promoting the interest of that politician or party. On the other hand, the Right's fantasy of unadulterated markets existing in pristine isolation is equally misguided, because the market as part of the economic evolutionary system is constructed out of a vast array of Social Technologies, comprising institutions, norms etc., many of which rely on government. The complexity solution? States help shape the ‘economic fitness function’ (= what we value and want the economy to work towards) whilst markets carry out the job of differentiating, selecting and amplifying Business plans according to this fitness function.

So what, expressing things in terms of complexity doesn't remove the niggly problems and trade-offs that are inevitable in politics, right? This is my initial feeling - taking the example above, to be honest at this point, pretty much everyone in the political mainstream agrees that states and markets both have an important role to play, so the caricatured socialist Left and free-market Right that Beinhocker slays aren't the issue. But complexity's basic insight that micro-behaviour matters for the operation of the system as a whole could be key. In fact Beinhocker suggests that it's here that we can find the answer to persistent poverty: in the norms guiding individuals’ behaviour (i.e. culture), which means that the usual prescriptions of the Left (redistribution) and the Right (laissez-faire, individual incentives) won't solve the problem. Some of the stuff he says about national cultures I am immediately wary of (anyone citing Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ gets my alarm bells ringing), but otherwise it seems plausible.

I had a little rummage around Google Scholar and apparently the above paragraph sums things up more or less: according to Paul Cairney at the University of Aberdeen (gated, apologies), some people think that Complexity Theory in politics is a passing fad, whilst others gibber unintelligibly about a ‘paradigm shift’ (*ahem*). Getting concrete remains the issue: ‘mapping the landscape’, ‘modelling the struggle’ and ‘encouraging systemic emergence’ all sound wonderful but are basically unintelligible. Add in a greater use of trial and error, learning from pilot projects, and accepting a degree of ‘error’ when designing policies instead of seeing error as ‘failure’ and we’re getting closer to 'Monday morning' realities, but still vague.

Great, but what does it mean in practice? credit: http://thewildpeak.wordpress.com/

Specifics are in short supply, so as a conclusion I’ll veer hazily back to fun, broad, sweeping ideas. If evolution is super clever at sorting through designs to get the best one, we need to bring evolutionary processes inside political decision-making somehow. Duncan Green spells out the implications: “we need to find a way of designing and strengthening institutions to make non-market forms of selection and amplification as effective as possible”. And this means nibbling away at the margins at the goals of individual agents, the norms that guide behaviour and the feedback loops in the system.

This all amounts to saying that the answers remain very much unclear. But at least we have a new question: no longer “Left versus Right” but rather “how best to evolve?”

Development double-think: how to (not) get out of bed in the morning

I'm currently in a very conceptual phase of my dissertation, with phrases like 'cognitive legitimacy,' 'socially constructed' and 'discourse' flying around. I'm trying to make them stop whirring using coffee and marks on bits of paper without success. In light of that I thought I'd continue the self-torture on this blog, by taking an assorted selection of ideas, articles and videos on a topic that occupies me a lot and attempt to construct a narrative. Let's see if pixels on a screen work better than ink on paper. Not promising coherence.

The problem is the co-existence of the following two facts:

1) Day-to-day, NGO/donor agency staff show up at the office and work hard and in good faith, to fill in the logframes/answer the emails/run the 'community consultation' session etc.

2) There is a consciousness among those who work in development that what NGOs/donors do is often extremely problematic conceptually and is fundamentally not what poor countries need.

Binyavanga Wainaina in a recent interview with the Guardian notes the guilty 'eye-rolling' of the aid worker betraying the fact she 'doesn't buy the bullshit' of aid work, just as he doesn't. Aid workers 'admit the irony, but the situation persists'. Neil McCulloch talks of the increasing popularity of the “political economy” approach to development assistance, attempting "to apply a more political approach to understanding development problems and, importantly, development “solutions”. In particular, a central tenet of the approach is that many development problems are fundamentally political rather than technical and that therefore solutions to these problems are most likely to come from inside a country’s polity than from outside." He finishes by remarking "Sadly, the political economy of donor incentives means that it [this approach] will probably remain a marginal pursuit [in development cooperation]." Banks and Hulme note in their 2012 paper on the role of NGOs in development the "increasingly professional and depoliticised nature [of NGOs] and their subsequent limitations in promoting long-term structural change."

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a massive judgement on whether aid is good or evil, not least because as I've remarked before, it's not the right question to ask. What I'm interested and perturbed by is the double-think that allows an development worker to carry out their job in good faith at the same time as knowing that it's inadequate as a solution to the task of helping countries to provide a better life for their people. This is something I feel myself in the work I do.

The paradox is easily explained in one sense: as Banks and Hulme put it, “organisational imperatives" prevail over the "development vision”. Much of the work that NGOs carry out responds to their desire to help not to 'satisfy any existing constituency' in Wainaina's words. There's no logic of the market or of politics to force NGOs to do what people actually need, so the development industry is free to define the task and the appropriate solution as they wish providing they can justify the whole thing to themselves.

And that's the key: to get over the cognitive disjuncture, you create a set of intermediary concepts like 'NGO' or 'partnership' or 'empowerment' or 'development' that you can imbue themselves with positive meaning, to save you the mental anguish of actually tracing the logic of what you are doing to its results and power implications. Because the results often ain't pretty. It's circular: I want to help those who are worse off in the world so I go do 'development', and 'development' is good because it's 'development'. The only problem now is that if you recognise all that and still work in an ineffective organisation (which is a lot of them), then that is probably unacceptably cynical.

Anyway I'm sure I've mixed up concepts, and ultimately make a fairly trivial, well-recognised point. But let's finish with a kind-of-relevant section of the Wainaina interview because he's brilliant and illustrates my existential problem perfectly (yes before you ask, development IS about me - that's the premise of the blog). 

"The utter cynicism of it is the assumption that there is no politics in Africa, so you simply bypass it; so you find a really, really good boy who's the best in his class in an English institution, and has symmetrical features, and [an impeccable] past, and so you know that when you know that when you give them a budget line that they'll stay [within it]...as you have defined. And those are what I call applications of power with a capital-P"

The Rebirth of Education (part 2): best bits

In part 1 I gave a quick run-down of Lant Pritchett's 'The Rebirth of Education'. In six words, learning not schooling, starfish not spider. Now I thought I'd highlight some important and/or interesting take-home messages. They mostly buzz around the same theme but hopefully will crystallise things a little.

On the problem:

1) You can't solve the education problem if you don't understand it.

We need to grasp that schooling systems adopted in developing countries were not designed to enable children to meet learning goals, so more of the same (more inputs alone) doesn't cut it. As with an addiction to Twitter, so with education policy, the first step is admitting you have a problem. "You cannot search [for solutions] if you are convinced you have already found what you need" says Lant. This also means that arguments on the public-private axis (as fun as they are) are also tangential to the debate in the developing country context.

2) 'More inputs help a bit so we might as well carry on doing that for now' = not advisable 

 “Taking a placebo can be dangerous if it prevents you from seeking out the right diagnosis”. Probably enough said there.


3) Western education experts need to eat some humble pie

Usefully-named 70s band Humble Pie

"No living Western education expert has led, participated in, or lived through a truly major national improvement in measured student achievement". All currently high scoring educational systems in OECD countries already had high-scoring systems 40 years ago, so we 'over here' don't seem to know how to transform an education system either. More generally the problems for education in developing countries are (unsurprisingly) different to those in developed countries, so even with a system proven to be successful in the Netherlands, for example, we may not be any closer to our goal.





4) This isn't technical, it's incentives, it's political

The problem is in the dynamic of the system and the incentives it produces, not just a lack of a certain missing X. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague when working in a school in Uganda last summer, when it dawned on us that everyone was 'playing their role' more or less effectively (teachers mostly present, pupils sat behind desks, adequate classrooms, timetable, register etc) but a lot of the time, nothing was actually happening. There was no learning. Pritchett's cover shows a child walking through a doorway of a façade of a school with nothing behind and this captures the point perfectly. Translating this into practical advice for someone who works for a charity trying to improve schools in developing countries (like me), when you think you've found the perfect initiative for the school, you need to ask yourself two questions: why isn’t this being done already? And why will it be done that way in the future? Incentives. And panning back out to the level of the whole system, this means politics: switching to a starfish system means ceding power and giving up central control to some measure, and there lies the difficulty.

Towards a solution...

5) There is no blueprint and there is no silver bullet

If what we are trying to do is learn the principles of design rather than how to design a particular house (Lant's metaphor), and we take into account architecture degrees are like six years (me stretching Lant's metaphor), it's clear there is no quick blueprint for success. Even within his six key characteristics for a successful system, you need these all functioning together. If you look at point 2, 'locally-operated' and think that the panacea for poor education systems is decentralisation, then you are likely to end up with a decentralised poor education system. You need all of these characteristics together, with the details right. Then adding in the inevitable caveat that political, social and educational context will determine the precise formula, and the surreal, incomprehensible bit of Zen teaching Pritchett adds in "If you should meet Buddha on the road, kill him"(?!), it's clear that there is no one formula for success.

*searching for something positive...*

6) There's loads of innovation at the micro-level, so change is possible

Particularly for those working on individual schools rather than an entire education system, take inspiration from the fact that there are plenty of actors doing great, innovative work in difficult contexts. We know that some interventions (remedial classes, curriculum reform, and others) are really effective at improving learning. The problem is more that the spider system often prevents these innovations from scaling-up.

And the irritating, super-keen development student's choice...

7) Systems-thinking is the way forward

Complex adaptive systems did this

Trying to take heed of the development ideas hype cycle and not explode with wonk-y excitement, but systems-thinking, and particularly complex adaptive systems theory, is the future. Lant has a great passage on why we're crap at thinking in terms of systems rather than agents (which is also an example of his excellent prose style) but all the cool kids in policy are talking about systems-thinking and I'll soon be blogging about it (once I've read this and this and this and this and this). Getting back to the concrete example of education, thinking in terms of systems explains why absent teachers and obstructive teachers' unions don't mean that teachers are the baddies and all we need to do is make teachers be less rubbish. If the system is set up to treat teachers like workers not professionals, and fails to provide the right incentives, then the outcomes will be inevitably be disappointing.

In conclusion, read the book because it's great and will change the way you think.

I'm not sure, and that's okay.

More of a reflective, slightly nebulous piece - apologies in advance. So I had the pleasure of listening to Mark O’Connell speak on ambivalence on a Four Thought podcast (the perfect accompaniment to a tipsy walk home in the early hours), and his strikes me as a valuable message for all, even in policy debates about development (yeah I can shoehorn anything into ‘being relevant to development’).

So in a nutshell, ambivalence is simultaneously holding two incompatible beliefs, the uncertainty of having mixed feelings about an issue. Ours is not the age of ambivalence, O’Connell points out: we inhabit a world of 'omniscient' politicians, of Ted Talks with a single take-home message, and of eight clear MDGs.

Academically I’ve had some experience of this. I’m currently doing some research into managerialism in NGOs. This is the theory and practice of managers in development, an ideology which relies on assumptions of development as a linear, mechanistic process of change in a technical, scientific sense. In its most exaggerated forms, local context is abstracted away to produce a replicable ‘recipe for action’ which can fit neatly into a logical framework analysis. The managerialist logic is what motivates you to write up that nice report of your development project in which you iron out all the inconsistencies and present a clear problem-solution-implementation-success narrative, recounted by a coherent, objective self. Managerialism in this context is the antithesis of ambivalence.

But while certainty’s clearly useful when attempting to make and justify decisions, it can also be extremely problematic for thinking about development. Suppressing ambivalence and constructing a single narrative (of a project for instance) can reduce reality to a single set of ‘truths,’ preventing political engagement and contestation, and favouring the opinions of some as more legitimate than others. But not only is this approach dangerous in its implications, it is misguided in itself, as it fundamentally misrepresents human experience, of which ambivalence is a inherent feature, as O’Connell points out. In fact one thing I am certain of is that people are hopeless psychological bundles of mutually contradictory and illogical thoughts and opinions. This misrepresentation in turn means that the given development project is unlikely to produce successful outcomes, addressing as it does only part of reality.

And in my own personal case, too, I’ve felt the conflict between ambivalence and certainty quite strongly. Up to the last couple of years, I have unintentionally but systematically avoided firm opinions on issues short of the most obvious, especially in domestic politics. My strategy, which my friends/siblings/ex-girlfriends may recognise, has been either to say ‘I don’t know’ when pushed on something, or, if I know something about it, argue fervently against whatever my interlocutor is proposing. Often I’ve literally produced a counter-argument and immediately realised that I don’t actually believe what I’m saying. Some of the time I even have the good humour to admit it. Anyway more recently I’ve decided that facetiously sitting on the fence is not all that productive politics-wise so I’ve been doing things like reading and thinking and writing a blog to try to trace some lines in the sand. But I do get the sense sometimes I’m just arming myself with facts and arguments to shield myself with dogma (even progressive, internationalist, statistics-based dogma) and hide my own ambivalence.

So fittingly I’m not going to come to a conclusion, even one simply arguing for ambivalence. Perhaps proposing ambivalence as a guide when thinking about politics is just a dressed-up defence of ignorance and lack of reflection. But certainly in the narrow context of development policymakers and particularly NGOs constantly searching for results, legitimacy and funding, to recognise the inevitable plurality of potential opinions on even the apparently most certain of facts, will allow them to be more flexible in their offering and to de-centre themselves in the development process.

As O’Connell neatly ends his talk, “Have the courage of your own ambivalence”.

The Great Escape

Read book. Took notes on book. Listened to Development Drums podcast. Read review. Went on holiday to Bologna. Got flu. Now finally ready to pass on a few thoughts about Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape.

First thing, just to highlight, is the amazing, bird’s eye view you get of progress in a) global health and b) income/economic growth over the last couple of hundred years. One general message is that, on a world scale, things have been getting better at an incredible rate over the last couple of hundred years and that a big part of the inequality we see is a result

of the some parts of the world becoming rich (which is undeniably positive as a fact in and of itself). And Deaton provides loads of lovely statistical snippets to show it. For example in the health ‘section’, for the last 160 years, for every four years of calendar time, the world’s highest life expectancy increased by a year.  Meanwhile, between 1820 and 1992, the average income of all the inhabitants of the world increased between seven and eight times and the fraction of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24% (at the same time as the world population increased by billions). Deaton is clearly a master of the data and a giant in his field and it shows.

Then of course we get some broad ideas of the ‘why’ without there being an overarching grand theory, which is quite refreshing and probably bang on given the scope and scale of the changes we are talking about. Deaton also focuses on some other pertinent issues like the hazards of measurement and indicators, economic growth as an overwhelmingly positive force (or not) and the (topical) issue of income inequality within the USA and worldwide (I have a word doc to which I add links to contributions on the inequality debate: currently on about 15 articles/reports in the last month).

But the most polemical, and (for me) interesting stuff is found in the final section on aid and why it’s bad, which got me writing angry comments in the margins. To cut straight to the chase, the central argument is that “foreign aid makes governments less responsive to the needs of the poor, and thus does them harm”. Essentially if we accept that poverty (broadly defined) is a consequence of poor institutions, and that aid to governments undermines institutions and democracy, weakening the social contract, aid is bad. Which isn’t revolutionary stuff, very broad-brush, reminding me a bit of Easterly with the idea that aid mucks with incentives, combined with sort-of Duncan Green/Oxfam change coming from combination of active citizens and progressive states working together. Deaton therefore also criticises what he characterises as the ‘hydraulic approach’ to aid whereby monetary inputs are automatically assumed to lead to positive outputs, with development conceived as a technical issue – definitely agree here, as does pretty much everyone up to date with current development thinking. And regarding the main argument about aid and institutions, the theory sounds eminently plausible...

However. The first problem is, as Owen Barder points out, this is an empirical not a theoretical question, and there isn’t hard evidence supporting Deaton’s view that all to-government aid ends up wrecking the given country’s political institutions and gets siphoned off by corrupt governments rather than being used to help the country’s people. Anecdotally, Barder mentions Ethiopia’s human development progress (see Development Drums podcast for this and further references) and Rwanda struck me as an example after listening to a Guardian podcast listing the positively stunning gains made in health there. This reported that in the last ten years alone: deaths from AIDS and TB were down 78%. Maternal mortality down 60%. Under five mortality down 70%. Paul Farmer called these developments ‘the steepest declines in mortality ever recorded, at any time, and in any place’. In this light, and even despite serious concerns about political freedoms in Rwanda, Deaton’s caricatured claims about corrupt African governments just don’t square with reality. It might be possible, in fact, for aid to strengthen democracy and the social contract when its use is made accountable to the people through traditional institutions. Rwanda’s imihigo system, whereby if the local ‘mayor’ fails to deliver on developmental promises he is made a social pariah, is one example. Chris Blattman in his review makes this point even more strongly:

 “And, frankly, I personally find it hard to believe that levels of democracy in Africa would be as high as they are without aid. I think the most important forces driving democracy are probably internal to Africa, and the example and economic success of advanced democracies comes second. But aid and foreign meddling comes a close third”

On the general point, Owen Barder, with characteristic succinctness, crystallises the underlying criticism when he accuses Deaton from arguing from extremes. And I’d agree that the sentence “the director of one aid agency gave me a bloodcurdling account of how aid funds had gone to gangs of murderers” isn’t the most nuanced or helpful reflection on aid I have read recently.  Basically there is definitely something lazy if not worse about taking a homogenised image of the African other (based on Mobutu or Mugabe for example) as a key premise of an argument about aid.

And second, even conceding Deaton’s argument about aid’s effects on political institutions, to claim, in the absence of hard evidence, that this overrides the (widely accepted) results from worldwide health initiatives (just one example) is a little strong for me. When first reading the chapter I’d scribbled down a note to Owen Barder’s ‘pocket defence’ of aid based on the smallpox case as potential rebuttal, and I’ve got to admit I did a fist-pump when he unleashed it in the podcast. And after Deaton took this road, it was a bit of a slippery slope, where he seemed to edge towards the view that political rights and freedoms trumped everything. The USA should consider stopping trade with Saudi Arabia (Deaton agrees to), okay, but then should the rest of the world stop trading with the USA because of Guantanamo? Deaton’s refrain that dealing with countries like Ethiopia under repressive dictatorships was “like having blood on our hands” seemed unconvincing.  Surely not supplying healthcare when people will die without it is also ‘having blood on our hands’? The world isn't that black and white.

And this is where my angry notes in the margin come in. Because it seemed to me that Deaton was, in general, pretty sloppy in the final chapter. My quibbles include: his use of hyperbole (see ‘gangs of murderers’ example above); his reliance on anecdotes, for example about 'WaBenzi'/corruption in Kenya; his random pot-shots about loosely connected issues ranging from RCTs (which he doesn’t like) to aid apparently being used as a way for rich country governments to boost their popularity (erm not sure I buy this given recent findings from ODI “the public may be becoming less supportive of maintaining, let alone increasing, current levels of UK spending on aid”). But worst of all (what Owen Barder with wonderful tact referred to as the chapter being “less well-evidenced”) his disingenuousness with statistics – his bread-and-butter! So he pulls up graphs showing that there is no positive correlation between aid and growth, or between aid and democracy, and then leaves these facts 'floating' in his argument, flirting perilously with the causation-correlation fallacy that jumped out even at me as a non-economist/statistician.  For a social scientist renowned in his field, to toy with these arguments seemed pretty petty.

Basically ‘Deaton-on-aid’ got a bit rant-y (though I do appreciate the sentiment of frustration with the aid sector, as Owen Barder put it, “a cry of exasperation”) and obscured the more important take-home ideas that most people agree on now and which did also come out partly in the final chapter:

1. Aid isn’t the solution – we can do far more through migration, climate change, trade policies, 'aid for development' in promoting global public goods like scientific knowledge etc;
2.  Aid and development is political - I think we can all agree that the technical, depoliticised, 'problem-solving' conception of aid and development can be put to bed;

But alongside these two conclusions drawn by Deaton, Chris Blattman's fundamental objection to Deaton is worth keeping in mind: that 'The answer to “Does aid work?” is the same answer to every question in social science: “It depends” ’(from his own review). So Deaton is coming up with (probably) the wrong answer to (definitely) the wrong question. The Great Escape is a triumph in terms of tracing broad global trends in health and income with rigorous statistical evidence, but the final chapter is best taken with a large dose of salt. Time to move on from Sachs-vs-Easterly methinks.