Easterly re-affirms all that in his ‘attack’, so maybe we’re all on the same side of the boat. Sachs in response seems to think Easterly was attacking something he rather re-affirmed, and so goes serious and highminded debate.

“his Big Plan is strikingly similar to the early ideas that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s and ‘60s”

It seems to me, and maybe I pay too much credence to Baker & Weisbrot etc., that third world economic growth under the Big Plan of the 50s and 60s was a hell of a lot better than what came after, and maybe there was some causation to be emulated in the correlation.

Easterly: “without the Big Plan—and without significant foreign aid as a proportion of the recipient country’s income. Gradual free market reforms in China and India in the 1980s and ‘90s (which Sachs implausibly argues were shock therapy in disguise) have brought rapid growth.”

Does this strike anybody else as disingenuous? And does Sachs actually argue that? Elsewhere – interviews with PBS I think – I’ve seen him just claim that the gradualist approaches of China/India weren’t possible in the countries he applied the electrodes to. “Gradual” is not “shock” in disguise.

And anyway the East Asian economies didn’t need a Big Plan because they had Big Plans of their own. If other poor countries could afford and were afforded the chance to persue their own industrial policies free of outside interventionism in their markets they would at least stand a chance.

And maybe Sachs puts it in the book but I haven’t heard him talk about it, but I feel that technology transfer should be an intrinsic part of this discussion and is getting short shift – particularly as concerns development’s impact on greenhouse emissions developed countries stand to benefit. Unless, that is, some ‘anti-globalist’ raises criticisms the draconian intellectual property aspects of the trade agreements that are still being aggressively pushed by the WB/IMF, even though we’ve supposedly moved beyond the “structural adjustment era”, which is the thing Sachs keeps saying that I haven’t quite been able to take seriously – Wolfeson’s reforms seem to be more cosmetic PR in response to public pressure, and Wolfowitz is being handed the helm.

Personalities aside, I understand the concern that money will be wasted again, but when 20,000 people die every day, if you’re going to try Easterly’s small-scale approach, you’d better be prepared to do an enormous number of small-scale approaches at a time and find out which ones work as quickly as possible, or continue to watch 8 million people die each year. Easterly seems a bit too philosophical about it all—being the man of wisdom that he is, he knows that the US and Europe didn’t reach their level of prosperity overnight. So what’s the hurry?

And yeah, people who criticize aid as wasteful should go right ahead and do it, but keep in mind that the people who will cite them have no problems wasting vastly larger sums on weapons systems where there isn’t the slightest bit of trickledown for the poor.

Well, I have to say say I’m somewhat skeptical of the article you linked to—partly on the grounds that it’s nearly 10 years old and, somehow, microcredit has failed to be widely discredited in the interval. And the bias of the writer against markets and ‘entreprenurial’ approaches is quite obvious (a bias that I think has declined to a substantial degree in the decade since that piece was written—seen, for example, in developing nations now forcefully demanding the dismantling of trade barriers that keep them poor).

But Grameen Bank style ‘entreprenurial’ microcredit isn’t the only approach—take a look at Bornstein’s chapter about Fabio Rosa in Brazil, for example. There, the credit is not for village based entreprenurial activity but for rather pedestrian (but important) improvements that poor farmers would not be able to afford without access to credit (lowcost electrification and irrigation, electric fencing needed to support modern cattle management practices).

Quite different than what the Grameen Bank is doing in Bangladesh, but still efficient, self-supporting, locally-directed efforts (and very much unlike the expensive, high-modernist, massive scale development projects of the kind that Easterly criticizes).

Which kind of stands Henry’s suspicion on its head: if Easterly has in fact failed to offer a viable alternative to Sachs’ proposal, that may or may not not make his criticism of Sachs suspect, but it does weaken it.

(Disclaimer: I read Sachs’ original FA article, about which I am hesitantly supportive, but the ensuing debate has gotten ahead of me.)

(this RealPlayer streaming video is about an hour and fifteen minutes long. )