Monday, May 22, 2017

The "Developing World," Too

This is the best line to explain policy advice given from on high both to cities and to "developing countries."

So they can’t give an exact recipe for how to grow, because that wouldn’t work. Instead, they propose ten nebulous items. A city that succeeds will get praised for how it implemented six of them; a city that fails will get criticized for how it only implemented six and did so in the wrong way.

I remember quite clearly (though not clearly enough for an exact quote) that one rather prominent economic adviser to Russia was asked, when Russia had their economic meltdown, how it all went wrong, and his answer really was something like "we told them to do 5 things and they only did 4 of them!"