My First Take On Development

I wrote the following in William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth:

Can I really give a damn about the poor? Every now and then I talk a good game. But poverty is so far away and then I think about domestic poverty. It is easy to blame poverty on ignorance, almost as easy as blaming it on bad luck. A child might not have opportunity, but he or she is paying for his or her parent's mistakes. Somebody has to pay. Zero-sum is neither complicated nor new, but it is real, relevant, and true.

Three years later, with a trip to the Philippines under my belt, I feel the same way. Poverty cannot be solved in a classroom or by an American researcher. It has to be solved in the bedrooms of Africa. It has to be solved in American ghettos and trailer parks.

The problem with most poverty experts is they do not see the poor as people. They do not care about the poor's ambitions. They want to treat the poor's symptoms but refuse to understand the disease.

Obviously I have no clue about development. But unlike most development economists I am not afraid to admit it.