By Gregg Gonsalves
Lant Pritchett--a
Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Harvard Kennedy
School--has been leading a campaign against the election of Jim Kim to the
World Bank presidency. While he
isn't the only critic of Dr. Kim's nomination, he is among the most vocal and
well-known. Though his views are his own, they have been
amplified by other leading development economists, such as William Easterly at
New York University and people associated with the Center for Global
Development in Washington, DC.
Over the past few
weeks, Pritchett has publicly questioned Kim's qualifications, saying a lack of
training in economics and experience in world finance should disqualify
him from the post. He has further suggested that Kim's nomination shows the
arrogance and hegemony of American power over the institution. He has called for Kim to step aside for a
merit-based election, in which the Nigerian candidate for the post, Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala (a World Bank, Harvard and MIT alum, also finance minister
of Nigeria) would presumably sweep to victory.
A few days ago, Pritchett
wrote an article in the New Republic (TNR)
which comes clean about the real reasons for the escalating, grasping campaign
of opposition to Jim Kim. The piece is called "Why
Obama's World Bank Pick Is Proving So Controversial." The title is an overreach: It should really read "Why Obama's World
Bank Pick Is Proving So Controversial to Me and My Friends."
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Jim Kim has extensive
support around the world for his candidacy, but it is vital for us to
understand Pritchett's objections because they boil down to what we think
"development" is.
Pritchett's article
in the TNR posits two kinds of development: national development and
humane development. National development
would involve the natural replication
of the four-fold historical transformation of the developed nation-states: Economies
would become more productive and hence support broad-based prosperity,
polities would become more fully responsive to their citizens,
administration would become more capable, and societies would become more
equal as birth-based distinctions (such as class and caste) and divisive
identities (of kith and clan) faded in favor of modern social
relationships. Note that each of these was something that would happen not
just to individuals but to a country.
Pritchett goes on to
define humane development as a kind of philanthropy, where people step
into the breach when national development fails, where "these idealists
and the organizations they run...[help] to mitigate famines, pandemics,
poverty, violence, and lawlessness in some of the poorest areas in the
world." Jim Kim is a humane development type in Pritchett's eyes, and
thus not fit to run the Bank, which should focus on national development
alone. However, Dr. Pritchett is deeply
myopic.
First, while many
people have been lifted out of poverty over the past century due to
economic growth, inequity remains pervasive.
We are well on our way to creating a new transnational economic elite--or
what I like to call "rich people without borders." The
birth-based distinctions and divisive identities that Dr. Pritchett
rightly decries are being replaced by class-based ones. (However, when you worry mostly about growth
in the aggregate, the little people don't matter.)
Second, our global experience
in the fight against HIV/AIDS is in fact, that political responsiveness and
accountability, better governance and administration can and do grow out
of the progress we make in mobilizing people to demand their right to health. The global AIDS movement has been
transformative in this regard. As
the South African journalist Jonny Steinberg has said in his book Three Letter Plague: "The idea of
demanding that a drug be put on a shelf, or that a doctor arrive at his
appointed time, is without precedent. The social movement to which AIDS
medicine has given birth is utterly novel in this part of the world, the
relationship between its members and state institutions previously unheard
of."
Pritchett has
previously and vociferously complained that the provision of ART in the
developing world is a prime example of palliative humane development and misguided
philanthropy. But for those of
us who have watched more closely, the movement for treatment access has in
fact all been about Pritchett's "polity, administration, and society."
For Pritchett and his
peers, Jim Kim is a crazed, lefty, charity worker who pushed pills on
Africa. They refuse to see what Kim did, what we all did,
as critical to their own professed goal of democratization. The push
for AIDS treatment was not charity or mitigation, but all about what governments
should do for their citizens; it was about redefining citizenship and state
responsibility.
Why are they unable
to see this? Well, I think there is something else going on.
Over the past several
decades there has been a push from those working at the highest levels of
economic and social policy around the world to redefine state responsibilities
downwards. The historian Tony Judt described this well in his book Ill Fares the Land. We're
seeing a renegotiation of the post-World War Two social contract, which
enshrined a system of social protections around the world. After World War Two, Europe, Canada, Australia
and even the US offered a safety net for the poor and the sick, and saw
this safety net as a core state responsibility.
In 1935, John Maynard
Keynes said: "the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when
they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly
understood. Indeed the world is ruled by
little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
Beginning with
Clinton's "welfare reform" in the 1990s, and continuing on with
the current, slow dismantling of the UK's health system by David Cameron and
Nick Clegg, states began getting out of the business of helping the poor
and sick. These political choices derive
from larger intellectual frameworks, constructed largely by economists, that
argue that healthcare is not a "public good" but that it is like a
loaf of bread, one consumes it privately).
These frameworks propose that states only invest in things that provide
broad-based benefits, such as economic growth and defense. In this
brave new world, the models for national development are the austerity-crazed
states in Europe, or a Republican vision of the US in which we slash social
protection programs and cut public spending to appease the gods of
growth.
For Lant Pritchett
and a generation of development economists, all heirs to Thomas Malthus,
you can't have it all (or anything nearly like it all). We have to promote growth and
democratization, even if doing so creates a new caste system based on
inequities in wealth. ''AIDS
is a catastrophe,'' Dr. Pritchett told the New York Times several years ago. ''And it's not fair, if
treatments exist, not to give them to all these people who are dying. But
it's also not fair that more than a third of children in Africa are
malnourished. ... Unfairness is not the test for action.''
For Dr. Pritchett,
the test for action is economic growth. We wait for AIDS drugs, we
wait for better schools. It will all come along if we just wait for growth
and democratization--as the economics textbooks tell us--to arrive like manna
from heaven.
Recently, economists
have been spectacularly wrong about so many things when it comes to the current
worldwide economic crisis and its aftermath. Some of the attacks against
Jim Kim in the end are also about the defense of Economics as a science,
about protecting a discipline that strives to cloak itself in
objectivity even though it is in fact deeply political. Someone like Jim Kim,
trained in the biomedical sciences, trained to rely on hard endpoints, is
a fundamental threat exactly because he doesn't take the laws of economics
as equivalent to the laws of gravity or molecular biology.
To be fair, there are
economists who do recognize that their field is contingent and inexact, and who
are raising serious questions about the rigor of their assumptions, about their
discipline's over-reliance on models.
They are calling for a far better quality of evidence. These debates take place far beyond the
sub-specialty of global development.
These are the kinds of people, the kinds of fresh voices and new thinking,
that one could see coming to the Bank under Kim's leadership. Kim is also trained as an anthropologist. He knows there are a variety of lenses with
which to see the world and that each has its limitations. Dr. Pritchett and his economist colleagues
don't have this humility. They
have certainty, they believe they know what is right and what should be
done. That is what scares me most of all.
For Pritchett,
national development is about economy, polity, administration, and
society. Kim's work has certainly
centered around the last three of these and he will bring a critical eye to the
first. In the end, Jim Kim represents a national development perspective that
is capable of critical thinking.
I am sure Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala is brilliant. I am not
quite sure she represents much more than a reification of traditional ideas
about development, or that she has sufficient distance from these ideas to
offer a critique or bring change.
Our work in AIDS, like
Jim Kim's work on AIDS and TB, has been about transforming the world for
the better--not out of a charitable impulse, but because we have a vision
of what the world should look like; about what governments should and
should not do for their people; about what we can demand in terms of delivery
of public services; about our role as active citizens who will not wait
for experts or politicians to come and save us. This is a vision of
national development that includes polity, administration, and society. It is one that dares to question whether
some idealized notion of free markets and free elections are all we need to
secure a future for our children, whether the prescriptions of economists
will deliver for ordinary people in the end.
Gregg Gonsalves is an Open Society Foundations Fellow.
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By Mike Frick 
Bradley Cox's highly controversial 2010 documentary Who Killed Chea Vichea? has been honored with a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. Only 38 Peabodies were awarded worldwide this year. Other recipients include CNN, the BBC, HBO and the Colbert Report.