Hello everyone, and you are listening to Ideas Untrapped podcast. This episode is a continuation of my two-part conversation with Lant Pritchett. It concludes the discussion on education with the five things Lant would recommend to a policymaker on education policy, how to balance the globalized demand for good governance with the design of state functionalities within a localized context - along with RCTs in development and charter cities. I also got an exclusive one of his infamous ‘‘Lant Rants’’. I hope you find this as enjoyable as I did - and once again, many thanks to Lant Pritchett.
Transcript
Tobi;
Yeah, I mean, that's a fine distinction. I love that, because you completely preempted where I was really going with that. Now, on a lighter note, there's this trope when I was in high school, so I sort of want us to put both side by side and try to learn more about them. There's this trope when I was in high school amongst my mates, that examination is not a true test of knowledge. Although it didn’t help the people who were saying it, because they usually don't test well, so it sort of sounded like a self serving argument. But examination now, or should I say the examination industry, clearly, I mean, if I want to take Nigeria as an example, is not working. But it seemed to be the gold standard, if I want to use that phrase. It's as bad as so many firms now set up graduate training programs. Even after people have completed tertiary education, they still have to train them for industry and even sometimes on basic things. So what are the shortcomings of examination, the way you have distinguished both? And then, how can a system that truly assesses learning be designed?
Lant;
Let me revert to an Indian discussion because I know more about India than Africa by far. There are prominent people, including the people around JPAL and Karthik Muralidharan, who say, look, India never really had an education system. It had a selection system. And the ethos was, look, we're just throwing kids into school with the hopes of identifying the few kids who were bright enough, capable enough, smart enough, however we say it, measured by their performance on this kind of high stakes examination who are going to then become the elite. So it was just a filter into the elite, and it really meant the whole system was never really in its heart of heart geared around a commitment to educating every kid. I've heard teachers literally say out loud when they give an exam and the kids don't master the material, they'll say, oh, those weren't the kind of kids who this material was meant for. And they leave them behind, right? There's a phrase “they teach to the front of the class.” You order the class by the kid's academic performance, and then the teachers are just teaching to the front of the class with the kind of like, nah, even by early grades. So the evils of the examination system are only if it's not combined with an education system. So essentially, an education system would be a system that was actually committed to expanding the learning and capabilities of all kids at all levels and getting everybody up to a threshold and then worried about the filter problem much later in the education process.
So if they're part of an education system like they have been in East Asia, they're not terribly, terribly damaging. But if they're part of a selection system in which people perceive that the point is that there's only a tiny little fraction that are going to pass through these examinations anyway and what we're trying to do is maximize the pass rates of that, it distorts the whole system start to finish. My friend, Rukmini Banerjee, in India started this citizen based assessment where it was just a super simple assessment. You need assessment in order to have an effective education system, because without assessment, I don't know what you know or don't know, right? And if I don't know as a teacher or as a school what my kids actually know and don't know, how is anybody imagining that you're giving them an effective education? So I think the role of early assessment and the drive to integrate teaching with real time assessment, I think is hugely, hugely important. This is why I had the preemptive strike on the question of testing [which] is that I want radically more assessment earlier, integrated with teaching. And there are still some educationists that will push back against that. But if we put in a bundle, formative classroom assessment integrated with effective pedagogy and high-stakes examinations, then everybody's going to hate them both. So we have to really unbundle those two things.
And the hallmark of an education system is that it really has targets that every kid can learn and believes every kid can learn, and builds a system around the premise and promise that every kid can learn. There's this example out there, Vietnam does it. And Vietnam did it and continues to do it at levels of income and social conditions that are very much like many African countries. So if I were a country, I'd kind of hate Vietnam as this goody goody, that, you know. You know how you always hated the kid in school who would really do well, and then the teacher would go, well, how come you're not like that kid? On education, Vietnam is that country. It's, like, out there producing OECD levels of learning with very little resources and starting at least in the 1980s, at very low levels of income. So they're proving that it's possible. They're the kid who, like, when everybody goes, oh, that exam was too hard, and like, Bob passed it, like, how hard can it be? Anyway? So I think radically different bases for assessment versus examinations. And to some extent, the only integrity that got preserved in the system wasn't the integrity of the classroom and teaching, it was the integrity of the examination as a filter.
Tobi;
I want to ask you a bit about the political economy of this a little bit. So if, say, you are talking to a policymaker who is actually serious about education, not in the superficial sense, but really about learning and says, okay, Lant, how do I go about this? How do I design an educational system that really does these things? I've written quite a number of reports here and there that rely so much on your accountability triangle. I would have sent you royalty checks, but it wasn't paid work. Sorry. So how exactly would you explain the political economy of designing a working educational system? I know people talk a lot about centralization versus decentralization, who gets empowered in that accountability triangle? Where should the levers to really push, where are they? So how exactly would you have that conversation?
Lant;
So let me start with the accountability triangle and design issues. I think people mistake what the accountability triangle and design issues are about in the following sense. If I'm going to design a toaster, and the toaster is going to turn my untoasted bread into toasted bread, and it's going to be an electric toaster, there are certain fundamental things that have to happen, right? I have to have a current. I need to get that current running through something that heats up. I need that heat to be applied to the bread. I need it to stop when I've applied enough heat. Now, those fundamental principles of toaster design can lead to thousands of different actual designs of toasters. So I want people to get out of the notion that there's a single best toaster and that the accountability triangle or any other mode of analysis is to give you the best toaster and then everybody copies the best toaster. The principles are, design your own damn toaster, right? Because there's a gazillion ways to toast bread. Now, [for] all of them to work, [they] have to be compatible with the fundamental principles of electricity and current flow. You know, so I'm trying to get to one size doesn't fit all, but any old size doesn't necessarily fit everything either.
You raise the question of decentralization, right? The thing is, if you look across countries that have roughly similar learning outcomes from PISA and other assessments, they're radically different designs. France is an entirely centralized system. Germany is a completely federalized system. The US is almost completely localized system. The Low Countries, Netherlands and Belgium have money follows the student system into the private sector. They have the highest private sector enrollment of any country in the world because they allow different pillars of education between the secular, the Catholic and the Protestant to coexist. So then if you ask is decentralization the best way to design your education system? It's like, no, no, no, you're missing the point. The point is, if you choose a centralized system, there are principles in how you design the flows of accountability that are going to produce success and those that are going to produce failure. If you choose a decentralized system, there are systems of the alignment of accountability that are going to produce success and failure. So the analytical framework doesn't determine the grand design, it determines the mechanics of the design. And I just want to get that straight up front.
Second, as a result of the eight year research project of RISE, we have a policy brochure that has, kind of, here are the five kind of principles and here's the 15 minutes if I have five minutes with a minister or leader of a country, here are the five things I want to tell. And the first of those things is, commit. A lot of times we want to skip the most fundamental stage. And what I mean by commit is you actually need to create a broad social and political consensus that you're really going to do this and that you're committed to it. This big research project, RISE, which is based out of Oxford and I've been head of for eight years, we included Vietnam as one of our focused countries because it was a success case. Hence, we wanted our research team to partly do research about Vietnam and issues that were relevant in Vietnam. But we really wanted to answer the question, how did Vietnam do this? Why did they succeed? Right? And five years into the research effort, I was with the Vietnamese team and they had produced a bunch of empirical research of the econometric type. Is Vietnam success associated with this or that measurable input? Nothing really explains Vietnam at the approximate determinant input level. And finally, one of the researchers said to me, Lant, we're trying to get around the fundamental fact that Vietnam succeeded because they wanted to. And on one level it's like, my first response was, I can't go back and tell the British taxpayers that they spend a million dollars for a research project on Vietnam, and the conclusion to why Vietnam succeeded was because they wanted to.
[Laughs]
Tobi;
That’s kind of on the nose, right?
Lant;
Yeah. On another level, it's a deep and ignored truth. The policymakers ignore it, the donors ignore it. Everybody wants to ignore it. Everybody wants to assume it's a technocratic issue, it's a design issue. I think the fundamental problem of these failing and dysfunctional education systems, it's a purpose problem. The purpose of education isn't clear, understood, widely accepted among all of the people from top to bottom responsible for achieving results. And once that leads to what I call norm erosion. Within the teachers, there's this norm erosion of what does it really mean to be a teacher? So again, the first and maybe only thing I would say if I had five minutes with a leader is, how are you going to produce a broad social, political and organizational commitment that you are really going to achieve specific, agreed-upon learning results? The technical design issues have to flow from that commitment rather than vice versa. And you could copy France’s system, you could copy the Vietnamese system. I think you've heard the term from me and others, isomorphic mimicry. You can copy other people's systems and not have the same effect if it isn't driven by per purpose. Like, if you don't have the fundamental commitment and you don't have the fundamental agreed-upon purpose, the rest of the technical design is irrelevant.
Tobi;
It sort of leads me to my next theme. And that is the capability question in development.
Lant;
Yeah.
Tobi;
First of all, I also want to make a quick distinction, because lately, well, when I say lately that's a little vague. State capacity is all the rage now in development.
Lant;
Really? Is that true?
Tobi;
Yeah,
Lant;
I'm so happy to hear that. 3s I'm glad that you think so. And I hope that that's true, because it wasn't. It really wasn't on the agenda in a serious way. So, anyway …
Tobi;
But I also think there's also a bit of misunderstanding still, and usually, again, maybe I'm just moving with the wrong crowd. Who knows? People focus a lot more on the coercive instruments of the state and how much of it can be wielded to achieve certain programmatic results for state capacity. Revenue to GDP in Nigeria is low, how can the states collect more taxes? How much can the state squeeze out of people's bank accounts, out of companies, or the reverse. That, the reason why the state collects very little taxes is because state capacity is low. But, I mean, nobody really unpacks what they mean by that. They just rely on these measures like X to GDP ratio.
Another recent example was, I think it was in 2020, when the pandemic sort of blew over and China built a hospital with 10,000 bed capacity in, I don't know, I forgot, maybe 20 days or…
Lant;
Yeah. It was amazing.
Tobi;
A lot of people were like, oh, yeah, that's an example of state capacity. It's very much the same people now [who] are turning around and seeing China as an example of failure on how to respond to a pandemic. So I guess what I would ask you is, when you talk about the capability of the state, what exactly do we mean?
Lant;
In the work that were done and the book that we wrote, we adopt a very specific definition of capability, which is an organizational measure. Because there are all these aggregate country level measures and we use them in the book. But in the end, I think it's easier to define capability at the organizational level. And at the organizational level, I define [that] the capability of an organization is the ability to consistently induce its agents to take the policy actions in response to circumstances that advance the normative objective of the organization. And that's a long, complicated definition, but it basically means can the organization, from the frontline worker to the top of the organization, can it get people to do what they need to do to accomplish the purpose?And that's what I mean by the capability of an organization. And fortunately, unfortunately, like, militaries, I think, make for a good example. It's amazing that highfunctioning militaries have soldiers who will sacrifice their lives and die if needs be, to advance the purpose of the organization. Whereas you can have a million man army that's a paper tiger. No one is actually willing to do what it takes to carry out the purpose that the organization has been put to of fighting a particular conflict. And I think starting from that level makes it clear that, A, this is about purpose, B, it's about inducing the agents to take the actions that will lead to outcomes. And the reason why I'm super happy to hear that capability is being talked about is (you're doing a very good job as an interviewer drawing out connection between these various topics) the design of the curriculum is almost completely irrelevant to what's happening in schools. And so there's been way too much focus in my mind in development discourse on technocratic design and way too little on what's actually going to happen in practice. And so my definition of capability is, you measure an organization's capability of what actually happens in practice, what are the teachers actually going to do day to day? Right? And having been in development a long time, I often sit in these rooms where people are just, you know, I go out to the field and teachers aren't there at the school. Teachers are sitting in the office drinking their tea while the kids are running around on the playground, even during scheduled instructional time. And then I go back and hear discussions in the capital about higher order 21st century skills. You know, I wrote this article about India called Is India a Flailing State?
Tobi;
Yeah.
Lant;
And what I meant by flailing is there was no connection between what was happening in the cerebrum and what was being designed at the center. And what was actually happening when the actual fingers were touching the material and the nerves and sinews and muscles that connected the design to the practice were completely deteriorated. And therefore, capability was the issue, not design. So that's what I mean by capability. I mean, you use the example of tax. I think it's a great example. It's like, can you design a tax authority that actually collects taxes? And it's a hard, difficult question. And I think by starting from capability, I was really struck by your description of capability being linked to the coercive power of the state because that's exactly not how I would start it. I would start it with what are the key purposes for which the state is being deployed and for which one can really generate a sufficient integrated consensus that we need capability for this purpose.
Tobi;
Now, one of my favourite blogs of yours was how you described… I think it was how the US escaped the tyranny of experts, something like that. So I want to talk about that a bit versus what I’ll call the cult of best practice…
Lant;
Hmm.
Tobi;
Like, these institutions that are usually transplanted all over the world and things like independent central bank and this and that. And you described how a lot of decentralized institutions that exists in the United States, they were keenly contested, you know…
Lant
Yes.
Tobi;
Before the consensus sort of formed. So I'm sort of wondering, developing countries, how are they going about this wrong vis a vis the technical advice they are getting from development agencies? And the issue with that, if I would say, is, we now live in a world where the demand for good governance is globalized. Millions of Nigerians live on the internet every day and they see how life is in the industrial rich world and they want the same things. They want the same rights. They want governments that treat them the same way. Someone like me would even argue for an independent central bank because we've also experienced what life is otherwise.
Lant;
Right.
Tobi;
So how exactly to navigate this difficult terrain because the other way isn't also working. Because you can't say you have an independent central bank on paper that is not really independent and it's not working.
Lant;
Your questions are such a brilliant articulation of the challenges that are being faced and the complex world we live in because we live now in an integrated world where people can see what's happening in other places. And that integrated world creates in and of itself positive pressures for performance, but also creates a lot of pressures for isomorphism, for deflecting the actual realities and what it will take to fix and make improvements with deflective copies of stuff that has no organic roots. I've written lots of things and even though you love all of your children, you might have favorites. One of my favorite blogs is a blog I wrote that is, I think, the most under cited blog of mine relative to what I think of it, which is about the M16 versus the AK-47.
Tobi;
Oh, yeah, I read that.
Lant;
It's an awkward analogy because no one wants to talk about guns.
Tobi;
Hmm.
Lant;
But I think it's a really great analogy because the M16 in terms of its proving ground performance is an unambiguously superior, more accurate rifle. The developing world adopts the AK-47. And that's because the Russian approach to weapon design was - design the weapon to the soldier. And the American approach is - train the soldier to the weapon. And what happens again and again across all kinds of phenomena in development is the people who are coming as part of the donour and development community to give advice to the world, all want them to adopt the M16 because it's the best gun, and they don't have the soldiers that can maintain the M16. And the M 16 has gotten better, but when it was first introduced, it was a notoriously unreliable weapon. And the one thing as a soldier, you don't want to happen is as you pull the trigger and the bullet doesn't come out at the end. That's what happens when you don't maintain an M16. So I think this isomorphism pressure confuses what best practice is with assuming there's this global best practice that can be adopted independently of the underlying capacity of the individuals and capabilities of the organizations. So I think huge problem.
Second, I think there is a super important element of the history that the modes of doing things that now exist in the Western world and which we think of as being “modern,” I'm using scare quotes which doesn't help in a podcast, but we think of as being modern and best practice had to struggle their way into existence without the benefit of isomorphism. In the sense that when the United States in the early 20th century underwent a huge and quite conflicted and contested process of the consolidation of one room, kind of, locally operated schools into more professionalized school systems, that was politically contested and socially contested. And the only way the newer schools could justify themselves was by actually being better. There was no, oh, but this is how it has to be done, because this is how it has been done in these other places, and they have succeeded. And so there was no recourse to isomorphism, right. So in some sense, I think the world would be a radically better place for doing development if we just stopped allowing best practice to have any traction at all. If Nigerians just said, Screw it, we don't want to hear about it. Like, we want to do in Nigeria, what's going to work better in Nigeria? And telling me what Norway does and does not do, just no. Just no, we don't want to hear about it. Like, that doesn't help because it creates this vector of pressures that really deteriorate the necessary local contestation. My colleague Michael Wilcock, who is a sociologist, has characterized the development process as a series of good struggles. And in our work on state capability, we say you can't juggle without the struggle. Like, you can't transplant the ability to juggle. I can give you juggling lessons, I can show you juggling videos. But if you don't pick up the balls and do it and if you don't pick up the balls and do it with the understanding that unless you juggle, you haven't juggled, you can never learn to juggle. So I think if development were radically more about enabling goods, local struggles in which new policies, procedures, practices had to struggle their way into existence, justifying themselves on performance against purpose, we would be light years ahead of where we are. And that's what the debate about capability has to be.
And I think to the extent the capability discourse gets deflected into another set of standards and more isomorphism, just this time about capability, I think we're going to lose something. Whereas if we start the state capability from discussion of what is it that we really want and need our government to get better at doing in terms of solving concrete, locally dominated problems, and then how are we going to come about creating the capability to do that in the Nigerian context, (I’m just using Nigeria, I could use Nepal, I could use any other country). That's the discussion that needs to happen. And the more the, kind of, global discourse and the global blessed practice gets frozen out completely, the sooner that happens, the better off we’ll be.
Tobi;
So I guess where I was going with that is…
Lant; 78:25
Yeah.
Tobi;
One of those also fantastic descriptions you guys used in the book is” crawling the design space” on capability. So now for me, as a Nigerian, I might say I do not necessarily want Nigeria to look like the United States. Because, It wouldn't work anyways. But at the same time, you don't want to experiment and end up like Venezuela or Zimbabwe. It may not work to design your central bank like the US Federal Reserve, but at the same time, you don't want 80% inflation like Turkey. So we're ate the midway, so to speak?
Lant;
I get this pushback when I rail on best practice. I often get the push back, well, why would we reinvent the wheel? And I've developed a PowerPoint slide that responds to that by showing the tiniest little gear that goes into a Swiss watch and a huge 20 foot large tire that goes on a piece of construction machinery. And then say they're both wheels. Nobody's talking about reinventing the wheel. There are fundamental principles of electricity that a toaster design has to be compatible with. So, again, there is a trade off. There are fundamental principles, but there's a gazillion instantiations of those principles. We don't want to start assuming that there's a single wheel, right? When people say, don't reinvent the wheel, it's like, nobody's reinventing the idea of a wheel. But every wheel that works is an adaptation of the idea of a wheel to the instantiation and purpose for which is being put. And if you said to me, oh, because we're not going to reinvent the wheel, we're going to take this tiny gear from a Swiss watch and put it on a construction machine and expect it to roll, it's like, no, that's just goofy, right? And what I've really tried to do in the course of my career is equip people with tools to think through their own circumstances.
Tobi;
Hmm.
Lant;
Coming back, the accountability triangle or the crawling the design space. What I'm not trying to do is tell somebody, here is what you should do in your circumstance, because my experience is what's actually doable and is going to lead to long-run progress is an unbelievably complicated and granular thing that involves the realities of the context. But what I do want to do is help people understand there are certain common principles here and some things are going to lead to, like, Venezuela like circumstances, and we've seen it happen again and again, but there are a variety of pathways that don't lead to that. And you need to choose a pathway that works for you. And the PDAA isn't a set of recommendations, it's a set of tools to help people think through their own circumstances, their own organization, their own nominated problems and make progress on them. The accountability triangle isn't a recommendation for the design of your system. It's a set of tools that equip people to have conversations about their own system. And I have to say, at one time was in some place in Indonesia and it was a discussion of PDAA being mediated by some organization that had adopted it and was teaching people how to do it in Indonesia. And I had the wonderful experience of having this Indonesian woman who was a district official working on health, describe in some detail how they were using PDAA to address the problem of maternal mortality with no idea who I was. And I was like, oh, just for me to hear her say, here is how I use the tool to address a problem I've never thought about in a context, in an organization I've never worked with. So I think equipping people with tools to enable them in their own local struggles is my real objective rather than the imagination that I somehow can come up with recommendations that are going to work in a specific context.
So the don't reinvent the wheel is just complete total nonsense. It's like every wheel is adapted to its purpose and we're just giving you tools to adapt the idea of the wheel to your purpose. Adapting a square to the purpose just isn't going to work. So I agree. We want to start from the idea of things that work. And there are principles of wheel design that you can't violate. You can't come in and say, I have a participatory design of a water system that depends on water running uphill. No. Water runs downhill. That's a fundamental principle of water. But I think the principles are much broader and the potentiality for locally designed and organic, organically produced instantiations of common principles are much broader than the current discourse gives the possibility for.
Tobi; 83:47
I can't let you go without getting your thoughts on just a few more questions. So indulge me. I've stayed largely away from RCTs because there's a bunch of podcasts where your thoughts can be fairly assessed on that issue, but it's not going away. Right? So for me, there's the ethical question, there's the methodological question, and there's the sort of philosophical question to it. I'm not qualified to have the methodological question, not at all. Maybe on the ethics, well, there's a lot of also biases that get, so I'm not going to go there. For me, when I think about RCTs, and I'm fairly close here in Nigeria with the effective altruism community, my wife is very active, and I have this debate with them a lot. Surprisingly, a lot of them are also debating Lant Pritchett, which is which is good, right now. The way I see it is. The whole thing seems too easy in the sense that, no disrespect to anybody working in this space at all… in the sense that it seems optimizing for what can be measured versus what works.
So for me, the way I look at it is, it's very difficult to know the welfare effects for maybe a cohort of households. If you put a power station in my community, which has not had power for a while. So, but it's pretty easy if you have a fund and you distribute cash to households and you sort of divide them into a control group, and you know… which then makes it totally strange if you conclude from that that that is the best way to sort of intervene in the welfare and the well being of even that community or a people generally. I mean, where am I going wrong? How am I not getting it?
Lant;
No, the people listening to the podcast can't see me on the camera trying to reach out and give you a big hug. I think you have it exactly right. I think we should go back and rerecord this podcast where I ask you questions and your questions are the answer. So I think you've got the answer exactly right. So first of all, by the way, the original rhetoric and practice of RCTs is going away, and roughly has gone away. Because the original rhetoric was Independent Impact Evaluation. All of the rhetoric out of JPAL and IPA and the other practitioners is now partnerships, which is not independent, but essentially everybody's adopted the Crawl the Design Space use of evidence for feedback loops in making organizations better. So they've all created their own words for it because they don't want to admit that they're just, again, borrowing other ideas. So to a large extent the whole community is moving in a very positive direction towards integrating, seeking out relevant evidence for partner organizations in how can they Crawl the Design Space and be effective. And they're just not admitting it because it's embarrassing how wrong they were first, but they've come to the right space. So I want to give them credit.
When I gave a presentation at NYU called The Debate About RCTs Is Over And I won. It's not a very helpful approach, it's true, but it's not very helpful because I have to let them do what they're now doing, which is exactly what I said they should have been doing, and they are now doing. So, to some extent, asking people to say, yeah, we changed what we're doing is a big ask. And I'd rather they actually change what they're doing then they admit they did that. So to some extent it is going away. I think it's going away as it was originally designed, as this independent white coat guys, descend on some people and force them to carry out an impact evaluation to justify their existence. They're much more integrated, let's Crawl the Design Space in partnership with organizations, let's use randomization and more AB testing ways. And so I feel it's moving in a very positive direction with this weird rhetoric on top of it.
Second, I think you're exactly right and I think it's slightly worse than you said. Because it's not just about what can be measured, but it's about attributability. It's not just what can be measured, but what can be attributed directly, causally to individual actions. And my big debate with the Effective Altruism community is I'm hugely, you know, big, big, big wins from the Effective Altruism movement attacking kind of virtue signaling, useless kind of philanthropic endeavors. I think every person should be happy for them. But if I were African, I would be sick of this philanthropic bullshit that you guys are going to come and give us a cow or Bill Gates talking about…
Tobi;
Or chickens.
Lant;
Chickens. My wife doesn't do development at all. She's a music teacher. But when she heard Bill Gates talking about chickens, she think, does Bill Gates think chickens haven't been in Africa for hundreds of years? Like, what does he think he knows about chickens that Africans don't know about chickens? That's just such chicken shit, right? But again, I'll promote a blog. I have a blog called let's All Play for Team Development. And I think what you're raising in your thing is that it's not just what we can measure, it's what we can measure and attribute to the actions of a specific actor. Because, you know, your example of not having power in a village, that we can measure. But all of the system things that we've talked about so far - migration, education, state capability - these aren't going to be solved by individualized interventions. They're going to be solved by systemic things. And with my team on education, we've had this big research project on education standards but I keep telling my team, look, if you're not part of a wave, you're a drop in the ocean. The only way for your efforts to not be a drop in the ocean is for you to be part of a wave [of] other people around you working on the same issue, pushing in the same direction, to build that. And that kind of thing gets undermined by attributability. So with my RISE project, I sometimes tell my funders, you can have success or you can have attributability, but you can't have both, right? Because if we're going to be successful at changing the global discourse in education, we're not going to do it by ourselves. We're going to be part of a team and a network. So, anyways…
By the way, like early, early, early in the Effective Altruism movement, I had an interview with Cari Tuna and I think Holden Karnofsky, when they were thinking about what to do, and I made exactly this point. It's like, look, being effective at the individualized interventions that are happening is one thing, but don't ignore these huge systemic issues because you can't measure the direct causal effect between the philanthropic donation and the outcome. And that's your point, I think, which is, Nigeria is not going to get fixed by cash transfers.
Tobi;
No way.
Lant;
I mean, for heaven's sakes if Nigeria had the cash to transfer to everybody and fix it, well, then the national development struggle wouldn't be what it is. It's a systemic struggle across a number of fronts.
Tobi;
Why not just get Bill Gates to donate the money.
Lant;
But again, even Bill Gates, his fortune relative to the…you know, impact you could have through these programs, relative to what happens with national development, is just night and day. So to the extent that the adoption of a specific methodology precludes serious, evidence-based, hard struggle work on the big systemic issues, it's a net negative.
Tobi;
Again, to use your term, “kinky ideas in development.”
Lant;
Yeah.
Tobi;
I was reading a profile in the FT, a couple of days ago, all about charter cities, right?
Lant;
About what?
Tobi;
Charter cities. It was an idea I was kind of into for a while, I mean, from Paul Roma's original presentation at TED. But you strongly argued against it at your CATO debate. So what is wrong with that idea? Because there are advocates, there are investors, who think charter cities are this new thing that is going to provide the space for the kind of organizational and policy experimentation. And China's SEZs are usually the go to examples, Shenzhen particularly. So, what do you have to say about that?
Lant;
I like discussing charter cities.
Tobi;
Okay.
Lant;
And the reason I like discussing charter cities is because they're not kinky. Right. My complaint about Kinky is that you've drawn this line in human welfare and you act as if development is only getting people over these very low-bar thresholds. So conditional cash transfers are an example of Kinky, and conditional cash transfers are just stupid, right? Charter cities are wrong.
I mean, conditional cash transfers are just stupid in a trivial way.
Charter cities are wrong in a very deep and sophisticated way. So I love talking about charter cities. The reason I love talking about charter cities is A, they have have the fundamental problem posed, right? The fundamental problem is countries and systems are trapped in a low level equilibrium and that low level equilibrium is actually a stable equilibrium and so you need to shock your way out of it. And the contest between me and Charter cities is I think there's good struggle paths out of low level equilibrium. So I'm a strategic incrementalist. I want to have a strategic vision, but I want incremental action. So I'm against the kinky, which is often incremental incremental, it doesn't really add up to a development agenda. So I like, yes, we need to have a way out of this low level equilibrium and state capability in the way education systems work, in the way economic policies keep countries from achieving high productivity, et cetera. But I'm a good struggle guy. And charter cities want Magic Bullet. Right.
Now, the rationale for Magic Bullet is that good struggle is hard and hasn't necessarily proved successful. And these institutional features that lead to these low level traps just are resistant to good struggle methods out. And I think that's a really important debate to be having. But I think the right way to interpret China's experience and Yuen Yeun Ang's book on how China did it is, I think, a good illustration of this is China was Good Struggle. Using regional variations as a way of enabling good struggles. It's instructive that difficulty with Charter Cities always goes back. You keep going deeper and deeper of who's going to enforce this, who's going to enforce this, who's going to enforce this, you know. They're caught in their own catch 22 in my mind. So the first proposed, what appeared to be feasible Charter City in Honduras eventually got undermined by governance issues in which the major investor didn't want to actually be subject to rules based decision making.
So, I love talking about charter cities. I think they're on the right set of issues of how do we get to the institutional conditions that can create a positive environment for high productivity firms and engagement and improved governance. And they have a coherent argument, which is good, that, it's a low level trap and there's no path out of the low level trap and so we need big shock to get out of it.
But I don't think they're ultimately correct about the way in which you can establish the fundamentals. You can't just big jump your way to having reliable enforcement mechanisms and until you get to reliable enforcement mechanisms, the whole Charter City idea is still kind of up in the air. The next podcast I have scheduled to do is with the Charter Cities podcast, so that hopefully…
Tobi;
Oh. Interesting. Last question. We sort of have a tradition on the show where I ask the guest to discuss one new idea they would like to see spread everywhere. But I think more in line with your own brand, like you said earlier, I think I would like to ask for our own exclusive, Ideas Untrapped Exclusive Lant Rant, something you haven't talked about before or rarely. So you can go on for however long you wish. And that's the last question.
Lant;
I think if I had to pick something that if we could just get rid of it, it would be this fantasy that technology is going to solve problems. My basic point I make again and again and again is Moore's Law, which is the doubling of computer capacity every two years, has been chugging along, and it might have slowed down, but has been chugging along since 1965. So computing power has improved by a factor of ten to the 11th. And just as an illustration of just how big ten to the 11th is, the speed you drive on a freeway of 60 miles an hour is only ten to the 7th smaller than the speed of light. So ten to the 11th is an astronomically huge number in the sense that only astronomers have any use for numbers as big as ten to the 11th. Okay. My claim is anything that hasn't been fixed by a ten to the 11th change in computing power isn't going to get fixed by computing power. And I ask people sometimes in audiences, okay, particularly with older people, you look a little young for this question, but I ask them, okay, you older people that have been married for a long time, computing power has gone up ten to the 11th over the course of your marriage, has it made your marriage any better. And they're like, well, a little bit, sometimes when we're abroad, we can communicate over Skype easier, but on the other hand, it's made it worse because there's more distractions and more temptations to not pay attention to your spouse.
So on net, ten to the 11th of computing power hasn't improved average marriage quality. And then I ask them, has it improved your access to pornography? And it's like, of course, night and day, like, more instantaneous access to pornography. And my concluding thing is a huge amount of what is being promoted in the name of tech is the pornography of X rather than the real deal. So people promoting tech in education are promoting the pornography of education rather than real education. People that are promoting tech in government are promoting the pornography of governance rather than true governance. And it's just like, no, these are deeper human issues, and there's all kinds of human issues that they're fundamentally technologically resilient. And expecting technology to solve human problems is just a myth. It enables salespeople to pound down people's doors, to sell government officials some new software that's going to do this or that. But without the purpose, without the commitment, without the fundamental human norms of behaviour, technology isn't going to solve anything and the pretence that it is is distracting a lot of people from getting to the serious work. So if we could just replace the technology of X with the pornography of X, I think we'd be better off in discussions of what its real potentialities are. How's that for [an] original?
Tobi;
Yeah, yeah.
Lant;
You asked for it.
Tobi;
Yeah, that's a lot to think about, yeah. Thank you so much for doing this.
Lant;
Thanks for a great interview, Tobi. That was super fun. We could go back and record this with my asking questions and your questions being the answers. Because you're really sophisticated on all these issues. You're in exactly the right space.
Tobi;
Thank you very much.
Lant;
Great.
LANT PRITCHETT ON EVERYTHING part 2