Our distant ancestors had a biological constitution awfully similar to our own, and, like us, only 24 hours in a day. Arguably the main reason we have so much better lives than them is that we have better ways of doing things (broadly conceived). So it makes a great deal of sense that much of the work in development planning and foreign aid consists in exporting ways of doing things. Technology and scientific know-how are the most easily obvious examples, but we also export methods of organization and governance.
People in poorer nations don’t have the nice things we do, so it must be because their ways of doing things aren’t as effective as our own. If we could just convince them to do things the way we do them then everyone would be rich, and Bill wouldn’t get any reception in Ghana either. So wealthy nations have spent a lot of time trying to export their newest and best makes and models of laws, regulations, and government agencies to the rest of the world.
One problem with this approach–one among many–is that it assumes that our every institutional and organizational innovation is beneficial. We call this “Whig history.” And while it’s hard to argue that wealthy nations don’t have an overall mix of institutions better adapted to producing wealth, it’s quite another to assume that they’re superior (at wealth production) to poor nations’ institutions on every margin. It could be that the evolution of our ways of doing things has taken a wrong turn in one or more spheres of activity.
Two recent articles raise the concern of Whig history, in ways relevant to ongoing debates in development. Eustace Davis writes at African Liberty that:
Governments world-wide are struggling to solve the problem of deficiencies in their schooling systems. Politicians, teachers, educationists, administrators, employers, parents, politicians, policy analysts and students have differing ideas on how the problem should be solved. All agree that something is wrong. All have ideas on the kind of tinkering that is needed to fix the problem. The framework within which schooling functions is seldom or ever questioned; a framework that is little changed since schooling was nationalised in England in the late 19th and in the US in the early 20th centuries…
Schooling systems everywhere have become frozen in time. Schools are configured much as they were, and function in the same way they did, a century ago. A 1910 child would feel very much at home in a ‘modern’ school environment, whereas everything else in the world we live in has changed dramatically over the past 100 years.
Davis is concerned that the whole world copied England’s public educational institutions after they changed for the worse (see also James Tooley’s work on this topic).
And this article reports on the work of historian Eckard Höffner on 19th century Germany’s copyright law, or lack thereof. Höffner argues that the absence of copyright law facilitated the spread of knowledge that was critical to Germany’s industrialization and flowering scientific community. There is certainly no shortage of debate about the role of intellectual property in international development, but most of it assumes that IP law is wealth-enhancing in wealthy nations. Are we sure? How sure should we be before we export our IP laws?
Are these convincing examples of Whig history gone wild? Are there others?
11 Comments
Drug policy is the biggest one I can think of. It’s definitely possible that the deluge of new psychoactive substances we’ve seen recently thanks to globalization and advances in chemistry would have sparked prohibitionist backlashes outside of the US and Western Europe, but I seriously doubt that places like Afghanistan, West Africa, Mexico, and the Andean region would be tearing themselves to pieces now if it weren’t for America and Europe’s drug wars. Even the supposed ravages of the Chinese opium trade may have been overplayed by white missionaries.
Another example could be American transportation/land use policy. Kuala Lumpur in particular, I hear, has become as car-dependent as Los Angeles, and has made all the same mistakes – massively subsidized road projects, mandatory sprawl through zoning and parking codes – that dense, East Asian cities avoided. The massive traffic jam in China and the general communistic approach to urban planning and architecture (the huge boulevards and general “towers in a park” thing that Le Corbusier loved) makes me fear that the massive urbanization that’s going on now might be fatally flawed. I write for an urbanism blog (linked above), and I’d like to write something about this trend sometime soon…if I get around to it, I’ll let you know.
Read Ha Joon Chang.
I hope everyone GOVERNMENT could read this. Very well said.
Very true, the lock-in nature of path dependent choices and the increasing returns these paths generate may cause little incentive to innovate or change, even when there are plausibly clear reasons to do so. I imagine most of use are using QWERTY keyboards, for instance, despite the possibility that more efficient designs may be out there.
However the one thing we have failed rather spectacularly at is exporting efficient institutions, particularly the informal constraints which make productive economic activity possible. Which is too bad because the fundamental underpinnings and benefit of these institutions (secure property rights, for instance) are relatively universal, in my opinion.
And that is without even thinking of the material dimension of institutional or organisational innovations. The Whig history way of innovating hasn’t really provided an answer to sustainable innovation that takes limited (natural) resources into account.
Oh so true that there are many things the developing world does not want from the developed world. There are so many constraints and restraints in place that to do something radically new in education, one can scarcely even do it with money. Money is like the boat with all the barnacles of complexity attached to it. The best example I can provide is that there can be no right to healthcare until people actually have the right to heal, and this may be the trigger that allows people to conceive of education differently.
Andy,
Path Dependancy and the QWERTY example suggest to me you’re a student of LSE Prof. Teddy Brett. Not so? Glad to see the ethos of DESTIN remains with you post-dissertation hand-in!
I’ve often thought of this in terms of healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. Essentially most of the countries I have experience in have a socialized healthcare system modeled somewhat like the NHS.
I don’t have a solid grounding in the political economy of healthcare system development in industrialized economies, but the NHS wasn’t rolled out until 1948 in a State with significant legitimacy and a particular set of institutions. The NHS works for the UK, but I don’t think that model is ready out of the box in countries with different institutional arrangements (including the US, apparently).
I would imagine, that this monopolistic arrangement (besides mission hospitals) must affect the development of a private healthcare sector with a significant impact on the supply chain of medical commodities and the quality of services.
Brendon,
I think the NHS is a good boiler plate model that can be tinkered. I’m in Uganda now and it seems the system they have largely doesn’t work because there’s not enough money. I don’t think the Ugandan electorate would be nearly as opposed to a stronger monopolistic system as the Americans. I don’t think the private sector could do that well here in terms of direct provision of care since most Ugandans are very poor and already going bankrupt from having to pay for their own drugs when the government hospitals are out. Many doctors already have their own private practices on the side and barely come to the nation’s only referral hospital since they are paid around 400-500$ a month (compare to 7000$ for Members of Parliament…). The private practices are not offering services accessible to the majority of Ugandans…
I do agree about medical commodities and the development of the private sector. Although there are some allegations that individuals in the Ugandan government who invested in the generic pharmaceutical manufacturing company here are now more interested in treating HIV and malaria than preventing it. Tricky tricky…
One little pet wish of mine is that they contract the delivery of drugs to a private courier service instead of doing it themselves.
I think it is a great point about the English school model everyone has designed their systems after. People tend to forget or not are not taught the U.S. 19th century public model (which is what the modern system is largely based on) was primarily not about education. The U.S. already had the highest literacy rate in the world with-out public funding. It was about integrating immigrants into society. From personal experience culture is the biggest hurdle. The laws and institutions are based around a specific culture which Africans due not have so they will be a failure.
Great comment Andy, interesting observation.
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