A Scott Alexander post argued that plausibly “land reform” was a vital first step to developing most countries in Asia. I hadn’t heard any clear theory like this before—all the development goals I hear about sound like “get them more education and democracy” or sometimes “invest in them so they can develop their economies”. Does anyone have other novel models of how to develop countries, like the idea of land reform as prerequisite, that are far outside the mainstream?
(Given that >$40b are now committed to EA, it seems plausible to me that most of the current best charities and even cause areas will soon be fully funded. If so, the bottleneck becomes opening new cause areas. Pushing hard for novel and better developmental economic policies seems like one of the possibilities with highest impact/neglect/tractability combination, with plausible comparative advantage in tractability through non-ideological thinking and pulling the policy rope sideways.)
Instead of talking about more education it might be worthwhile to talk about better education. A lot of education in third world countries is cargo culting Western education and then gets used as a credentialing system.
Education that would focus on teaching accounting and other business skills would likely be much better then a lot of what passes as education currently in those countries.
I agree, and want to place a slightly different emphasis. A “better” education system is a two-place function; what’s better for a poor country is different from what’s better for a rich Western one. And education in Western countries looked different back when they were industrializing and still poor by modern standards.
(Not that the West a century ago is necessarily a good template to copy. The point is that the education systems rich countries have today weren’t necessarily a part of what made them rich in the first place.)
A lot (some think most) of Western education is also a credentialing and signalling system. It can also promote social integration (shared culture), and serves as daycare for lower grades.These things don’t directly help a poor country get richer.
Signalling is a zero sum game competing over the top jobs in a poor economy. Sequestering teenagers reduces available workforce for a net economic loss. Community daycare is economically valuable, but requiring qualified teachers is expensive and can make it a net loss.
So poor countries can copy Western education systems faithfully and still not benefit. What they are cargo culting is not (just) the elements of how to do “education”, but the function of the education system in broader society. Faithfully reproducing modern Western education doesn’t necessarily make your country rich: that’s cargo culting.
Fascism successfully transformed South Korea and Imperial Japan from poor agrarian states into industrial powerhouses through top-down industrial policy by the government.
Make the whole legal system of a third world country based on a blockchain solution like Kleros. Having an legal system that isn’t easily corrupted and that can uphold contracts is very valuable for economic development.
Two big problems:
Establishing ownership of real-world resources. The blockchain can track any contracts or changes, but it can’t validate or enforce them outside of the blockchain itself.
Writing and checking blockchain contracts is non-trivial. This likely gives way too much power to the unscrupulous experts in the technology.
Human courts which can arbitrate ambiguity and choose not to enforce abusive (even if well-formed) contracts will be necessary for a long long time.
It sounds to me like you don’t know what Kleros is.
Kleros is a human court and when you write the rules well it can choose not to enforce abusive contracts perfectly fine.
Hanson wrote about bounty hunter justice and you can do that for enforcement.