Paras Ratna

Expecting BJP to reset West Bengal by moving beyond the Kolkata lens. The state deserves a leader rooted in its districts, someone who truly represents its rural heart. For too long, governance and development have been viewed through a Kolkata-centric prism. A rural voice at the helm could rebalance priorities, only then can development become genuinely inclusive!

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:

I used to have this view until I was convinced otherwise by a conversation with Abhijit Banerjee. His point was that we should try to alleviate poverty — RCTs are one way — until we figure out the big questions of macro development — eg industrialization. An analogy: research on palliative care until we figure out a cure for terminal diseases. It is not either or…