For more than half a century, there have been government programs and international organizations devoted to socially engineering development. As evidenced by the recent United Nation’s Millennium Project report, surprisingly little has been learned as to why that mode of development assistance is ineffective. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to explaining the old idea that the best form of assistance is to help people help themselves but that this cannot be “engineered” as is amply evidenced by over a half-century of failures. There is a conundrum: how can the helpers supply help that furthers rather than overrides or undercuts the goal of the doers helping themselves? Otherwise, it is actually “unhelpful help.” The overriding and undercutting forms of unhelpful help are analyzed and strategies for autonomy-respecting help are presented.
Lessons of the Moldova ARIA Project
This paper, coauthored with Vladimir Kreacic, describes a remarkably successful World Bank project in the poorest of the countries of the former Soviet Union. It contains many lessons for development projects elsewhere.
Four Enterprise Creation Schemes: Putting Jane Jacobs to Work
This note presents policy ideas about entrepreneurship and enterprise creation derived from or, at least, inspired by Jane Jacobs’ writings.
Micro-Finance and other Development Fads
These are the slides for a 2012 talk given at USC along with Milford Bateman and Lamia Karim on mircofinance.
Pragmatism versus Economics Ideology
This paper contrasts some of the wisdom of philosophical pragmatism with the social engineering ideology implicit in the conventional economics profession. The principal case example is the transition strategies of Russia versus China.
Investment Climate for Who?
This is one of my few writings on globalization. It started as a memo for the World Bank Chief Economist that “complicated” the issue of “improving the investment climate.”
Parallel Experimentation
This is an unpublished working paper about the process of parallel experimentation which I take to be a process of multiple experiments running concurrently with some form of common goal, with benchmarking comparisons made between the experiments, and with the “migration” of discoveries between experiments wherever possible to ratchet up the performance of the group.
Knowledge and Ignorance in the Post-Socialist Debates
These are the slides for my talk in the invited lecture series, The Specter of Ignorance, at the Korbel School of Denver University May 2012.
It’s not the What but the How that counts
These are slides from a lecture sponsored by The Philanthropic Enterprise given in New York October 2012.
Good Intentions: The Dilemma of Outside-in Help for Inside-out Change
This article in the Non-Profit Quarterly applies some of the key lessons from development philosphy (in my Helping book) to the community development work of foundations.