Developmentally Challenged

Here's an interesting virtual round-table discussion on poverty and intervention. It includes some of the stars of the development industry - Paul Collier, William Easterly, Nancy Birdsall.... It's also collectively a peek into some of the recent thinking on the question of poverty. What is most striking is that over 60 years after the institution of the Bretton Woods Agreement creating the IMF and World Bank there's not a whole lot of progress, philosophically and practically speaking, on the issue of tackling poverty. Members of those institutions have resolved their own economic needs quite generously, but global poverty rages on to such an extent that Collier is here basically arguing the case for intervention in the affairs of poor countries for their own sake.

How 19th-century.