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Must-Read: Chris Blattman: The Mistakes Made by Most Development Reformers - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

I’d make a different point: the way I’ve learned how things operate is to work with a government or organization to try out a policy and succeed or fail. This kind of trial and error seems crucial to me. Karl Popper called this the piecemeal social engineer. Deng Xiaoping called it crossing the river by feeling each stone…. A lot of people would say this is China’s secret to success: informal experimentation on a grand scale. The problem, as I see it, is that most governments and aid organizations I’ve worked with are really, really bad at this. They don’t use the lessons from past failures to try again a different, better way. They don’t throw out bad programs…. The important question is not ‘what is the right policy?’, but ‘what is the process for generating good policies over time?’, and more importantly ‘how to get governments and aid organizations to adapt to the good and throw out the bad?’…
#Chris-Blattman - equitablegrowth.org