Lant Pritchett

Great to be here.

When I spoke to Lant Pritchett recently, he was very keen to differentiate schooling, measured in years or attendance, from education.

What's the challenge to improve education? How big's the problem here?

It's a massive challenge, and it's true that for many years, education was proxied by schooling.

And, you know, there's no better way to design policy for failure than, you know, by not paying attention to context from the outset, right? Because, you know, it then leads to this sort of, uh, crisis of perennial failures whereby, um, we design very onerous and ambitious policies sometimes that way overshoot the capacity for implementation.

Lant Pritchett has written quite a bit on this.

Uh, which then, you know, bakes in failure, and then failure begets failure because then we get convinced that we can never do it.

And then we come up with all kinds of reasons why we couldn't do it, right? Corruption and, you know, lack of capacity being part of the problem.

And that intersection, as well as just kind of being one of the fault lines or the terrain of how we've talked about development and anti-poverty work in recent decades, is also at the heart of a very, very current debate among development economists.

Critics like Lant Pritchett and Ken Apollo have argued that development economists have become really good at answering narrow questions, these very kind of micro questions about what households do and how they behave.

but that that may have come at the expense of sufficient focus on these big questions like growth, even as we know that growth is one of the things that has accounted for a lot of the exits from poverty.

My view is, maybe not surprisingly, that this is kind of an oversimplification of this distinction.