Lelo Nxumalo

It is not an overstatement to say that this is THE book to read if you want to learn anything about an emerging view of why and how countries grow. A key take-away for me is the importance of assessing development, not in terms of what people can buy, but instead what people can make. This knowledge and know-how, Cesar describes, is embodied in the products that countries exchange with each other. He thus proposes a new way of thinking about international trade as really an exchange of crystals of imagination (i.e., the products that embody knowledge and know-how).  As to why some places exhibit more "imagination" or crystalization thereof (or make more sophisticated products) he offers an explanation grounded on the difficulties of fostering "links" to create dense networks from which individual "personbytes" can be combined to make more imaginative products. Transaction costs make it difficult to bring knowledge and know-how together. Things li...

For a while it seemed self evident to me that income growth precedes human development, and that nations should focus on engineering growth before focusing on the distributional aspects (think China). Without even trying I implicitly rationalized the need for benevolent dictators to champion rapid economic development ( See here ). Even after reading Amartya Sen's seminal work Development as Freedom , which argues that this so-called "Lee thesis" (attributed to Singapore's former leader Lee Kuan Yew) lacks comprehensive inter country evidence, I found myself leaning toward what William Easterly calls "conscious planning" in his latest book. In this post, however, I confront this bias of mine and conclude that growth ought to be judged by the extent to which it facilitates the acquisition of what Sen calls individual agency. Individual agency is practically manifested as the ability to escape premature mortality, preventable morbidity, or involuntary st...