Reddit mentions of Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails

The comment does exist, and hasn't been moderated. Reddit's servers may be having an issue.

Here's the reply again:

"This is really somewhat hilarious. You're dismissing the plurality view of the academic field because I "haven't posted evidence of it" (even though the research we're discussing actually supports that conclusion, if you read the paper), and it hurts your feelings.

Fine, here are some citations. Since you don't even know what "literature" means, I'll leave out things behind paywalls:

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? by William Easterly

The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly

Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

Coffee and Power by Jeffrey M. Paige

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson

Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth by William Easterly, Jozef Ritzen, and Michael Woolcock

African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis by Nicolas Van de Walle

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

Doing Bad by Doing Good by Christopher Coyne

From Subsistence to Exchange by Peter Bauer"

As a note, several of these are ones that one of the mods posts when asked about good books on development.

Well, one thing it's important to keep in mind is there is a significant difference between increasing economic growth, or what I like to call economic progress, and merely increasing output. Conflating the two is to make a serious mistake.

Genuine economic progress is about getting more bang for your buck. This is why we can have rising standards of living while using fewer real resources-- productive techniques become more efficient, we have better ideas, etc. That's the economic problem society faces, namely adding value while minimizing opportunity costs, and it's why it's so important to allow people to experiment in the market process to see what works and what doesn't-- because no one can know the solution ex ante from the armchair, as it were.

Increasing output, on the other hand, can merely be a case of expending more resources to get more products. Opportunity costs in this conceptualization of growth need not be minimized relative to the value they create. This isn't necessarily conducive to raising standards of living at all for a variety of reasons, and it's really no more interesting than the fact I can spend twice as much money at the grocery store and get two times the groceries.

So (real) growth need not be wasteful at all, and can even minimize the use of resources relative to a society's needs and wants. And no, I would not say growth in the West is necessary for poorer nations to grow. What those nations need is better institutions that provide incentives and feedback mechanisms that allow their own citizens to better themselves. Generally this is going to mean things like protected and well-defined property rights, a clear legal system without excessive corruption, broadly free markets, some degree of trust amongst the people living there, and so forth.

It's very difficult to try to impose better conditions on those third world countries from outside, precisely because outside interveners lack access to the specific circumstances of time and place in those countries. And that's knowledge which is needed to genuinely fix things. If you'd like to read more, try Chris Coyne's Doing Bad by Doing Good.