stories? Here is an exercise: Find a young child, say age eight or nine, and try to
explain to him or her why much of the world lives comfortably, even
luxuriously, while millions of people elsewhere on the planet are starving to
death and billions more are barely getting by. At some point, the explanation just
starts to feel inadequate. Clearly we do not have a silver bullet for economic
development. We don’t have one for cancer either, but we haven’t given up. Will
the world be significantly less poor in 2050? That answer is not obvious. We can
imagine an East Asian scenario in which countries transform themselves in a
matter of decades. Or we can imagine a sub-Saharan Africa scenario in which
countries stumble from decade to decade without any significant economic
growth at all. One scenario will lift billions of people out of poverty and misery;
the other won’t.
When we ask whether poor countries will still be poor four decades from now,
the question seems distant and abstract, almost as if the answer will be
determined by some future alignment of the stars. But when we break that
question into its component parts—when we ask about the things that we know
will distinguish rich countries from poor countries—then global poverty seems
more tractable. Will governments in developing countries create and sustain the
kinds of institutions that support a market economy? Will they develop export
industries that enable them to break out of the trap of subsistence agriculture—
and will the United States open its huge market to those products? Will the rich
countries use their technology and resources to fight the diseases that are
ravaging the developing world, especially AIDS? Will the family of a baby girl
born tomorrow in rural India have an incentive to invest in her human capital?
Can America get its fiscal house back in order? The United States is the
world’s largest debtor. We owe Chinese bondholders more than a trillion dollars.
We’ve had to borrow heavily to pay our bills for the past decade. The sobering
