Wednesday, July 10, 2013

It's just that what we have learned is not quite what we expected to learn.

From The Principle of the Hiding Hand by Albert O. Hirschman.
After two decades of intensive work by social scientists, the processes of economic, social, and political development of the so-called underedeveloped countries - in Latin America, Asia, and Africa - remain poorly understood. Theories that were attractive because of their simplicity and because they had clear-cut and hopeful policy implications have been badly battered by academic critics; worse, they have been faulted by events. Nevertheless, it is not true to say that we have learned nothing from the experience of the past twenty years. It's just that what we have learned is not quite what we expected to learn.
This was written in 1967 and is as true today as it was forty five years ago. We still fall prey to the seductively simplistic solutions in which no one is to blame, no one has to change, and all we have to do is provide money or knowledge. We choose to keep ignoring what we keep learning which is that the source of the problem is rarely knowledge or money and is almost always behaviors and values.

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