Stephen Jennings: evaluation

Transcript context

…I take it to be your view that economic development is in some sense the default. It’s not automatic, but there are forces pushing economies in that direction. If you had to reduce that view down to your most fundamental belief, where does that view come from? It started in New Zealand working with you, because we saw how a country could be changed, and we saw how growth could be catalyzed. I guess that opened my mind to change. I have this idea that humans evolved over a period of time where no change happened, so we are wired to think that the world doesn’t actually fundamentally change. I think that’s like a cognitive default, but that’s actually at variance with the world’s experience since the Industrial Revolution. The experience since the Industrial Revolution is, a wider and wider group of countries with a more and more diverse set of institutional settings and styles of government have experienced economic takeoff and very high rates of growth by historical standards. There’s a disconnect between people — the way people think — and what has actually happened. My default setting is, unless you do things really, really, really badly, per capita GDP is going to grow, and it’s probably going to grow quite quickly. That’s what’s happened in most countries in the world. Whereas people look at Africa, and they look at the past, and they have got this default setting, “Probably nothing’s going to change.” But in my mind, the bias is massively to change, more change, more growth. What do you think is the book that has influenced you most?…

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