Dani Rodrik: belief

Transcript context

…I read a small excerpt about your new book, and I know that it’s about economic models. I was wondering how do you factor in best practice institutions when you consider economic models. Is there room to factor in, say, in your own words, second best institutions, and how effective would that be in the ultimate analysis of a country or a model? I’ve said this before. I hate the notion of best practice. I think this is probably a very harmful notion. I was a student of Avinash Dixit, who was a great economist at Princeton. He likes to say, “The world is second best at best.” You always have to think in those terms. The notion of a best practice is based on the idea that you can simply just have something that worked somewhere and take it and copy it and apply it somewhere else. Not only does that not work in general, it gives us a very lazy frame of mind. We end up developing all these World Economic Forum scorecards where we have all these checklists of the business environment rankings, or even the sustainable development goals. I think to some extent, these things can be important as public relations, as PR for it. But you look at all successful countries and what you’ll see is that you’ve had their societies and leaders who have always distilled experience from elsewhere from the lens of their own local knowledge. I think that when you get that combination is really when things work. A best practice mindset, I think, is an enemy of that. Question here. Last question.…

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