Gregory Clark: evaluation

Transcript context

…Under your current view, is foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa counterproductive? I’m not talking about corruption or siphoning it off. Those are clearly problems but just aid as a brute, abstract concept. Does it counteract itself through Malthusian, or what I would call Clarkian mechanisms? I think you used to believe that. There are societies like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa where there is consistent economic progress, but that progress gets eaten up in terms of population growth. So, the living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture. There’s a limited agricultural area, and better technology then induces more people. How could you best help such societies? It would be somehow by breaking that link between resources and population. Industrialization, if it’s possible to achieve, would be fantastic in these societies. The second thing would be limits on population growth. It looks like those limits are coming, and that we are going to see such a transformation, but there’s — A lot of this aid is public health. More people survive, more people live longer. That all seems to me to give them better lives. It may not always show up in per capita GDP.…

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