What Lant Pritchett thinks about market efficiency
Development economist. Research director of RISE at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, formerly of the World Bank and the Harvard Kennedy School, and a founder of Labor Mobility Partnerships. He argues that letting people move across borders is the largest unexploited gain in global welfare, and that rich-country aid agencies have quietly abandoned the goal of making poor countries prosperous.
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3 dated positions, 2023, in their own words. Our reading of what Lant Pritchett has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsMy key argument is that in the current global economy we have some of the scarcest resources on the planet devoting themselves to economizing one of the most abundant resources on the planet.
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Their wordsThis is not because there are not people who would drive trucks for Amazon in the world, and not because “natural” scientific progress has made machines that drive trucks easy and cheap, but because in a global economy which is “flat” for capital, information, and goods, there is a legal “cliff at the border” for labor, as prices don’t reflect scarcity.
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Their wordsBut, whether it makes financial sense or not for the individuals involved, they are responding to distorted prices, not scarcity, and the world is not better off from their invention and innovation.