Migration is Pritchetts religion. He was raised a Mormon in Utah and Idaho, venerating ancestors who crossed the Plains to chase their dreams of Zion. Fifteen of his 16 great-great-grandparents made the trip. To commemorate the Mormons arrival, Pritchett and his siblings wore period clothes on Pioneer Day and paraded with covered wagons. Im into the general gestalt: people finding God, pursuing a vision to start a new life, he says. Its a story you can build a culture around.
His father, a lawyer, was a Mormon bishop, a lay position, but Pritchett was the family rebel. He not only drank beer with his buddies; he left the cans in his parents car. When his father berated him for skipping services, the smirking debate-team son replied, Is that what you learned in church today? In high school, he gave a cop the finger just to see what he would do. The defiance continued at Brigham Young University, where a fireworks prank in a bathroom stall made the school paper.
Mormon tradition required him to go on a mission after his freshman year, but Pritchett was unsure whether he believed. He hiked off one night and wandered until dawn, when he found himself at the Geneva Steel Mill, a dying plant that his grandfather, a carpenter, helped to build; it was as ugly as any place he had seen. Then the new sun painted the valley pink, and Pritchett had what he later called an epiphany: In the right light, everything can be beautiful, including religious duty. Thats when I became a Christian, he says. (His brother, who practices law in San Francisco, told me the story, which Pritchett seemed embarrassed to discuss.) His two-year mission in Argentina awakened him to global poverty. When he returned to B.Y.U. and married after his sophomore year, a text that figured in the courtship of his wife, Diane, was the Mormon book of Mosiah, in which King Benjamin implores the faithful to share their wealth.
If Joseph Smith offered one lodestar, Adam Smith offered another. Pritchett entered graduate school in 1983, as a long era in international development was meeting its end. For decades, experts had pursued variants of the Big Push theory: poor governments would borrow heavily abroad, invest in roads, clinics and schools and subsidize domestic industries protected by high tariffs, expecting their economies to eventually ignite. But the infant industries remained inefficient, and developing countries could not sell enough abroad to pay their debts. After Mexico stunned the world in 1982 by defaulting on its foreign debt, Big Push was out and structural adjustment was in. That meant budget cuts, privatization and, above all, free trade: export-led growth would save the worlds poor. Pritchett came of age with these policies, which were dubbed the Washington Consensus. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined a group of researchers at the World Bank known as the Hezbollah of Free Trade.
There he found a mentor in Lawrence H. Summers, the banks chief economist, who was already famed as a brainy critic of received wisdoms. They wrote papers together challenging conventional views of health programs and population control and set off a tempest after Pritchett, critiquing a colleagues work, wrote a mocking memo that pretended to advocate polluting poor countries. Summers signed the long memo (without reading that passage, he says) and found himself tied to a leaked portion that argued the logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable. Summers survived to become treasury secretary and until recently president of Harvard, where he and Pritchett will teach a course next year on globalization.
Pritchetts career has straddled a paradoxical time. Poverty in China and India has plunged, Bono campaigns for debt relief and Angelina Jolie puts African hunger on MTV. On the surface, it seems like a golden age for poverty fighters. But despite a half-century of study, the development guild has few reliable answers to its most important question: how to make poor economies grow? China and India, by their very size, are idiosyncratic and have moved toward economic orthodoxies in unorthodox ways. There is little agreement on why they have succeeded, much less on how to transfer their success to places like Nepal. Elsewhere, experts have seen little but disappointment.
No region bought the Washington Consensus more avidly than Latin America. Yet for two decades, the growth of its per capita G.D.P. has hovered close to zero. Everyone expected the countries of the former Soviet Union to face transitional hardships, but their average economic contraction has been greater than that of the Great Depression and longer-lasting. Sub-Saharan Africa, despite decades of Western aid, has had little growth, more wars and new epidemics. Some big-name optimists remain, most notably Jeffrey D. Sachs, whose best-selling book, The End of Poverty (foreword by Bono), argues that the West knows how to end extreme poverty by 2025. But Pritchett is more typical of his peers when he says of the development record, If that hasnt been sufficient to beat the hubris out of you, you havent been paying attention.
His own career reflects the professions lowered sights. His first field assignment, in 1998, cast him as a relief worker not a development specialist: he helped to finance rice purchases following the Indonesian financial crisis. His best-known academic work is negative: an article that shows global inequality to be even larger and more longstanding than generally supposed. One of Pritchetts closest friends, William Easterly, attacked the whole rationale for foreign aid in his book The White Mans Burden, which argues that aid has failed to promote growth. In contrast, Pritchetts book (with David Dollar), Assessing Aid, argues that foreign assistance can spur growth when accompanied by sound local practices and helped to inspire a major Bush administration program, the Millennium Challenge Account. Still, it says something when Pritchetts failure to condemn all aid casts him as an aid optimist.
When Argentina, a faithful adapter of the Washington Consensus, defaulted on its foreign debt in 2001 two decades after Mexico it rang down the curtain on another age of failed prescriptions. By then Pritchett was on leave at Harvard, teaching alongside other chastened economists. No one was fully satisfied with the Washington Consensus anymore, at least not as a prescription for growth. But no consensus had taken its place. The gains from increased trade, though sizable in many economists view, had mostly taken place. Aid and debt relief were generally seen as limited tools. The whole notion of big ideas was out of favor. So little seems to work, Pritchett warned in an article Whats the Big Idea that disparaged big ideas. Yet he was mulling a big idea of his own. True to form, it was a stink-bomb-in-the-bathroom kind of idea: an assault on the morality of borders.
The basics are simple: The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot. This strikes Pritchett as bad economics and worse social justice. He likens the limits on labor mobility to apartheid on a global scale. Think Desmond Tutu with equations.
Pritchett sees five irresistible forces for migration, stymied by eight immovable ideas. The most potent migration force is the one epitomized by Nepal: vast inequality. In the late 19th century, rich countries had incomes about 10 times greater than the poorest ones. Todays ratio is about 50 to 1, Pritchett writes in Let Their People Come. The poor simply have too much to gain from crossing borders not to try. What arrests them are the convictions of rich societies: that migration erodes domestic wages, courts cultural conflicts and is unnecessary for perhaps antithetical to foreign development. When irresistible force meets immovable object, something gives in this case legality. Migration goes underground, endangering migrants and lessening their rewards.
The key to breaking the political deadlock, Pritchett says, is to ensure that the migrants go home, which is why he emphasizes temporary workers (though personally he would let them stay). About 7 percent of the rich worlds jobs are held by people from developing countries. For starters, he would like to see the poor get another 3 percent, or 16 million guest-worker jobs 3 million in the U.S. They would stay three to five years, with no path to citizenship, and work in fields with certified labor shortages. He assumes that most receiving countries would not allow them to bring families. Taxpayers would be spared from educating the migrants kids. Domestic workers would gain some protection through the certification process. And a revolving labor pool would reach more of the worlds poor.
In effect, Pritchett is proposing a Saudi Arabian plan in which an affluent society creates a labor subcaste that is permanently excluded from its ranks. His does so knowing full well that his agenda coincides with that of unscrupulous employers looking to exploit cheap workers. Many migration advocates oppose a plan, now dividing Congress, to create a guest-worker force a 15th as large as the one Pritchett wants, saying it would create a new underclass. But Pritchett calls guest work the only way to accommodate large numbers. To insist that migrants have a right to citizenship and family unification, he says, is to let men like Gure Sarki go hungry. It is cruel to be kind. The choice is theirs. Let the poor decide. Letting guest workers in America doesnt create an underclass, he says. It moves an underclass and makes the underclass better off.
Part of Pritchetts argument is mathematical. Drawing on World Bank models, he estimates his plan would produce annual gains of about $300 billion three times the benefit of removing the remaining barriers to trade. But the philosophical packaging gives his plan its edge. Pritchett assails a basic premise that development means developing places. He is more concerned about helping Nepalis than he is about helping Nepal. If remittances spur development back home, great, but that is not his central concern. Migration is development, he says.
Indeed, Pritchett attacks the primacy of nationality itself, treating it as an atavistic prejudice. Modern moral theory rejects discrimination based on other conditions of birth. If we do not bar people from jobs because they were born female, why bar them because they were born in Nepal? The name John Rawls appears on only a single page of Let Their People Come, but Pritchett is taking Rawlsian philosophy to new lengths. If a just social order, as Rawls theorized, is one we would embrace behind a veil of ignorance without knowing what traits we possess a world that uses the trait of nationality to exclude the neediest workers from the richest job markets is deeply unjust. (Rawls himself thought his theory did not apply across national borders.) Pritchetts Harvard students rallied against all kinds of evils, he writes, but I never heard the chants, Hey, ho, restrictions on labor mobility have to go.
Even friends fear he has not come to grips with the numbers. The West is nowhere close to accepting Pritchetts 16 million and the developing world has a labor force of nearly 3 billion; what if most of them moved? I think Lant overdoes it in estimating migrations potential, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, which commissioned and published the book. Do you think the U.S. would accept 300 million of the worlds poorest people? Birdsall praises Pritchetts work as a conversation starter but adds, People think about development as being about place not person theyre more right about this than Lant believes.
One of those people is Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Theres no way that migration is going to substitute for economic development at home, he told me recently. Pritchetts willingness to abide more family separation reddens Sachs face. Separation has spread adultery, divorce and AIDS across the developing world. Its tragic! he said. Let them come as a family! Having tens of millions of men separated from their families in temporary living conditions is hardly going to be conducive to the kind of world were aiming to build.
Lawrence Summers, Pritchetts old mentor, said Pritchetts book may be like Milton Friedmans Capitalism and Freedom, which seemed lunatic in the moment but won converts with time. Still, he wonders if the West can create migrant subcastes without compromising its values and fears that voluntary compacts do not solve the moral problem; we do not let people volunteer to sell body parts or work in unsafe mines. Lants kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways, he said. He is open to guest-worker experiments but wonders about their sustainability.
Those are migration allies. People who think migration is too high 12 percent of Americans are foreign-born say that Pritchett is prescribing cultural suicide. All guest-worker programs result in permanent settlement, says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that seeks less immigration. Some workers will overstay their visas, he warns. Advocates and employers will lobby for extensions. And guest workers will increase illegal immigration by attracting relatives and friends. Krikorian fears that immigrants are already forming parallel societies whose numbers do not even bother to learn English; adding to the 36 million already here, he said, would speed the cultural secession. Youd have more Press 2 for Swahili, no question about that, he says. Itd be a complete catastrophe.
Pritchett responds in character defiantly. Moral coarsening? Were already being morally coarsened by allowing people to live as fourth-class citizens in the rest of the world, Pritchett says. Were just not forced to confront it. Scale? Yes, his plan would start small (by global terms), but Pritchett argues that it contains the seeds of its own expansion. With lots of old people to support, rich countries will get hooked on the migrants labor and especially on the taxes they pay into retiree health and pension funds. And if, as critics fear, the migrants stay, then yes, Pritchett does believe the U.S. could eventually swallow 300 million of the global poor. Its a big, empty country, he says.
With more access to global labor markets, Pritchett predicts some poor countries will develop quickly while others, like Zambia, will depopulate into giant ghost towns as the world grows comfortable with higher levels of permanent migration. Eventually over a century, say the combination of population adjustments and policy innovation will raise the living standards of most poor countries to that of the West without pulling the West down, just as the rise of the Japanese has not meant the fall of Americans. The labor forces of the West are shrinking, which, he says, should keep wages high despite increased migration. Whether or not his forecasts are correct the track record of his field is not reassuring he has pondered the economics.
But the greatest risk posed by the Pritchett plan is cultural conflict, or even conflagration, which Pritchett greets with a shrug. I dont think about it a lot because Im an economist, he says. If you say your culture cant survive an influx of migrants, you have a pretty dim view of your culture. Cultures change all the time, he figures, and change is not to be feared. A century hence, nations will still exist, but in a more ecumenical way. Germans will accept Turkish mosques, and Turkey will accept Christian spires, and everyone will be free to come and go as long as they obey the law. Here he sounds less like Adam Smith than Rodney King: Cant we all just get along?
So far, in the U.S., at least, the answer has been yes: acculturation has triumphed in every generation, despite the doubters. But Pritchett envisions cultural blending on an unprecedented scale, across societies much less skillful at it. Israel and Palestine, Hutu and Tutsi, Bosnian and Serb the world is not exactly galloping away from the ethnic and nationalist identities that he finds anachronistic. With an Ellis Island heart in a sleeper-cell age, Pritchett is reluctant to consider the possibility that the interests of the West and its would-be migrants could diverge. If you say you believe in open borders, you sound like a lunatic Im aware of that, he says. Im saying lets start slow and let whats already happening happen in a managed way. A hundred years is a long time. We can work it out.
On his last day in rural Nepal, Pritchett hiked down a parched canyon to find another group of earnest villagers awaiting him with a report. Along with buying 55 goats, the Chaurmuni group planted 182 trees and built two toilets. Everything about the gathering seemed familiar, except the groups chairman Gure Sarki whose shirt had such gaping holes they bared his shoulders to the sun. He wore a black knit cap yet shivered in the heat, and a boil-like growth the size of an egg rose from his forehead. For all his striking need, he was ruggedly handsome, as if the great Karmic wheel had reincarnated Clint Eastwood as a Nepali goat farmer. Pritchett and I spent the morning at his house.
Sarki, 52, is an Untouchable whose family had lived in Chaurmuni for at least 100 years. Chronically hungry in his early 20s, he walked nine days to an Indian border town with road-building work. He stayed three years and bought a little land, but returned home after his fathers death at his grieving mothers request. Sarkis half-acre inheritance was too small to feed his children, so he worked for others when he could and borrowed when he had to at the village interest rate of 36 percent. He pointed to a reedy teenage son and boasted that he fed him three daily meals. I would like to eat three times a day, but I am feeding the children, he said. (Pritchett, wincing, whispered, Im almost certain this boy is malnourished.) On one level, the story confirmed Pritchetts view: migration, even to India, had helped Sarki more than anything else. But he did not leave again. I like this place, he said. I have brothers and sisters here. Staying or going each involved pain.
A low-caste, underfed goat farmer, in a place with per capita income of $90 a year, Sarki is global inequality corporealized. He has never seen a bathtub. He has never been to a dentist. He has never owned a pair of glasses and squints to see his feet. He said the boil on his head has been there 30 years. and he did not know what caused it. When I told him the average American lived on about two million rupees a year, $25,000, he laughed as if hearing a fable. That is like a story to us, he said. He thanked us for coming and asked how to do better. Pritchett stammered. What can you say, Be born in America? he said to me. Then speaking through a translator, Pritchett assured Sarki that few Americans could manage with so little. Sarki smiled.
The jeep was quiet as we drove away, as if the sheer abjectness of Sarkis poverty negated the meaning of anything that could be said about it. When we paused at a teahouse an hour later, I asked why Americans should care so what if there are destitute goat farmers on the other side of the world? I dislike arguments that try to give self-interested explanations: We should care because theyll become terrorists, Pritchett said. I think we should care just because theyre human beings. The arc of human history has been the broadening of the scope of moral concern.
Just then the power grid failed, leaving Pritchett in the dark as he recalled a college graduation speech his wifes that urged classmates to meet the gazes of beggars. The poverty of the poor is so desperate, it creates a situation that most of us are incapable of looking in the eye, he said. You dont want to realize theyre human beings just like you. Rich countries have jobs. Poor people need work. In Pritchetts proudly eccentric view, to dwell on anything else is to blink and turn away.
quotes, eh?
