Sunday, April 6, 2008

World Bank: Fifty Years of Failure?


Dr. Benjamin Powell, Director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute and assistant professor of Economics at San Jose State University

World Bank prediction on Burma, in 1958;
"made remarkable economic progress...[its] long-run potential compares favorably with those of other countries in South East Asia."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

What's your point? Burma *was* doing well until the military coup in 1962.
Do you expect the World Bank to be prescient about something like that?

Or, to put it differently, tell us the expected future for China. Is it vast further growth building on the past successes, or does it all end in tears with a hardliner takeover of the government in five years?

The World Bank has certainly been responsible for failures over the last fifty years but the bottom line is that failure was inevitable because of population growth. Pretty much every one of the countries targeted by the World Bank has grown its economy over the last fifty years, but has pissed away that growth just as Malthus told us would happen by having ever more kids.

You can rail against the Bank for not making more of a racket about this, but you can't blame it for the endless line of idiots responsible for this behavior, starting with the Pope, and his muslim and protestant counterparts, going on to the leaders of these countries who have set the example of generally having four kids or more, all the way to the standard syrupy crap pumped out by most entertainment organizations, Western and otherwise, that are always going on about the happy arrival of a new child on TV and in movies.