Individuals within communities didn’t own the land, there were customary rights to use it as a commons, generally apportioned at the whim of a local chief. The Lesothan government’s proposals were [at least superficially] compatible with orthodox microeconomic theory that the land would yield more if portions of it were fenced off and intensively farmed by land-owning individuals or corporations, and to the limited extend that land titles actually existed in Lesotho, the government and their favoured chiefs were entitled to put fences around valuable portions and develop, lease or sell it to people with the means to exploit it. Lesothans who customarily grazed cattle or collected reeds from those portions of land before nominal landowners fenced it off obviously felt differently.
The process probably resembled the enclosure of common land in 18th century Great Britain more than privatization of state-owned industries (also commonly recommended by the World Bank), but it certainly had far more to do with putting land into private ownership than Stalinist collectivization. There’s not much doubt that the government of the time was authoritarian and that its process for allocating land was corrupt, but it was fundamentally driven by the market logic that privately owned land would see more capital investment and higher yields. Ferguson wasn’t accusing the World Bank of paying too little attention to “ideas that would occur to anyone who understood the content of introductory college-level courses in microeconomics and finance”, he was accusing them of not understanding anything else.
Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I’d say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I’m trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of—treating them as stage 1 simulacra—and, on the other hand, treating those theories as stage 3 simulacra, a bad-faith substitute for interpreting one’s environment that serves to entitle one’s identity to false credit and the concomitant extraction of resources from less entitled groups. The former attitude would reason from evidence of inefficiency, to predictions about profitable deals one could strike with the locals. The latter would lead to the sort of thing that actually happened. This us approximately the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism.
Individuals within communities didn’t own the land, there were customary rights to use it as a commons, generally apportioned at the whim of a local chief. The Lesothan government’s proposals were [at least superficially] compatible with orthodox microeconomic theory that the land would yield more if portions of it were fenced off and intensively farmed by land-owning individuals or corporations, and to the limited extend that land titles actually existed in Lesotho, the government and their favoured chiefs were entitled to put fences around valuable portions and develop, lease or sell it to people with the means to exploit it. Lesothans who customarily grazed cattle or collected reeds from those portions of land before nominal landowners fenced it off obviously felt differently.
The process probably resembled the enclosure of common land in 18th century Great Britain more than privatization of state-owned industries (also commonly recommended by the World Bank), but it certainly had far more to do with putting land into private ownership than Stalinist collectivization. There’s not much doubt that the government of the time was authoritarian and that its process for allocating land was corrupt, but it was fundamentally driven by the market logic that privately owned land would see more capital investment and higher yields. Ferguson wasn’t accusing the World Bank of paying too little attention to “ideas that would occur to anyone who understood the content of introductory college-level courses in microeconomics and finance”, he was accusing them of not understanding anything else.
Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I’d say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I’m trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of—treating them as stage 1 simulacra—and, on the other hand, treating those theories as stage 3 simulacra, a bad-faith substitute for interpreting one’s environment that serves to entitle one’s identity to false credit and the concomitant extraction of resources from less entitled groups. The former attitude would reason from evidence of inefficiency, to predictions about profitable deals one could strike with the locals. The latter would lead to the sort of thing that actually happened. This us approximately the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism.