Your post seems to perfectly underline the classic aid critique of drawing too many conclusions from fitting too few facts, but perhaps not in the way you intended
As the original review linked notes, Ferguson’s Anti Politics Machine argues that development economists working on Lesotho in the World Bank drew conclusions from basic statistics and economic theory which they would never have made if they had a wider understanding of Lesotho culture or had at least asked more Lesothans what they wanted. A key example detailed is that Lesothans rarely sold their cattle, which World Bank economists concluded was due to lack of market access, but Ferguson argues is a complete misunderstanding of how Lesothans saw cattle herds (bred as inherited wealth, not a source of income from selling off).
For some reason rather than engage with this detail, you choose to derive your own conclusions from a summary of the same basic facts the World Bank economists based their recommendations on, which happen to include the same conclusions the World Bank economists jumped to: if there’s barely any cattle sales it’s probably a case of needing better access to markets. As you correctly note, this is the sort of analysis people who have completed an introductory microeconomics course (i.e. basically everyone carrying out economic research at the World Bank...) are likely to conduct.
Similarly, the Lesotho government’s privatization of select plots of land that outraged villagers in a culture where land was mostly commonly owned[1] sounds a lot less like something Stalin would approve of and a lot more like a dubious idea that gets signed off by someone who’s very familiar with microeconomic theory of land improvement and has found the evidence of underexploitation of land for crops you propose looking for, but hasn’t considered that the Lesothan government and local people might have other motivations
I’m agnostic about the benefits of the sort of full blown “historical and ethnographic study”, that Ferguson recommends, but it sure beats deriving the ills of complex programs and organizations from a handful of bullet points.
in fairness, this detail isn’t in the original article, though it’s not exactly an obscure detail you wouldn’t expect anyone positing land reform as the real problem to have found out...
You wrote about “this suggests a profitable investment scheme in which an outside investor either lends the Lesothans the money to feed their cattle adequately, or buys or rents the cattle, feeds them optimally, and gets more out of them than the Lesothans otherwise would” which sounds a lot like trying to create markets to me. The World Bank also tried creating profitable markets for cattle and cattle field and educating farmers to get more out of them than they otherwise would. According to Ferguson, this was a mistake because the Lesothans had no desire to market their cattle, and much more realistic routes to boost their income than trying to maximize milk yields.
(he also argued the same thing about crop sales; it was supplementary food they had little intention of selling)
My understanding of the term “privatization” is that it generally refers to the voluntary sale of state assets, by the state. That doesn’t seem like quite the same thing as the state expropriating and possibly selling assets that were previously understood to be owned and administered by some smaller community within the state. Am I missing some important detail here?
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.
Your post seems to perfectly underline the classic aid critique of drawing too many conclusions from fitting too few facts, but perhaps not in the way you intended
As the original review linked notes, Ferguson’s Anti Politics Machine argues that development economists working on Lesotho in the World Bank drew conclusions from basic statistics and economic theory which they would never have made if they had a wider understanding of Lesotho culture or had at least asked more Lesothans what they wanted. A key example detailed is that Lesothans rarely sold their cattle, which World Bank economists concluded was due to lack of market access, but Ferguson argues is a complete misunderstanding of how Lesothans saw cattle herds (bred as inherited wealth, not a source of income from selling off).
For some reason rather than engage with this detail, you choose to derive your own conclusions from a summary of the same basic facts the World Bank economists based their recommendations on, which happen to include the same conclusions the World Bank economists jumped to: if there’s barely any cattle sales it’s probably a case of needing better access to markets. As you correctly note, this is the sort of analysis people who have completed an introductory microeconomics course (i.e. basically everyone carrying out economic research at the World Bank...) are likely to conduct.
Similarly, the Lesotho government’s privatization of select plots of land that outraged villagers in a culture where land was mostly commonly owned[1] sounds a lot less like something Stalin would approve of and a lot more like a dubious idea that gets signed off by someone who’s very familiar with microeconomic theory of land improvement and has found the evidence of underexploitation of land for crops you propose looking for, but hasn’t considered that the Lesothan government and local people might have other motivations
I’m agnostic about the benefits of the sort of full blown “historical and ethnographic study”, that Ferguson recommends, but it sure beats deriving the ills of complex programs and organizations from a handful of bullet points.
in fairness, this detail isn’t in the original article, though it’s not exactly an obscure detail you wouldn’t expect anyone positing land reform as the real problem to have found out...
I don’t think I stated or drew this conclusion. You might be confusing it with the bit about crop sales.
You wrote about “this suggests a profitable investment scheme in which an outside investor either lends the Lesothans the money to feed their cattle adequately, or buys or rents the cattle, feeds them optimally, and gets more out of them than the Lesothans otherwise would” which sounds a lot like trying to create markets to me. The World Bank also tried creating profitable markets for cattle and cattle field and educating farmers to get more out of them than they otherwise would. According to Ferguson, this was a mistake because the Lesothans had no desire to market their cattle, and much more realistic routes to boost their income than trying to maximize milk yields.
(he also argued the same thing about crop sales; it was supplementary food they had little intention of selling)
My understanding of the term “privatization” is that it generally refers to the voluntary sale of state assets, by the state. That doesn’t seem like quite the same thing as the state expropriating and possibly selling assets that were previously understood to be owned and administered by some smaller community within the state. Am I missing some important detail here?
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.