This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Saturday, March 23rd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown. Development economics has itself developed in recent years,

according to new president of the Atlas Network

Matt Warner. He says some clear targets for those who work in development now more

prominently include strong institutions like property rights and economic freedom.

We spoke recently about ill-fated attempts at foreign aid and how to tackle the so-called

Outsider's dilemma.

How has the mainstream of development economics changed over the last couple of decades?

I mean, the Cato Institute handed out its first Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Peter Bauer who you know really at least burned into my mind the idea of

the economic development as options, not as big factories churning out stuff.

Right. Well, yeah, starting with his dissent on development, I mean things really sort of picking up you know steam about 20 years ago

where people started questioning the efficacy of what we've been doing since the Marshall Plan.

And what's really interesting right now is that you have, you know, a lot of mainstream people who are taking seriously the question of how successful can we be if we're paternalistic about this, if we're technocratic about this, you know, an

economy is a complex adaptive system. If you apply kind of a very simple linear

solution to it, you know you're not going to really be able to predict what's going to happen and that's

what we've seen with a lot of of traditional approaches to development.

So in 08 and then since then there's been some different resolutions that

have had complete buy-in across the globe about how aid needs to get much more sensitive to local priorities, local

vision for change, but of course that can only go so far as an intellectual

exercise because if

governments and aid agencies are the

inherently the center of your strategy

...