This is the Kewa Daily Podcast for Friday, March 25th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

As a developed world attempts to help other countries achieve higher

levels of economic development,

institutions of the developed world fail to effectively account for local

culture and local institutions when they're delivering aid. Valuing people as agents of self-government

as ends unto themselves is essential to that process.

Matt Warner is co-author of Development with Dignity.

We spoke earlier this month.

We have a specific reason for bringing this up, but when we talk about foreign aid, when we talk

about people living their best lives, what do we mean when we talk about dignity? I think what's useful about the term dignity in addition to measures of economic success

or even measures of freedom, which are obviously both very important,

is dignity helps us understand that there is something about each

individual that has value for the system, and that value is that no one knows better than the individual what their

tradeoffs are and what their preferences are and how they're going to how those

things are going to influence the way they behave.

And so that data, if you're trying to solve for human flourishing,

that data has to be accounted for in the model.

So when we talk about human dignity, it helps us rethink traditional economic

development approaches so that we are making sure we have a model that accommodates the individual agency of every person.

All right, so that seems hyper-local.

Yes, it is.

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