I'm much more worried about the loss, about the waste of effort on ideas.

So we have geniuses, just truly stunning geniuses,

devoting themselves to charity work, as opposed to thinking about development strategy.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

Why are some countries poor and others rich?

What can we do to help poorer countries become more affluent?

And why is it that development economics has taken a wrong turn in the last 20 years,

becoming obsessed with questions about whether this small intervention or that small intervention

might be more effective while missing the big picture about the actual internal changes

that have put countries like China or South Korea or Vietnam on the path to much greater

affluence.

Well, this conversation is all about the fate of billions of people in the world and as you will see,

it is full of interesting and provocative ideas. Land Pritchett is one of the most influential

development economists and also a kind of bettina of the profession. He has taught for many years at the Harvard Kennedy School,

at the Blavatny School in Oxford,

at the School of Public Policy,

at the London School of Economics,

and he's also a co-founder and research director

at Labour Mobility Partnerships.

We talked today about what the basic requirements for economic growth are.

We talked about why GDP per capita is actually an incredibly good predictor of people's well-being

and why criticisms of that metric are often short-sighted. Why political factors, like a competent

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