Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Village

Despite its mild tone, that article is a devastating critique of the Millenium Village Project. Everything that is not working was pretty predictable from reading the many people, including Easterly, who have written about development in Africa.

The point that disturbed me the most, because I’ve read it a lot and can’t see how it can be fixed, was the anecdote about how the guy who’d made a lot of money due to the project but was unable to save any due to demands from relatives elsewhere. That kind of communal responsibility is laudable in some ways, and clearly would have been socially beneficial in a subsistence environment, but it pretty much neutralizes incentives to save and invest in favor of current consumption, plus it works as a tax on labor and entrepreneurship. Unless some new religious group or other cultural innovator can import something more like “as you sow, so shall you reap” or an equivalent doctrine more favorable to wealth accumulation, it’s hard to see how places like this can ever get off the ground.