Composing a TED Talk

Karl T. Muth discusses how he decided on a TED Talk topic.

In a Twitter “conversation” with Bill Easterly earlier this week, people replied to Easterly’s criticism of what is now decades of what I have termed “inno-ventionism,” the contention that innovations from the developed world will make enormous differences in not only the quality of life, but the economic productivity, of people in the developing world. People replying to the Twitter thread, which can be found here, [Twitter], tossed out various examples from the $100 laptop to the cook stoves to the solar gadgets. I offered my personal favourite, the PlayPump, a poorly-conceived piece of playground equipment that used power from children playing on a carousel to pump water to the village (unsurprisingly, a stream of adults ended up having to “play” on the carousel after the children got bored of the device). The PlayPump quickly became a punchline in international development circles.

I was asked to give a TED Talk, and that presentation is now only three days away. Unlike some other speakers, I was allowed a very wide intellectual range. Should I speak on law, on finance, on economics, on development, on my recent research, on underappreciated important research from others? I decided to speak on development and, specifically, the tragedy of the last thirty years of overly interventionist, paternalistic “standardisation” of development.

Inno-ventionism is only part of the problem. The root of the problem is that the developed world is full of answers looking for questions, and the matchmaking process this invites is treacherous. Because this matchmaking relies on identifying similarities (mobile banking worked well in Kenya, maybe it’ll work in twenty other countries that look sort of like Kenya), similarities are overestimated and differences are underappreciated. This is true in development economics, but even more true in development policy and in development politics.

It results in an industry-wide (and let’s not pretend international development is anything other than an industry) bias toward sameness, including seeing sameness where there is none.

The differences between countries are vast and the sample size is small.

Think of the planets in our solar system and how different they are. Just as there might be other planets in the universe that we will someday visit and learn more about, right now we only have a lot of good information about the planets in our neighbourhood. And what we know so far suggests enormous diversity.

Similarly, if we look at the countries that became upper-middle-income countries after WWII and went on to become high income countries, there are only nine. These nine are as different as the planets in our solar system, with only tenuous parallels between them. For instance, the five Asian countries among the nine have very different stories from each other.

For the developed world to assert that low GDPPP is a disease and that the G7, G8, or G20 have a cure (a “growth serum” as it were) to solve this is simply false. Such a “disease-and-cure” approach misrepresents the nature of the problem it aims to solve and trivialises what are very real differences between countries in various geographies, political scenarios, and stages of economic development. The “treatment” analogy is deeply flawed, both epidemiologically and epistemologically.

There are few things more maddening than the "one size fits all" approach to development that so many have adopted in their attitudes, advising, and even advertising to the developing world. Until we appreciate the diversity of other nations and peoples as a “feature” and not a “bug,” we will never understand how to help them, or how to better ourselves.

And I thought that’d be as good a topic for a TED lecture as any.

Karl T. Muth delivered his TED Talk at the TEDx event in San José, Costa Rica in October.