Informal Response 3: Owen Barder, “Development and Complexity”

1. How does Owen Barder define development? How does he extend Amartya Sen’s definition to include the idea of complexity? Development is undeniably a difficult thing to define in simple terms. Both Owen Barder and Amartya Sen recognize this fact, and both include significant data and examples to back up their respective interpretations of the phenomenon. Sen’s understanding of development includes five specific factors that contribute to human wellbeing: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Barder extends this idea of development to include the concept of graduated progress through complex relations, linking together each individual freedom discussed by Sen. Beyond economic flourishing, Barder argues that interdependent success in all aspects of human development contribute to true social health. Barder’s definition of development thus relies on the idea of connected systems that contribute to each other’s respective growth.

2. What was the toaster project? What did Thomas Thwaites attempt to do? Was he successful? What is the significance of this example in the context of complexity? Thomas Thwaites was a British university student who attempted to create a toaster from scratch, using only self-produced or independently obtained parts. In order to accomplish this seemingly simple feat, he deconstructed an existing, working toaster, replicated each part to the best of his ability, and put together the reconstructed parts. After turning on, the toaster – duplicated in exact measure and with extreme care – managed to work for around five seconds before exploding in a demonstration of absolute failure. Clearly, Thwaites did not succeed in building a toaster, but he did make a fair point about complexity in the context of human development in the process. Thwaites’ project highlights the importance of understanding interdependence and the relationships between, not just the properties of, individual parts. Since he had no formal electrical engineering training or the efficiency of a mechanized factory line worker, Thwaites spent a lot of unnecessary time attempting to create a device that was only superficially viable. Applying this exercise to development demonstrates the importance of deep learning and understanding as it relates to inherent complexity. Like many development projects funded by outside sources with little knowledge of the intricacies of a low-middle-income country (LMIC), Thwaites’ toaster-building experiment resulted in something that appeared to work on the outside, but short-circuited (literally) internally due to his misunderstanding of the interconnectivity of the parts he used.

3. According to Barder, how successful have economic models been at describing and predicting growth over the past 50 years? There have been a number of models that have claimed to “perfectly” encapsulate the solution to economic flourishing over the past 50 years. Many of them – in fact, most of them, if not all – have failed in application. Barder discusses several of these models in his podcast, beginning chronologically with the Harrod-Domar model. Developed in the mid-1900s, the Harrod-Domar model relied on the fundamental variables of capitol and labor to explain financial growth and development. According to this model, proportional amounts of capital and labor were all that was necessary to achieve fiscal flourishing, incorrectly assuming that LMICs that lagged behind their financial competitors on the global stage simply lacked the capital to do so, or else labor, and subsequently, growth, would have been achieved. This model entirely ignored covariates of human wellbeing that contemporary development experts like Amartya Sen now recognize as vital to the process, such as social welfare. Similar models, such as Robert Solow’s, included an unidentified “magic ingredient” besides labor and capital, but failed to explain what exactly made some countries, and not others, develop. The Rostow model of the 1960s included more complexity in its explanation of development, proposing that a “virtuous cycle” of development could be accomplished by investing in capital, which would produce output, and then incomes, which would result in excess savings, which could be concentrically invested as the cycle began again. Rostow’s model relied on a snowball effect to create development, but in countries where this “snowball” refused to roll, the impacts of technological investment and intangible freedoms like political engagement were again ignored by theory. Barder uses these historical examples to demonstrate the fallibility of modelling development.

4. Who was Steve Jones? What did he do at uni-lever? Was he successful? How significant were his results? Steve Jones was an engineer who worked at Uni-Lever, a soup-dust production company. He sought to make a more efficient and less wasteful dispenser for Uni-Lever’s primary product, and ended up producing a source of huge profit for the company through a series of randomized experiments testing the ratio between different materials. The results of experimentation and his subsequent success are extremely significant in the context of development, as they represent the high value of randomness on the growth of a country’s economy and its population’s contingent wellbeing.

5. What is a complex adaptive system? What are some of its important features? Barder describes a complex adaptive system as a rich set of interactions between many adaptive agents. These agents include unpredictability, broad applicability, positive external influences, tendency towards complexity, and a variance from equilibrium. The increase in technological integration within modern society can be thought of as a result of a complex adaptive system, with people, institutions, raw inspiration, and the free market all acting as co-evolutionary catalysts for change.

6. *Who was Haile Sellasie? According to Barder (and Kapuscinski), how did Ethiopia during the time of The Emperor exemplify the suppression of emergent systemic change? * Haile Sellasie was a ruler of Ethiopia whose luxuriant lifestyle was detailed in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book, The Emperor. According to the interpretation of Kapuscinski, Sellasie’s story and long-lasting legacy in Ethiopia represent the impact of early-onset stratification in developing countries. Delegating valuable resources to a select few creates severe poverty for the rest of the population, a trend which can dominate the future of an entire country. This system of elitism suppresses the economic growth of nations as a whole by strictly delineating between classes and negating the potential of systemic change for the benefit of a wealthy few.

7. Why does Barder recommend resisting engineering as a policy implication? What did he mean by iso-morphic mimicry? Barder recommends resisting engineering as a policy implication because it fails to predict the non-linear dynamics of progress and development. Instead, he suggests organic adaptation as a means of achieving growth in the face of emerging phenomena in order to construct new, self-organizing, complex adaptive systems. Isomorphic mimicry is a term used by Barder to describe the shortcomings of engineered, linear systems of development, which create development “solutions” and models that adopt the appearance of effectiveness rather than implement truly effective techniques for the furthering of human wellbeing. Barder’s analysis of unfulfilled donor promises and their impacts on infrastructure in LMICs, such as those encouraged by the misguided policies that came about after the Washington Consensus.

8. What does Barder mean by “resist fatalism”? Who was Norman Borlaug and what is the Green Revolution? Barder discourages his listeners from accepting the current state of the world as an indication of the finality of processes, especially the process of development, by advising them to “resist fatalism.” Through the power of adaptation, something which Barder argues is already built into our society as a complex adaptive system, detrimental circumstances hindering the development of LMICs can be addressed. He references Norman Borlaug, who sparked the Green Revolution by cross-breeding wheat to create a heartier and more disease- and weather-resistant strain of the crop, as an example of the power of human-induced evolution. Borlaug’s actions allowed for the birth of what is known as the “Third Agricultural Revolution,” or Green Revolution, which has allowed developing countries across the world to increase the crop outputs through the use of easily-accessible technology, fertilizers, pesticides, and bio-engineered crops.