among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition
forcing them to do so. Third, authoritarian growth is neither
desirable nor viable in the long run, and thus should not
receive the endorsement of the international community as
a template for nations in Latin America, Asia, and sub-
Saharan Africa, even if it is a path that many nations will
choose precisely because it is sometimes consistent with
the interests of the economic and political elites dominating
them.
Y OU C AN’T E NGINEER P ROSPERITY
Unlike the theory we have developed in this book, the
ignorance hypothesis comes readily with a suggestion
about how to “solve” the problem of poverty: if ignorance
got us here, enlightening and informing rulers and
policymakers can get us out, and we should be able to
“engineer” prosperity around the world by providing the
right advice and by convincing politicians of what is good
economics. In chapter 2, when we discussed this
hypothesis, we showed how the experience of Ghana’s
prime minister Kofi Busia in the early 1970s underscored
the fact that the main obstacle to the adoption of policies
that would reduce market failures and encourage economic
growth is not the ignorance of politicians, but the incentives
and constraints they face from the political and economic
institutions in their societies. Nevertheless, the ignorance
hypothesis still rules supreme in Western policymaking
circles, which, almost to the exclusion of anything else,
focus on how to engineer prosperity.
These engineering attempts come in two flavors. The
first, often advocated by international organizations such as
the International Monetary Fund, recognizes that poor
development is caused by bad economic policies and
institutions, and then proposes a list of improvements these
international organizations attempt to induce poor countries
to adopt. (The Washington consensus makes up one such
list.) These improvements focus on sensible things such as
macroeconomic stability and seemingly attractive
macroeconomic goals such as a reduction in the size of the
government sector, flexible exchange rates, and capital
account liberalization. They also focus on more