Prelude: An Invitation.

History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which,

as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst

Most well-meaning people want to believe that their actions and charitable contributions somehow serve "to make the world a better place." At Harvard Kennedy School, where I have taught a graduate seminar for more than sixteen years, this objective is explicitly stated as its core mission. Beyond individual efforts, most well-meaning people surely also want to believe that the collective tasks undertaken or sponsored by their governments, civic groups, and favorite charities - whether in poorer countries abroad, or to redress the challenges faced by the less fortunate in their own countries and communities - are helping to "improve" lives, livelihoods, and opportunities. More broadly still, most people have some sense that the steady advance of science, law, technology, communications, human rights, medicine, transportation, and infrastructure have changed the world, mostly "for the better," and that it is desirable that these hard-won advances be made available to everyone. So understood, development is the process by which reason and resources are intentionally deployed, at scale, to enhance human welfare.

The abiding challenge, however, is that there may not be shared agreement on what constitutes "better," and especially how exactly any "improvement" might be brought about; indeed, forging a broadly shared and politically supportable understanding of what counts as legitimate "progress" is itself part of the development process.1 Even where there is general agreement on what constitutes "better," it is extraordinarily difficult - logistically, politically, financially, administratively - to ensure everyone has access to clean water, safe food, comprehensive health care, insurance (of various kinds), quality education, a reliable mail service, affordable energy, and honest business practices. There is surely also broad agreement that everyone should be able to presume they will be physically safe in all places, that public infrastructure will be regularly maintained, that elections will be free and fair, that courts will uphold the rule of law, that the trains will (mostly) run on time, and that one's financial and material assets are secure - though achieving these too is a wondrous accomplishment. So wondrous, in fact, that life for most people most of the time for most of history has not been characterized by these things, even as most readers of this book can confidently take most of them for granted.

In whatever form it takes, however, the attainment of "better" is always a package deal: realizing it inexorably changes other things around it and generates new challenges of its own; if financial or medical resources are routinely squandered in the notional pursuit of improving infrastructure and public health it can lead to cynicism and despair, sometimes even outright tragedy. The development process is thus always fraught, no matter whether it succeeds or fails. Providing a formal education to everyone for at least ten years, for example, where once there was widespread illiteracy, is likely to both expand employment opportunities, promote gender equality, and enhance civic participation; but achieving this goal at scale is also likely to require providing instruction in a majority (usually national) language, thereby making it harder for minority languages and cultures to endure, while requiring minority speakers to do the additional work needed to learn new material in their second (or even third) language. Rising levels of literacy and numeracy are likely to challenge how traditional leaders secure legitimacy, to undermine prevailing dispute resolution procedures, to introduce alternative frameworks for how illness, injury, and crop failure (and misfortunes more generally) are understood, to encourage migration to higher-paying jobs, and to alter longstanding social norms pertaining to gender roles, respect for elders, adherence to religious practices, cultural rituals, and obligations to family.2

Similarly, expanding life expectancy by two decades (e.g., from forty-five to sixty-five years) via widespread improvements in education, nutrition, sanitation, and public health will, over time, likely be accompanied by parents having fewer children and the emergence of a new social category of people ("retirees") requiring pension systems and medical facilities for addressing their distinctive disability and disease profiles. Where once the children of large families directly supported their aging relatives, rising prosperity will mean the two or three children from the smaller family unit are likely to be geographically dispersed, their aging parents now supported by professionals in nursing homes. Where parents may once have determined their children's marriage partners, now - to their deep consternation - they may have little or no say. The same roads that promote travel and trade in goods, medicines, and services can also enable human trafficking and the spread of drugs, weapons, and diseases. We need no reminding that ubiquitous social media has both a very bright and a very dark side. Clearly, economic growth can be the basis of global poverty reduction, yet it can also result in widespread pollution and the spreading of non-biodegradable plastic to the deepest point on the planet (the bottom of the Mariana Trench), justify the destruction of irreplaceable rain forests, and entail using forms and levels of energy consumption that raise average global temperatures, thereby altering weather patterns and decreasing soil fertility, leading to mass migrations by farmers within and across national borders - all generating disruptions experienced most consequentially by those who have contributed least to the problem, and who are in the weakest position to respond.

Raising productivity - the key driver of economic growth - means entire categories of employment and ways of life are inexorably rendered obsolete. One of the most common forms of male employment in nineteenth-century England was being a wheelwright; now there are none, such skills being valiantly sustained only by weekend hobbyists. Historically, it has taken about seventy farmers to feed one hundred people, but in the wealthiest countries it now takes as little as three: in agriculture, "raising productivity" - a first-order development priority - means that, over time, sixty-seven of these seventy farmers and their families will have to find alternative sources of employment; or, most likely, will have little choice but to uproot their lives and disrupt their home communities by seeking "better opportunities" in distant cities, probably (at least initially) in informal squatter settlements. In rich countries today, a steady decline in democracy coupled with rising inequality, political polarization, and an escalation of "deaths of despair" shows that hard-won welfare gains can unravel, that material prosperity, paradoxically perhaps, creates its own wrenching social problems. The nature and scale of these challenges may vary over time and across levels of development; those challenges with technical solutions (such as eradicating polio) may seemingly be solved once and for all, but other problems (how to constrain elite power, how to resolve violent conflict, how to raise children) must keep being addressed anew by each generation, in its own way. In this latter space, "knowledge" rarely accumulates. Humans can now take color photographs of black holes 26,000 light years away by coordinating eight cameras located across the globe . but we continue to struggle, as we always have, with how to get along with each other. "Development" makes rocket science and brain surgery possible; it also creates larger and more complex forms of ancient human problems (world wars, environmental collapse) while opening new opportunities for resolving them (multilateral forums, international law, mediation). Promoting both prosperity and security is the vexing challenge and promise of development (Bates 2021).

In the early twenty-first century, another "paradox of progress" is our apparent predisposition for taking increasingly strident either/or views on contentious policy issues, making it hard to create and protect space for finding nuanced or innovative solutions to development's vexing challenges. Viewing only the unhappy outcomes I've listed above, it is all too easy (and common) to lump them with other social outcomes one finds abhorrent in the world, and to deem them all to be the products of an insidious, all-encompassing "neoliberal" agenda promoted by corporate interests and/or "globalists," for which the solution is the adoption of a "nation first," "post-development," or "end of development" agenda. Similarly, it is equally easy to double down on an "the end justifies the means" stance - a view long articulated to justify slavery and colonialism3 - in which pursuing aggregate rates of economic growth excuses all...