Idea du jour from Sunday’s New York Times:
Pritchett, a development economist and practiced iconoclast, has just left the World Bank to teach at Harvard and to help Google plan its philanthropic efforts on global poverty. In a recent trip through Chaurmuni, he praised the goats as community-driven development at its best: a fast, flexible way of delivering tangible aid to the poor. “But Nepal isn’t going to goat its way out of poverty,” he said. Nor does he think that as a small, landlocked country Nepal can soon prosper through trade.
To those standard solutions, trade and aid, Pritchett would add a third: a big upset-the-applecart idea, equally offensive to the left and the right. He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. Never mind the goats; if you really want to help Gure Sarki, he says, let him cut your lawn. [...] If goods and money can travel, why can’t workers follow? What’s so special about borders?
The economist profiled in the article advocates a guest-worker program as a tool to ease poverty in underdeveloped parts of the world. For example, in Nepal, there has been growth in the national GDP and improvements to a few families’ lives arising from remittances received from Nepalese who get jobs in India, and send back parts of their paychecks. Consider the benefit if more Nepalese who wanted to go abroad to work actually had a place to go to and be employed.
I like the idea in principle. However, I doubt (in the U.S.’s case) that the xenophobes in Washington would even consider anything remotely like toleration to an idea such as this.