Reflection on “Development and Complexity” by Owen Barder

1) Amartya sen defines development as enlarging people’s choices, freedoms, and capabilities so they can have access to knowledge, live a long healthy life and participate in their community. This concept is supported by Owen Barder who expands on this notion. Owen argues we should think of development as property of the economic and social system itself. The economy is made up of adaptive firms, individuals, and institutions. It behaves like a complex adaptive system. Owen explains that development is a property of the system as a whole. Thus he explains that this is an emergence of self organized complexity.

2) Thomas Thwaites attempted to make an electric toaster from scratch. He bought the cheapest toaster in a store, disassembled it, and tried to replicate the complex system that it was. The project took nine months and was high cost. When he turned the toaster on, it worked for five seconds before the machinery burst into flames. Thomas’ goal was somewhat of a success in his books. Building simple things is hard. Own explains that the economy has to be rich to supply all of these individual parts. In regards to the bigger picture, development is not an increase in output by an individual/firm. It’s an emergence of a system using legal, political…etc institutions that offers citizens an opportunity for well being, good lives, freedoms.

3) The last 50 years have seen the most success in terms of economic development. The neon capital growth model offered technical change on top of capital and labor as a way to model output (added onto the conventional economic model). But the technical change has gone unanswered almost like an unknown ingredient. Economists didn’t know why it made a difference. Was the ingredient capital, technology, policies, institutions, or better politics maybe? According to barder, the past 50 years has seen economic success but there has been no accurate economic model. Economists argue models describe the potential of firms/institutions and that was why there has been some ambiguity and inaccurate measures.

4) Steve Jones, an employee at uni-lever, worked on the problem facing the company at the time: perfecting the soap nozzle. Other workers were attempting designs of new nozzles without the errors of the prior one. But what Steve Jones did was that he took the old nozzle and randomly manipulated it into different conformations. His design worked! It was hundreds of times more efficient than the other nozzle designs. Owen uses this example to emphasize the point that every complex system is an adaptation and starts with failure.

5) People adapt to changes in circumstances. People, products, institutions, and industries all adapt together and coevolve. An increase in technology and online shopping for example has hurt local shops. This change in environment affects how people then live and spend leisure time. This shift in how people live can then in turn lead to directed change in regards to public policy. Owen uses this as a prime example for what a complex adaptive system really is. Firms, institutions, and individuals all adapt like such. These systems are difficult to predict (butterfly effect), tend toward greater complexity, do not tend towards equilibrium, have emergent properties, and we can make general assumptions about them based on past patterns.

6) Haile Selassie was once the emperor of Ethiopia. In Kapachinsky’s The Emperor, the political state of Ethiopia is discussed. All orders came from the emperor in a top down manner. Fear was at a high level. It was even dangerous to tell the emperor about poverty/starvation around Ethiopia. Regimes started to rise up and this extracted economic value from the population and restricted the notion of an inclusive society. Owen brings up the variation on resource curse and how the elite wealthy dominated society. For example if a nation has oil/natural resources, the powerful elites can use this as an asset to maintain power. It was corruption, and Owen claims there was no stesemic change or development.

7) Regarding policy, Owen concludes that it’s difficult to engineer a solution in a complex adaptive system. This is because often evolutionary processes outperform design. Progress and development are neither linear nor predictable. These characteristics make engineering very hard. With poor developing countries, what’s been happening is aid reformers stop by and tell them that they need radical change in one of their institutions. This solution could work, right? Well it doesn’t. These revamped institutions may fail to connect to its environment. This is isomorphic mimicry and it appears more dangerous than it really is. Owen uses an example to summarize this situation. He says that it’s easier to create an institution that looks like the police force rather than an institution that enforces the law.

8) Own Barding emphasizes that we must resist fatalism. We don’t need to accept the pure result that stems from coevolution. We can accept it but we may also shape/accelerate it for progress and development. For example, Norman Borlaug crossbred wheat crops (made them disease resistant) to improve yield and prevent starvation. He caused a rapid increase in agricultural production in what became known as “the Green Revolution”.