Development needs people who have noble intentions
Development is, to quote an economic cliché, not a linear but a complex and multifaceted process. Embedded in this is an understanding that there will be no gain without failures along the way.
This requires that a country’s administrative and governance architecture, from oversight by the legislature and civil society to auditors, must consider that some efforts at driving economic growth development will not succeed, though they may generate valuable lessons for policymakers. This talks to experimentation, crossing the river by feeling for the stones, in the words of Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping.
SA needs such an approach to deal with its huge development challenges. Of course, all of this is premised on there being a professional and technically proficient civil service and political officebearers who are motivated, not by the desire to steal public resources but by the growth and development of the country.
The Commission on Growth & Development made the point in 2008 that there was “no generic formula” for economic growth and development. This meant each country’s growth and development strategy had to factor in its characteristics and historical experiences. Fast growth that is sustained over a long period required “longterm commitment by a country’s political leaders, a commitment pursued with patience, perseverance and pragmatism”.
Noting that uncertainty would always cast a big shadow over growth and development, the commission said the correct response to uncertainty “is not paralysis but experiment”. Fear of failure should not paralyse governments into doing nothing. This is where the issue of administrative and governance framework comes in. It can be so punitive that it shocks policymakers and administrators into doing nothing for fear of being punished for policy failures.
The commission said governments should test policies and learn quickly from failures. “If they suffer a misstep they should try something else, not plunge ahead or retreat to the shore.
“But these experiments should be cautious. Small ones are usually less damaging should they fail than big ones. Risk management is an important aspect of policy formation in developing countries.”
Living with a manageable level of failure is a defining characteristic of successful private sector entities. US economist Robert Solow, who died last December, stressed this in a 2002 interview with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Solow said his experience in observing industrial research was that even though R&D groups work on problems of interest to their employers they might “come up with something different from what was intended. They may fail where they thought they were going to succeed, and vice versa.
“Nor is it a pure probability thing. Every science has its own internal logic. There are questions you can answer and questions you can’t, and that logic may have very little to do with the economic motive for trying to answer the questions,” said Solow .
Though comparisons of public and private sectors should be done with caution because they differ markedly in many respects, there are valuable lessons to be drawn from how the private sector does some things. Take the pharmaceutical industry.
The US congressional budget office noted in 2021 that developing new drugs is costly and uncertain, with almost 90% not making it past clinical trials.
“Only about 12% of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA),” the budget office said, explaining that development process often took a decade or more. In the decade to 2019 the FDA approved an average of 38 new drugs a year, with a peak of 59 in 2018, the yearly average being 60% higher than the previous decade’s. That would mean that on average 317 drugs a year entered clinical trials, peaking at 491 in 2018.
But you would find there are valuable lessons the pharmaceutical R&D teams draw from the development of drugs that never make it to market. One recent example relates to venom and antivenom specialists who sought to develop a therapeutic antibody for pit viper’s bites. In the last mile they discovered that the antibody did the opposite of what they had hoped. Though disappointing initially, the flaw in their approach, they later reasoned, had helped identify a danger future anti-venom researchers can avoid. So, all was not lost.
Development, with its nonlinear contours, is similar. But successful development needs women and men with noble intentions and the requisite skills to feel for the stones and learn as they move from one stone to the next.