I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
We say necessity is the mother of invention, but false necessity is the mother of stupid inventions.
There seems to be an unstoppable march toward the automation of work,
from checkout at the supermarket to the seemingly limitless possibilities of chat GBT to much else.
But Lant Pritchett, a development economist,
argues in a new piece for foreign affairs that none of this is inevitable.
In fact, it reflects a policy failure that is needlessly driving up poverty across the globe.
Instead of handing jobs over to robots, Pritchett argues,
rich countries should lift the barriers to migration.
Put simply, choosing devices over people is a mistake.
Lance, thank you for doing this and for the powerful essay in our current issue.
Thanks for inviting me.
I think you're fairly unique among development economists in the focus you put on migration.
What was your path to that focus?
Tell me a bit about your path through development economics and how you came to see migration is so central to these questions.
So it gradually dawned on me that in the design of development organizations at its foundations in the 1950s and 60s,
We had a fundamentally wrong model of what was going to happen.
The vision was once these countries were newly freed of colonial powers and could guide their own destiny,
the existing economic model of the time is something called the solo model named after Bob Solo.
It assumed that your level of output was factors and technology,