A Development Economist Returns to What He Left Behind

"For decades, Collier immersed himself in the question of what makes poor countries grow, or fail to grow, mostly in Africa. He ran the research group at the World Bank and conducted research on foreign aid, civil wars, and corruption. In 2007, his work found a global audience with "The Bottom Billion," an analysis of why the world's poorest economies were diverging from, rather than catching up with, more prosperous ones."

"Collier, who is seventy-six, is more shambling than imposing. But when he speaks, and especially when he writes, he is forceful and impatient, like someone who fears that his ideas are running out of time. "Divergence breeds despair-and despair breeds anger," he writes, in "Left Behind." By his own admission, Collier's mind operates at a certain altitude: he thinks in terms of demographics and decades, as opposed to news cycles."

A development economist who studied growth and failure in the poorest countries redirected attention to struggling post-industrial English towns, applying lessons from international development to domestic decline. The background includes leadership of a World Bank research group and decades of research on foreign aid, civil wars, and corruption. The work links economic divergence, demographic change, and social despair that can produce political anger. The approach favors decade-scale, demographic-informed policies rather than short news-cycle fixes. The scholar engages directly with communities in towns such as Scunthorpe and conveys urgency about limited time to address entrenched local decline, amid occasional public controversy over language used about Britain’s white population.

Read at The New Yorker