“Long-distance development policy” by Karthik Tadepalli

It seems to me that we have ended up in a strange equilibrium. With one hand, the Western developed nations are taking actions that have obvious deleterious effects on developing countries... With the other hand, we are trying (or at least purport to be trying) to help developing countries through foreign aid... Probably the strategy that we as the West could be doing, is to not take these actions that are causing harm. That is, we don't need to "fix" anything, but we could stop harming developing countries. —Nathan Nunn, Rethinking Economic Development EAs typically think about development policy through the lens of “interventions that we can implement in poor countries.” The economist Nathan Nunn argues for a different approach: advocating for pro-development policy in rich countries. Rather than just asking for more and better foreign aid from rich countries, this long-distance development policy[1] goes beyond normal aid-based development [...] ---Outline:(01:17) The argument(01:21) Do less harm(05:17) Do some good(06:54) Isn't this just aid advocacy?(07:42) Can we do anything about this?(11:35) Travel visa reforms(13:50) Consumer purchasing power(16:16) Payment processing for remittances(17:53) What would we need to do to make this work?(20:03) ConclusionThe original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 18th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j5um9ZhyDCiDXaDqd/long-distance-development-policy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.