Good law destroys rule of law

That’s how Lant Pritchett phrases expecting too much of your state agents — bureaucrats, police, tax collectors etc. You can see the talk here (it’s super entertaining, as always). I’ll call them “bad good laws”.

The thesis being that transplanting best practices from high capability states (Denmark, for example) into low-capability states (Egypt, for example) decreases the likelihood of what you want to achieve through the law. A hilarious example he provides is that of implementing a monitoring system for nurses in India to reduce absenteeism. While the number of days that nurses are absent went down, the number of days they are exempt from being on the premises rose sharply — effectively increasing absenteeism compared to before the intervention.

I propose a corollary — the more Pritchett’s rule holds, the greater the capture of lawmaking by people who have spent more than half their lives at a desk. Please @ me.

In the case of India, this largely means improving human capital (how? we don’t really know but we can experiment) to improve execution of laws that are already on the books. There are no big bang reforms — there’s only improving delivery. As a first step, this involves increasing the size of the government since it’s woefully understaffed (don’t listen to the libertarians). I’m puzzled by the consistent shortfalls in recruitment given the large number of unemployed, educated folks. It is likely that they bring no skills commensurate with their degrees but since most of the training happens on the job, it is worth testing if they can be groomed into their roles once hired.

Lastly, keep in mind that it is possible to have “imperfect” rule of law and still achieve tremendous growth in certain circumstances. Chang-Tai Hsieh describes how China does it here and in greater detail here. This ties into what Pritchett recommends at the end (this is slightly meta)— ignore outsiders who provide “best practice” solutions and figure out what works best for you.