Duncan Green Quotes
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Often we're having an argument with something imaginary - a fixed idea of the "enemy" and the good. We need to get beyond that and actually develop a deep curiosity about people and systems and understand them better.
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You have a huge number of people who spend their time writing papers which show that migrants pay more to the country than they take out in benefits, and they say, "Why don't you approve of migration? Why don't you open up borders?" They're not able to empathize with how people feel about migration.
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We should look at how "the enemy" - people that you wouldn't necessarily agree with - have done change and see whether there's bits in there that we could learn from.
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I sound like a church nut, but look at the role of the churches in the civil rights movement in the States. People are brought together in other ways that can become drivers of change.
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People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.
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In the end, that's a blind alley - we have to get back to being able to think on our feet and react.
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The post-Second World War simple system of social democracy and organized labour has fragmented massively, but just because people aren't organized in workplace trade unions doesn't mean they aren't in associations with other people - work-based, place-based, culture-based, sport-based, faith-based - there's a bit of an old rainbow coalition argument.
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The question, "When did you last listen to a poor person properly and try to understand what's going on inside their own experience?" enables you to connect.
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I have to be sure of myself - in a conditional way, always being open to the possibility that I'm wrong.
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Floundering around, learning by doing but also by failing, is not only good but inevitable.
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If you were disabled in Russia, you had to re-register every year, and it took up to six months to re-register, so people who lost limbs in Afghanistan had to prove that their leg hadn't grown back.
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Activists can get very preachy about things. It's more about understanding people's own experiences and tapping into them.
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I see [activists] getting really angry that people won't just do what the evidence tells them, and that's not very helpful. You need to actually think why that is.
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There's no point in just hankering for the big trade unions of the 1950s or '60s.
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Lots of people in the open system are very determined to try and strengthen evidence-based policy.
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When you get talking to people in positions of power, you find that often their worldview is framed either in terms of their disciplinary studies at university and/or the country where they first got interest in development.
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The death of deference seems to be general at the moment, so everybody has to earn their reputation and trust all over again. You don't just get it by virtue of being a professor or a politician or anybody else.
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There's a diversion between economic reality - integration, global village, everybody depending on everybody else - and cultural reality, which is people feeling invaded, undermined, threatened, wanting to have "stand-your-ground" legislation all over the place. It's alarming because at the moment, the fear is outweighing the benefits, and that's partially because the benefits have been so unequally distributed that lots of people don't feel better off. They feel threatened, angry and despairing.
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Somewhere like Russia or China, decision-makers have far fewer constraints on acting than in more open systems.
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Some kinds of activists are more willing to try stuff out, see if works and think on their feet, but some of the people who are working on [change] find that very difficult: They've been schooled into thinking you have to come up with the perfect plan in advance. It has become a bit technocratic.
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In any system, there will be change happening without you.
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I keep coming back to the phrase "Dance with the system" - not just march onwards no matter what happens.
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There are always pressures on decision-makers other than just what is right or what is wrong.
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People are saying, "I have a right to my opinion. Don't just keep condescending, telling me what to think." There's something slightly liberating about that, but also it lends itself to being taken advantage of, because in come the demagogues.
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When we do work in places like China and Vietnam, research tends to be really effective as a way of getting change, whereas in more open places, mobilization and the creation of public pressure through the media often seem to be the things we try.
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Until you have looked in depth at the system and found out where women in Egypt are not being cut through female genital mutilation, or where kids in Vietnam are not malnourished, or where hospitals in America are getting rid of the superbugs anyway - unless you have that level of curiosity about what's going on without you, you will always come in with your great new recipe and just ignore what's going on, and that will make you much less effective at what you're trying to achieve.
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Economists who studied in the '80s tend to have a pretty crude neoclassical view that's just about freeing up prices and markets, and then you'll get the growth and everybody benefits. And they'll just repeat that, because if you're a minister or a senior civil servant, you don't have time to read anything anymore. You get very fixed in your views.
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The magic formula is there is no magic formula.
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What you don't do is just say, "I've got all the ideas and all the knowledge, and listen to me."
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There's a tendency for people who believe passionately in something to be so convinced of their rightness that if they just repeat themselves a lot at the person, that will convince them. And that hasn't worked on things like immigration or trade deals.
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