A Conference Call with CFR: What Students Are Asking

Today with Francis Fukuyama, I participated in a Council on Foreign Relations “Academic Conference Call” (listen here) with undergraduate and graduate students from over 40 universities.  We answered questions about our March/April Foreign Affairs article, The Post-Washington Consensus: Development after the Crisis.  (The article is based on a book due out any day now from Johns Hopkins University Press:  New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis).We had time for at least a dozen questions – on trade, on the shift at the IMF on capital flows (what Arvind Subramanian calls in his essay in the book the foreign finance fetish), on “where Africa fits in” and on state-building in fragile states (see Lant Pritchett’s paper here on capability traps),  on social policies and inequality in Latin America, on global imbalances and lessons from successful developing countries for the United States, on social spending and economic development, and on China as a model (or not) for other nations.For those who want to know more about how ideas on development strategy are changing, and how the financial crisis influenced them, the book is a gold mine.  My introductory chapter, titled ‘The Global Financial Crisis: The Beginning of the End of the “Development” Agenda?’ can be read here.