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comment by deepflows
deepflows  ·  3207 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools.

There would be plenty of ways to do good. Those just involve less invading the place and more implementation of policy actually designed to help. But that's boring and there isn't as much profit in it, so why bother.





johu  ·  3207 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I agree that good policy would help. But how do you make good policy happen in a place like that? The institutions themselves and many of the people that fill them all have strong incentives towards corruption; that's a big point of this article. Aside from long term occupation and incorporation of the population in foreign institutions, like the British in India, how might we make institutional change happen? What if they don't want it?

I'm only saying that there is a point to be made that if the implementation of policy designed to help comes from a foreign source, and we want the policy to actually be followed, the force element still has to be there on the ground. And even then, as this article shows, it can be an abject failure.