'Billions of people are forced to sell their labour at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders' (p. Multiple studies estimate free travel of labour would lead to a doubling of the worldwide economy. 216), from goods to stocks to information. But with the advent of war it became very important to know where someone 'belonged.' 'Oddly though, the world is wide open to everything but people' (p. Until World War 1, borders were rarely enforced and passports rarely issued. But there is an even bigger picture, and an even better way to both tackle poverty and grow the economy of wealthy nations: Open Borders. 'The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid' (p. 213), and we shouldn't lose track of where the biggest gains can be made. 'Major dilemmas such as how to structure a democracy or what a country needs to prosper can't be answered by an RCT' (p. Of course, there is only so much that developmental aid can do. However, since developmental aid is limited, there will always be unfunded areas to compare with. Of course, not all factors can be measured or tested in an RCT, sometimes due to ethical concerns about withholding aid/treatment. While economists like to work with models of humans that are perfectly rational actors, the randomistas prefer to find out what humans actually do. The researchers in this field, nicknamed 'randomistas,' want to take the intuitive thinking out of developmental aid and replace it with actual data. 207), and it has since turned out many of our intuitions about aid are wrong. 'he first RCT of foreign development aid didn't happen until 1998' (p. In an RCT, researchers look at a group receiving the type of aid in question and compare that to a group receiving no aid. The gold standard for testing efficacy, in this field as well as in medicine, is the Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). MIT professor Esther Duflo is one of the first to actually do research into the efficacy of aid programs. 204), but until recently there was no research into which types of aid were actually effective.

Not only did the World Bank find out that '85 % of all Western aid in the twentieth century was used differently than intended,' (p. It's still a lot of money, but we actually don't know if that money has been useful. the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost about the same' (p. 'Over the past fifty years, that brings us to a grand total of almost $5 trillion. When tallied together, developed nations spend over $130 million per year on developmental aid. Chapter 9, Beyond the Gates of the Land of Plenty

Bregman utopia for realists