Download This PaperWorld Development Report 2015: Programming the Poor
The Multilateral Development Banks and the Global Financial Crisis Working Papers Series, No, 7, Southeast Asian Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong
13 Pages Posted: 26 Dec 2014
Date Written: December 2014
Abstract
The World Bank has discovered that people are programmable, and some (poor people) are more programmable than others. So the 2015 World Development Report (Mind, Society and Behavior) has ditched the ‘rational actor’ model on which neo-classical economics was built, as an impediment to the purposive transformation of society. It draws on a wide range of disciplines (behavioural economics, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience) to ‘improve the design and implementation of development policies that target human choices and action,’ or in other words to turn our own cognitive capacity and sociality against us with the transparent objective of implanting the whole of humanity with the gene of conformity in thought and behaviour to the logic of globally competitive capitalism.
Keywords: World Bank, behavioural economics, World Development Report
JEL Classification: O19, O20
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