consensus building, we move forward bit by bit—and sometimes, when we break through to new knowledge (which can come from anywhere, and most of all comes from our collective imagination) we make a leap.
Maybe we are on the brink of a leap forward in relation to poverty reduction. Dr. Collins shows that in its policy changes of the last 15 years or so, the World Bank has made substantial progress towards this understanding. Perhaps it is halfway there. It is essential that it should progress, because we have invested more resources for poverty reduction through the Bank than anywhere else. It is hard for the Bank to set aside the mindset entailed in economics. Economics is always premised on a doctrinal faith in capitalism, ‘my system right or wrong’, which takes ultimate priority over humanist and ecological objectives. The assumption of the Bank is that all objectives can only be achieved through the medium of capitalist economics. The culture of the Bank is steeped in the methods of economics, which shares the singular outlook of Western science. All disciplines are heterogeneous to some degree, but the practitioners of science habitually behave as if there is only one possible truth. Science is a unitary republic rather than a polyglot empire. So it is extraordinarily hard for economists to acknowledge that they were wrong in the past, even when they proffer new policies that are different. It is apparent that the Bank has set aside its old rates of return calculations, which purported to show that in emerging nations investment in basic education was almost more generative than investment in higher education. But it has not set aside human capital theory itself.
In the end that step will be necessary. In the World Bank's calculations of the 1970s and 1980s, rates of return on the investment in primary education were higher than on investment in higher education because the costs were lower in two senses: less was spent on education, and there were less years spent in education so that the individual's income forgone was reduced. This calculation assumed that all else remained equal—and that only one individual's education was in question. But what happens when the collective conditions are changed, many more people participate in tertiary education, and the level of modernization and social and technological development are much advanced? Then the