How to leverage resources within the liberty movement
2020-03-04 · Guest: Matt Warner (President of the Atlas Network) · 52:02
Poverty and Freedom Case Studies on Global Economic Development
Bob Zadek introduces Matt Warner, President of the Atlas Network, to discuss his book Poverty and Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development. They explore why top-down foreign aid often fails due to the “outsider’s dilemma” and how local think tanks are more effective at identifying and removing institutional barriers to economic growth, such as business licensing and property rights.
Topics: Atlas Network, Poverty, Economic Freedom, Foreign Aid, Think Tanks, Property Rights, Occupational Licensing, Institutional Reform, International Development
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Matt Warner
Introduction to Atlas Network [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are, this Sunday and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this first day of Daylight Savings Time in the winter.
This morning’s guest, Matt Warner, is President of the Atlas Network. Both words in that two-word name of the organization, Atlas and Network, are important, as you will learn. Matt has written a book which, for me, helps me collect and connect so many dots in regarding the cause and effect of poverty around the world. Poverty does not happen randomly, and poverty does not reflect at all upon the poor people, as we all know, but rather on the environment that creates it. Much like, I suppose, the coronavirus. People aren’t born with the virus; they are exposed to it existentially, and thus is the same with poverty, as you will see. Matt has edited an important new book that for me answered so many questions that I had. Matt’s book is called Poverty and Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development. Case studies—this is not speculation, this is not theory, this is case studies on global economic development. We will learn from Matt during this hour that there are universal causes and universal cures for poverty. And as Matt will explain, it is so insanely simple, you have to wonder how poverty has not been erased long before today. Erasing poverty is so gosh-darn simple, as Matt will explain. Matt, welcome to the show this morning.
Matt Warner: Thank you very much, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Now Matt, Atlas Network, an organization that I have supported over the years, I have had many of your colleagues on my show when the opportunity arises. Tell us a bit about the Atlas Network, and the reason I’m asking you to do that is you have quite an unusual and effective business model. So share with us the business model of Atlas Network.
Matt Warner: Sure. So it’s hard enough to explain to one’s parents that you work for a think tank and what that is. Imagine trying to explain that you work for a nonprofit that serves think tanks. So this is the challenge I always face at holiday dinner, explaining to relatives, what is Atlas Network and what does it do?
Well, the quick history is that the development of think tanks, that is nonprofit institutions that are independent from government in the case of the ones we serve, that are looking at policy solutions that are going to increase economic freedom and individual freedom towards human flourishing. So in the ’50s, our founder established a think tank in London that Margaret Thatcher later credited with being the intellectual foundation of her reforms that were very successful. Fast forward to today, the number of think tanks around the world that fit that mold is around 500 and in more than 90 countries.
So the organization I work for, Atlas Network, looks at those locally-led think tanks that are independent of government and independent from us as the key answer to achieving the kind of economic and individual freedom reforms that we know lead to human flourishing. So our job is to support them, and our model is to provide grant-making, that’s financial support for their projects, also to provide training on think tank excellence and on the best in policy reform ideas that are happening around the world, and most importantly, to provide them a network. It is not the most common job to have to lead a think tank, and we learn so much from peers. And so much of what our programming does is simply provide these fantastic, inspiring, enterprising think tank leaders with peers around the world that they can learn from. And so the case studies is an example of how we try to circulate those kinds of great ideas that are being discovered around the world and then shared at the same time.
Bob Zadek: Matt, as you explain the business model of Atlas Network, what I thought of is, my goodness, it’s global federalism. It’s all the good work, or the quality of work that’s done is better to the extent that it is local to the problem. States are better at solving their problems than Washington, cities are better than states, so the more local one can get, the more success you’re likely to have. That was a founding principle of our country. It was often referred to in Supreme Court Justice Brandeis’s describing states as laboratories of innovation. He respected the fact that states could do better than Washington, and your model is simply that same premise: that the good work can be done by local think tanks because while in one sense there’s a commonality to the problems which cause poverty, on the other hand, the cures for that problem will vary from locale to locale.
The Outsider’s Dilemma in Foreign Aid [02:58]
Bob Zadek: Now, if one didn’t have 500 or so local think tanks with knowledge of their community, their states, or their regions, what’s the alternative? How does foreign aid operate without think tanks? What is the governmental system that we live right now and what are the shortcomings with it? Because your local think tanks solving problems of economic freedom and poverty are doing the same—have the same goal as the global organizations which our government gives a lot of support to. So how does the operation of these global aid organizations work, and why is local think tanks better?
Matt Warner: Well, it’s become increasingly important to share this message of “there is an alternative way to foreign aid.” And the reason why it’s become important is that most of the aid community has recognized the limitations of foreign aid as a model. And just a quick background or just a quick orientation: currently, the United States spends about close to $50 billion a year in foreign aid. It is by far the largest donor in absolute dollars, but the UN has established a target, a suggested target, that all countries give—all donor countries give 0.7% of GDP. Very few countries do that, mostly Scandinavians cross that threshold, but of course in absolute dollars, it’s very little money compared to the US, less than 10%.
So we do about 50 billion in foreign aid. Most of that goes through USAID, that’s the United States Agency for International Development, and the State Department and the Defense Department. What is foreign aid? A lot of it is our military support, that’s included in that, not many people realize that. It also includes things like trying to deal with health issues in the local area. But it’s also this idea of long-term development: how do we help solve poverty in the long term, not just humanitarian aid for right now, which is also part of it.
And the reason why the foreign aid community has become very introspective about its efficacy is you started to have some broad criticisms the last 20 years about two things in particular. One is, how do we even know how to measure the results of foreign aid if it’s even working? And two, how often are we actually doing more harm than good? Meaning, there’s this challenge that we face that I call the “outsider’s dilemma,” which isn’t just a problem for foreign aid, it’s a problem for any of us who are trying to be charitable to others. And the outsider’s dilemma is: how do we know that our ideas are the answer for someone else? How do we solve an economic problem for someone else? And the truth is, the nature of economic development and the nature of human dignity and individual freedom means that there are limitations to what we can do to solve other people’s problems.
In the arena of foreign aid, we have a laundry list, unfortunately, of projects that have not only failed but have made things worse. Quick example: in Uganda, we spent $300,000 to give a local village of 7,000 farmers the money to switch from banana crops to corn crops. Researchers from Columbia University said, “Oh, you’ll get a much better yield with corn crops. We think that’s the answer. We’re smart, we’re educated, we’re wealthy, we should know.” Not that they were necessarily arrogant; they were probably very well-intentioned. But they brought all this money that was hard to say no to, and the village got excited and switched their crops. And in fact, they did increase their yield by quite a bit. The problem is, economies are not simple. What happened as a result was there was no one to sell the extra crop to and there was nowhere to store it, and it started attracting a huge infestation of rats to their village. And so not only did they have this new problem of rats, they didn’t have their old crop of bananas that they understood how to make the most of. That’s just one of many, many examples where good intentions aren’t enough to solve problems.
Case Study: Business Licensing in Burundi [04:52]
Matt Warner: So the reason why the think tank model is so important is that we know from studying economic development that institutions are really important. And what do I mean by institutions? I mean the rules of the game, the actual laws that people face in their society, and the norms and customs that influence the way people behave in an economy and in their communities. The rules of the game can lead to the talent of entrepreneurs becoming very successful and providing value, or it can lead to the talent and the entrepreneurs gaming a political system to benefit themselves but no one else. That’s the difference between the quality of the institutions.
Very quickly, the reason think tanks are so important is because they are locally sensitive to how to improve those institutions: how to make property rights more secure, how to make market exchange easier and fluid, how to have predictable courts where you know if you have a conflict what you’re likely to get a judge to say, not who does the judge know and how are they getting paid off. All of these issues are things that local think tanks can tackle. And we would hope that local governments can tackle them too, but when we give them money in the foreign aid model, that undermines the local democracy and the democratic process for reforming institutions because they no longer answer to their constituents, they answer to us.
Bob Zadek: Matt, I’d like to ask a question and offer an observation at the same time. The large US organization that manages foreign aid, as you said, is USAID: United States Agency for International—now comes a drumroll—International Development. Speak about the word “development.” And the reason I’m asking that question is your case studies deal with poverty. Development—the word development, the concept development—is not per se designed to cure poverty. Curing poverty requires institutional restructure. Development is building a dam, building a project, building a something. I think once you focus on development, you get off-message and you can’t possibly cure poverty because they are kind of unrelated. So speak to development. What does that mean exactly? And is development designed to cure poverty or only to build a dam or build a something?
Matt Warner: Well, I do think historically development, if you think back to the Marshall Plan and reconstructing Europe, it did have this very tangible, linear, direct investment kind of approach. And even fast forward to the ’60s and ’70s, we were very focused as a development community on how do we bridge the gap between the capital that’s available in free markets that feels very secure in making investments and the capital that would be needed to invest in developing economies where private investors are not so confident. And so that’s where World Bank and IMF tried to bridge gaps where they said, “We’ll provide some financing to help build this infrastructure, create these environments in terms of, like you said, dams or roads or airports or what have you.”
The problem is that these are very crude and blunt solutions that aren’t actually context-sensitive. They don’t actually know what at the margin is the next step in development. And the good news is, I think we have started to broaden our understanding if we just think about the idea of a country developing and becoming a more robust, rich economy of free people. That that is going to necessitate the phenomenon that happens in a free market, which is that no one person or no one organization decides how exactly that economy is going to develop. Who decides? All the individuals making daily decisions as a function of the trade-offs they face and what they value in an economy and in their communities. And there is something that is marvelously rational about the way that individual decisions aggregate together to create value in a society. As long as people are free and given the human dignity to make those decisions for themselves, that’s how you validate the forward progress and that’s where you get that created value that leads to—it’s not a zero-sum game, the pie gets bigger. And that’s the trick that we’re trying to support and see happen, but it can’t happen as a result of one set of wealthy, educated technocrats designing a system or a set of construction projects that are going to solve poverty across the world. Poverty is solved by individuals themselves navigating their own paths, and they are more likely to be successful if they are not facing unjust restrictions, regulations, oppression, violence, etc.
Bob Zadek: That’s a perfect segue into a subtopic I’d like to cover for a few seconds. And that is, I found myself asking myself the question: what causes poverty? Is poverty caused because a country or a region lacks natural resources? Is it because the weather is bad? Is it because of sheer size—there aren’t enough people there to make the region or the country wealthy? And of course, all of those questions I just asked are rhetorical because obviously it’s not size—look at Singapore, look at Hong Kong, look at Japan, which has not a lot of natural resources, yet they’re wealthy places and very little poverty. So when you ask yourself what causes poverty, it’s not natural resources, it’s not size. Of course it’s not natural resources—compare Venezuela with the largest oil reserves in the world and Singapore which has none. So therefore, what is it? Well, Matt, as one learns from your book, it’s the economic environment. Does it foster economic activity and economic freedom? So as I have observed on my show, the ultimate natural resource is economic freedom. That’s the secret. So tell us how the think tanks around the world, part of your network, the think tanks that you support, how they focus on building what I have called the ultimate natural resource: economic freedom. Tell us how the think tank approach is not on a project, but on creating an environment which will in and of itself eliminate poverty.
Matt Warner: Well, one of the ways that our model works so well is because we as Atlas Network are not going around prescribing to think tanks what they ought to be doing. Instead, it’s a model that requests from them strong proposals that tell us what they believe, what their vision is for how to increase economic freedom in their country. And they, of course, understand local politics, local culture, historical factors that influence things, and in particular, what are the things right now that are most egregious, that have the most disproportionate adverse impact on the low-income populations?
For example, in Burundi, there is a very modest think tank run by just an inspiring young man who lives in a country that is one of the poorest in the world, leans very authoritarian. It’s a very difficult place to be advocating different ideas. But he has identified some very practical, concrete ways that he believes not only increase economic freedom but provide the government and other stakeholders with a win-win solution that helps the economy overall. The specifics are: he said, “Look, we all know the informal economy, that is the people who are doing business here in a very modest way, all the street vendors, all the very small businesses that don’t have business licenses. They make up a large portion of our economy. And we want to grow the formal economy. The reason for that is people who are in the formal economy who have a business license, they have the institutional protections, the legal protections that allow them to take risks and grow and become smart to reinvest in your business.”
One of the reasons why he identified as a think tank that the formal economy wasn’t as big as it could be was because for a lot of very, very low-income entrepreneurs, joining the formal economy, getting a business license, was not only expensive because of government fees—there was anytime you have a bureaucrat who is in charge of whether you get a license, you’re vulnerable to having a lot of corruption and bribery that happens all over the world when you have these fees. It was too cumbersome and Byzantine to figure out how to secure your license; you had to go to all these different offices and it took months and months and, you know, low-income people can’t afford to spend their time trying to get a business license. They have to make enough money every day just to survive.
Well, this think tank succeeded in convincing the government to simplify its processes significantly, lower those fees. And the year prior to achieving those reforms, there had been a 5% increase in business licenses. In the year after that, there had been a 49% increase in business licenses. You had all these talented people rushing to join the formal economy.
And let me put this in a human perspective. We got introduced to a man known locally as “Papa Coriander” because he made products out of coriander—drinks and other products. And for years he had had this small business, he had two employees. He tells about being jailed many times, police taking all of his cash or taking all of his inventory, and he had no legal recourse because he wasn’t a licensed business. Now that he is licensed—this will sound incredible—in a year he’s grown to 100 employees. His business has exploded. That is how poverty is solved: is we give individual people the freedom and the institutions that support and facilitate their own ideas and investment in their own success. So we celebrate and we look for these kinds of opportunities to provide modest grants to these think tanks to help them achieve these kinds of projects because therein lies the big explosion. It’s not, as you said, natural resources or foreign governments investing in infrastructure; it’s economic freedom and institutions.
Parallel with US Occupational Licensing [06:51]
Bob Zadek: The story you tell is so—it touches me, Matt, in a very deep way because here we have Papa Coriander in an undeveloped Third World country who, I’m guessing, didn’t have an MBA. I’m guessing. But he didn’t have to be taught how to support himself. He just needed government to get out of the way. It’s almost as if it’s part of human DNA to learn through trial and error, through experience, and through observation the best way in that environment to earn a living. And Papa Coriander observed the world that he lived in, detected a need, determined how to satisfy that need, make a profit, give people what they want at the price they wanted to pay for it. He made a living, and the only obstacle to 100 employees was government was in the way.
And what astonishes me is before we get too smug in thinking about Papa Coriander and his struggles in a Third World country, I was struck, Matt, with the parallel between that and the United States, where I have done many shows on occupational licensing, where individuals who want to be anything from a barber to a chimney sweep to an interior designer are prevented from doing so by the difficulty in getting a license. So Americans, don’t get smug; it can happen to you and it is happening today. So the problems, the obstacles of wealth accumulation are so universal and so obvious that it highlights the important work, the good work that your think tanks around the world are doing. And Matt, before we go to break, I’m going to ask you a softball question: what is the likelihood that USAID would have come around to solving the problem of business licensing in Burundi? Softball question.
Matt Warner: Well, I’ll tell you, things aren’t as bleak as you might think. The current administration at USAID is working hard to help countries transition out of aid. And in fact, the World Bank and their “Doing Business” report has been very influential around the world to wake governments up to this very problem. It includes this business licensing question. So I’m actually pretty optimistic that even though some of these traditional models have some fatal flaws in them, the people who are trying to make the most of them and do good in the world do recognize some of these important principles.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending the morning with Matt Warner. Matt is the President of the Atlas Network, if you will, the “fund of funds” business model for think tanks, economic think tanks around the world. Matt has edited an important new book, Poverty and Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development, where Matt recites chapter and verse of the various success stories attributable to local libertarian free-market think tanks which try to change the economic environment around the world. Because as you go to a Third World country and if you change the economic environment, poverty will disappear as surely as night follows day. Now Matt, of course we have discussed briefly the alternative to local think tanks, which is large global aid and development organizations. And in your book, you explain some of the problems with that model. It’s not, of course, all bad; they do lots of good work. But there are some inherent problems. And one you pointed out in the book—and please discuss it because it is a wonderful example—if you can discuss the focus of these large organizations on something called “sustainable development.” Not because sustainable development is bad per se, but because it’s an example of how applying First World goals and First World values in a Third World country has a very deleterious and negative effect. And sustainable development or promoting it is not bad per se, but in the context of a Third World country, explain how that doesn’t work and explain how other First World lofty principles cannot be imposed in the Third World just yet.
The Problem with Top-Down Development Priorities [09:13]
Matt Warner: Yes. Well, we talked a little bit about—yes, there are good people working in the USAID, World Bank. I’ve gotten to know lots of these people very well. They are super smart, they feel a real calling to be out helping the world improve and get better. Their hearts are in the right place. The problem I see is that the model itself is extremely problematic. And the reason is, as you say, it’s very difficult for us to get out of our own way when we are the donor as a country going through a political decision-making process to achieve economic development somewhere else. You can’t help but include our own values, our own opinions, our own priorities. And in fact, many taxpayers would say that’s absolutely correct: if you’re spending my taxpayer money abroad, I want to make sure that I agree with the priorities.
Well, that’s fair enough, but those priorities may be at odds with what is actually at the margin the next development opportunity or milestone transition experience that that economy needs to go through to achieve sustained development or enduring development. What often happens is sometimes it gets distilled down to just what we think is a good idea but may not be. Let me give you an example. I’ve been working hard to build relationships with a whole range of diverse allies. I see a lot of common ground, as I’ve said, it’s not just libertarians who are concerned about some of these issues of undermining democracy abroad or being too paternalistic. There’s a movement called “Shift the Power.” It’s Global Community Fund, they have a hashtag ShiftThePower, and the whole idea behind it is basically we should decentralize and move who is leading development away from wealthy governments and wealthy NGOs in wealthy countries to helping to build up the local independent institutions and NGOs and think tanks in developing countries. And I support that. I think that’s smart, that actually matches our model.
But the problem is, because their movement represents their priorities, they have the premise correct, but their top two priorities for helping people in developing countries is to: one, solve climate change; two, improve the inequality problem as they see it. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can only imagine that the kind of projects that are going to be green-lighted to spend millions of dollars on in developing countries focused on inequality and climate change are unlikely to be the kind of industrial, technological, free-market opportunities that are actually going to help that economy, that community achieve a level of standard of living that will endure into the future so that they pull themselves up and their children out of poverty.
Bob Zadek: Can you give some examples of where those values had the opposite effect or a perverse effect on local economies, where while the goals are laudable, they simply didn’t work in a Third World country where the needs are far more basic than that?
Matt Warner: Yes. Well, just yesterday in Foreign Policy magazine—again, this speaks to the fact that this is not a controversial point of view that I’m sharing—the title is “Mozambique Is a Failed State, the West Isn’t Helping.” We have been investing in the country of Mozambique to try to solve poverty for a long time. And we think that what we’ve got set up via the current government is our best chance to solve that problem. But in the end, all we’ve done is prop up a corrupt government, keep them in power, and the economic development hasn’t come. And this is actually such a non-unique story. If you look at—there was a great book by a guy named Dan Honig, Navigation by Judgment. He created the first comprehensive database to evaluate economic development projects around the world. And even on self-assessment, economic development practitioners only gave 14% of their more than 13,000 projects top marks in achieving their success. Our intentions do not equal outcomes.
And this is happening, unfortunately, all over the world. And while I don’t spend my time studying issues related to humanitarian efforts—that is aid to solve a crisis happening now—there’s a book, if listeners are interested, by Linda Polman called The Crisis Caravan that details in just a very disheartening way all of the times that we’ve tried to attack a human crisis and we’ve actually made things worse, even though we didn’t mean to. And isn’t that a great disappointment that should cause some real self-reflection on what is it about our “savior complex”? We’re going to go save the world, it’s up to us, we’re the smart ones, we’re the ones with money, we’re going to come in and solve their problems. Inherent in that is an arrogance and a hubris and a denial of the human dignity of those individuals who are perfectly capable of solving their own poverty so long as their governments start to right-size and build the kind of institutions that have made us prosperous.
”Tied Aid” and the Politics of Foreign Aid [13:30]
Bob Zadek: I learned a phrase in your book which I had never heard before, and it’s an important phrase that really encapsulates everything you’ve just said, and that is the concept of “tied aid,” which exists both in the United States when Washington gives block grants or gives money to states and cities but it has a lot of strings attached, and the strings may make the gift kind of useless. So help us understand the important international foreign aid concept of tied aid and how that concept plays into your thesis.
Matt Warner: Yeah, there’s a really insightful phrase I’ll use, wink-wink: “when there’s politics involved, there’s politics involved.” And the important thing for us to do is realize that foreign aid, because it is done through a political apparatus, is always going to be vulnerable to the politics of the day. And in fact, this isn’t unique to the US. I had a chance to meet with a researcher in Oslo, Norway, a few years ago who had just won a large grant from the Gates Foundation to study Norway’s foreign aid. And he explained to me, “Look, when Norway started to become a wealthy country in the ’60s and ’70s from their oil production, we needed a way to get our name out on the global stage so that we could join the global market for oil. And we realized the best way to do that was to increase our foreign aid apparatus so that that would give us the entrée to be knocking on government doorsteps and saying, ‘Hey, we want to start a foreign aid program in your country. By the way, we’re also interested in selling oil here.’”
So these things always go together and they’re hard to parse, and they aren’t always necessarily evil and malicious; it’s just sort of a natural part of the portfolio for any foreign ministry or State Department to say, “Hey, we want to make sure that our businesses can do business over there.” But too often, this has the very effect of nullifying or at least making very difficult the actual humanitarian and anti-poverty efforts that we hope to see. So part of my message is to say, love or hate foreign aid, stop pretending it’s going to solve poverty. It’s not even designed to do that. And so this is the challenge we face as Americans who want to help the world, and in our own country, by the way. You mentioned occupational licensing; we’re investing in that too here in the US. We totally agree that there are lots of priorities here. We actually have more than 100 think tank partners in the US that we support. And so it’s important that we focus on what is going to work and let atrophy the old model that hasn’t proven to be the right way to solve these issues going forward.
Bob Zadek: And just to name one example which often finds its way into the news, it is we have seen how often Washington, in doling out foreign aid around the world, ends up because of the conservative social right-wing part of our government, they have all these abortion restrictions either one way or the other depending upon which party is in power. So that foreign aid, which is supposed to be primarily economic aid to eliminate or reduce poverty, it often has all of these social concept riders like abortion, like as you said, equality, children’s rights, and the like, which simply don’t export very well to a Third World country. So we have seen how once the political process gets involved in the decision-making of where the grant money goes, the goals get all distorted.
Case Study: Land Titles in South Africa [14:47]
Bob Zadek: Now help us understand now, because you have so many wonderful stories, compare what we have said up to now with how these independent local think tanks operate and tell us some of your favorite anecdotes and recent events of the success of the local think tank model as compared to the model we’ve been discussing up to now.
Matt Warner: Absolutely. So one that comes to mind is not only a great story but it also should give us pause when it comes to thinking that we can design these things from afar. There’s a think tank in Johannesburg, South Africa, that in the ’90s was on the forefront of pushing to end apartheid and to create justice in the aftermath of apartheid. And one of those efforts took the form of pushing for legislation that would allow all of these apartheid victims who were living in now-free government housing the opportunity to win title to where they were living. In many cases, their land had been taken from their parents or their grandparents, and so this was about making restitution and giving them a chance to move beyond a free government housing lifestyle, which has never been the key to achieving prosperity.
And so they passed that legislation in the ’90s. And as part of their ongoing agenda, they started to realize that even though they got the law right, they hadn’t seen a big change in land titling and in home titling. And that was surprising to them, so they studied the issue: why weren’t more people who were eligible to go and receive title to their homes doing it? Well, they did more research on the issue and they did a pilot project in a local town. Fast forward to just a couple of years ago, they learned that there wasn’t trust in the system. Those people who they thought should be jumping at the chance to get title to their property said, “Uh, we heard about that, but we thought it was too good to be true, and we don’t trust those big city lawyers anyway, and we’re not going to get involved.”
So they created a model that set up in each community local attorneys, and then they matched it with donors so that they could get some bulk rates on the administrative fees to achieve title. They called this project “Kaya Lam,” which is like “my home.” And they have since helped to achieve land title for thousands of post-apartheid victims. And in fact, they estimate that as this continues to scale, there are just millions and millions of dollars available to those who are sitting on what Hernando de Soto called “dead capital.” That is, without the right institutions, without a land title, you can’t sell your property, you can’t use it as collateral to get a loan for education, you can’t start a business. And so that’s what we’re starting to see as a result. And that was an iterative process. There wasn’t one plan that someone came up with from afar and said, “This is how we’re going to solve this.” This think tank that was local, born and bred, had to live the experience and fight and stay diligent to come up with those kinds of solutions.
The Power of Local Solutions and Networking [16:28]
Bob Zadek: And the important point—I mean, there’s so many valuable lessons from that one anecdote that you have shared with us. But one of them that comes to mind is that when you have 500 or so local around the world think tanks, when they make a mistake, it’s a small mistake. When USAID makes a mistake, it is a huge mistake, costing ultimately taxpayers big chunks of money. Where a local think tank makes a mistake, it’s invisible, it’s too small. And other think tanks, through the networking that you provide, they learn from each other’s mistakes so they develop organically the best practices around the world. And one, as you have shared with us in your book, one think tank will learn from the other, not per se because you have to adjust every approach to the mores and the society of the other country, but they learn from each other and the successes create great leverage. And your story about South Africa, one can just imagine how once the few homeowners get title, they now have acquired by magic a capital asset that they can borrow against and create a business and improve their life and give some of the money away. And all of a sudden, there’s this profound multiplier effect. So wealth is created like magic just in the very modest system you have described. It almost gives one goosebumps how this system works through the work of the Atlas Network.
Now, you organize meetings constantly. I know because former visitors to my show have been on their way to those meetings. You provide meetings around the world. Tell us about, in the few minutes we have left, what the networking process is all about. Tell us what it’s like if any of our listeners were to be sitting in the back row of one of those meetings you have, and they exist constantly around the world. What are those meetings like?
Matt Warner: Well, let me first invite all of your listeners to come sit in the front row at any of our meetings. We hold them around the world. And the key reason that we invest in physical opportunities to spend time together again is going back to this principle that the reason why freedom leads to prosperity is because it allows for so much constant learning and correction. We’re constantly experimenting, learning something, doing something different. If you try to apply very crude rules that one size fits all, that doesn’t work. So in our broad network of think tanks around the world, we love to get people together to learn from each other, but in a very free way. There isn’t someone in charge who’s deciding what everyone should be doing. We don’t believe in that; we don’t think that’s going to be a successful model.
But we do a few things that, based on human behavior and psychology research, we do things to accelerate and facilitate the successful achievement of these think tanks. And that is: we provide awards, we put a fine point on who’s succeeding in achieving something. We again, like I said, do those case studies so that people can learn—not necessarily copy, but learn from each other. We do a lot of competitions. Our grant-making is very competitive. We’re very collegial with all our think tanks; anyone who wants to do this work, we cheer for them. But we are very judicious about where the donor money goes. We want to see a good outcome. And so part of the reason that our third pillar is training is we get to know all of these think tank leaders through all of our training programs, which are very peer-driven. They aren’t very prescriptive in what it means to be a think tank leader, but they give people an opportunity to tackle big questions and learn from each other.
Bob Zadek: Matt, I hate to interrupt, but we’re going to run out of time. How do listeners support Atlas Network? How do they follow you?
Matt Warner: So atlasnetwork.org. You can also go to povertyandfreedom.org. Both of these places you can read more stories, see videos, see more examples, see the directory of think tanks, and also look at our events and see if there’s one you want to come to.
Bob Zadek: And a reading advice to my friends out there: if you’re having a bad day and if things seem pretty bleak out there, just go to that website and read the stories. It will put a spring in your step. It will make you feel, as it always does for me, so optimistic. It’s great reading. Matt, thank you so much for the great work Atlas Network is doing, and keep it up.
Matt Warner: Thank you, Bob. It was an honor.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot, Matt.