If you have a little free time this weekend, go over to the playground in your area and watch the kids playing cricket. The bats, ball, wickets, etc. will be familiar, and occasionally even pads and gloves, but what they're actually playing is different from cricket by the rules.
You'll notice the teams don't always have the same number of players. That's life. If 13 kids come out to play, one team is going to end up with more players. That's ok, because they usually adjust this by having a strong player on one side, giving the other side an extra player.
Development is a little like that. There's more than one way forward, and some nations pick one path, while others pick a different one. Some trade their way to growth, others build a manufacturing economy, others are happy to play banker in the middle of the field of nations.
Still, there are rules. Look at the game again. One team might have a bowler or batsman less than the other, but neither team will be missing a wicket-keeper. That's a clue. Teams can afford to be a player short, but there are some roles that no amount of talent can make up for.
Making up for a wicket-keeper is just too hard. The opposition can let a few balls go by, and the game moves along by adding '4 byes' a lot, followed by edged boundaries instead of outs behind the wicket. We keep fetching the ball from the ropes, while what we need is a stopper.
Back to development. In that world, the 'keeper' is not a person, but instead, it's the balance between the state, market and society. When all three act together to push agendas of development, nations make a lot of progress. You take one out, and it's game over, more or less.
Having all three players on the development field partners limit each other's mistakes (like stopping 5 wides in cricket), joint efforts for success (catches to be taken) and preparing pitches (fields set). In both arenas, without these, defeat is the likeliest outcome.
Most developing nations have not yet got this balance right. Governments try to dominate society, telling citizens how to live and think. They are also in an awkward relationship with industry, either extractive or collusive, and sometimes both - what we call a mixed economy !!
Rather than restore the balance, nations try to win in other ways. They fix the umpire (killing the independence of institutions), rig the score-card (putting out fake data about the economy) or they try player substitutions at odd times, through unexpected political alliances.
To the field again. Occasionally a game will start without a wicket-keeper, but soon it will be obvious that won't do. And someone from the audience, or even the opposite team, will step in to keep wickets, or at least stop balls from running away for fours repeatedly.
That's our cue to development too. We can watch from the sidelines as governments struggle to do things that cannot be achieved without the participation of society and markets, or we can also begin to play a part, and make those outcomes more likely.
Post 1947, INC got into a state-led view of development - that major challenges must be solved by the sarkar. Other parties continued this. Result - the largest number of poor people in the history of the planet, and lots of avoidable suffering. There's only one way to fix it.
To keep wickets, or to lose? That is the question. The balance between state, market and society, and the breadth of capabilities it brings to the development arena, contains within it our best hope for progress. This has always been true; what's left is for us to believe it.
