Development in Perspective

The painting above is Mamasani Tower by the 19th-century French orientalist Eugène Flandin. It shows a view near Shiraz, where I grew up, and it carries the name of Mamasani, the region where I was born.

I keep it here as a small reminder of why I do development economics. The questions I work on, how institutions form, why some places build capable states and shared identities while others stall, how political and economic elites shape the paths open to everyone else, are not abstractions to me. They are the difference between the place in this painting two centuries ago and the country it belongs to today. Development, in perspective, is the study of how those differences come to be, and whether they have to persist.