The question that still underlies much thinking about economic development is this: What can we do to kick-start economic growth and reduce poverty around the world?
The "we" is sometimes the World Bank, sometimes the United States and other rich countries, and sometimes professors of development economics and their students huddled in a seminar room. It is on this question that the entire development-aid complex is based.
But what has transformed Tunisia, Egypt and Libya over the past two years has not been efforts by the outside world to improve these societies or their economies, but grassroots social movements intent on changing their countries' political systems.