Benjamin King.

• Position: Proposal to privatize the World Bank - Response to article by Nicholas Eberstadt and Clifford M. Lewis in this issue, p. 14

Although they are not in the phone book, there is a thriving public relations firm in Washington, known as Nostrum, Gimmick & Fad. Their specialty is to take a promising idea and ram it into the ground. They have had plenty of clients. Privatization seems to be the latest.

No one in his right mind would now read the proceedings of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. If, in a moment of insanity, he did, he would find that it had been undertaken, Inter alia, to avoid the monumental private screw-up of the '20s. If, in a bout of madness, he were to scan the proceedings of the Senate Finance Committee towards the end of 1931, under the chairmanship of Senator Smoot of Smoot-Hawley tariff fame, he would observe a procession of eminent investment bankers explaining why they sold bonds to finance, as likely as not, extravagances such as government palaces and stadiums (as an article emanating in 1950 from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put it). In fact, because of fungibility, no one really knew what they were used for.

When Eugene Black, the first president to run the Bank for more than a couple of years, was about to retire, Scotty Reston devoted an entire column in the New York Times (February l8, 1962) to an extraordinary paean of praise for this "creative pragmatist ... the orthodox conservative American banker out of Atlanta via the Chase National, [who] became an international social reformer." There is much more, including reference to his undoubted charm. Under him and his successor, the Bank was indeed a pragmatic institution with few pretensions, intellectual or otherwise. But, arguably, it had a considerable effect on the quality of its clients', projects, individually and in the aggregate. It preached orthodox principles of free markets and fiscal prudence, but there Its role was more modest, though not without the occasional success. In flagrant cases, it just slowed lending down or stopped it altogether.

Subsequently, the level of intellectual pretension has moved up a quantum notch, as has the capacity to match it. But, at the same time, so has the urge to...