Historical explanations, in other words, are neither causal
explanations nor even really descriptions—at least not in the sense
that we imagine them to be. Rather, they are stories. As the
historian John Lewis Gaddis points out, they are stories that are
constrained by certain historical facts and other observable
evidence.12 Nevertheless, like a good story, historical explanations
concentrate on what’s interesting, downplaying multiple causes and
omitting all the things that might have happened but didn’t. As
with a good story, they enhance drama by focusing the action
around a few events and actors, thereby imbuing them with special
significance or meaning. And like good stories, good historical
explanations are also coherent, which means they tend to
emphasize simple, linear determinism... (查看原文)
A Planner thinks he already knows the answer; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his anwers will solve.
A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors... and hopes to find answers to individual problems by trial and error...
A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown. (查看原文)
