Over the years I've engaged with the World Bank fairly often; negotiated alongside of it, met with its president, lectured at, plotted with, and so forth. So let me say: this is by and large a terrific multilateral Bretton Woods-style helpful organization that foreshadows the sort of global effort to end poverty and stop calamitous climate change that in fact is the necessary task of all of us alive today.

There's another view: namely, that the World Bank is an enabler of global despotism at worst and inefficient pocket-lining "French" bureaucracy at worst.

It's certainly

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