convergence

Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber
attract investment and jumpstart growth, so other countries are willing to tolerate what we
might call social or moral pollution in order to achieve the same ends. 9
Seen from this point of view, deviant industries are not just about crime; rather, they are
wellsprings of innovation—“disruption” in Clayton Christensen’s sense, “creative destruction”
in Joseph Schumpeter’s sense—for political economies that need investment and growth
and that have a hard time producing them via licit channels. At the same time, of course, the
sort of innovation that deviant entrepreneurs produce is not a direct substitute for the kind
of development proposed by metropolitan NGOs. Deviant development is different along
several crucial dimensions:
8
• It is less transparent and operates according to more fluid rules of the game because
deviant innovators are, by definition, less constrained—but it also creates new
degrees of freedom, allowing entrepreneurs to try things that they could hardly try
elsewhere.
• It is less centered in formal organizations such as corporations because deviant entrepreneurs
do not organize in that way until and unless they have to—but it also
enhances flexibility and adaptability.
• It struggles to make, monitor, and enforce contracts because even if the normal
instruments of enforcement are weak in developing country settings, deviant entrepreneurs
have even less access to them. This can get in the way of bargaining, increase
transaction costs, and the like—but it also spurs the development of “alternative”
means of deal-making, monitoring, and enforcement. These alternatives often involve
mass violence—though, to be clear, from the point of view of those participating in
these markets, such incidents of violence are undesirable because they increase the
cost of doing business.
• Its success does not result in the long-term production of public goods, both because
the deviant entrepreneurs are (for reasons of selection bias if nothing else)
not public-minded sorts and because the profits from deviant industries are rarely
if ever taxed by the state, the classic provider of public goods—but what the state
loses, local communities and organizations partly gain in the form of jobs and capital.
• It tends to foster mass antisocial behavior, such as corruption. While all entrepreneurs
are risk-takers, deviant entrepreneurs, virtually by definition, have a heightened
willingness to flout social norms and conventions. Their success in turn degrades
respect for other social norms and conventions, which may be otherwise unrelated
to the market in question, leading to generalized decay of the dominant social order.
Rather than representing a divergence from the liberal norm of licit growth in the formal
economy, deviant globalization might better be conceived as a way for the globally excluded
to find a space to be innovative, a space in which the rules of the game have not already been
stacked against them. At the same time, this is no subversively heroic Robin Hood morality