difficulties of a project has on occasion been helpful in eliciting creative energies that otherwise might never have been forthcoming” (Hirschman 1994, p. ix). But this was the point: the principle of the hiding hand, based as it was on the actor’s ignorance, was not intended to be a policy tool. It was a way for Hirschman to elaborate on the need to include uncertainty and limited rationality in the Bank’s epistemology. While this principle received its final name in juxtaposition to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” its original name was perhaps more revelatory: in January 1965, from India, Hirschman wrote a long explanation of what he then used to call his “theory of providential ignorance” to his two daughters in New York: The Pakistan project, the Karnaphuli paper mill, is perhaps most interesting because it shows that it isn’t so easy to ‘transfer’ an industry from one country to another. It _looks_ easy – why shouldn’t the same machines perform just as well in East Pakistan as in Sweden? The fact is, however, that there are many differences, from the raw materials (bamboo instead of pine) to the demand in the market which require far more ‘creative’ adaptation than the country had probably expected it would to be. One almost feels that had they known all the troubles they were headed for, they would never have founded this industry, but having founded it they managed to solve their problems one by one. The secret of creativity is then to place yourself in situations where you’ve got to be creative, but this is done only when one doesn’t know in advance that one will have to be creative. This, in turn, is so because we underestimate our creative resources; quite properly, we cannot believe in our creativity until we experience it; and since we thus necessarily underestimate our creative resources we do not consciously engage upon tasks which we know require such resources; hence the only way in which we can bring our creative resources into play is by similarly underestimating the difficulty of a task.<sup>72</sup> More generally, Hirschman underscored the centrality of side-effects, and in his 1967 book he described project appraisal as the art of visualizing them. In his definition, side-effects are not just “secondary effects,” mere spillovers or repercussions of a project. More often than not, they turn out to be “inputs essential to the realization of the project’s principal effect and purpose” (Hirschman 1967a, p. 161). They are called “effects” instead of, for example, “conditions” or “prerequisites” because they are “eventual requirements,” essential for the project to survive after the start-up and mature into a long-lived endeavor, although they are not needed from inception. A project for the development of highways (as opposed to railways) would serve as an example. It is commonly held that investment in highways

> 71 Walter S. Salant to Albert O. Hirschman, “More on ‘The Hiding Hand’ and other comments on _Development Projects Observed_ ,” January 26, 1967, Albert O. Hirschman Papers, Box 57, Folder 1.

> 72 Albert Hirschman to Katia and Lisa, January 1, 1965, Albert O. Hirschman Papers, Box 57, Folder 8, emphasis in the original.

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