Main idea

Faced with a foreign practice that surprises — paying for a toy in ten installments, giving your tax ID number for a coffee, taking payment by QR code on a beach — the reflex is to place it on a single axis, that of progress: this country would be ahead of or behind ours.

The axis is false. The solutions observed don't answer the same constraints: a different economic history, a different relationship to the State, to banking and to credit, different everyday risks, a different level of social protection. It isn't the same mental map, and a point can only be compared inside a map.

Ranking as ahead or behind isn't a measurement, then, it is a projection: it installs your own situation as the reference and turns a difference in constraints into a gap in development.

Why it matters

That projection produces costly decisions. Judging a market to be behind leads you to transpose what worked elsewhere while waiting for it to catch up; judging it to be ahead leads you to import a practice without the constraint that gave rise to it.

Replacing "where are they?" with "what does this solution answer here?" is the only shift that makes the observation usable.

Nuances and limits

Some comparisons remain legitimate: an indicator defined the same way in two countries can be compared. What can't be compared is the ordering of practices on a supposedly single axis of progress.

And refusing the hierarchy doesn't mean suspending all judgment: a practice can have documented harmful effects without that making the country a laggard.

Open questions

• How do you reconstruct the constraint a local practice answers, when those who live it don't articulate it?