For heads of state, celebrity activists, and heralded intellectuals—the agenda setters whose  Powerpoints prescribe the policy goals—the distance from reality is even more profound than for low-level consultants like me.

For these notables, new hotels and traffic lights are constructed in anticipation of their visits, creating an illusion of progress.

To be part of this consulting class is to have what the writer Primo Levi, in his vocation as a chemist, called “ideal work,” where all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you’ll feel like the Delphic oracle

Credit: https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2015/ebola-liberia-cult-bankable-projects/