From the department of what the…

George Monbiot writes about child welfare:

Texas is a largely-Christian state that appears to believe in neither forgiveness nor redemption. Last week the Guardian revealed the extent to which it has criminalised its children(1). Police now patrol the schools, arresting and charging pupils as young as six for breaches of discipline.

Among the villainies for which they have been apprehended are throwing paper aeroplanes, using perfume in class, cheeking the teacher, wearing the wrong clothes and arriving late for school. A 12 year-old boy with attention deficit disorder was imprisoned for turning over a desk; six years later, he’s still inside. Children convicted of these enormities – 300,000 such tickets were issued by Texas police in 2010 – acquire a criminal record. This makes them ineligible for federal aid at university and for much subsequent employment.

Yet most of them have committed no recognised crime. As one of the judges who hears their cases explained to the Guardian, “if any adult did it it’s not going to be a violation.”(2)

Above and beyond how abhorrent this is, it also points neatly to a paradox at the heart of US conservatism over (at least) the last decade. Loudly and violently (if only ostensibly) in favour of promoting freedom in the rest of the world; brutally and effectively in favour of curtailing freedom in the United States.

Violence in Venezuela

I’ve blogged before about what I call the Hugo Chavez Polarity Inversion Level (the Hug-PIL!)- that is, the strange, differentiated effect Chavez has on almost everyone’s thinking. To the right of a line that falls somewhere amongst left liberals and in a portion of the political sphere that includes most liberals (in the American sense of the term) and definitely all conservatives, Chavez is a Really Bad Dude, a despot in disguise who is ransacking his country’s economy and who can not possibly be doing anything good. Nothing. To the left of the line, amongst lefter left-liberals, socialists and the like, Chavez is a Very Good Guy, the future of anti-capitalism, a model for us all, and a man who can do no wrong.

This frustrates me – by inclination I suspect that not all of what he does is great, and not all of what he does is bad. And it would be very helpful to separate the good from the bad, and the successful from the unsuccessful. And then, who knows, maybe we might learn a bit. It wouldn’t be as exciting as re-staging the cold war, but it would be useful from a development perspective.

And so: if you know of any impartial and intelligent writing on Chavez which attempts to do this please do let me know.

Also, if you’re a Chavez fan, have a crack at explaining the following:

Venezuela’s homicide rates are among the highest in the hemisphere — twice those of Colombia and three times those of Mexico — despite largely escaping the world’s attention. Rates were rising even before Hugo Chávez assumed power. But under his 12 years they have skyrocketed, from 4,550 in 1998 to 17,600 last year. The victims are predominantly poor young men — killed for as little as a mobile phone, caught in gunfire between gangs, or even subject to extrajudicial killings by security forces. (from here)

How can this be commensurate with the rise of socialist utopia? And how can criminal violence be rising amidst social progress and falling inequality?

If there is a good explanation I am genuinely interested in hearing it.

A treasure trove…

…of research on inequality, and a great dataset, can be found Frederick Solt’s academic webpage.

Meanwhile, genius from the marketing department…

The wrapper of a sweet given to us in a course recently.

Rich in Glucose!

Corporate Evil

In comments to my last post J. writes:

Corporations and the larger, increasingly global corporate state is evil. Full stop.

I’ve always been uncomfortable applying the word evil to very broad categories, such as ‘corporations’. But his comment reminded me of one other important point about global businesses and global trade: the issue is not purely economic, political economy is deeply important too.

There are no such things as free markets or free trade. Markets and trade always occur embedded in institutions – laws and norms that form the rules of the game. And these rules can make things considerably better or worse for workers above and beyond the pure economics of what is occurring. If you get good, fair rules workers will typically benefit most from trade. The trouble is that in countries such as China the rules aren’t good or fair. What’s more, the fact that they’re not good or fair reflects in part the impact of lobbying from business groups. Here’s Johann Hari writing in 2007.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed finally to allow Chinese workers like her – too late – some basic rights.

The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions. It would give them the right to a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the right to change jobs freely. Where previously China’s labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn’t propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of “factory kidnappings” of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists’ sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn’t kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers’ protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce – representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others – listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were “unaffordable” and “dangerous”, they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

Like I said, I have some trouble with the word ‘evil’, but lobbying China to be more repressive? That’s evil if ever I saw it.

 

 

iPods don’t exploit people, people do…

Chris Blattman finds himself on the horns of a familiar dilemma:

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

That is the tagline from this week’s This American Life, freely available as an mp3 this week. Often funny but also often horrifying: Child workers, terrible workplace injuries, and police state tactics. They have released reports on the Apple subcontractor from October 2010, May 2011, and September 2011.

I am of two minds. If even a tenth of the abuses are systematically true, then even the most ardent capitalist among you should be incensed.

On the other hand, I am in the midst of a randomized control trial of factory labor in Ethiopia. One reason is because I believe–and the early results suggest–that the improvements in poverty and work conditions and risk and well-being are huge. Huge huge.

When this choice is presented as a simple binary it is a very unappealing one. Buy iPods and support a system that is exploitative and abusive. Don’t buy iPods and leave people condemned to rural poverty. It’s an agonising choice. For what it’s worth I think the least worst option here is to buy the iPod. But the least worst option in this binary is not the same as the actual best available option in reality. There is a third way. It’s simple.

Continued global trade but with workers’ rights. Workers in factories in China and Ethopia would still receive low wages but they probably wouldn’t be quite as low as is currently the case, and their working conditions definitely wouldn’t be so bad.

And how could this happen? In a world of developing countries that were democratic and well governed, it would be easy: trades unions to offset the bargaining advantage of bosses; and the progressive implementation of some workplace safety laws brought about via the democratic process.

Trouble is, neither China and Ethiopia are democratic or well governed (although I guess the situation is slightly better in Ethiopia???).

Then what? This is where I think there is a very real role for consumer activism in developed countries. As much as possible, avoid products produced in situations where workers’ rights are violated. As much as possible, buy fair trade products. Write to companies to let them know that you’re doing this and why you’re doing this. Don’t tell them “don’t make stuff in China?”; tell them “make stuff in China but protect your workers?” Share this information. Fund entities devoted to obtaining this information.

This is an imperfect, partial solution. But it’s better than either of the horns of the dilemma presented above.

–

As a footnote. The other potential improvement here is to write labour standards into trade agreements (and actually follow up on this). Most economists hate this (“oh noes don’t limit teh free trade!”). Me I’m kind of in favour: I think in theory it would work. Although in practice, in the messy world of enforcement, political economy, unequal power, and trade agreement negotiations, it may well not.

Untenable beliefs about the Poor

My new year’s resolution is to spend more time reading books and less time reading on the internet. Obviously, it would be dangerous to transition directly from screen to paper so, as an intermediate step, I’m reading Poor Economics on my wife’s Kindle.

I’m some way in and one thing that strikes me profoundly is that three very commonly held views about the poor are simply untenable based on the evidence:

1. The first of these is that the poor always make the right choices (or, at least that they’ll do so if they are free to do so). This view underpins the proposed solutions to under-development both of free-market economists and radical leftists, as well as (some of the) arguments used by those promoting participatory development. And yet it’s clearly wrong: poor people in developing countries make mistakes. Of course it doesn’t automatically follow from this that someone else ought to, therefore, be making decisions for them. People abuse this sort of power and experts make mistakes too. But it does suggest that simply giving the poor their say, either through market mechanisms, participatory planning meetings, or anarcho-socialism, isn’t going to solve the problems of under development.

2. On the other hand, the view – held mainly by armchair conservatives – that poor people are poor because of their mistakes, is also utterly wrong. We all make mistakes and if mistakes caused poverty we’d all be poor. What’s more there’s no evidence that the poor make more mistakes.

3. The idea, depressingly common in parts of academia, that people in developing countries are profoundly, culturally different from the rest of us – so different as to justify cultural relativism or anti-development thought – is also utterly wrong. Actually, it turns out that poor people have similar wants and preferences to everyone else. They are just less able to meet them.

I wouldn’t say that Poor Economics is a perfect book but, by reflecting the complicated realities or the lives of poor people, and for showing them to be remarkably similar to the rest of us, it is certainly a very good book.

Only human…

Slightly faster internet and a decidedly slower pace of life mean I’ve finally had time to read over Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. Two thoughts:

1. Unlike William Easterly’s crowd-sourced effort it’s actually funny (very funny).

2. The failings that propel the satire all feel very familiar. Not because I’m a development old-hand but simply because I’m a person. Double standards, the propensity to conform to group norms even when they’re daft, mixed motives, desire for status. These are all very human failings. And that leads, I think, to the most useful take-away point from this blog: development is a human endeavour. One that is prone, every step of the way, to human failings. This might be stating the obvious but I think it’s something that often gets lost in discussions of development, and it’s worth remembering. Worth remembering because:

* After all, it’s (often) you and me – everyone likes to point the finger at others as being the source of problems in the world of development. And often enough these others are, but it’s worth remembering that we ourselves almost never live up to the standards we expect of others, and so a little bit of humility is a great starting point.

* Development workers make their mistakes, but they do not make them under circumstances of their making (quote mangled from here). The aid world often seems crazy when viewed in isolation. But when you view it as a link in one of the following two chains of craziness it starts to make quite a lot more sense:

(usually) uninformed voters -> vote dependent politicians -> aid agency staffers working at the behest of these politicians -> developing country politicians whose own agendas are the product of a complicated domestic political economy -> aid recipients

or

(often) uniformed donation givers -> NGO marketing departments -> NGO staff -> recipient communities (who often have their own complex power dynamics) -> recipients

* Humans are too complicated for utopia (be that socialist or free market capitalist utopia), trade-offs exist, and the perfect really can be the enemy of the good (and when it’s not it’s often working with the good to pick on the better-than-nothing).

None of this is to excuse the most egregious nastiness of development – this needs to be fought. But the garden gnome variety of development badness on the other hand, that’s always going to be with us, for the simple reason that it comes from us.

Markets and Progress

The best case I ever heard for free markets was the one made by Paul Krugman, who paraphrased Churchill to the effect that markets are the worst way of organising economies, except for every other way we’ve ever tried. That sounds about right to me. In many instances as an allocative and organising tool markets are lousy, but nevertheless less lousy than any alternative I can think of. Their outcomes aren’t particularly just. And they are prone to clear and repeated failures. And they don’t guarantee entitlements to their participants that are adequate for survival. But in many – although not all – situations they do a better job than the alternatives in getting people what they need and want.

That’s a reasonable defence of markets I think. Not markets in everything (there are many areas where otherwise organised collective action is better and or necessary) but markets in some things, at least.

A much less convincing defence of free markets is that they lead to faster economic growth. This is plausible but not really true. Growth, in the long run, is driven mostly by technological change. And successful technological change, it turns out, is often much more about states than markets.

Here’s Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway in Merchants of Doubt:

“[W]e turn to Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, where he claimed that “the great advances of civilization, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” To historians of technology, this would be laughable had it not been written (five years after Sputnik) by one of the most influential economists of the second half of the twentieth century. The most important technology of the industrial age was the ability to produce parts that were perfectly identical and interchangeable. Blacksmiths and carpenters couldn’t do it; in fact, humans can’t do it routinely in any profession. Only machines can. It was the U.S. Army’s Ordinance Department that developed this ability to have machines make parts for other machines, spending nearly fifty years on this effort – an inconceivable period of research for a private corporation in the nineteenth century. Army Ordnance wanted guns that could be repaired easily on or near a battlefield by switching out the parts. Once the basic technology to do this – machine tools, as we know them today – was invented, it spread rapidly through the American economy…Markets spread the technology of Machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it. Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the inventor of the modern machine age.

Machine tools are not the exception that proves the rule; there are many other cases of government-financed technology that were commercialized and redounded to the benefit of society. Even while Friedman was writing his soon-to-be-famous book, digital computers were beginning to find uses beyond the U.S government’s weapons systems, for which they were originally developed. Private enterprise transformed that technology into something that could be used and afforded by the masses, but the U.S. government also played a made it possible in the first place. The U.S. government also played a major role in the development of Silicon Valley. In recent years, something we now all depend on – the Internet, originally ARPANET – was developed as a complex collaboration of universities, government agencies, and industry, funded largely by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was expanded and developed into the Internet by the government support provided by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, promoted by then-senator Al Gore.

In other cases, new technologies were invented by individual or corporate entrepreneurs, but it was government action or support that transformed them into commercially viable technologies, airplanes and transistors come to mind…Still other technologies were invented by individuals but were spread through government policy. Electricity was extended beyond the major cities by a federal loan-guarantee program during the Great Depression. The U.S interstate highway system, which arguably created postwar America as we know it, was the brainchild of President Dwight Eisenhower, who recognized the role it could play both in the U.S. economy and in national defense; it became the model for similar highway systems around the globe…The relationship between technology, innovation, and economic and political systems is varied and complex. It cannot be reduced to a simple article of faith about the virtues of a free market.”

Charter Cities and Cheeky Heuristics

It’s naughty, I know, but I have a rule of thumb that runs something like this:

The more a solution to the problems of under-development appears simple and elegant on paper, and the more it appeals to the intuitions of orthodox economists, the more likely it is to fail.

Like all rules of thumb it’s sometimes wrong (CCTs for example) but, on the other hand, the 1980s and 1990s and the broad failure of the decades’ free-market reforms, suggests that generally it fits fairly well with the data.

It’s basically this rule of thumb that made me deeply sceptical of Cash on Delivery Aid, at least in the form that it’s been promoted (incentivise countries in the same way that you can incetivise people? – please). It’s also why I haven’t paid much attention to Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities.

But now it looks like a charter city may actually happen, and Duncan Green’s offered a wager that it won’t work.

I’m with Duncan on this. I think failure is very likely. For the following reasons:

1. Because formal rules, which is the only thing the philosopher kings technocrats in charge of the city would actually control, aren’t the only rules (or perhaps even the most important rules) responsible for making cities work. Informal institutions are critical. And I’m not confident that healthy norms and informal rules will simply arrive in an instamatic migrant city, the way the Charter Cities’ boosters seem to think they will. And if they don’t I suspect the task of governing the city will become difficult, and difficultly bureaucratic pretty quick.

2. Issues of political economy. I would imagine that in the lead up to the creation of the city, there will be a major push by interested businesses to get sweet deals for themselves, with regards to the city, from the Honduran government. And I imagine that the government, being eager for the project to be seen to work, will grant such deals. Which will make the city a less than optimal place for its workers.

3. Of course, if the city is a worker’s hell-hole workers simply won’t move there. So even if they don’t have any political voice in the rules of the city, they still have exit (or never entering in the first place) as a tool to ensure their rights. However, information about the city won’t be perfect and exit is never as easy in practice as it is on paper, particularly for poor migrants. All of which makes me think that worker welfare will be under catered to in the city.

4. No city is an island. Presumably there will be relatively easy migration in and out of the city (otherwise the problems in point 3 would be much worse), which I suspect will lead to rather messy spillover effects. On both sides of the city line. Squatter camps on the outside and crime on the inside, for example.

I could be wrong. And as is usually the case when I’m pessimistic about someone else’s development solutions I hope I’m wrong. But I really doubt charter cities will work.

Africa

On the Guardian’s blog Owen celebrates a new era in Africa. One of increased economic performance, decreased dependence on aid, decreased vulnerability to disasters (in most countries) and increased democracy.

He attributes this to:

The emergence of a new generation of leaders, the end of the continent’s debt crisis, business-friendly policies, new technologies, the spread of peace, and strong demand for natural resources…

Not knowing a lot about Africa I have the following questions.

1. How pro-poor has this growth actually been?
2. What’s the within continent variation?
3. What’s the actual evidence that business-friendly policies and new technologies have actually played a major role in the changes as opposed to rising resource consumption in China?
and
4. Are the good new leaders (who?) achieving change on their own or are they doing so because the institutions that they preside over are changing in a sustainable way.

To me questions 3 and 4 are the crucial ones. Because Africa has been here before, or at least parts of it have been: inspiring looking leaders and reasonable economic performance, only for things to end up imploding. And unless something fundamental has changed it is hard to see why this won’t happen again. Demand in China drops (for whatever reason), the economies of many African countries stagnate and, freed from the tailwind of economic improvement, older zero-sum problems of political economy re-emerge. And things start to look grim.

This mightn’t happen. I hope it doesn’t happen. But, for what it’s worth, I think it’s too soon to be making too much noise about a new dawn in Africa. Or, at least, it’s too soon to be doing this without good evidence of structural change.

[Update: Great review of the Radelet book that informed Owen's column here by Edward Miguel.]

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is dead. His arguments were almost always witty, eloquent, and intelligent. And yet they were also often wrong.

Like Danyl I think he was at his most wrong, most pugnacious and most repugnant over Iraq. And yet I think I can forgive all that having heard his thoughts on death.

“It will happen to all of that at some point you’ll be tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on but you have to leave.”

Iraq

Juan Cole provides the numbers on Iraq.

Population of Iraq: 30 million.

Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187

Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243

Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17

Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50

Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.

Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.

Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.

Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.

Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million

Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1.3 million

Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8

Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175

Quite possibly you don’t want to know what I really think

Unless you’re a saint, an already transcended practitioner of a transcendental religion, or not actually undertaking any development related fieldwork yourself, it’s likely that at some point during your data gathering you are going to end up feeling at least a little frustrated with at least a few of your research subjects.

I certainly do from time to time. Although it turns out I’m not even in the big league. The following excerpt comes from Paul Theroux’s book ‘The Happy Isles of Oceania.’ He’s writing about Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of modern Anthropology.

I was reminded of how Malinowski, the most sympathetic of anthropologists, would spend a day among these laughing people [the Trobriand Islanders of PNG] and then go back and scribble vindictively in his private diary.

“The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death,” he wrote. “I understand all the German and Belgian colonial atrocities.” Or: “Unpleasant clash with Ginger…I was enraged and punched him on the jaw once or twice.” Or: “I am in a world of lies here.”

If you’re lucky, development field research will afford you profound insight into human nature. Even if it doesn’t, as a consolation prize, you’ll almost certainly end up afforded insight into a very important aspect of your own nature: the grouch within.

Of tinfoil hats…

Meanwhile, in the Herald, New Zealand’s paper of record, a columnist returns from a visit to the Northern Hemisphere, sees the cloud trails of planes in the sky, visits Wikipedia, and concludes that conspiracy theories about secretive governments poisoning their people from above and deliberately triggering earthquakes could actually be true.

Her arguments stumble onto the page propelled by sentences like this: “My mind went back to when I first became aware of claims that chemtrails with a purpose were being laid across our skies.”

First up, I have a question for any economist who might be reading this: what kind of market failure has led to this situation (where a newspaper *pays* someone to emit poorly written nonsense)?

OTOH Ms Bridgeman’s writing is a handy reminder of an important development relevant point. I’ve been busy interviewing people about voting here in Solomon Islands. And it would be easy to conclude from the general confusion, the quantity of mis-information and the allegations of conspiracy that are present in quite a few of my interviews, that the problem with politics here stems from very poorly informed voters.

An easy conclusion, but also mistaken, as Ms Bridgeman’s writing very helpfully reminds us: voters (not to mention pundits) back home in New Zealand are often woefully under-informed too, or cling to beliefs that are just plain wrong. And yet democracy works well enough in New Zealand. It’s true that there are also plenty of well-informed voters in New Zealand, but that’s also true of Solomons too. So what ever the causes of political dysfunction may be in Solomon Islands they almost certainly aren’t voter ignorance. If they were, New Zealand would be an aid recipient country too.

I wanna hold your hand…

I’m no homophobe, but I would find it very hard to hold the hand of another man. I don’t think men holding hands is wrong and I believe gay people, everywhere on Earth, deserve the same rights to relationships as everyone else. And yet if you asked me to walk down the street holding the hand of my best friend I would feel distinctly uncomfortable. Holding my wife’s hand, on the other hand, feels every bit as normal and natural as holding a man’s hand feels wrong.

Why is this the case? One possible answer is biology — holding hands is part of the spectrum of romantic interaction that culminates in reproduction (he says, trying to find suitably prude words for the internet). So it feels natural to hold the hand of your mate (i.e. lover) but wrong to hold the hand of your mate (i.e. Australian word for friend). This being for the simple reason that you don’t want to mate with your mate (reproduce with your friend).

That sounds plausible but as five minutes walking the streets of Honiara will show you it can not be the case. Following the norms of social behaviour here, heterosexual couples never hold hands or engage in public displays of affection. On the other hand you see many men (and to a lesser extent women) walking down the street talking and holding hands. These aren’t people in same sex relationships (alas Solomon Islands society is not gay friendly) they’re simply friends. For whom it is completely normal to engage in some physical conduct.

So what is going on here?

In a word: norms. A lot, but not all, of our social behaviour reflects our instinctive desire to conform to the informal rules (norms) of the social group that we are situated amongst.

This makes sense evolutionarily – we are communal animals so it stands to reason that mechanisms will have evolved within us to make collective action possible by leaving us inclined to behave in predictable, and not entirely self-centred, ways. Absent this we could have never lived in groups.

And in the case of hand-holding, our instinct to group conformity means that those of us raised in societies where friends don’t hold hands, don’t hold our friend’s hands, while those of who were raised in societies where lovers don’t hold each other’s hands don’t do that.

From a development perspective the importance of norms matters for a lot more than hand holding. The role of informal institutions (social rules or norms) in determining development outcomes has been on the rise since the work of Douglas North and other economists revitalised the area of study and it’s hard not to spend time in a developing country and not end up concluding that this aspect of human interaction might be a key piece currently missing in our understanding of development and under-development.

Why are bureaucracies in many developing countries dysfunctional maybe (not definitely, just maybe) this has to do with the absence of norms necessary to instil commitment to the outcomes of an entity to which employees are only professionally linked to. Want to understand why nepotism is rampant in many developing countries, possibly this has to do with very strong norms of familial obligation? Want to understand how markets actually work in the developing world? Then maybe you need to understand the normative rules that shape them? Want to understand the persistence of clientelist politics? Then possibly you need to understand norms of leadership within communities. Want to understand how ideas and practices propagate within NGOs and aid agencies? Have a think about norms, too. Norms are everywhere and while they aren’t everything in development they are almost certainly an important component of it.

An intellectually appealing aspect of norms is that there is an apparent logic or rationality to their functioning too. They aren’t completely random and can be modelled into intellectually pliable frameworks such as rational choice. This is a good thing and leads to much fruitful thinking such as that in the work of Akerlof and Kranton, discussed by Tom Slee here (HT Luis in comments a while back – thanks!) Lots of irrational behaviour becomes rationally explainable if you allow that we have a natural (and itself reasonable) preference for conforming to group norms.

That’s great intellectually, models of reasoning agents are infinitely easier to use than those positing more complex or unpredictable actors, and yet we need to be careful. Not only would I find it very hard to hold the hand of a friend on a busy street. (Which you can explain via reason and calculation – he knows that by doing this he will break a group norm and so, through fear of consequences, calculates that the utility maximising strategy is to resist the urge to hold). But, I would find it equally hard to hold hands with a friend on a deserted island. No group to catch us there – no rational calculation involving norms. Just an instinctive aversion.

In many instances norms aren’t reasoned at all, they are instinctual. And while that doesn’t totally negate the merits reason based modelling exercises it does mean that norms are likely to be sticky (persist even when all actors involved can see that they are harmful) and that they are likely to change in strange, erratic ways.

And what does all of that mean?

Development is complicated. And aid is complicated.

Development happens and aid can work – but both are a lot less predictable and understandable than we usually admit.

Amartya Sen on the Weather Coast

So far my PhD field research has taken me to two constituencies outside of Honiara. The partially urban Auki/Langalanga and the much more remote South Guadalcanal. As you may have noticed I don’t actually write about my PhD here – actually I blog to hide from the damn thing. So nothing about voting and clientelism today. Rather three quick reflections on life in two low GDP parts of the Pacific.

1. Once you leave Honiara you really do leave most of the government of this country behind you. And yet its absence doesn’t mean entering the world of ungoverned spaces. Take away the state and you don’t get anarchy – you get small groups of people governing themselves with whatever tools of governance they have at hand. And end result, while not wholly undemocratic, isn’t utopia. It’s true that inequalities of power are less but abuses of power still exist. Similarly, it’s true that all manner of problems can be tackled at the community level, and all sorts of things achieved. But there were also all manner of problems within communities that couldn’t be addressed and all sorts of things that looked like they needed fixing through government on a larger scale.

People in the villages weren’t hiding from the state either (in a James Scott type of way). In general if you asked they wanted more government in their lives, not less. Although it was a particular type of government – the government that delivers services. People usually weren’t hankering for the arrival of state coercion.

2. The lottery of life. Go anywhere on earth and of course you will meet a few plonkers, but our travels also brought us into contact with lots of intelligent, hardworking people. I’m stating the obvious, but it was really rammed home to me out there how little justice there is in the outcomes we see in this world: who gets to grow up in affluence and who does not. Who gets to ask the research questions and who gets to answer them. Who gets to be a post-graduate student and who gets to be intelligent but uneducated. I found it humbling and sad to time and time again meet people who were smart and hardworking and yet who will have in their lives only a tiny portion of the opportunities afforded to me.

3. On the subject of opportunity… I’ve always kind of liked Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to poverty and yet, at the same time, not really been convinced by it. His conceptualisation of freedom is clearly superior to that clung to by libertarians but I don’t think is idea of development as freedom offers an improvement on the traditional utilitarian idea of development as happiness (or welfare). In his book ‘Development as Freedom’ Sen offers most the textbook critiques of utilitarianism but it’s not clear to me that his own approach is in any way inherently better at providing answers to the dilemmas present in the sorts of thought experiments that make utilitarians squirm (such as “kill one person to save six”). And at the end of the day I don’t think Sen has any convincing answers for the central utilitarian retort of “would you still support enhancing substantive freedoms if it could be shown that doing this would make people less happy rather than more?”

Having said all that, in Langalanga and on the Weather Coast (South Guadalcanal) particularly when speaking to young people it was hard to escape the fact that, often, more than anything else, what they lacked, and yearned for, in their lives, was opportunities. And how the most meaningful improvements that could be made to their worlds would be those that enhanced their capability set (in the Sen sense of the term) and which grew their substantive freedoms.

As a practical yardstick for development Sen’s approach makes more and more sense to me.

A great review…

…of Poor Economics from Charles Kenny (HT Chris Blattman).

Magnets all the way up

Still recycling old posts while in the field…

Laying waste to the competition (except for Owen) Chris Blattman wins the award for this week’s most sensible post by a development economist on aid agency work:

The problem, however, might not be with USAID. USAID springs from Congress, a Congress that uses its charity as an instrument of foreign policy, has little belief in country ownership, and no real stake in actual development. Congress just might be getting the aid agency it deserves.

In 2006 I was lucky enough to attend a workshop run by Robert Chambers. He was gracious, humorous, and dynamic (I’d been tasked with taking some photos of him speaking – all I ended up with was a series of shots of this grey haired blur standing in front of a whiteboard; too fast and too animated for my poor old point-and-shoot camera.)

In the talk Chambers used the analogy of spinning magnets to explain the dynamics of trying to make aid agency staff think outside the box, or do things a little differently.

Image from here: http://devnet.org.nz/conf2006/album/pages/22.htm

According to Chambers you might be able to get the agency staffer who you’re dealing with to spin (think freely) but the problem is that they report to someone higher up, and if they’re not also spinning polarity kicks in and the junior magnet will get pulled back into line. And of course the more senior staffer/magnet is held in line by his or her boss and so on up.

The message I took from this is that you really need to instill wholesale agency-wide change if you actually want to see any real difference. And you need to get agency heads to change their way of thinking if you want to see that occur.

Fair enough. But – I wondered as I watched – why was the top magnet the agency head? Why not the Minister (politician) in charge of the agency? Why not then the media who report on what the Minister does? and why not then the public? (Who are only dimly aware of the agency in most cases and who get their knowledge of its work via the media for the most part – so the whole magnetism thing starts to get rather fuzzy and quantum physics like.)

The point being that if you’ve ever wondered (despaired) why the government aid agency you partner with is the way it is, a lot of the answer stems from the dynamics of politics. Wonder why aid agencies are regimented and risk averse? Well that’s because there’s nothing their Minister hates more than a scandalous headline in the local paper about some or other aid project gone wrong. Ever wondered why aid agencies have onerous reporting requirements? That’s because of public finance laws. Ever wondered why aid is sometimes skewed by the home country self-interest? That’s because it’s much easier for a vested interest to get the ear of a Minister than it is for an aid recipient.

This isn’t to say aid agencies should never be criticised. Or that they can’t be better or worse. Or to absolve them of every freakin’ form you ever had to fill out. But just to point out that the obvious answer to the question – why are aid agencies the way they are? – is politics.

Development Neologisms: Ad Frominem

Ad Frominem: Closely related to Ad Hominem, Ad Frominem is the act of trying to dismiss a concept by noting that it comes from somewhere else. e.g “Human rights are a Western construct and not relevant here.” Or, “Dissent is un-American.”

Ad Frominems are frequently used and thoroughly wrong-headed. Frequently used, one presumes, because they are an effective means of mustering nationalistic sentiment to stifle debate. Thoroughly wrong-headed because concepts are right or wrong because they are right or wrong not because they came from somewhere in particular.

Development Neologisms: Eastelytize

To Eastelytize: To propound through sermon, speech, or blog post the claim that development is far too complex to be amenable to any simplistic solution. Except your own.

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Inspired by this comment on Aidwatch and also Robert Wade’s comments on Development Drums.

3 Roles for Aid

Still recycling old posts – this one from not too long ago on this blog; recycled because I think the distinction made is a useful one…

There are effectively three types of aid (excluding disaster relief), each with it’s own different type of success.

1. Development aid. In this, aid is a somewhat effective tool for sustainably transforming countries. For shifting them from a sub-optimal state to a better one. This is the aid of Jeffrey Sachs books and development agency rhetoric. This is the ideal.

2. Band-aid aid. This is aid that makes no pretence at changing societies. It’s simply about improving people’s welfare in the absence of systematic change. This is the sort of aid that might ensure that people get basic health care over many years, even as their country stays poor. I don’t use the term band-aid pejoratively here: if you’re bleeding, a band-aid helps. And, even if you never significantly change the development trajectory of a country, if you help its people, by reducing the number who die from disease or who are crippled by it, then you’re likely making the world a better, happier place.The improvements generated by this aid aren’t usually sustainable in the sense that they stop when the aid stops (although, arguably vaccinations fall into this category and their impacts can be sustainable.)

3. Keeping it together aid. This is aid which aims higher than band-aid aid, but which doesn’t pretend to be transforming anything. This is aid which tries to keep states together and functioning even if it’s not transforming them. It’s aid that works in the short term (when it works) and which may have a long term impact, not through developing anything but through providing at least a little bit of space for development to occur indigenously.

Imagine a person seconded from Inland Revenue in New Zealand to the tax department of a Pacific Island government. Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that she’s not aspiring to build the capacity of her replacement. Rather she’s just tasked with getting the tax system working somewhat. She does it for 10 years, and her (New Zealander) replacement does it for 10 years and his replacement does it for 10 years. That’s 30 years in which life has been just that little bit easier for local businesses and when just a little bit more money has made it from domestic tax returns to the ministry of health and out to medical clinics. And over that time the growth of businesses has changed the economy, and with it the political economy. And ongoing provision of services has changed people’s expectations. (As well as increased their education levels and the like).

Like I said, it’s the first type of aid that most aid agencies and politicians talk about. This is also aid that rarely, I think, succeeds on its own terms. It turns out that development is too complicated, aid too cumbersome, and the ability of external agents to effect change too weak, for this type of aid to succeed often. Not often isn’t the same as never – it probably sometimes works. But success is less common than one would think from the rhetoric of aid. And I think we kid ourselves much of the time regarding the potential for type 1 aid to work, and end up wasting money.

I’m a big fan of the second type of aid. This, I think, can work — and it’s probably where aid has had its most major success in improving welfare. The main argument against it is that you have to give it in perpetuity, or at least for a long time. But, hey that’s what we do with our own welfare state. No one in New Zealand says “we’re funding a health service now so that one day we won’t have to have one”. I’m comfortable with aid as a global social safety net, as part of a global social contact of sorts.

I’ve never really thought about the third type of aid but, if we were being honest with ourselves, I’d say that much of our ‘capacity-building governance-strengthening’ aid, when it works at all, works — while it works — in this way. It holds things together. And by doing this probably improves people’s quality of life and enhances the space in which development can occur.

Success in aid type 1 would be ideal but success in aid types 2 and 3 does still help. And I think we’d be a lot more successful in aid across the board if we were much clearer, and realistic, in what we were trying to achieve.

Better, I think, in most instances, to concentrate on type 2 aid, and use the modalities most likely to make it effective. And maybe devote more time and thought to type 3 aid too.

Most of all though we need to be realistic. ‘Perfect,’ as the old saying has it, is often the enemy of ‘good’. Likewise, in development the ideal is understandably tempting, but it’s also too-often the enemy of at least getting something done.

Development: what’s the point?

Still recycling old posts while in the field – this one from very early in this blog’s history…

Over the space of a couple of weeks in 1996 I travelled between two extremes of the public transport spectrum. At one end were the busses of rural Sumbawa – grumpy, diesel-spitting creatures that lurched their way around potholes taking interminable amounts of time to get anywhere, let alone their destination. As a means of transport they were inclusive though. Want to take your surfboard? no problem. Want to travel with freshly caught fish? fine. Want to move your goat – trussed up and still trying to kick? just pay your fare. And if the bus ever got full, you were invited to sit on the roof.

At the other end of the spectrum was the London Underground. Trains were frequent and – despite everyone’s complaints – mostly on time. You could only travel with surfboards off peak and, though I never tested the hypothesis, I suspect goats and fish were prohibited outright. Yet the tube got you where you wanted and it got you there quick. It was safe, efficient and no one ever asked you to ride on the roof. Compared to the bus riders of Sumbawa, all but the poorest travellers on the London Underground were wildly wealthy too. And healthy: no Malaria, nor cholera, nor typhoid; life expectancies in the mid 70s. Almost all of them were literate and many could expect to travel overseas. They got to elect their leaders (something denied to Indonesians during the Suharto years) and their human rights were reasonably well safeguarded.

And yet they were miserable. Or, at least, they appeared that way. Silent, pale, staring at their shoes. The Sumbawan bus travellers, on the other hand, were full of cheer. The bus rang loud with talk and laughter, and delays which would have driven Londoners to apoplexy were cheerfully dismissed.

For a long time contrast between these two scenes led me to question the very merits of development itself. If London was wealthy but glum and Sumbawa poor but happy, then maybe we should abandon development and all aim to live like the Sumbawanese. Over the years I engaged in plenty of this anti-development thinking. It’s common currency on the backpack trail and surprisingly prevalent amongst some sectors of the development community too.

It is also mistaken. My own error was to compare two snapshots of life that were both subtly different but also not representative. At least part of the boisterousness of the Sumbawan busses came from the fact that most everyone knew each other. On the Underground people are silent because they are among strangers. Of course, if Sumbawanese and Londoners lived their lives as they travelled (amongst companions in the case of the former; isolated and alone in the case of the later), this would be a real issue. And it is certainly easier to end up lonely in a large city than a small village, but London is hardly atomised – you only have to go into any bar, or restaurant, or football stadium to see people interacting amongst friends.

And, of course, a bus ride is not someone’s life. What I didn’t see on those buses were the dirt floors of people’s houses, or the absence of running water. Nor did I feel the anguish of loosing a child to Malaria, or the pangs of hunger at the end of the dry season, or the anxiety of living with only the barest social safety net. I didn’t feel the frustration of being unable to afford basic medicines or of having to deal with corrupt officials. On the other hand, much of what London has to offer – comfort, food, the NHS – I have had all my life. So I took it for granted.

None of this is to say, of course, that London is all good, or that village life in Sumbawa has no merits. All I’m saying is that the modern misery / happy poverty dichotomy, and its variants – views held by a considerable number of people – are wrong.

In other words, there is such a thing as Development, and it matters. Countries can be better or worse places to live and, taken as a whole, for the majority of their people, the best places to live aren’t those with per capita incomes of a few hundred dollars per year.

To say something exists and that it matters is not, of course, the same as saying that it is straight forwards or even that it can be easily defined. One has only to look at the many very real problems of London to realise that development can’t possibly be a nice linear journey from rural Sumbawa to the South-East of England.

So what is development? Let’s start with its purpose.

 

As a Utilitarian I believe that the purpose of politics – and, it follows, development – should be to increase happiness/wellbeing in a manner that is, ultimately, sustainable. Utilitarianism is far from a perfect political philosophy so I’m open to being dissuaded from it, but the very first question I would want answered from anyone trying to do this is, would your alternative end-goal for development really be worth holding if it made people’s lives more rather than less miserable? Personally, I can’t think of any principle I would want societies to cling to if it could be shown that it consistently, across time, made life less happy. You can argue that your alternative purpose won’t suffer this problem; that it won’t make people worse off. But by doing this you are tacitly admitting that your purpose is a second order one. That it is worthy for it what it might do for people’s wellbeing rather than for any intrinsic value of its own.

At a practical level, because suffering is so my easier to define and identify than wellbeing or happiness, it makes sense to me that the purpose of development (as practiced) should be to increase wellbeing by focusing on the reduction of suffering.

So if we know what we want from development, can we also paint a rough picture of its essential ingredients? Those things that with distinguish more developed countries and communities from less? Simon very wisely argues for some flexibility – good development will look different in different places. I think, though, that – despite the importance of context – we can lay down some universal ground rules.

The first being the protection of human rights. It might seem strange that a utilitarian would put human rights up front. After all, didn’t the founding utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, refer to the French revolutionaries’ talk of inalienable rights as ‘nonsense on stilts?’ (Surely, one of the best phrased insults in the history of political philosophy). Bentham’s critique though, at least as I understand it, of rights for rights sake – rights because they are given to us by god, or by virtue of us being human beings – and, even if wellbeing is your central concern, then rights remain important. Not because of some intrinsic worth of their own but simply because history has shown us time and time again that when they are grossly violated suffering ensues. Think Rwanda, or the Holocaust, or the Gulag. It follows then that countries that protect and promote their citizen’s rights will be less likely to experience suffering.

Suffering also clusters around extreme poverty. So the second essential ingredient of development is the reduction of extreme poverty, followed by the reduction in poverty in general. There’s not space here in this blog post to explain Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to poverty but I do want to emphasise that the reduction of poverty is not the same as merely increasing one’s wealth. Wealth is an important component, but it needs to be set amongst others, including increasing the meaningful choices that people have in their lives. We want to reduce poverty of opportunity as well as material poverty

The third essential ingredient for development will be the protection of the environment. Despite all the advances of technology we humans remain dependent on the world we live in – and if we destroy it suffering will follow. In saying this, I’m not arguing for extreme sustainability that prohibits any environmental destruction but rather that we don’t damage the environment in a way that either significantly harms us now or which bequeaths a mess to future generations. (As a tangential point, where it is in any way avoidable, I’m also against irreversible environmental damage such as species extinction).

Finally, development needs to provide space all those other, less-quantifiable things that matter to human beings – social interaction, opportunities to have fun, a sense of meaning in one’s life.

It all sounds so simple on paper doesn’t it? But that sad fact is that for the vast majority of people living on our planet at present, development remains a long way off. Even so-called developed countries have problems sufficient to suggest that the very term ‘developed country’ has arrived prematurely. All of which begs the question, why are we still so far away from living in a developed world? That is a much, much more difficult question to answer…

Social Progress?

There’s no doubt that physically and materially we human beings are doing better than ever before. The proportion of the world’s population living in poverty is almost certainly declining, while human development indicators are improving almost everywhere.

But much of this is simply thanks to the marvels of technology.

Setting technological change aside is there any evidence that humans have actually become more ethical in their conduct or are we every bit as brutal and unjust as our savannah based ancestors? Is there, in other words, such a thing as social progress?

Steven Pinker clearly thinks so. Or at least he’s clearly convinced that human societies have become considerably less violent. Despite the fact that technologies of killing have become considerably more potent we do a lot less of it than ever before. If he’s right this is pretty good evidence of social progress.

So is he right? I’m no expert but the related work I’ve read suggests he is. Still I’m not sure, so I’ve been eagerly devouring reviews. Positive ones here, here, here and here. Although John Grey hates it (unconvincingly in my opinion) and Chris Bertram does a good catch on the table that was in the Guardian but is otherwise less convincing than John Quiggan is in his comments box. Brad Delong has a good comment too.

For what it’s worth:

1. I think Pinker’s right on violence. It is decreasing. And I think this is good evidence of some social progress.

2. However, even if there have been achievements they are clearly still over shadowed by the scale of what remains to be done.

3. And the potential for a catastrophic reversal in what has been a broadly possible trend is still real.

4. The main problem I have with the Whig view of history is not that their hasn’t been any progress but rather that the Whigs rarely deserve any credit for it. Even if Pinker is right the trends he describes owe little to the types of elites who will be congratulating themselves after reading the book and, instead, owe much to people out towards the margins of history. The Pacifists, the odd religious types, the proto-hippies, the socialists. All who got sneered at as being impossibly idealistic while they quietly made the world a better place.

[Update: Some debate in the Boston Review, with Pinker's defender winning handily.]

[Update: A superb, and damning, review by Timothy Snyder in Foreign Affairs. Also, listen to Pinker speak on the book at the LSE here.]

Why didn’t I think of that!

I have at least a couple of conspiracy theorist friends. They are nice people and I value their friendship but man their conspiracy theory nonsense bugs me.

There are more than enough real injustices in the world to occupy several life times. So why invent new ones and protect them with hermetically sealed logical circles.

Anyhow, thank you XKCD – I’ll try this approach next time

Is Fair Trade Really Such a Good Idea?

Still recycling old posts while in the field. This one from here, written in 2006.

In a column written for the Times of London in 2004 English blogger Oliver Kamm had this to say about fair trade:

OXFAM, we learnt last week, is going to back a chain of “fair trade” coffee bars. Meanwhile Gap clothing company has disclosed that many of the factories that it uses in developing countries do not comply with minimum labour standards. For those consumers whose prime concern is Third World development, the proper course is clear: buy clothes at Gap and avoid Oxfam’s coffee.

The rationale of Oxfam’s venture is to lessen the hardship that coffee growers have suffered since coffee prices slumped in 1997. The organisation claims: “Coffee growers will win three times . . . They’ll be selling their coffee at a fair trade price; they’ll share directly in the profits and will also showcase their coffee to the UK.”

Unfortunately the sharp decline in world coffee prices is not only cyclical. Over the past decade, exchange-rate movements and new technology have made the Brazilian coffee industry more productive, while Vietnam has used its low wage costs to become a large and efficient producer. Low coffee prices are not the result of market failure, but a sign that there are too many producers.

Of course laissez-faire is no reputable response to the farmers’ hardship. Oxfam is right that there is an obligation to assist poor coffee farmers. But its Scargillite remedy of subsidising enterprises that can never be profitable will prevent the development of new businesses which could be. A better scheme is to support farmers’ efforts to diversify production.

Now, prescience, is unfortunately not one of Mr Kamm’s strong points. He supported the invasion of Iraq writing, on the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture, that:

American and British forces liberated Iraq with a scrupulous concern to avoid civilian casualties; our respect for due process and our commitment to the rule of law extend even to apprehending alive a man who deserves as no one else to burn in hell.

Yes, well, quite. I guess.

When it comes to coffee, almost immediately after Kamm declared that the decline in coffee prices was more than just cyclical, coffee prices began to rise again.
(more here)

Kamm’s predictive powers then can fairly safely be discounted. But what about his more substantive point about the futility of subsidising enterprises and the impact this on people’s incentives to diversify.

Kamm’s argument, in a nutshell, is that: by paying small farmers a premium, Oxfam is reducing their incentives to diversify into areas where they can someday earn enough to move out of poverty.

So does he have a point? Is Oxfam essentially barking up the wrong Coffee-tree, so to speak?

The short answer is no. Kamm is mistaken. His reified world of markets and incentives just doesn’t map to the reality of the small coffee growers that he claims to be concerned about.

This excellent paper by Oxford academic Alex Nicholls provides an in-depth discussion goes into more detail about why simple incentive based explanations such as Kamm’s don’t map to real world development economics.

The most important point is simply that lack of incentives isn’t the real reason why small coffee farmers aren’t diversifying. It’s lack of options and capabilities. For a start, absence of education means that farmers may well be unaware of alternatives available to them. And lack of training means that alternative employment options may be thin on the ground too. By funding schools, fair trade products help overcome this. On top of this, many farmers may not have the capital to switch crops or change careers. The small premium paid to farmers by fair trade organisations can help with this too. Fair trade coffee can also provide money for investment in infrastructure (infrastructure investment has been a significant contributing factor to the success of Brazilian agriculture). And, as the upturn in coffee prices has shown, coffee itself may not be the development dead end that Kamm predicts. Coffee production is certainly not the magic elixir of wealth, but – when topped up with a fair trade premium – it can ease the poverty burden and, through funding education and infrastructure, and by providing capital, what it can do is give farmers an important first step onto the ladder.

It’s very hard to see why mister Kamm opposes this.

Postscript: Earlier this year I was fortunate to attend an informal panel discussion at which the producer of a movie on fair trade spoke, along with the proprietor of a fair trade coffee company and a staff member from trade aid. One thing that came out of this was that, fair trade, like all development solutions is still a fraught process. It’s not a panacea and there are lots of potential problems ranging from large companies co-opting the label to tradeoffs when it comes to eliminating the middlemen from the export/import process.

Turtles Can Fly – a review

“Turtles Can Fly,” directed by Bahman Ghobadi, 2004

“All wars, just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.” Eglantyne Jebb (founder of Save the Children)

Kurdistan is not the type of country that you will find on a map; it is something else, something far more ethereal: a country that exists only in dreams and aspirations, and, in particular, the dreams and aspirations of the Kurdish people.

Asking the Right People About Getting it Wrong

Over at Tales from the Hood J. asks a good question – should NGOs and aid agencies be more open when they fail? He’s asking the wrong people though. A readership of aid workers academics and students will have many interesting thoughts to offer but they’re not the people this question ultimately needs to be addressed to.

Instead you need to be asking:

People working in the evaluation of aid projects how confident they are that they don’t often get it wrong in their line of work too?

Tax payers whether they’re willing to let a small slice of their tax bill go to helping people in far off lands, even though it sometimes won’t work?

Politicians and journalists if they’ll be wise enough to separate the true aid scandals from mere mistakes and only seek to sell papers and earn political capital from the former?

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed writers whether they will be willing to defend their Libertarianism on philosophical grounds instead of selectively mining aid failures as ammunition in their war against taxes?

And you need to ask the donation consuming public: instead of purchasing atonement and a dose of ‘feel good because you fed the starving child’, will you really give your money in response to more complicate messages?

If the world of aid is to really become more open about getting things wrong, these are the questions that will really need to be answered.

Update: A few more thoughts…

Highlighting the challenges I listed above isn’t the same as absolving the world of aid from all the blame in the current situation. To date we folks working in development have done less than we could (even bearing in mind the constraints above). This has been the case for several reasons.

First, no-one likes admitting they’re wrong.

Second, development is often the battleground for warring ideologies – when you’re belief system is at stake it’s even more difficult to admit you got it wrong, especially when your intellectual enemies are crowing.

Third, and related to point 2, development work is located squarely in the realm of very powerful oughts: morally we ought to give aid, women ought to enjoy the same rights as men, people ought not need to work in sweetshops…When the oughts are this powerful they often eclipse is’s (aka facts of the matter). Often simply because it’s such a battle to get the ought all the way to the policy finish line and put it into practice (getting aid agencies to pay attention to gender, for example) that too few people stop to ask: sure we ought to do this, but can we? And too few people are open to admitting, after all that, that we can’t.

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Marc Bellemare has an interesting contribution to the forum, but I have serious doubts when he writes:

Likewise, even though a nongovernmental organization (NGO) admitting failure might incur a small cost for it (i.e., some donors might decide to withhold their funding), something tells me that admitting failure is also pretty much all upside. In other words, there are many more donors who will applaud the NGO for admitting failure than there are donors who will withhold funding

My question for Marc is: you’re an economist, if that’s really the case why has this particular $5 bill being lying uncollected on the pavement for so many years?

I’ve always thought that admitting you’d stuffed up in development work cut the other way: if everyone did it would be easy enough to do but if you’re the first NGO trying to do it you’ll find yourself at the sharp end of a ‘first penguin to leap off the ice sheet’ type collective action dilemma (i.e. it’s the first penguin that has the highest chance of getting chomped by the sea lions). Who’s going to keep giving money to the one NGO that’s forever feeding journalists with stories of what it did wrong.

However, having said that I’m inclined to think that the world of development donors is diverse enough these that days that there is space for certain NGOs, with certain types of donors, to be open in their failures. I know I’d give more money to one which was.

A Simple (but resilient) Definition of Power

Still recycling old posts…

I’m 100% sure this has been thought of elsewhere, and I’m not claiming anything profound – I’m just pinning this up here to clarify my own thoughts.

Power over someone is simply the ability to restrict their choices.

My own very succinct definition of an…

…idealist:

Someone who believes that processes that appeal to a sense of justice (or possibly morality) will also lead to better outcomes in a consequentialist sense.