Ernie’s environmental program takes an unexpected turn…
throw out the development experts, bring in … everybody?
Bill Easterly – the development industry’s angriest critic* – had a column in the Financial Times this week.
[I didn’t realize, as I wrote this off-line on my commute home yesterday, that Chris Blattman was writing something closely related at more or less the same time.]
He starts out with a reasonable argument that experts don’t know that much about how to make poor countries grow:
The report of the World Bank Growth Commission, led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, was published last week. After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11- member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out…
Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for “development experts” to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have said it.
What went wrong? Experts help as long as there are useful general principles, such as could be established by comparing low-growth and high-growth countries. The Growth Commission correctly pointed out that such an attempt to find secrets to growth has failed. The Growth Commission concluded that “answers” had to be country specific and even period specific. But if each moment in each country is unique, then experts cannot learn from any other experience – so on what basis do they become an “expert”?
Unfortunately, Easterly then turns expert! What’s the magic bullet?
The answer is freedom for multitudinous individuals to figure out their own answers. (emphasis added)
The evidence provided is a quote from Friedrich Hayek (another expert) and five examples: “old, despotic, poor Europe compared with modern, free, rich Europe,” “South Korea compared with North Korea, former West Germany compared with East, New Zealand compared with Zimbabwe.”
I don’t disagree that freedom leads to growth, and I make no defense of development “experts,” but this analysis is about as helpful to poor countries in implementation and evidence as, well, saying “we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.”
* I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Easterly this week, and he is pleasant and funny.
* Easterly is the development industry’s angriest critic among mainstream economists. Outside our profession, there are definitely angrier.
40 Africa Reading Challenge reviews!
I just read the 40th review from the Africa Reading Challenge, and I have to say, this has been (and will surely continue to be) wonderfully illuminating. I have been exposed to fiction and non-fiction I would have been unlikely to encounter otherwise from across the continent, from Zimbabwe to Libya, from Sudan to the Congo.
Keep ’em coming! Karibu sana.
reseña del libro: El vigilante, por Felipe Montes
Escuché esta novelita por autor mexicano Felipe Montes. Mis pensamientos:
la perspectiva de un miembro de la comunidad que es – a la vez – observador íntimo y forastero completo
Pasamos un rato en la vida de un vigilante en Monterrey, Mexico (el local no se revela en el cuento pero todos los cuentos de Montes ocurren en Monterrey). El vigilante protege el vecindario pero no es parte del vecindario. Observa a todos, conoce a todos, pero nadie realmente le conoce a él.
Saltamos entre el presente y los recuerdos del pasado. En el presente, el vigilante camina, anda en su motocicleta, mira la gente del barrio, mira las ventanas de la gente, mira los carros de la gente [ves como es], y rememora los viejos tiempos cuando tenía un enamoramiento (ya no: el vigilante tiene que estar sólo) y una familia (ya no: ¡el vigilante tiene que estar sólo! Pero justo cuando te relajas, cuando piensas que la vida del vigilante es un aburro, se mete en una pelea con una banda de patineros malvados o intenta salvar la vida de un hombre que va a ahogar o trata de rescatar a una niña perdida. A lo mejor, es una ilustración fiel de la vida del vigilante: largos ratos en los que nada pasa, seguidos por arranques de violencia. «La sangre va a correr siempre sobre estas avenidas oscuras, y tus botas van a mancharse con ella.» [Nota: Este libro tiene bastante violencia gráfica.]
El autor intenta hacernos experimentarlo a través de su narración en segunda persona (o sea, tú – el lector – eres el vigilante). Después de todo, no lo encontré tan absorbente: largos ratos de nostalgia yuxtapuesta con violencia intensa. A la vez, Montes sí logró hacerme sentir lo solitario, lo invisible, lo afuera que es el vigilante aunque sea – de otra perspectiva – él que ve más que cualquier otro en el pueblo. Y la prosa es linda: veo que quiere decir Montes cuando dice en su sitio web: «La novela es una más de las formas de la poesía.»
Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Darío Tangelson y publicado por Recorded Books Audiolibros [4 CDs]. La narración es bien hecha pero no excepcional.
not knowing whether aid works vs knowing it doesn’t work
The research exploring the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth has shown a fragile relationship (when it has shown a relationship at all!). I just enjoyed Aid Effectiveness – Opening the Black Box, by Bourguignon and Sundberg (2007), which gives a nice summary of why we shouldn’t assume that means that aid doesn’t work. (Rather it means that either aid doesn’t work or we’re measuring aid wrong or we can’t capture how long aid should take right or …)
It is no surprise that reduced form analysis shows tenuous links between aid and development outcomes. Aid has often been for non-developmental objectives, such as disaster relief or for military and political ends. Much aid is lost due to instability and conflict: roughly half of aid to Sub-Saharan Africa has gone to countries facing civil war and/or frequent military coups (Fitzpatrick et al, 2007). Much (though not all) aid has also been wasted on poorly conceived and executed projects and programs, often fettered by debatable conditionality. And from a statistical point of view many technical problems arise: distinguishing short vs. long term impact, problems with endogeneity of the aid-growth relationship, difficulty determining the direction of causality or controlling for country-specific characteristics, etc, (Bourguignon and Leipziger, 2006).
Case studies do not avoid this due to the difficulty of establishing the counterfactual: Easterly (2006) argues that aid is not associated with growth in Africa, whereas Collier (2006) argues that in the absence of aid growth would have been far worse. Moreover, the multi-dimensionality of development objectives-mean income, poverty, literacy, access to sanitation, inoculations-further complicates empirical analysis.
Herbst’s States & Power in Africa – the heavily abridged version for the concentration-challenged
Jeffrey Herbst’s States and Power in Africa has been recommended to me by various sources, not least of which is Chris Blattman’s recommended reading in Africa list. But while everyone tells me it’s excellent, I haven’t made much progress. It’s too dense for my pleasure reading (hello Wizard of the Crow, which I’m still reading), and too off the topics of my own research to read for work.
So today I was pleased (more than pleased: almost giddy) to encounter Harvard professor James Robinson’s ten-page review of Herbst from the Journal of Economic Literature. Better yet, this ten-page review has a two-page summary of the book in the middle (as well as some interesting analysis). If you’re not sure you want to invest in Herbst (or if you’re just lazy like me), I highly recommend the Robinson article. I reproduce an abridged and highlighted version of the two-page summary here:
The starting point of Herbst’s analysis is that Africa is plagued by “state failure.” A state is meant to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement,
and infrastructure. Yet in Africa most states provide very few of these. They are unable to exercise control over much of their territory; they do not provide order or public goods. The literature talks dramatically about state “failure,” even “collapse.” What then is different about African states that leads them to diverge so radically from our ideal?
inspirational quote of the day
When I was growing up, my mom said, The sky’s the limit. I could do anything: be a teacher’s aide, nurse’s assistant, some kind of volunteer. But now I’m not so sure.
from Phyllis, on The Office (episode “goodbye, toby”, deleted scene #2)
sweet non-school photos of south africa & sierra leone (in my own estimation)
the best elucidation of the credit crisis i’ve seen so far (and other great podcasts this week)
1. This week’s episode of This American Life has the clearest explanation of the credit crisis I’ve seen: they talk with people in each step of the chain, from homeowners who took mortgages they couldn’t afford, to mortgage brokers, to the banks that bought those mortgages, and on up the chain through Wall Street and to the pool of global savings (they don’t actually talk to someone in the pool of global savings, but they talk to someone at the IMF about the pool).And it’s all in English, not Economese.
The radio program can be listened to on-line here. It’s the best hour I’ve spent this week.
2. The NPR Movies podcast for May 7 has a physicist explaining exactly which suspensions of disbelief are required to accept Iron Man and other superheroes. You can skip straight to the story here.
3. The Moth podcast for May 9 tells the story of a young African-American woman who goes to work as a health assistant for a terminally ill Klansman. [This one has a little bit of strong language, but not more than you’d hear around town.]
4. This week’s EconTalk has Chris Anderson discussing his next book, all about “the idea that many delightful things in the world are increasingly free–internet-based email with infinite storage, on-line encyclopedias and even podcasts, to name just a few.” Anderson is the author of The Long Tail and the editor of Wired magazine. Here is an article by Anderson discussing the major points.
A good week for podcasts.
book review: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost
Some of you have read funny stories that I post on this blog while traveling in Africa. If I made those stories into a book (and if I were a better writer), they might be like this book. Maybe I’ll stick to the blog. My thoughts:
alternate title: funny stories from life as an ex-pat on a tiny Pacific island
Having finished graduate studies in International Relations, Troost (he’s Dutch) finds himself unclear on the next career step, so he accompanies his girlfriend who takes a job as an aid worker in Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas), where he tries to write a novel and has funny experiences.
Troost is funny, sarcastic, and self-deprecating. I enjoyed much of the book. If I were reading the stories periodically (e.g., on a blog or in an occasional email), I would have found it even more funny, but in rapid sequence the style got tiresome (especially in the middle of the book). At times the humor felt unpleasantly smug (although I give him credit for being as deprecating to himself as to others).
He also sheds some light on a part of the world that I know very little about: life on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific? It’s a whole different world, one very different from other poor countries. When he includes history, he succeeds in making it entertaining. Ultimately, though, most of the book felt like a trifle: I enjoyed it on net but considered stopping halfway and am not rushing out to read his two more recent books (about life in Vanuatu and travels in China). Sort of like he says himself: “I like my entertainment not too serious, not too stupid, sort of like this book” (p84).
I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Simon Vance (British accent) and published by Blackstone Audio (7 CDs). The narration was good.
[Note on content: This book is not about anyone’s sex life, has very little sexual content, very little violence, but a significant amount of strong language.]
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