The Lives of Others

UPDATE: contrasting negative images offered by commentators on Twitter (see end of post) My Ghanaian friends often tell me that if you want to understand Ghanaians at all, you have to understand how religious are most Ghanaians. I believed them of course, but it didn’t really become vivid until I attended the most amazing church service this morning. I am not saying this out of any religious motives, just to point out another side of Ghanaians that outsiders seldom see or appreciate.

The service was at an Anglican church in Bolgatanga (I am myself an Anglican at a fairly tepid level). The Anglicans in in the US (where we’re called Episcopalians) are a pretty sedate denomination, associated with rich, formal, well-dressed, stuffy older people. So imagine an Anglican service with music including a drum-set, Ghanaian drums, a talented organist and a vocalist, dancing, and a congregation made up of all ages (also well-dressed in indigenous clothing). A drum-set would be as out of place at an American Episcopalian service as a vuvuzuela, but the Ghanaian Anglicans were clearly much more into the service than their American counterparts.

Exactly what point am I trying to make in my current travel-addled state with little time to write this? (Insert obligatory academic references to some random research findings on religion and development when I get more time.)

I think it’s something about how to understand people’s behavior, you need to understand how they see themselves. A good guess is that the people in the congregation this morning, in one of the poorest regions of Ghana, do NOT see themselves primarily as “poor” or “developing”, they see themselves as Christians. Another guess is that similar feelings about religious faith would apply to other Ghanaians in other religious services, like Muslims, Catholics, traditional religions, etc.)

Perhaps this fits into the recurring Aid Watch theme about humanizing aid recipients, how poor people have a life, and may not even see themselves as poor at all, and so may according to some other perspective NOT be poor. This is not to deny the material hardships of people around Bolgatanga; in fact, I talked to the bishop afterwards about really bad stuff like malaria and human trafficking in teenage girls. But not all the comparisons with rich Americans go one way. Just daring to speak for my fellow Episcopalians, Ghanaian Anglicans have something that American Episcopalians could envy and learn a lot from.

UPDATE: got this comment on Twitter:

@auerswald Noticed that too. RT @JaneReitsma: The absolute opposite of @bill_easterly's post today - "#Africa’s unsung heroines" http://econ.st/ce525h

The Economist article cited is a description of a few women in Burundi, whose husbands are depicted as follows:

As for the husbands... Many of those who stay are drunks with syphilis. Women are forbidden to inherit land. They are often beaten and raped.

I'm not sure how a random example from Burundi is the "opposite" of the post above on personally observing one congregation in Bolgatanga, since I was not trying to establish the definitive portrait of "the typical African", which would be a ludicrous enterprise. I certainly would not deny the very real existence of abusive husbands and victimized women, but it does bother me that there are a lot more of the extreme negative anecodotes  in the Western media covering Africa than any positive anecdotes.

P.T. Bauer, Development Prophet

This post is by Claudia Williamson, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI. P.T. Bauer was a brilliant development economist who began writing in the 1940s, and published many influential works throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, when most of his profession favored central planning and government solutions.*  Bauer preferred bottom-up solutions and focused on the importance of institutions to align incentives and provide information to promote social cooperation and economic growth.

Relying on basic economic principles and logic, Bauer made bold arguments that are surprisingly relevant today.

Bauer said: The vicious circle of poverty “is in obvious conflict with simple reality.”

Proponents of the “poverty trap” explanation argue that underdeveloped countries are so poor that individuals can’t save enough to support the investment necessary to generate economic growth.  The only way to break out of the cycle is through external funding.

Bauer argued that the poverty trap cannot be a binding constraint.  The mere existence of prosperous individuals and societies—most of which have emerged from poverty without the assistance of foreign aid—flies in the face of the poverty trap.    While it is true that poor people can’t save as much relative to rich people, if the right incentives are in place, small scale savings will lead to small scale investment, which in turn will generate marginally higher incomes leading to medium scale savings and investment, thus creating a “friendly circle of wealth.”

Bauer said: “Guilt-ridden people hope to assuage their feelings simply by giving away money…without questioning the results: what matters is to give away money, not what results from this process.”

At the recent World Bank annual meeting, the Development Committee praised the World Bank’s “vigorous response” to the global financial crisis, which they quantified as “a tripling of IBRD commitments to $33 billion this year and IDA reaching a historic level of $14 billion.”

While most development agencies profess a commitment to measurable results and outcomes, “results” in development are puzzlingly often equated with volume of loans given or number of grants handed out. According to Bauer, the reason for this apparent contradiction is that collective guilt has replaced individual responsibility. Because the West feels responsible for the lack of development in the rest of the world, what matters is to give away money, not actually see results.

Bauer said: “Foreign aid is demonstrably neither necessary nor sufficient to promote economic progress in the so-called Third World and is indeed much more likely to inhibit economic advancement than it is to promote it.”

Foreign aid inflows alter the incentives of recipient governments, argued Bauer, increasing the power of the (often dictatorial) government, promoting dependency and encouraging rent seeking.  Aid ignores the fundamentals that are necessary for economic development: the primacy of property rights and the importance of informal norms and culture for economic change.

Bauer said: There is a “need to restate the obvious.”

If Bauer said it all, why is it still so vital that new research follow in his footsteps?

Bauer’s answer comes from George Orwell, who lamented in 1939: “we have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men.”  What may be obvious to some is counterintuitive for many.

There is a need to restate the obvious.

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*Update:  Thanks to astute readers for prompting us to be more precise on the time when Bauer began writing. As a few of you pointed out, Bauer's influence spanned many decades: he published his first major work, "The Working of Rubber Regulation," in 1946,  and continued publishing through the 1990s. A collection of Bauer's essays, entitled "From Subsistence to Exchange," with an introduction by Amartya Sen, was published in 2000, two years before his death.  The opening sentence of the blog has been changed to more accurately reflect this. - Eds.