Friday Round Up

Monkeys Do Markets In a recent experiment, a team of scientists trained a vervet monkey to open a container of apples, a task no other monkey in her group could do. She was well-compensated for this service by the other monkeys, who began to spend a lot of time grooming her (apparently, grooming is the monkey unit of exchange). Then, the scientists trained another monkey in the group to get the apples, and the “price” for the service (ie the amount of grooming the apple-providing monkeys received) went down. NPR Correspondent Alex Bloomberg explained:

[W]hen there was a monkey monopoly on the skill, the monkeys paid one price. But when it became a duopoly, the price fell to an equilibrium point, about half of what it had been. And this all happened despite the fact that we're talking about monkeys here. Monkeys can't do math.

What’s the point, other than research studies are really bizarre? Acquiring a sought-after new job skill leads to a higher income, even among monkeys. And, monkey markets can still set prices, even though the market participants can’t add, sign contracts, or talk. And, perhaps, complex markets can be the product of an unintentional, spontaneous order:  Out of the chaos of many monkeys running around hitting one another on the heads, pulling nits off each other’s fur, following only the simple rules of monkey hierarchies and monkey appetites…a functioning market emerges.

The Most Remote Place in the World is Three Weeks from Anywhere

Along the lines of our recent post, Africa Desperately Needs Trade Links: A Pictorial Essay, check out this feature from the New Scientist.

Bad Bosses Suck (Worse than War?)

I can think of lots of reasons why a local aid worker in Iraq might forego a secure paycheck and quit their job. Long lines and indignities at the security checkpoints to get in and out of the Green Zone every day. The dangers inherent to working with foreigners, like the threat of kidnapping or injury to themselves or their families.

But a paper based on conversations with local and international aid staff working in Iraq found that staff attrition and high turnover was more commonly caused by plain old bad bosses and poor treatment of staff. That’s not to say that poor management and dangerous environments aren’t linked in some causal way.  The paper pointed out that difficulties of aid worker life in hostile environments, like the lack of frequent contact with beneficiaries, problems building trust, and disparities in the amount of risk assumed by Iraqis vs international staff, magnify the effects of bad management.

I’m sure these “lessons learned” are old news to anyone who’s done aid work amidst hostilities.  But they are worth noting this week as observers of the attack on the UN guesthouse in Kabul asked whether there will soon be a Green Zone in Afghanistan, and in light of last month’s decision to bump up the amount of non-military aid the US gives to Pakistan, which may (or then again, may not, depending on how the aid is distributed) give aid workers a larger footprint there.

China in Africa

Finally, a couple notable books out to shed light on the little-understood subject of China’s  aid to Africa: The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa by Deborah Brautigam, and China into Africa: Trade, Aid, and Influence, a collection of essays published by Brookings.

Strength in What Remains: Healing in a Post-Genocidal World

An individual overcomes unbelievable odds, in a tale so implausible that it might well be rejected if it were a mere movie script, but it is a true story. In "Strength in What Remains," Tracy Kidder tells us about a member of the Tutsi ethnic group in Burundi named Deogratias, or Deo, who barely escapes the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in a harrowing journey on foot out of Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa during the genocidal year 1994. Deo makes his way to New York City but arrives penniless and speaking no English. He sleeps on a scrap of floor in crime-ridden tenements, endures abusive low-wage employment and then finds himself homeless, living in Central Park.

Despite such unpromising beginnings, Deo goes on to earn a degree in organic chemistry and philosophy from Columbia University and then gets into Dartmouth Medical School. From Dartmouth, he takes time off to start a free health clinic back in Burundi—in his home village, a mark of his forgiveness for those who had tried to kill him and a sign of hope for Burundi's future.

Read the rest of the review of Tracy Kidder's book in today's Wall Street Journal, here.

Giving Us Idiots More Credit than We Deserve

While not a complete idiot, I still find books in the "Complete Idiot’s Guide” series amusing and occasionally useful. So when The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Giving Back came out recently, I was curious to read the book’s recommendations.

The author outlines a process for deciding which causes to support, how much to give, and other factors to consider before giving a not-for-profit your hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, most idiots, and many other well-meaning people besides, will not read this book, but will respond to heart-wrenching pictures of children to decide which charity qualifies.

Even more unfortunately, reading this book isn’t going to make it much better. The author does counsel potential donors to devise and execute a giving plan. The chapter “Shopping for Charity” is particularly pointed in caveat emptor advice, interpreted here as "let the donor beware," but fails to provide enough guidance for idiots (or anyone else, for that matter) to truly evaluate the effectiveness of a charity.

On the other hand, the book encourages donors to look for more than just that warm and fuzzy feeling, and to ask questions about cause marketing: how much of an item’s purchase price actually goes towards the cause being promoted? Is there an upper limit on how much will be donated? Do the donations also have to cover corporate administrative costs?

We learn that the idea of cause marketing did not spring fully-formed from the heads of Bob Geldof and Bono, but rather got its start in 1971, when George Harrison and Ravi Shankar put on a concert to benefit Bangladesh. Sir Bob does deserve the credit for scaling up the concept, recruiting big-name rock stars for his 1984 project, Band Aid, and bringing us “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “Feed the World,” which remained the best-selling single of all time in England until 1997. With his (RED) campaign, Bono refined the concept by leveraging his celebrity status to promote particular products, some of the proceeds of which go to the Global Fund.

The author directs readers to “Check out the Charity” but limits guidance to annual reports and IRS forms and how to identify a scam, providing insufficient tools to evaluate charities effectively. The author confesses that it is often challenging to unearth the amount actually donated to the designated cause. How well we know!

The book also fails to differentiate between charity at home and abroad. For example, the author’s advice on donating used goods may apply when the recipients of lightly used T-shirts and tennis shoes live halfway across the city, but the situation gets rapidly more complex if the charity plans to ship those goods abroad. The international landscape is more complicated than the scant references to issues like fair trade purchases and disaster relief imply. Looks like this blog still has a role to play.

Better life, liberty, and lager

Global infant mortality has halved since 1960. The poorest countries are steadily catching up to the richest on other critical measures of the quality of life: life expectancy, literacy, political and civil rights – not to mention beer production per capita. This blog tries to remind us all periodically that there ARE successes in development. Charles Kenny has a great book in the works that will shoulder THAT load from now on. Kenny is a clear-eyed and honest observer of development that I have admired for a long time. He summarizes his forthcoming book on his website, from which I got the statements in the first paragraph.

(He also points out that per capita income growth in poor countries has not lived up to expectations and we don’t have a clue why – another theme of this blog also – but I think he is too negative about this growth, which is respectable even if not matching development economists’ expectations. Anyway, he argues that other quality of life indicators are disconnected from GDP growth.)

Kenny argues that the rapid spread of technology and ideas have led to the happy trends he identifies. Technology and ideas have made, for example, good health, cheaper and easier. (Cheap technology: soap. Spreading idea: wash your hands.) I have previously noted that aid should get part of the credit for improving health, and aid could do even better on these improving things in the future as Kenny argues. Kenny summarizes his work:

Realistic optimism is the right attitude with which to face the issue of development… a recognition of the challenges still facing the world – significant progress to be made, limits to the likely speed of that progress…. But we should also acknowledge that the rapid and unprecedented improvement in global quality of life over the past fifty years provides some significant grounds for hope about the future.

Salvation is Not Ours to Bestow: A Review of Michaela Wrong’s new book

Michaela Wrong’s gripping latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, is the antidote for anyone who knows the weariness of wading through the jargon of implementation plans and institutional treatises on governance and anticorruption. It’s the anti-boredom serum, the potion that brings you the real consequences of what happens when those plans are ignored.

On one level, the book is the story of one John Githongo, the eponymous whistleblower. A former journalist and pro-transparency activist, Githongo was handpicked in the euphoria following the 2002 Kenyan election to serve as the new president’s special anti-corruption advisor. “The era of ‘anything goes’ is gone forever,” declared Kibaki in his acceptance speech, “Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”

But when life very quickly began imitating that old Who song (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,”) Githongo fled the country, fearing for his life, with the tapes and documents that would blatantly incriminate government officials—up to the highest rungs—in a $500 million corruption scandal.

On a different level, Wrong’s book is also the story of an international movement. Githongo was up against the looters and thugs who threatened to silence him. But he also found himself on the wrong side of the fence from much of the donor community, which wanted Kenya’s new president to be part of a generation of democratic leaders paving the way for a new and prosperous Africa.

As Githongo gasped for air, Tony Blair was boosting DfID's aid commitments to Africa and launching the Year of Africa:

Playing to the industrialized world’s guilt complex, the Make Poverty History Campaign, Africa Commission and Gleneagles summit all shared one characteristic: the emphasis was on Western, rather than African action. Top-down, statist, these initiatives were all about donor obligations, pledges, and behaviour. What they definitely weren’t about…was highlighting the shortcomings of African governments set to benefit from future Western largesse.

It’s Our Turn to Eat is an unblinking look at the roots and the consequences of sleaze (the violence during Kenya’s recent elections, a referendum on the corrupt leaders’ failure to spread the wealth, was the worst Kenya had seen since independence). It is also a condemnation of “the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’.”

Despite Nairobi booksellers’ reluctance to stock the book, Kenyans are buying the book off street corners, reading it aloud on the radio, and debating it in church groups. Still, some of the best advice Wrong has to offer is for her Western readers.

Worried Westerners, who so often seem to fall prey to a benign form of megalomania when it comes to Africa, would do well to accept that salvation is simply not theirs to bestow. They should be more modest, more knowing, and less naïve.

You’re rational after all: unconscious development insights from unreadable books

Vernon Smith is a Nobel Prize winner. You quickly realize on reading this book that he got it for economics, not literature. But if you can slog through this book (which took me about 4 months), you will be rewarded with some great insights about development. (But why I am working so hard when Tyler Cowen’s blog is about topless French sun-bathers?)

His big picture is familiar to readers of Hayek: societies develop NOT through the conscious design of some experts (Smith uses the horrible jargon “constructivist” for the design view), but through the “ecological” survival of institutions, norms, rules, firms, and products in a society of freely choosing individuals.

It gets more novel when Smith applies a similar insight to individual rationality. Unlike most of his experimentalist colleagues, Smith is not celebrating findings of human irrationality in the lab as the greatest thing to come along since Sacha Baron Cohen. Instead, Smith wants to look more deeply at “irrationality” and see if in some cases it might be rational after all. The big idea is similar to the above: as humans biologically and culturally evolved, unconscious ways of acting “rationally” passed “ecological” tests of contributing to survival and well-being. The standard “rationality” model that looks at only explicit constraints and logical reasoning (“constructivist”) is way too simplistic for Smith.

An example is the well-known two-player game, the prisoner’s dilemma, when each player gets a higher payoff by cheating if the other doesn’t. The payoff is still very high if neither cheat, and it is the lowest if both cheat. Rational behavior predicts that both players cheat and hence wind up with the lowest payoff. Yet laboratory experiments with real human subjects and real money find that both refrain from cheating surprisingly often.

So players are behaving “irrationally,” yet Smith points out that they have managed to get a better outcome than what “rational” behavior would achieve. He argues that players have unconscious social norms of “fair” behavior (and also they may find ways of “socially” signaling to each other these norms, since one thing we know about humans is that their social skills are highly advanced). Unconscious sociability allows humans to realize gains from social exchange that cannot be captured by the explicit “rational decision” model. He finds more evidence for this idea by subtle variations in the social context of the experiment.

Smith doesn’t address development differences, so the big question is why gains from social exchange are realized more in some societies than others. Maybe he will get to that in his next unreadable insightful book.

Didn't we try that in 1938? Why technical poverty fixes fall short

Is African poverty caused by lack of the necessary technical knowledge applied to disease, nutrition, clean water, and agriculture? Reading many discussions, like that of the recent food security initiative, or the UN Millennium Project (UNMP) on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, would make you think so. Would it change your mind if that technical knowledge already existed and there were attempts to apply it as long ago as 1938? The following table compares the technical recommendations from a prominent and exhaustive survey of African problems headed by Lord Hailey in 1938 to those of the UNMP in 2005.

African Problem to be Addressed	African Research Survey, 1938	UN Millennium Project, 2005
Malaria	“mosquito bed-nets …malaria control by the spraying of native huts with a preparation of pyrethrum”	“insecticide-treated nets…. insecticides for indoor residual spraying …{with} pyrethroids”
Nutrition	“…the African suffers from deficiency of Vitamin A”	“Malnutrition {is also} caused by inadequate intake of … vitamin A”
Soil fertility	“methods of improving soil fertility {such as} green manuring”	“using green manure to improve soil fertility”
Soil erosion	“increasing absorption and reducing runoff on cultivated land {through} the use of terraces”	“Contour terraces, necessary on sloping lands… when furnished with grasses and trees…{to avoid} soil erosion”
Land tenure	“… legal security against attack or disturbance can most effectively be guaranteed by registration”	“security in private property and tenure rights … registration of property”
Clean drinking water	sinking boreholes	“Increase the share of boreholes”

(A longer version of this table and the citations for the quotes appear in my recent article “Can the West Save Africa?” in the Journal of Economic Literature.)

Enthusiasts for technology fixes for poverty concentrate almost exclusively on the science and the technical design -- this is a characteristic fault of poverty solvers from Silicon Valley, the Gates Foundation, doctors, and natural scientists.

All of the above seem to forget that technology does not implement itself. Technical knowledge needs people to implement it – people who have the right incentives to solve all of the glitches and unexpected problems that happen when you apply a new technology, people who make sure that all the right inputs get to the right places at the right time, and local people who are motivated to use the new technology. The field that addresses all these incentives is called economics.

The Soccer Theory of Globalization

by Daniel Kaplan, NYU graduate student in economics and supporter of Bafana Bafana Last season, when the British soccer team Liverpool FC played Real Madrid, the number of Spanish players in Liverpool’s team outnumbered those playing for Madrid. This is one illustration of an emerging trend: while soccer is already the most globalized of sports, it is also fast becoming one of the most globalized professions.

As labor mobility among soccer players has increased, there has been a decline in team inequality at the country level (documented by Branko Milanovic in this 2001 paper). Although traditionally dominant teams like Brazil, Italy, France and Germany continue to win, international tournaments are becoming far more competitive.

Cases in point: at the recent Confederations Cup in South Africa, Egypt beat Italy. And while Brazil eventually won the tournament, they had to fight back from two goals down against the USA (which had never before been in a major tournament final). What is behind the leveling of the international soccer landscape, and how could these lessons be applied to developing countries struggling to benefit from globalization?

Some “soccer economists” argue that nations that are worse at soccer have benefited from exporting their players to world-class foreign clubs, where they gain valuable skills and experience before returning to play for their home country This is similar to recent literature that questions the traditional Brain Drain fear, with the Brain Circulation alternative – skilled emigrants bring home skills and connections that could be as valuable to their home country as the skills brought back by exported soccer players.

But there is also a homegrown story. As Dani Rodrik points out, the Egyptian team that beat Italy had a majority of players with experience playing in domestic, rather than foreign clubs. The USA team that similarly surpassed expectations has key players from both domestic and foreign clubs. So taking advantage of globalization perhaps requires BOTH strong domestic capabilities and international links.

One nation’s strategy for developing a strong domestic soccer league will be very different from the next. American kids who play under the supervision of soccer moms are different from the street kids in a Brazilian favela. Perhaps the venerable theory of comparative advantage needs to become more complex as each country learns to play to its strengths and use more of whatever are its most abundant resources to compete globally. And just like in soccer, it’s hard to predict who will win the game at any particular time in any particular industry. Except the nice thing about trade, unlike soccer, is that both teams win in the end.

“Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles”

by Diane Bennett

The poor can’t sleep

Because their stomachs are empty.

The rich have full stomachs,

But they can’t sleep

Because the poor are awake.

-Copper miner

Lusaka, Zambia

I have been privileged to work with some of the poorest people in the world in South Sudan. Their daily life is a constant struggle to feed, shelter and clothe their families. I have been, quite literally, the rich person who couldn’t sleep. So I was pleasantly surprised to read In the River They Swim, a collection of essays edited by Michael Fairbanks, Malik Fal, Marcela Escobari-Rose and Elizabeth Hooper, providing first-person case studies in going from poverty to prosperity that are informative and inspiring.

The title is based on a Sufi anecdote about three ways to know a river: to read about it, take a long journey to see it, or to enter it and be surrounded by the reality. Each essay plunges the reader into the river of being poor and overcoming it. Each essay left me wanting to hear more from the author, (except Rick Warren, author of the foreword).

The essays are not intended to be systematic or comprehensive and often leave the reader hanging with unresolved issues, much like real life (and unlike most aid reports). For example, Eric Kacou’s essay “Deciding What Not to Do” gives insight into a trade policy decision a Minister of Trade has to make (or not) that can substantially affect the financial progress of his country and the livelihood of five hundred thousand of coffee-growing families. The essay leaves the reader hanging as the author prepares for a meeting …

The book aims to be “the antithesis to the search for solutions in the next big theory of global poverty.” Instead it powerfully illustrates the power of individual creativity and resourcefulness.

Malik Fal, a Senegalese executive for PepsiCo in east Africa, describes his family’s struggles with poverty and racism in “Locomotives, Needles and Aid.” His father’s school experience under colonial rule included a teacher’s daily denigrating assertion, “Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles. Whites are civilized; Negroes are savages.” As his father “earned everything the hard way,” he worked his way through French engineering school, rising out of poverty through hard work. Malik compares the challenges of his father with his post-colonial business experience where Africans still struggle to receive equal treatment. Yet he himself overcame the odds anyway.

Did “Save Darfur” Lose Darfur?

I have long been a fan of Mahmood Mamdani. His new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is very critical of the Western approach to Darfur. In brief, he accuses advocacy campaigns like Save Darfur of making the achievement of peace in Darfur more difficult by portraying the conflict simplistically between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans,” and by advocating foreign military intervention. I’ll repeat just a few points from Mamdani that stuck in my mind, but I encourage you strongly to pick up the book.

• The Save Darfur campaign repeatedly ignored and distorted the facts on the ground.
• Darfur is an insurgency and an extremely vicious counter-insurgency, but there was never the intent to eliminate any specific group and so the word “genocide” is inappropriate. But the word “genocide” gave the West and the UN a free hand to intervene.
• The prospect of foreign military intervention encouraged the rebels to hold out rather than agreeing to a peace deal, while hardening and attracting additional support for the position of the government to “defend national sovereignty.”
• There were also terrible atrocities on the “good African” side.
• The “good African” side includes one key player, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), that is an opposition Islamist movement that was previously on the “bad Arab” side in the North-South civil war between “bad Arabs” and “good Africans.”
• There was a sharp decrease in violence after 2005 just as the Save Darfur campaign picked up steam.
• The ICC is not credible to much of the non-Western world as a judge of war crimes since the US itself does not subject itself to the ICC, and since the ICC seems to selectively prosecute US enemies and turn a blind eye to war crimes by US allies.
• The Western pressure based on distorted facts has set back attempts within Sudan and within Africa to reach a peace settlement in Darfur, which is the only way the tragedy will end.

None of this is to deny the enormous human tragedy in Darfur. But Mamdani’s analysis makes one wonder: is it possible that ill-informed outsiders with the threat of military power on their side can make things worse rather than better?

The Answer to Development Ignorance: More Complicated Advice by Experts or More Freedom for Entrepreneurs?

by William Easterly in the Financial Times (extract of full review)

Alan Beattie’s new book False Economy accurately reflects the collapse in self-confidence among economists on our ability to usefully recommend how “developing” countries can rapidly develop. And he’s right about the reasons for this: both success and failure have often caught us by “surprise”, the key word in the book’s subtitle: A Surprising Economic History of the World.

Beattie’s supremely entertaining and informative book is a great reminder that the details of success are often impossible to predict or prescribe: no one can work out how to achieve each component. The best response is not to have increasingly convoluted advice by experts, but to let individuals with local knowledge roam free by trial and error to find their own successes.

So in the end, the economics profession does have more sensible things to say about achieving long-run success than Beattie allows: (relatively) free individuals, free markets, free trade, free thinking, and institutions that support all of the above.

Amartya Sen on Moralism, Maoism, and Capitalism

Professor Sen has an article on Capitalism beyond the Crisis in the current New York Review of Books. He has a shorter summary in the Financial Times today. I share the universal respect for Professor Sen, but must respectfully disagree on some of his take on capitalism in crisis:

He points out that even Mr. Free Market Invisible Hand, Adam Smith, was aware that you need more than self-interest to make capitalism work. You also need moral values like trust, honesty, and prudence (none of which has been too obvious in the financial sector lately), so business people can do transactions without cheating each other. His story is that free market proponents forgot all that in the run-up to the current crisis. If this is true, free market proponents are amazingly lazy, not bothering to read the zillion articles by economists on precisely these values in the last 15 years. The interesting question is where do these values come from? As this recent research shows, they COULD still arise even in a world of pure self-interest, since self-interested individuals could rationally find ways to bind themselves to norms of good behavior so that they can do repeated transactions with each other (probably helped along by pre-existing norms based on culture or human evolution -- see previous post on values). A norm of trust can sustain a free market driven by the profit motive (usually supplemented by formal institutions). And why do the values sometimes break down? Unfortunately, a norm of distrust is also another possible equilibrium, in which you expect everyone else to be untrustworthy and so you are untrustworthy too. A bunch of cheaters could catch everyone by surprise, destroy trust, and we jump to the bad equilibrium. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the current crisis, but I suspect this type of analysis, as practiced by tons of recent research on values and norms, is more useful than moral sermonizing to those (probably nonexistent) economists who didn’t know you need trust as well as the profit motive.

One last footnote: Professor Sen shows some rather surprising nostalgia for Maoism (in the NYRB but not the FT) over the current Chinese system. He is upset the gains in life expectancy slowed down after China moved from Maoism towards (at least partial) free markets. I would have thought you might also want to count the greatest escape from poverty in human history with the change from Maoism to partial capitalism. I also wouldn’t have thought that you would want to bring up Maoist China in an article on moral values. (Great Leap Forward/Famine/Cultural Revolution/50 million killed by Mao, am I missing something?)

Can You Justify Buying Fine Wine Rather Than Saving the Life of an African Child?

Peter Singer's new book argues that this choice is equivalent to whether one of us rich people would rescue a drowing child in a pond even if it ruins our clothes (most rich people would save the drowning child, but would also choose to buy the fine wine). The argument is both deeply moving and deeply problematic. See the book review here in today's Wall Street Journal.

Participation of the poor in mainstreaming gender empowerment for civil society stakeholders to promote country ownership of good governance for community-driven sustainable development

I have just stumbled across a great series of articles on buzzwords in development. Some aid workers and development scholars are so jaded by these vague but ubiquitous buzzwords that they play “Development Bingo.” Whenever a development pro is giving a lecture, they hold Bingo cards marked with all the buzzwords and check them off whenever the lecturer mentions them in the talk. When they have got a full set of buzzwords, they stand up and shout “Development!” (No doubt leaving more than a few lecturers baffled.) My favorite article discovery is Andrea Cornwall, Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. 44, No. 1, 49-65, March 2006. Professor Cornwall is a brilliant anthropologist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She also guest-edited a fascinating special issue of the journal Development in Practice (2007, Volume 17, Issue 4) devoted to “buzzwords and fuzzwords.”

In my favorite article, Professor Cornwall gives a history of how the aid powers that be have resorted to the buzzword of “participation” to convey good intentions to give the “power to the poor” over aid affairs, while never in fact ceding any such powers.

What is most scary is that “participation” as a buzzword goes all the way back into colonial times. In 1929, a British MP told the Parliament that they had a “moral responsibility” to give colonial subjects “some participation in the shaping of their own destinies.” Right after World War II, the Labour government would “inspire these {colonial subject} men with the hope that, as never before …. London could assist them in their work of extending popular participation in public affairs.” The irony that these promises were made by an authoritarian empire run from London apparently escaped notice. The US Foreign Assistance Act of 1966 similarly promised to emphasize “maximum participation…on the part of the people of the developing countries” -- all while the US was propping up dictatorial Cold War allies who were not too interested in giving power to anyone besides themselves.

Today of course, “participation” (and synonyms like “community-driven,” “empowering stakeholders”, “local ownership” etc. etc.) is everywhere in aid documents. Yet the aid powers giving away their power is not exactly going to happen anytime soon. Cornwall cites the 1998 World Bank “Participation” manual, which lists “the poor and disadvantaged” as only one of many stakeholder groups (another is “World Bank management, staff, and shareholders.”) I wonder which stakeholder is going to win the next battle.

The main function of buzzwords such as “participation” and “empowerment” is to paper over the ugly reality that there will be some battles of conflicting interests between “the poor and disadvantaged” and other more powerful groups like the World Bank and rulers of poor countries -- and that the poor will almost always lose such battles.

Using clear language instead of buzzwords would at least force us to confront the reality of the battle for real democratic rights. We should use words that have historically been associated with popular movements actually seeking power to the people (even if those are also misused and have conflicting meanings, at least they meant something historically).

One word that is extremely unpopular in aid documents but has great historical resonance on “power to the people” is “liberty.” Neither the 347 page World Bank 1998 “Participation Sourcebook” nor the 372-page World Bank 2006 “Empowerment in Practice” ever mentioned the word “liberty.” The poor cannot have liberty, but they can have lots of empowerment and participation and ownership and civil society. I’d rather have liberty myself.

Some cite good news on aid

A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature states: "There are well known and striking donor success stories, like the elimination of smallpox, the near-eradication of river blindness and Guinea worm, the spread of oral rehydration therapy for treating infant diarrheal diseases, DDT campaigns against malarial mosquitoes (although later halted for environmental reasons), and the success of WHO vaccination programs against measles and other childhood diseases. The aid campaign against diseases in Africa … is likely the single biggest success story in the history of aid to Africa..."

"The well-known Kremer and Miguel paper showed a strong effect of deworming on worm infection rates in a district in Kenya, which reflected not only direct effects on children receiving the drugs but also surprisingly strong externalities to others in the same school or nearby schools."

"Breastfeeding, immunization against diarrheal diseases, micronutrient supplementation and oral rehydration therapy (ORT) have all been found to work in randomized trails in the fight against diarrhea....Case studies suggest ORT is another health aid success story, accounting for a substantial drop in diarrheal mortality since 1980."

Who is this wild-eyed aid optimist? Oops, it's me.

The point is that even those of us labeled as "aid critics" do not believe aid has been a universal failure. If we give you aid agencies grief on failures, it is because we have seen some successes, and we would like to see more!

Everyone Should Be Responsible...(except the aid agencies)

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is. Alas, there is far to go. Take World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s oped (A Stimulus Package for the World) in last Friday’s New York Times and another one in today’s Financial Times (It is Time to Herald the Age of Responsibility).

The more you promise, the more you are telling us you don’t expect to be accountable for promises

In the NYT, President Zoellick requests an additional $6 billion from the US in foreign aid, which will “speed up global recovery, help the world’s poor and bolster [America’s] foreign policy influence…facilitate fast and flexible aid delivery…create jobs while building a foundation for productivity and growth…increase demand for American-made equipment...[and] limit the depth and length of the international downturn, prevent the contagion of social unrest and help save a generation from a new poverty trap.”

The more actions you list, the less you are serious about each action

Right after saying “priorities” for actions in poor countries (NYT), President Zoellick manages to touch on agriculture, health, education, nutrition, infrastructure, banking systems, small-and-medium-enterprise development, microcredit, global warming, and private sector development. Mr. Zoellick (FT) also wishes for international action on the Millennium Development Goals, the Doha trade round, the Copenhagen climate change agreement, humanitarian food supplies, energy conservation, and more G20 meetings to agree on fiscal expansion and reopening credit market agreements.

It’s not about aid money to reach objectives, aid money IS the objective

NYT: “The United States could begin by pledging some $6 billion…0.7 percent of its stimulus package.” FT: “How we respond to the crisis…will set the course.” The “first step” is to give more aid.

President Zoellick does mention briefly the critical issue in both the NYT and FT: some “safeguards to ensure that the money is well spent,” which don’t currently exist. In the FT, he makes the inspirational call for an “Age of Responsibility,” but the Responsibility seems to apply only to rich donors, there is nothing about holding the World Bank responsible.

If you are not accountable for promises, if you try to do everything and focus on nothing, and if you obsess about aid money raised rather than results achieved, haven’t you already told us that the money will not be “well spent”?