The G-20 this weekend: A model international summit

The FT gave this straight-faced summary of the G-20 Meeting: "Although the meeting ended without specific new commitments and no country or central bank would be forced to change any existing policy in light of the communiqué, the participants ...said they were pleased by the spirit of cooperation among the Group of 20 leading and emerging economies."

This is why politicians love summits -- they get credit for doing something while they are in fact doing nothing.

We in development aid perfected this art of summiteering before anyone else. We get the record for getting everyone to agree to the loftiest goals while nobody in fact has to make any "specific new commitments" or "change any existing policy". We call them Millennium Development Goals.

Spies Play Economists, Economists Play Spies

The New York Times on Friday the 13th headlined “Global Economy Top Threat to U.S., Spy Chief Says.” Many other papers followed suit with similar prominent headlines. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair staged a raid on the Big Issue of the Day as a “security threat” and thus something falling within his bureaucratic turf. Thanks, Spy Chief, but we have enough trouble sorting out the advice of the expert economists on the Global Financial Crisis without adding the amateur opinions of spies.

Of course, Spy Chief’s turf raid could just be retaliation for foreign aid economists' even more audacious turf raids on the worlds of spies and generals. Aid economists like Paul Collier in his book The Bottom Billion are trying to micro-manage the deployment of UN and Western armies around the globe, suggesting aid economists have hitherto-unsuspected access to both global intelligence and military knowledge.

Here’s an even more audacious proposal. Let’s go back to that old-fashioned world called Division of Labor and Gains from Specialization, where spies were spies, generals were generals, and economists were economists.

How About a Free Press to Hold Aid to Africa Accountable?

Courageous independent Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda was featured in a mass circulation magazine last weekend, getting some well-deserved recognition.

Mwenda has been in and out of jail for his criticism of the (aid-supported) authoritarian Ugandan government. He was a recipient of the International Press Freedom Award for 2008.

Mwenda started his own independent newspaper (known appropriately as the Independent) in Uganda, after complaining the government was curtailing the freedom of the newspaper where he previously worked.

He also is a frequent critic of aid agencies’ operations in Africa for tolerating corruption and poor results, which caused Bono to heckle him in a famous confrontation at the TED conference in Tanzania in 2007.

A free press is an important way in which we hold our governments accountable in rich democratic countries. Why shouldn’t Africans have the right to freedom of the press as well?

Mwenda will be speaking at the NYU conference “What Would the Poor Say? Debates in Aid Evalution” this Friday, February 6.