Why development history matters for the Millennium Villages Project

by Ed Carr, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina A growing volume of critical writing on the Millennium Villages project (MVP) includes blog posts, journalistic pieces, scholarly works, and, recently, one partial social impact study. Nearly all point to project outcomes that could have been avoided had the project seriously engaged with the long history of field-based experiences in development.

Here, I will focus on just one example: Because the MVP did not critically evaluate the effect of its own assumptions about what works in development, a conflict between project goals and the needs of the villagers has emerged in at least one site.

The MVP is part of Millennium Promise, an effort to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  As a result, the MVP framed its interventions around the MDGs.  For example, in 2005 the MVP website described community participation in this MDG-centric manner:

An open dialogue [between MDG-trained teams and villagers] will cover topics such as local problems as related to the MDGs, constraints and opportunities for achieving the MDGs at their village level, initial discussions on possible solutions and approaches for achieving the MDGs, and general impressions/consensus on being included as a Millennium Villages Project site.

The project’s founders have stated that the MVP was built on the “core truth” that there are “known packages of effective and generally low-cost interventions” that can address poverty.  A review of the MVP described it as a pilot project seeking to “provide successful evidence of how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals”. The project’s focus on finding “successful evidence” for the efficacy of these packages of interventions suggests that the project has an interest in validating the importance of the problems identified in the MDGs and justifying the interventions of the MVP.

This creates a conflict of interest for the field staff of the MVP: What if the evidence does not show success? And what to do when the local community’s concerns do not align with either these solutions or the MDGs?

Those familiar with the history of development work know that such conflicts of interest are chronic. Take the classic by Robert Chambers:  Whose Reality Counts. He describes what happened when he examined a consultant's glowing report on a World Bank irrigation scheme and found evidence that the conclusions were wrong:

My points were more or less accepted, but then the matter was consigned to an indeterminate limbo.  Nothing was done.  Far from being rejected or modified, the consultant’s conclusions were published unchanged, and without reference to the criticisms....The consultants knew that the World Bank, which had commissioned the study, was keen to justify the new approach.  They knew what result was wanted.  Supported by the consultants’ unchanged report, the new approach was implemented on a large scale.  So, even if bad news is reported, it may be avoided, rejected or finessed out of sight. (p.82)

Another disconnect appeared in a UNDP/OECD evaluation of a project in Mali: “it has to be asked how the largely positive findings of the evaluations can be reconciled with the poor development outcomes (1985-1995) and the unfavorable views of local people.” (1999)

Similarly, a classic work by James Ferguson (1994) recounts a World Bank project to teach better farming techniques in a mountainous region of Lesotho, out of touch with local people who had long ago learned to abandon the poor soils of that region and work as migrants in South African mines.

There are the same significant pressures on the MVP field staff to press participants to conform to project assumptions and expectations, and to reject or finesse evidence and feedback that does not. Those designing and implementing the MVP should have addressed possible conflicts between their goals and those of the communities. They did not. As a result, I was not surprised to see this quote from a woman living in a Rwandan Millennium Village, from a recent study:

The MV has to meet with local community to learn more about what people really want because sometimes the MV brings things that the community doesn’t need or want.

This and several other issues with the MVP were easy to see from the outset (see here and here). But to recognize them required a familiarity with the history of development and a self-awareness that the Millennium Village Project itself has never shown.

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Ed Carr is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina.  His book Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future was released by Palgrave Macmillan on February 1, 2011.  He blogs at Open the Echo Chamber.

Read all Aid Watch posts on the Millennium Villages project here.

Double Standards Brigade Goes to Egypt

UPDATE 8:45am 2/2/11: NYT: US policy is stuck one step behind popular movement for democracy Update 5pm: Joe Biden, oops I mean Hosni Mubarak, says he will not run for re-election in Egypt

UPDATE 8:45AM: much heavier heavyweights with similar criticisms of Double Standards (see end of post)

I want to thank all the major world leaders who have worked so hard during the past few days to confirm my own personal thesis that the Development/Foreign Policy Establishment has a Double Standard on Democracy for rich and poor nations.

I never would have thought that a cringingly catchy slogan like "Democracy is for Rich People, Not for Egypt People" would have so many takers.

UN News has helpfully posted where Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stands:

Asked directly what concrete steps he thinks President Hosni Mubarak should take to show that he is listening to the voices of the people of Egypt and if he thinks the appointment of a new Government is sufficient, Mr. Ban replied: “I would leave it to the Egyptian leaders.”

This blog already gave Secretary of State Clinton grief over the weekend for using the well-known “transition” rhetorical maneuver to avoid taking any position.

At least Vice President Joe Biden took a position.  On the PBS News Hour, Jim Lehrer asked Biden:

Has the time come for President Mubarak of Egypt to go?

Biden said no. Lehrer pressed further:

Should Mubarak be seen as a dictator?

Biden helpfully explained:

Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.

Rich nations need to respect the rights of their citizens to avoid the “dictator” label, but in poor nations all you need is to be a US ally.

This is perfectly consistent with US policy in the previous administration, when (at-the-time) Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, according to a recent opinion on English Al Jazeera,

rebuffed attempts by local journalists to get him to admit to a double standard in calling for human rights without actually supporting them in countries like Tunisia and Egypt.

One has to feel sorry for Mr. Zoellick, who may someday win recognition for being stuck on the wrong side of democratic history twice. Now as World Bank President, Mr. Zoellick presides over an institution whose Egypt page on the Internet today has a helpful summary on “10 Things you may not know about the World Bank in Egypt.” This includes this affirmation of democracy in Egypt:

Through consultations processes, participation and community driven development projects, the Bank engages in active dialogue with and promotes initiative among various stakeholder groups to enhance the quality of its work and acquire a sharper focus on its mission to alleviate poverty.

OK, frankly, this post doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about the Double Standards on shameful display for Egypt, for the Arab World, for the developing countries in general.

Couldn’t we find somebody to draw upon the words from our own democratic history to say something like:

let’s speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, will be able to join hands and say “Free at last! Free at last!”

UPDATE 8:45am  Great columns in this morning's papers by Nick Kristof, David Brooks, and Gideon Rachman making related and far more eloquent criticisms .

Davos Man meets Girl

UPDATE 12:40 pm: Readers point us to an example of a "girl-focused" campaign gone badly awry. The Girl Store markets school supplies in an extremely creepy and objectifying video that asks you to "Buy a girl before someone else does." Sign a petition against this campaign here. --

In the new issue of the e-journal Contestations, Rosalind Eybens asks, What is Happening to Donor Support for Women’s Rights?:

Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, a tone set by the World Bank’s 2006 action plan – ‘Gender equality is smart economics’….Other equally disturbing trends are emerging, such as DFID’s adoption of the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ theme of ‘stopping poverty before it starts’ by ‘investing in girls’ – an approach that entirely ignores the historically derived structural inequities that are keeping many millions of girls [and boys!] in conditions of poverty.

The yearly gathering of the word’s rich and powerful that took place at Davos last week is an equally good example of this new approach. “Six Global Challenges, One Solution: Women” was the not at all over-promising title of Thursday’s panel on women and society. Recent years’ sessions on women and development have also taken place within the “Girl Effect” rhetorical framework: girls are the “world’s greatest source of untapped potential” and must be seen as “a resource and an asset.” “Investing in adolescent girls” “yields a higher return in improving the local economy than any other type of investment” and is a “cost-effective tool” in “lesser developed countries.”

(Never mind that this year, to compensate for the rich world’s utter failure to achieve gender equality at the highest levels of power, Davos organizers had to make it a requirement that their top 100 corporate members make at least one of their five delegates a women, and 20 of them were unable to do so. They were perhaps outnumbered by “Davos wives” whom, according to one poignant account, the other Davos men snub as non-persons.)

The problem is that the message of the “Girl Effect,” is “profoundly anti-rights,” according to Eyben, in that:

The seeming triumph of the 1990s had been that social justice was seen as a sufficient reason for efforts to be made to secure gender equality. Women’s and girls’ well-being was an end in itself. Today, it is all about calculating the rates of return from investing in a person as if she were a piece of machinery.

Emily Esplen describes the dilemma posed by “the Girl Effect” Effect for women’s rights advocates:

Our cause is being championed but not in the way we intended; it has been sapped of political intent and reduced to a technocratic problem. DFID’s ‘unrelenting focus on results’ … incentivises and intensifies this technocratic, de-political approach to women’s empowerment, and to development more broadly.

Even our own local aspiring feminist weighs in, expanding on a discussion that took place here on the blog a few weeks ago:

The debate over the Nike “Girl Effect” video has unintentionally revealed a deep divide in approaches to development, with the two sides close to mutual incomprehension. The divide is between … the technocratic approach and the rights approach.

…The technocratic approach never really tests the proposition …that technocracy will eventually yield equal rights, despite the technocratic veneration for “evidence.” Nor does the technocratic vision consider how much “we” may violate such rights …of “them” along the way. Even if there were such evidence, it would not address whether the final state of equal rights made it “worth it” to violate rights along the way, and above all - who gets to decide?

Putting rights at the end inevitably enmeshes “us” in a tangle of paradoxes in which it will always be unclear who is benefiting from whom, or who is harming whom. Rights must come first, not last.

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Related posts: So now we have to save ourselves and the world, too? A critique of “the girl effect” It takes more than a cow, but…girls still count

Hillary opts for lame "transition" jargon on Egypt

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced today a new US government position on Egypt, calling for a 'transition to a democratic regime.' This was also the old US government position on Egypt. As this blog has pointed out, the "transition" word is a much-used device to appear to be in favor of democracy while in fact taking no position whatsoever. The democracy scholar Thomas Carothers is one who first pointed out the emptiness of the "transition" paradigm, noting a USAID description of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2001 as a country in “transition to a democratic, free market society.”

In this rhetorical make-believe, EVERY country is allegedly in "transition" to democracy, even if a dicatator is the status quo. Dictators are just a temporary delay, or even maybe themselves gradually "transitioning," since the "transition" jargon leaves completely open WHEN democracy will arrive, or HOW SLOWLY the dictatorship will imperceptibly fade away.

Sorry, Hillary, you haven't actually said anything yet, please let us know when you get a bit more enthusiastic about people demanding their own democratic rights.

Poetry of the Arab Revolt

Many sources have been quoting the Tunisian poet Abul-Qasim al-Shabi (died 1934). One of his most famous poems was "To the Tyrants of the World"

Hey you, the unfair tyrants...

...You kept walking while you were deforming the charm of existence and growing seeds of sadness in their land

Wait, don't let the spring, the clearness of the sky and the shine of the morning light fool you...

Because the darkness, the thunder rumble and the blowing of the wind are coming toward you from the horizon

Another of his poems even more quoted during current events is "The Will to Live":

If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call.

And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall.

Please let the World Bank know that something might be happening in Arab countries

UPDATE: heard from @worldbank, see below On the Bank web site:

The Development News is a summary of current news collected by the World Bank and published each business day.

The Development News on Friday January 28, 2011 mentions violence or political conflict in the following countries: Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Haiti

Number of references to any news happening in any Arab country:

zero

The lead story yesterday:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is shifting his focus away from involvement in international climate change talks and towards new areas in the fight against global warming.

UPDATE 3PM: Just got this, addressed to me from World Bank twitter account:

We're monitoring #Egypt closely. The story is everywhere. Thx for feedback, watch Dev News for the development angle.

Asked them why Egypt did not already make Development News, waiting for reply.

Arab masses 9519; Davos elite 435

Scoreboard update 3pm EST, 1/28/11: Arab masses 11778; Davos elite 257

The parable of uneven growth

You’re in a multi-lane tunnel, all lanes in the same direction, and you’re caught in a serious traffic jam.  After a while, the cars in the other lane begin to move. Do you feel better or worse?

Though it may sound like a description of New York traffic after last night's snow storm, this is in fact NYU Economics Professor Debraj Ray’s analogy (adapted from Albert Hirschman’s early work on economic development) about the response to uneven growth in unequal societies:

At first, movement in the other lane may seem like a good sign: you hope that your turn to move will come soon, and indeed that might happen. You might contemplate an orderly move into the moving lane, looking for suitable gaps in the traffic. However, if the other lane keeps whizzing by, with no gaps to enter and with no change on your lane, your reactions may well become quite negative. Unevenness without corresponding redistribution can be tolerated or even welcomed if it raises expectations everywhere, but it will be tolerated for only so long.  Thus, uneven growth will set forces in motion to restore a greater degree of balance, even (in some cases) actions that may thwart the growth process itself.

In this same paper, Professor Ray argues that economic growth in developing countries has recently been “fundamentally uneven”:  some sectors in an economy initially grow more quickly than others, which allows some groups in society to benefit while others lose out.  When, where, and why uneven growth leads (destructively) to frustration or (constructively) to higher aspiration is a puzzle whose answer determines how well societies will adapt to change and sustain growth.

His tunnel parable made me think of Andy Sumner’s recent finding that three-quarters of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, a big change from 30 years ago, when 90 percent of the poor lived in very poor countries. This means that far more of the people stuck in the slow lane may now also be watching their neighbors break free of the gridlock and cruise away.

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See also: Development is uneven, Get over it.

Skeptics and thermostats

UPDATE 12:50PM: Please assume I'm an idiot (see end of post) Many have suffered from being in a building where there was a centralized thermostat for the whole building (or the whole floor), with the predictable result that some rooms are way too hot or way too cold. (Sounds like a metaphor, watch for it...)

Things were even more extreme in the former Soviet Union, where there were centralized heating plants for a whole city, and the hot air would then be pumped out to individual homes and offices. So basically the whole city had one centralized thermostat.

What a nice and simple solution there is: give each room its own thermostat. First, there is automatic adjustment from the thermostat to keep it from being too hot or too cold. Second, the people in the room at any one moment can choose to adjust the thermostat according to their preferences.

A thermostat is a very simple knowledge processing device. So this is a great metaphor for (here it comes!) the advantages of decentralized knowledge over centralized knowledge  (Hat tip to Adam Martin for the Facebook conversation that sparked this idea).

When skeptics (like me) criticize the uselessness of very aggregated centralized knowledge on "how to do development", we get labeled nihilists, like we're saying nobody never knows nothing nowhere nohow. But what we're really saying is that centralized knowledge is an impossible dream for overall economic development, but decentralized knowledge can work very well.

In sum:

1) Skeptics like me are not criticizing ALL knowledge, just saying some types are useful, and others are not. And so the best systems are those that can gather and process decentralized knowledge.

2) Well-functioning markets and democracy give people their own thermostats.

PS {Insert here your own favorite example of the centralized approach to global problems at Davos starting today.}

UPDATE 12:50pm on Please assume an idiot:

In response to commentators:

(1) have I ever heard of any situation where centralized knowledge plays a full or partial role? Yes

(2) does that change the above argument? No

Cool maps: Measuring growth from outer space

For many of the world's poorest countries, figures measuring economic growth are unreliable, and in some cases they don't exist at all.  In an NBER working paper, Brown University professors J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil came up with an interesting proxy for GDP growth: the amount of light that can be seen from outer space.

Of course, the light intensities pictured in this world map reflect both income and population density. The authors explain:

In the United States, where living standards are fairly uniform nationally, the higher concentration of lights in coastal areas and around the Great Lakes reflects the higher population densities there. The comparison of lights in Western Europe and India reflects huge differences in per capita income, as does the comparison between Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

While GDP figures are almost always reported at the national level, the night lights allow us to see the growth of cities and regions too. The lights may be better able to show activity in the informal economy, and can be captured far more frequently, and with less of a time lag, than GDP figures.

Growth in light intensity not only "gives a very useful proxy for GDP growth over the long term;" the authors also found that it "tracks short term fluctuations in growth." One example shows the dramatic contrast in long term growth between North and South Korea, and gives a picture of how quickly South Korea has developed over the last two decades:

Another example illustrates how genocide literally darkened Rwanda in 1994:

Don't forget the Congolese who helped tell the Congo story

When Western  journalists report from the front lines in Africa, the reader may not be aware how much these reporters depend on Africans as sources, guides, translators, fixers, and intermediaries. The curtain has just parted a bit to see one of these locals, a Congolese hero who helped get the story of the Congo out to the rest of the world (quoting CPJ):

Pastor Marrion P'Udongo has been called the "Oskar Schindler" of Congo...In 2003, as militia sacked the town of Bunia in northeastern Congo and executed hundreds of their ethnic rivals in the streets, the pastor sheltered scores of people in his home and miraculously guided them to safety. ...In order to finance {his} mission and support his family, Pastor Marrion has worked as a translator and fixer for the world's leading news agencies who cover the conflict... If you've read a story about Congo in recent years, or seen one on television, the pastor probably helped produce it.

The reason for the belated recognition of Pastor Marrion is that he is now dying, and journalists who have worked with him have started a fund to finance a kidney transplant to save his life.

In a dizzying role reversal, Nick Kristof kindly agreed to ME interviewing HIM on this topic. He did not know Pastor Marrion, but he said:

local interpreters are unbelievably important absolutely everywhere in the world, from Afghanistan to Congo. The Western reporter gets the credit and the prizes, but the hardest work and greatest risk is typically undertaken by the local interpreter. And then we have some protection because we’re foreign, and in any case we bounce out, while the locals stay behind and must deal with disgruntled warlords and governments when documentaries/articles come out. Local interpreters truly are the heroes of international reporting, especially in more dangerous places like Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ivory Coast.  So I hope the upshot is not only a new kidney for Paster Marrion but also a greater appreciation for the courage and contribution of people like him.

What’s it like to live in a Millennium Village?

In Mayange, a cluster of villages about an hour’s drive south of Kigali, Rwanda, interventions by the Millennium Village Project across all sectors (in seeds, fertilizer, malaria nets, health clinics, vaccines, ambulances, water sources, classrooms, computers, cell towers, microloans and lots more) aim to lift villagers out of poverty within five to ten years. What do we know about the effects of such ambitious projects on the lives of the people living in these impoverished, rural communities? A qualitative study by Elisabeth King, a post-doctoral fellow with Columbia’s Earth Institute, produces a fascinating if limited* “snapshot” of social impacts of the Millennium Village Project in Mayange. A few observations:

The villagers King talked to were reluctant to bare all to a foreigner asking questions about delicate social topics. Her questions about quality of life, trust, and social exclusion elicited some contradictory and evasive answers: “Life in Mayange…In general it is not bad, it is not good, it’s in between.” “I know people well. But then, people are private and one only knows one’s own problems.” “There are no problems. But there are always some small problems between people though.”  King explained that in her previous research she found that Rwandans “downplayed negative aspects of social life and tended to embed negative reflections within positive pro-government ‘bookends.’”

MVP has good brand recognition and outreach; cooperatives sometimes increase cooperation. King found that the project was well-known among villagers, and almost all could name a change that had resulted from the project. Most were members of some kind of cooperative (farming, basket-weaving, bee-keeping) created by the project, and some described these groups as strengthening social bonds in the community or increasing women’s confidence by helping them provide income for their families.

Villagers thought that benefits from the project were unevenly distributed. In response to “Who gained the most from the project?” villagers answered most frequently “MV staff,” followed by “local leaders,” and villagers most willing to adopt new practices suggested by the project.

MVP may not be doing so well on the most basic thing – letting people say what THEY want. The most common suggestion was that the project should consult more with people in the community about what they want. One woman told King: “The MV has to meet with local community to learn more about what people really want because sometimes the MV brings things that the community doesn’t need or want. People may have good ideas.”

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*King’s study is limited in several ways beyond lack of statistical significance (she spoke with 35 individuals and 8 focus groups in a population of 25,000 people). One, as a visiting Westerner asking questions about MVP, she can’t avoid being seen as tied with the project. Whether this makes her interviewees more timid in voicing complaints (for fear of losing some project benefit or subsidy), or more bold (in the hopes of gaining resources to address their troubles) is hard to say. Two, the Rwandan ban on talking about ethnic divisions prevents people from speaking candidly about this obvious issue in a place where resettled genocide survivors and released prisoners now live side by side. Three, King has no baseline data, so she can’t talk about changes in quality of life or social cohesion based on statements from before the project vs. during/after the project (see also: Clemens and Demombynes).

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Thanks to Michael Clemens for the tweet that sent this study our way.

Read previous posts on the Millennium Villages here.

Will the first Charter City be in Honduras?

A reader pointed us to the news that the Honduras is deliberating whether to pass legislation this month that would pave the way for the first “Charter City” to be created on Honduran soil by 2012. The radical brainchild of Stanford economist Paul Romer, the Charter Cities concept is based on the idea that good rules make good societies. Accordingly, poor countries should be able to galvanize their own development by building foreign-financed and foreign-run cities governed by a new, better set of rules.  It has been lauded as a bold, innovative idea (so crazy it just might work) and criticized as historically inaccurate or representing a new strain of colonialism (just plain crazy).

That debate just got a lot less theoretical in Honduras, as President Porfirio Lobo announced that 1000 square kilometers* currently “doing nothing” could become a “Honduran Dream” if only Congress and the Honduran people would take a risk in the name of progress.

The substitution of the new “Honduran Dream” for the old American one represents Lobo’s solution to the immigration problem too. Hondurans in search of a better life could choose the new Charter City, where they would find jobs created by new export industries, with no crime, first-class education and health care, clear property rights, and a fair courts system, instead of the US “where they suffer all sorts of situations at odds with human dignity,” said the President.

Opponents say the plan will undermine Honduran sovereignty and destroy natural resources in uninhabited areas. One backwards-looking editorial, entitled Another enclave or another utopia, argues that large-scale foreign investments and interventions in Honduras have historically tended to turn out badly for Hondurans.

*UPDATE 12:15 pm: Professor Romer wrote to say that the Honduran press misunderstood President Lobos when they reported that the Charter City would be 33 square kilometers. The proposed territory would actually be 33 kilometers on each side, or 1000 square kilometers. The third paragraph was edited to reflect this.

Complexity, Spontaneous Order, blah, blah, blah...and Wow

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenters who confirmed the "hostile reactions" thesis while disavowing hostility :>)... By the way, I am surprised nobody has yet mentioned that blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are superb examples of Spontaneous Order. I was surprised by hostile reactions to mentioning complexity on the Ivory Coast coup debate. Of course, I dish out hostility like water myself, so it's only fair that I got accused of mindlessly mumbling complexity to sound trendy.

Regardless of exactly what language you use and whom you give credit for what ideas, I think we can all agree that Complex Adaptive Systemic Emergence of Spontaneous Order General Equilibrium in Development (acronym? don't go there) incorporates the following ideas, all of which I think are really exciting.

1. Nobody designed it.

The old idea that complex phenomena imply a designer (an old argument for the existence of God) doesn't survive. Surprisingly complex phenomena can emerge without design, like Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker" in evolution. The same in development.

Corollaries: nobody needs to direct it. nobody needs to even understand it.

2. Surprisingly simple behaviors and rules can result in complex phenomena.

A lot of the complexity of nature  (to keep using the evolution metaphor) results from the very simple principle of Natural Selection. The analogue in economics is the Invisible Hand, which is also very simple (the latter inspired the former, by the way).

3. Spontaneous order is not automatically good.

The Mafia is a spontaneous order, case closed. In economics, we get the good "Invisible Hand" outcomes when private returns equal social returns (which, uh, is not true in the Mafia spontaneous order).

4. Actions can have unintended consequences.

In neoclassical economics, one example is the Theory of The Second Best. If there is one part of the economy where private returns do not equal social returns, then correcting a different part of the economy to make private returns equal social returns could actually make things worse rather than better.

It should not be too hard to think of Finance examples from the recent Crash.  Could somebody please suggest  something like how going more "free market" in  financial deregulation when the government was implicitly bearing a lot of the risk....made bad things happen?

5. What do you mean by "actions"?

In development, the trend is to think of more and more things as the undesigned, unplanned outcomes of some spontaneous order...institutions, politics, cultural values, social networks, and so on. So there is nobody left to stand outside the whole system and pull a lever to move everything.

6. Partial equilibrium analysis still works.

While (1) through (5) apply to the whole system, you can still simplify by isolating a particular part where you can usually link actions to consequences (and then cross your fingers that the general equilibrium effects don't cancel out or reverse the partial equilibrium prediction).

So I still feel confident saying that price controls will lead to long lines and are a bad idea, that expropriating private property will decrease investment, and that letting you choose for yourself is usually better than having the Central Authorities tell you what to do.

Culture matters

My wonderful NYU Economics colleague Raquel Fernandez has been carrying out a fascinating research program on the effect of culture on development outcomes. The academic literature on this is exploding, and Raquel surveys it in a recent paper. A simple yet powerful methodology for exploring the role of culture is to study differences in behavior among second-generation immigrants to the U.S. The idea is that all of them face a similar environment in the US, yet bring with them the cultural differences of their parents' country of origin. So differences in immigrant behavior could be attributed to culture (with a large number of caveats that Raquel addresses in her paper).

The figure below shows the association between attitudes about "trust" in the country of origin and "trust" in immigrants to the US from that country.

A second figure shows the association between female labor force participation in the country of origin and how many women work among immigrant groups.

Researching culture used to be taboo in economics; thank goodness that has changed. The finding that "culture matters" reinforces the recent general finding in academic development research that very long-run factors matter more in development than we used to think.

Does bad taste indicate dictators' vulnerability to overthrow?

UPDATE: an enterprising reader offered another intriguing datapoint Bill noticed it on ubiquitous billboards during a trip to Libya. Laura found more examples. So we think we have found an intriguing phenomenon: autocrats and outré pop stars look alike. Photographic evidence:

And one last uncanny visual correlation:

There are many directions we could go with this, but we choose for now the point that many dictators look ridiculous, and ridiculously unaware of how ridiculous.

A plausible explanation: when you rule by terror, you wind up surrounded by sycophants and yes-men,  so you lack even the most rudimentary check: don't look like a bad parody of yourself.

Which makes dictators vulnerable to some day the population waking up and noticing the Emperor has No Taste. This is of course just a jokey symbol of a much broader disconnect between the dictator and their society's real needs.

We wrote this post before the happy news of Tunisians overthrowing their dictator, and don't intend the post to have any particular relevance to that event (the ex-dictator's taste level is depicted below), but we do hope that more and more peoples can get rid of rulers who are a bad joke.

No coups please, Professor Collier

UPDATE 10:30AM 1/15: Chris Blattman has a thoughtful response to my blog. The Complexity tribe is still upset that I didn't do their sacred idea of Complexity justice. On the Guardian Global Development blog, I tell Paul Collier that he's crazy to recommend a coup in Cote d'Ivoire. But the use of complexity theory allows me to be very nice about it.

It takes more than a cow, but…girls still count

By Amanda Glassman, Director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development, and Miriam Temin, co-author of Start With A Girl In her blog post on Aid Watch last week, Anna Carella took on the “Girl Effect,” using some faulty logic and evidence oversights. Marketing may have over-simplified the message in the translation of research to advocacy in the campaign, but let’s take the post point-by-point:

[The campaign…] relies…on the view that women are innately more nurturing than men, and that women’s natural strengths lie in the home as the “chore doer” and “caretaker.”

The point is that investment in women directly benefits their children and to a larger extent than if benefits were provided to men. For example, Ben Davis’ paper The Lure of Tequila or Motherly Love: Does It Matter Whether Public Cash Transfers Are Given to Women or Men?.  There is also the huge literature on the positive effects of female education and income on child health and nutrition outcomes (here).

Anna suggests that we instead focus on “structural factors that underlie men’s apparent disinterest in the health and education of their children.” Good luck with that. In the meantime, we’d like to see aid agencies put more money into proven cost-effective strategies: girls’ education, delaying age at marriage, providing greater access to family planning and supporting cash transfers for poor mothers of young children.

The “Girl Effect” is about the community-wide and intergenerational benefits of investing in girls during their adolescence; based on the premise that there are high costs to the counterfactual. In India, for example, adolescent pregnancy generates $100 billion of lost potential income, equal to almost two decades’ worth of aid (Chaaban et al 2009).

This approach does not preclude work with men and boys. In Brazil, for example, Promundo influenced young men’s gender role attitudes, leading to healthier relationships, fewer sexually transmitted infections, and more condom use.

What poor countries need to stimulate sustainable growth are not women taking out loans to buy cows, but better governance and better terms of trade with rich countries.

There is impact evaluation evidence that microfinance –like insurance and cash transfers- increases the accumulation of productive assets and smoothes consumption, both of which are good for helping poor households escape poverty. Better governance and reduction of trade barriers helps with economic growth, which is good for poverty reduction.  But there is no automatic reason why donor policies and activities related to governance and terms of trade would benefit poor adolescent girls in the near-term or be more effective than the better-studied policy options described above.

…women in developing countries already make up a larger proportion of the workforce on average than women in industrialized countries, and yet development is stalled.

Leaving aside the difficulty of defining what work and workforce means, according to 2010 UN estimates, women’s labor force participation as a share of total employment remains below 30 percent in Northern Africa and Western Asia; below 40 percent in Southern Asia; and below 50 percent in the Caribbean and Central America. The gap between participation rates of women and men has narrowed slightly worldwide in the last 20 years but remains considerable. In OECD countries, 60-80 percent of women participate in the labor market. If you want to make a link between the share of female labor force participation and economic growth, this would be a better approach. And according to that study, greater female labor market participation is positively associated with growth. Finally, other research shows that greater female labor market participation improves child schooling attainment and health, probably via income effects.

Increases in domestic violence have been observed among some female microloan recipients.

While this may be anecdotally true, there is research demonstrating that microcredit, when combined with training on gender, reproductive health and violence, can reduce domestic violence and other social ills. Examples are the IMAGE project, BRAC, etc.  In the Latin American evaluations of conditional cash transfers to women, there has been no evidence that transfers increased domestic violence. Instead, there is evidence that women enjoy new respect and negotiating power in their domestic relationships.

The girl effect has nothing to say about domestic violence, rape, the wage gap, or the many other systemic problems underlying and reinforcing gender discrimination in poor countries...

This is inaccurate.  Not in the video, but in the motivating report Start with a Girl.

This message gives more agency to Westerners than to the girls it claims to be empowering.

I don’t know who the “Westerners” are, but if you are a “Westerner” reading this blog, know that if you give some of your hard-earned money to your government or to NGOs that are investing in adolescent girls in partnership with developing countries, it could be a good thing. Just don’t get all “arrogant white man” about it.

Deep in the Sahara, listening to “Feelings”

Perhaps it’s a sign of ambivalence about Development that one periodically wants to flee the most developed places and go to the least developed place on earth.

One candidate for the latter is the Sahara desert in southwest Libya, around the Akakus mountains. The few local inhabitants are the Tuareg, with apparently very traditional ways (including great courtesy and hospitality). Bread baked in the sand with hot coals. On foot from one place to the next, with navigators who follow unknown traditional methods, who never get lost. Going six days and five nights without electricity, without roads, without water except for drinking (yes, that DOES imply no bathing for six days).

Hours and days without seeing another human being. The never-altered beauty of dunes and mountains and pitch-black nights under the stars.

Ancient paintings of giraffes on the rocks that date from 8000 BC when the Sahara was still green, before the failure of the 5000 BC International Summit on Climate Change.

Of course, the forces of globalization are not stopped that easily. The Tuareg guide wears Nike sneakers. Toyota 4WD Land Cruisers can bring even the least mobile tourists to see the rock art. And one guide has brought along a tape of Western pop music played over and over again at camp every night, including the official Worst Pop Song of all time mentioned in the title.

It’s still good to get away from Development on occasion, but you can never completely get away.  Indeed, don’t forget about all the planes and automobiles and a thousand other products, services, and communications technologies that make a trek in SW Libya possible. It’s only Development that makes it possible to get away from Development.

Aid is not just complicated; it’s complex

One of the points that we try to make on this blog is that aid, planned from an ultra high level and driven to alleviate just the symptoms of poverty, doesn't realistically address the complex problems of international development. We understand that our own economies are complex and require complex allocation mechanisms (i.e. markets; see also "failure of the U.S.S.R.") but this thinking doesn't hold when it comes to helping the poor. So consequently we come up with overly simple solutions to far more difficult puzzles. Ben Ramalingam, author of the blog (and forthcoming book) Aid on the Edge of Chaos, explains this another way in an interview with Dennis Whittle:

[I]nternational aid has been built on a very particular way of looking at the world, and this continues to dog its efforts. As a senior USAID colleague put it, because of our urgency to end poverty, we act as if development is a construction, a matter of planning and engineering, rather the complex and often opaque set of interactions that we know it to be.

...The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels – in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.

So the end result of all of this is that poverty, vulnerability, disease are all treated as if are simple puzzles. Aid, and aid agencies are then presented as the missing pieces to complete the puzzle. This not only gives aid a greater importance than perhaps it is due, but it also misrepresents the nature of the problems we face, and the also presents aid flow as very simple.

Instead of engaging with complexity, it is dismissed, or relegated to an afterthought, and the tools and techniques we employ make it easy for us to do this. We treat complex things as if they were merely complicated.

What is the difference? As Ben goes on to explain, complicated systems can be modeled mathematically, but complex systems cannot.

[For complex systems,] there is no mathematical model which can say, if X is the situation then do Y. Sustainability, healthy communities, raising families have all been given as examples of such complex systems and processes. Peacebuilding would be another, women’s empowerment, natural resource management, capacity building initiatives, innovation systems, the list goes on and on. Complexity science pulls back the curtain on these processes and it can force you to think about the world you live in in a different way.

Thanks to Dennis for this pointer to Ben's work. (See also Nancy Birdsall's blog post about Dennis on the occasion of his retirement from GlobalGiving.)