International Affairs: January 2010 Archives
David Books is wrong: the problems of the third-world are primarily political, and poverty is an effect, not a cause.
This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”
He touches on the corruption issue, but if we really want to help the third-world we'll probably need to resort to the sort of intrusive paternalism that we normally associated with colonialism. I doubt we have the will for it... it's a lot easier to just throw money into a pit and hope for the best.
In one of the most realistic and practical offers of long-term help I've yet seen for a devastated Haiti, Senegal is offering plots of land to Haitians who want to return to their ancestral home.
HAITIANS WHO survived the earthquake have been offered the opportunity to come back “to the land of their ancestors” by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade.Mr Wade told French radio he wanted Africa to make room for victims of the disaster as it was from there that many Haitians’ ancestors had originated. ...
Presidential spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye told reporters that Mr Wade had shared his plans with senior aides, and they involved offering voluntary repatriation and plots of land to any Haitian who wanted “to return to their origin”.
“Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” he said.
Senegal is hardly a wealthy nation, but they're in much better shape than Haiti.
In January 1994, Senegal undertook a bold and ambitious economic reform program with the support of the international donor community. This reform began with a 50% devaluation of Senegal's currency, the CFA franc, which was linked at a fixed rate to the French franc. Government price controls and subsidies have been steadily dismantled. After seeing its economy contract by 2.1% in 1993, Senegal made an important turnaround, thanks to the reform program, with real growth in GDP averaging over 5% annually during 1995-2008. Annual inflation had been pushed down to the single digits. As a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), Senegal is working toward greater regional integration with a unified external tariff and a more stable monetary policy.
If I were in Haiti, I certainly would have left for somewhere, long before the recent earthquake.
In the aftermath of the earthquake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is useful to review the four stages of post-disaster misery and to consider how our expensive Western institutions and society are designed to protect us. Each successive stage is easier and cheaper to prevent or mitigate than the stage before it. Unfortunately, in the case of Haiti we're likely to see all four stages play out to their fullest.
Stage 1: Immediate aftermath. People are killed or injured directly by the disaster itself. Stage 1 is often impossible to prevent and very expensive to mitigate.
Stage 2: Zero to three days. Within the first 72 hours people who were injured during the disaster will start to die from their injuries if they do not receive treatment. People who are trapped in rubble or otherwise isolated will also die. Stage 2 can be mitigated by extensive search and rescue capabilities that are on-site in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and by a robust medical system that was not degraded itself by the disaster.
Stage 3: Four days to two weeks. Lack of water, sanitation, and electricity (depending on the climate) will begin to cause an explosion of communicable diseases within the first two weeks after a disaster. People who survive the disaster itself will fall sick with respiratory and digestive tract diseases, and minor injuries will become infected and cause further mortality. Caches of emergency water will be consumed, further weakening the survivors. Stage 3 can be prevented or mitigated by quick repairs to basic services and by the delivery of water and generators.
Stage 4: Two weeks to one month and beyond. Starvation will take hold in urban areas if basic infrastructure is not restored within one month. Urban population centers will begin to dissipate as survivors migrate into rural areas in search of food. Social unrest will quickly lead to the complete breakdown of pre-disaster political institutions, and survivors will form into ad hoc gangs or tribes. Violence will break out as these groups fight for control of resources. Stage 4 can be prevented by strong institutions that are powerful and organized enough to prevent food scarcity and provide basic physical security.
As we've seen in Haiti, most third-world urban centers are precariously balanced -- they wear a visage of civilization, but reality can come crashing down in an instant. The institutions required to mitigate suffering in the aftermath of a disaster are a form of insurance that must be built before a disaster strikes, but they're viewed as a luxury that poor countries are reluctant to invest in when money could instead be spent building an appearance of civilization. They choose to have a higher median quality of life with greater risk than a lower median quality of life with less risk.
The Obama Administration is charging panty-bomber Abdulmutallab with possession of weapons of mass destruction!
Just read Abdulmutallab charging docs. He's charged w/having a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Hmm. So, since we're using the 'criminal' standard, shouldn't all those thousands of pounds of mortars, bombs, missiles, etc in Iraq as WMDs? (leaving yellowcake out of it, since that was sold to Canada for energy)
So wait a minute, now the left is willing to admit that Saddam Hussein had WMD after all?
Despite finding saarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons, and despite various prison sentences for those who used them in Iraq or those who sold them, apparently, the only thing that would have satisfied the left that Saddam had WMDs would have been discovering a giant SPECTRE-sized Ken Adam-styled laboratory with men in white lab coats hard at work caught in the act.
Well it's nice to know that our invasion of Iraq are now justified in the minds of the left.
