We’ve broken the 50k barrier! And this is trending data . . . I bounced up and down between 50k and 70k today, so climbing into the 40k range is reflective of even more new sales . . .
Could this be sustainable?
Thanks to everyone!
Author: Ed
Me likey trendlines (the book is starting to sell!) . . .
Man, you have to like the trend for Delivering Development on Amazon right now . . .
Hey, nearly in to the top 50k, and the book is technically not on sale yet! Of course, that preorder glut will go away soon, and then we will really see where we are. But for now, I enjoy being in the top 0.6% of all books on Amazon . . .
Four days to go!
The Frankfurt School was right . . .
the revolutionary potential of the working class has been greatly overestimated. The latest evidence?
Yep, if this doesn’t provoke the revolution, nothing will. Guess I’ll go watch what’s on TV . . .
A legit sale! Wait, ahead of release?
Hey, according to bookscan, someone from my neck of the woods bought a copy of the book yesterday . . .
Yahoo, a sale! And even better, four days before the book is actually released.
Liveblogging Dead Aid (Chapter 3)
And the beat goes on . . . ladies and gentlemen, Chapter 3.
p.29: Well, so much for starting brightly. She has grossly oversimplified Diamond (which is hard to to, y’all) to argue that a country’s wealth and success depend on geography and topography. Er, no, that would be a form of environmental determinism. Diamond was writing an anti-racist history of the world, explaining how the conditions that would eventually result in the ability of some groups to colonize others, etc., was enabled by environmental and geographic situations – but Diamond does not simply erase colonialism from the equation, he is trying to set the stage for how it came about. You could argue that he has a somewhat environmentally determinist take on the causes of colonialism, maybe . . .
Oh, and for Diamond’s purposes, Africa was not resource-rich . . . it lacked easily domesticable crops and animals when compared to other world regions. The whole discussion of squandering natural riches on page 30 is a total non-sequitor in the context of Diamond.
Note: I really don’t love Diamond’s book . . . and I am defending it here. Ugh.
p.30: OK, the geographer in me just screamed. I can’t blame Moyo for this – it is all about Collier, who along with Sachs and a few others in the field of economics is slowly resurrecting environmental determinism (or at least geographical determinism) with their damn correlations between coastline, endowment of natural resources, and economic growth. The connections between these three issues are so complex that any analysis that simply divides countries into three categories (resource poor/coastline, resource poor/no coast, resource rich) is going to over-aggregate different relationships and causes into gross oversimplifications and false correlations. Further, the damn N for these analyses is going to be less than 20 for one or more categories (less than 60 countries in Africa, folks). I mean, you can run non-parametric stats on this sort of thing, but for the love of God, why? Just do the qualitative work, dammit.
p.31: Moyo seems to have completely and utterly missed the reason why colonialism had such a brutal impact on African development. Sure, artificial countries were not great. And the inherited governmental structures after colonialism often caused problems. But this sort of thing only really mattered after independence. By then, these places had been completely restructured into sources of primary materials for the industries of the Global North – infrastructure, agricultural innovation, etc., all of it was aimed at enriching someone else and ensuring the colonized never developed any economic power of their own. This led to the perpetuation of colonial relationships by other means after independence (neocolonialism), and I have little doubt this is way more important than the borders or governmental structures when we try to understand the growth trajectories of Africa since independence. Either she is stunningly ignorant of her own country’s history, or this is a very disingenuous reading of African history.
p.32: Wonderful, Paul Collier postulates that the more ethnically divided the country, the more likely the prospect of civil war. In other news, people with guns are more likely to shoot one another. How much more likely? Is this a cause unto itself, or a variable mobilized to political ends that can be better explained by another variable (I’m looking at you, Rwanda)?
p.34: If you are going to use Botswana as an example of a place where growth and development were facilitated by good institutions (which it was), you still have to contextualize the huge growth numbers by noting the GIANT DIAMOND MINES in the country. I’m just sayin’.
p.35: Nondiagnostic diagnoses make me crazy. “Africa’s failure to generate any meaningful or sustainable long run growth must, ostensibly, be a confluence of factors: geographical, historical, cultural, tribal and institutional.” Again, no kidding. This is meaningless. Of course, it also discounts her previous example of Botswana having meaningful economic growth. Or Ghana. Or South Africa. In other words, her whole statement is an overgeneralized negative that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny (or, in fact, her own argument from a page ago). Next part of the diagnosis: “No factor should condemn Africa to a permanent failure to grow.” I don’t know of anyone making that claim. If we were, we wouldn’t really bother with development, would we? We’d just give up and walk away . . . And the final part: “for the most part, African countries have one thing in common – they all depend on aid.” Er, and colonialism (except maybe Ethiopia, and then mostly on a technicality. And don’t tell me about Liberia – for God’s sake, we carved the place out to resettle freed slaves). And colonialism has a lot to do with what CAUSED the situations we now address with aid.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how she is ignoring this.
p.40: Yes, I am skimming a bit here. That first bit really killed me. But here I can give her some credit for hammering the “democracy gives us development” crowd – at least that portion of the crowd who thinks the relationship is simple. It is not, of course, and some of the new thinking on this examines how, for example, governments can make difficult decisions that balance needed reforms/changes and their electoral interests. But sadly, much of the mainstream writing on the subject tends toward the simplistic.
p.42-43: OK, I am now uncomfortable with what seems to be a bit too much lauding of dictatorships. Yeah, they produce great growth numbers, but growth is a means to an end . . . improving the human condition. Dictatorships tend to create large tradeoffs in quality of life that seem, on balance, to have negative impacts on their populations. Not a lot of Chileans think back on Pinochet as the good old days, you know?
p.44: Moyo is quite right – the timing of aid, and inappropriate aid, can do much more harm than good. For example, having food aid arrive nine months after a famine (not all that uncommon), just as the new harvest comes in, crushes local food prices (oversupply of free food drives prices of locally-grown crops) and re-impoverishes the local farmers. But this is not an inherent problem of aid – this is about timing, something people are well aware of, and trying to address. Further, Moyo’s complaint about celebrities bringing mosquito nets to the continent, and thereby putting local producers out of buisiness – while valid – steps outside her definition of aid (government-to-government transfers) that she laid out earlier in the book. Apparently her terms of reference are not stable. Super.
p.46: Moyo does not know what I feel in my heart of hearts, despite her claims – I do think aid can work. Her evidence against it has to do with aid’s impact on various economic indicators. But this is just means to an end, and does not capture many of the benefits of aid in a clear manner (reduced illness means a better quality of life, and might be partially captured in a growing GDP via the extra days the individual can work . . . but maybe not very clearly). This isn’t to say that aid is perfect. Hell, I wrote a book arguing that we don’t really know what it is we are trying to fix in much of the world, so I have my issues with aid and development. I just want an honest reading of their impacts and drawbacks.
Liveblogging Dead Aid (interlude)
The liveblog of my reading of Dead Aid will continue shortly. However, it is worth passing along links to several really good critiques of the book, published elsewhere:
Lawrence Haddad from IDS has a review on his Development Horizons site (thanks Andy Sumner from IDS for the heads-up).
New friend Owen Barder (thanks again for the birthday drink!) has an outstanding, brutally detailed review on his personal site. This link is to a short summary review, but he has a very prominent link to the longer review on this page. Read it.
A very thin review from The Economist
And finally, a hugely important review from the blog Zambian Economist (thanks Ryan Briggs for pointing me to it). Why is this review so important? Well, besides its serious detail, it is written by a Zambian, thus undermining the argument that all of these critical reviews are just the development community beating down a voice from the Global South.
Given this body of reviews, why continue liveblogging? Well, each of these reviews takes on the whole book, but is limited in size and scope (Owen’s megareview notwithstanding), whereas I can leisurely point out issues as I come to them without worrying about length if I go chapter by chapter. Second, I think the liveblog gives some insight into how a critical reading of the book might go as it happens . . . or maybe you all just can see my mind at work. In any case, I think there is something of value here, at least until you all tell me there is not.
Liveblogging Dead Aid (Chapter 2)
Well, we got off to a bit of a rough start with chapter 1. Let’s see how we do with chapter 2 . . .
p.10 In chapter 2, Moyo presents a history of aid. She chooses to start with Bretton Woods. One could nitpick this point, and how it begins during colonialism yet seems to ignore colonial infrastructural development in its history. Not to say that colonial efforts were meant to serve as aid (in that they might improve people’s well-being), but they did introduce a lot of new crops, infrastructure and institutional structures . . . which certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to a lot of aid and development efforts. But Moyo is not the only author who has chosen this somewhat arbitrary start date – A host of postdevelopment writers chose Truman’s 1948 speech decrying “underdevelopment” as the beginning of the development era without explaining how this speech actually created such a different world, given that decolonization did not really gain speed for another decade.
Well, OK, Moyo has decided to call the Marshall Plan development . . . fair enough, it certainly was a motivating force behind the idea that we could fix all the world’s problems. And Moyo has divided the history of aid by decades . . . well, everyone needs a typology, and this breakdown is not all that different from others presented elsewhere.
p. 14 Whoa, what just happened there? Moyo was just wrapping up a brief overview of the 1950s, in which she briefly laid out decolonization and the rise of the Cold War. She quite rightly notes that aid was a weapon in this war, and was given to rather unpleasant leaders by both sides in an effort to maintain influence in Africa. As a result, aid was not necessarily about how deserving or needy a country was, but about its geostrategic importance. And then she ends the section by saying “It is impossible to know for sure what the true motivations for granting foreign aid to Africa were, but granted it was.” Really? Seems to me that she laid out the dual imperative behind aid at this time, and the rationale for aid to different countries has been dissected in many venues such that I think we can say why aid was given to a particular country. Why eschew complexity in decisionmaking?
p. 17 Moyo’s politics are starting to leak out here. Explaining the shift toward a poverty focus in aid and development, Moyo says “By the beginning of the 1970s the growth-oriented strategy was widely believed in policy circles to have failed in its mission to deliver sustained economic growth.” The issue here is the phrase “was widely believed.” There was a pile of empirical evidence that “big push” modernization approaches did not work. This shift was driven by that evidence (McNamara was a data freak). But Moyo subtly dismisses and denegrates that evidence with the term “belief”, as if these approaches had not worked. Hmmm . . .
p.18-19 Moyo’s reading of the debt crisis is technically accurate, if broad, but it leaves open an odd question: why was everyone making such insane loans to Africa at this time? What was all of this lending for? Moyo completely ignores the huge glut of capital created by petrodollars at this time – a glut of capital that needed investment somewhere to stay productive. The saturation of markets in the Global North led to lending in the Global South – something of an analogy to the contemporary subprime mortgage crisis, where another huge glut of capital (the folks at Planet Money call it “The Giant Pool of Money”) overwhelmed “safe” investment opportunities, and as a result more and more risky options began to look palatable in the search for investment vehicles. Further, there is little doubt that these lenders all knew about the geopolitical ramifications of financial failure for a lot of these states, which meant they were secure in lending to them because various Western powers would gladly step in to prevent insolvency and the challenges to “friendly” leadership that would result – at least long enough for the lenders to get out with their shirts. This unasked question perhaps reflects the fact that Moyo was herself an investment banker . . . which leads one to wonder if she did not understand this aspect of the debt crisis and how it came about, or she is trying to erase it.
p. 20 We are in the 80s now, and Moyo has just offered the oddest reading of the Asian Tigers I’ve yet seen . . . she writes “The experience of the newly industrializing economies of Asia gave these market-based ideas [free trade, laissez-faire] a popularity boost in policy circles in the United States and Europe. Er, last I checked, the Asian Tigers were about as far from the free trade, laissez-faire model as you get: they were hugely protectionist, and strongly controlled investment in their economies to drive certain industries toward global competitiveness. How the hell is that free trade, laissez-faire? The Tigers have always been a bit of a challenge to that model, as I see it . . .
p. 24 And now we are into a full rewriting of the history of late 20th Century development . . . which oddly seems to contradict some of the very things that Moyo just wrote. In trying to capture the rise of governance as an important topic in the 90s, Moyo writes “So after three decades of aid-centric development models, it was left to Western Democracy to save the day.” Basically, Moyo has just rewritten structural adjustment as aid-centric to create a history of development that is all about aid. Look, development cannot be simultaenously aid-centric and laissez-faire (or really even free trade, as aid distorts markets) – you have to pick one or the other. There might be aid present in structural adjustment, but that aid is not at the center of the model – restructuring the economy is at the center of the model. Aid was a means to that end!
p.26 Must say that when Moyo turns to what she calls “the rise of glamour aid” in the 2000s, she is pretty spot-on. There’s been a lot of writing on this recently, what with Clooney’s Satellites for Southern Sudan and a general snarking at Bono and Angelina, and most of it is pretty consonant with what Moyo has written here.
p. 28 Moyo is right – aid (and development) have not delivered expected results. No doubt about that. But then she argues that aid remains at the heart of the development agenda “despite the fact there are very compelling reasons to show that it perpetuates the cycle of poverty and derails sustainable economic growth.” Fine . . . except she is making this statement in the summary of a chapter, making it sound like a summary of what she has just presented – when she has presented absolutely no evidence to support this point as yet. Narrative structure matters to the integrity of one’s argument, people.
Well, to summarize chapter 2: a rather whirlwind romp through 6 decades of development history. It is a very shallow reading of that history, which is a problem here because Moyo’s entire premise is that the history of aid is one of failure. To make this point, it seems to me, requires a serious engagement with the history of the enterprise. This is not a serious history. Further, the reading of that history which is presented is thin and at times confused/contradictory. However, it works to one end – it is shallow enough to skim over all those pesky counterexamples and details that might derail the central argument that aid is a central cause of Africa’s problems. This isn’t history, it’s an exercise in strategic argumentation that gives me little hope for the rest of the argument.
Terms matter
How Matters has an interesting post about learning to embrace one’s own biases and positionality as an aid/development worker. However, the title of the post, “Confessions of a Recovering Neocolonialist on Martin Luther King Day“, is pretty misleading – it isn’t about neocolonialism at all, as best I can tell. Basically, the post picks up on the idea that aid/development workers are neocolonialists because a Zimbabwean staff member once dropped this blanket label on the expat staff of an aid agency. The problem is that the author of the post takes what might have actually been an interesting, trenchant comment about the role of aid/development, and those of us engaged in it, in the creation and perpetuation of a contemporary global political economy that results in patterns of advantage and disadvantage that are quite similar to those once seen under colonialism (hence the term neocolonialism – a “new colonialism” enforced by things like trade rules, aid conditionality, etc.) and turns it into a discussion about ethnocentrism and myopia among aid/development workers.
Now, I am not decrying any discussion of either ethnocentrism or myopia in the aid and development community – it is there. We all know it. And being reminded of that – and being critically aware of that tendency in ourselves and others – is both important and valuable. But this post misses the point of the Zimbabwean comment because it does not address how our work in this endeavor perpetuates the relationships of inequality that are often root causes of the symptoms we find ourselves addressing in the field. This is hard to do – it not only requires self-awareness, but the time, effort and interest to trace the effects, intended and otherwise, that radiate out from our efforts. This is the only way to discern whether our efforts are neocolonial or not.
Liveblogging Dead Aid (Chapter 1)
Today, I begin an series of posts “live blogging” my reading of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid. I had intended to read the book for some time, and over the weekend I finally was able to pick it up. I got two chapters deep, felt deeply frustrated, and went back through to figure out why. If I am frustrated, surely others are too. So, over a series of posts (this is the first) I will offer my thoughts on Dead Aid as I read it. Take them for what they are worth – I won’t correct the text, but I will raise concerns where I see them. I am not doing this to tear anyone down – indeed, I see this exercise as an effort to either shore up the argument in this paper by cleaning up otherwise loose or problematic readings of development history and practice, or provide a clear basis for the rejection of the argument. To that end, I hope that people will offer their own comments, argue with me, and argue with Moyo from a different perspective than my own . . . hopefully something good will come out of the mess. So, away we go . . .
Chapter 1: The Myth of Aid
p.3 The book begins with the usual litany of positive developments and remaining challenges for Africa. Fair enough, I have a bit of this at the outset of my book. However, she ends this section by arguing that the reason Africa has not yet realized its potential has its roots in aid. Ok, provocative.
p.7 Yikes, we are headed downhill almost right away, as Moyo defines aid. She breaks aid into three types:
- humanitarian/emergency aid (in response to disasters)
- charity-based aid (disbursed by charitable organizations to people on the ground)
- systematic aid (payments made directly to governments from other governments or multilateral institutions).
My issue with this typology is simple: it doesn’t clarify our understanding of aid, as the categories she uses overlap heavily: for example, humanitarian aid is often administered by charitable organizations, and may also consist of direct payments to governments. Further, bilateral aid is often implemented through charitable organizations acting as implementing partners who conduct work on the ground – there does not seem to be any space for this sort of aid in her typology, or her analysis. So, when Moyo then argues that the book is not concerned with emergency and charity-based aid, she is also (unwittingly) removing from play a lot of bilateral aid – a form of aid that she then reduces to concessional lending/granting. In short, it is not clear to me that Moyo actually understands the mechanics of aid and its implementation, which strikes me as a central part of any argument against it (or for it, for that matter). We shall see how this plays out . . .
p.8 Ah, we finally come to the myth of aid (I think): a fundamental, pervasive mindset that aid, whatever its form, is a good thing. Wait, what? Really? This strikes me as a very thin straw man, and it is supported by absolutely nothing. It is a bald assertion about the “western mindset” that strikes me as oddly echoing the really embarrassing overgeneralized assertions about various African ethnicities on the part of early-to-mid 20th century ethnographers. I’ll spare you the quotes. Not only is this assertion embarrassing in a horribly ironic way, it is hardly the stuff of the central argument for a book like this. Of course that attitude toward aid is a myth . . . it doesn’t really exist. At least not anywhere of which I am aware. It is really easy to prove something is a myth when nobody believes in it in the first place – which might have something to do with the success of this book: it is telling people something they already knew, which makes the reader feel good about themselves.
Don't tell us the food price index is rising! Tell us why . . .
The rising price of food has been a subject of many news stories over the past few months, with the intensity of attention ratcheting up recently upon news that the FAO’s food price index has just surpassed its 2008 peak. Stories about this issue – well, at least the good stories – point out the highly variable way in which this increase in the price of food has played out in different places. One good example of this sort of reportage is from Saturday’s Washington Post.
This variability, however, tends to be illustrated instead of interrogated, with explanations remaining remarkably shallow (see my earlier complaints about how explanations related to “local specificity” and “cultural difference” tend to obscure important processes and blame the victims of larger processes). However, a quick examination of the information we have about food prices and their impacts points to the fact that global food prices are not all that useful for understanding the variable food outcomes we see in the Global South. First, we have to understand that the increase everyone is talking about is in an index of food prices – that is, the price data drawn from a number of different foods. Though the index is going up, this does not mean that the prices of all foods are rising equally. As the WaPo and others have noted (and is quite clear in the FAO presentation of the data), when you disaggregate the crops and their prices, the biggest increases globally are in sugar, cooking oils and some fats (there are, of course, local surges in price for particular crops, but those are often independent of the larger global markets). While cereal prices are increasing, they are not rising as quickly as these other foods, and they remain below 2008 levels. So who is hit by these prices has a lot to do with who consumes sugar, or products heavily constituted by sugar and oils. Oils are widely distributed in diets, but sugar is not – the poorest tend to have the least access outside the Global North (ironically, this is reversed in the Global North, as noted by Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me). Meanwhile, staple crop prices are not rising anywhere near as rapidly. So the principal drivers of the rising price index are not a huge portion of the diets of those in Global South . . . with one key exception: urban populations. More on that in a second.
Second, who is hit by these prices has to do with the degree to which producers and consumers are linked to global markets. Many rural producers are consumers of their own produce, or the produce of their neighbors. As a result, they are somewhat insulated from shifts in commodity prices. I’ve seen this at work in Ghana firsthand – it is a disaster for incomes in these areas, but not for food security. Instead, people just eat the crops they might otherwise have sold at market. Of course, this comes with other costs, such as in terms of the purchases of needed household goods, and sometimes in terms of children’s education (in places where school fees are still charged). But in terms of food security, not so much. FEWS-NET has offered this same interpretation of the impact of rising food prices on the countries in which it operates, arguing that this increase in this index is not as worrying as what we saw in 2008. This is one of those instances where integration with global markets, long seen as a goal of development programs and a clear pathway to prosperity, can also produce significant new challenges for the global poor . . . or at least that segment of the rural poor whose livelihoods and production are highly integrated with global markets.
So, where people are dependent on global commodities that are internationally sourced for their food or incomes, shifting global food prices are more likely to result in direct shocks to their food security. While there are certainly rural populations that fit this description, once again it is the urban poor who are most generally and directly exposed to this challenge. With little food production of their own, they are dependent on purchased food that has passed through one or more middlemen from the source of production. By definition, their food supply is more commodified, and more connected to global markets, than most of their rural counterparts.
Therefore, there isn’t a whole lot of point to looking at global price indexes to understand the relationship between these prices and food insecurity. Instead, we have to look at who is affected by these prices, and how – the connections are complex and often involve tracing what appear to be unrelated factors as they radiate out from these price changes. This is the only way to appropriately design interventions to address these issues . . .
Don’t tell us that the food price index is rising – tell us why it is rising . . . then we can do something about it.