Author: Ed

Twitter is a huge time sink, but bits of it are hilarious . . .

Yeah, most of twitter is mindless crap.  But there are a number of really smart, well-connected folks out there who are posting info in real time . . . which  is a great way to stay abreast of events and conversations relevant to one’s field.  And then there are the funny feeds.  I am currently losing my mind at bill_westerly.  Basically, the feed plays off of development economist Bill Easterly (who, interestingly, follows the feed) – but it takes on a sort of bizarro Easterly, if Bill Easterly was an Austrian-bodybuilder-governor-of-California.  For example:

  • broder @bill_easterly. let us swing duh axes togedder und bring doom to der army uff churnalists und girlymen egonomists dat oppose us?
  • hur hur hur. u call yurself egonomist? war gif der axellent market penetration @mattbish War is obsolete, you end up bombing your customers!

There is a lot of hidden insight in these tweets.  Then there is a whole series, linked to an extended discussion of expat aid worker behavior that is passing under the hashtag #stuffexpataidworkerslike

  • Monitorin der urban program in “der field” cos yur naad even vun hour from Florida club und Jomo Kenyatta
  • like jargon. luff akronyms uff dat jargon more…
  • gettin der intern to write cluster minutes so yoo gots time for snark bloggin bout volnteerz in aid
  • Kipling. #stuffexpataidworkerslike Akshully reading der Kipling#stuffexpataidworkersdontlike

And then there is the just completely random

  • mebbe is time fur twitter karaokes to build der courage und appetite to fight der turkeysaurus……..

Yeah, I find this funny.  Cope.

Posted on by Ed 0

Understanding the politics of a climate deal with charts

While I have my doubts that a global climate agreement is actually in the best interest of the planet (mostly because I think local adaptive management is likely to yield locally-appropriate, more accountable outcomes), it is worth remembering why there is so much debate about such an agreement.  Many people still fail to grasp why the developing world thinks it absurd that places like the US, Canada and Germany feel justified in demanding big cuts of them – there are two reasons:
1)Big cuts close the door to historical development pathways.  Most of the OECD countries went through a major industrialization phase that was hugely polluting.  China is going through this today on an unprecedented scale. While I think these pathways are, by and large, dead ends for development anyway these days, the fact is that a global climate deal more or less demands that currently poor countries abandon the very methods that we in the wealthier countries used to get to our current status.  This, by the way, is why there is a transfer of money and technology being built into the agreement – because the wealthy countries are not completely hypocritical, and therefore recognize that creating new development pathways will be expensive and beyond the means of most currently-poor countries.  If we are going to demand they change what they are doing, we should at least contribute financially to those changes.  So the next time you hear this deal called a huge wealth transfer, feel free to remind the speaker that the age of exploration, through colonialism, through the first 40 or so years of free trade was a giant wealth transfer from poor to rich.  We are only partially answering for that, no matter how large the transfers built into a climate agreement.
2) While we in the US like to point at China’s and (to a lesser extent) India’s total emissions as an argument they have to accept big cuts, and use the argument that 80% of future emissions growth will come from poorer countries to argue for cuts to all emissions, these demands fail to account for the per-person production of these emissions.  The Washington Post has two graphics, which they ran on their front page on December 10th, that capture this issue perfectly.  First, the total emissions graphic:
Yeah, that looks pretty bad – China produces more emissions than we do, and India is catching up quick.  Man, we’d better get those people under control . . . right?  Well, no . . .
Yep, per capita we in the US are big emissions hogs – per person, we crank out 385% of the average Chinese person, and a boggling 1333% more emissions than the average Indian.  Hell, Iran looks bad compared to China when we get down to per-person use.  This is the sticking point – what right do we in the US have to be sloppy with our emissions, yet demand cuts of everyone else?
Building a global deal that addresses both of these issues is damn near to impossible – we need to control total emissions, but at the same time recognize that not everyone emits equally.  Addressing the first of these is politically unpalatable for the poorer countries.  Addressing the latter is unpalatable here in the US and in many other wealthy countries. The result: weak global agreements that address neither.

Posted on by Ed 1

“Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,”

Well, there’s nothing like continued empirical evidence for the arguments I have been making about Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and thanks to a Tweet from Michael Clemens, I’ve now got more.  Clemens is one of the authors of a report that is very critical of the MVP, and that report was good enough to find and cite my work on this topic – but how he dug up this story from a Liberian newspaper, I will never know:

“The project is a new approach to fighting poverty in post-conflict Liberia, but residents in the District have complained that they had seen no evidence of the project getting off the ground. In a brief statement to the President, Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah indicated that the project, which seeks to improve the socio-economic and infrastructural development of the District lacked the residents’ involvement and that there was not tangible impact being felt by the villagers. He added that the people of that District were discontent about the way the project is being implemented in their village.”

But the brutal sentence is the one by Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah that titles this post: “‘Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,’ he said.”
Clemens’ report is here.  My article is here.

Posted on by Ed 0

Easterly says what most of us are thinking . . .

Bill Easterly is one of the better public intellectuals in the area of development – I enjoy his writing, and I think that his work since leaving the World Bank has become more and more valuable as it takes on an ever-more critical edge.  I take him to task for some of his earlier work in my book, and I think that he does not quite question the workings of globalization and development to the extent necessary to really start to get at what is happening in the world, but by and large I think he is a tremendously valuable asset for the development community.
My belief in his value just went up tenfold, however, with his op-ed comparing the celebrity activism of Lennon to that of Bono.  While I take his points about Lennon’s activism, I suspect that Easterly overstates the case for Lennon’s importance as an activist a bit – it is hard to change the system from completely outside, as there is often no way to engage with people constructively – all you get is parallel conversations.  But Easterly’s criticism of Bono is dead on:

While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise – doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.

Bono becomes a problem not through any fault of his own, really, but because he becomes a mouthpiece for people like Jeff Sachs (I have plenty to say about him, but look here, here and in the peer-reviewed literature here) who really seem unable to think about power relations, history and political economy when considering development.  Asserting that poverty is the result of a lack of development asserts a problem and a solution all at once, without ever really addressing a cause.  Further, as I tell my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention – even putting in a well will have variable impacts across a community, creating winners and losers.  The technical is not the hard part in development – if it was, we’d have accomplished a hell of a lot more than we have up to this point.
I also must admit that I really appreciated Easterly turning his guns on the other celebrity activists:

Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.

But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?

Why indeed?  I sure as hell don’t plan to lecture Clooney or DiCaprio on acting.  Affleck, well . . .
But I must take issue with Easterly a tiny bit here – yes, Bono is the frontman, but shouldn’t our frustration be directed at those who fill his and others’ heads with the belief that we can fix it all, with just a little more money (I’m looking at you, Dr. Sachs)?  I have no doubt that Bono, Clooney and all the rest have the best of intentions, and work hard to inform themselves rather than run around blind, but in the end they are manipulated by people with greater experience and what appears to be greater expertise to further agendas that these celebrities do not understand – Bono is backing Sachs’ push for more aid (which is in conflict with Easterly’s and others’ view that we need to focus on institutions, political systems and corruption).  Clooney is supporting a group that has one idea of how to address issues in Sudan, but may not have the best or the only ideas because they tend to deal in moral absolutes (like supporting an ICC warrant for Kony, which derailed peace talks in Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan/Congo/CAR).  We need to make sure we dig past the celebs to those who feed them these ideas, and address the problem at it source . . .

Posted on by Ed 3

Not good enough . . . maybe worse than nothing

Well, Cancun did not totally collapse . . . but the outcome was maybe worse.  What we now have is a one-year stall with very little to show for it. The targets are basically useless.  The only thing this agreement has created is an excuse to keep talking without doing anything.  As I argued the other day, we might be better off if the whole thing just collapsed, creating the space and urgency needed to really push forward the various state, city and local initiatives that seem to be the only effective measures that are moving us toward real emissions reductions and a sustainable future.  Instead, this agreement creates a counter-argument – just hang on, don’t do anything yourselves, and the countries will figure this out soon.
First, I doubt the countries will get to a place where a real, meaningful agreement could be put in place in a timely manner.  Second, as I argued in the post the other day, there is empirical evidence, via the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Scenarios, to suggest that a global agreement isn’t the best way to get to a sustainable future anyway.
I know everyone working on this was well-intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions . . . and we’ve not yet taken the off-ramp.

Posted on by Ed 2

Yeah, this relates to development . . .

Hey, I’m a geographer by training, inclination, whatever . . . so this story in the New York Times is very cool.  Think of it as a very early GIS (geographic information system) plotting social data (number of slaves) on a map so they can be read spatially.  Basically, it is an early choropleth map (odd the historian writing about this did not use this term*) where shading of different areas represents different concentrations of whatever is being measured (here, the percentage of the population of a given county that was enslaved).  You can see how this map presented information about slavery that made it easy to see that secession was about preserving a labor system (as opposed to more noble principles about State’s rights).
That said, the South was fighting for its life – it was already an agrarian, raw-material supplying cousin to the Northern states, dealing with massive income inequality and poverty issues.  Which should remind people of the situation in much of today’s developing world.  The Southerners who were wealthy needed slaves to stay that way . . . the entire South risked becoming, in effect, an underdeveloped area if slavery was abolished.  And if you look at post-civil war history, that is pretty much how it turned out.  Industry concentrated in the north until the Northeast moved on to biotech, education and other services, pushing the dirty production to the poorer South.  Now even that production is headed overseas.  That the Southern US is generally poorer and less educated (and therefore with fewer options) than much of the rest of the country is therefore not an accident, random or something inherent to Southerners themselves (my children are all Southerners, after all) – the South started off as a massively unequal raw material production zone, and it has been struggling with that legacy for the past 150 years.
And we expect countries that only emerged from colonialism 50 years ago to somehow do better?
*Geographers, why the hell is a historian writing our history, dammit?  We are better than this – surely we have covered a bunch of this already, but seriously, can we reclaim our disciplinary history from the people unclear on the concept of a choropleth map?
(h/t to Micah Snead)

Posted on by Ed 0

Giving the pyro the matches . . .

They put Ron Paul in charge of the subcommittee overseeing the Federal Reserve.  Really?  The man who wrote End the Fed?

Paul, in an interview last week, said he plans a slate of hearings on U.S. monetary policy and will restart his push for a full audit of the Fed’s functions.  (via Bloomberg)

Ah, let the overreaching begin.

Posted on by Ed 0

The right decision, but now we need action . . . quickly

Cote d’Ivoire gets a bit dicier, as the UN declares Ouattara the winner in the presidential election.  Russia was concerned about issues of sovereignty in this vote (of course they are – they have their own fairly entertaining electoral issues), but Gbagbo’s theft was so blatant, and so quickly condemned by the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS), that it took remarkably little time to get everyone on board here.  Well, that and Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t yet have viable oil or other resources anyone absolutely must have, so this turns out to be fairly “low stakes” for the Security Council.  Not so much for the Ivorians, of course.
Why is this decision, so clearly rooted in facts, possibly problematic?  Well, the likelihood is that Gbagbo will try to use this decision to rally his support around the “meddling of foreigners in Ivorian affairs” (or something to that effect).  Nationalism can be an ugly tool, and in this case the subtle argument will be that to support Ouattara is to cave in to foreign pressure, to sell out the country.  Once you have set this argument in motion, it is pretty easy for the situation to turn violent, as the fight becomes about nationalism, not candidates.  Hopefully the UN and ECOWAS are prepared to move quickly here, as their statements will likely precipitate this sort of crisis.  If not, we could see a resumption of armed conflict with great potential for regional spread (Sierra Leone and Liberia are still recovering from an earlier civil war/cross-border conflict).  Public pronouncements only do half the job – but create an awful lot of responsibility to which we must live up.

Posted on by Ed 2

Ah, see . . . we are paying attention

Turns out the leaks that shall not be named by federal employees have produced a document demonstrating that the State Department is, in fact, paying attention to China’s role in Africa.  The BBC is carrying the story.  Of course, the story also highlights the amusing lack of self-awareness in our own diplomacy.  Take the following from Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs:

“China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons,” he says. “China is in Africa primarily for China.”

He adds: “A secondary reason for China’s presence is to secure votes in the United Nations from African countries.”

Well, yes.  Of course, why exactly is the US involved?  Why has anyone been involved with Africa over the years?  To paraphrase The Who, “here comes the new expropriator, same as the old expropriator.”
On the upside, most Africans with whom I interact suffer no illusions about the sudden interest of the Chinese in their continent.  Seems a learning curve has set in . . .
Also interesting here is what appears to be a clear rationale for the apparent silence of the US Government on Chinese expansion in Africa – a set of “tripwires” that would trigger a reaction:

Have they signed military base agreements? Are they training armies? Have they developed intelligence operations? Once these areas start developing then the US will start worrying,” he says.

I would think that we would have an interest in the Chinese locking down rights to arable land, minerals, etc., instead of such narrow concerns for military and intelligence operations, as these resources have strategic value.  But who am I to question State?*
*this, more or less, summarizes State’s attitude toward AID.

Posted on by Ed 0