If you’re interested in the politics and economics of ending Third World poverty (and we all should be more!), go read William Easterly’s Washington Post review of Jeffrey Sachs’ End of Poverty and Sachs’ reply. [thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer].
Not having read Sachs’ book nor having any real expertise in the field of international development, I can’t weigh the competing claims well here. On one hand Easterly seems right in his smaller point that bad governance poses a real obstacle to Sachs’ Pollyanna prescriptions and a larger point that even today "nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty." And MR’s Alex Tabarrok catches Sachs applying a silly straw man misreading of Easterly
On the other hand, in his somewhat artificial opposition between utopianism and pragmatism, Easterly may be constructing his own straw man: is the only choice really between a Masterplan which micromanages these economies back to health and market-oriented incrementalism? Is Sachs really as hubristic as a Great Leap Forward? I do in fact think Sachs retort ("Shall we do vaccinations this decade, AIDS control the next, malaria control in the 2020s, clean drinking water in the 2030s, and food production in the 2040s?") is a reasonable one.
But the questions I have are fairly big:
1) Easterly writes, "The West itself achieved gradual success through piecemeal democratic and market reforms over many centuries, not through top-down Big Plans offered by outsiders. Do we try out shock therapy only on the powerless poor?" Good point. I suppose Japan’s experience is the closest we have to "shock therapy," and even that took a good century. But it seems clear to me that Africa, Oceana, Latin America and underdeveloped Asia won’t follow the same path to development that the West did. We would like it to be faster and since the 60s still operate on the expectation that it will be. Am I wrong?
2) Even if social, economic and political systems that underlie development are too complex to adequate eliminate policy, have our social sciences really not improved to provide us some knowledge beyond what we had in the 1950s or 1970s? Could they not in the near future, with some effort and resources?
3) What contradictions, if any, lie between Easterly’s humanitarian opening and an apparent acceptance that Africa will face Malthusian limits on life while its government fumble dialectically toward market reforms and while disease halves some nations’ population?
4) Do we not know how to make aid work, beyond stop-gap measures to quell famine in war or disaster-plagued areas? It seems we face the twin dangers that it will either get wasted by corrupt governments or the black market or else will be diverted toward increased consumption rather than increased capital improvement. (See Tyler Cowan’s comments)
Sorry for the rambling post. These are genuine questions I have, coming from a political view aligned with Sachs and feeling like we surely could be doing a lot more to help the Third World develop, yet realizing that help is not as simple as transferring money overseas.
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