In view of the topical nature of Third World issues, this online journal from Africa may be of interest. A summary has been turning up in my mail for some time, courtesy of one of the many email groups that flood my in-box with more stuff than I can read. Clearly it has free market tendencies but I have not read enough of it to form an opinion on its quality. Reader beware!

This week’s column comes out of the conjunction of my reading Jeffrey Sachs book on how we can cure extreme poverty in a couple of decades and the mounting hype about Live 8. Sachs’ book is exciting in a way, though one also becomes aware fairly quickly that one is dealing with an ego that’s out of control.

The book has a very strange structure. It begins with some worthy introductory chapters and I was thinking ‘this guy needs a better editor or a ghost writer’. Then we get a bit of a credo on ‘clinical economics’. This is quite a good critique of modern economic advice to countries in crisis. But what it is critiquing is not all that hard to critique.

In any event, the book proceeds from this chapter to Jeffrey’s exciting adventures sorting out economic crisis. He succeeds in Bolivia and Poland and is less successful in Russia because the problems are much harder, and he has less help from those within and outside the country. Without wanting to offer myself as an authority on the subject matter (of stabilising economies in crisis and the international political and economic context of doing so), all this seemed OK to me. Then we get India and China who have also called up Jeffrey and got his advice. He argues in these two chapters that India and China are not success stories for ‘gradualism’ in reform. That each reformed very quickly in certain respects. Again, he probably overstates his case, but the case is certainly of interest.

But Sachs then segues back into third world poverty, with some good chapters on geography and health and then a grand plan for eliminating poverty very much along the lines of past plans and big pushes. Now solving Bolivia’s and Poland’s problems with hyperinflation was to a substantial extent a technocratic exercise although of course the politics had to be integrated into the exercise. But Sachs won’t really take seriously – except as a debating point to be dispatched – that solving poverty is not a technocratic exercise.

He does discuss all the nay-saying about poverty. Corruption etc. But he doesn’t take it very seriously saying that Africa is corrupt because its poor not poor because its corrupt. Well maybe but it doesn’t really help if that means all one’s aid dollars disappear out the back door and into a Swiss bank account as quickly as they arrive.

John Kay, an excellent English columnist is sceptical of Sach’s vision as he outlines here. Read Easterly’s stuff on this if you want to get very depressed about it all. (Check out Easterly’s Table 1 (which I’ve extracted here) if you really want to feel that we’re going round in circles)

But while I find Easterly’s stuff pretty persuasive, its also arguing a line. Of course his case needs to be needs to be argued, but neither is it the whole story. I think that all sorts of good things could come out of major health initiatives. And as Sachs argues there are very poor countries that are reasonably well governed where our money won’t simply disappear into Swiss bank accounts.

So I think it’s a good time to open our hearts and our wallets. So long as we open our eyes. The most worrying thing about Easterly’s critique is his argument backed by good evidence that reporting by euphemism, priority setting by lowest common denominator and progress by forgetfulness are entrenched in the system.

Even if that’s true then, even if we get more of the same, each of the dollars we send in will probably still do more good than they would back here. But I’m hoping that maybe we can learn something, even if we do it slowly. And I think we are though I still expect we’ll take a steps or two backwards for each few steps we take forwards.

As Easterly himself says in this ‘spirited exchange’ between himself and Sachs (shitfight is another word for it):

Why didn’t aid officials implement his easy solutions to world poverty already, after half a century of foreign aid? How will his top-down, many-pronged solutions conceived in New York get feedback from the faraway poor on whether they are actually getting what they most need? For example, Sachs says that modest sums would control malaria in Africa. Doesn’t he have a little curiosity about why this easy problem wasn’t solved with some of the $568 billion (in today’s dollars) in foreign aid given to Africa over the last 43 years? . . . And yet there was progress in other areas, like increased vaccination and access to clean water in Africa. Shouldn’t we examine why these things worked and others didn’t? The piecemeal approach doesn’t mean less money or less effort for the poor; it means redirecting resources away from the utopian schemes at the top (that have already failed) toward rewarding those at the bottom who find things that work for the poor.

And yes Rafe – Easterly does quote Popper in defence of a piecemeal approach!
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Having posted on Collingwood and racism last night, I came across this in the Sunday Age. The idea of sporting bodies getting involved in making our world a better place is a bit scary at one level. A bit like religious leaders lecturing us on politics (With the AFL getting politically involved, Australia could fall to theocracy yet!). But for as long as I agree with what they’re doing, I think it’s great.

Blogs are a good place to post half baked theories, and I have a half baked theory which is that everyone should get into a bit of subversion for the common good. That is, no matter where you are, and no matter what your ‘core functions’ are, whether they’re making money for a company as its director, or screwing bolts into a piece of metal on an assembly line, you can do some good in the world and probably do yourself some good at the same time – all the while not doing harm to the cause represented by your ‘core functions’.

One can build a theory of ‘corporate social responsibility’ around this idea, but I won’t try to do so here. I’ll leave that till another exciting installment. In any event, the article in the link above could do with a heavy edit, but its content is very very interesting. The AFL have clearly done fantastic things engaging with the Aboriginal community. Good on them.

Following the example of Nicholas Gruen who posted on some people who helped to save the world, I will put up some little-known people who were less involved in affairs of state but instead made their contribution in the world of ideas. Let me introduce Ian D Suttie, Bill Hutt, Karl and Charlotte Buhler, and Peter Bauer.
Those people who wait in eager expectation of each new edition of the Revivalist supplements to the Rathouse will recognise these names but others may not. Incidentally Revivalist 5 will feature R G Collingwood and Edmund Wilson but production has been delayed indefinitely due to other commitments especially on the part of the webmistress.
Why these five? They are selected because their ideas have, or had, the capacity to correct some of the debilitating intellectual fashions and misconceptions that dogged the 20th century.
Three of the five were psychologists – Suttie and the Buhlers, and the other two were economists and also classical (non-socialist) liberals. In this post I will introduce the psychologists and leave the economists for later.
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