We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Doing good by doing very well A report in the Times (of London) states that one of the UK’s leading charities, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), has told gap-year students (students taking a period of time off between school and university or whatever) not to take part in costly and often useless aid projects.
Indeed. Far better to encourage students not to take a gap year off at all, but to work hard, get a job, and then use all their energy and idealism to campaign to scrap all tariff barriers, trade “pacts” and other distortions of the world trade system.
As a subject for reading, this I highly recommend. I wonder if any university dons care to put it on their students’ reading lists?
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
I saw that in The Times and was rather pleased that somebody was speaking out on this farce. These sort of nonsenses do about as much good for the third world as Marie Antoinette did for the French dairy industry. Any job where the worker pays for the privilege of doing it is very clearly a job seriously not worth doing.
My personal aid bugbear is clothing collections for the third world. Now I’ve got nothing against Oxfam selling second-hand clothes in the UK but some of these organizations are shipping our cast-offs to Africa and places.
Someone pushes a bag with instructions every couple of months through my door. My understanding is that textile and clothing production is a major part of the third world economy so how we can conceivably help them by dumping my old T-shirts on their markets is beyond me.
When in UK (well we all make mistakes) in the late ‘90’s, I contacted VSO and quickly concluded they only wanted the know nothing, been nowhere student crowd.
If you really want to get stuck in at the sharp end, look on the web. I found an aid worker guy working with and for Akha Hill Tribes in Northern Laos. Forget NGO and particularly missionary groups; they’re part of the problem. He’d been deported from Thailand, so I met up with him in Vientiane. Was with him for a bit. Now he’s speaking in the UN denouncing the Queen of Thailand for stealing Akha land. Obviously no plan to return to Thailand. What goes around comes around.
how we can conceivably help them by dumping my old T-shirts on their markets is beyond me
Not only can’t we help them, but we are seriously screwing up the nascent Kenyan textile industries, the traditional entry route into industrialisation.
Nick M and Counting Cats: What you say sounds right, and I want to agree with you, but I’m missing something.
How is throwing old clothes in a landfill to encourage Kenyan textile makers different from breaking windows to encourage glaziers?
The case seems clearer with food aid because governments are using subsidies to encourage more food production than there would otherwise be, then dumping it on poor countries and putting farmers out of business.
But donating old clothes is voluntary, and to the extent that Kenyans prefer free old clothes to inexpensive new ones, they don’t need a textile industry.
Rob,
No they wouldn’t need a textile industry would they? They could live an idyllic life of subsistence agriculture wearing my ratty old cast-offs for the rest of time. Possibly with a bit of cash from eco-tourism? (AKA rich Westerners roughing it a bit and patronizing the natives – “so in touch with the land”).
But just maybe the Kenyans want to industrialize and textiles and clothing production is a tried and trusted way to get into that. What else do you propose they do – start designing and producing anti-cancer drugs and airliners ab initio?
It’s very different from breaking windows. A better analogy to the “Clothes to Africa” scam is if we, in a fit of aid madness, sent a delegation of free glaziers over to Kenya and put all the native glaziers out of work. In any case not giving somebody something is hardly the same as depriving them of something they already have. I was saying we shouldn’t give ’em clothes. I was not suggesting we boost the clothing trade there by stripping folk naked in the street and burning their threads. Sheesh!
On the subject of Kenya specifically. I have heard (can’t recall a reference) that if you buy a tin of tomatoes in Nairobi it’s probably from Italy. The EU dumps huge amounts of over-production in Africa. They probably have the brass face to call it “aid” as well. You’re right on that one.
The clothes are not normally free to Kenyans – or any other Africans. They are usually sold in bales to small entrepeneurs, who then resell them as a way of making a living. It may be true that this has disrupted local textile industries, but who are we to say how African businesspeople should invest their money?
Aid is either :
1. A feelgood sop for Western people.
2. Designed to help Africans (or others) in the long run.
3. Turning Africans into de facto welfare recipients.
Giving Africans my old T-shirts possibly satisfies 1 and 3. I fail to see how it does 2.
Ok, seriously, what do we do?
Dumping food at less than the cost of production is known to fuck the local food producers sideways, but what about textiles?
Textiles don’t suffer from the same problem though. European textiles are, in fact, overpriced. The stuff is thrown away or given to Oxfam not because it is worn out, but because we just want newer stuff and need to clear out the wardrobes. The stuff is then sold/given to Africa, where it is so cheap that it drives out the local manufacturers. If there was truly free trade in textiles prices would be lower, we could afford new more often, and would chuck out even more of the stuff. Making the problem worse.
Despite what I said previously, is this really a problem? Poor Africans are immediately getting clothing at less than they could make the stuff, leaving them able to spend their capital on something else. If they can’t come up with alternative investments, would they really have invested in a textile industry in the first place?
The way I see it, for them, it should be win/win.
CC,
Have you just turned 180 degrees? I’m confused.
ian,
Yeah, I know they’re sold not given away and I have no desire or interest in telling African business folk what to buy or sell. My problem was at this end. I just… Well, basically I agree with nick above (and no we are not the same person!)
Personally I think everyone would be better off if we bought more textiles from Africa* rather than dumping our hand-me-downs on them. This is of course a question of tarriffs and trade barriers. I knew a woman who was trying to set up a small business in Manchester importing traditional West African clothing from Nigeria. She had a torrid time with UK customs (bolstered by the EU, natch) and also good ‘ole fashioned Nigerian corruption didn’t help.
*And they do some pretty funky stuff.
CC,
I don’t know what we should do. I only know that what we have been doing is utterly useless.
Well, we’ve got:
1. Bono & Geldof – the Barnum & Bailey of international aid.
2. Grandiose Government schemes – you know the rusting fish-canneries on dried-up lakes, the half-finished roads to nowhere, the hydro-electric plants with no generators and no customers even if they did work. There is an example in “White Man’s Burden”* of a steel plant in Nigeria which has received $5 billion since ’79 and has yet to make any steel… Fortunately the tide seems to have turned against such schemes.
3. Do-gooders wedded to very Western, Green ideas of “sustainable development” – let’s build them a wind-farm!
4. Rich Western kids “doing their bit” and feeling a nice warm feeling about it even though they’re basically there to network and shag and get something cute on their CVs. I’m not being censorious or puritanical about that because that’s exactly what they’ll do/did at University too – let’s just not pretend this is really about alleviating poverty. Apparently Addis Abba is a real party town for the Western “aid workers”.**
It’s by and large just not working. I am not dissing all aid charities – not by a long-shot… but…
So whadda we do? Short of bringing down trade barriers and hoping that these states also allow free-trade without the usual graft, corruption and chronic instability (fancy investing in my start-up in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Thought not) I don’t see what we can do. An effective HIV vaccine would be a hell of a good start though. The way I see it the only significant good things the West has so far done for the third world are things like smallpox and polio vaccination (and yes I know about Comrade Bob and the mullahs in the more, er, “provincial” parts of Pakistan’s objections to polio vaccination).
Oh, I dunno CC. I guess we could “allow” them to use DDT again. That’s one concrete proposal at least. The big structural shifts can only occur if our societies shift first.
*Haven’t read it but I gleaned that from the reviews at Amazon. Thanks for the link JP. I won’t be buying it, interesting and necessary book though it might be because reading too much stuff like that make me want to defenestrate things.
**On return: “Oh it must have been terrible for you seeing all that poverty…”. That schtick just makes me wanna puke.
Actually, Nick M and other nick as well. Just to mess with your heads a bit…
My mother used to bake things for families who had an illness, or a new baby, or any other life unsettling event. We as kids quickly learned that the good stuff was to give away, and the mistakes were for us. As produce farmers back in the eighties, my dad and I sold the premium stuff and kept the blemished stuff for our own table and some people we occasionally gave stuff to.
Why should not the Africans want to sell their manufactured goods to our infamously overpriced 1st world markets and keep the baled clothes from Oxfam or whoever for domestic consumption? It would certainly be the strongest market incentive.
As I see this situation, it has the potential (meddling powertrippers who work for international aid groups can mess anything up) but it has the potential to be a market driven product cycle. Instead of wealthy economies land filling clothes, they are baled and shipped cheaply to third world economies. There, they are sold at market value (which may even cover shipping) and the buyers sort them either to sell as clothes domestically, or to recycle into other products whether fabric, paper, or something else. Meanwhile the textile industry in these economies ship clothes to the first world. A great many industries are set up on this exact model.
What I am saying is the market model has potential. We just need to get and keep all of the usual suspects out of the picture.
Easterly (author of “White man’s burden”) has a summary of his arguments on development assistance in the May volume of the AER. There is a working paper version of it here(Link).
What we do is we go there and sell them, not give them, a working land title system, a personal property registry and an honest court system. Wealth will follow as night follows day.
Fred,
How do you sell a working legal system? Has anyone ever done this?
Exporting a legal system has been done, partially. Years ago I had a surveyor friend who also ran a property tax consulting business. He got a contract with a city in one of the central American countries to set up what was to be a computerized survey and tax collection system. I understand it turned into a de facto land title system. The locals came to rely on the accuracy of his surveys and records.
I expect it got destroyed by corruption in due course because the courts were still “old style”.
As for exporting the whole system, I dunno, but there’s too damn many lawyers everywhere, let’s export a few. Despite that slander we do need lawyers and despite the many faults of our various western legal systems they are an integral part of our success. Imagine, you can have a dispute dealt with, and no guns or knives and some reasonable expectation of honesty. Third worlders don’t have that.
So it’s a benefit and people should pay for benefits.
Nick M: Just to be clear, I’m trying to understand the economics better. I absolutely don’t believe in any “idyllic life of subsistence agriculture”.
If the Kenyan government put a tarrif on your ratty old cast-offs to protect the native textile industry, wouldn’t we all be complaining that free trade doesn’t have to be bilateral to work? Does free trade stop being beneficial when the selling price == 0?
To be honest, though, I think you nailed it here:
Whenever the economics stop making sense, start looking for the government interference.
Now, that kind of stuff really does sound interesting. Although, as you go on to point out the underlying legal infrastructure did not seem to support this and I think that the presence of the most basic legal framework, in a stable and predictable form, may often be the problem. In other words: it seems reasonably clear what kind of basic system is needed, the problem is how to ‘make it appear’.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; but you also undermine the livelihood of the indigenous fishing industry who are unable to compete with your freebie international-aid-fishies.
Have you just turned 180 degrees? I’m confused
Yes
Giving Africans (or anyone else) something for free cannot hurt them. It just cannot, if it hurts they will not take it, it’s as simple as that.
What other kind of help may prove more helpful – is another, unrelated issue.
But giving them things for free (or at low prices) such as clothing or food or medicine cannot, by definition, hurt them.
Jacob,
Imagine you’re CEO of “Jacob’s Widgets Inc” and someone else starts selling their widgets at below cost, due to an extremely generous government / charity subsidy, to your customers. You’re gonna be pissed off, you’re gonna be bankrupt because you just can’t compete with that.
I have met perennial dole-hounds. I have met people who can work the system to the extent they can get the “Social” to buy their kids a better laptop than I* had and… This is overall a positive thing?
I am not making that example up. It occurred in Leeds a few years back.
No, it’s not doing any harm but it’s hardly helping these countries to grow their economies and surely that is what is fundamental?
Mid,
Your idea is probably bonkers enough to be sound but (a) will it cover trans-continental transport costs of a very low value product and (b) how you’d keep the usual suspects out of the loop is an exercise I leave to you. Then there’s (c) – the trade tariffs. I get the impression very strongly that while trading through them is workable for big outfits it’s sufficient of a ‘mare to put off the small companies.
*I had a 386SX 16Mhz mains only laptop with a “16 shades of orange” gas plasma screen (this was in 2000). It was from the dawn of time (Noah administered the Ark with something similar) and had “issues”. I’ve been a computer geek since my first Speccy and have degrees in Physics and that but the reason I earn my bread and cheese as Dr Compustein was that I learned fixin’ with that machine. And I mean soldering iron fixin’… And then there was configuring the first 640K…
You’re gonna be pissed off, you’re gonna be bankrupt
Sure. Life is tough. But there is no way you can advocate preventing A from giving B something. Neither can you say it’s a bad thing, for A and B. If you, personally, get caught in the middle and get hurt – then try your luck elsewhere.
“Imagine you’re CEO of “Jacob’s Widgets Inc” and someone else starts selling their widgets at below cost, due to an extremely generous government / charity subsidy, to your customers. You’re gonna be pissed off, you’re gonna be bankrupt because you just can’t compete with that.”
Imagine you’re a widget consumer, and you have 100 Widget Pounds (£W). Jacob’s Widgets Inc is selling you widgets at £W1 each, but Subsidised Widgets Ltd. is selling them at £W0.5. You go to buy from Subsidised Widgets Ltd., but find out that you can’t because of mercantilist trade embargoes that ban Subsidised Widgets Ltd. from outcompeting Jacob’s Widgets Inc. You’re going to be pretty annoyed, aren’t you?
To go one step further, imagine that you only buy Widgets to make into Wodgets, a vital commodity, on which you make £W0.25 each. If you’re buying from Jacob’s Widgets Inc, a Wodget therefore costs the end consumer £W1.25, but if you can buy from Subsidised Widgets Ltd., a Wodget will only cost the end consumer £W0.75. Aren’t Wodget consumers going to be pretty annoyed as well?
There are always winners and losers in any system, but a system based on voluntary exchange rather than mercantilism is more just, and ultimately damaging to fewer people, and more sustainable in the long term.
Jacob, MDC,
I am sure that we can all accept the fact that the third world is poor because it has a weak economy.
Please now explain how artificial distortions of the market there helps anyone (the wodget trade being hardly the be all and end all)?
All I was suggesting was that the shipping of clothes to Africa was (a) a sub-optimal use of resources* and (b) undermining the nascent clothing trade in the recipient nations.
MDC, the last thing I was suggesting was mercantilism.
*In the UK we have “bottle banks” to dump your empties in. These are segregated by colour. We make a lot of beer so brown glass is handy, clear glass is always useful but we don’t have a big enough wine industry to make green glass useful for recycling and it gets land-filled. This is because it isn’t economic to transport the glass to near neighbours such as France, Spain, Italy and Germany (all of which we have a free-trade agreement with). So why is it viable to ship old T-shirts to Africa?
Maybe, but as long as it does not involve coercion (taxation) – you have no grounds to oppose it.
Maybe… see above.
The people who get cheap clothes benefit from the transaction, and you shouldn’t and can’t deny them their benefits. They are free to buy new clothes from the “nascent” textile industry of their own country if they feel it is better for them.
Nick M, I think problems ‘A’ and ‘C’ would go away with problem ‘B’, which I interpret to include not just the international welfare managers, but the despots in the recipient countries as well.
I think Fred summed up the needs very well with “a working land title system, a personal property registry and an honest court system”. Those parameters pretty well preclude despotism and forced redistribution.
Since Jacob made himself such an easy target, I’ll have my 2 cents.
Jacob. Think currency dumping. You get a paycheck of 100 dollars a week. What possible harm could it cause for me to come into your village and start handing out dollars to everyone. After all “giving … something for free cannot hurt them. It just cannot, if it hurts they will not take it, it’s as simple as that.”
Commodities = currency. Dumping food destroys the price of food and destroys the farmer’s ability to earn enough money to plant next years crop. Destroying the farm production system is a recipe for a perpetual famine/aid/famine cycle.
“Jacob, MDC,
I am sure that we can all accept the fact that the third world is poor because it has a weak economy.
Please now explain how artificial distortions of the market there helps anyone (the wodget trade being hardly the be all and end all)?
All I was suggesting was that the shipping of clothes to Africa was (a) a sub-optimal use of resources* and (b) undermining the nascent clothing trade in the recipient nations.
MDC, the last thing I was suggesting was mercantilism.”
The purpose of industry is only to produce useful goods. If those useful goods are being given away for free, it isn’t in one’s interests to refuse the freebies but instead spend effort working to make them. I’m not saying that coercion should be used to bring about “dumping” (which is whay the EU does at the moment with, for instance, the CAP), as that is bad for both trade partners. But if free stuff is being offered anyway, there’s no reason for the third world not to take it, or for the West to dump it into the sea (or whatever) instead of giving it to them “for their own good”.
In an ideal world, of course, there would be no mercantilism and the third world would receive the greater proportion of the world’s agricultural industry by natural market pressures, but that’s only valuable for them in that they can exchange their produce with other countries for foreign currency, not that they become “self-sufficient” in food. The harmful aspect of trade distortions is the lack of trading partners for the third world – the “dumping” is beneficial (not to the farmers, obviously, but to the society as a whole), albeit not by enough to outweigh the damage.
I thought Mercantilism was voluntary exchange.
Mid,
I assume “B” was “corruption”. Well, as they used to say in my primary school, Best of British with that one.
Fred is of course right and in Zimbabwe we have an unfolding train-wreck of an example of what happens when property rights are determined by volatile governmental fiat. In the early 70s my parents worked in Zambia and all the best produce was trucked in from Rhodesia (as it was). Comrade Bob’s anti-imperialistic paradise is now importing food from Zambia in an attempt to prevent total famine. It is tragic beyond belief that a country so fertile is reduced to such dire straits.
me:
you:
Is there a difference? I grant that there are the small scale non-quaNGO charity organizations that are definitely not-corrupt. But having worked for one and being well acquainted with others, I can say they generally understand local dynamics and the long term consequences of their actions. They see their effect on the local economy and adjust their ‘help’ to make sure it truly is help.
Luckily, food is rarely dumped, as the dumping costs someone money… there is no free lunch.
Anyway, there is no such thing as “dumping”, dumping is what people cry when they want government subsidies or protection (which is a subsidy too).
If there are trade wars (i.e. competition) and somebody decides to sell at below cost to build up his market share, the competitors must find a strategy to cope with it – they might opt for price reduction or accept temporary market share drop, until the competition loses steam, cannot take more losses and raises prices back to normal level.
You cannot cry “dumping” every time your competitor plays rough, and whine for government protection.
Very well said.
Nick M, good point about DDT. Rachel Carson is a mass murderer.
Here’s an idea for the gap year:
According to London’s Sun (March 30), a jobless man from England has found work as an Indian goddess whom thousands of Hindus believe can cure their infertility. Pilgrims head to a remote jungle temple in the northern state of Gujarat to be blessed by Steve Cooper (who calls himself “Pamela”), regarded as a reincarnation of Bahucharaji, the patron of Indian eunuchs. Steve now dresses in a holy saffron robe, follows a strict vegetarian diet, and sleeps in a spartan room among 80 eunuchs — castrated men — at the temple. Every time Steve walks through the local village, people flock to greet him, shouting: “the goddess is here.”
Nice job if you can get it.
Mid,
I know small(ish) and therefore not associated with the likes of the UN charities often do a lot of good. For the record I don’t think there is a difference concerning where the corruption occurs. It is some bugger poncing on millions and buying a solid gold bidet from the proceeds and whether that happens in Kinshasa or Knightsbridge really isn’t the point. In any case despots Au toilet requisites are usually paid for by BAE Systems…
Kentuckyliz,
I always fancied finding work as a Hindu deity but I’m a little deficient in the arm department – having only the usual two. I’m also not blue enough.
Glad you exhumed Ms Carson. She’s responsible for more deaths than Stalin. Are you taking note Sir Jonathan Porritt? We ought to celebrate her life on the annual Pol Pot memorial day.
I’m agreeing with you Nick. I work on the assumption that any ‘aid’ programs that use forcible redistribution are staffed by varying degrees of corrupt and/or power tripping sorts of people. This includes anything that comes from taxes or government established privilege (ie Red Cross to say nothing of the UN!).
On the flip side, I think private voluntarily supported aid is a good thing by almost any measure. Regarding those ‘year off’ types, I think it has the potential to be a good reality check and see what aid really means and does. The company I worked for, in addition to distributing medical supplies and equipment to hospitals, also conducted community development experiments. I’m speaking second hand now because I never got to leave the US, but our people reported seeing the debris of other aid programs standing (or falling down) unused.
The first thing our team did in one of their experiments in a village with severe mortality from contaminated water, was to play games with the people of the community. Literally, play games. One of them was to divide the village into teams, put two lines about ten feet apart and give each team 3 sheets of paper. Then they were told to get each member across the gap touching only the paper. One of the team’s solutions was to crumple up the paper and throw it back, another team tied the paper to the feet of the biggest guy and he walked back and forth carrying them. The idea was to create the meta-context of solving their own problems. After that was working well, then a health worker explained water contamination and disease to them for them to solve the problem.
Unfortunately :-), no great aid contracts were signed, no big appropriations bills were passed, our advisers job was over almost before they started. The village’s solution was to buy some PVC pipe, build a small retention cistern with a lid around the spring up the hill, and run a pipe down to the village. They designed, built, maintained, and most importantly, used it. And actually I think they payed for it. That is not they way the usual suspects would have addressed the problem or the solution.
But in this same area were any number of abandoned cinder block and corrugated steel roofed ‘houses’. These wonderful modern structures were built by volunteers for housing. The only problem was they were cold and drafty and the people who lived in them caught pneumonia and complained about the deafening noise when it rained. An absolutely preposterous design to put at high elevations. The people moved back into their ‘primitive’ but very well adapted original houses. The new ‘houses’ got used for storage some but apparently not even live stock liked them.
But I’m sure many highly paid administrators and volunteer supervisors benefited.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there – apart from the myths about Rachel Carson – do a bit if research rather than relying on half baked claims.
for example:
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/ddt-junk-science-malaria-and-the-attack-on-rachel-carson/
or
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/who_put_out_the_contract_on_ra.php