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]
|
Fight the fire! Poor on more petrol! Here are the first two paragraphs of a BBC report about a report, from a Commission:
The UK-led Commission for Africa has urged wealthy nations to double their aid to the continent, raising it by £30bn ($50bn) a year over 10 years.
African leaders need to root out corruption and promote good governance, the commission’s final report says.
I cannot help suspecting that there may be something of a contradiction there, between paragraph one and paragraph two.
Is the way to root out corruption to double the amount of money you are chucking at it? This, it seems to me, might be problematic.
I mean, how do they intend to persuade Africans to refrain from being corrupt? Bribe them?
|
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.
|
That’s how you achieve most things in Africa, so I suppose there’s a certain logic there…
EG
That commission probably believes that capacity for theft is limited, numerically speaking. If you flood them with money, they probably will not be able to steal it all and a fraction of it will actually get through to help fight good governance and promote corruption.
A dictator, safe, wealthy unbothered by concerns for the welfare of his people and knowing he is on for another nice earner if his people are starving enough has to be removed. Simple as that.
Meanwhile, massive trade barriers, tariffs, quotas and such like continue to be imposed. Can someone explain why it makes sense to give money to Africa, whilst at the same time preventing the continent from selling its good value commodity and agricultural products to the west without onerous restrictions? Maybe if we allowed them to trade freely, they wouldn’t need any aid, and western consumers would save a packet as well.
The Africa thing is theater, it’s just to make Mr Blair look good in the run up to the election…”look at me, look how much I care, I’m such a nice guy”. Does he care about Africans, or are they just props?
How many people did your war kill today Mr Blair?
“…it’s just to make Mr Blair look good in the run up to the election…”
Look good to whom? African dictators? What have corrupt African dictators ever had to do with the run up to any election?
A dictator, safe, wealthy unbothered by concerns for the welfare of his people and knowing he is on for another nice earner if his people are starving enough has to be removed. Simple as that.
If only it were. One has to remove the entire waBenzi class, plus armies of… er… soldiers accustomed to helping themselves. That done you have find a way to get people out of the rent-seeking, big man habit of mind when they’ve in many places experienced nothing else.
You seem not to have noticed that dictatorship is pretty stable, and tends to creep back in, even if the last dictator isn’t immediately replaced by a new one. The assumption you just have to get rid of bad institutions for freedom and markets to do the rest is a libertarian delusion analogous to the circular Rawlsian claim that we’d all prefer social democracy if we had no way to take our personal circumstances into account. People–nice intelligent people–everywhere are accultured.
I suspect, though I’ve no evidence, that the reason people from African backgrounds are overrepresented in the British public services is because they are culturally indoctrinated to see government work as desirable, safe, well-rewarded. Certain parts of local government (in particular housing) do offer some of the closest parallels to the life African officialdom available in Britain, with elaborate static heirarchies, clienteles to patronise, undemanding work, and opportunites for corruption. But the majority of British-African officials I’ve met have been honest, well-educated people (often over-educated for their roles) who have chosen public service when it would be obvious to a native Briton that they’d do better elsewhere.
That said, in the last decade Britain has been heading in the African direction, with ever better pay and conditions for bureaucrats relative to the general population, and increasingly heavy regulation giving increasingly arbitrary power. Maybe it’s not acculturation but prescience.
The public would (apparently) like to see money being give to Africa to ‘help’ them so money shall be delivered, probably.
If you just give money to Africa as aid, no-one really objects, apart from the taxpayers, but they’re not really in a position to demand anything and complaining about ‘my tax money being thrown at starving people’ is rarely fashionable.
Actually cutting farming subsidies and reducing import and trade barriers upsets people who are much easier to sympathise with – after all, farmers are hard working good honest people just out to earn a decent wage etc etc etc (at least, that’s how they’re perceived.)
It’s the lesser of two evils, really. Still, I’m not sure that anyone really takes the ‘Commission for Africa’ seriously – I think both the general public and politicians have finally worked out that pumping money into Africa just props up dictatorships and corrupt governments, and I think that the aid is going to dry up sooner or later.
Guy H,
Just for the record, I’m a conservative, not a libertarian (although I have my bad days…)
Actually, my point was incompletely – and rather flippantly – made. Here’s a model (just a model, mind) for the end of dictatorship: wherever you find one and it abuses human rights, remove it if possible (so that means stuff Zimbabwe but tread carefully – very carefully! – with Putin).
It matters not that the dictatorship you remove is replaced by another. After all, dictatorship is just one of a number of competing methods of governing and possibly has its good points – stability, as you mention, being one of them (Pakistan’s doing so-so now that it’s ditched democracy).
What this model creates, if applied consistently and with enthusiasm, is an environment where would-be tyrants recognise that the moment they start messing with their people or stealing from the national piggy bank their sell-by date contracts enormously.
Bring back the British Empire. It wasn’t as bad as was made out…
Sorry. Still in flippant mode…
AB
Ex-World Bank economist William Easterly wrote a good book on development called elusive Quest for Growth.
The argument is that development strategies have failed because they haven’t acknowledged that people respond to incentives. For instance, people run up more debt the more likely it is to be cancelled.
Whilst the book is generally softly statist, one argument that stuck out as intriguingly libertarian/conservative was for aid to work it has to increase the more the reciever fixes their own problems, which is the opposite of all first world welfare states.
Come on guys, there is NO solution for Africa. They have their way of life, and nobody can change it. Stop trying to educate, improve, save, the world. It cannot be done. Social engineering does not work.
Giving money to Africa is for easing the conciences of western lefties, or just a matter of fashion. It’s only impact on Africa is to increase corruption there.
Let everybody who feels the need, give his money or personal help to Africa, I don’t object to that.
But , as usual, the do gooders are not after doing good but after MY money. For the poor, for Africa, for Global Warming, whatever, they always come for my money. Giving money to Africa is another pretext for power grabbing at home.
Remember the four articles of European socialist/BBC faith:
– more of other people’s money is the solution to every problem;
– crooks, junkies and murderers are never at fault. Only law-abiding, successful, conservative people ever have any explaining to do;
– tyranny, corruption and incompetence are only wrong in white-ruled governments. Anybody who deplores them in black or brown-run countries is a racist imperialist; and
– paying the market price to these countries for produce they are desperate to sell to us is exploitation.
One can only understand Western African policy once one grasps the stupid, patronising mentality of the European left.
“how do they intend to persuade Africans to refrain from being corrupt? Bribe them?”
If that’s what you want to call it, yes. As it is, less corrupt African countries get more aid. This is a major incentive for the more corrupt or more poorly governed countries to improve. It is also consistent with Easterley’s argument, as pointed out by Kit, that “for aid to work it has to increase the more the reciever fixes their own problems”.
Here is some excellent research on how aid is good for growth in poor countries: “Counting chickens when they hatch”.
I invite anyone who says that aid doesn’t work to read that research and tell me why it’s wrong.
It seems to me as a former CPA, chartered accountant to you Brits, that big pots of money given to governments are less desirable than small amounts of money given to individuals for business development. First, the big pot is a temptation. You don’t need to look any farther than the UN’s Oil for Food Program to see how completely corrupting wealth beyond one’s wildest dreams can be. Second, Government funds should be spent where they are most likely to have the largest multiplier effect on the economy. Instead, as here in the US the best roads are frequently built in sparsely settled areas with the intercession of highly placed officials settling favors. My church has begun doing micro loans to Africans to enable them to start their own businesses. Not enough to raise wild envy, just enough for a sewing machine, a loom, various simple machinery. When the sums are repaid, they are re-lent. Trying to better things in Africa is better left to opening trade than passing out fortunes.
I’m of two thoughts.
1) I’ve assumed for a long time that the main purpose of most government to government foreign aid is to induce dependence in recipient countries. I’ve yet to really say any convincing counter evidence.
2) Small-scaled local projects can do good, especially when it’s doing something locals want. My first rule is to get money into married womens’ hands, directly, bypassing their husbands if at all possible. I recall research [no cite, sorry] that indicated that men to spend aid money (and to spend most of the extra money when wages rise, very often on themselves) while women are much more likely to invest it (or if they spend it, they spend it on their family).
After WW2, the devestation wreaked on Germany and Japan in defeat really went a long way to making the thinking and aims of their previous ruling elites completely untenable for generations afterward.
I wonder whether there is a grain of truth in this. For regime change to really work, might it not be somehow necessary that the former regime (and unfortunately the people ruled by it) suffer such a colossal defeat that the bad old habits and aspirations become unthinkable afterwards?
Sorry I’m tired, and that seem a monstrous notion.
Cobden Bright – I’m not exactly a fan of the Africa commission, for the usual libertarian reasons, but to be fair, it *has* stated that trade barriers must go down. Even the Guardian accepts this now!
Jim, I read some way in to that “Counting Chickens Before They Hatch” piece before semi-giving up and skimming the rest. Unimpressive, you may say, but we’re talking 76 pages of highly mathematical text here.
OK, it looked a closely reasoned and serious piece of work. I agreed with its argument that different types of aid (emergency / long term / short term) must be disaggregated and that each type needs different assessment periods. But I don’t intend to surrender my deep scepticism about whether most government aid works yet. Nor will I accept the idea that I should wait until I know what a regression analysis is before I dare comment.
For one thing, I’m pretty sure that there are equally mathematical and serious papers giving other messages. Indeed, they are mentioned.
More fundamentally, I think that “Counting Chickens when they hatch” suffers from something almost all aid literature also suffers from: not seeing the woods for the trees.
While it did try to compare what did happen to what would have happened without aid, by bringing in regional growth comparators etc., what I want to do is to ask what would have happened if this entire vast movement had not taken place? What if the whole mindset of Africa as recipient, Africa as pauper, Africa as guilt-sink, Africa as playground of anti-colonialist, nationalist and socialist dreams; this mindset confirmed by a billion separate interactions, had not got off the ground?
What if Africa had been like Taiwan?
I think you get a much richer Africa.
I can see that this is essentially unverifiable. I can’t help that. But Taiwan is richer than the Sudan, when it wasn’t fifty years ago.
What if Africa had been like Taiwan?
I think you get a much richer Africa.
I believe Botswana measures as more liberal than Taiwan. I’m sceptical of the these economic freedom think tank tables, but that African country did manage an eye-popping 7.7% growth pa for 30 years.
It’s also an ethnically homogenous country, ethnic hatred being a serious economic aswell as social problem. See Why Botswana?, which has a link also referencing William Easterly’s work on ethnic strife.
Some of this is included in his book, which is very good and worth reading. The balance of evidence is that aid can work, it just needs to be the right sort. Perhaps the task of aidification needs to be outsourced to someone?
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/10/why_botswana.html
On Easterly’s work:
A close reading of the aforementioned paper makes clear that the ethnic heterogeneity of African states can account on its’ own for nearly half the entire performance gap between East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the 1965-1990 period, and in some cases (for instance, Tanzania and Japan), is enough to account for the entire gap in economic growth..
Flaming Nora!
Natalie – Agreed. This keeping African producers dependent on charity is not only insulting and vastly corrupt in itself, but it ensures that Africans will not be able to get a mental picture of their own national finances.
So they get an announcement that the World Bank’s “lending” them $Xbn for land reclamation, or a damn or reforestation, or whatever the hell. The citizen has absolutely no say over the stewardship of these funds. The leaders and their cohorts sit around thoughtfully ticking off which Swiss bank accounts the lion’s share will be deposited in, then scatter the rest around in some projects that provide a little work for the locals, then it all somehow goes away. And the GNP stays at a level which ensures that servicing the debt deprives the country of funds for further development.
It is all totally remote from the people who are perfectly capable of producing wealth.
In other words, the average African – I am deducing this – has no more control over his country’s economy than a medieval serf working the land in a fiefdom.
If ambitious African producers were allowed to sell their produce to the West at competitive rates, and calculate investment and profit and see how much is taken for taxes and how these taxes are being used corruptly, this would bring provoke change. Just now, it’s all too remote. Let people see how the taxes they’ve poured their own energy and calculations are being deployed to enrich others, and we will see a change.
African producers must be given access to Western markets. And what a pleasure for Brits and Europeans to be able to buy produce at prices enjoyed by the rest of the world! Where I am, I pay around 55P for a kilo of mangoes imported from the Philippines. Produce can be sold very cheaply and still make a good profit for the producer and the shipper.
British and European producers should be told the gravy train doesn’t stop here any more.
Natalie, I appreciate you taking the time and effort to read the research I linked to. If it’s any comfort, I skipped the most intensely mathematical parts too …
While the paper does indeed mention dissenting arguments, I think it represents an original and very important progression in the argmument – disaggregating aid into its components hasn’t really be done this way before, and the result is pretty striking.
“What if Africa had been like Taiwan?
I think you get a much richer Africa.”
That’s a bit of a truism though. There’s all sorts of reasons why Taiwan grew faster than Africa, but it’s worth bearing in mind that Taiwan received massive levels of aid from the US in the 1950s. This research from the Congressional Budget Office says it got around $1bn a year in the 1950s (in 1994 dollars), and according to a book I’ve got Taiwan’s GDP was about $7.4bn in 1950 (in 1990 dollars) so that works out to aid at about 13% of GDP, which I believe is above the level most African countries receive. In terms of aid per person, it’s far higher than African levels.
Off the top of my head, I bet nearly all that Taiwan aid was weaponry to stop them being invaded by China.
This timeline says that Taiwan got $1.5bn economic aid over the period 1951 to the mid-sixties. By the crudest of sums that gives $0.15bn-ish per year, with presumably the rest of the $1bn per annum cited in the Congressional Budget Office link above being military aid.
Well, that’s quite a lot of economic aid. But I think Taiwan got rich despite it rather than because of it. Similar sums were given India and Pakistan without much to show for it – until India started to liberalise its economy.
As P J O’Rourke says, When the water level rises, *all* our boats go up. Tanzania, as an example, has diamonds, tin, phosphates, gold, natural gas and nickel, among other plentiful natural resources. Yet seventy-five percent of its foreign income comes from its pathetic little agricultural exports.
Why the hell don’t we let them in? It will take nothing away from us. Yes, the coddled farmers in France, in particular, and the EU in general, will have to pull their belts in to somewhere near normal for farmers elsewhere, but the citizens of the EU will not stop spending money just because they can get realistically priced fruit and vegetables. They’re not going to say, “Oh, I saved six euros on produce today. I think I’ll put it in the bank!” They’re going to keep on spending and enriching another sector of the economy. We will not get poorer by admitting produce from African producers. We will enrich other sectors of our own economies. And Africans will get foreign exchange that they actually earn and don’t have to pay back.
Allowing other capitalists into the market will not impoverish anyone!
I think there is a more general point about money and development that is not restricted to international charity, or aid as it is more politely called.
For my sins, I spent a considerable time working for one of the major oil companies in Saudi Arabia in the ‘80s. It is true that there is a vast improvement in the external appearance of the quality of life in a country like Saudi as a result of the vast sums its government collects from oil sales. However when one looks beneath the surface, it’s soon clear that these changes are more superficial than real, and I am sure will in due course fade away, leaving behind a people who will probably turn out to be no better off or perhaps even worse off than they would have been if there had been no oil under the sand in the first place.
I am convinced that the reason why Saudi, and indeed other countries rich in natural resources but little else ultimately fair worse than other such as Japan, with few if any natural resources, is that in the end there is only one natural resource that can really deliver progress. That is the natural resource between people’s ears.
If people do not have to work and learn and think to get by, they won’t. They will sit back and take what the world gifts them, and when that is gone, they are lost too. It’s the difference between living on the dole (eg., international aid) or even winning the lottery (eg., Saudi oil) on the one hand, and earning your wealth (eg., Japan) on the other.
Africa, by and large, has been living on the dole of international aid for decades, and upping the dole now will do the opposite of helping. It would be like upping a drug addict’s dose in order to break the addiction: it will not work.
I don’t pretend to have the answer for Africa, but more dole is not it.
PS: what about the original Marshall Plan in post WWII Europe? I hear people ask.
But this is a false parallel. The people of Germany and so on had already been well attuned to working and learning and thinking in the ways that succeed in modern industrial economies. What they needed after 1945 was a recharging of batteries, a kick start, a helpful push, to get things moving forward again; the fundamental natural resource between the ears was already there.
In Africa today this fundamental natural resource still has to be developed. The nature of the modern African problem is not amenable to the European solution of half a century ago.
Africa needs an enlightened despot like Deng Xiaoping or Chiang Kai-Shek, enforcing strict political and military control while loosening up the economy, as well as encouraging foreign investment instead of foreign aid.
Exports should be encouraged, and the money earned plowed back into infrastructure and education to form a virtuous circle of economic progress.
The asian economies managed to do all that years ago. The strangest part is, why haven’t the Africans learnt the same? Is there something fundamentally different in the psyches and cultures of East Asians and Africans? Is there really a difference in the grey matter between our ears?
TWG
Africa needs an enlightened despot like Deng Xiaoping or Chiang Kai-Shek, enforcing strict political and military control while loosening up the economy, as well as encouraging foreign investment instead of foreign aid.
Exports should be encouraged, and the money earned plowed back into infrastructure and education to form a virtuous circle of economic progress.
The asian economies managed to do all that years ago. The strangest part is, why haven’t the Africans learnt the same? Is there something fundamentally different in the psyches and cultures of East Asians and Africans? Is there really a difference in the grey matter between our ears?
TWG
PS: what about the original Marshall Plan in post WWII Europe? I hear people ask.
But this is a false parallel. The people of Germany and so on had already been well attuned to working and learning and thinking in the ways that succeed in modern industrial economies.
Indeed. Contrary to the spin, German reconstruction was not the principal aim of ERP aid. It was to bribe southern European elites not to join the Soviet sphere.
The allies were slow to deal even with mass starvation in Germany in ’45-’46. Germany got significantly less Marshall aid per capita per capita than that fortress of industrial strength and western liberal values, Greece.
Sorry. Second paragraph of the foregoing is also quoted and should be italic.
Africa has no lack of despots. The problem is finding enlightened ones.
Yes, there is something fundamentally different in the psychologies and cultures of East Asians and Africans. East Asian cultures are not identical to the traditional western ‘Protestant work ethic’, but the ‘Confucian work ethic’ seems sufficiently similar to deliver similar or perhaps even better results.
There is no difference between African and East Asian grey cells; this is not a racial issue in any way. However there is a vast difference between the cultural, education and work ethic environments they grow up in. There are rather similar psychological and cultural difficulties to Africa in parts of the Muslim-Arab world too, where the effects are probably masked in comparison with Africa due to oil, etc.
Yet where Arabs are left without natural resources, such as in the Lebanon, or Muslims are not Arab, such as Malaysia, the economic results are often much better. Yet again, when two countries with fundamentally similar racial compositions but significant religious divergence–such as India and Pakistan–are compared, it’s clear that Islam carries a considerable economic penalty compared with Hinduism.
By the way, look out for India to surge ahead over the next few decades as the next Asian tiger and rival to China. And all this in a genuine parliamentary democracy; despots, enlightened or otherwise, are not part of the solution.
Quite so. Germany was already much more attuned to being a modern industrial society than Greece, so it could manage with less.
And you have doubtless noticed that Germany is still a far more advanced economy than Greece.
Indeed so. Germany was already much more attuned to being a modern industrial society than Greece, so it could manage with less.
And you have doubtless noticed that Germany is still a far more advanced economy than Greece.
Jim Mangles – no need to alert Samizdatas to the energy and brainpower of India! We have acknowledged it and commented on its wealthy and powerful future many times. Plus, the important point, as you noted, it is the world’s largest democracy. Despite occasional factional volatility, India is a very stable democracy with a high regard for the rule of law and contract law. And awesome brain power.
Wobbly – You say Africa needs a Deng Xiaoping or Chiang Kai-Shek, both of whom governed one country. A Deng for all of Africa? Sub-Saharan Africa has around 50 countries. How do you propose to have a Deng over a vast land mass containing 50 countries with different languages and cultures and a population of half a billion? And that makes 50 dictators and their families and friends onto a nice little earner and, as we know, they don’t go easily.
I think aid is a large part of the problem, both in providing motivation for dictators to oppress and rob their fellow citizens, and for the general culture of unaccountability to sap the will of the citizenries. Some clever people ought to come up with some plans to scrap all aid, save medical for children, which would be administered 100% by donating Western countries with no local involvement save actual medical personnel – and shovel all the UN waBenzis out, and at the same time throw Western markets wide open to any African who thinks he/she can sell something to us. Let them in to try their hand!
I realise this is simplistic and unrealistically radical, but the traditional process has failed for around 60 years now and has created three or four generations of utter corruption and welfare dependency.
There’s yet more William Easterly goodness posted over at MarginalRevolution.com, this choice excerpt’s from Easterly’s highly critical review of Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/03/easterly_on_sac.html
Tyler Cowen posts has interesting critical thoughts of his own on the book:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/03/can_we_cure_pov.html
Verity-With a great deal of military backing. Maybe somebody like Franco or Pinochet, ruthless and authoritarian, yet setting in place a foundation for future democracy.
In truth, we don’t even need a supreme ruler of Africa to get the ball rolling. Just one hellhole out of the fifty to be ruled by such an enlightened despot would be sufficient, because eventual economic progress brings along military and political strength in its wake, and other African countries would have to find some way to follow suit, and that means they’ll have to reform too, or get absorbed eventually. They might keep their tinpot dictators and so-on, but when economic freedom comes first, everything else isn’t going to be far behind. They would have no choice but to play the game.
Problem is, who can get the ball rolling? Who will be their Lee Kuan Yew? Their Reagan? Their Thatcher? Or is the socialism creed and tribalism so ingrained in their psyches that even their elites cannot envision any other way?
Clasuewitz once said conflict was simply an extension of diplomacy(politics). I’m beginning to view politics and interstate diplomacy as just an extension of economics. Everything boils down to economics of scarcity, resource allocation, and marginal utility.
Wobbly – Just one hellhole out of 50 to be ruled by an enlightened despot … well, I’d like to think that might work, but look at S Africa. No, it’s not ruled by a despot, but it has long been a shining example on the dark continent of how capitalism works to create and spread wealth. Did any of them copy it?
Then, there’s the terrible, tragic case of Zimbabwe, which was a thriving, wealthy democracy with the races mixing around freely, and it took a hellish step back. So I’m not sure a working template for capitalism would have the faintest effect in Africa.
I still maintain that aid should be stopped. Cold turkey. At the same time the UN and all its works should be evicted. I don’t care if it’s WHO or UNESCO or any of the rest of the UN fiefdoms and sinecures for relatives of Kofi Annan and his mates. Out. Let private charities in to work on a local basis (if requested). Or let the Africans come up with their own charities and their own solutions.
At the same time, remove the trade barriers to their produce and other products. Let them sell to us, if they can. Transferring funds does not increase net wealth. Everyone trading and making money is what raises the water level.
We have bred a monstrous dependency which has fostered corruption on an unimaginable scale, and has also impoverished the people it was intended to help. All those hundreds of billions of pounds have resulted in nothing. Time to try something new: self-reliance.
Natalie,
This timeline says that Taiwan got $1.5bn economic aid over the period 1951 to the mid-sixties. By the crudest of sums that gives $0.15bn-ish per year, with presumably the rest of the $1bn per annum cited in the Congressional Budget Office link above being military aid.
That timeline doesn’t say whether the figures are adjusted to today’s dollars, so I wouldn’t rely on it for a breakdown between military and economic aid. If this article is correct, just over half the total aid Taiwan received was designated as ‘military’. Of course, receiving so much military aid meant that Taiwan could divert ‘military’ expenditure to economic aims, so military aid can end up being a kind of economic aid. And Taiwan was also quite protectionist in the 1950s, so it really isn’t a particularly shining example of the role of free markets in development.
England was the first country in the world to undergo agricultural and industrial transformation. It was monstrously ‘corrupt’ by today’s standards. Patronage networks were everywhere: favours done and received were what made the wheels go round and the steam engines pump and drive.
Today China, the world’s fastest growing major economy, is so shot through with ‘corruption’ that occasionally examples are made in front of firing squads. That doesn’t stop families, tribes and rackets taking care of their own. India, with the persistence of castes, is no stranger to backhanders and greased palms either. Likewise Japan, where bushido has survived modernisation.
‘Corruption’ is never the problem: it’s how to inject dynamism, so that the endemic rottenness becomes a noble pourriture, producing something worthwhile. Nobody really knows how or why lightning strikes and enriches one economy rather than another– least of all World Bank economists.
If Africa is weltering in poverty, tyranny and disease, it must be something in the genes, not the ‘culture’. Culture is not an independent variable: it is largely an expression of your evolutionary history. It can be modified by other peoples’ examples and coercion to some extent, but never decisively, as we saw when all those Westminster-style constitutions in former colonies melted into dictatorships. All the preaching, external aid and attempts to bully African regimes into following a template for growth devised elsewhere peter out in frustration. Africans will sink or swim in their own fashions.
(BTW, Botswana may have been exceptional in its constitutionalism and prosperity for many years, but it is now the AIDS capital of the world. Doh!)
Yes.
EG