American hubris, African nemesis
Article Info
Nina Munk's The Idealist
is a deep and important book about foreign aid and development:
grandiose plans, especially those hatched abroad, will be brought down
by the complexity and unknowability of local conditions and human
behaviour. Beyond the enormous punch that the book delivers, the quality
of the writing is that of a fine novel, not of the usual tract in
social science. We get to know and care about the characters, including
Munk herself; we share their dedication, their optimism, and their
dreams of improving lives. We also care when their illusions are
destroyed, and their dedication is betrayed. Much of the message is
conveyed by the arc of the story, and by the change in Munk's own voice
as she moves from her initial optimism and her commitment to reporting
on something that really matters—the fight against global poverty—into
final disillusion. It is a trip that many of us have made over the
years, but few with so much knowledge from the field and none whose
experiences are so eloquently and movingly reported.
Academic writers have explored this territory too. James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,
documents, among other schemes, Stalin's catastrophic collectivisation
of agriculture, as well as Julius Nyerere's failed attempt to relieve
poverty by having everyone in rural Tanzania live in “rationally”
planned villages. Both schemes took their inspiration from the USA, and
from the modernist belief in technology and social engineering. In one
case, in 1928, during 2 weeks in a Chicago hotel room, three American
experts produced detailed plans for a 500 000-acre Russian collective
farm. James Ferguson's The Anti-politics Machine is about a
failed Canadian development scheme in Lesotho. Unfortunately for the
developers, Lesotho did not look anything like the “dual-economy” model
then fashionable among economists—any more than Russian or Tanzanian
farms looked like the model farms of the planners. Economists, perhaps
even more than other social scientists, are susceptible to mistaking
their models for reality. Ambitious plans, even when formulated
domestically, can never know enough not to be undone by the complexity
on the ground. The law of unintended consequences is the engine that
inevitably brings nemesis to such hubris.
Jeffrey Sachs,
the eponymous idealist of Munk's tragedy, holds to a model of economic
development in which poverty cannot be broken piecemeal, but must be
attacked on all fronts at once. Perhaps people cannot save for the
future because they are too poor or too unhealthy, or both; perhaps they
cannot improve their health or their productivity without the
investments that depend on saving; or perhaps their productivity is low
because they are not adequately nourished which, in turn, comes about
because their productivity is so low. These vicious circles cause
“poverty traps” from which people cannot escape except through a “big
push” from outside. “In order to make lasting changes in any one sphere
of development, we must improve them all”, argues the website of the
Millennium Villages, where “all” comprises eight categories: education,
mother and child health, business and entrepreneurship, gender equality,
technology, the environment and intervention, water and energy, and
food. (Note the “we”, which presumably means the western visitors to the
website.)
http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/arguing-with-angus-deaton-on-aid/
