Two examples of astonishing naivete immediately spring to mind.
The first is his claim that corruption is common, but Asian countries have prospered in spite of corruption, a statement that seems unaware of the concept of degrees of badness. There is an awful difference between a corrupt government that skims 10% off the building of a dam/highway/powerplant, and has the plant still built, and a government that skims 100%, leaving the country with blueprints for a powerplant and not much else.
The second is his favorite example of mosquito nets. I imagine this example is chosen because the implication is that, unlike giving a government cash, if you give them mosquito nets how can they then do any damage? Of course even the most cursory glance at African history shows a wide variety of ingenious ways in which the nets can be exploited—they can be sold to the people they are meant to be given to, they can be sold to slightly less poor countries (Asia and South America spring to mind), or, that most favorite of African tactics, they can be given to those of the chosen sphere (correct tribe/language/voting record) while being withheld as punishment from those who are not favored.

At the end of the day we are face the elephant that no-one wants to mention—sovereignty. There is a constituency in the west that, for good reason, sees any attempt by Westerners to force Africans to do things a certain way, as intensely problematic. There is another constituency that, for just as good reasons, doesn’t believe that a single damn good thing will happen in Africa until those providing aid can, with overwhelming force behind them, step in as necessary to damn well crush and kill those who use aid as piggy bank or political patronage. Between these two we have a stalemate with no obvious resolution.

If they are fishing for fish which are the size of mosquitoes, no wonder the poor buggers are starving. Does nobody read these things before printing them?

Oh yeh and

don’t think you’d find anyone on this site (conservative commentators included) who’d support the European Common Agricultural Policy or the US farm subsidies, which are the major barriers to our markets

Hand up; I’ll support the CAP, at least in the face of the current attacks, because it isn’t a major barrier to the EU market. Since the last set of reforms, the EU does not subsidise the creation of material surpluses (not that surpluses were a bad thing anyway; cheap food is not bad for starving people). It also allows poor African nations access to the EU market on member state terms. The only commodity for which this is remotely true is Malawian and Zambian sugar, and it would be a bad idea for Malawi and Zambia to increase their reliance on sugar exports, since they would be competing with Australia and Brazil.

The current proposals to scrap the CAP (as opposed to the previous campaigns which resulted in the present reforms) look like nothing more than an attempt by the UK to get out of paying for the thing, backed by energetic lobbying by Australian and Brazilian commodities interests, and greenwashed as proposals to “help Africa” by a load of NGOs that should know better. I have not seen any anti-CAP campaigner come up with a plausible suggestion as to how we should replace the preferential access regime, which leaves me with the sneaking suspicion that removing the CAP would leave Africa somewhat worse off.

I don’t know anything about US farm subsidies.

doesn’t even really make sense on its own terms. The “material/ nonmaterial” divide on the causes of poverty is one between economics and those aspects of politics and law that touch on economics, on one side, and culture (and those aspects of politics and law etc) on the other. “Corrupt governments” are decidedly a material cause of poverty. They directly steal from their people; they impose such high transaction costs in demands for bribes that productive economic activity is stifled; they refuse stability and transparency in property and contract enforcement, which require an uncorrupt judiciary.

This isn’t culture, or religion, or alcoholism, or illegitimacy, or anything like that. It’s straightforwardly material.

Brooks appears to be conflating “material causes of poverty” with “the absence of transfer payments.” This allows him to assimilate the foreign aid case to the domestic welfare case, and to imply that the Bush foreign aid policy is something like the faith-based initiatives. But the implication is silly. F-BI stresses nonmaterial causes of domestic poverty. The rhetoric of the Bush plan is about material causes of African poverty—local material causes, certainly, but material nonetheless.

On the “Why Africa” question, I think Sachs would say that there are some barriers that Africa faces of the “Guns, Germs, and Steel” variety. For example, endemic malaria, the distribution of rainfall juxtaposed with the location of port cities, etc.

On the “Why Africa” question, I think Sachs would say that there are some barriers that Africa faces of the “Guns, Germs, and Steel” variety. For example, endemic malaria, the distribution of rainfall juxtaposed with the location of port cities, etc.

I read this in the IHT and thought it made a lot of sense but couldn’t find it on-line.

Because the trends are much worse. Absolute number of poor is higher in S. Asia, but these countries are growing at a sufficient rate to pull a lot of people out of absolute poverty on their own. They’ve done a lot of poverty reduction already. Africa hasn’t even managed to do things that South Asia did, like Green Revolution and creation of tech enclaves. Of course the work is not done when we lift people from $0.99/day to $1.05 per day. But Sachs would argue for directing global effort where the prospects for absolute misery are highest.

South Asia has more than half again as many people living in extreme poverty as all of Africa. Yet a program to eliminate poverty there would surely be cheaper, easier to implement, and more likely to succeed than Sachs’ proposal for Africa. Repressive, corrupt government, civil and border wars, and illiteracy are not entirely absent, but they’d likely be much less of an obstacle to development. There’s even a “colonial guilt” angle, if that matters.

So why Africa?

Just $4 billion per year would guarantee every full-time farmer in America a minimum income of 185 percent of the federal poverty level ($34,873 for a family of four in 2004).5 However, farm subsidies are more corporate welfare than poverty relief, so Washington instead spends $12 billion to $30 billion annually subsidizing large farms and agribusinesses that are much wealthier than the taxpayers footing the bill.

If it’s Tuesday, we can and must remake the world in our image, for such is the nature of true conservatism.

If it’s Saturday, we are humble and prudent and wary of grand, messianic schemes, for such is the nature of true conservatism.

And if it’s Thursday, something I overheard while waiting on line at Home Depot the other day will be spun into a profound insight into American political sociology.

Brooks, Friedman, Tierney…it boggles the mind. How many people are going to pay 50 cents a year for this parade of idiocy, let alone $50?