In which the Crooked Timber of Humanity fails to appreciate conservatives

Many thanks to you and P. O’Neill for reading Brooks so that we don’t have to. Now that US officials are holding talks with the Iraqi insurgents (well if you can believe Rumsfeld), fans of Burke will be able to quote great chunks from the Letters on a Regicide Peace about the horrible consequences of shrinking from a long war against a fanatical enemy.

That’s the nice thing about Burke. You can always find what you want.

Here’s
an update on Bush’s African Aids initiative.

Everything that is true about proposed foreign aid for Africa is also true about proposed Tsunami aid. The money will just be wasted, it’s not our responsibility, we have problems of our own to worry about, etc. etc.

Arthur Silber had a really great post about why there was such an outpuring of aid after the Tsunami, as opposed to the resistance to foreign aid in general. If we were to start giving foreign aid now, without a mobilizing event, that would be an implied criticism of our not giving aid in the past. While after the Tsunami, there’s no question of blaming ourselves or defending ourselves or feeling guilty for not helping before, so we could open our hearts to the Tsunami victims without any emotional resistance at all. And we did.

So I think one lesson is that liberals need to make the case for foreign aid without self-righteousness, and without making people feel guilty or defensive.

And it’s also important to point out that nobody is proposing giving away all of our money, or vast amounts of money. 0.5-1% of GDP is what Sachs and others like him are proposing. Even if the experiment fails, or is only a partial success, isn’t an experiment of 1% of our income for foreign aid worth trying?

(cross-posted at Brad Delong’s blog)

I watched Hotel Rwanda this weekend and it was horror beyound words. So I think we could start our foreign aid by paying and training the Ugandan/Rwandan RPF to invade the Sudan and stop that genocide too (maybe for 15 billion they’d do most of Africa).

But I think it is very clear why so few dollars have been allocated. According to this, there really aren’t many countries in Africa who qualify for aid. But Bush needs to open a history book and see how it is done. You don’t demand the country change and then give them the foreign aid crack. You get them hooked on the foreign aid/trade crack and then demand they change.

But given how hard it is even for entrenched NGO’s to get aid to the needy, Bush isn’t totally wrong for withholding funds. What is the current percentage for Zimbabwe, 10% of the foreign aid actually gets to the people while the rest is soaked up by the corrupt?

I don’t think there are many left on the Left who would advocate that foreign aid be dispensed the way it was in the ’60s, without regard to quality of governance and without what the development community calls “monitoring and evaluation”. Conservatives like Brooks tend to write idiotic columns on this subject because they’ve been so uninterested in foreign aid for so long that they have no idea what’s been going on for the last fifteen years. The sharp and well-deserved critiques of the waste and dependency-fostering of old-fashioned development assistance which started coming out in the late ’80s have had their effect. Donors have subjected development organizations to a range of monitoring and evaluation requirements so rigorous and invasive that they make the corporate accounting standards imposed in the wake of the Enron scandals look like child’s play. Indeed, much of the discussion going on around current large-scale aid programs like Bush’s PEPFAR anti-AIDS initiative is over the question of whether monitoring and evaluation have now become so rigorous that NGOs are spending more time monitoring and evaluating than they are actually trying to accomplish anything. Brooks, of course, believes this entire trend was invented by Bush’s “Millenium Challenge Accounts”, which as he notes haven’t actually gotten around to giving out any money yet. The fact is that the development community has fully absorbed what we used to consider “conservative” skepticism and hardheadedness.

The ills afflicting American-sponsored development aid today have more to do with the actual pathologies afflicting conservatism in power than with the philosophical clashes of Burke vs. (pick your antipode – Rousseau?). To wit, aid organizations with no technical expertise or experience created out of thin air to glom onto the politically mandated policy nostrums of the latest USAID specifications and score a quick multimillion-dollar contract. (E.g. “abstinence education”.) A fondness for announcing multibillion-dollar aid initiatives, then quietly failing to provide the funding. (PEPFAR, Millennium Challenge, etc.) A mania for new unilateral American programs in areas where excellent multilateral programs already exist, resulting in time-wasting learning curves and massive duplication of effort, not to mention byzantine accounting and reporting requirements for small NGOs receiving funding from American and foreign sources. (PEPFAR especially, duplicating the GFATM.) And of course the slaving of American aid to flavor-of-the-moment political issues in the US, again forcing NGOs abroad to whipsaw their programs in obedience to bizarre and irrelevant American political concerns. (E.g. USAID’s requirement that US-funded NGOs declare their opposition to legalization of prostitution. One expects any day now to find that African NGOs are being forced to issue declarations opposing the burning of American flags.)

All that said, however, Sachs’s grand plan to save Africa with an infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars in aid seems, to this leftist ex-African resident with some acquaintance with development, completely wacko. For all the stupidity associated with Bush’s PEPFAR program, one of the points on which the administration was right and its critics were wrong was its refusal to immediately dedicate $3 billion in the program’s first year. Aid needs to be ramped up gradually. Pouring money in all at once just blows holes in all the containers. The wages of local skilled and educated personnel who will be administering the programs get bid up. Recipient governments become obsessed with scoring large amounts of funding, rather than with achieving actual development targets. The big disbursing NGOs, which are funded directly by USAID and then redistribute the money downwards to smaller players, have to get rid of all the cash they receive in a FY or they’ll get less the following the FY; they run around desperately looking for semi-competent organizations to fund, and the standards get redefined downwards. And so on. Sachs may be a lot smarter than me, but he’s already been responsible for one colossal development failure in his career – Russia – and he’s now gunning for number 2. Russia and Africa hae always had a lot in common; it would be a shame if they came to share the distinction of being the two vast land masses ruined by Jeffrey Sachs.

catch 22 – Spend time and effort monitoring the effects of aid, and you’re a bloated bureaucracy who spends the money on red tape. Cut out the red tape and minimise the money spent in the aid agency itself, and you’re creating perverse incentives, enabling wars, etc, etc.
Either way, you don’t deserve any money.

Why do you conclude this Steve? I 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. In any discussions I’ve had, it’s more or less taken as a given that those are bad things, and removing them would improve the situation. But since (a) removing them would not be a magic cure and (b) they are sadly not about to leave any time soon, it doesn’t seem there is no point discussing anything else.

Ah, I see. Sorry for the misreading.

When you realize the impact of US (and European) farm subsidies on third world nations, articles like this are hard to stomach.

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.

So it would appear that the US could extremely fairly and quickly add another 30 billion in indirect foreign aid (or as I like to call it, Free Trade) and the only people hurt would be large agro who are buying yachts and G5’s with taxpayer money.

Why Africa?

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?

I think it is clear that current EU and US agricultural arrangements are very damaging but instantly switching to free trade will have all sorts of unintended consequences. For example it is not clear that the countries that are suffering at the moment are also those that would benefit from liberalisation. The EU and the rest might just end up switching to cheap supplies from Brazil reducing prices and opportunities for undercapitalised industries in Africa and other places. There are also a lot of opportunities for major industrial enterprises to co-opt the no doubt imperfect legislation to implement this kind of reform. Britain’s wimp-out on the CAP (refusing a cap on CAP aid payments)is a case in point.

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

brooksfoe, great comment. I saw Sachs speak (haven’t read the book) — he’s an economist, not a historian, political scientist, or sociologist, and it shows. He really does believe that “clinical economics” can find the roots of problems and offer “practical” solutions. He acknowledges that aid is currently poorly spent (much on international consultants, direct food aid, and shipping direct food aid), but he doesn’t confront the fact that even if aid spending is increased, this apportionment will (most certainly) not change. He’s for “trade AND aid” in order to overcome the poverty trap, but he’s overemphasized aid to a degree that is shocking. I think he’s made a political calculation — 1) his advocacy can have a greater effect on aid as compared to trade policies and 2) this work came out of the UN sponsored Millennium Project, which has an interest in increasing aid. His arguments seem to be made to appeal to American conservatives in particular, as he emphasizes that the poor should not be blamed for their poverty. Perhaps he thinks that becoming saviors through aid will appeal to them.

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.

You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish.

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.