Esther Duflo at TED

The MIT Economist who won the John Bates Clark Medal:

The award is considered one of the most prestigious honors within economics [..] Many consider the Clark Medal to be a preview of future Nobel prizes, as 12 of the 31 prior Clark Medalists have gone on to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science (including Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman).

Here is a video of her talk on using randomized trials to evaluate which development policies work.

Googling off the grid

From Slashdot:

Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor.

Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time.

Snippets from the site:

2301. What is the use of melanine in humans?
2300. what proceedures must a person go through to hold patent rights when he wants to produce a book?
2299. what are the causes and control of constipation?
2298. are telephone masts hazardous to human health
2297. What is the cause and control of constipation?
2296. what is the least sparse district in uganda
2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant
2294. what are the signs and syptoms of swine flu in human beings
2293. when was the uganda railway line built?
2292. what food values are got from eating jackfruits?

Dambisa Moyo interviewed in Australia

Basically, in the aggregate aid does not grow an economy or jobs—it corrupts, destroys incentives to work, and makes governments accountable to donors instead of their people.

How to aid Africa

In response to "End aid, save Africa", Matt has a lot to say:

[This] problem is a function of a common information processing bias, of overestimating efficacy. In other words, you attribute a problem in the world to a presence or lack of direct human agency instead of to complex causal factors -- blaming executives getting too many bonuses as the cause of our latest economic problems is a good example of the efficacy bias (as if simply being less greedy would make the economy work better). It is a helpful bias, usually, though because it directs human efforts at what can be changed.

Military intervention is one thing that this fellow Collier, who I'm guessing (based loosely on reviews) wrote a better book than the lady you cite, argues for (see below). It's a bit too simplistic to see the "solution" as our needing to stop giving directly/having pity and focusing exclusively on macro "root" causes all of which are quite controversial (see The GiveWell Blog: The root causes of poverty). In fact, I think that we should continue to give, but to give more strategically. Better than relying on scattershot private charities as we currently do and as a dogmatic libertarian would suggest, (where people end up often as not giving to something disgusting like suburban soccer teams or music programs for elite suburban youth) would be a built in form on your tax return that you have to choose to OPT-OUT on that would contribute to the best reviewed charities in the world. Maybe even better, would simply be more government taxes going directly to defensible aid projects, AND macroeconomic strategies (which are controversial). Free trade as you welcomely suggest, is a no-brainer. However, some protectionism for those in the most poor billion (i.e., Africa) that are getting crushed by the cheap labor in Asia right now just for the time period for their businesses to start up might make good sense.

Here's a snippet of the Collier (who also sees problems with development aid) book review:

"Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.

At a time when the idea of humanitarian intervention is selling at a considerable discount, this is a vital insight. (One recent finding by Collier and his associates, not reproduced here, is that until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than other comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French effectively gave informal security guarantees to postindependence governments.) Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide." [As Collier says] “If Iraq is allowed to become another Somalia, with the cry ‘Never intervene,’ the consequences will be as bad as Rwanda.”

...he pins more hope on the growth of international law than on global policing. Perhaps the best help we can offer the bottom billion, he suggests, comes in the form of laws and charters: laws requiring Western banks to report deposits by kleptocrats, for example, or charters to regulate the exploitation of natural resources, to uphold media freedom and to prevent fiscal fraud.

...As Collier rightly says, it is time to dispense with the false dichotomies that bedevil the current debate on Africa: “ ‘Globalization will fix it’ versus ‘They need more protection,’ ‘They need more money’ versus ‘Aid feeds corruption,’ ‘They need democracy’ versus ‘They’re locked in ethnic hatreds,’ ‘Go back to empire’ versus ‘Respect their sovereignty,’ ‘Support their armed struggles’ versus ‘Prop up our allies.’ ”

[ NYT: The Least Among Us ] 

I think utilitarian justifications (such as you claim in the earlier post) are always better than libertarian ones, even if libertarianism is a useful heuristic for a lot of helpful policies. It's just, it should be treated as a heuristic and not a moral principle otherwise it provides unneeded rationalization for the idea that we should just leave things alone and magic will happen.

Giving aid is good and highly defensible from a utilitarian stand point once you figure out where to give it, I think. See GiveWell.

Also potentially helpful, Brookings Global Economy and Development Conference: "What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small” (.pdf)

Heuristic is a good word for how I see libertarianism; more so than ideology. Libertarian principles are not a perfect answer to everything, but I've found them to be a very strong and effective heuristic.

I'm sure some forms of aid are much more helpful than others, and GiveWell looks like a good resource.  I'm certainly not going to argue against $10 bednets and 5-cent nutrient packs for children.

But I think it's clear that most aid has been of a harmful welfare sort or been lost to corruption.  When you leave people alone, what happens is not so much magic as self-sufficiency.  This is not an 'unneeded rationalization', but an essential understanding of what makes humans tick.

I'm no expert on how to best carry it out in practice, but my first stab at a solution would be to only provide free aid to children. This should not be administered through parents, because they cannot be trusted to distribute it solely to the kid. Preferably I think it should be provided in exchange for the child getting some basic schooling. Then, after hitting puberty (say, age 14), people should care for themselves.

Training can be provided if necessary.  What they do might be subsistence farming, or a more marketable trade (including agriculture for others' consumption), but regardless people need to learn to work for their own advancement and not rely on free aid to survive.

As for preventing wars and other conflicts, my first stab at a general solution is to come up with a framework for providing security until locals can take over and police themselves. Once they can, leave. Train the police force and help set up a basic civil law system if it helps. When would going into a country and providing this to prevent another Rwanda be warranted/advisable? I can't begin to guess, and I imagine there are many pro and con factors to weigh in avoiding all possible disasters.

"Dead Aid" podcast with Dambisa Moyo

Earlier:

• Emotion and pity vs. logic and evidence?
• Guernica interview with Dambisa Moyo
• If the world had 100 people...

End Aid, save Africa, ctd.

Guernica has a long interview with Dambisa Moyo, the African development expert who has seen the foreign aid machine from positions at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs and thinks the best thing for Africa is to cut it off. Some quotes:

Despite a deluge of aid between the years of 1970 and 1998, poverty on the continent skyrocketed from 11 percent of the population to 66 percent, which means over six hundred million Africans are now impoverished.....Dambisa Moyo is a unique voice in the debate over African aid. In a conversation dominated by white, male westerners—and most conspicuously by celebrities such as Bono or Bob Geldoff—Moyo is a black, African woman....Moyo earned her master’s from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Economics at Oxford. She’s worked as a consultant to the World Bank, and for the past eight years was the sub-Saharan economic expert for Goldman Sachs. It was at Goldman Sachs that Moyo began work on her book, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is A Better Way for Africa, just a few weeks ago

[...] Systematic western aid, Moyo argues in Dead Aid, has essentially turned Africa into one giant welfare state. The unending stream of money has created a situation where governments aren’t accountable to their citizens: since they don’t depend on tax revenue, leaders don’t think they owe their people anything—and the people don’t expect anything from their leaders. Moreover, says Moyo, since the money flows virtually no matter what, tyrants like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (three hundred million dollars in foreign aid was sent to Mugabe in 2006 alone, says Moyo) often pilfer it and buy foreign goods, or stow it in foreign bank accounts where it does nothing to help the country. Furthermore, aid stamps out entrepreneurship. Moyo offers the example of an African mosquito net maker. When aid arrives in the form of a hundred thousand mosquito nets, the net-maker is out of business, and one hundred and sixty people (employees and dependents) are now aid-dependent. This, she says, is not a sustainable model.

[...] I think it’s quite bizarre frankly, and slightly laughable, when I hear people say “Oh, the book is controversial.” My view is that it’s hardly controversial; it’s very obvious...I think we all know that aid is not working. That’s why in the book I draw on literature from organizations like the World Bank. It’s somewhat bizarre that all this evidence is out there [that aid doesn’t work], but somehow we just continue to push for more. Let’s take the capitalistic system for a second. It’s quote, unquote, not working now. We have centuries of evidence that it generates wealth and delivers jobs, and yet here we are after one bad year and we’re ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So I find it quite worrying that we can look at aid—after sixty years and one trillion dollars that haven’t worked in Africa—and we still don’t question the system....

[...] I went to Kenya for the first time and visited the largest slum in Africa. It’s got about 1.2 million people living in it, and it’s been there since 1918. Frankly, it’s a perfect representation of the aid model. The UN for Habitat is right next door, yet this slum is spiraling out of control. It’s got no clean running water; it’s got nothing. It’s a direct example where they could have gone in and shown that aid works, but the slum is still there....In my experience—growing up in Africa and being an academic who went back to the continent and whose family still lives there—I have seen no evidence that aid is delivering a foundation that could ensure long-term sustainable growth and alleviate poverty

[...] I think the whole aid model is couched in pity. I don’t want to cast aspersions as to where that pity comes from. But I do think it’s based on pity because based on logic and evidence, it is very clear that aid does not work. And yet if you speak to some of the biggest supporters of aid, whether they are academics or policy makers or celebrities, their whole rationale for giving more aid to Africa is not couched in logic or evidence; it’s based largely on emotion and pity....

[...] having an open-ended commitment for long-term development and long-term aid is not acceptable. In sixty years, we’ve had over one trillion dollars in aid go to Africa. It needs to stop. So if somebody comes to me and says, “Listen, we think that your five-year program is a bit aggressive, why don’t we make it ten years?” I’m up for a debate on that. What I don’t want is for people to say “Oh, her book is so controversial,” and then they put it aside and continue to perpetuate a long-term, open-ended cycle of aid. I don’t want to raise my children on a continent that continues to spiral downward

[...] There is an incentive structure for the donors, and African countries know this. They know that the World Bank can only survive if it’s spending money. So when the conditionalities are not met, the aid continues to flow anyway....The World Bank discouraged Ghana from going to the capital markets to raise money because it wanted to keep the aid flowing. We’ve seen situations where, in order to keep the system going, the World Bank has lent to countries just so they could pay off old debts. A friend of mine had a great quote: “Africa is to the development industry what Mars is to NASA.” NASA spends billions on a MARS project, but they don’t really think we’re going there. Same with aid. Billions are spent, but no one really thinks it’s going to develop Africa. It’s kind of a scam.

Read the whole thing. (ht reason)

End aid, save Africa

Overcoming Bias:

Dambisa Moyo, an African economist, has joined her voice to the other African economists [e.g. James Shikwati] calling for a full halt to Western aid. Her book is called Dead Aid and it asserts a direct cause-and-effect relationship between $1 trillion of aid and the rise in African poverty rates from 11% to 66%.

Though it's an easy enough signal to fake, I find it noteworthy that Moyo - in this interview at least - repeatedly pleads for some attention to "logic and evidence":

"I think the whole aid model is couched in pity. I don’t want to cast aspersions as to where that pity comes from. But I do think it’s based on pity because based on logic and evidence, it is very clear that aid does not work. And yet if you speak to some of the biggest supporters of aid, whether they are academics or policy makers or celebrities, their whole rationale for giving more aid to Africa is not couched in logic or evidence; it’s based largely on emotion and pity."

I was just trying to think of when was the last time I heard a Western politician - or even a mainstream Western economist in any public venue - draw an outright battle line between logic and pity. Oh, there are plenty of demagogues who claim the evidence is on their side, but they won't be so outright condemning of emotion - it's not a winning tactic. Even I avoid drawing a battle line so stark.

Moyo says she's gotten a better reception in Africa than in the West. Maybe you need to see your whole continent wrecked by emotion and pity before "logic and evidence" start to sound appealing.

Who could have predicted welfare for countries is as harmful as that for corporations and people?

Sigh. Ain't it always the same—by the time people will listen to we stoicly pitiless libertarians and our "logic and evidence", the damage is done.

Update: Excerpts from an interview with Moyo

(earlier: If the world had 100 people)

Pink elephants

They exist! Now stop thinking about it.

Genital mutilation in Africa

Sierra Leone:

Ms Turay was mutilated at her aunt's house where she was staying with her three sisters and her cousin. "We didn't even know that we were going to be initiated," she says. "They called me to get water and then outside they just grabbed me."

She was blindfolded, stripped, and laid on the ground. Heavy women sat on her arms, her chest, her legs. Her mouth was stuffed with a rag. Her clitoris was cut off with a crude knife. Despite profuse bleeding she was forced to walk, was beaten and had hot pepper water poured into her eyes.

"My mother had always told me never to let anyone touch me there. I was scared and I tried to fight them off. Nobody talked to me but there was all this clapping, singing, shouting," recalls Ms Turay. "When I tried to walk on the seventh day I could not walk. All they could say is 'Today you have become a woman'."

Ms Turay is among the estimated 94 per cent of girls who undergo female genital mutilation in Sierra Leone. The practice – which forms part of a ceremony of initiation rites overseen by women-only secret societies such as bondo and sande – can cause severe bleeding, infection, cysts and sometimes death, but is largely ignored.

Reasons for the process vary, but many people cite tradition and culture, saying it is essential preparation for marriage and womanhood; binds communities to each other and to their ancestors; and restricts women's sexual behaviour.

(more)

While not as barbaric and actually useful in preventing HIV transmission, male genital mutilation is more prevalent and still a problem in much of the world because it's often done without consent, especially to infants.

In the Western United States 62% of males have their genitals intact, but in the South it's 35% and in the North 32%. Here in the Midwest we have the worst prevalence with only 18% intact. Those numbers wouldn't be a bad thing if done with consent.

The inhumane practice of genital mutilation without consent needs to be banned worldwide.

Politically incorrect truth of the day

A large number of Africans have primitive tribal belief systems and low IQs. They stand to benefit significantly from widespread conversion to any major monotheistic religion.

Corollary: the mean African IQ is as-of-yet insufficient to support a flourishing community of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics, and some Buddhists) who reject supernatural superstition.

For more on this, see Secular Right and the comments.

For a background example on how religion relates to IQ, see this fascinating plot vs. biblical literalism.