Monday Musing: In the Peace Corps' Shadow

A couple of weeks ago the travel writer and memoirist Paul Theroux published an opinion piece entitled "The Rock Star's Burden" in the New York Times. It is an article full of bitterness and bile where, in a display of almost unbelievable hubris, Theroux basically expresses a thinly disguised disappointment that the country of Malawi, where he worked as part of the Peace Corps 40 years ago, has not been able to convert his (and others') generous donation of time and energy into becoming more like a grateful version of Switzerland:

Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the ''more money'' platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for -- and this never happens.

He then takes his misguided judgment of the causes of problems in Malawi and, predictably enough, generalizes it to all of Africa:

Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

The emigration of Africans to the preposterously prosperous countries of the West particularly galls Theroux; after all, didn't he go there to try and help them? Why can't they stay and help themselves? Is he really seriously suggesting that if Malawians, with an average income of around 50 cents per day, 900,000 of whom are infected with AIDS, and who have a basic literacy rate of barely 50 percent, were to just stay home and "volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades," that Malawi's problems would go away? It doesn't seem to have occurred to Theroux that while he had the education and the luxury of taking a couple of years off in his youth to indulge his idealistic fantasies (and turn the experience into a lucrative career writing about it--it takes the average Malawian a year to earn the amount of money Theroux probably makes in a day) through a program (the Peace Corps) explicitly designed as a propaganda tool for the American government in the cold war years, most Malawians cannot take a few years off to "volunteer" for the betterment of their country. Of course, those (and there are really very few) who are able to get to the West to make a better life for themselves will do so. And why shouldn't they? (Mr. Theroux seems not even to have any idea of the difficulties of getting a visa to the West for anyone in the third world.)

Bono, through his high-profile campaigns for African debt relief, serves as the main lightning rod for Theroux's odious and acidic attacks:

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson -- who calls himself ''Bono'' -- as Mrs. Jellyby in ''Bleak House.'' Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha ''on the left bank of the River Niger,'' Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes ''to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade,'' all the while badgering people for money.

And also:

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the ''more money'' platform...

By coincidence, at the time that I read Theroux's hysterical screed against any money for Africa (keep in mind his saying, "I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for -- and this never happens"), I had just finished reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, with a foreword by the much-maligned Bono. Sachs is an extremely well-respected economist, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is also the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I recommended Sach's book in 3QD's year-end round-up of the best books of 2005, and he does such a good job of not only explaining the "poverty trap" that some African (and other extremely poor) countries find themselves in, but also of anticipating and answering the objections of the likes of Theroux, that I will let him do most of the talking now:

When poverty is very extreme, the poor do not have the ability--by themselves--to get out of the mess. Here is why: Consider the kind of poverty caused by a lack of capital per person. Poor rural villages lack trucks, paved roads, power generators, irrigation channels. Human capital is very low, with hungry, disease-ridden, and illiterate villagers struggling for survival. Natural capital is depleted: the trees have been cut down and the soil nutrients exhausted. In these conditions the need is for more capital--physical, human, natural--but that requires more saving. When people are poor, but not utterly destitute, they may be able to save. When they are utterly destitute, they need their entire income, or more, just to survive. There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future.

This is the main reason why the poorest of the poor are most prone to becoming trapped with low or negative economic growth rates. They are too poor to save for the future and thereby accumulate the capital per person that could pull them out of their current misery...

[The saving rate, for example, of upper-middle-income countries was 25% as opposed to 10% for the least-developed countries, according to a 2004 World Bank study.]

In fact, the standard measures of domestic saving, based on the official national accounts, overstate the saving of the poor because these data do not account for the fact that the poor are depleting their natural capital by cutting down trees, exhausting soils of their nutrients, mining their mineral, energy, and metal deposits, and overfishing... When a tree is cut down and sold for fuelwood, and not replanted, the earnings to the logger are counted as income, but instead should be counted as a conversion of one capital asset (the tree) into a financial asset (money). (TEoP, p.57)

There is much more to this, but you will have to read the book yourself to get all the details, which Sachs does an admirable job of laying out for the non-specialist reader. Much of the book is spent in showing that it is possible, using available data, to estimate fairly accurately the amounts of capital infusion needed by a country to escape the poverty trap. It's better to just let Sachs take it from there:

Africa needs around $30 billion per year in order to escape from poverty. But if we actually gave that aid, where would it go? Right down the drain if the past is any guide. Sad to say, Africa's education levels are so low that even programs that work elsewhere would fail in Africa. Africa is corrupt and riddled with authoritarianism. It lacks modern values and the institutions of a free market economy needed to achieve success... And here is the bleakest truth: Suppose that our aid saved Africa's children. What then? There would be a population explosion, and a lot more hungry adults. We would have solved nothing.

If your head was just nodding yes, please read this chapter with special care. The paragraph above repeats conventional rich-world wisdom about Africa, and to a lesser extent, other poor regions. While common, these assertions are incorrect. Yet they have been repeated publicly for so long, or whispered in private, that they have become accepted as truths by the broad public as well as much of the development community, particularly by people who have never worked in Africa.  I use the case of Africa because prejudices against Africa run so high, but the same attitudes were expressed about other parts of the world before those places achieved economic development and cultural prejudices could not hold up. (TEoP, p. 309)

Hmmm, does the first paragraph above remind you of something you've read lately? In the rest of the chapter, Sachs answers these and other objections to aid for Africa in careful detail, with section headings such as:

• Money down the drain
• Aid programs would fail in Africa
• Corruption is the culprit
• A democracy deficit
• Lack of modern values
• The need for economic freedom
• A shortfall of morals

Just to give a flavor of how Sachs's refutations of these cliched arguments go, let me first quote our self-appointed Africa expert, Mr. Theroux, one last time:

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Now here is Sachs again:

In the past, the overwhelming prejudices against Africa have been grounded in overt racism. Today the ever repeated assertion is that corruption--or "poor governance"--is Africa's venal sin, the deepest source of its current malaise. Both Africans themselves and outsiders level this charge...

The point is that virtually all poor countries have governance and corruption indicators that are below those of the high-income countries. Governance and higher income go hand in hand not only because good governance raises incomes, but also, and perhaps even more important, because higher income leads to improved governance...

Africa's governance is poor because Africa is poor. Crucially, however, two other things are also true. At any given level of governance (as measured by standard indicators), African countries tend to grow less rapidly than similarly governed countries in other parts of the world... Something else is afoot; as I have argued at length, the slower growth is best explained by geographical and ecological factors. Second, Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than other countries at the same income level. (TEoP, p. 311)

As for Africa's lack of democracy, Sachs notes that:

Africa's share of free and partly free countries, 66 percent, actually stands above the average for non-African low-income countries in 2003, 57 percent...

Democratization, alas, does not reliably translate into faster economic growth, at least in the short term. The links from democracy to economic performance are relatively weak, even though democracy is surely a boon for human rights and a barrier against large-scale killing, torture, and other abuses by the state. The point is not that Africa will soar economically now that it is democratizing, but rather that the charge of authoritarian rule as a basic obstacle to good governance in Africa is passe. (TEoP, p. 315)

Well, you get the idea. Buy the book and read it. As for Theroux, he should stick to doing what he does best: writing gossipy accounts of much better writers than himself, like, In Sir Vidia's Shadow, his book trashing his former mentor, V. S. Naipaul. And more power to Bono!

From Sach's website: How You Can Help End Poverty.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick's Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka's President

Comments

[Steven Levine]

Great post Abbas. I was waiting to see a take down of theroux, but before your piece it never came. Thanks.

[Aatish]

Thanks for that very illuminating post Abbas. I'm going to pick up a copy of Sach's book today! Cheers.

[James]

Don't you think you're being a little tough on Theroux? Sure, he was comfortable enough to take a couple of years off...but I'm sure he didn't have to spend it digging wells in Malawi. Yes, he sounds like a curmudgeon. But then, he's just come back from seeing the fruits of his youthful labor turn to crap. What do you expect?

And he's got a point: Sach's call of prejudice notwithstanding, in these days of easy computer-based accounting, transparency is so simple. Why not try it? Also, does Sachs say whether donations of the scale he's calling for would have a destabilizing effect on those economies? Nigeria has a lot of oil, but I don't think it's doing so hot.

[Abbas Raza]

Hi James,

Maybe I should have sounded less angry, but I don't think I am being too hard on Theroux. He is wrong, and being irresponsible by not knowing what he is talking about. Sachs, Bono, and a lot of other people are calling for the elimination of extreme poverty. By these standards, Nigeria is fine. The point is that there IS corruption, lack of democracy, lack of transparency, etc. in many poor countries, but no more in Africa than anywhere else. These are problems endemic to poor countries everywhere, and we cannot keep waiting for them to be solved (they never will be) before we try to help them out of the "poverty traps" they are stuck in. It is not the fault of the destitute populations of some countries that they don't have perfect leadership.

Don't forget that these countries suffered extreme violence and distortions of their own cultures and stable methods of governance due to Western colonialism. We tend to forget that, even just a few decades after "granting" them independence, and installing the corrupt leaders they are now burdened with, and then using them as pawns in the cold war.

I did not mean to ridicule Mr. Theroux's youthful stint trying to help Malawi; I was trying to point out how ludicrous his idea that Malawians should "stay home and volunteer" is now. I don't think he has a point at all. Instead, he is just expressing his irritation that all the work he did was for nothing. But this is a rather silly complaint in the face of the tragedy of the Malawians themselves.

I urge you, again, to read Sachs's book for a more comprehensive and clear account of what I am trying to say.

Thanks for the comment.

[Daryl McCullough]

I think it's interesting that the debate between Theroux and Sachs is very similar to the debate in the United States about what to do about poverty (in particular, inner-city poverty that falls hardest on African-Americans). There is the liberal answer, which is to provide more and better government programs, and there is the conservative answer, which is that such programs are counter-productive and lead to a dangerous dependency that undermines individual initiative.

As a liberal, I tend to think of the conservative argument as just a convenient excuse for doing nothing. However, that's a little unfair, because at least one thoughtful black author has endorsed the conservative view, namely John McWhorter in "Winning the Race". (At amazon.com)

[liberal]

You really want to trust Sachs on development/poverty issues after his role in the Russia debacle?

[liberal]

Daryl McCullough wrote, There is the liberal answer, which is to provide more and better government programs, and there is the conservative answer, which is that such programs are counter-productive and lead to a dangerous dependency that undermines individual initiative.

And then there's the correct answer, which is to tax land heavily, stop taxing buildings and other improvements, and lower taxes on labor and capital---as Henry George showed over a century ago.

[Daryl McCullough]

liberal,

My brother Kyle is a big fan of Henry George. I asked Max Sawicky about George's notion of taxation, and he doubted that it would be workable today. I don't understand why not---maybe because so much wealth is generated through intangible property (stocks, copyrights, patents, etc.)?

[Bob]

Abbas:
I appreciate your post on this topic, and your blogging in general, but have a few problems with your take.
First and foremost, Theroux is arguing for accountability. I find it difficult to argue with that. Like you, I am troubled by some of his arguments, find some trivial and would like him to approach the topic in a more considered manner. However, the west will not give billions, watch it disappear, forgive the debt, give billions more, watch it disappear, forgive the debt…..on and on indefinitely. Obviously, at some point the money needs to be used wisely and transparently. Demanding that is a positive step. You and Theroux are on the same side. He is NOT arguing against aid for Africa – he is searching for the best way to get the most help to the Africans most in need.
As for Bono, I’m sorry, but every time I see an individual dressed “casually” in thousands of dollars worth of clothing and designer eyewear I see a part of the problem. This is not some knee-jerk sophomoric Marxist rant. Mr. and Mrs. Bono are consuming a HUGE share of the earth’s resources. Those resources come from somewhere. Believe it or not there really are principled people who turn down earthly riches because they believe in a more equitable distribution of said riches instead of living a life the Pharaohs would have been jealous of while demanding that working class taxpayers give more to the world’s poor.
And before signing off, let me make something clear. I agree with most of what Bono says. I just find the package it comes in smug, self-righteous and pompous.

[mike schmidt]

Theroux is such a loser. Why do people even pay him to write?

[anghara]

I haven't read either of the works you quote from, so this is entirely based on what quotes you've provided and your own take on tehm - but while Theroux may be misguided and/or expressing himself really badly,there is a kernel in what he says that does make a heap of sense - and no, it isn't the easy answer, but until it IS thought about seriously Africa's problems will just continue to multiply. He is right in asking why the young educated African elite doesn't stay at home to pull the collective socks of the entire community up - change, if it comes and if it is effective, always comes from within. You can throw as much aid as you want at something that doesn't change or doesn't want to change and you know you're only feeding the problem, not making it go away. Yes, it might be curmudgeonly to be critical of the youngsters' emigrating to nice developed countries and leave behind their poor hovels - but what that leaves out is that in those nice developed countries all the hard work has been done already to establish those social structures on which the emigrating youngsters dote, and those nice developed countries weren't ALWAYS rich and powerful themselves, either - it all had to happen over years, centuries. The problem isn't the emigration, the problem is that our world isn't developing in parallel and there will always be shangri-la type places calling to the poor (to whom nobody has explained that a huge percentage of Americans without health insurance is at enormous risk from all the "civilized" diseases plus a wasting dease of the wallet if (god forbit) one needs to be hospitalised for anything at all. My husband's three-day stay in a hospital following his stroke cost $44 000, and that was two and a half years ago, God knows what it is now. These are the kind of figures that would GIVE a stroke to any starry-eyed emigrant from the African hinterlands.

There are ways to help Africa, but until they start WANTING to help themselves most of them are so much useless running in place to keep up the status quo. Africa is full of riches - diamonds, copper, oil, vast arable lands on the central plateau - which could be focused on and the income from which could feed a hungry continent - but an atmosphere has been established where huge debts have been racked up without hope or prayer of repayment, and where expiation for various colonial misdeeds has been built up as a basis for a collective guilt trrip which perpetuates the situation. Post-colonial Africa has been a child raised to be dependent on handouts. They expect them now.

And before you tell me that I don't know what I am talking about, I spent 20 years living in various countries in Africa, with a father who held Government level jobs in at least two of those countries, and I have seen certain attitudes and certain ways of life all close up and personal. Leaving aside the economics for a moment, there's the example of the AIDS crisis in Africa - and the response, in South Africa, that using a condom during sex was the white man's way of preventing the birth of any more black children. So protection is distained. More black children are being born, certainly - but they are being born to AIDS-infected mothers, or into a life of such abject poverty and such godawful quality fo life that even emigrating to the bright lodestar of Europe or America isn't an option any more. These kids are born sick, and die poor and ill-educated.

Sure, Africa has been hard done by - but until Africa learns that with freedom comes a shitload of responsibility we aren't really getting anywhere. Being a philanthropist of the Gates and Bono ilk is wonderful - but what happens when that help stops...? (And it will, eventually - not eve Bill Gates goes on forever)
What happens when the people of Africa DO get left to figure out how to help themselves? Are they being shown how to do this, or are we STILL doing no more than holding their hand and petting them and telling them everything is going to be all right, as you would to a child, making ourselves feel better in the process (because we're "doing something") but achieving no lasting results...?

[JB]

I have say there are many parts of what Paul Theroux wrote that I agree with but some of what he wrote is flat out wrong. He has lived in Malawi but the 40 year time span has definitely affected his memory. Take this passage from his

NY Times piece:

"In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local nstructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. "

No country in Africa depends on Peace Corp volunteers for teaching. Not Malawi, not a single country. Yes Peace Corp volunteers provide valuable services, including teaching but their numbers are too small for their presence to be critical. Second of all, almost no Peace Corp volunteer can teach at the elementary school level because of the language barrier. This means that the few Peace Corp volunteers who teach can only do so are the secondary school level.

Some sub-Saharan African countries do depend on a lot of non-native teachers but those teachers are from other African countries - not from the west. For example, a country like Gambia in west Africa has a lot of teachers from Ghana and Sierra Leone.

[JB]

I also want to add one thing. Both Theroux and Alma A. Hromic (anghara) seem to be pointing to the symptoms as causes. Fingering emigration is one example. For a moment, it seems that Theroux was going to realize this in his article but he didn't. Why would people want to leave their homeland in droves? Young people migrate not only because of the expected larger monetary rewards in the West but because of the conditions in their countries, primarily caused by bad governance. In some instances, there were civil unrest or civil war. What kind of work can be done in such situation? And saying that some of these young people should stay because the countries they are heading to had been build by others centuries ago betrays willful ignorance of history. The history of many countries is the story of people getting up and moving to other places when they face hardships. This was one of main reasons behind the creation of the US. Alma's own country of origin saw a huge emigration of people during the unrest a few years ago. When things are going well, people stay because even though there may be higher salaries overseas, there are other non-monetary rewards that act in the other direction.

"There are ways to help Africa, but until they start WANTING to help themselves most of them are so much useless running in place to keep up the status quo."

What nonsense. The African countries mired in poverty and economic stagnation are the result of lack of Africans not wanting to help themselves? So we can conclude that for most of the 20th century, China was lacking in Chinese who were interesed in helping themselves. And only after Deng Xiaoping's reform in the 1970s did the Chinese mentality change away from self-loathing?

My own view that is that aid should be stopped completely. Including the kind advocated by Sachs and Bono. To some extent, I agree with both Theroux and anghara that the solutions have to come from within Africa. I'm aware the Sachs and Bono are advocating a specific kind of aid but the problem they are trying to solve are in almost all cases caused by policies pursued by governments. And if the ultimate source of the problem is not recognized and tackled, treating only the symptoms cannot be a long term solution

[Jon H]

"As for Bono, I’m sorry, but every time I see an individual dressed “casually” in thousands of dollars worth of clothing and designer eyewear I see a part of the problem. "

The clothing and eyewear is made of approximately the same amount of material as is used in cheaper clothing and eyewear.

They may be expensive, but the added expense isn't paying for wasteful use of materials. It's paying for status, design, and perhaps quality of construction.

If you want to see wasteful clothing, check the ridiculous oversized pants from some urban styles, with the pant legs as wide as many people's waists.

[Curly Howard]

Ai Chihuahua! Funny how the minute one of our liberal brethren doesn't preach the party line we eviscerate. As long as Bono wants to keep buying helicopters for dictators, fine - when every African gets a helicopter we can then look to stem the AIDS epidemic over there.
In the meantime, guys who develop simple cost effective water transport and groups like pedals for progress are the ones who are making a real difference over there. Read DARK STAR SAFARI and see what happened to him & hear the opinions of Africans he's friends with to this day from there and then see why he thinks what he thinks.
I did not come away thinking that we should do nothing - just that cash is not the answer.

[R J Keefe]

A great entry - thanks.

[Bob]

Jon H, in response to my previous comment, wrote: "They may be expensive, but the added expense isn't paying for wasteful use of materials. It's paying for status, design, and perhaps quality of construction."
Actually, there is indeed plenty of waste involved in such slavish devotion to "fashion" as practiced in the western world. Do a quick search of U2 photos over the years and see if you ever catch Bono looking even remotely passé. You won't. His wardrobe turns over constantly. I will concede up front to never having been in his closet, but I am going to go out on limb here and speculate he owns a rather average amount of clothing for one in his income/occupation. In other words at any given time he most assuredly owns as many clothes as most of us go through in 20 years. Does Bono ever throw away clothes because they have become so frayed he can no longer wear them? This promotion of faddishness over practicality is a big part of the problem. When a small family lives in an enormous house filled with clothes and other accessories, the resources to manufacture all those goodies comes out of the limited resources available world wide. What’s more, when someone like Bono, who is an enormously influential individual, creates constant cravings for the latest fashion, he compounds his impact a million fold. If the west really wants to help Africa, a good start would be to ratchet down our own consumption a few notches.

[Bob]

Jon H, in response to my previous comment, wrote: "They may be expensive, but the added expense isn't paying for wasteful use of materials. It's paying for status, design, and perhaps quality of construction."
Actually, there is indeed plenty of waste involved in such slavish devotion to "fashion" as practiced in the western world. Do a quick search of U2 photos over the years and see if you ever catch Bono looking even remotely passé. You won't. His wardrobe turns over constantly. I will concede up front to never having been in his closet, but I am going to go out on limb here and speculate he owns a rather average amount of clothing for one in his income/occupation. In other words at any given time he most assuredly owns as many clothes as most of us go through in 20 years. Does Bono ever throw away clothes because they have become so frayed he can no longer wear them? This promotion of faddishness over practicality is a big part of the problem. When a small family lives in an enormous house filled with clothes and other accessories, the resources to manufacture all those goodies comes out of the limited resources available world wide. What’s more, when someone like Bono, who is an enormously influential individual, creates constant cravings for the latest fashion, he compounds his impact a million fold. If the west really wants to help Africa, a good start would be to ratchet down our own consumption a few notches.

[Bild]

Did Theroux credit Niall Ferguson for the Mrs. Jellyby analogy?

Further references:

http://irenkenya.org/page.php?instructions=page&page_id=63&nav_id=19
http://africabiotech.com/news2/article.php?uid=52
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html
http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4127278&tranMode=none
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/02/05/do0501.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/02/05/ixopinion.html
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=378482004
http://discuss.pittsburghlive.com/viewtopic.php?t=52213&view=next&sid=2e41fc35485a1878aa6886d2e349eba4

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[Bob Utne]

Lots of ivory-tower fusillades with little personal experience evidenced to back up the assertions. I give credit to both Theroux and Bono for keeping this vital issue alive on many front burners. Maybe its a yin and yang or heads and tales thing but all issues have their pros and cons. Keeping them alive/in the news/in your face is the key. Personally, I, too, served in the Peace Corps in Africa (Gabon/primary-school construction) at about the same time as Theroux and went back to visit 35 years later. Unlike Paul, I didn't come away from my visit casting stones at all the perceived culprits that hindered better development. On the contrary, I was wishing that Mother Earth had been left better intact.

[Pablo Policzer]

Abbas,

Good post, and nice critique of Theroux. But I'm not persuaded by Sachs' arguments, even though he is much in vogue these days. Sachs was one of the principal architects of the economic transformation in Russia after the collapse of communism. The policies he helped design had much the same flavour as the ones he is currently recommending for Africa (and elsewhere): essentially, economic reforms above all else, including political reforms. In Russia, he was criticized for trying to implement economic reforms in a context without a functioning legal system, and I'm afraid history has not judged his policies very kindly. The reforms failed because political institutions in the end mattered (i.e. the absence of a functioning political and legal system fostered corruption and chaos, which resulted ultimately in the authoritarian backlash led by Putin). Although the stories are a little different in each place, Sachs' economic reforms also failed in other countries, such as Bolivia and Argentina, where Sachs had also been highly influential in the 1990s. As a good economist, Sachs has consistently ignored the importance of politics and political institutions. I think good governance is more important than he thinks.

For a contrast, take a look at Adam Przeworski et al's "Democracy and Development," which also tackles the relationship between political and economic institutions. Among other things, they show that economic development doesn't really drive political development in the way most economists think. For example, being wealthy doesn't guarantee good governance (e.g. the current administration in the U.S.). And while being poor increases your chances of, say, a military coup, this simply means that for poor countries it's especially important to get the political institutions right. India is a good example: a country that has historically had far more democracy than economists would predict.

In short, politics matters more than Sachs thinks, and I'd be careful with singing his praises too uncritically.

Pablo

[Pab]

PS: Take a look at this paper by Adam Przeworski and Jess Benhabib:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/przeworski/papers/account.pdf

[Beatrice Moigula]

I am originally from Sierra Leone and have lived legally in the US for 12 years now. Because i am very much concerned about the plight of Africa, I have adopted 5 villages in the southern part of Sierra Leone that i assist in different little ways in order to make a difference. I am not a graduate nor earning a 6 figure salary yet in my own little way i am doing something with the hope of bringing about positive changes in the lives of the people in these villages. If i do have the financial means and support, I would rather be in Sierra Leone and use the experiences i have earned living in the US and working with people with developmental disabilities to educate,assist, motivate my people and show the world that with dedication,the right tool,love and motivation, poverty in the African sense could be challenged. If there is any one who wants to work with me and my 5 villages,please email me. I have pictures and dvds showing my activities in these villages. Chao, Beatrice

[Bartholmew Cubbins]

"Governance and higher income go hand in hand not only because good governance raises incomes, but also, and perhaps even more important, because higher income leads to improved governance..."
Example: Dick Cheney.