A little sheepishly I write you to admit that just after I
wrote you my earlier blog post, in which I presented a few options for how we
might consider dealing with the aid issue, I found out that these options
actually more or less represent the two sides of a long-term and very heated
debate between two of the world’s leading economists. No wonder I didn’t have
an answer all by myself! However, by the end of my time in Ambovombe, I had
also come to a decision as to which side I support, and before I close the book
on this subject (for now), I’d like to tell you why I’ve come to believe what I
believe. Let’s look back at my options from last time.
Option 1: Force feed the children. As it turns out, this is
a mild exaggeration of the argument put forth by Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth
Institute (at Columbia, coincidentally). Banerjee, in Poor Economics,
dubs this the “supply wallah” argument. Essentially he posits that poor
countries remain poor because they are stuck in “poverty traps” (they are
landlocked, have lots of disease, don’t have clean water, etc), and without an
initial infusion of aid and cash, they can never break the cycle. Additionally,
giving them that initial influx of aid will set off a virtuous cycle.
Option 2: Forget it and wait for them to ask us to help.
William Easterly, an economist at NYU, is the very vocal proponent of this
option, arguing that aid does more harm than good by essentially giving people
an easy out, which corrupts local institutions and diminishes creativity and
ambition amongst local people who would otherwise be searching for a solution
to their problems. Essentially this is the free market – what Banerjee calls
the “demand wallah” – argument, in which there is no such thing as a “poverty
trap,” and given the right incentive people will always strive to find a way
out of their predicament.
Many books have been written by experts on these topics, and
if they are still fighting it out amongst themselves, I certainly don’t expect
to convince anyone here. But nonetheless, before I even knew who Sachs and
Easterly were, I had already settled on option 1. Here are some of my reasons:
1) In the world of children’s health and
malnutrition, certain barriers to advancement really are a trap. There are tons
of studies that show increases in educational achievement, IQ points, and
lifetime earning potential that are independently linked to small interventions
such as giving iodine supplements to pregnant women or deworming treatments to
children. If you consider that these micro- and macro-nutrient deficiencies are
essentially causing a form of brain damage (as evidenced by the significant
functional improvements seen after targeted interventions, or by studies such
as one done in Ecuador that showed a decrease of 10-15 IQ points in children of
iodine deficient mothers), then it is reasonable to assume that as long as that
biological disadvantage continues, it is going to be that much harder for those
people to pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty or even to be able to see
that they need to.
2) Aid is not universal, it doesn’t reach every
tiny little corner of every country, so if option 2 really worked, we’d be
seeing more little pockets of progress where people got fed up by their
situation and tried to improve it. We are not seeing very much of that. Mostly
people just keep on going the way they always have.
3) If we don’t choose option 1, then we have a
double standard. We consider that in our own countries a woman should not be
allowed to starve her child, education and vaccination are mandatory for
children, and not providing basic health care is considered neglect. If we
believe we have a moral imperative to protect American or European children
from neglect, even if it means forcing the mothers to do something they don’t
want to do, why do we think it’s ok to let African children suffer from the
same kind of neglect?
Furthermore, as Banerjee points out, we
take for granted that a lot of these decisions are made for us in the rich
world. Our water is piped into our houses already cleaned and disinfected, and
our waste is pumped back out again and disposed of properly rather than
polluting our waterways (most of the time). We don’t even give a second thought
to the fact that the government is “forcing” this on us, because we all know
and accept it’s for our own good. But a poor person in the developing world has
to go out and buy chlorine if he wants to sterilize his water, and each time he
gets a bucket of water, he has to actively put the chlorine in it. Does it
really make sense for us to wait for him to realize that he’ll be better off with
clean water and that in the long run the economic benefits of improved health
will outweigh the costs of the chlorine, or is that really too much to ask of
anyone who isn’t an economist or public health specialist? We have already
decided it’s too much to ask of our own citizens, so why are people in poor
countries any different? Given that the benefits of clean water are well known
and indisputable, shouldn’t we help this man? I think so.
I could go on, but I wont. I encourage you to
have a read through of some of the books on my list if you are interested in
learning more, and even more, to go to one of the countries in the “bottom
billion” and experience it for yourself, as there is truly no better way to
decide about which side you take in this argument.
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