The Great Escape

Read book. Took notes on book. Listened to Development Drums podcast. Read review. Went on holiday to Bologna. Got flu. Now finally ready to pass on a few thoughts about Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape.

First thing, just to highlight, is the amazing, bird’s eye view you get of progress in a) global health and b) income/economic growth over the last couple of hundred years. One general message is that, on a world scale, things have been getting better at an incredible rate over the last couple of hundred years and that a big part of the inequality we see is a result

of the some parts of the world becoming rich (which is undeniably positive as a fact in and of itself). And Deaton provides loads of lovely statistical snippets to show it. For example in the health ‘section’, for the last 160 years, for every four years of calendar time, the world’s highest life expectancy increased by a year.  Meanwhile, between 1820 and 1992, the average income of all the inhabitants of the world increased between seven and eight times and the fraction of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24% (at the same time as the world population increased by billions). Deaton is clearly a master of the data and a giant in his field and it shows.

Then of course we get some broad ideas of the ‘why’ without there being an overarching grand theory, which is quite refreshing and probably bang on given the scope and scale of the changes we are talking about. Deaton also focuses on some other pertinent issues like the hazards of measurement and indicators, economic growth as an overwhelmingly positive force (or not) and the (topical) issue of income inequality within the USA and worldwide (I have a word doc to which I add links to contributions on the inequality debate: currently on about 15 articles/reports in the last month).

But the most polemical, and (for me) interesting stuff is found in the final section on aid and why it’s bad, which got me writing angry comments in the margins. To cut straight to the chase, the central argument is that “foreign aid makes governments less responsive to the needs of the poor, and thus does them harm”. Essentially if we accept that poverty (broadly defined) is a consequence of poor institutions, and that aid to governments undermines institutions and democracy, weakening the social contract, aid is bad. Which isn’t revolutionary stuff, very broad-brush, reminding me a bit of Easterly with the idea that aid mucks with incentives, combined with sort-of Duncan Green/Oxfam change coming from combination of active citizens and progressive states working together. Deaton therefore also criticises what he characterises as the ‘hydraulic approach’ to aid whereby monetary inputs are automatically assumed to lead to positive outputs, with development conceived as a technical issue – definitely agree here, as does pretty much everyone up to date with current development thinking. And regarding the main argument about aid and institutions, the theory sounds eminently plausible...

However. The first problem is, as Owen Barder points out, this is an empirical not a theoretical question, and there isn’t hard evidence supporting Deaton’s view that all to-government aid ends up wrecking the given country’s political institutions and gets siphoned off by corrupt governments rather than being used to help the country’s people. Anecdotally, Barder mentions Ethiopia’s human development progress (see Development Drums podcast for this and further references) and Rwanda struck me as an example after listening to a Guardian podcast listing the positively stunning gains made in health there. This reported that in the last ten years alone: deaths from AIDS and TB were down 78%. Maternal mortality down 60%. Under five mortality down 70%. Paul Farmer called these developments ‘the steepest declines in mortality ever recorded, at any time, and in any place’. In this light, and even despite serious concerns about political freedoms in Rwanda, Deaton’s caricatured claims about corrupt African governments just don’t square with reality. It might be possible, in fact, for aid to strengthen democracy and the social contract when its use is made accountable to the people through traditional institutions. Rwanda’s imihigo system, whereby if the local ‘mayor’ fails to deliver on developmental promises he is made a social pariah, is one example. Chris Blattman in his review makes this point even more strongly:

 “And, frankly, I personally find it hard to believe that levels of democracy in Africa would be as high as they are without aid. I think the most important forces driving democracy are probably internal to Africa, and the example and economic success of advanced democracies comes second. But aid and foreign meddling comes a close third”

On the general point, Owen Barder, with characteristic succinctness, crystallises the underlying criticism when he accuses Deaton from arguing from extremes. And I’d agree that the sentence “the director of one aid agency gave me a bloodcurdling account of how aid funds had gone to gangs of murderers” isn’t the most nuanced or helpful reflection on aid I have read recently.  Basically there is definitely something lazy if not worse about taking a homogenised image of the African other (based on Mobutu or Mugabe for example) as a key premise of an argument about aid.

And second, even conceding Deaton’s argument about aid’s effects on political institutions, to claim, in the absence of hard evidence, that this overrides the (widely accepted) results from worldwide health initiatives (just one example) is a little strong for me. When first reading the chapter I’d scribbled down a note to Owen Barder’s ‘pocket defence’ of aid based on the smallpox case as potential rebuttal, and I’ve got to admit I did a fist-pump when he unleashed it in the podcast. And after Deaton took this road, it was a bit of a slippery slope, where he seemed to edge towards the view that political rights and freedoms trumped everything. The USA should consider stopping trade with Saudi Arabia (Deaton agrees to), okay, but then should the rest of the world stop trading with the USA because of Guantanamo? Deaton’s refrain that dealing with countries like Ethiopia under repressive dictatorships was “like having blood on our hands” seemed unconvincing.  Surely not supplying healthcare when people will die without it is also ‘having blood on our hands’? The world isn't that black and white.

And this is where my angry notes in the margin come in. Because it seemed to me that Deaton was, in general, pretty sloppy in the final chapter. My quibbles include: his use of hyperbole (see ‘gangs of murderers’ example above); his reliance on anecdotes, for example about 'WaBenzi'/corruption in Kenya; his random pot-shots about loosely connected issues ranging from RCTs (which he doesn’t like) to aid apparently being used as a way for rich country governments to boost their popularity (erm not sure I buy this given recent findings from ODI “the public may be becoming less supportive of maintaining, let alone increasing, current levels of UK spending on aid”). But worst of all (what Owen Barder with wonderful tact referred to as the chapter being “less well-evidenced”) his disingenuousness with statistics – his bread-and-butter! So he pulls up graphs showing that there is no positive correlation between aid and growth, or between aid and democracy, and then leaves these facts 'floating' in his argument, flirting perilously with the causation-correlation fallacy that jumped out even at me as a non-economist/statistician.  For a social scientist renowned in his field, to toy with these arguments seemed pretty petty.

Basically ‘Deaton-on-aid’ got a bit rant-y (though I do appreciate the sentiment of frustration with the aid sector, as Owen Barder put it, “a cry of exasperation”) and obscured the more important take-home ideas that most people agree on now and which did also come out partly in the final chapter:

1. Aid isn’t the solution – we can do far more through migration, climate change, trade policies, 'aid for development' in promoting global public goods like scientific knowledge etc;
2.  Aid and development is political - I think we can all agree that the technical, depoliticised, 'problem-solving' conception of aid and development can be put to bed;

But alongside these two conclusions drawn by Deaton, Chris Blattman's fundamental objection to Deaton is worth keeping in mind: that 'The answer to “Does aid work?” is the same answer to every question in social science: “It depends” ’(from his own review). So Deaton is coming up with (probably) the wrong answer to (definitely) the wrong question. The Great Escape is a triumph in terms of tracing broad global trends in health and income with rigorous statistical evidence, but the final chapter is best taken with a large dose of salt. Time to move on from Sachs-vs-Easterly methinks.

Dorian Gray, NGO critic

Apologies in advance for a straight-up self-indulgent and frivolous post. So I'm currently reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (nice counterpoint to following international development blogs and source of endless fantastically enigmatic quotes for hypothetical dinner parties). And it turns out, despite his self-professed superficiality (the guy basically trades his soul away to keep his incredible Greek-god level beauty - one lover of his: “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”), he is an astute commentator on the contradictions of the international NGO apparatus. Who knew? Granted if my source of cutting, up-to-date analysis of development issues is a novel written in 1890 it is not worth your time reading it. But the irony of a guy who rejects anything moral or 'deep' serving up a classic commentary on the paradox of big-D Development was too much for me to resist just this once. So here you go (no spoilers by the way):

Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, his friend and creator of the painting of Dorian which gets old and disgusting as he morally decays in order that he can keep his wonderful youth:

"You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered -- I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope"

What Dorian actually means here: In a nutshell, many development NGOs are set up to run projects in a developing country and achieve some outcome like improvements in education or enabling people to escape poverty. But a by-product of success (or the realisation that it actually makes more sense to just employ someone local who is infinitely better equipped to do the job than a well-meaning white, middle-class expat) is that there is no longer any reason for said NGO to exist (at least in the form of predominantly expat-staffed). But that means all of us lovely people in the global North who want to work in Development are out of a job (boo). So faced with this basic contradiction, instead of taking Gray's philanthropist's option of retiring bitterly, probably to become a bloodsucking banker (those are the only two options right?), many NGOs have reinvented themselves as intermediaries in the aid-chain to keep their relevance (classic justification being that they are more flexible, closer to the grass-roots and innovative than big bulky donors thus better vehicles for partnerships with Southern NGOs). Or others just carry on doing an implementation job which is less efficient than letting local people/organisations do the same thing. And others still carve out another niche, maybe bringing relevant actors together to facilitate change or highlighting the needs of the poor, Oxfam-style.

Basically what Dorian is trying to say here more generally is that there is often a fundamental disjuncture between the desire to help and the actual need for us development workers (aspirational in my case). Which is a common idea, highlighted by people like Angus Deaton most recently. Fortunately for me, I don't buy into this view, that there is little or no need for the activities of the development 'sector'; it just means that we have to make sure that we keep questioning the value of what we do and ensure that the results for the 'beneficiaries' of the work are always put first. Ed Carr offers one defence of why it is fundamentally good and useful to work in development (crucially, given the right skills and the right programme, see HowMatters on this). So we are not doomed to 'die of ennui' for a lack of development work, fortunately.

Next week, how to deliver structural economic transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa using quotes from Romeo and Juliet.

A little bit of optimism never killed anyone

The more I think about development, the more pessimistic and sceptical I seem to get. While I reckon it's generally a good thing in an industry often characterised by good intentions without much to back it up, sometimes it's downright moany and inappropriate; the other day I was introduced to someone who had spent their summer on a project with an NGO in Malawi, and before she could even finish explaining what she did there, I had to stop myself from blurting out some pointed question about how rigorous their monitoring and evaluation set up was.

Similarly, I saw this advert today (see photo or video if you are a Spanish speaker) for Vicente Ferrer's foundation - the recently deceased and publicly-decorated Spanish philanthropist (whose work I am not familiar with so the following is no criticism of what he did as much as his foundation's ad campaign) - in which he appears saviour-like, holding the 'key' to development, urging us to give a little and solve the problem of poverty . Usually, and in fact today was no exception, I would double back and question why there was a white Spaniard in the foreground covering half the advert which was supposedly putting the poor of India (represented by nameless dark-skinned children behind him) first, whilst the text had the arrogance to claim we outsiders with our spare change have the 'key' to relieving poverty in India ("we are the key that can change everything" it says in the video).

This then sent me into a spiral of thoughts about a variety of frustrating phenomena: the depressing lengths to which charities have to put us the potential donors in the foreground to get any sort of reaction (see Lilie Chouliaraki for a fascinating treatment of this subject - still reading odd chapters of the book when I get the chance); my friend telling me that she went to a conference about happiness and is now set on going to Haiti for a month next summer to help the world's poor ('what will you be doing?' 'Not sure, whatever they need me to do'), the pervasive idea of international development as charity, ah the list goes on. And this suits my slight tendency to scepticism - it's much easier to criticise and avoid putting your neck out and making the solid claim that in many cases international development efforts are good and we should celebrate them when faced with criticisms of volountourism, of useless and even harmful development projects, and of the whole development 'project' itself.

But not today (or this evening at least). I'm reading Angus Deaton's The Great Escape, which opens up with a relentlessly optimistic salvo ('Life is better now than at almost any time in history. More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty') and which goes on to claim that the "total number of dollar-a-day poor people in the world fell by three-quarters of a billion between 1981 and 2008," and even more damningly positive things like the fact that there is not a single country in the world where child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950. Added to this I came across a review of Charles Kenny's Getting Better as well as this article from the Independent and I'm thinking that it's time for a bit of optimism in my development thinking. Clearly there are many many negatives and criticisms that can be made, but perhaps, at the start of the new year, and in contrast to my previous post we should reflect on the successes for a moment. If only to steel us for the inevitable setbacks and frustrations as we observe what happens development-wise in the 12 months to come.

Reflections from a student volunteer in Uganda

In summer 2013 I was fortunate enough to work as a volunteer investing money and trying to generally make improvements at a secondary school in rural Uganda. I recently entered the following essay in a competition (give it a go here!) on a title along the lines of 'what did you learn/how did your view of development change?'

Basically my key idea (not that original: similar sort of idea from Angus Deaton here) is we zealous international development-minded students should either:

 a) accept that the projects we get involved with (and I'm not talking about hopeless gap yah projects which no one would claim are very beneficial) may very well not have great long-term impacts but keep doing them anyway because of an intuitive feeling that we can't be wrong about micro, short term impacts (building a school is surely never bad right?) or some ideal of solidarity whereby us being there is a good thing in itself.

OR

b) don't go on summer projects but concentrate on campaigning at home on issues like illicit financial flows, transparency, indigenous rights/environmental destruction, take your pick (there is no shortage), where governments in the global North could often be doing a whole lot more.

If you fancy reading the whole thing, here it is below for your enjoyment...

"I spent summer 2013 working with two other volunteers for an NGO[1] in a secondary school in rural south-west Uganda, planning and implementing initiatives to improve the quality of education for the students using money we fundraised previously. We worked alongside school management, students and teachers, ultimately introducing measures improving the library, sanitation and counselling provision, among others. We were fortunate enough to receive constant and engaged support from the school, as well as a brilliantly warm reception from both school and community. Yet despite this overwhelmingly positive experience, in which we witnessed tangible outputs in infrastructure and school resources, the question of whether we have a long-term, sustainable impact remains doubtful. Having subsequently joined the central charity administration in a monitoring and evaluation capacity, I was struck by a double realisation: first, that we currently lack a means of knowing that our work is effective; and second, with the further discovery that our water purification scheme had failed, that it is possible that our work is not effective in many areas, and even that our whole model may be partly misguided(see Crawfurd 2013). Fundamentally, the idea of international volunteering and indeed international development, in the broadest sense, is to help promote positive changes in the lives of others. Therefore, short of rigorous evidence of impact, we are left with a challenge.

One immediate lesson to be learnt is that we need to focus our attention to the evaluation of programmes, in order to find out empirically what works. And indeed, impact evaluation and RCTs are undoubtedly ‘in fashion’ in the development world, as demonstrated by the popularity of Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics(2012) and the establishment of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation in 2009. My own charity is itself doing some excellent work to put in place a more robust M&E programme. But leaving aside the empirics and entering speculatively into the theory of how development happens, my volunteering experience suggests some potentially sobering lessons for any young international volunteer.

Our school did not perform well academically, achieving generally poor exam results and failing to get many students into university. In a wider sense, it is a school with many talented teachers and fantastic students, but which could be much better. We observed unmotivated and often undisciplined students and teachers, unfocused lessons starting late, and a chronic lack of effective communication between staff and administration, among other problems. To address these, we attempted to plug some gaps: we facilitated better access to the many books the school possessed by expanding the library; we introduced a system to improve students’ wellbeing through a peer-to-peer counselling system; and we improved sanitation to get more happy, healthy students in class more often. Nevertheless, comparing the problems we perceived with what we supplied as ‘solutions,’ it is clear that they do not match up. Part of this, admittedly, is due to the size of our investment, which was insufficient to even attempt to cover the financial shortfall faced by the school. Yet we also failed to prompt change in areas not directly determined by money: the basic operating pattern of the school; the motivation to teach well or learn; the power structures which deny voice to innovative and motivated teachers, for instance. In this way, what we supplied was investment, creativity and time to plan projects to facilitate better delivery of education and better learning at the school. But unfortunately, what I have come to realise is that this sort of facilitation cannot drive dynamic change or permanently improved outcomes.

Acemoglu and Robinson(2012) offer a broad theory of why some countries prosper and others do not, and I suggest that their analysis holds some relevance for us. They locate the drivers of prosperity in ‘inclusive economic and political institutions,’ implying that improvements come from gradual alterations in the institutional makeup of a country rather than an imposition of the ‘right’ policies. The latter idea they denounce as a manifestation of the ‘ignorance hypothesis’ which “asserts that world inequality exists because we or our rulers do not know how to make poor countries rich”(2012:57), therefore “enlightening and informing rulers and policymakers can get us out” of poverty (2012:440). This manifests itself, for example, in the ‘Washington Consensus,’ generally accepted to have been largely unsuccessful, which advocates “seemingly attractive macroeconomic goals such as a reduction in the size of the government sector, flexible exchange rates, and capital account liberalization”(2012:440). Applying these ideas to my experience, this logic seems evident at least partly in what we did; we came with ideas about how to better run a school (and the money to make change happen), on the assumption that the school management may not be aware of such ideas. Extending this thought further, we too advocated ‘seemingly attractive goals’ such as enlarging the library and improving sanitation. However, like Acemoglu and Robinson who find that it is “institutional patterns” which are “condemning them[poor countries] to poverty” (2012:61), it strikes me that the institutional pattern and environment of the school is what condemns it to underperforming. It is thus the interplay of fundamental factors, often political, including why students comes to school, what opportunities(or lack thereof) are available post-school, the private situation of students and teachers, the distribution of power and authority amongst the staff, the decision-making process at school, the demands made on and interests of the management, the relationships with boards of governors and with local authorities, extending all the way up to the ministry of education. And these areas are generally beyond the scope of student volunteers’ capabilities.

So where does this leave us? We have seen that many development NGOs lack empirical evidence of positive impact for ‘beneficiaries’, and are faced with a theoretical argument which locates the long-term solution to beneficiaries’ problems outside the remit of what we can achieve. There are therefore perhaps two options for young people in the global North. First, to continue participating in international volunteering programmes in their current form whilst striving to improve monitoring and evaluation to improve our offering, meanwhile recognising that the benefits will often be limited to (i) short-term gains,(ii) promoting ‘solidarity’ whereby our being there and interacting with people is recognised as an intrinsic good,(iii) encouraging volunteers’ interest in development in anticipation of further, more productive involvement, or even (iv)(more controversially) boosting the reputation of the school or organisation through our prestigious status as ‘outsiders’, often connected to racial factors. This option would reflect Chouliaraki’s (2013)idea of an ‘ironic’ attitude to development, whereby the desire to help others exists alongside a fundamental scepticism towards the benefits of the project of development itself. Second, we might avoid international volunteering, and instead concentrate either on fundraising on behalf of charities with demonstrated impact, or lobbying governments to change policies detrimental to the prospects of the global South. Indeed the recent revelation that for each dollar that reaches the global South in aid, seven escape through illicit financial flows(Green 2013) provides an arresting starting point. Whichever option is chosen, what is essential is that young people with an interest in development actively examine the value of what they are doing, and ensure that their actions are dictated by concrete outcomes not good intentions.

Bibliography

Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. A. (2012) Why Nations Fail (London: Profile)

Banerjee, A. V. and Duflo, E. (2012) Poor Economics (London: Penguin)

Crawfurd, L. (2013) ‘We don’t need no education’ Roving Bandit accessed 22/12/2013 available at <http://www.rovingbandit.com/2013/12/we-dont-need-no-education.html>

Chouliaraki, L. (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity)

Green, D. (2013) ‘Poor countries are losing $1 trillion a year to illicit capital flows – 7 times the volume of aid’ From Poverty to Power accessed 22/12/2013 available at <http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=16967>

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[1] Which has asked to remain anonymous"