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:
- 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;
- 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.
