"Serve People, and Feed People"

-The Maharaj Ji's answer to the question, "How do I get enlightened?"
I have been trying to figure out what has created the bond in my mind with this video; Ram Das, famous spiritual guru of the 1960's counterculture, the author of "Be Here Now," former Harvard professor, and subject of the bioflick, "Fierce Grace," which details both his growth as a spiritual guide as his trials as a stroke-survivor; a 10 minute clip, describing Ram Das's first meeting with his guru, Maharaj Ji, in the hills if northern India, has stirred by heart, inspired beauty within, as well as renewed vigor towards my own guru, my own practice....

"When Maharaj Ji was near me, I was bathed in love. And because he knew everything about me, it was like I was forgiven. Prior to that I had a lot of things in my past that I didnt want anyone to know; and I always felt that if they knew, they wouldn't love me. He knew, and he loved me. It was so beautiful. It was so beautiful."

"All he wanted was for people to be liberated, to be free."

-Ram Das

"What staggered me is not that he loved everybody; but that when I was standing in front of him, I loved everybody. That was the hardest thing for me to understand. How he could so totally transform the spirit of those who were with him." 

"We tried to give him things; you couldnt give him money, you couldnt do anything for him; there was nothing that he needed."

-Larry Brilliant

Collier, The Bottom Billion, and "Private Investment to the Rescue"

Private Investment to the Rescue

Collier advocates that the answer is private capital investment; private capital investment in Asia has been huge, and has resulted in huge productivity gains for its populace; however, the level of private capital investment in the countries of the bottom billion has been extremely fickle. Thus, another huge challenge; how can we prod private investment in sustainable industry in a place where the lack of transparent governance and rule of law makes this very investment so unlikely? How can we connect these two side of an unanswerable equation?

“Historically, part of the answer (to the lack of investment) has been poor governance and policy. Obviously, this does not impede capital inflows for resource extraction-hence Angola-but it has curtailed the footloose investment in manufacturing, services, and agribusiness...the problem is that even reforming countries are not attracting significant inflows of private capital...the answer is that the perceived risk of investment in the economies of the bottom billion remains high...the problem for the reforming countries of the bottom billion is that the risk ratings take a long time to reflect turnarounds.” And thus, when we monitor global events and consider the recent upheavals in previously “stable” nations such as Malawi, and a bit longer-span-wise in Coite D'Voire, and recently in the United States and Europe, it is no surprise that the lack of serious, long-term, private investment is a problem that will not vanish anytime soon.

“Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but are usually defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes...” (96)

The Bottom Billion and Globalization/Economies of Agglomeration

Globalization and the Bottom Billion

“...the sad reality is that although globalization has powered the majority of developing countries towards prosperity, it is now making things harder for these latecomers.” (80)

Indeed, how can the growth models of South and East Asia be replicated in the sphere of the Bottom Billion, and specifically, in the poor, landlocked, resource-rich, and poorly governed countries of Sub-Saharan Africa?

Collier continues, “...manufacturers and services offer much better prospects of equitable and rapid development (than the production of primary commodities). They use labor rather than the land. The opportunity to export raises the demand for labor. Since the defining characteristic of developing countries is that they have a lot of unproductive labor, these exports are likely to spread the benefits of development more widely. And because the world market in manufactures and services is huge and was initially dominated by the rich countries, the scope for expansion by developing countries is massive.”

“Economies of agglomeration.” (Krugman and Venables): if other firms are producing in the same area, it brings down the overall costs of production and manufacturing, as well as providing a solid pool of labor and other inputs necessary for manufacturing and services. This is what occurred in Asia, with the manufacturing shift from the US; at first, firms who wanted to relocate needed to “jump” the gap of a lack of agglomeration in return for the value added by low wages; once one company made this jump and was followed by others, it opened up a huge competitive advantage for Asian manufacturing, as a result of this “Economies of Agglomeration.”

Collier notes on this point that, “...in order to break into global markets for manufacturers it is necessary to get over a threshold of cost-competitiveness. If only a country can get over the threshold, it enjoys virtually infinite possibilities of expansion; if the first firm is profitable, so are its imitators.”

And thus, because of a lack of these agglomerations, Africa “missed the boat” in the manufacturing boom of the 1980's. (84). However, “...each year of being free of the gross failures of governance and policy added significantly to the success of export diversification. The countries that stopped shooting themselves in the foot were able to break into new export market” (85).

And finally, Collier concludes, “If there really has been a process of missing the boat, it is pretty depressing...The most depressing reaction is for people to see the society as intrinsically flawed. Their prolonged period of economic failure in Africa and the other countries of the bottom billion has deeply eroded the self-confidence of their societies. The expectation of continued failure reinforces the pressures for the brightest people to leave...the same automatic process that drove Asian development will impede the development of the bottom billion”(86). Anyone who has transited from the African continent, via air, to Asia, can feel the difference in the air, can immediately sense the heightened activity, the energy, the industriousness that often overwhelms in South Asia and Southeast Asia; everyone seems to be doing something, movement is certain, lethargy the exception; a vast contrast to the realities on the street in much of Sub-Saharan Africa and a critical area for analysis, (though it would be hard to quantify a sense of societal energy). I think the key term that Collier references here is expectation. The expectation that the next generation will be better off, that the country is indeed progressing, is an extremely powerful motivational and economic tool for a populace, the effects seen both in the developed and developing world.

In this chapter, “On Missing the Boat,” Collier goes on to mention the effects of the drive-up in global commodity markets (as a result of the Asian manufacturing boom) on world commodity prices, and thus, commodity-producing nations in the bottom billion. And the results are not encouraging; though much of the recent “African Economic Renaissance” can be attributed to increased commodity exports (particularly to China, which is described well in “The Dragon's Gift” a great book by Deborah Brautigam), this economic boom benefits few, as the governance needed to ensure proper development from natural resources is sorely lacking in places such as The DRC, Chad, and even Mozambique, ala, “The Natural Resource Trap.”

Collier, The Bottom Billion: The Resource Curse, Aid, and The Road Ahead

A brief explanation of the resource curse, aka: Dutch Disease that has become a huge challenge for the global south: resource exports, (normally in the form of oil/diamonds or other extractables) cause the country's currency to rise against other global currencies; this, in turn, makes the country's other exports uncompetitive, and thus, cripples the rest of the broader economy of a developing nation. This curse has been seen all over the world, but has been most prominent in the new oil producing states of West Africa, which have seen their standards of living actually contract after decades of enormous oil-based inflows of wealth. The situation also causes the "renter state" mentality, in which a nation's rulers, by the lucky chance of geography, become unaccountable to the people, as they are not depending upon the people for power; they are, in fact, only accountable the the minerals being extracted under the ground for the power and rule. Thus, authoritarianism and corruption become the rule, the norm, ala Chad, E. Guinea, Nigeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, etc etc.
Collier explains, "Dutch disease can damage the growth process by crowding out export activities that have the potential to grow rapidly. The key activities are labor-intensive manufacturing and services, the sort of exporting now done by China and India." (40). And thus, with the tested means of economic advancement in the modern world, aka: manufacturing and services, which have created the most massive unburdening of poverty in world history in the past decades ruled out (as these nations simply cannot compete with the dynamic economic cohesion, infrastructure, and governmental benevolence of the far east) what do we have left to answer the puzzle of growth? Is it aid? I think not: aid cant actually create the same problems as mineral extraction; ie: they can cause the same artificial imbalance in a country's import/export earnings/currency valuations. Aid becomes a key source of foreign exchange, and for a poor country, especially a nation languishing in the bottom billion, exports lose their value domestically, and the local currency is driven up, making daily life and existence harder and harder for the local populace, which bears the brunt of the macro-economic geopolitical realities.

Civil War and Postconflict: The Bottom Billion

Some important notes and commentary from the "Civil War and Postconflict" section of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion:


"Dependence upon primary commodity exports-oil, diamonds, and the like-substantially increases the risk of civil war." (21)

"A typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14 percent in any five-year period." (20)

"Take the repression of political rights...There is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war." (23)  To which I would love to ask Professor Collier, how has this changed with the Arab Spring, which obviously proved that there is a connection here, ie: Libya, Yemen, and with the greatest example being Syria (and to a lesser extent the events of the failed Iranian uprising of a few years ago and the recent events in Uganda and Malawi).

"The experience of having been through a civil war roughly doubles the chance of another conflict." (27)

"Civil war is development in reverse." (27)

"The risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in a five year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette...growth directly helps to reduce risk; cumulatively it raises the level of income, which also reduces risk, and that in turn helps to diversify the country's exports away from primary commodities, which further reduces risk." (32) To which I would add, in order to prevent the stalling of this cycle of development at the raising of the levels of income (ie: stalling at the diversification level of the economy, which is the true state of affairs in most resource-rich countries, ala: Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, etc), a truly benevolent, people-focused government must be in place (either democratic or not, in my mind and experience, there is no bearing or necessary correlation between open democracy and strong development, ala: the Rwandan/Chinese model of growth), and this government must be willing to invest the necessary inputs into freeing the citizens at the lowest level of society from the bonds of historical repression, ie: illiteracy, malnutrition, etc. Growth is important, obviously, as previously stated, however, key to this growth is a systematic, solidified investment in a populace.

"A country such as The Democratic Republic of Congo will need around half a century of peace at its present rate of growth simply to get back to the income level it had in 1960. Its chances of getting 50 years of continuous peace with its low income, slow growth, dependence upon primary commodities, and history of conflict, are unfortunately, not high. This country is likely to be stuck in a conflict trap no matter how many times it rebrands itself, unless we do something about it." (34). The stark realities, the realism of the challenges facing the very poorest in the world, the most unstable; the realities shared with so many other countries on the ground; and even with massive western intervention, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, the realities are uncertain, at best.





 

Collier, The Bottom Billion

In completing some of the preliminary suggested reading for my coursework at LSE, I have been rereading Paul Collier's most excellent book, "The Bottom Billion. I had read this a few years back and its message stuck with ever since. I will be quoting and providing dialogue/commentary to some of the key points made by Collier, a true expert in the field of developmental economics. (In fact, I am at the library right now and I have just picked up another of his works, "Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places," which is next on the reading list.

(p11): Collier advocates for an emphasis on the growth rate of countries, to harken back to Kennedy, "A rising tide lifts all boats." While it is obviously hard to disagree with this, I think that a focus on growth alone is fraught with danger. Joseph Steiglitz has agreed in his drive for a measure "other than GDP" to gauge human development, and the cause has been taken up by countries such as Bhutan, which is aiming to expand the breadth of its "Gross National Happiness" measure at the UN. From recent personal experience in East Africa, and the experience of recently reading the Wikileaks pages on Mozambique, GDP growth, even where phenomenal, where not corresponding to the strong rule of law, transparency, and governance, is a shallow indicator of human development. If a country, such as Mozambique, (which has been growing at 6-8% a year for quite some years now), is measured in this light, what is being measured is the rise in living standards of the rich, urbanized elite, whose stranglehold on power and the economy (often in gangster like cartels, such as is seen in Mozambique, despite its "liberalization" and heralding in the west), and not the actual living standards of the populace, which if one ventures to the rural areas of the north of the country, remain as unchanged as they have been for hundreds of years. Try telling a villager on the road from Namialo to Pemba in the north of the country, living on a dirt path, in a mud hut with thatched roofs, no electricity, no plumbing, and possibly only a mobile phone to connect them to the 21st century that their country has experienced one of the highest growth rates in the world going on a decade, and I do believe that would solicit a wide, hearty laugh. Developmental indicators must, thus, focus on the real indicators of progress for the populace, and not simply economic output figures that often mask the realities on the ground. Literacy, infant mortality, caloric intake; these should be the measure of progress for nations in the developing south. There should not be a "discomfort" about growth, it should be an aim for all; nobody wants to regress, nobody wants to stagnate; however, more enlightened thought needs to be focused on this topic.
Collier notes, eloquently, that, "To my mind, development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. Take away that hope and smart people will use their energy not to develop their society but to escape from it" (12).

Stiglitz on GDP Measure

"GDP does not tell you what is going on with the average citizen. When you have inequality in a society, you can have GDP going up, as it has been in the United States, but most people...are becoming worse off...Developing countries may be growing by cutting down their forests, but once they cut down their forests, there's nothing there. Its not sustainable. GDP tells you nothing about sustainability"

Abhijit Banerjee on Doing Better Through Randomized Evaluations

"We are at a starting point, rather than at the end. We are at a point where we can do better...."

The Conflict Trap

Drawing parallels between the book I am currently reading, (well, re-reading), Paul Collier's wonderful "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It," and today's news streaming down my computer screen courtesy of the BBC. Collier laments constantly about the "Traps:" those conditions which hold the poorest nations in a cycle of instability and economic malaise; looking at the news today about famine being declared in Somalia, already a failed state, I think of the regional ramifications for this newest humanitarian disaster. Collier states, "Many of the costs are borne by neighboring countries...Since most countries are bordered by several others, the overall cost to neighbors can easily exceed the cost to the country itself." And while it is calloused to think of a newly declared famine in the terms of "costs," the spiraling effects of these regional calamities are hard to understate.  Reading further in the news: riots in Malawi, an attempted assasination in Guinea; just when the "bad old days" seemed to be over, the fractures reappear so easily in the poorest nations in the world; the image band-aids are so easily peeled away by the softest of breezes.   

Collier on "The Bottom Billion:" The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance. They are concentrated in Africa and Central Asia, with a scattering elsewhere. Even during the 1990's, in retrospect the golden decade between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, incomes in this group declined by 5 percent. We must learn to turn the familiar numbers upside down: a total of five billion people who are already prosperous, or at least on track to be so, and the one billion who are stuck at the bottom."

Famine or Plenty?

Reading of the newest round of desperation in the Horn of Africa, the failed rains of Somalia, the floods of refugees pouring into Kenya, threatening to destabilize, once again, an unimaginably fragile region, I am brought to the words of Richard Kapucinski, and others who have preached the same lessons about the way things are. Can we ever learn from the past if the present is so powerfully blinding?

“People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and te bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics...Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.” The Shadow of the Sun

Economic Gangsters

Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel on the fundamental question, the fundamental divide facing development economics, ie: the Sachs Vs Easterly divide: 

"Fundamentally, it boils down to whether rich countries have already provided to much money to help Kenya and others out of poverty-or not nearly enough. Leading academic researchers have lined up on both sides. The answer turns out to hinge critically on one's own views of the role that corruption and violence play in the impoverishment of nations. Maybe corruption and violence are mainly just the symptoms of poverty. If this is the case, once rich donor-countries send enough money to Kenya to jump-start economic growth, its citizens will no longer have to fight one another to survive. On the other hand, if most foreign aid is lost to the grabbing hands of corrupt officials or destroyed in civil strife, then how could aid dollars ever lift countries like Kenya out of poverty? More aid would just enrich an already corrupt elite, and could even make the twin problems of corruption and violence worse by giving people even more money to fight over."

LSE 2011-12 and the Poverty of Nations

As of now, it looks like I will be attending The London School of Economic's Masters in International Development Management program for the 2011-12 academic year. I am very excited for the intellectual and professional challenge of this program, and have begun to read through some of the required reading. Thus, in correlation with my Schools Project website (www.theschoolsproject.org) I will be posting on different readings and findings in my own academic research and others published works. While I have still to iron out the financial and visa issues concerning my attendance at the LSE, I hold an unconditional offer, and thus, have begun the intellectual journey a bit early.

“Understanding the incentives behind economically motivated acts of violence helped us to develop new schemes to break the cycle of violence and poverty by using aid to stop violence before it starts.”

 -Fisman and Miguel

I have almost completed reading Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's book, "Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations." Fisman and Miguel are Columbia and Berkeley professors and have taken a great approach, ala Freakonomics, to uncovering some of the lingering issues of developmental economics.  They attempt to track the trail of global economic gangsters, those who stymie the development of nations in their individual pursuit of gain, through development issues such as life under Suharto in Indonesia, smuggling and the loss of tariffs in Hong Kong and China, post-conflict economic recovery in Vietnam, and also the impact of fragile environmental/agricultural production on developing nations. All in all a very interesting read. In looking at my particular interest of educational development, I want to specifically focus on a few sections of the book. The first concerns the randomized trials that have become the norm in the health field, when conducting field trials for new medicines before they can be approved by the FDA. The implementation of these randomized trials into all realms of development will be a crucial measure of success moving forward:

“There isn’t any conceptual reason why economists cant harness the power of randomization, by picking villagers-or even entire villages-to receive an economic treatment, and compare these changes to control villages. Armed with these ideas, we hope economists can generate similar breakthroughs in tackling the challenges of global poverty...In collaboration with NGO's, and the MIT Poverty Action Lab, the academic researchers working in Busia (Kenya) have already used randomized evaluations to show that providing anti-parasitic drugs for intestinal worms-a major scourge affecting over 90 percent of Busia's kids-can boost children's school attendance and may have longer term effects on students health...Information on failures is just as useful as successes, since it allows policymakers to shift funding away from the projects that don’t work and towards expanding those that do...

In Busia, for every success there has been two or three development projects that didn't have any meaningful impacts. For example, given the scarcity of textbooks in Busia's schools, it seemed natural to expect that providing more books would produce better student test scores. (However, the successes of literacy and book campaigns need to be measured with more metrics than only standardized test scores, which can be a poor indicator, and can themselves be plagued with problems). It turns out though, that students in classrooms randomly assigned to receive extra books didnt do any better on average than their counterparts in control schools. Maybe other educational expenditures like higher teacher salaries would be more effective, or maybe Kenyan school textbooks just arent any good. Paul Glewwe and coauthors find that standard school texts are written at too high a level of difficulty for most rural Kenyan students, probably because they were written to cater to the needs of the high-achieving children of the country's Nairobi elite. Whatever the reason, we've learned that resources need to be redirected away from programs such like these that, however well-intentioned, don't have any impact.”

The Shadow of the Sun

Reading Richard Kapuscinski's beautiful memoirs on his decades reporting on Africa as a foreign correspondent...some of his striking words....

"The population of Africa was a gigantic, matted, crisscrossing web, spanning the entire continent and in constant motion, endlessly undulating, bunching up in one place and spreading out in another, a rich fabric, a colorful array."

"More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun...from the morning's earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight."

"The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa.' In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist." 

Tanzania. Leaving.

"But did nobody realize that an improvement in economic activity would reveal a shortage of power? Didn't anyone believe that Africa's economies would start to grow? Power-or lack of it-is becoming a problem all over the continent. Africa did not plan for success."
-Richard Dowden
A quote made especially relevant in the 12-15 hours a day of power cuts facing Dar Es Salaam, the engine of the Tanzanian economy, and a mirror of the issues I lived through this year in Nepal



Last morning waking up in Sub-Saharan Africa...the bells, the light, the birds, clashing of metal trays.
It certainly has been an experience, another experience in the long chain of them, exhilerating and exhausting,
a time for learning, technical matters and the common themes of this world, the threads that bind, for both
good and for bad.,
Time for rollcall of highlights and lowlights for this trip in full, as all things in my life need to be itemized (all non-schoolsproject.org related stuff, here):

The Good.
1. Africa. In General. In extreme generality. As this continent is no more "African" than any dissonant, vast continents can be defined in a single word. It beats you up, is hard-as-hell to travel, but at the end of the day, there are few places as rewarding and truly different.

"The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."

-Richard Kapucinski

2. Ihla de Mozambique. Hands down amazing. Still entranced. Magic.
3. Rocklands. The scene. The Camping. The climbing.
4. Cape Town Climbers. Some great, accomodating folks. Really made the time spent great.
5. Maputo. My new favorite African city.
6. Bread in Mozambique. (Pao)...one of the positive aspects of the Portuguese Empire....got me through many a day.
7. The Night Market in Ihla: $1 for 2 lbs of fish, taro, bread, rice, and beans. Nuff said.
8. INES Guesthouse, Pemba.. Despite no water and still costing $20 a nite
9. Mozambique Locals: most friendly African country I've visited (Sub-Saharan)
10. Cheap and Easy Sim Cards: a lesson that the US could pick up from the developing world.
11. Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. A fantastic travel companion.

The Bad
1. Malaria-prophalaxis-induced-hair-loss: Flaking Scalp Mess! Praying that the malaria doesnt decide to come on now....
2. Nampula, Moz: an armpit. The place still haunts me.
3. Prices-in-general: sure is not Asia in the get-what-you-pay-for category.
4. Chapas. Insanity.
5. Horribly terrible power in Dar. See above quote. Worse than Kathmandu. Not easy to do that.
6. S. Africa Vibe-in-General: lacking, lackluster, no smiles, too many bars and elecrtrified wires and fences and supermarkets closing at 530pm for my taste.
7. The heat. Even in the "winter" one can never get used to simply being hot all the time. See: Pemba.
8. The Internet: What I would give for 30 minutes of actual broadband.
9. The number of church-based-missionaries encountered: they literally swarm through towns like locusts: for the love of god.
10. Cost of Flying: As I have developed a phobia to days-on-end-local-transport, the state mafia monopolist African airlines have been the only game in town: And they know they have you by the balls come payment time.