#115, December 25, 2006

Marshalling Harry Potter

In the “and so this is Christmas” category. Here is a powerful quote from William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and So Little Good:

In a single day, on July 16, 2005, the American and British economies delivered nine million copies of the sixth volume of the Harry Potter children’s book series to eager fans. Book retailers continually restocked the shelves as customers snatched up the book. Amazon and Barnes & Noble shipped preordered copies directly to customers’ homes. There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicine to dying children.

This is a staggering thought. On the one hand, you have all of us recipients of the Harry Potter volume getting our pleasures satisfied; on the other, you have the world’s poor unable to get a supply of 10-cent medicines. What gives? Or, given that it is Christmas, who?

William Easterly’s book is well worth the read – it is Christmas pudding (I received it as an early Xmas present) for much thought. Commenting before the book is finished, a dangerous thing no doubt (but the importance of the book makes one want to respond as one reads), let me outline his argument in the early going. Easterly believes that much of development aid has failed dismally (and who could disagree with that), not because of the level of aid and the lack of desire among the givers to do good, but because of the manner in which it has been carried out. It has been carried out by “Planners,” who have good intentions, but who impose solutions, and don’t suffer the consequences of their failure. If it were carried out by people (“Searchers”) who were looking to gain an advantage in some way (and so more tied to grassroots organizations that benefited more directly) then it would be more effective. This is a nifty argument at some levels, and there are clear examples where it really can be shown to be correct – the example of mosquito nets in Malawi is very telling, and one can think of the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner – Muhammad Yunus – whose work also seems to bolster Easterly’s analysis.

Here is another quote that I think sums up the argument Easterly is making:

To oversimplify by a couple of gigawatts, the needs of the rich get met because the rich give feedback to political and economic Searchers, and they can hold the Searchers accountable for following through with specific actions. The needs of the poor don’t get met because the poor have little money or political power with which to make their needs known and they cannot hold anyone accountable to meet those needs. They are struck with Planners. The second tragedy continues.

I am not sure I fully agree with Easterly, though I have to confess to being no expert in these matters and am willing to be convinced as I move forward through this book. Of course, he does say that he is simplifying, but this simplification seems to have occurred at the expense of some important aspects of the story.

World poverty certainly has not been eradicated by the Planners – this is true. But two questions come to mind: 1) What would the situation for the World’s Poor have been like without their efforts? Would the situation now be better, worse, or no different? And 2) Did the Planners fail because they were Planners and not Searchers, or were there other factors involved?

I am just going to respond briefly now, as I want to move forward and see whether Easterly responds to these questions, before I return to a more developed analysis.

1) This is a counterfactual point, so cannot be proven either way, but, I think it is fair to say that without the Planners and their efforts mobilizing world opinion through the very visible and unwieldy organizations that Easterly seems to decry, there would have been even less support going to the world’s poor, and even less room for the Searchers to do anything to help change things. [I think where this is leading is a problem I am having with the book’s title, White Man’s Burden – which is a clever one, in that it gets people to associate today’s Planners with yesterday’s imperialists (a very useful connection at many levels) – but which, I think, may miss a point about the nature of that “burden.” In other words, Easterly may make the same mistake the Imperialists made in his assumption about the intentions of the West and the ability of markets to bring about good throughout the world.] Indeed, one of the things that was beneficial about the New Deal mentality of planning and imposing solutions from the top was the restraints that these placed on people who otherwise might have had no limits placed upon them. Here I am thinking of those other Searchers, the capitalists, who were trying to supply cheap commodities and products, so that their companies could be “healthy”, and so that their consumers – the rich – could have their Christmases without too much cost. Without such restraints (looking at the history of limits placed upon slave traders, slaveowners, mineowning capitalists, textile companies, etc., etc.), I think it is safe to say that there would be poverty in places where it has been clearly diminished by the Planners.

2) But there is a problem, and this is the problem at the heart of New Deal liberalism – much exploited in the past by those who were attempting to provide alternative systems – and that is that it cannot succeed in its goals without fundamentally upsetting those who are its leading advocates. The Rich don’t just get their needs met because they can give feedback to political and economic Searchers, as Easterly suggests above; they also get their needs met because there are poor people in the world who will produce commodities for them at minimal cost. The Poor's lack of money and political power mean that they cannot challenge the Rich to reduce the latter's expectations so that its members will not expect all their “needs” to be met (and “needs” is a very interesting word to use in this quote – “wants” might have been a more appropriate substitute). Consequently, there is something that gets in the way of Planners – if they were to be too successful, they might suffer retribution from the very people who pushed them to be Planning the end to world poverty. As the Poor’s standard of living rises what happens to that of the Rich? Well, what one sees is a shift of capitalism to new sites of cheap labor where there are fewer restrictions? What happens when there is nowhere to go? If we were to live in a world merely of Searchers – and let us remember that many Searchers are people who are placed in untenable positions who cannot in fact achieve the improvements they seek, and then get blamed for this “failure” (blaming the victim, after all, has been the other side of the coin of the Planners’ failure) – without the Planner/Utopians who push the wealthy to make concessions in return for some moral uplift – even if it is only once a year, before Christmas and the end of the tax season – then we would be in for some dark times.

But this is clearly a book to be read, and I will plough onwards.