Comments on: Who gets the Last Seat on the Plane? Why Aid Hates Economics

By: Bill Stepp

Bill Stepp — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:40:21 +0000

This has been effective as advocacy, but still doesn’t make aid money an infinite resource – there is still a limit on how much rich people will give. And the scarce resource is not only money – it is also political capital, rich peoples’ attention, or effective and accountable aid workers in the field. So using AIDS as an example, sure you should do some of both treatment and prevention – but how much of each? In the end, they are still competing for limited Seats on the Plane.
——
Aid money isn’t given freely, it’s stolen money that is then given. (Taxation is theft.) But private money is given freely; it’s not aid in the sense that other people’s money stolen by the government is.
You should make this distinction.
“The Government’s” money, bad; the Gates Foundation’s money, good.

By: fundamentalist

fundamentalist — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:25:32 +0000

Can someone tell me why China doesn’t play a more important role in the analysis of economic development techniques? China today is a walking talking miracle! In the 1960′s, Chinese were starving to death and eating each other. The US kept them alive with massive loans to buy our grain. Then just 30 years ago things changed.

China is the greatest economic development story in the history of mankind! It seems to me that if people were truly interested in the poor, they would have armies of economics examining every detail of China’s miracle. Yet it seems that development economists are stuck in Africa squabbling over failed aid programs and tiny, tiny ideas.

By: Karen W

Karen W — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:55:41 +0000

In response to 2)
I worked for Millennium Villages for 3 years and have a lot of criticisms and insights as to why they may not be “sustainable” or scalable. However, I do not believe that this particular criticism is valid. The Millennium Villages project does as much as possible to train and build technical skills in locals and integrate with local governance structures (village council, local and state government, nearby medical facilities, other UNDP projects). This is a direct result of the stated goals of the project and the beliefs of MVP management in using and building local talent. For example, locals are used at every level in a variety of positions such as project management, health care workers, and database managers. During my time at MVP, I held training sessions with many of the local staff, who I then relied upon to train other locals.

By: Joel Selanikio

Joel Selanikio — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:32:57 +0000

” A better project replaces the scarce foreign expertise very soon with more abundant local expertise and labor – such as training programs to transmit foreign technical skills to locals, who will in turn pass it on to other locals.”

Even better, though, is when technology renders the scarce expertise unnecessary: 10 year ago building a website required scarce expertise in HTML programming. Now it requires 5 minutes at Facebook.com or similar sites. 10 years ago reaching an audience of millions required ownership of a television or radio station, or printing presses. Now you just need a blog, or a twitter account.

Similarly, our EpiSurveyor.org website allows anyone to create mobile-phone-based data collection systems immediately, for free — a capacity that is otherwise entirely dependent on scarce and expensive experts.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:39:22 +0000

@Skeptic

Yeah, sort of.

I blithely quoted from the report’s synopsis because it felt like Aidwatch bait. However, given that the report is largely focused on the impact of government policy within a country (certainly it is when criticizing over-reliance on market forces as per my quote) I’m probably missing the mark for *Aid*watch.

It’s an interesting report nonetheless and does seek to crystallize some issues around foreign Aid. Perhaps I should have quoted it’s answer to the question “Can aid ease fiscal constraints?” from p 94. Not much bait for debate in that little section but certainly more relevant here

By: Skeptic

Skeptic — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:57:14 +0000

RE: Matthew H and the UN report…

Just reading your quote, it seems to me that you – and probably the UN as well – are confusing two issues. One is how a government should manage its own resources and policies. The other is how a government, organization or individuals should help poor or otherwise disadvantaged people in another country. I would probably agree with whats in your quote when it comes to, for example, US regulation of the financial sector. But on the international side, foreign assistance does great damage to the poor because by definition it is NEVER market driven, and almost always strengths the individuals and institutions in the state and government that are the source of the problems in the first place.

By: Kasper

Kasper — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:18:57 +0000

“In summary, there really is scarcity and aid really is forced to make intelligent choices. Be sure to give a seat to the pilot.”

Very well, but who gets to choose who the pilot is, then?

By: peripheries

peripheries — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:46:07 +0000

@Ted: Unfortunately there is little evidence that “education” works againts AIDS. William Easterly does brush the issue in the white man’s burden (with an example about diarrhea), but there are evidences from clinical trials showing that despite being in a trial where you get free condoms, intense counselling and so on, overall the HIV incidence is hardly lower than that of the general population of the same area.

By: David Roodman

David Roodman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:18:24 +0000

The irony: you can thank economist Julian Simon for the overbooking system, which he designed to use scarce resources (airplane seats) more efficiently.

By: David Ellerman

David Ellerman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:00:26 +0000

The basic idea of opportunity cost is that the cost of spending resources on Plan A is the value foregone by not spending the same resources on the best available Plan B. Yet so many economists in the Dev Biz forget this basic idea when they support the notion of an “impact evaluation” which compares the results of spending the scarce resources on Plan A such as Millennium Villages to doing nothing (as if the resources were not scarce) rather than spending the same resources on the best available Plan B. But the development bureaucracies love impact evaluations as the ultimate low hurdle because then their projects only need to be “better than nothing” to get a positive evaluation. But rather than consider this basic economic blunder, could we please more time discussing the details of using randomized testing in the impact evaluations?