When you might want a skeptic…

ha ha…next time owen will start saying the same things

I hope it is not too late anyway for our friend Owen.

Don’t find this to be a clever analogy at all.

Variation, Same scene, but Bill is driving:

Owen: Did you see that sign? I think we’d better turn around.
Bill: Why are you always so trusting of authority? You think the government knows what you should and shouldn’t do? Really?
Owen: But the sign said…
Bill: You’ve gotta be skeptical about things, my friend. If we keep going in the directions we’ve always been told to go in, we’ll keep getting nowhere just as fast as we always have.
Owen: I just think this time that…
Bill: I know you mean well and work hard to do what’s right, but you’ve always been a bit of an unquestioning, play-by-the-rules kinda guy. Look, have we gotten anywhere by going the easy route, following these signs put up by The Man? No! This is probably just yet another way that the government shackles our own creativity and drive. Ergo, I will drive on like the Searcher I am.
Owen: I really think we should turn around. I mean your skepticism makes you sound really smart and all, but . . .

[suddenly, there is a vista with a view of El Dorado glimmering at the bottom of the hill]

In unison: Ooooh, Ahhhh.
Owen: Next time I won’t argue with a skeptic . . .

But seriously, a lame, self-serving analogy like this begs the question: Where are we when we’re just as defensive about our approach as the development world is about theirs?

There’s a lot in Owen’s letter that I’d have thought Prof Easterly ought to agree with, especially Owen’s attitude toward donor ‘expertise’.

Jess,
Your comments are a slightly passive aggressive. I was making a general statement about the aid development industry. I did not personally attack you or anyone else. Why are you so hostile?

I enjoy the satire that Bill adds to the discussions. Arrogant, self-righteousness has no place in the aid and relief industry.

I am an independent global citizen that does not represent any charity, church, NGO, or government. I have partnered with my Ugandan friends to help the underprivileged and vulnerable people in their villages and communities. I am a huge advocate of supporting Ugandans helping Ugandans. I have traveled there many times since 1998 on my own time and with my own money. I support my passion by having a job in corporate America working for a medical device company whose products save lives. I just happen to find it more fulfilling to visit my friends in Uganda on holiday than to go to the beach, go on a cruise, or go to Disney World. That’s what works for me. I don’t demand that of anyone else.

Here is information about one of my friends that I support:

Ugandan artist Fred Mutebi has exhibited his distinctive woodcut prints in galleries all over the world. He has established himself as a premier international artist and compassionate humanitarian. His mastery of the primitive art of woodcut printmaking has earned him global acclaim and recognition. He is the founder and Executive Director of Let Art Talk. The organization uses art as an educational tool to teach underprivileged and vulnerable children and communities in Uganda. They have gained recent accolades for their program in the city of Gulu in the northern part of Uganda.

Fred Mutebi
http://www.fredmutebi.org/

Let Art Talk
http://www.letarttalk.org/

Let Art Talk | US Embassy in Uganda
http://kampala.usembassy.gov/art_talks.html

Fred Mutebi and Let Art Talk | U.S. Department of State
http://exchanges.state.gov/multimedia/fred-mutebi-talks-about-let-art-talk.html

One theme I see running through some of the more recent modifications of foreign aid is an attempt to make them look more like market orders. The market works on a Cash on Delivery system already. If I go to the store, and they don’t deliver what I want, I don’t give them my cash. Small scale field experiments are conducted every day by market participants in developed countries. They experiment for themselves, consumer reporting groups experiment, and even companies trying to promote their products experiment to try to satisfy the desires of their customers. Perhaps a rebranding is in order. Professor Easterly, you’re not an aid sceptic, you’ve pointed to several examples where aid has helped, especially disaster relief and some health related projects. The planning/searching distinction I think is far more important. Aid can work as long as it is compatible with basic economic principles. Focus on getting the right incentives, the right rules and allow for quick failure of things that are not working and scaling up those that are.

“I have never said we should eliminate aid or even cut aid.” If you polled 100 of your followers I’d be surprised if five knew you thought that.

Any “follower” of Bill’s who thinks that Bill is out to nihilistically eliminate aid must never have bothered to turn past the title page of either of his books. That is not what they say.

OTOH he is, apparently, an uncritical supporter of Dambasa Moyo and that is exactly what she’s campaigning for.

Jess,
You are trying to discredit me based on the title of my website and my profile picture. Interesting! That’s what I call “judging a book by it’s cover”. I think your comment will help people understand the failures of many aid and development programs. Imagine large global institutions arrogantly judging Africans by their “cover” and coming to the conclusion that they are not qualified or capable of self-determination.

For the record, I love the Onion. I hope they do a parody of my website. I would welcome the publicity that it would generate for my Ugandan friends who are doing wonderful work in Uganda.

In response to your recent tweet, and as a frequent visitor/reader of this blog, I do not think that you want to eliminate aid.

It is enough to read the prints on the logo of this site to get a better idea about Prof. Easterly’s position.

It says “AIDWATCH: Just asking that the aid benefit the poor” (See on top of this page)

It is all about the accountability of the aid industry and not about eliminating aid/charity/compassion altogether.
Maybe the reason why they think that accountability means elimination of aid, is that the aid industry doesn’t actually believe it can (or is) achieving its stated goals.

Well, I “follow you,” (yeah, right) ….

and I’m not certain you want to get rid of all aid.

You just have little good to say about anything that is currently in place.

And it’s not just that the glass is half-full, but I don’t too often see an attitude of knowing how or what to get it to the top.

Otherwise, great work.

There’s lots of potential in this skeptical attitude, and I see you doing great things with it.

I would like to think this is simply a problem of semantics: ‘aid skeptic’ can be interpreted to mean skeptical about ANY aid, rather than skeptical about the effectiveness of particular aid projects, or more generally, skeptical of how effective our aid models are.

But then I read this in Owen Barder’s original article: “Aid skeptics promote an interesting and unexpected idea: that aid can cause harm to the people it is meant to help.”

I had naively assumed that anyone with any interest in the subject was well aware of the damage done by many of the aid projects of the past — particularly large scale technical projects instigated by Western corporations and designed primarily for their own benefit. If the possibility that badly designed and targeted aid can cause harm is indeed a novel idea then I have been badly mistaken.

The rest of Barder’s article, however, goes on to talk about talk about better ways to target and deliver aid, however, to avoid its being wasted, specifically the Cash on Delivery proposal. What are we to make of this implicit admission that aid can indeed be ineffective? Is Barder himself an ‘aid skeptic’?

No, I think the more reasonable conclusion is that Barder has decided to set up critics of current aid models as a straw man– perhaps with the idea that “This type of counter-intuitive thinking turns economists into overnight celebrities, and it certainly helps to sell their books.”

I would suggest that telling people who are critical of our aid models that they must either shut up or join the ranks of the various wing nuts who oppose all kinds of aid is equivalent to telling people who were critical of the invasion of Iraq that they are giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda.

The only answer is to stand your ground and repeat with as much patience as you can muster that, on the contrary, criticizing your government when you believe it is wrong is the highest form of patriotism, and criticizing an aid effort gone wrong is the highest form of loyalty to the interests of those we are trying to help.

Terence, You are not understanding the nature of the intellectual debate. I am not “supporting” some “campaigning,” I am trying to make arguments based on logic and evidence, and responding to others’ arguments on the same grounds. I don’t “unconditionally” support anyone, nor do I expect such support for myself.

Thanks Bill, that’s excellent to hear. Now, can you point me to any critique you’ve offered of Moyo? You’ve certainly found plenty of time to raise your voice in support of her. Which is fine, but – to return to my original point – the fact that you give a free ride to aid-critics such as Moyo while, at the same time, devoting a plenty of time to the numerous – real and imagined – failings of the aid industry does, seem rather indicative of some strong underlying priors.

Still, I enjoy your blog and learn from reading it, so thanks for the forum, and for your reply.

I read Dambisa Moyo’s book closely, and I reviewed it in Finance and Development last fall. Nowhere in the book does Moyo call for aid to be quickly eliminated.

At one point she asks a rhetorical question about what the consequences of quick elimination of aid would be, which is a reasonable and thoughtful question that is worthwhile to ponder as a provocative thought exercise. At another point she espouses the ultimate, long-run goal of “an aid-free world”, which strikes me as uncontroversial, since not even the strongest aid advocates believe that aid should continue literally forever. Neither of these constitutes recommending the quick elimination of all aid.

It may be that in other writings or speeches she actually recommended the quick elimination of all aid. If so I’d appreciate it if someone could post a link. But the book does not say that.

Bill, being more explicit would help. I still routinely have people telling me that cost sharing works better in distributing LLINs. People who know a fair amount about development mainly (in my experience) consume your work responsibly. The 600 word opeds where your opinions come across as very strong and influence a wider range of people who are not even involved with development to begin with (and don’t yet care) is where my primary concern lies.

If you say $2.3 trillion has been wasted in aid and someone with little or limited knowledge of the topic reads it do you think they’ll say let’s shift aid from the bad projects to the good ones? How do you think those people will respond to others in the future when offered with a chance to help out? The answer is much more likely to be along the lines of $2.3 trillion has been wasted so aid doesn’t work rather than maybe this is one of the good projects/ngos/etc so I’ll look into more.

Our system for involving people in these issues also has very poor incentives on a variety of levels (and especially at the lower ones) and promotes less than ideal people to positions of influence so many of your arguments are also frequently taken somewhat out of context as fodder for the anti-aid types. I don’t have a great answer for this. Being more explicit is the best I got for now, but I’ll think about it and get back to you

The “painfully honest realization that there is no reliable evidence on exactly what to do to end poverty” * can be read as a suggestion that efforts to reduce poverty are just too hard. I doubt that is what Bill really means, but his critique of the self-cloning mental vacancy of the aid industry can seem a counsel of despair.

* http://aidwatchers.com/2010/05/how-the-audience-educates-the-lecturer-skepticism-and-freedom/