Tag Archives: Development

The Great Escape – Angus Deaton

“Life is better now that at almost any time in history…Yet millions still experience the horrors of destitution and of premature death…This book tells stories of how things got better, how and why progress happened, and the subsequent interplay of progress and inequality.”

The movie The Great Escape tells the story of Allied POWs seeking to escape German prison camps. Some of them make it, and some don’t. Deaton argues this makes a general point: that inequality is an inevitable result of progress, because not everyone can escape at the same time. The key, however, is to make sure that inequality is only temporary: that everyone, to stretch the metaphor, escapes in the end.

Deaton focuses on health and wealth inequality, covering their historical evolution and the current state of affairs, before turning to how we might reduce inequality and particularly foreign aid. He is an interesting mix of idealist and pragmatist: he believes strongly we have a moral obligation to eliminate poverty and improve health for the less well off, but also rejects foreign aid as a failed method of achieving those goals. Aid, he suggests, tends to flow from a desire to be seen to be doing something, rather than actually making a difference, which is why so much money is spent to so little effect. Instead, he argues that the most important step we can take is to “work on and within [our] own governments, persuading them to stop policies that hurt poor people, and to support international policies that make globalization work for poor people, not against them.” He recommends we invest in things for the developing world, rather than just in the developing world: R&D on malaria and other diseases, improving country capacity in international negotiations, arms control, and other projects.

Deaton has a gift for making complicated concepts clear, and a book that might feel like a dry compendium of statistics works for that reason, though there are times when sections can feel like a litany of graphs and analysis. He is also good at explaining how statistics might mislead or betray our reasoning: the book may be of particular interest to readers without much background in statistics, but want to understand the debates around wealth and inequality.

The book really comes into its own, however, in the final section. Deaton is passionate and eloquent when it comes to aid, something he feels strongly about. For someone well read in the subject, it won’t add a lot to your understanding (though it will serve as a helpful reminder of the basics), but if you’re willing to do a bit of work to actually understand issues rather than just read results, he’s insightful, interesting, and informative. Worth the read.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace – John Maynard Keynes

“The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable – abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.”

Keynes wrote the Economic Consequences in 1919, and it played a critical role in turning public opinion against the Treaty of Versailles as too harsh and unfair to Germany. In it, he argues that France’s desire to punish Germany and unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the war has led to reparations wildly beyond Germany’s ability to pay, and worries about the future of Europe after a crippling peace treaty and continuing instability.

Keynes is fun to read because he’s ridiculously clever, and this book is no exception. He’s witty, he’s insightful, and he’s entertaining. Conveniently, history has also judged him right, with the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty contributing to the outbreak of World War 2. Being Keynes, though, he also had opinions on a wide variety of other topics.

On History

“The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.

On Poverty and Inequality

“Men will not always die quietly, for starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”

“Then a man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.”

On inflation

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.”

On the Modern World

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep…The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life.”

The Black Jacobins – CLR James

“They enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.”

The most successful slave revolt in history is also one of the least well known. San Domingue (modern Haiti) was the wealthiest colony of France, supplying two thirds of France’s total overseas trade and serving as the largest single market for the European slave trade. In 1791 the slaves rose up, defeating in succession their French masters, British and Spanish armies, and then a 60,000 soldier French force. They would declare full independence in 1804, and remain the only slave revolt to found a state.

The story is best known from CLR James’ 1938 The Black Jacobins, one of the first books to portray slaves not as things to whom atrocities were done, but rather men and women who had agency over their own lives: masters of their fates and captains of their souls, as it were. Their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, would eventually be arrested on Napoleon’s orders and die in prison, but not before beginning a revolution, inspired by the French ideals of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, that would end with the declaration by his lieutenant of full independence.

The book can at times be hard to follow, covering as it does eight independent sides with constantly shifting alliances; the slaves, wealthy whites, poor whites, French royalists, French counter-revolutionaries, Spanish, English, and Mulattoes. Each would make and break treaties with the others while attempting to dominate the island. I also tend to object to Marxist historians: all historians have biases, of course, but I prefer mine to at least try to minimize their biases, instead of reveling in them. If all you want is to know the history, you should read the Wikipedia article. If you want to understand the history, however, and even more understand how slaves and slavery have been seen and portrayed through history, CLR James is the place to start. From how scorched earth tactics and crippling reparations impoverished Haiti, to the end of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade three years later, to framing 12 Years a Slave’s portrayal of slaves with agency, there is much of modern interest.

“The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”

The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell

If you were one of the few survivors of some sort of global apocalypse, what sort of knowledge would you need to rebuild a functioning society? Building an iphone isn’t exactly easy, and I think most of us would struggle with even more basic things like a lens (for science), a bike (for transportation), or a system of crop rotation that would keep sufficient nitrogen in the fields (essential for food), never mind something like a pottery kiln or steam engine.

The Knowledge has two goals. One, to teach future survivors how to rebuild a technologically advanced civilization, ideally advancing them as far as possible without creating things too difficult to repair or maintain (there’s no point in jets if you can’t repair jet engines). Two, to examine the fundamentals of science and technology that are very remote from most of us. To do so, Dartnell covers the basics of food, shelter, and water plus some more ambitious projects, explaining to the reader how to get an arc furnace going to work metals; recover antibiotics, X-rays, steam engines, and photography; and reproduce electricity and cement, trying to strike a balance between useful detail for the survivor and overwhelming a casual reader.

The book is interesting even given the low odds of an apocalypse (depending on time scale – just ask this documentary produced by Stephen Hawking), and it’s even better as a way to provoke a thought experiment on what you think should be passed on. Theory of atoms? Evolution? How to make cement or grow food? Chemistry? As a social scientist myself, something I wondered is the role of social invention in all this. Are there social technologies that should be passed on? The Knowledge mentions only physical tech, but what about how to design a democracy, the importance of trade, or a la Steven Pinker, how to restrain violence? Overall, though sometimes a bit heavy into the detail of engineering that I must confess I skimmed, the basics of the technologies that underpin our society have shaped the way we live, the way we talk, and the way we think. Dartnell does an excellent job highlighting all of these, from how we say o’clock to show we mean clock time, not solar time, to the advantages of golf cart batteries over car batteries. Read it to learn more about the basic technologies we use, but whether you read it or not it’s interesting to think about what you would want to pass on.

Disclosure: I read The Knowledge as a free advance reader copy – it is released on April 3rd. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). You never know when such knowledge might be handy!

The Tyranny of Experts – William Easterly

“Development seems to be almost exclusively about the fate of nations rather than the fate of individuals. We seem to care more about Zambia than about Zambians.”

In the 4th century BC, Plato sailed to Sicily in order to help educate the tyrant Dionysius the Younger, the leader of the city of Syracuse. He believed he could turn him into a philosopher-king, the perfect leader of a country, despite his tyrannical tendencies. It did not turn out well. Plato would end up banished (though it could have been worse: the tyrant’s father had sold Plato into slavery when they disagreed) and the tyrant was bad as ever until he was overthrown in a coup.

Though he doesn’t mention Plato, Easterly worries about a similar modern problem. He points to the World Bank-supported theft of land from farmers in Uganda for a British company’s forestry project, about which the World Bank refused to conduct an investigation, or their support for development policies which resulted in the forced displacement at gunpoint of around 1.5 million farmers in Ethiopia so land could be leased to foreign investors, for which UK aid is now being sued. The development industry, he argues, has a nasty habit of accepting or supporting dictators and human rights abuses in its quest for development, accepting a false bargain of material development in exchange for overlooking human rights.

Development experts get all excited about their favourite policies, and then find that the democratic process to enact those policies is messy and slow. With the best of intentions, some turn to autocracies and let the end justify the means. This, Easterly argues, is not only immoral but also ineffective. In the short run, supporting an autocrat who rewards loyalists and punishes everyone else eliminates incentives for growth: in the long run, it leaves a legacy of poverty and poor human rights for generations (see Why Nations Fail for more on this).

As befits a book that emphasizes local context, each chapter begins with the specifics of an individual or region developing, from the Mouride Brotherhood, an Islamic order based in Senegal that produces wildly successful international traders, to Hyundai in South Korea. I was disappointed that, as Easterly himself admits, the data to decide whether autocracies are bad for growth just doesn’t exist, and the book is not really convincing in either direction, though there are certainly reasons for skepticism. Readers hoping to be convinced that China is bad or good for growth will be disappointed. Well taken, however, are his moral and long run criticisms: he rightly points out that in the absence of statistical fact about whether autocracies boost growth, the burden of proof surely lies with the side that violates human rights.

Disclosure: I read The Tyranny of Experts as a free advance reader copy – it is released on March 4th. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). I’ve also had the opportunity to see Easterly speak in person about one of his previous books; he’s an excellent speaker, for what it’s worth.

Abundance – Peter Diamandis and Stever Kotler

“When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview…Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge.”

Abundance suggests we have the wrong worldview. We shouldn’t be trying to inch our way along, making marginal gains; instead, we should be trying to achieve those dramatic improvements that can really make life better for everyone. 97.3% of the world’s water is salty, and another 2% is in polar ice: bickering over the remaining .5%, the authors argue, will never lead to abundance for all.

They have some great stats. Americans, for example, spend enough time to write Wikipedia anew watching ads on TV every weekend. Microchips take 35 gallons of water to produce. And 500x more solar energy falls on the earth than the total energy consumed by humanity each year. For them the answer, as befits a book co-authored by the CEO of the X-Prize foundation, is technology. Not just to become more efficient, though that’s a good thing, but to truly make human happiness and wealth abundant. Technology, they argue, can not just alleviate our problems but actually render them irrelevant, as when the introduction of the car made the problem of horse manure in New York City an irrelevancy.

The book is a whirlwind tour of the exciting new areas of technology and research in water, food, energy (backyard nuclear devices, anyone?), health, education, and freedom: progress in waste management, organ supplies, AI, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and more. In some ways, it doesn’t add much to what’s already known – it’s a survey, not a contribution. If this is a field you’re interested in getting an overview of, though, the book is hard to beat. My only objection is their sheer optimism; it’s a book meant to be optimistic, and though I don’t in principle object, sometimes their treatment of the other side can feel superficial at best. If you’ve already read in the field, particularly Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, then you may also have heard much of it before. Still, the book remains a light but engaging read, and an important reminder that there is reason for optimism in what is often a pessimistic world.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 2 – David Landes

“The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”

I gave broad thoughts on David Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations earlier this week, but today I’m going to try to give a flavour of the kind of broad themes he talks about. This, I think, is the real strength of the book: the breadth of scope and insight it brings to bear,

The kind of broad questions he tackles are not thought about enough, I think. Sung China had mechanized power in ironmaking; Europe had windmills; early modern Italy had shipbuilding. Why didn’t they have an Industrial Revolution? Why did England? And why in the 18th century?

He argues it occurred in the UK for 3 reasons. The autonomy of intellectual inquiry, the method and language of understanding science and discovery, and the invention of invention (the routinization of research), all, he argues, contributed to England’s success. Other countries in Europe had obstacles to development, holdovers from the medieval period like serfs, guilds, and trade barriers, while the UK led the way in changing those institutions to suit the new economy. In addition, he gives some credit to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, though he is equally happy to credit a Buddhist work ethic that emphasizes the same virtues. A follower of any religion can have the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, etc., he points out, but perhaps the incentives were higher for Protestants.

Most of us have heard of the industrial revolution, but it’s the uncommon book that can really capture the industrial evolution from mechanized textiles, which led to steel through a focus on process, which led to dyes made with coal byproducts, which would in turn spawn modern chemistry, of critical importance to World War I. After that, food refrigeration and processing would further modernize and globalize the world, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Something he doesn’t appear to be familiar with is some work I’ve seen by Bob Allen, the economic historian at Oxford. He has built estimates of real wages for labour in countries around the world for much of history, and argues a key driver of the location of the industrial revolution was the price of labour. In the UK, the return to adopting a spinning jenny was 40%, because the employees it replaced were so expensive: in India, the return was negative 4%, because labour was cheap. I suspect Landes would happily agree with this as a driver, so it was a shame it didn’t appear he’d seen it.

For me, his thoroughness on the industrial and colonial periods is his greatest strength, and he does well to spend considerable time on other regions, like South America and Asia. The one notable exception is Africa, which though mentioned in reference to other regions is given little time itself. It’s possible he left it out due to time, but it is an unfortunate absence. For perhaps the same reason, his concluding chapters feel weak. Still, for the middle chapters alone, the book may well be worth it.

If you do want that deep knowledge of how rich countries developed their wealth, you get can the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list!

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations – David Landes

“The Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, making it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by estranging winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds.”

If I had been asked what I thought 100 pages in, I would have been quite negative, I think. Landes attempts to write an economic history of the world, and in his first hundred pages or so he covers pre-industrial revolution. It felt disorganized: he has vast knowledge of the subject, but the interjections and tangents were overwhelming, and I am dubious about the accuracy of some of them.

Once he got onto the era of the Industrial Revolution though, he began to shine. His chapters on Japan (he argues that had Europeans not intervened, they might well have had an industrial revolution of their own – I had no idea that because early Japan guaranteed riparian cultivator rights so strongly, they actually built boat-mounted waterwheels!) are fascinating, and he does well to focus on finding the reasons why things happen, instead of ascribing historical events to chance. His studies of colonial powers are equally interesting, highlighting differences between the different powers and their influences in a comprehensive way that is not done enough. Where else can one learn that early England was mostly about privateers and piracy rather than colonies, and as a result the crown issued sailor uniforms without pockets so they couldn’t steal things from the captured ships before the crown got its share?

In some ways it’s a good but weaker precursor to Why Nations Fail: Landes too emphasizes institutions, though he also gives credit to geography, culture, and other factors. His knowledge, however, is considerably more comprehensive, and flipping to any point in the book can reveal an enormous depth of knowledge on the subject at hand (Galileo was in trouble for the same reason inexpensive pornography used to be banned in Italy: such things were fine for those with refined tastes, but not appropriate for the masses. Galileo published in Italian, not Latin). That can be both fascinating and frustrating, but it’s certainly impressive.

Overall, then, I’m impressed. I might skip the first few chapters and the last few, but the middle is well worth the read. Whether that means the book is worth reading overall, I suppose, depends on how much of a hurry you’re in: I’d suggest Why Nations Fail as a speedier, but less comprehensive and content-rich, alternative.

If you do want that deep knowledge of how rich countries developed their wealth, you get can the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list!

Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher

“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”

Schumacher wrote extensively about natural capital consumption and his worry about the exhaustion natural resources, culminating in Small is Beautiful in the 70s. As a result, most of the ideas it presents do not feel new, largely because the ideas have been discussed widely since then. It remains, however, beautifully written.

I particularly liked his discussion of education, and found other chapters less compelling: I thought I’d share a few particularly good quotes, however;

 On Education

“The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.”

“To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.”

“If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or, shall we say, a tool-box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events.”

On Economics

“If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.”

“We must study the economics of permanence.”

“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”

“The modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technical, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment groans and gives sign of partial breakdown; and, third…the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead.”

The World Until Yesterday 2 – Jared Diamond

“[T]he Sirionos’ strongest anxieties are about food, they have sex virtually whenever they want, and sex compensates for food hunger, while our strongest anxieties are about sex, we have food virtually whenever we want, and eating compensates for sexual frustration.”

Earlier this week, I gave my broad thoughts on The World Until Yesterday. Today, I’ll highlight a few of the more interesting examples Diamond gives.

Dispute Resolution

Many traditional cultures use what is Diamond refers to as “sorry money” – one cannot compensate someone for the death of a child or a parent, but one can say sorry. Parties are forced to interact until both feel satisfied and their previous relationship is restored. This contrasts sharply with the modern court system, which attempts to ensure reparations are paid or justice is served, but does not attempt to restore any previously existing relationship between the parties. To some extent, this makes sense: in a traditional society, you will almost certainly interact with the same people again, while in a modern one you will not. Still, Diamond suggests that the modern system can often leave people feeling unsatisfied or lacking closure. Justice may well be served, but it lacks the personal relationship of traditional societies.

Leisure

Children’s games in New Guinea, for example, almost never involve competition. One example would be when each child gets a banana. Each of them divides it in half, eats half, and gives the other half to another child, who then divides that half into quarters. They do this for as long as possible. How much children’s games say about a society is up for debate, but it’s a striking difference.

Risk

At one point, Diamond is about to put his tent under a dead tree, and his New Guinea companions refuse point blank to join him. At first he is surprised: the chance of a dead tree falling is miniscule, perhaps one in a thousand. On reflection, though, he points out that locals of New Guinea may sleep under trees over one hundred nights per year: even a miniscule risk, if repeated, is not worth taking. The modern world, in contrast, frequently takes such risks, whether driving cars or, dare I say it, designing financial systems.

Diet

Don’t eat so much sugar. Or salt. You should know this. I was interested though in the idea that the massive prevalence of diabetes in some developing countries (up to 30%), may not be a natural difference, but rather a result of natural selection. When sugar became popular in Europe, Diamond suggests, Europe too might have had an epidemic of diabetes deaths, and individuals who were most sensitive to it died off; western societies today have lower rates of diabetes simply because the most vulnerable have not survived.

The whole thing is great. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).