Tag Archives: Development

The World Until Yesterday 1 – Jared Diamond

“Traditional societies represent thousands of millennia-long natural experiments in organizing human lives. We can’t repeat those experiments by redesigning thousands of societies today in order to wait decades and observe the outcomes; we have to learn from the societies that already ran the experiments.”

A bit late on posting this – apologies. It’s been a busy week.

We too often mistake past cultures based on flawed information and unconscious assumptions. Jared Diamond has actually done the research, and has the breadth of knowledge to make interesting, provocative, and informative assertions on the nature of humanity and human society.

As a result, The World Until Yesterday is a great book. Jared Diamond is an absolute master of his field, as readers of his other books can attest, and his breadth of examples and insights is exhaustive. In past books though, he has tended to take a single thesis, and argue for it based on case studies. Here, Diamond examines 9 broad themes, discussing how we treat them in the modern world, and how they were treated then. In some ways, we are clearly better off: in other ways we are perhaps not. Those nine themes are dividing space, peace/dispute resolution, war, raising children, treatment of elderly, danger response, religion, language, and diet/lifestyle.

Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway is that there are many possible ways of organizing a society, and that the narrow field of possibilities we experience for ourselves is just that: narrow. Some of these alternatives are probably undesirable from the modern standpoint: among the Kaulong people, when a man died, his brothers would strangle his widow, or in their absence, one of her sons. If they failed to do so fast enough, the widow would mock and humiliate them in order to pressure them to fulfill their obligation. Others, though, have a definite appeal, as with care for children and elderly, or our diets.

Exactly what we should learn from traditional societies is up for debate, and Diamond does not attempt to reach a consensus. His point is more profound: that we should at the very least think about other possible ways of organizing our societies, and that traditional cultures provide a way to see other possibilities in action. As they shrink and disappear, we lose a cultural laboratory of untold richness.

If you’re interested in how human society works (and if you ask me, you should be), then you should read this book, no questions asked. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Later this week, I’ll look at a few of the specific examples contained within.

River Notes – Wade Davis

“To walk down a gravel road just south of the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado and watch what remains of the Colorado pass through rusted culverts, bringing not fertility but toxicity to the land, is to ask what on earth become of this stream so revered in the American imagination, and yet now so despoiled that it today reaches the ocean a river only in name.”

If you’ve ever been in North America during the winter and eaten lettuce, you’ve drunk from the Colorado. The Yuma region, which gets 4 inches of rain a year, grows 95% of North America’s winter lettuce, watered almost exclusively by the Colorado. Without the river, America would be forced to largely abandon southern California and Arizona, and much of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming; upwards of 25 million people forced to relocate, not to mention eat less lettuce. As it withers, the animals, plants, and natural beauty that rely on it wither too.

Wade Davis mourns its treatment. Wade Davis, for those who don’t know him, is a possessor of one of the coolest jobs I’m familiar with, being one of the seven permanent Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and is the guy who explored how zombies were created in Haiti.

Framed by his own rafting journey down the Grand Canyon, he weaves together stories of the native people around the river, both the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, whose ruins cover the area, as well as extant groups; the stories of the first Europeans to explore the river; its geological and natural history; and its exploitation through dam construction and water diversions.

Americans may find his lament particularly powerful, but beyond enjoyment of his beautiful writing, I also took away a number of broader lessons. Water is a resource we tend to squander, and we have not yet begun to bear the costs of such behaviour, at least in the Western world. We also tend to lionize dams as a solution to global warming, and as such River Notes is a useful reminder that they too have costs, like all sources of energy. Most of all, though, he ends on an optimistic call to action: to maintain the Colorado ecosystem may take as little as 1% of the total flow, and if it were not for “cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither really belongs,” he points out, the entire crisis could be averted. It takes, after all, over 1800 litres of water to raise a pound of beef.

Disclosure: I read River Notes as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Saturday. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada).

In Praise of Slow – Carl Honoré

“And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”

“Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave?”

I’m going about this backwards, because I reviewed Honoré’s more recent book, The Slow Fix, several months ago, and am now reviewing his older one. Worse yet, I think I like his newer book more, so the need for this review is debatable, since the two are on very similar topics. Apologies to all who find that irritating.

My reasons for preferring his second book are twofold. First, this first can feel dated: it predates the financial crisis, and there are a few sections where that shows. More broadly, though, his second book simply has the better stories and anecdotes of the success of slow, and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to read.

All that said, there are definitely still pearls of wisdom to be found here. Honoré is careful to say that many things can and should be done quickly. Some things, though, must be done slowly, and in the modern world it’s not clear we remember that. How many of us, for example, wince when we read the letter from the Harvard Dean of undergraduates to new students, which suggests that “empty time is not a vacuum to be filled…It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4×4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other 15 pieces around.”

I read recently that most people don’t listen to each other; when they’re not talking, they mentally rehearse what they’re going to say next. That’s why most conversations proceed without pauses, and yet when you think about it, that’s crazy: does no one ever need to stop and think? Fitting in writing blog posts with the rest of my life, I’m the last person to claim speed isn’t useful, but I think there’s a deeper point to be made here. If we don’t remember to stop and slow down over what matters, we may reach a point where nothing feels like it matters.

No amazon links today: you can slowly navigate there yourself, and see if you see any other books that look good on the way there! Or, you could just join the Subtle Illumination email list.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character – Paul Tough

The classic study on self-control is the marshmallow experiment, conducted by Walter Mischel. Children were asked to resist eating a single marshmallow, and if they managed it they would be rewarded with two marshmallows later on. The most successful students would sit on their hands, sing, or otherwise distract themselves. One young overachiever even took a nap! Later in life, the children who could resist the marshmallow best did better on almost every measure of life outcomes. (Interestingly, one measure they didn’t do better on was avoiding problem drinking: alcoholism did not appear to correlate with lack of willpower).

How Children Succeed follows on from this work and examines the importance of character (things like self-control, optimism, and grit), not just intelligence, in adult outcomes. Tough points out that measures of character are as good at predicting success in later life as measures of intelligence, and that measures of intelligence can be disturbingly flawed: one study found that offering M&Ms for each correct answer increased IQ scores by 12 points for kids at the bottom of the distribution.

One of the most fascinating chapters, though, is on stress. On the savannah, when we see a lion every possible system activates in order to get us out of trouble: we breathe faster, we have more white blood cells, our muscles tense, etc. This response is essential for survival, but wears our body out over time. He argues the same happens today when people have stressful childhoods: their systems become overloaded and wear out, and they find it difficult to regulate thoughts and emotions later in life. If we measure stress levels as children and control for them, the effect of poverty on adult outcomes almost disappears.

Perhaps even more interestingly, evidence from rats suggests the opposite of some suggested parenting styles: the rats with nurturing and attentive mothers while they are young become more independent and self-reliant when they are older.

The evidence is clear that character is extremely important to outcomes, and it’s not clear our modern society accounts for that. Policy interventions are therefore critical. Stress reduction among children can contribute to measures meant to tackle poverty, and ensuring that students rate themselves on non-cognitive measures can go a long way to encouraging the right behaviour, as some charter schools that offer a character report card have discovered. Intelligence is not enough, as many an intelligent adult can tell you.

You can keep reading How Children Succeed here (or in the UK or Canada) – for those interested in education, I’d highly recommend it. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, and we can try to build our characters together.

From Democrats to Kings – Michael Scott

“From Democrats to Kings is a story not just of Athens at the height of its power and Alexander at his, but of the turbulent times of transition in between these two powerful extremes.”

Is the European Union better off as a united whole or individual nations? Would the US be better off if it had a stronger president, one that could break congressional deadlocks? Countries today are immersed in arguments over the benefits of centralized or decentralized power.

As Michael Scott dryly points out, however, the past is just like now, only earlier. In From Democrats to Kings, he covers a relatively understudied period of Greek history: the period of transition between what we often see at the height of Athenian democracy, the 500s, and when it was taken over by Philip and Alexander the Great, often seen as the end of their democracy.

The book is perhaps slightly easier to read if you already know about the periods immediately before and after its setting, but it’s fun either way. Over a single generation, Athens goes from a democracy to a dictatorship, and Greece goes from a collection of warring cities to a unified whole, one that would eventually be a part of the enormous land empire of Alexander the great. For that generation, Athens would be wracked with indecision between divisive democracy and dictatorial unity, even putting Socrates on trial for supporting dictatorships.

Today, we often see Alexander as the death of Greek democracy (partly due to Athenian propaganda), but Scott points out that Athens actually benefited enormously during his reign. Their GDP doubled, huge public investment was begun in religious sanctuaries, stadiums, theatres, and public works, statues stolen 150 years previous by the Persians were returned by Alexander, and Athens entered the longest period of prosperity it had enjoyed in a century. Unification, even under a dictator, was not all bad for Athens, nor for Greece, though it came at the cost of liberty.

The period is an interesting one, and the book is even more so. As well as a professor at Cambridge, Scott is a presenter of BBC documentaries, and that style comes through in the book with his eagerness to share tidbits of knowledge as well as explain his larger theme. I will guiltily admit I have a passion for classical history anyway, but even if you don’t the book is interesting, providing a clear understanding of events and carefully putting it into modern context. Though few democracies today are faced with a choice between democrats and kings, the optimal level of centralization remains an interesting, and contentious, issue.

Want more? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Public Intellectual in Canada – Nelson Wiseman

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

Something of a specialist post this week, and not everyone is interested in the state of public intellectuals in Canada, I realize. But, I think it’s interesting, and I get to pick. So there.

According to the philosopher Julien Benda, because intellectuals existed, “humanity did evil for 2000 years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” A fairly intellectual way to look at it, of course, and it reflects an irony in asking public intellectuals to contribute to a collection of essays about public intellectuals. How public intellectuals see themselves and each other does not exactly capture all possible viewpoints.

The Public Intellectual in Canada is a collection of essays on, as can be guessed from the title, the role of the public intellectual in Canada, whether as public policy wonk, media don, professional pundit, or perhaps simply as thorn in the side of power. Canadian thought and thought-leaders can sometimes feel a bit overshadowed by our much larger neighbour to the South, a fact reflected by several essays, as is our somewhat unique cultural divide into English and French Canada. In other ways, however, our public intellectuals struggle with much the same issues as anyone else, and insight into the need for public opinion polls as a way for individuals to learn about themselves in the context of society, the history of public thought, the changing nature of universities and their expectations of academics, and perhaps most of all the role of slow deliberation to mediate the deluge of information from a 24 hour news cycle, is welcome – and applicable – anywhere.

Many of the essays are Canadian centric, and I suspect would have little interest beyond Canadians. One, for example, focuses on the history of Le Devoir, a Québécois publication, while another discusses the benefits of a larger population for Canada. Others have broader appeal; some individuals discuss their own experiences as public intellectuals, while others reflect on the role of an intellectual more broadly. Most of all, however, Wiseman has assembled a selection of essays both left and right, data-driven and qualitative, on how knowledge is constructed and ideas disseminated, and for someone interested in Canada, it is a great read.

Want more? Get the Public Intellectual in Canada from the U of T publisher. Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right for regular updates! Disclosure: I read The Public Intellectual in Canada as a free advance reader copy.

Prosperity Without Growth – Tim Jackson

“We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.” – Ben Okri

Prosperity Without Growth tackles an intuitively fascinating subject. Economists and politicians tend to assume that the key goal of policy is to create perpetual economic growth. There is, however, a finite amount of resources on Earth, whether oil, steel, or even volume of sunlight. Are these two facts compatible?

Unfortunately, despite my interest in its subject, I didn’t find Prosperity Without Growth compelling. The first two thirds seemed to add little to the discussion, while frustratingly the final third introduced ideas and frameworks that could well have made for an interesting book had they been discussed earlier. The book’s audience also seems unclear: he goes from introducing macroeconomic equations, likely appealing only to economists, to explaining very basic economics of little interest to the same.

In that final third, Jackson points out that to reconcile growth and limits, one of two things must happen. Either we must have sustainable growth, in which the economy grows but doesn’t require more energy inputs, as for example when we move employment to low-carbon jobs, or we must have a sustainable no-growth economy, as when productivity increases but we work less hours to compensate. To do either, he says, we must establish limits, fix our economic system, and change our social logic.

Perhaps the most interesting piece I have read on this subject is a discussion between an economist and a physicist, available here. It introduces ideas that had never occurred to me, like a planetary heat death from waste heat, and though I’m not sure I agree when we discuss that scale of issue that ruling out space travel is fair (you’ll have to read the link for yourself), I found the whole thing fascinating. I’m not sure I can say the same about Prosperity Without Growth. Still, it’s a book that tackles a critical issue of broad interest to many, and for that alone it deserves some credit. It does also manage some nuance and depth at the end – I just regret it didn’t manage it earlier.

Keep reading here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, get more illumination by joining the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Alleviating Poverty – Poor Economics by Banerjee & Duflo (2)

Part 1 of Review available here.

“To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.”

I’d heard before that on average, tall people earn more money. What I hadn’t heard was that apparently if you control for IQ, that difference disappears – tall people are smarter and so have higher wages. A suggested explanation is malnutrition, which both reduces height and lowers IQ, and poses a significant challenge to poverty. This and other fascinating studies make up the bulk of Poor Economics, as Banerjee and Duflo follow their own advice and turn to the data to understand the challenges of development.

If you want to help the poor, say Banerjee and Duflo, you need to give up grand theories and ideas of structural change, no matter how appealing a silver bullet may be. Rejecting Why Nations Fail, they argue that poverty is not the product of grand institutional failures, but rather is an individual or local condition, making cookie-cutter remedies useless. Development must be achieved by a series of small, well-thought out and well-tested steps, gradually accumulating into big changes, not grand designs with little relevance to the lives of the poor.

To do so, they point out, it is essential to first actually understand the lives of the poor. Arguments often rage over whether the poor are in a poverty trap, the concern being that had they only a little more money for health, schooling, or business, they could invest and increase their wages, starting a positive cycle of investment and returns. B&D, however, dismiss the arguments of Sachs, Easterly, and others, and point out that the answer can only be found in the data, through randomized control trials and empirical work, not through theory or ideological debates.

They do make some broader claims. Without a stable job, for example, they suggest there is little incentive to save, invest, or plan for the future. As a result, the creation of jobs with job security may be justified even if it is an inefficient method of job creation, because of the indirect benefits. I’m not sure if I agree or not, but it’s an interesting point.

Perhaps the one criticism I have of Poor Economics is that their attempt to stick to economic rationality, though understandable, can feel forced. At several times in the book, as when they’re discussing how some households will borrow at a 24% rate of interest in order to save it at 2%, psychological or behavioural explanations seemed like a natural next step in the discussion, and I was disappointed when they neglected them. Still, the book adds a much-needed voice in the discussion of economic development, one driven by data, not ideology.

Still interested? You can read my summary of their lessons for development here, or sign up for the Subtle Illumination reading list to your right! Or, you could always head to Amazon and get the book your yourself (or in the UK or Canada).

Poor Economics by Banerjee and Duflo (1)

Part 2 of review available here.

“The ladders to get out of the poverty trap exist but are not always in the right place, and people do not seem to know how to step onto them or even want to do so.” – Banerjee and Duflo

I’ll be posting a review of Poor Economics on Sunday, but it’s looking like a long one, so in the interim I thought I’d post a summary of their five lessons for economic development, and leave discussion to Sunday.

The poor often lack information or have false beliefs, leading them to do things like ignore potentially useful dietary advice.
The poor are responsible for far more decisions than comparable households in the West, to their cost. We take sanitization of water or the removal and treatment of sewage, for example, for granted: for the poor it can be a conscious choice. Too many conscious choices can be overwhelming, and reducing the number of decisions that need to be consciously made is no more patronizing than sanitizing household water in the US.
There are often good reasons for some markets for the poor to be missing, and so we can’t assume they will always self-form or should be formed. A health insurance market for the poor, for example, though of potential benefit, has struggled to form because the insurance options that can be sustained by the market are not what the poor want.
Poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor. We often hear of the failures of aid programs, but in many cases those failures are avoidable through small design fixes, rather than grand institutional change of the social and political structures.
Expectations of outcomes can often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Children drop out of school because they don’t expect to be good at it; adults stay in debt because they don’t expect to be able to stay out of it. Getting a virtuous cycle started can be enormously powerful.

Number 5, I would argue, is a lesson for life, not for development, but nevermind.

As we’ll find out on Sunday, the foundation of their book, however, is that these are not general rules applicable everywhere. Instead, they argue that development cannot be conducted by universal rules and general theories. It must be adapted to suit context, culture, and location, all of which require data, not ideological theorizing.

You can read part 2 of the review here. In the meantime, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Explaining Why Nations Fail – Acemoglu and Robinson

Acemoglu and Robinson present in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty an important idea: that it is institutions that determine whether countries are rich or poor. When institutions concentrate power in the hands of only a few, nations fail. Unfortunately, their book can also be frustrating – their focus on institutions can feel like it blinds them to other possibilities, and as a result their examples, though fascinating, can feel repetitive.

A&R argue that political and economic institutions can be extractive (designed to extract resources and centralize power in an elite who will then oppose change or progress) or inclusive (decentralizing power and allowing individuals economic autonomy). Both types of institutions, they argue, must be inclusive for long run prosperity. It’s an important division, and one that has a lot of explanatory power: anyone who’s crossed the American border with Mexico can’t deny that it is the institutions, not the fifty feet of distance, which matters.

The bulk of the book provides examples. Their studies are both well written and compelling, but they also make me wonder whether institutions are really the distal cause: apart from the simple case of countries with a colonial past, there is little discussion of what leads to good institutions. When they do raise the issue, they seem to implicitly assume that institutions are chosen rationally by elites, based on the cost and benefits of each type, an assumption that seems unconvincing.

Economists and development experts often underrate the importance of institutions, and so Why Nations Fail makes a critical contribution. It also makes a strong argument against the centralization of political power, which can be tempting in the short run but corrupts institutions and social norms in the long run. It’s engagingly written and full of interesting facts, and so is well worth the read for anyone remotely interested in these issues (and everyone should be). It just doesn’t seem to entirely meet its (admittedly ambitious) mandate: to explain why some nations fail and some succeed.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or order from the UK or Canada). Why Nations Fail is certainly worth a look.