AFRICA / NO EZ FIXIN

OK, weirdly enough I wasn't actually planning on writing anything about 'the greatest thing that's ever been organized in the history of the world' aka Live 8, but I was struck by the incredibly subtle symbolism of this photo/caption accompanying K-Sanneh's NYT review of the concerts -

Roland R. Scott, of Philadelphia, helped Laura Pinnie, of West Chester, Pa., to a higher spot for a better view as Stevie Wonder performed yesterday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

I read: "With the help of a hardbodied urban black man, a suburban white woman is able to ascend to a 'higher ground' where presumably she can finally see how bad things are in Africa, and she smiles, because once suburban white folk with money to give see a problem there is nothing, nothing at all that can stop them from solving it!"

...It's 2005, so there's been a bit of a genuinely progressive 'helping Africa help itself' gloss on some of this media circus, but basically this is obviously the same old bullshit, the bougey-est of bougey middle-of-the-road white cultural elites incomprehendingly grandstanding on the decades-no-wait-centuries-long suffering of an entire continent, crowning themselves the benevolent kings of the world and casting Africans as charity cases capable only of receiving handouts - and serving as useful props for demonstrating the kings' righteous grandeur, of course.  At the end of the day, it's basically a concert 'for' political status in the (largely white) elite circles of the rich world, washed up rock stars trying to prop up their limp careers with illusory secondary careers as do-gooders.  It would be pretty repulsive if it weren't for the fact that there are countless, equally useless politicians and activists that make this kind of moral posturing their first and only career, so it's more just kind of boring and depressing. 

Sanneh's review, like Nick Sylvester's from his new official V-Voice blog (please don't tell me that this means less frequent posting on the irreplaceable Riff Central!!!), is as ambivalent as I suspect most serious-ish musos' opinions on this are.  Like, "hmmmm, it's pretty obvious that a concert in which the richest, shittiest musicians in the world get together to pretend like they can save Africa is hideously retarded, especially when you consider the mind-numbing suffering of that continent as well as the nauseatingly horrible music that they are using that suffering to pimp* - but hey, I'm not a dick or anything and I'd like to think that we can do something to help Africa and publicity is good, right?"  Or as Mr. Sylvester puts it, well enough -

Live 8, I think, wasn't about making a direct and tangible difference, just for raising awareness, however caught in contradiction...  Not that intent excuses execution. And not that a more thought-out production-- with better politics, more relevant artists, and traceable effect-- would have put more people on this Feed Africa tip anyway. But while some poo-poo the event for missing its own point, I'm a firm believer, I think, in work coming from play-- history finds a way to redeem this sort of shit somehow.

'Redeem' is probably too much to expect - 'forgive', maybe?  The 'Better Politics' angle is key, because the whole premise of the concert - that Africa is poor because the rich world's aid programs are too stingy, and that all we need to do to save Africa is give them more money - is as ineffectual and irrelevant as the artists. 

This article in the NYT from earlier in the week sums up the current situation well enough -

In Nigeria, even children understand corruption's menace. Increasingly, so do the donors that have poured more than $300 billion into African nations since 1980 - and watched too much of it vanish into a sinkhole of fraud, malfeasance and waste.

Now the efforts of reformers are being scrutinized at meetings where donor countries consider aid to Africa, as leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations will do this week at Gleneagles, Scotland.

The summit meeting has been billed as a turning point for Africa, where the billions have begun to flow again. Foreign aid to the continent reached a 17-year low in 1999, but in May, the richest nations agreed to write off $40 billion in loans owed by the world's 18 poorest countries, all but four of them in Africa...

There is ample fodder for pessimists and optimists alike. On the positive side, a growing number of African nations are edging away from crime and autocracy toward democracy and openness...  Yet a May study by the World Bank found that between 1996 and 2004, the quality of governance deteriorated in as many African countries as it improved.

While African kleptocrats are undoubtedly the largest obstacle to Africa's progress, part of the blame also lies with the rich world donors' tone-deaf, big money approach to aid thus far:

Whether the new wave of African aid avoids the pitfalls of the past depends not just on its recipients, development specialists say, but also on the donors, who have often pushed poorly devised projects, refused to coordinate their efforts or demands with one another and failed to monitor the impact of their largesse.

Foreign aid must be tied to teaching poor nations how to build accountability into their governments, development specialists contend. In some countries, it is not even clear whether the executive branch or the parliament controls the budget, said Steven Radelet, a senior fellow for the Washington-based Center for Global Development. He warned, however, that such improvements typically require generations to take root...

"Hopefully, [African reformers] are going to do enough good that people are going to be attracted to them," said Victoria Kwakwa, the lead economist for the World Bank here. "It is going to have to start with small groups, because you don't have the base. If you did, you wouldn't have gotten to this point to begin with."

It's not surprising that bombastic and self-aggrandizing rock stars would buy into the idea that it's possible to erase centuries of a seriously fucked up and complex history with one big, multinational 4-minute power ballad of a charity drive - but these hubristic ideas are essentially shared by 'superstar' development economist  Jeffrey Sachs, who espouses "shock therapy", a 'comprehensive package of economic reforms that attempts to fix all problems simultaneously and quickly'.  Appropriately enough, the foreword to his new book, The End of Poverty, was written by Bono, the reigning champion of terrible musicians that opportunistically enhance nobly use their celebrity to bring more attention to starving children and the politicians who are by and large unable to do anything for them. 

William Easterly, a former economist at the World Bank and currently an economics professor at NYU (also the baseball columnist for the Vatican newspaper!?) reviewed TEOP for the Washington Post a couple months ago and pointed out the 'rock star' mentality of Sachs's proposals as well as the problems with bringing this approach to bear on huge, complex, continent-sized problems like African poverty.   The review is quietly devastating as well as inspiring, and worth reading in full and excerpting at length:

The climax of The End of Poverty is Sachs's far-reaching plan to end world poverty -- a sort of Great Leap Forward. His characteristically comprehensive approach to eliminating world poverty derives from his conviction that everything depends on everything else -- that, for instance, you cannot cure poverty in Africa without beating AIDS, which requires infrastructure, which requires stable government, and so forth.

Social reformers have found two ways to respond to this complexity; Karl Popper summed them up best a half-century ago as "utopian social engineering" versus "piecemeal democratic reform." Sachs is the intellectual leader of the utopian camp. To end world poverty once and for all, he offers a detailed Big Plan that covers just about everything, in mind-numbing technical jargon, from planting nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations and so on. Sachs proposes that the U.N. secretary general personally run the overall plan, coordinating the actions of thousands of officials in six U.N. agencies, U.N. country teams, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Sachs's Big Plan would launch poor countries out of a "poverty trap" and end world poverty by 2025, as the book's title advertises...

What's the alternative? The piecemeal reform approach (which his book opposes) would humbly acknowledge that nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty. It would eschew the arrogance that "we" know exactly how to fix "them." It would shy away from the hubris of what he labels the "breathtaking opportunity" that "we" have to spread democracy, technology, prosperity and perpetual peace to the entire planet. Large-scale crash programs, especially by outsiders, often produce unintended consequences. The simple dreams at the top run afoul of insufficient knowledge of the complex realities at the bottom. The Big Plans are impossible to evaluate scientifically afterward. Nor can you hold any specific agency accountable for their success or failure. Piecemeal reform, by contrast, motivates specific actors to take small steps, one at a time, then tests whether that small step made poor people better off, holds accountable the agency that implemented the small step, and considers the next small step.

Easterly's got a book to sell too, and is obviously trying to sell the 'piecemeal reform' approach as much as Sachs tries to sell his Great Leap Forward - but he's got the evidence of history on his side:

What's the evidence on how well the two approaches work? Sachs pays surprisingly little attention to the history of aid approaches and results. He seems unaware that his Big Plan is strikingly similar to the early ideas that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s and '60s. Just like Sachs, development planners then identified countries caught in a "poverty trap," did an assessment of how much they would need to make a "big push" out of poverty and into growth, and called upon foreign aid to fill the "financing gap" between countries' own resources and needs. This legacy has influenced the bureaucratic approach to economic development that's been followed ever since -- albeit with some lip service to free markets -- by the World Bank, regional development banks, national aid agencies like USAID and the U.N. development agencies. Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today's dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it's fair to say this approach has not been a great success...

Meanwhile, some piecemeal interventions have brought success. Vaccination campaigns, oral rehydration therapy to prevent diarrhea and other aid-financed health programs have likely contributed to a fall in infant mortality in every region, including Africa. Aid projects have probably helped increase access to primary and secondary education, clean water and sanitation. Perhaps it is also easier to hold aid agencies accountable for results in these tangible areas...

Indeed, the broader development successes of recent decades, most of them in Asia, happened without the Big Plan -- and without significant foreign aid as a proportion of the recipient country's income. Gradual free market reforms in China and India in the 1980s and '90s (which Sachs implausibly argues were shock therapy in disguise) have brought rapid growth. Moreover, the West itself achieved gradual success through piecemeal democratic and market reforms over many centuries, not through top-down Big Plans offered by outsiders. Do we try out shock therapy only on the powerless poor?

"Success in ending the poverty trap," Sachs writes, "will be much easier than it appears." Really? If it's so easy, why haven't five decades of effort gotten the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage at the question of why the previous $2.3 trillion didn't reach the poor so that the next $2.3 trillion does. In fact, ending poverty is not easy at all. In those five decades, poverty researchers have learned a great deal about the complexity of toxic politics, bad history (including exploitative or inept colonialism), ethnic and regional conflicts, elites' manipulation of politics and institutions, official corruption, dysfunctional public services, malevolent police forces and armies, the difficulty of honoring contracts and property rights, unaccountable and excessively bureaucratic donors and many other issues. Sachs, however, sees these factors as relatively unimportant. Indeed, he seems deaf to the babble and bungling of the U.N. agencies he calls upon to run the Big Plan, not to mention other unaccountable and ineffectual aid agencies.

Sachs and Easterly had a little catfight on the WaPo letters page a couple weeks later that is worth a read if you're interested in reading Sachs's respond to these criticisms (and Easterly's able counter-rebuttal).  These links are courtesy - of course! - of Gary Jones, who wrote (and often writes related posts on) about the epistemological differences between Sachs's 'magical thinking' and Easterly's more complex, natural systems-ish approach to social change in his post Disordered By Design:

Those like Sachs that have failed to grasp "The idea of society being “the result of human action but not of human design”" are further confused by the metaphors of those who attempt to explain the process. When they hear "that the patterns of spontaneous order "appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind"", the minds of magical thinkers like Sachs slide into the well worn grooves of creationist thinking remarkably similar to that of the Intelligent Design religious community. Both of these groups misunderstand how natural systems work, especially the role of information in ordered systems. The attempt to centralize information in the mind of the designer or planner completely destroys the system so that it cannot possibly function. Information is the ordering force that is both produced and consumed (in the sense of source and sink, not that it is destroyed by consumption) within the system, even at the lowest levels, and the apparent order is the result of this process...

From human social systems to colonies of slime mold it is neighbors acting with only local information that co-ordinate the system as a whole and result in what appears to be order from an external view. It is important to grasp that even human communication and transportation systems that span the globe don't disrupt these processes, they just redefine "neighbor" independent of time and space: virtual neighbors so to speak.

The piecemeal approach to poverty reduction that Easterly advocates is in this sense biomimetic or sociomimetic, more like a natural system since it adresses Easterly's concerns about how "top-down, many-pronged solutions conceived in New York get feedback from the faraway poor on whether they are actually getting what they most need?" The confusing part for magical thinkers like Sachs is understanding how the myriad small acts of piecemeal aid can result in an ordered reduction of poverty when there is no high level or mid level plan to coordinate it all.

Poverty reduction isn't work for rock stars or weekend warriors - it's a hard, slow slog, with lots of trials and errors along the way, and most of the work can't be done from the UN headquarters in New York.  Of course, $$$$ is needed for piecemeal and utopian approaches alike, and as Easterly notes, the simplistic bombast of Sachs/Geldof/Bono et al is more excusable when considered as light entertainment for a fundraising drive instead of as an example of a serious Big Plan that could 'solve' a historical tragedy so enormous and complex that thinking of it as a discrete 'problem' with a 'solution' can only be thought of as a loose metaphor at best. 

The G-8 today pledged to double foreign aid to Africa to $50 billion a year by 2010 - here's hoping we learn some lessons from the past and figure out how to spend it wisely.  I can't say I'm extremely optimistic, but stranger things have happened.

* Obviously, none of this applies to Jay-Z - apologies to any other non-shitty or non-washed up superstar that played, it's not like I read the bill or anything.