Matt Yglesias

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Increasing USAID Capacity

Anne-Marie Slaughter, on leave from Princeton to serve as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department where she’s playing a key role in the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review process, was at CAP today to talk about putting the idea of integrated power into progress.

After the event, she sat down with Matt Duss and I for a few questions. He asked her about the perception that under pressure to produce quick results, the U.S. has increasingly shifted development responsibilities onto the Pentagon. She said it was wrong to look at the dynamic exclusively in these terms and that we need to look instead at a multi-decade process that’s led to “the complete hollowing out” of the Agency for International Development:

A huge part of the problem has simply been the complete hollowing out of AID. Not just under the last administration, indeed the last administration increased foreign aid in various ways. But it’s been a twenty, twenty-five year process where the number of employees that AID has has steadily decreased, the number of contract that AID manages has steadily increased. So instead of having an agency that has a whole set of knowledge experts and experts in the field and then also contracts that it manages, you’ve got a small number of people managing a very large number of contracts just without the number of people or the resources that it needs to be the world class development agency we want it to be. So we’re looking very specificially at what AID is going to need in terms of specific sectors in terms of, again, how does it lead whole of governmnet projects both on the grounds but also in Washington.

Of course turning this kind of dynamic around is politically difficult. At the moment, the military is in a high-resource/high-prestige equilibrium. In part because it’s so lavishly resourced, the military is able to do a good job. Having lots of competence makes the military well-respected. And having lots of prestige makes it possible for the military to make politically potent claims on its own behalf. USAID has been, as Slaughter says, in a different place for a long time. One promising sign, however, has been that figures like Robert Gates and others from the Pentagon side have increasingly shown some indication to use some of their clout to help build up AID capabilities as they more and more find themselves convinced that more robust civilian partners are what they’re looking for.

Obama’s Tough Love for Africa

I’m always reading on the Corner that Barack Obama is a far-left radical driven by anti-American and anti-Western impulses. Under the circumstances, it’s weird that he keeps giving speeches that are so at odds with his world view:

President Barack Obama addresses the parliament of Ghana (White House photo)

But despite the progress that has been made — and there has been considerable progress in many parts of Africa — we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Countries like Kenya had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born. They have badly been outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent.

In many places, the hope of my father’s generation gave way to cynicism, even despair. Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

One sociological finding I’m fascinated with is the fact that the extent to which one overestimates one’s personal degree of control over one’s fortunes is an important predictor of success. In other words, success in life is partly a result of circumstances and luck and partly a result of individual effort. And people who overestimate the importance of effort at more likely to succeed. It makes sense when you think about it, but it’s also a bit paradoxical.

In that light, I think this is a useful kind of message to spread. It’s not helpful to a country to have its politics dominated by post-colonial grievances and attempted blame-shifting. But particularly amidst a global economic crisis, I think it’s striking the extent to which few countries really are masters of their own destiny. And it’s not just Africa. The Canadian banking system, for example, is very strong and the Canadians don’t seem to have made any important errors in macroeconomic policy. But they’re going to have a painful recession just like everyone else, because Canada’s economy is very intertwined with America’s. And you see tons and tons of this sort of thing in poor countries where the prices of commodities they export can collapse for reasons that are far outside their control. And, again, the Ghanas of the world are very seriously impacted by the nature of the global trading regime and by rich countries’ immigration policies, but Ghana has no real ability to influence either of those things.

GDP and the Developing World

Gross Domestic Product is an extremely useful analytical tool. But like any tool, it needs to be used in appropriate situations. Assessing negative impacts that will be felt worldwide, but especially concentrated among the world’s poorest people, is not such a context. Nate Silver has an excellent map illustrating the point—what would the world look like with 5 percent of GDP wiped out? Well, it could look like a world in which the U.S., Europe, and the developed part of East Asia are slightly poorer. Or it could look like this world in which 81 countries containing 43 percent of the world’s population are wiped out:

Conventional wisdom has it that for the purposes of US domestic politics it doesn’t make sense to talk about the impact of climate change on the developing world. I’m not so sure. It’s very difficult to imagine Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) wading through the jungles of Vietnam slaughtering villagers and redistributing their possessions to the people of Missouri. It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine her tweeting complaints about Waxman-Markey being unfair to coal-dependent states like Missouri. To an extent, in other words, I think it’s worth raising the ethical stakes around this issue.

Nobody’s quite sure what the solution is for people and countries trapped in severe poverty. But we can be fairly certain that “cause them to drown so we can drive bigger cars” is not the answer.

The Success of Development

Soweto, South Africa (Wikimedia)

I’ve been sort of in a funk about the prospects for doing something to improve the lives of the world’s poorest ever since I read Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms which suggests that the state of play in places like Africa is actually worse than most people think. One possible antidote, it seems, will come from development economist Charles Kenny, whose The Success of Development aims to kick me out of my miasma:

A lot of people are depressed about the state of global development. And they are particularly miserable about Africa. There is a widespread belief that the region remains mired in a Malthusian trap, home to many of the ‘bottom billion’ who are living in ‘fourteenth century’ conditions. And many argue that aid has been a dead loss in fixing the problem. According to this view of the world, we’re stuck in a serious crisis of development.

This book explores the bad news and the good news about development. It lays out the evidence on growing income disparities between the global rich and the global poor that are at the heart of a narrative of crisis. And it chronicles the failed search for a silver bullet to overcome economic malaise.

But it also discusses the considerable successes of development. Not least, the evidence for any country being stuck in a Malthusian nightmare is threadbare. The book points to global progress in health, education, civil and political rights, access to infrastructure and even access to beer. This progress is historically unprecedented and has been faster in the developing world than in the developed.

Interestingly, he’s making the book available for free online. Felix Salmon says he’s been glued to his Kindle all day reading it. I haven’t had that luxury, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Evidence That Standard Models Understate Climate Change’s Impact on the Poor

As clowns like Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) are wont to point out, the scale of the average temperature shift associated with catastrophic climate change is not especially large relative to ordinary fluctuations in the weather. In other words, in most parts of the world summer is much hotter than winter, and the summer-winter gap exceeds the sort of changes associated with carbon emissions. If you’re dumb, this becomes a reason to get blasé about climate change. If you understand the issue, you understand that even modest structural shifts in the climate can have enormous impacts—shifting rainfall patterns, altering sea levels, massively increasing the odds of extreme weather, etc.

Consequently, most climate change analysis focuses on these kinds of problems. But new research from Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken gives reason to believe that the hot weather on its own will likely have large adverse consequences for economic growth rates in poor countries:

We find that higher temperatures reduce the growth rate in poor countries, not simply the level of output. Since even small growth effects have large consequences over time, these growth effects – if they persist in the medium run – imply very large impacts of permanent temperature increases. [...]

To the extent that responses to future climate change are similar to historical responses, our findings have implications for quantifying potential future impacts of climate change. Even assuming that countries adapt fully after only a decade to temperature changes, if the future response follows our historically-driven estimates, the future effects of climate change for poor countries would be substantially more negative than those implied by existing models. For example, our estimates imply that global climate change would lower the median poor country’s growth rate by 0.6 percentage points each year from now until 2099. Extrapolated over 90 years, the median poor country would then be about 40% poorer in 2099 than it would have been in the absence of climate change.

That’s the estimated negative impact assuming complete and successful adaptation . And that, in turn, is a completely heroic assumption. Members of congress considering the Waxman-Markey bill should think that over, but so should political leaders in China, India, and Brazil.

All this via Ryan Avent.

Peter Singer Diavlogs With Tyler Cowen

A solid star match up. My feelings about Singer’s brand of utilitarianism are a bit too complicated to sum up in a blog post at the moment, but I think that where Singer tends to go wrong is in his policy analysis, where the issues are often less clear than I think he thinks, more than his ethical theory which, though very unpopular, strikes me as pretty compelling.

Land Reform

John Danilovich and Jonathan Reckford write about the problem of third world poor who don’t have secure title to their land, relying instead on traditional understandings. This situation is unfavorable to the poor themselves, and also constitutes a substantial barrier to economic mobility:

The absence of clear, enforceable rules and the lack of a simple piece of paper, like a deed, are often roadblocks on the pathway from poverty to prosperity for the world’s poor.

Secure tenure — the freedom to live without fear of eviction, the freedom of knowing that property rights are protected — matters not only for you, but also for these individuals, families and communities in the poorest corners of the world. Having a place to call home, or a piece of land to farm, or a place to start a business matters to the poor and non-poor alike, and all of us should have secure access to rights of use, ownership and transfer.

Secure tenure is an economic matter. Tenure security can provide opportunities for investment and accumulation of wealth and can encourage business development. Farmers make more productive use of land they own, investing in improvements or higher-value crops and safeguarding it from environmental degradation.

For households and small businesses, legal records of land ownership are one factor necessary to access credit.

Reducing developing world poverty would, of course, be a good unto itself. But when the United States is seen as a leader on such issues, then other countries and publics become more willing to see themselves as benefiting from America’s leading position in global affairs and are more likely to sympathize with our security concerns. Meanwhile, the human potential of the world’s poorest citizens is at the moment probably our most egregiously underutilized resource. If the poorest of the poor could more fully participate in the global economy, it would put us all on a path to more stable prosperity.