The [Middle] of Poverty

The history of foreign aid and charitable giving is riddled with examples of well-intentioned westerners making things worse. NYU economist William Easterly has made a career out of pointing this out, highlighting in two books I've (um.. halfway) read about how giant, top-down, state-based aid pushes that get a ton of attention are lazy, ineffectual and often harmful (he supports grass roots, bottom-up approaches instead).. and are essentially reincarnations of messianic colonial motivations.

And now Easterly has a blog:

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is.

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We fiercely debate domestic spending bills that waste affluent taxpayers’ money with a few millions on a bridge to nowhere, so why should we be NICE when the head of the world’s premier aid agency outlines virtually zero accountability for helping the world’s poorest people?

He's an important voice in an interesting conversation.. and he at least partly makes sense.

It makes people feel good when the UN launches a program to cut poverty in half, or when rock star economists like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs travel the world with Bono and Angelina Jolie touting books like his famous The End of Poverty. People want to believe in big ideas and pushes, especially if someone else (governments) does the dirty work for them. But it doesn't necessarily mean the big ideas work. Every ten years poverty becomes trendy, someone puts on a big concert, countries pledge big money to meet big goals, and planning starts for the next inevitable big concert ten years down the road.

But Sachs is undeniably a heavyweight, and makes several salient counter-arguments. And the debate touched off an ongoing, somewhat contentious (albeit important) back and forth between the two. Other respectable economists we read in development classes jumped in (Jagdish Bhagwati thinks they're both wrong, Amartya Sen thinks Easterly makes good, but overblown points).

The result, if you follow it casually, is a bit dizzying and dismaying. If the world's smartest people can't agree on clear actions for attacking poverty, and if misguided (even if well-intentioned) action can only make things worse, why try?

But at least the blogosphere is making these debates more accessible and dynamic.. and a lively exchange of ideas seems like the right place to start.