pretty much a perfect blog post
Yep, pretty much.
"I've been giving you 20 cents a week for years now, and you're still poor - you must have squandered my generous help".
Awesome.
Yeah, that line tied it all up perfectly.
Check out our lovely and cherished collection of concern trolls by the way - "Swiss bank accounts" has been mentioned about five times already.
Concern trolls that can't read, since the point of the post isn't 'aid alone will fix all of Africa's problems' but that 'bitching about the amount of aid sent as if it were proof of anything makes you a douche.'
"... informative, engaging, clarifying, convincing."
Only if you already agree with him, I thought the post was basically content free.
7: I believe three of four of those words are objectively true. "Convincing" is debatable obviously.
7: Here's the content.
1. Numbers are frequently presented in ways that confuse the issue.
2. Here's a non-confusing way to look at aid to Africa.
3. The amount of aid given to Africa, when looked at in this non-confusing way, is not very big.
Do you not think the post said these things?
CT's lovely collection of concern trolls drives me batshit insane. D2, why do you come over here and yell at us about spanking instead of whupping the crap out of your commenters, as they deserve?
I sort of promised Henry I would cool it after a particularly violent episode.
Spanking trolls only encourages them.
9
"1. Numbers are frequently presented in ways that confuse the issue.
2. Here's a non-confusing way to look at aid to Africa.
3. The amount of aid given to Africa, when looked at in this non-confusing way, is not very big."
1 is true but trivial. 2 and 3 are unconvincing. In fact the post appears to me to be an illustration of 1. Quiggin wants to turn $500 billion into a small number. So he converts it to time payments a trick well known to sleezy used car salesmen and the like. And he computes it per capita a trick well known to spendthrift politicans. The computation isn't even correct since the population of Africa may be close to 1 billion now but it wasn't 50 years ago. Nor is it clear what adjustments if any have been made for inflation. Furthermore he does not compare the amount of aid to the size of African economies as should done if you are arguing it was a drop in the bucket.
Quiggin wants to turn $500 billion into a small number
How much has been spent on trying to get Iraq into functioning status? How big is Iraq compared to Africa?
13: In fairness to Quiggin, neither does the other side. "Money spent on aid" doesn't generally exclude "money for warfare", or distinguish between countries.
Ok, but you called the post "almost content-free." There are different ways in which a piece of writing can have problems, and the problem of making claims which you think are wrong is a different one from the the problem of not containing any information.
14
A comparison to an even bigger and stupider waste of money is a pretty desperate defense. Of course it is correct that if you trying to eliminate waste from the US budget the war in Iraq is the obvious place to start.
16
Dividing by 2.5 trillion to make a number look smaller does not add any useful information.
James, you'd have to show that the adjustments you suggest in 13 make a difference to Quiggin's larger point that the money spent on Africa has actually not been very much. My suspicion is that even with adjustments, his point stands, and so it's still an excellent post.
it's still an excellent post.
Also useful in separating the people who want to argue "Aid isn't the right way to talk about helpfully engaging with people in Africa" from those who want to argue "Those people shouldn't get any more of my money."
19
According to Wikipedia nominal per capita gdp is $45594 for the United States, $825 for Nigeria and $161 for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire). So while $10 per capita per year is .02% of US output, a fairly trivial amount, it is 1.2% of Nigerian output and 6.2% of the output of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These later amounts do not seem trivial to me.
As regards trlls, I've disemvowelled Dn Smn, in the hope that his cnsnntl rmns will deter others.
James, you've contradicted yourself in about as many ways as its possible to do. As wd notes, you've claimed the post is both content-free and wrong, which is silly enough to suggest that you should adopt a more humble tone in future. You've made no argument, beyond vehement assertion and abuse, that the cumulative total provides more useful information than the change in per capita weekly income. Its not my problem if those quoting the big number haven't made adjustments for inflation. On any remaining substantive points, what ogged said at #19 .
that the cumulative total provides more useful information than the change in per capita weekly income.
Surely the claim isn't that it provides more useful information. It's the exact same information. In neither case is it particularly useful. If you want to answer the question "have we given enough aid to africa to be a proof of its effectiveness" it's not clear that citing either number is going to help. You'd actually have to look at how the aid was provided and what it was trying to do.
You say in your post:
Much more useful in thinking about the likely impact of aid is the amount per person per week.
Is it really? Why? If aid is meant to serve as a living stipend, or as as access to capital that enables people to escape a poverty-trap, then maybe this is useful. If the purpose is to build roads and water systems, maybe not.
Is it really? Why?
Because it gives us a more intuitive sense of how much money we're talking about. Ten billion dollars is a big number, but I don't have much of a sense of what that gets you in infrastructure, health care, and police. But I do know that if I and my neighbors each paid only twenty cents per week into government coffers, our society would go to hell, and that's true even granting all the infrastructure that already exists here.
If you want to answer the question "have we given enough aid to africa to be a proof of its effectiveness" it's not clear that citing either number is going to help.
I think it's best to think of this as a threshold argument. If we'd given significant aid, then your questions would be appropriate, but I took the post to be making a more basic point: there's no way the amount given could have had much of an effect.
24
"I think it's best to think of this as a threshold argument. If we'd given significant aid, then your questions would be appropriate, but I took the post to be making a more basic point: there's no way the amount given could have had much of an effect."
And if that was the point, then in view of 21 the point was wrong.
I'm not sure how that follows, James. I don't read "do not seem trivial to me" to be equivalent to "is a significant investment in the society." But I'll defer to John Q on the specifics.
If we'd given significant aid, then your questions would be appropriate
I think this is still in dispute, and that Quiggin's calculation doesn't help us much. I know that on this question (crudely) Jeff Sachs says no we haven't and Bill Easterly says yes we have. I tend to incline mildly Sachsian myself -- in my preferred policy and in my selections of charity. But I really don't think the argument is going to be answered by looking at the lump sum, or dividing the lump sum by 50 years and 1 billion people. (although were I politicking for more aid, I'd definitely do the latter). Indeed, the article Quiggin links does a more balanced job than just say "$500B, holy cow!."
Quiggin's post makes perfect sense, and is specifically directed at the argument "With all that aid, why haven't things improved?"
The preexistent answers still are relevant, however. Some of the aid was grafted and squandered, and some was military aid -- which is economically worthless at best, and economically harmful if there's an actual war. Some of it was also primarily intended, one way or another to buy favors for the giver, and was effectively a bribe to governmental leaders, regardless of however it may have been officially labelled.
26
Relative to the size of the economy the amount is equivalent to current annual investment in the US (assuming US population of 300 million) of $166 billion (Nigeria) or $849 billion (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Are you claiming this would not be a significant investment?
29: If I follow what you've done here, it seems like you're multiplying a small number to make it seem bigger, rather like what you accuse ct of doing.
In any case, if the smallish amount of aid we've given Africa seems large relative to the economies of of the recipient nations, that really just goes to show they they're really quite poor. Big surprise there.
For my money (literally!), microlending is the way to go, and kiva is my preferred middleman at the moment. Suggestions for alternatives are welcome.
A comparison to an even bigger and stupider waste of money is a pretty desperate defense.
We're not allowed to compare attempts at economic development between once place and another? This game is rigged.
23: It is enlightening though, against a certain sort of argument that would say "We've given $500 billion to Africa in aid, and they're still poor! $500 billion!!! If those [haughty sniff] people can't make it on that, they're obviously too dumb to bother with", to point out that we haven't given all that much.
To conclude from there that all we need to solve Africa's problems is more money would be foolish, but Quiggin doesn't do that as near as I can tell.
You're right, James. If my annual family income is $10k, and you give me an additional $2k, then my annual family income is a whopping $12k!!! Why would we still be poor?
Relative to the size of the economy the amount is equivalent to current annual investment in the US (assuming US population of 300 million) of $166 billion (Nigeria) or $849 billion (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Are you claiming this would not be a significant investment?
why stop there? relative to the size of the economy of the entire OECD over the next millennium it is equal to (to an estimation error) a gazilion trillion dollars!
Quiggin's absolutely right that any argument about the size or amount of aid to Africa carrying any information at all about why aid succeeds or fails. The amount is very small. That doesn't say that a lot more would succeed, but to say that the amount is huge and therefore aid is a demonstrable failure for that reason is stupid.
30
"In any case, if the smallish amount of aid we've given Africa seems large relative to the economies of of the recipient nations, that really just goes to show they they're really quite poor. Big surprise there."
The problem is not just that they are poor, it is that they are failing to grow. The failure to grow cannot be attributed to the fact that the aid was insignificant, as Quiggin tries to do, if in fact the aid was significant relative to the size of the recipient nations.
33
See 36, the problem is not that African nations are still poor, it is that they are failing to grow despite substantial aid.
to James B. Shearer,
Aid has NOT been substantial. Full stop. Doubtless one could find some examples where it has or (more likely) some time periods in certain countries, and no doubt 20 cents per week goes much further in a developing country than in the US, but this does not meaningfully change my first sentence. If you spend time engaging the bottom 80% of people in a variety of developing countries, you would find that even $1 per week would not allow them to eat well, deal with medical crises, or adequately invest in education. All this is before mentioning that any conversation regarding the absolute amount of aid given in the past 60 years should center on political and military and natural disaster aid as those were the primary reasons the world gave aid over this time period. These reasons may be well and good, but they are not poverty-alleviation reasons. For example, check the massive amounts of aid we gave to Egypt, the Congo, and Somalia. It is absurd to suggest that our reasons for giving this aid were poverty alleviation. Not surprisingly then, they didn't alleviate poverty.
Your comment that the problem is African nations' failure to grow is on point, to a degree. In some very poor countries or in some countries torn apart by regional conflict and/or natural disasters, the problem is also that their current level of income is inhumane. Nevertheless, how to give aid in order to spur economic growth is a difficult question that I'm not even sure I can start with here (given that the thread may be dead anyway). However, this is a different issue than whether or not we have given them substantial aid. The "despite substantial aid" part of your last post is inaccurate and your stubborn refusal to acknowledge that makes me doubt that you really care much about the problems African nations confront with economic growth.
(And yes, I've read Easterly, and I appreciate much of what he has to say, but this is one of his weakest arguments, and he uses a handful of rhetorical tricks to get around it.)
38
"Aid has NOT been substantial"
It appears to me it was relative to the amount of capital these countries were capable of producing internally and thus should have been enough to promote growth. Whether much of the aid was wasted or not intended to promote growth are different issues than whether the amount of the aid was enough to make a difference. And note the material aid is just part of the assistence given Africa. There is also the massive transfer of knowledge which all other things being equal should allow backward countries to grow faster than and catch up to the advanced nations.