There was but one student of economic development who fully embraced the solutions offered by the polity of the free society, the late Peter Bauer. Amartya Sen, who wrote Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) is a less avid supporter of this view, mixing, as he has done, his championing of substantial free markets with substantial dosages of government intervention. (By "freedom" Sen tends to mean both "freedom from interference" and "freedom to demand public help" via the political, electoral process.)
The bulk of the policy efforts of organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund rely, however, on the belief, propounded by, among others, Columbia Economics Professor Jeffrey Sachs, that often the first step on the road to economic development in countries with inordinate degrees of poverty is substantial donations from Western Countries. That may not always work but it tends to be the beginning. Sachs also advocates, of course, various conditions for making the donations, but he has considerable confidence in their potency.
But Sachs's main point is this: "The poorest countries can't make it on their own. They will need help from the international community to fight malnutrition and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV and malaria. These diseases devastate economies and destabilize societies. Disease control is therefore an economic and security priority, as well as a humanitarian imperative." These ideas lie behind the UN's Millennium Project, aimed at eradicating poverty around the globe. Of course, help to impoverished regions can be useful for a while. Yet, in nearly all the studies of this phenomenon of extreme poverty, scholars tend, in the main, only to search out impersonal factors that impede development, factors such as climate, terrain, disease, ignorance, and so forth. What doesn't seem to find a place in the thinking about world poverty is that people themselves sometimes – even often – are responsible for how they fare. This is clearly evident to us when we consider our own friends, neighbors, acquaintances, so why should it not be so with people in far off lands? (We even know people who are poor deliberately – ascetics and ones who have taken a religious wow of poverty!)
Probably we shy away from considering the poor's own complicity in their poverty because we don't know those far away well enough and we tend to avoid explanations that have a normative component. Instead, scholars tend to rely on general models which invoke causal variables of an impersonal kind, so as to explain poverty. Studies of the phenomena, influenced very much by the tradition of value-free analysis in the social sciences, do not make reference to the merits of the beliefs and conduct of the individuals who experience the poverty.
Yet, we do know that in some cultures certain practices and well entrenched customs develop that stress objectives that are incompatible with economic prosperity. So, for example, wherever people spend most of their time striving to appease mystical deities, worshipping their dead ancestors, seeking pure spiritual salvation or paying respect to their elders, they will not pursue the kind of intense productivity that is likely to get them out of poverty. Indeed, in some cultures many people scoff at such an objective, deeming it to be a distraction from more important matters. Yet they also complain about the poverty! The concerns of people in many such cultures, however, are likely to impede making headway with matters such as their own good health, sufficient education, old age security, and productive career development. In such cultures the effort to erase poverty and all its side effects simply cannot be managed via donations, loans, debt forgiveness and the like. Instead, the people there will have to develop different patters of living, better or more productive habits – or they will just have to go without. Even simply establishing a strong free market infrastructure – private property rights, protection of contracts, and so forth – will not suffice.
One place where this kind of thinking has made an appearance is in the works of some travel writers, such as Jimmy Rogers (Adventure Capitalist [New York: Random House, 2003]) and Paul Theroux, (Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003]). But making the point about cultural and personal habits that thwart prosperity central to the analysis of widespread world poverty is nearly forbidden in formal analyses, by the ways most scholars study such matters, namely, within the framework of value free social science and, more recently, multiculturalism (according to which all culture are equally sound, valid, and may not be criticized for their practices and customs). And this consigns the resulting policy to repeated and frustrating failure and massive wastefulness.
By relying on the method of "donations" – actually, coerced transfers – from wealthy societies the reality of the cause and effect relationship that determines the eradication of poverty is simply going to be hidden from view. Which is not helpful at all, a bit like trying to support the maturation of young adults by always bailing them out when they neglect their financial responsibilities.
February 3, 2004
