Back to Sachs: Astrology, Despotism, and Africa

Sachs Debate, Day Eight. Surprised that Sachs did not understand the point about Occam's Razor -- that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler. African poverty is complex, but our theories about it should not have so many complex Buts, Ors, and Excepts that they are impossible to disprove. Ignoring Occam's Razor is how astrologists stay in business. An astrologer might say: "Watch out for strangers, especially those that are short, or dark, or fat." You are likely to have a number of bad encounters with strangers (especially in New York!), and being short or dark or fat covers such a large share of the population that you will likely encounter one such bad stranger sooner or later.

Explaining poverty with a flexible theory of geography when you already know the outcome is similarly easy. First, you notice that Africa had the worst poverty in the world. Second, you notice that Africa also was the only region that had a particular mosquito species, had a lot of landlocked countries, had a particular soil type, had a large share of continent in the tropics, and did not have snowmelt-irrigated agriculture. Third, you define the worst geography as consisting of exactly these mosquitoes, landlocked locations, soil types, tropical locations, and non-snowmelt-irrigated fields. Fourth, presto, you have proven that the worst geography causes the worst poverty!

(Some of the above are bad, but there are many bad things in the world, and only such a four-step exercise guarantees that you will predict rightly in hindsight. Try this at home to impress your friends! If they object that you are just using hindsight, tell them they don't understand "complex systems.")

The more general argument why geography is not destiny is what economists call comparative advantage -- you can export what your geography gives you an advantage at, and import what you geography makes you bad at. Rainy countries (Thailand) could export rice (a thirsty crop) and import minerals, and desert countries could export their minerals (Chad) or maybe tourism (Dubai), and import rice. Landlocked countries can always export high value to weight items by air (Swiss watches, Botswana's diamonds). Other geographic problems have their own human adaptations. Sachs contradicts his own geographic determinism by arguing how easy it would be to solve these problems (like bed nets and medicines for malaria). When such adaptation to a geographic problem fails, there is usually some kind of social barrier to problem-solving.

One such social barrier is a bad government -- like a government that fails to deliver the bed nets and malaria medicines -- a factor that Sachs still refuses to do justice. Sachs' admission that Zimbabwe has a bad government is not exactly revolutionary. This continues his longtime reluctance to admit there is bad government in any except a handful of extreme despots. In his UN Millennium Project in 2005, he only named four bad governments: Belarus, Myanmar, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. At the time, he listed 63 poor countries that are "potentially well governed" (a phrase equivalent to calling Paris Hilton "potentially a virgin.") Sachs' list included 5 out of the 7 countries singled out by Transparency International at the time as the most corrupt in the world, and fifteen governments that Freedom House classifies as "not free." Even a despot like the late Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, who so terrorized his country that he renamed the months of the year after himself and his mother, couldn't get into Sachs' bad government club at the time. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia is inexplicably a Sachs darling despite rigging elections, jailing opposition politicians, shooting demonstrators, fielding an army accused of atrocities in the Ogaden, and fomenting corrupt practices that give Ethiopia a ranking on Transparency International of 138th out of 179 countries.

So Sachs' re-admission that Zimbabwe has a bad government does not get us very far. Unlike Sachs' flexible theory of bad geography, the bad government theory is inflexible enough that it is not rigged to pass in advance -- but it does pass this test according to studies by three different and independent groups of economists published in prominent economics journals. All science is essentially about testing one thing -- like bad government -- at a time, but nobody thinks that such testing implies only one thing matters.

The bottom line remains the same -- bad government is a serious obstacle to development, and ignoring bad government is a formula for the same kind of bad aid policy that gave us decades of failure. Isn't it time for a change? Even cash transfers directly to poor people are demonstrably better than cash transfers to poor governments.

 

Follow William Easterly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bill_easterly

Comments

[Michael Strong]

Again, simply brilliant, a concise and effective rejoinder to Sachs' ongoing failure to address the real cause of global poverty, bad government:

In his UN Millennium Project in 2005, he only named four bad governments: Belarus, Myanmar, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. At the time, he listed 63 poor countries that are "potentially well governed" (a phrase equivalent to calling Paris Hilton "potentially a virgin.") Sachs' list included 5 out of the 7 countries singled out by Transparency International at the time as the most corrupt in the world, and fifteen governments that Freedom House classifies as "not free."

[FixingAfrica]

Mr. Easterly, if you have 5 minutes I would be honored if you download my free e-book at www.fixingafrica.com.

One of the lessons of the Internet is that crowd power and bottom up movements can achieve a lot. It is time to expand the debate beyond the usual suspects (World Bank/IMF, UN, African Union, a few academics...).

I am the author of Fixing Africa, once and for all. The website www.fixingafrica.com provides a forum where bold ideas about Africa can emerge. One of the goals is to get 1,000 contributors in each African country as well as countries where the diaspora has an important presence, and ask their opinion. Usually experts (and Joe Sixpack) tell Africans what they should do, they don't ask our opinion.

Sincerely,

Jeff

[Nommo]

Any "astrologer" that dispenses such advice is to be deplored. Try not to make analogies of what you don't comprehend. Anyone who seeks such advice is to be deplored as well as exploited. Any such notions of "burdens" and saving people are old and should have long been discredited as the imperialist lies that they are. If such burdens justify mass murder and land appropriations as well as the outright theft of resources then the truth of such affairs is where we need to begin.

Nothing has changed. The bad gov't syndrome has returned home to roost. Seems to me that the time to pull of the covers is now. The problem is, having lived for so long off of stolen goods, when one's own goods are stolen, it is already too late. Who, for example, really owns GM now?

[avam2009]

Also.....

Title plagarised?? are you trying to be obtuse? Of COURSE it is rudyard kipling - it is (and means to be) using the poem by Rudyard (and the poem is printed in full in the book's opening pages) - as an ironic nod to how racist/colonial the original thought (that Africa could ever be a "white man's burden") was at the time. Indeed - in very simplistic terms - the point of Easterly (and Moyo - an african woman) is that it is not Up to the west to determine Africa's future, nor to 'save them' - and that as humans on this planet we are all equal , regardless of gender, colour, religion, ethnicity - and that where some people lead less fortunate lives, it is up to all of us (including those in the less developed nations) to get involved and offer help where it can do some good, but that ALSO there are complex issues about aid flows and bad government that can prevent any real substantial change....and that looking at why some areas are not developing or are stagnant is what needs looking at.

To Natturnnex - please see point above.

[avam2009]

Excellent response Mr. Easterly - fully agree.

Re: Ahn Amuru...???? 1) the point about keeping things simple (Occam's Razor) is precisly to pinpoint the actual reasons stunting development (I suggest you familiarise yourslef with the substantial body of work by Easterly, as well as Sachs - to fully understand the debate.)
2) The point that bad govenrmnt does not fully 'write off' developmnt is true in some cases (where a government, with no transparancy or democratic freedoms etc, could ensure other human needs - food, shelter) - but this is an exception, and again, easterly does not discount this fact in his books.
3) Your expectation that a complex body work can fully mention all countries in a short Huffington Post op-ed type response is ludicrous. Again, read the books, look at actual studies undertaken (by both Sachs and Easterly) - but don't expect to get a thorough and complex discussion of the issues surrounding aid from a short essay.
4) I'm sorry - why is the first paragraph inappropriate????

[AhnAmuru]

Following that logic would lead one to conclude, for instance, that the reason GM is in it's current predicament is due to "bad management" or the similarly "logical" inference that "the leading cause of divorce is marriage!" - true, but overly simplistic.

Aggregating a range of problems in a simplistic explanation strikes me as something to be left to pundits, not scholars.

What was Mr. Ockham thinking! How did he survive the tower!

[natturnerx]

to the right of the web page we see a listing of books by the blogger, including : "the white man's burden : why the west's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good" by william easterly.

ahh... so we have finally found the missing link in the evolution from 19th century western colonialist ideology to 21st century western neocolonialist humanitarian interventionist ideology. cecil rhodes would be so proud that his tradition of condescension continues.

[AhnAmuru]

Title plagiarized from Rudyard Kipling - of all people.

[William Easterly - Huffpost Blogger]

AhnAmuru, see my other reply that this was a sarcastic reference. And Rudyard Kipling is explicitly cited as the source of the quote on the first page of the book.

[William Easterly - Huffpost Blogger]

Natturnex: please do me the honor of glancing through the book. You will see that the "White Man's Burden" reference is sarcastic, deploring exactly the condescension that you don't like either.

[natturnerx]

mr easterly, i'm sure the book's title was meant to be wink-wink ironic, but if its thesis is along the lines of the essay above, then it probably ended up doing more to support the philosophy of 19th century colonialists than debunking it. what could your "bad government" theory be, but an update of the "they cant govern themselves" theory? i truly suspect that development problems in africa have more to do with the neo-liberal economic model foisted on them from abroad than the decisions of their leaders trying to adapt that alien model to their cultures. i read an article, some time back, about how the imf advised zambia to dismantle the grain silo that they used to store a reserve supply of grain. supposedly, having that excess grain stored up suppressed market forces in their agricultural sector & depressed prices & farmer incentives. so the zambians blew up the silo. well, whaddayu know - along comes a drought. normally the zambian gvt would have dispensed grain from the silo to tide people over - but there was no silo. so what would have been a manageable drought turned into a disaster bordering on famine & requiring massive foreign aid. i'm sure episodes like that are common, but the narrative we hear is such&such african leader is stealing from his people, as we drink pepsi sweetened with subsidized iowa high-fructose corn syrup, while cheaper african sugar is blocked from our market. but so it goes...

[AhnAmuru]

Dude!

What a muddled puzzle!

Without any helpful basis for measuring development, the writer relies on obfuscation - lumping together incompatible countries to emphasize a shallow point - a simplicity theory.

Point in issue - bad government. Simply because a country ends up on an indicator, like transparency, "not free" does not write off their developmental achievements.

Let's test your theory; the "bad government" indicators mentioned also cast China, Russia and Turkey in unfavourable light, yet in the muddled puzzle these aren't even mentioned!

So much for simplicity, dude.

P.S. Your first paragraph is totally inappropriate.

[William Easterly - Huffpost Blogger]

On the first paragraph, I know I am not going to win popularity contests pointing out how statistical explanations can be, and often are, abused so that "evidence" is not real evidence at all. This is called "data mining" in my field -- you try dozens of statistical explanations until you find one that fits the data very well. This is of no value, because with a limited number of data observations, and sufficient flexibility in a convoluted statistical explanation, you will ALWAYS find one that works even if all the data are completely random numbers. So this kind of data analysis is close to what astrologers do.