I’m toying around with a new, regular post. The Daily Quarrel will be a short summary and links for virtual spats between bloggers. I’m going to post a new one every day, Monday through Friday. I think it’ll be a fun feature because it’ll allow you to see the forest before diving into the trees and getting a good idea of what each participant in said spat has got their undergarments in a twist about. Let me know what you think.
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Today’s daily quarrel concerns aid to Africa. One of my favorite economics blogs, Free Exchange, brought this squabble to my attention in the daily link exchange.
Here’s some background to get your feet wet. Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian born economist whose previous employers include the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. She wrote the New York Times Bestseller Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa.
Jeffrey Sachs, who is an economics professor at Columbia University, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post that refutes Moyo’s ideas about aid. Sachs is a well-known advocate of aid and wrote a book of his own that addresses aid called The End of Poverty. In his HuffPo piece he names Moyo and another prominent economist, William Easterly, personally. In fact, he doesn’t use the word hypocrite, but he spells it out pretty clearly for the reader.
“The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in opposing aid, Bill Easterly, received large-scale government support from the National Science Foundation for his own graduate training.
I certainly don’t begrudge any of them the help that they got. Far from it. I believe in this kind of help. And I’d find Moyo’s views cruel and mistaken even she did not get the scholarships that have been reported (Easterly mentioned his receipt of NSF support in the same book in which he denounces aid). I begrudge them trying to pull up the ladder for those still left behind. Before peddling their simplistic concoction of free markets and self-help, they and we should think about the realities of life, in which all of us need help at some time or other and in countless ways, and even more importantly we should think about the life-and-death consequences for impoverished people who are denied that help.” link
Moyo and Easterly both hit back.
Moyo responded by saying:
“Finally, with respect to Mr. Sachs’ remark that I would see nothing wrong with denying US$10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malarial bed net — even labeling me as cruel; I say, if working towards a sustainable solution where Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby creating jobs for Africans and a real chance for continents economic prospects) rather than encouraging all and sundry to dump malaria nets across the continent (which incidentally, put Africans out of business), then I am guilty as charged. Don’t forget that the over 60 percent of Africans that are under the age of 24 need jobs not sympathy.” link
Easterly responded with a piece at HuffPo as well. He points out that Sachs quoted him in one of his books that concerns aid.
“Sachs complained that ‘most Americans know little about the many crucially successful aid efforts, because Moyo, Easterly, and others lump all kinds of programs — the good and the bad — into one big undifferentiated mass.’ Sachs again prefers another writer whom he quoted in Common Wealth: ‘Foreign aid likely contributed to some notable successes on a global scale, such as dramatic improvement in health and education indicators in poor countries.’
You guessed it — that was me again, illustrating how aid COULD work if only aid agencies were accountable for their actions.“ link
I read each piece in the tiff, but I’m not sure I know where I stand on this. I know that long term solutions, ie teaching people to fish rather than giving them some fish sticks, look to be a better solution. However, I don’t know that I know enough about this issue to hop into the intellectual throwdown. I think my leaning on this is probably informed by my macroeconomics professor at St. Edward’s University, Wani Tombe. He was explaining, to the best of my recollection, that in his home country of Sudan, aid COULD hurt rather than help because the few farmers who were able to scratch some nutrition out of the ground didn’t have a market to sell their goods because of a flood of food aid. It’s something I never thought about before and it’s definitely a topic I’d like to learn more about.
What are y’alls’ thoughts?
