iConverge through iZation

After years of taking a number of courses on International Development from a variety of professors from a variety of fields, I've developed the ability to figure out what professors are trying to say with their reading lists. There is no more clear way to discern a professors ideological leanings than the reading list they present when trying to provide a comprehensive look at development. What's excluded or what's relegated to the "recommended" list is particularly glaring.

This week, we were given a variety of readings, all of which somewhat critical of development policy for somewhat varying reasons. We'd already read some stuff from the World Bank so I consider that point of view at least somewhat addressed.
A few notable absences:
Critique of the foundations of policy, or any real attempt to define what's in the way.
Several authors talked about "bottom-up" strategies. But, in Rodrik for instance, bottom-up refers to policies developed by the countries that are subjects of development policy. While this is certainly not the same as policy developed by the countries administering aid, it is not the same thing as policy developed by the people within this country. That is, it implies that if governments have total control, they will make the best decision.
Mamdani cleverly sets aside the question of socialism versus capitalism at the very beginning of his paper, and procedes to use a more marxist perspective of how economies work. The nice thing about this is suddenly you have discussion about communities. Mamdani discusses battling inflation and mentions that you can do it by cutting demand or increasing supply, and that they have different effects, a fact neo-classical economists regularly overlook. Mamdani also manages to critique trickle down theory, another weird off shoot of neo-classical economics.

I will argue, probably later, that what's missing from most discussions of development policy is not only a notion of what development is, but also a discussion of the real subjects of development policy. This is no more the country itself than a corporation is a person. People are ultimately the subjects of development policy. This brings in a whole wealth of questions I will discuss in some other post.



I am going to try very hard to post once a week here for the rest of the semester (God willing). I had a very in depth post going with serious summaries around each reading for this week, but it became completely over whelming. So instead what I'm going to do is pose this question, and then offer some links and citations.

The Question:
What do we mean by development?

Background:
Given that development policy is the programs, regulation, and aid that is delivered to inspire development, we can now distinguish between the two.
Development is good. Necessary. Something important to be attained.
Development policy may be good, but it may also be harmful. It may be working it may not. It is often delivered in a variety of different ways backed by different theories from different organizations.

Problem:
How do we generate effective development policy without identifying what we mean by development?

Preparation:
First, we attribute a word to development. This word is convergence. We expect the (developing countries/global south/third world) to converge with the (developed countries/global north/first world). We are surprised that it hasn't.
In what way do we want the former to converge to the latter? ERROR: not defined.
Okay, well, let's use "living standards." This is also poorly defined but most people (or at least most "developed" folks) have a vague conception of what this means. So, let's say in terms of living standards, the "developed" and the "developing" world do not look the same.

Method:
Second, we answer the following questions:
a) What is standing in the way of convergence?
b) How do we correct for this problem?

Data:
i) a) corruption. b) Democratization.
ii) a) agricultural economy. b) Industrialization.
iii) a) "primitive". b) Modernization.
iv) a) rural communities. b) Urbanization.
v) a) closed markets. b) Liberalization.
vi) a) culture. b) Westernization.
vii) a) lack of opportunity. b) Globalization.
viii) a) aid. b) Stop aid. (sorry, lost form.)
ix) a) colonialism, extractive development policy, neo-liberal world order. b) ERROR: not defined.

Readings:

Easterly, W. "Aid or Folly: Are the billions in aid to Africa helping or hurting?"Youtube. Al Jazeera English, 30 May 2007. Web. 4 February 2012.

Mamdani, M. “Contradictions of the IMF Programme and Perspective,” Development and Change, Vol. 21, no.3, pps.427-67, 1990.

Rodrik, D., One Economics Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth, Princeton University Press, 2007 a.

Add'l Resources:
Collier, P. Ted. Ted, May 2008. Web. 4 February 2012.
Rodrik, D. "One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth." IMF Book Forum. International Monetary Fund, New York, NY. 28 November 2007. Web. 29 January 2012.

Guns, Germs, Steel, and Diamond.

This is the second time in my education that I've been asked to read a review or response to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. For whatever reason, the book itself has never appeared on my reading list. To me this implies that this book is easily summarized if you're not actually interested in the history of it and that, more important than its explanatory power is the debates it brings up (at least among economists and agents of development).

The last time I didn't read Jared Diamond's book was my senior year in college in Development and Poverty, an Economics Course taught by Professor Nathan Nunn. Instead, he appeared in a text book (Weil, David N. 2005. Economic Growth, 1st edition. New York: Addison Wesley. ), summarizing his argument.

For those like myself who have not read Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond argues that the reason why Eurasia (and especially Europe) conquered the rest of the world was for largely geographic reasons. That is, the climate was more favorable to fixed agriculture which many historians argue started civilization or something. I've been hearing this argument and not entirely understanding what "civilization" is and how "agriculture started it" since 9th grade. But I digress. Anyway, that gave Europeans the time to focus on other pursuits like making weapons. Naturally.

In Poverty and Development, Diamond entered the conversation because, when dealing with economic development, you run into this question of how did this happen? Citing the assignment I wrote dealing with this question (instead of going back to the articles (cough)), Sachs and Sachs and Malaney favor the geography explanation, while Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson attribute the underdevelopment of Africa to European colonialist strategies. Professor Nunn also has done some fascinating work on the subject all available here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/nunn/papers_nunn

Currently, I am not reading Diamond and instead reading a debate he and William H. McNeill had on the New York Review of Books in 1997. Diamond's explanation is the same as above. He concludes with the important caveat that leaving colonialism unexplained lets people invent racist explanations in their heads implicit or explicitly for the domination of the global south by the global north and the all-but-complete eradication of Native American culture. By so-doing he creates a brilliant buffer around his argument. "Don't disagree with me, World," Diamond seems to challenge, "that's racist!"

McNeill seems to concede that environmental factors do play a role, while also sticking to his claim that cultural autonomy is an important role as well.

Without having read any of McNeill's work (or, really, Diamond's either) I find him more convincing.

"Racist!" Jared Diamond yells from across time and space.

Well, that's one way to look at it, but what I think is most fascinating about Diamond's argument that "In the absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture (1997)" is what you have to take for granted to make that conclusion. I do think, without any evidence whatsoever, that many people do invent some explanation in their minds that Europeans were some bestowed with an innate conquering ability. But what I disagree with is, well, one, that this exists. And then two, that there is anything great about this.

The problem with a lot of historical explanations is the inclination toward ranking. There is a real habit of investigating one pattern of development and then extrapolating that this is necessarily the way cultures, economies, governments, whatever, progress. To say that Europeans surpassed other cultures in development already imposes a Euro-centric value structure.

Were the Europeans more developed? Or did they have a societal structure that favored brutalism? Were Europeans better at warring? Or were they more obsessive toward total annihilation?

I'm not saying that Europeans were the only people who warred against their neighbors, but the nice thing about not having guns is that your enemy then doesn't have guns. I don't know why each civilization fought each war with each neighbor they fought with, but for some reason (historical, cultural, geographical, whatever) the Europeans at that moment in time were intent on being the superior and perhaps only power on the entire globe. Some people sailed for exploration and knowledge, but many more people sailed to conquer. I'm not convinced that we can say with 100% certainty that if the Europeans did not go on a violent rampage for global domination, someone else would have.



Diamond's response to McNeill's response to his book and McNeill's subsequent response can be found here :
Diamond, Jared. 'Guns, Germs, and Steel.' The New York Review Of Books. 26 June 1997. web. 28 January 2012. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jun/26/guns-germs-and-steel/?pagination=false

Other Related Readings.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. (2001). “Reversal of Fortunes,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117, 1231-1294.
Sachs, Jeffrey and Pia Malaney. (2002). “The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria,”
Nature, 415 (6872), 680-685.
Sachs, Jeffrey. (2001). “The Geography of Poverty and Wealth,” Scientific American,
284 (3) March, 70-75.

A year and some later

Welllllll there was an attempt.

Part of the issue I'm having with this blog is the general anxiety I feel as regards citing things. Then time inspiration etc.

Well now I'm in graduate school working on the same problems that I wanted to be working on when I started this. I'm considering using this as a place for response papers. To reflect on readings I've been assigned for a given week as a tool for me to collect my thoughts, while also opening the conversation to a somewhat public forum. And posting whatever readings are available online.

Perhaps in the form of obnoxious opinion pieces.

Which seems like a good outlet given that I may start writing for http://newschooljournal.com/ and it will help me keep the ranty-er aspects of my writing here. Maybe.

Intro 2 & How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Creating this blog was something I did as a coping skill. I have now decided that actually writing in it might have some positive side effects of it's own.

The intent of this blog, no matter what I may have written, is to revisit and summarize old readings from college.

The thought behind this came out of the same part of my mind which favors consumer awareness, the destruction of the "perfect information" assumption in standard economics, and would like to discuss old ideas with new minds.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, though I didn't read it until my junior year in college, seems like the perfect place to start. While Social Anthropologists carry this assumption under their belts, it's a point that seems to be lost on most northern hemisphere global citizens: when Europe colonized Africa, it did so at great expense to the people of Africa, and great benefit to the people of Europe, which created an imbalance in power and money that exists even today.

The reading that we focused on was Chapter 6 from Walter Rodney's book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, entitled "Colonialism as a system for under-developing Africa." Because this is my first attempt and because I am out-of-practice and not entirely interested in recreating my college experience, this post is intended to serve as a summary of Chapter 6 section 1.

The chapter begins by acknowledging argument that while there was an undeniable benefit to colonialists at a cost to the colonized, that it was paid back in social services. This chapter contends that there was absolutely no positive side-effect for Africa out of colonialism. Firstly, because the quantity of what was built was negligible. Secondly, because they to served to eek further resources out of Africa and into the pockets of European colonialists.. 

Similarly to the intent of European colonialists who came to the Americas, colonialists who set up shop in Africa were individuals who could not afford luxury in their own country, and set up a system so they could in Africa. Social services built there by colonialists were used primarily by colonialists.

While health services in Africa did not serve Africans as much as they did Europeans, their health was also being threatened by the newly-imposed labor industries. Mining, a common industry poses tremendous health threats to miners including even scurvy. Also, thanks to the economic system that was set up, Africans working for the colonialists were not paid enough to feed themselves.

Furthermore, social services were only offered to Africans who worked for the profit of the colonialist power. Railroads were only built in locations that helped ship out exports and imports, or to move colonialist troops. Subsistence farmers were not offered assistance, and internal trade was not promoted by railroads. 

In this section, Rodney elaborates on the disturbing bank system that was put into place by the colonialists. Essentially, banks were made primarily for generating even more capital to Europeans at the expense of Africans.  In fact, many of the banks were birthed from the capital made through the slave trade. Banks were even discouraged from issuing any credit in the first place, to insure that the capital flow was from  Africa to Europe.

One of the most interesting points, to me, in the article is in response to those that would contest that services were provided, and they were paid for by the colonialists. To that though, Rodney responds (italics preserved) :

"African workers and peasants produced for European capitalism goods and services of a certain value. A small proportion of the fruits of their efforts were retained by them in the form of wages, cash payments and extremely limited social services, such as were essential to the maintenance of colonialism. The rest went to the various beneficiaries of the colonial system. (232)"

Another commonly claimed benefit to colonialism is introducing capitalism to Africa. The problem here, as Rodney sees it, is that capitalism as a discrete system is not what Africa received. Instead, the African economy received "capitalist elements" that went up against existing societal standards in a destructive way. Rather than interacting on a purely monetary basis, challenges were put up against familial ties.

Capitalism consists of a working and a capital-owning class. Africans were not afforded the opportunities to own factories or in any other way join that class. Rodney describes the capitalism of Europe as "one of competition, elimination and monopoly. (236)" 

To Rodney, the most surprising failure in bringing capitalism to Africa is the failure to create a modern working class with any level of self-sufficient skill in the industrial market. In that sense, industrialization was not entirely introduced either.  Jobs requiring technical expertise were reserved for European ex-patriots. More advanced labor was done off the continent, and as a result, Africa still imported many finished goods. Since Africa offered Europeans a great deal of man-power, that was used in exchange of advanced technology. meaning "far too many Africans were crowded on to inadequate land, and were forced to engage in intensive farming, using techniques that were suitable only to shifting cultivation.  In practice, that was a form o technical retrogression, because the land yielded less and less and became destroyed in the process. (239)"

Because wages were low, many farmers continued subsistence farming to feed and clothe their family, but still needed to generate a profit in order to pay taxes. Brute force is what kept people from revolting.

Rodney also discounts claims that colonialism brought nationalism or independence. He refuses theories that it was the "initiative" of Africans to move into the labor industry.

The section ends thus: "Bourgeois liberty, equality and fraternity was not for colonial subjects. Africans had to make do with bayonets, riot-acts and gunboats (244)."

In terms of my own opinion, while I agree with most of Rodney's points, I see the failure to fully implement capitalism as a great luck rather than a failure, as it presents the opportunity now to preserve or revisit positive aspects of alternate economies. Though I do concede that it allowed for a really unfortunate starting point post-independence.

Maybe next time I will revisit this point from an economic perspective.

The full text of the book can be found at: http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was born in Georgetown, Guyana. He was awarded a PhD with honors in African Studies at the age of 24. His dissertation, titled A History of the Upper-Guinea Coast was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.

I know citations are few, but I'm still determining the proper process for this blog. Comments welcome.

Mission:

In a coffee shop in Seattle, another 20-something creates a blog.

Graduating from college with a degree in Economics, the newly-initiated (to the fellowship of educated women and men) finds herself happy, in love, at home, and struggling.

Having had to penny-pinch her whole life, she is now struggling to make decisions like: is it cheaper for her and her boyfriend to take the bus and occasionally be stranded, or pay for parking and gas? Can she go out with friends and have a beer, or will that interfere with her electricity bill? Quite frankly, her household is making the decision to live on mostly rice so that they can keep their shelter, electricity, mobility, and (occasionally and only if they're lucky) sociability.

It's not a problem. "The worst that can happen, is someone can take us to court and prove we're poor."

I suppose it's worth asking what makes her feel so entitled to have a roof over her head? 

It's a loaded question motivated by a loaded word: entitled. In college, it had to do with people who seemed to think others should move around them. They were entitled to having people clean up after them, standing in particular spots in the hall, straight A's, and a few people were even entitled to the sex organs of others.

Here, it reflects the idea that someone's worth is measurable by their earnings(1), and also the idea that a shelter is a human right. I tend to reject the first and accept the latter. This hypothetical woman we've been talking about (me) works hard. 6-7 days a week if she can get it. She's trying not to give up on her dream of being a socially responsible economist-researcher and take up volunteer and un-paid internship positions, but her financial standing doesn't really give her that luxury. Her boyfriend is trying not to give up on his dream of being a recognized painter/illustrator and also working, despite hours demanded for commissions and shows. They even quit smoking. I guess that means they have to choose between apartment and movies. Internet and food groups.

(1)It is worth debate if that idea exists and is prevalent, I argue that it does and will cite examples in future posts.

I don't think life should revolve around money, but it often does. Whether you have a little or a lot. When you have a little, you have to think about where the money for your financial obligations (mortgages, student loans, children) is going to come from, and what you can afford to live without. When you have a lot, you have to think about where to invest it, if it will all be gone in a flash, and who has more than you.

There are several professors, researchers, professionals, who believe this is a silly way to do things. Amongst them people reject it, or try to work within it. Some call themselves socialists even though they know they'll be laughed at. Some fight off the name Economist, some cling to it. The point is, there are people who are well-acquainted with standard economic thought (the philosophy that mandates economic decision making at the national and international level) and reject it. Respected or Respectable Academics. My mission is to collect and highlight their points and hope to give them a little more voice, while also lamenting my not-so-bad existence, combining the two worst forms of blogging: Pedantic and Angst-Ridden.