Quickstops (Sep 27, 2005)

- Continuing on a theme previously blogged (here and here), William Easterly takes utopian thinking to task in the realm of development and aid in his article, "The Utopian Nightmare" (Foreign Policy, Sep/Oct 2005):

Indeed, we have seen the failure of what was already a “big push” of foreign aid to Africa. After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths.

With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good, much less attain Utopia? They get the political and economic incentives all wrong. The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t. A more subtle problem is that if all of us are collectively responsible for a big world goal, then no single agency or politician is held accountable if the goal is not met. Collective responsibility for world goals works about as well as collective farms in agriculture, and for the same reason.

When everyone is responsible for X, no one is responsible for X (someone tell Peter Singer).

- A "must read" according to Simon, with Eaglespeak concurring--"China must wait for democracy", by Spengler (Asia Times, Sep 27):

Democracy requires an act of faith, or rather a whole set of acts of faith. The individual citizen must believe that a representative sitting far away in the capital will listen to his views, and know how to band together with other citizens to make their views known. That is why so-called civil society, the capillary network of associations that manage the ordinary affairs of life, is so essential to democracy. Americans elect their local school boards, create volunteer fire brigades and raise and spend tax dollars at the local level to provide parks or sewers. But the most important sort of faith required for democracy to succeed is the willingness to lose. Governments decide upon issues that affect the lives and livelihoods of their citizens - wars, taxation, health care and so forth. A majority of Americans appears to believe that the Bush Administration has bungled the Iraq War, but only a handful of fanatics question the president's authority to conduct the war according to his best judgment. Even when the American government does things that most citizens oppose, the sanctity of elected authority outweighs the particular issue at hand. That is, Americans have faith that good sense will prevail over time and that a majority of their fellow citizens eventually will come to the right conclusion and elect better leaders.

The faith that underlies constitutional politics as it originated in the Anglo-Saxon world stemmed from a religious faith. America did not assign democratic rights to its citizens because it aspired for a more efficient market for public goods, but rather because Americans believed in a God who championed the poor and downtrodden, who could not help but hear the cry of the widowed and fatherless. It is possible that an enlightened but non-religious view of the rights of man, on the French model, might produce the same political result, but no sane person would want to repeat the political experience of France.

I do not propose that the Chinese must become Congregationalists before they can practice democracy. But political faith presumes a deeper sort of faith in the inherent worth of the humblest of one's fellow-citizens.

See also these earlier posts on related themes.