In the "Week in Review" section in yesterday's New York Times Stephanie Strom wrote an article on the effects of the growing "tyranny of donors" on charitable organizations. Donors have increasingly earmarked their donations for specific costs, stipulating how they want the charity to spend their money. In the wake of September 11th terrorist attacks, the Red Cross and other charitable organizations, which had raised money in the name of providing services to the victims and their families, were criticized for "diverting" some of those funds back to the organization itself. Since then, following other disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, donors have been more vigilant about stipulating that their donations be used solely for the purposes of relieving those specific disasters. As Strom notes, the Red Cross has also developed tools to help donors do just that, allowing them to set aside their contribution for a strictly defined purpose and committing to notifying the public when the charity has raised enough money for a certain disaster The result? The Red Cross has announced this week that they will be forced to cut their staff due to a $200 million dollar deficit.
So what, if anything, went wrong? Donors have the right, even the responsibility, to ensure that their donations are going to a worthy cause. The controversy last week in Boston surrounding a bogus group that has been (successfully) canvassing for donations in and around Downtown Crossing illustrates the importance of choosing charities carefully and not simply giving to an organization that seems legitimate. So, if donors are taking a more active and engaged approach to giving, isn't that a good thing?
Yes and no. The problem is that donors are always attracted to the "sexy" parts of charitable work, the feeding of starving children or the rebuilding of destroyed homes. Considerably unsexy elements of charitable work, such as overhead or infrastructure costs and workers' salaries, are often of equal or greater importance but will never attract donations. Moreover, charities that work in disaster relief such as the Red Cross tend to receive a lot of donations in the wake of a specific, headline-grabbing disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks. By the time the media and the public are mobilized, the charity has already invested a good deal of money, personnel, and supplies in the affected area. When a disaster strikes, time is all-important. A charity must rush food, water, and medical supplies to a disaster area immediately following the disaster, and it may sometimes send supplies in preparation for a disaster as in the case of a natural disaster like a hurricane. Following Hurricane Katrina, the government and charities were criticized for the slowness of their response given that meteorologists had predicted that the hurricane would strike Louisiana and possibly New Orleans. By the time most people began to give money to the organization, the critical first few days after the disaster had already passed, and while donations were still needed to help the displaced, it was too late to save those that had already perished. In fact, had the charity been allowed to invest the money raised for the 9/11 attacks back into the organization as it had originally hoped, the response to Katrina may have been better. In order to effectively respond to a disaster ahead of time, the Red Cross must have the internal strength and solvency to distribute relief supplies immediately, whether that disaster is on a large scale like Hurricane Katrina or on a small scale like a family displaced by a house fire. When donors give only to the disaster du jour, they are neglecting future disasters and small scale disasters that are ignored by the media. By empowering donors to think only of the disaster du jour, the Red Cross has in effect crippled its ability to respond effectively to these disasters.
The fault here lies with the Red Cross. Allowing donors to have too much say can be just as harmful as ignoring donors' wishes. The example Strom gives of the response to last year's wildfires in California illustrates that problem. Long after the disaster has been managed, the agency still has $6 million to spend only in that specific area forcing it to re-imagine its mission as an organization. There is a balance between ignoring donors' wishes and forcing an organization to be entirely beholden to the capricious "tyranny of donors." We as donors need to be aware of how our money is spent. We should not, however, police every cent of our donation. We can look at general trends of how donated money is spent, read the annual financial report of the organization, and examine the history of success that the charity has or has not had with different interventions. We can withhold money from an organization if it does not live up to our expectations, but in reality a successful charity must spend some money on things like marketing, overhead, and infrastructure to ensure its long-term viability. We need to pay salaries so that competent people can plan and execute disaster relief and then write a report on the experience later so that donors can know how the organization did.
This fact needs to be made explicit to donors so that they are aware that when they give in the wake of any given disaster some of that money is going to be invested in preparation for future disasters. Yesterday the Red Cross responded to the September 11th attacks, today it is responding to a huge fire in Lawrence, Mass., and it is anyone's guess where it will be called tomorrow. In the ad campaign following a disaster, the Red Cross and other similar organizations should make that point. Even after the victims of the immediate disaster are taken care of, a relief organization still needs money so that it can recover the money it invested before the donors were paying attention and make improvements so that it can save more lives in the wake of the next disaster. In the past organizations could get away with being misleading about this, but in this day of "donor intent" and "charitable accountability," they need to be more careful about what they can and cannot promise.
This means having to occasionally say no to donors in order to preserve their organizational credibility, no small feat for a sometimes financially insecure non-profit organization. As Strom notes, some organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders, have been more willing and able to do this than others. CARE's rejection of millions of dollars of government money for ill-conceived food aid programs to Africa last year was another example. The Red Cross' desire to make donors feel more involved in the organization is a good one, but they are going about it the wrong way. What the organization needs to do is better articulate their mission and their responsibility to donors. In the wake of a disaster, let the donors know that their money may be used to prepare for the next disaster or to finance relief to localized disasters that do not grab the attention of the nation but are also deserving of attention. Shareholders of a business help select the leadership of the business, but leave the day to day workings of the business to employees. This is the role of donors in an organization. We should keep a critical eye out to make sure that the organization is using our money well, but stipulating that it can or cannot be used for certain disasters is a bit like allowing shareholders to examine employee expense reports. The organization needs to build trust by doing good work over a long period of time and by being open about its challenges and needs. Donors in turn should respond to these needs and keep an eye on the organization on the macro level. This is a much more effective way to ensure organizational accountability to the donors and to its own stated mission.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
What the Government Owes Workers and Itself
In yesterday's New York Times, Steve E. Landsburg, a provocative writer, columnist, and economics professor at the University of Rochester, wrote an interesting Op-Ed piece responding to some of the frequent attacks on free trade and outsourcing we have heard during this presidential campaign season. Prof. Landsburg rightly concludes that Americans are net winners from free trade--through it we are able to access a greater variety of goods and services at lower prices. Competition is good for the consumer, and the benefits of free trade to countries both rich and poor has been well documented. So why is there still so much resistance to the idea of free trade? When someone loses their job, it is a much more acute loss than is compensated by the gain of lower prices and better goods and services. While we all benefit from free trade (I challenge anyone to try to only buy and use American products for a couple of months; it is pretty hard to find many products that are made and assembled entirely in any one country anywhere), this benefit is not as conspicuous to us. When voting, we are more likely to think about how our friend was laid off last year or how the fifty-year-old factory in town is in danger of closing.
As Landsburg points out, several of the Republican (ostensibly pro-business) candidates for president have articulated, as Landsburg puts it, the"moral mandate" that winners from the system have to compensate the losers through taxpayer-funded programs such as job retraining. Landsburg's response is right, to a point: taxpayers need not fund these programs out of a sense of moral obligation to their neighbors. The government and all of its citizens stand to gain a good deal from funding these programs for even selfish reasons.
As a taxpayer, and one that has not thus far been directly affected by outsourcing or the closing of factories, I would want my government to fund programs such as these because it provides me with a safety net in case my job is ever in danger. An open and comprehensive job training program, much like unemployment benefits, Social Security, and Medicare, is something we fund jointly not necessarily to benefit the poor because we are rich but in part because we know that we can access those funds if something happens and we need support. The casualties of the high tech boom can tell you that it is not only blue collar manufacturing workers who can lose their jobs in this competitive economy. Service sector and high tech jobs like IT support and even hotel booking are being outsourced in droves to places like India with a large highly-educated, English-speaking population. Even jobs which seem secure today may not be in the future. As technology, demand, and prices change anything can happen. Innovation means, to paraphrase Schumpeter, occasionally creatively destroying established businesses and industries. Personally, I would be happy to see some of that money taken out of my pay every two weeks put toward programs like taxpayer-funded job training just as a form of insurance for ME, not merely as a form of altruism toward my unemployed neighbor.
Some people are independently wealthy and will never need these programs. Maybe you are one of those people who is lucky enough to be in that situation, but if so, it is still to your benefit to fund these programs. Programs such as these are good for the economy on a systemic level for several reasons. First, they will help deflect some of the intense political pressure on businesses and politicians to put up protectionist barriers to free trade and innovation in our economy. Perhaps more importantly, this program could be seen as an investment to improve the human capital of the US economy. Companies pay better-qualified and better-educated workers more because they can earn the company more money. As technology changes, we need to make our pool of workers adaptable so that they can easily acquire the skills to give American companies an edge in world competition.
In this respect, the job retraining program is an investment in our future like public schools or libraries. The reason we pay so much attention to the deficiencies in the American public schooling system is, in part, because those educated in America's public schools become the workers of tomorrow. A subsidized job retraining program would not merely help workers get back on their feet. It would also help innovative businesses find workers to fill jobs that may not have existed even five years earlier. The workers of the 1960's might have been surprised to see the role that computers play in the workforce today. I cannot claim to know what the American economy will look like in five, ten, or twenty years, but I imagine that it will be somewhat different than we see today. In five, ten, twenty or thirty years, there will probably be a need for workers with skills that haven't even been invented or named yet. This is why it is in our interest to fund programs like the job retraining program proposed by McCain and Romney. Most of us have taken advantage of public education to get us where we are today. I, for example, attended public schools through my secondary education and received government-funded support like Federal Work Study and subsidized student loans to help me pay for college. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Landsburg received some support for his education from the US government at some point, helping him to get his Ph.D. and become a professor and writer. Programs like public education are good for individual members of society and for the collective whole.
Of course there are some people who do not want to fund programs that do not benefit them directly. I remember some people in my hometown growing up who did not see why their taxes should go to pay for the local schools or library because their family never used them. Some people don't use public transportation, some people don't need Social Security Disability Insurance, some people won't go to public hospitals, and some people never need to use the public court system. I don't own a car, but that doesn't mean that I can stipulate that the government must not spend my tax dollars on paving the highway. In fact, it is to my benefit that the government provide some basic services I don't need to my neighbors because it raises the value of my property, supports the health of my economy, and improves my quality of life. Framing the debate on job retraining as a "moral obligation" to fellow workers misses the point. The most compelling reasons to support these programs stem from the selfish expectation of a basic social safety net and a selfish desire to power the American economy in the future.
As Landsburg points out, several of the Republican (ostensibly pro-business) candidates for president have articulated, as Landsburg puts it, the"moral mandate" that winners from the system have to compensate the losers through taxpayer-funded programs such as job retraining. Landsburg's response is right, to a point: taxpayers need not fund these programs out of a sense of moral obligation to their neighbors. The government and all of its citizens stand to gain a good deal from funding these programs for even selfish reasons.
As a taxpayer, and one that has not thus far been directly affected by outsourcing or the closing of factories, I would want my government to fund programs such as these because it provides me with a safety net in case my job is ever in danger. An open and comprehensive job training program, much like unemployment benefits, Social Security, and Medicare, is something we fund jointly not necessarily to benefit the poor because we are rich but in part because we know that we can access those funds if something happens and we need support. The casualties of the high tech boom can tell you that it is not only blue collar manufacturing workers who can lose their jobs in this competitive economy. Service sector and high tech jobs like IT support and even hotel booking are being outsourced in droves to places like India with a large highly-educated, English-speaking population. Even jobs which seem secure today may not be in the future. As technology, demand, and prices change anything can happen. Innovation means, to paraphrase Schumpeter, occasionally creatively destroying established businesses and industries. Personally, I would be happy to see some of that money taken out of my pay every two weeks put toward programs like taxpayer-funded job training just as a form of insurance for ME, not merely as a form of altruism toward my unemployed neighbor.
Some people are independently wealthy and will never need these programs. Maybe you are one of those people who is lucky enough to be in that situation, but if so, it is still to your benefit to fund these programs. Programs such as these are good for the economy on a systemic level for several reasons. First, they will help deflect some of the intense political pressure on businesses and politicians to put up protectionist barriers to free trade and innovation in our economy. Perhaps more importantly, this program could be seen as an investment to improve the human capital of the US economy. Companies pay better-qualified and better-educated workers more because they can earn the company more money. As technology changes, we need to make our pool of workers adaptable so that they can easily acquire the skills to give American companies an edge in world competition.
In this respect, the job retraining program is an investment in our future like public schools or libraries. The reason we pay so much attention to the deficiencies in the American public schooling system is, in part, because those educated in America's public schools become the workers of tomorrow. A subsidized job retraining program would not merely help workers get back on their feet. It would also help innovative businesses find workers to fill jobs that may not have existed even five years earlier. The workers of the 1960's might have been surprised to see the role that computers play in the workforce today. I cannot claim to know what the American economy will look like in five, ten, or twenty years, but I imagine that it will be somewhat different than we see today. In five, ten, twenty or thirty years, there will probably be a need for workers with skills that haven't even been invented or named yet. This is why it is in our interest to fund programs like the job retraining program proposed by McCain and Romney. Most of us have taken advantage of public education to get us where we are today. I, for example, attended public schools through my secondary education and received government-funded support like Federal Work Study and subsidized student loans to help me pay for college. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Landsburg received some support for his education from the US government at some point, helping him to get his Ph.D. and become a professor and writer. Programs like public education are good for individual members of society and for the collective whole.
Of course there are some people who do not want to fund programs that do not benefit them directly. I remember some people in my hometown growing up who did not see why their taxes should go to pay for the local schools or library because their family never used them. Some people don't use public transportation, some people don't need Social Security Disability Insurance, some people won't go to public hospitals, and some people never need to use the public court system. I don't own a car, but that doesn't mean that I can stipulate that the government must not spend my tax dollars on paving the highway. In fact, it is to my benefit that the government provide some basic services I don't need to my neighbors because it raises the value of my property, supports the health of my economy, and improves my quality of life. Framing the debate on job retraining as a "moral obligation" to fellow workers misses the point. The most compelling reasons to support these programs stem from the selfish expectation of a basic social safety net and a selfish desire to power the American economy in the future.
Monday, January 14, 2008
The Profit Motive and the Public Good
In applying the metrics of management consulting to the Peace Corps, Mr. Strauss ignores the essence of this marvelous organization: its humanity. If he wants to deal with “customers,” his matrix for analysis makes sense. The Peace Corps, however, deals with people.
--RPCV Michael Levy, in response to a critical Op-Ed piece about the Peace Corps in the New York Times.
--RPCV Michael Levy, in response to a critical Op-Ed piece about the Peace Corps in the New York Times.
Here in the United States, the presidential race is in full swing. This year, along with the usual shaking of hands and kissing of babies, candidates are lining up against big business. Given that polls indicate that the economy is the number one issue for voters, perhaps this isn't surprising. The mortgage mess, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and the perceived lowering of living standards due to prices rising higher than wages can all be blamed on big business, and it makes for an easy target domestically and internationally.
Business is all about the bottom line. It doesn't care about starving babies, or poor blue collar families out of work, or the rising cost of living. Unlike altruistic NGOs or government agencies like the Peace Corps, business is a selfish undertaking. While the image of PLAN International or USAID might be a starving Sudanese child finally getting an education, the image of big business is a rich, fat, white American man wearing an expensive suit. No wonder only die-hard Ayn Rand Objectivists claim publicly that big business good or moral.
The current rhetoric against business from proponents of the poor reminds me of a cartoon I saw in October's Reason magazine. The cartoon shows several "voters" wearing T-shirts with silly slogans printed on them. One of these was, "Make jobs, not money!" The problem with the constant barrage of anti-business rhetoric is that it ignores real problems with the way a particular business may operate (such as Wal-Mart's inability or unwillingness to disclose data about its workforce) and attacks the profit motive in general. This is unwise because the profit motive has done a lot of good in the world and only through it do any of us have any money. The profit motive itself has not caused the problems many attribute to big business, and the profit motive may actually provide the key for solving these problems.
When I think of the problems facing blue collar workers in the nation, I think of my Aunt Agnes. Agnes lives in central Pennsylvania, in an area that has been economically depressed since the coal mines closed decades ago. She had been working for thirty years at the same greeting card factory, a factory which finally closed last month after years of threats from its parent company. The sad truth is that the cards can be made more cheaply overseas, and since price is paramount to the American consumer, the company sent its work there. Agnes is nearly sixty-years-young, has never married, and has always been a dependable, good worker. And now she has been given a few months of severance pay to try to find something else. Agnes doesn't need angry threats or empty campaign promises right now. She needs another job. Chances are, if she can find one, it will be in another for-profit company operating in the area.
I don't disagree that there is a role for government to cushion the blow to people such as Agnes, to give them training in new skills and support in finding new work. Perhaps for someone at Agnes' age, there can be the possibility of early retirement. But we have to ask where the government can get the money to pay for these programs. Unless you are willing to pay more of your wages in taxes (money that comes, either directly or indirectly, from the private sector), this means having to reallocate money the government is already spending.
This is where the Mr. Levy's comment about the Peace Corps comes in. Just like the Defense Department, or the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Peace Corps is, like it or not, a government agency that spends over $300 million of taxpayers' money supporting its goals. When thinking of the "price" of that money, it is good to think about opportunity cost. Money spent on the War in Iraq cannot be spent training Agnes to get another job. Money spent providing training and staff to Peace Corps volunteers living in Guatemala is money that cannot be spent on a USAID program to teach Afghani girls to read. This is why it is imperative that we justify the level of spending for all government programs. If we could use less money to reach the same end, we could reallocate those funds to popular programs like health care for the poor, job training for the unemployed, and development programs for the starving. When Mr. Levy says that the point of the Peace Corps is its "humanity," he is missing the point. There are a lot of equally or perhaps more deserving causes than the Peace Corps. Bringing prosperity to the world is a large, expensive undertaking. It is also a worthy one. But just because the Peace Corps, or PLAN International, or CARE, professes to work towards that goal does not mean that we should blindly give them as much money as we can afford. Throwing money at a problem never solved anything, and with so many pressing needs we cannot afford to waste anything.
If anything, NGOs and government agencies need to start thinking more like big business. A successful business is endlessly self critical, forever creatively destroying its previous business models as technology improves, consumer preferences change, and prices shift. While it can seem cruel as it is happening, even very liberal economist Paul Krugman has written that, "globalization, driven not by human goodness but by the profit motive, has done far more good for far more people than all the foreign aid and soft loans ever provided by well-intentioned governments and international agencies." As development economist William Easterly has written and I touched upon earlier, far more transformative change has come from entrepreneur-like "Searchers" in a developing country than from altruistic, well-intentioned, external "Planners." Does the fact that Grameen Bank is a for-profit enterprise take away from the incredible good it has done for the women of Bangladesh? Does the fact that an NGO is well-intentioned excuse its inability to show results on investment? Of course not. We should demand results from our investment. If the Peace Corps were a for-profit corporation, I doubt its shareholders would have let it go on spending so long simply on blind faith that it is doing good for the host country. Maybe the Peace Corps' main contribution to the world is as a cultural exchange agency and not as a development one, but if so, it needs to alter its marketing campaign.
Finally, the last large overlooked aspect of the profit motive is that, in the end, the consumers rule. Nobody makes us buy a certain car, or hairbrush, or box of cereal. We are always making decisions, and it is the consumer and not the shareholder that has led companies to outsource their labor, cut costs, and create more cheap plastic stuff. Because we the consumer saw price as the most important characteristic in greeting cards, Agnes' greeting card factory had to either change with the times or close down for good. The result was the same for Agnes: she no longer has a job and is going to have trouble finding a new one. This is not the fault of the company, but rather the direct result of decisions you and I have made. We have decided that lower prices is more important to us than ensuring something is made in our own country (which may or may not be more moral; as a result of Agnes losing her job, a person in China now has a job), and that we do not wish to invest our money on support to hardworking people like Agnes who need to find a new job and acquire more training. We have decided that it is more important to pay for technocrats to retool the Baghdad stock exchange, to give more subsidies to the farmers of Iowa, and to allow "selfless little altruists" to share American culture with the people of Moldova. Maybe our investments here will pay great dividends to our future security and prosperity, and maybe not. But for people like Mr. Levy to pretend that good intentions can be divorced from their high costs is wishful thinking. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources; there needs to be some metric to measure whether these resources are being used well.
Business is all about the bottom line. It doesn't care about starving babies, or poor blue collar families out of work, or the rising cost of living. Unlike altruistic NGOs or government agencies like the Peace Corps, business is a selfish undertaking. While the image of PLAN International or USAID might be a starving Sudanese child finally getting an education, the image of big business is a rich, fat, white American man wearing an expensive suit. No wonder only die-hard Ayn Rand Objectivists claim publicly that big business good or moral.
The current rhetoric against business from proponents of the poor reminds me of a cartoon I saw in October's Reason magazine. The cartoon shows several "voters" wearing T-shirts with silly slogans printed on them. One of these was, "Make jobs, not money!" The problem with the constant barrage of anti-business rhetoric is that it ignores real problems with the way a particular business may operate (such as Wal-Mart's inability or unwillingness to disclose data about its workforce) and attacks the profit motive in general. This is unwise because the profit motive has done a lot of good in the world and only through it do any of us have any money. The profit motive itself has not caused the problems many attribute to big business, and the profit motive may actually provide the key for solving these problems.
When I think of the problems facing blue collar workers in the nation, I think of my Aunt Agnes. Agnes lives in central Pennsylvania, in an area that has been economically depressed since the coal mines closed decades ago. She had been working for thirty years at the same greeting card factory, a factory which finally closed last month after years of threats from its parent company. The sad truth is that the cards can be made more cheaply overseas, and since price is paramount to the American consumer, the company sent its work there. Agnes is nearly sixty-years-young, has never married, and has always been a dependable, good worker. And now she has been given a few months of severance pay to try to find something else. Agnes doesn't need angry threats or empty campaign promises right now. She needs another job. Chances are, if she can find one, it will be in another for-profit company operating in the area.
I don't disagree that there is a role for government to cushion the blow to people such as Agnes, to give them training in new skills and support in finding new work. Perhaps for someone at Agnes' age, there can be the possibility of early retirement. But we have to ask where the government can get the money to pay for these programs. Unless you are willing to pay more of your wages in taxes (money that comes, either directly or indirectly, from the private sector), this means having to reallocate money the government is already spending.
This is where the Mr. Levy's comment about the Peace Corps comes in. Just like the Defense Department, or the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Peace Corps is, like it or not, a government agency that spends over $300 million of taxpayers' money supporting its goals. When thinking of the "price" of that money, it is good to think about opportunity cost. Money spent on the War in Iraq cannot be spent training Agnes to get another job. Money spent providing training and staff to Peace Corps volunteers living in Guatemala is money that cannot be spent on a USAID program to teach Afghani girls to read. This is why it is imperative that we justify the level of spending for all government programs. If we could use less money to reach the same end, we could reallocate those funds to popular programs like health care for the poor, job training for the unemployed, and development programs for the starving. When Mr. Levy says that the point of the Peace Corps is its "humanity," he is missing the point. There are a lot of equally or perhaps more deserving causes than the Peace Corps. Bringing prosperity to the world is a large, expensive undertaking. It is also a worthy one. But just because the Peace Corps, or PLAN International, or CARE, professes to work towards that goal does not mean that we should blindly give them as much money as we can afford. Throwing money at a problem never solved anything, and with so many pressing needs we cannot afford to waste anything.
If anything, NGOs and government agencies need to start thinking more like big business. A successful business is endlessly self critical, forever creatively destroying its previous business models as technology improves, consumer preferences change, and prices shift. While it can seem cruel as it is happening, even very liberal economist Paul Krugman has written that, "globalization, driven not by human goodness but by the profit motive, has done far more good for far more people than all the foreign aid and soft loans ever provided by well-intentioned governments and international agencies." As development economist William Easterly has written and I touched upon earlier, far more transformative change has come from entrepreneur-like "Searchers" in a developing country than from altruistic, well-intentioned, external "Planners." Does the fact that Grameen Bank is a for-profit enterprise take away from the incredible good it has done for the women of Bangladesh? Does the fact that an NGO is well-intentioned excuse its inability to show results on investment? Of course not. We should demand results from our investment. If the Peace Corps were a for-profit corporation, I doubt its shareholders would have let it go on spending so long simply on blind faith that it is doing good for the host country. Maybe the Peace Corps' main contribution to the world is as a cultural exchange agency and not as a development one, but if so, it needs to alter its marketing campaign.
Finally, the last large overlooked aspect of the profit motive is that, in the end, the consumers rule. Nobody makes us buy a certain car, or hairbrush, or box of cereal. We are always making decisions, and it is the consumer and not the shareholder that has led companies to outsource their labor, cut costs, and create more cheap plastic stuff. Because we the consumer saw price as the most important characteristic in greeting cards, Agnes' greeting card factory had to either change with the times or close down for good. The result was the same for Agnes: she no longer has a job and is going to have trouble finding a new one. This is not the fault of the company, but rather the direct result of decisions you and I have made. We have decided that lower prices is more important to us than ensuring something is made in our own country (which may or may not be more moral; as a result of Agnes losing her job, a person in China now has a job), and that we do not wish to invest our money on support to hardworking people like Agnes who need to find a new job and acquire more training. We have decided that it is more important to pay for technocrats to retool the Baghdad stock exchange, to give more subsidies to the farmers of Iowa, and to allow "selfless little altruists" to share American culture with the people of Moldova. Maybe our investments here will pay great dividends to our future security and prosperity, and maybe not. But for people like Mr. Levy to pretend that good intentions can be divorced from their high costs is wishful thinking. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources; there needs to be some metric to measure whether these resources are being used well.
The Peace Corps in the News
Last Wednesday's New York Times included a very interesting Op-Ed piece about the Peace Corps. Robert L. Strauss, himself a former Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter, and Country Director, argues that the Peace Corps has lost sight of its stated purpose: to improve the quality of life in the countries that receive volunteers. Through bureaucratic inertia and a stunning lack of what the author calls "organizational introspection" the Peace Corps is quickly losing the ability to claim that it is anything but a glorified cultural exchange program. Peace Corps Director Ronald A. Tschetter's response printed in yesterday's paper only emphasizes the organization's lack of commitment to its host countries. The evidence he gives to refute Mr. Strauss' claims only serves to bring the agency's obliviousness into sharper focus.
The great historian E. H. Carr wrote that data and facts are like "fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean" and that the factual information a researcher ends up with "will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use--these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch." In short, the end result of any investigation depends on how the original research question is framed and investigated, and these two things are always predetermined by the researcher's determination of what information is pertinent to their investigation. Through looking at how the researcher asks the guiding question, one can already tell a little bit about her background, beliefs, and priorities.
What does this have to do with the Peace Corps? In my experience, Mr. Strauss' assertion that the Peace Corps lacks "organizational introspection" cuts to the crux of the problem. As a volunteer, I was astounded by the lack of critical thinking the agency either exhibited itself or countenanced among others in Honduras. When an agency stops asking itself difficult questions about its development progress, it stops being a serious development organization. Case in point: Mr. Tschetter's rebuttal letter to the editor.
Mr. Tschetter begins with the agency's usual anecdotal claim that it is proudly carrying on President Kennedy's vision, with very little substantial evidence that this is the case. He points out that he has heard good things from Peace Corps counterparts and that more countries are hoping to take part in the program. Wishing to prove that "the agency's success is more than anecdotal," he then brings in a few telling quantitative statistics: first, that only one out of three applicants to the agency becomes a volunteer, second, that 91% of volunteers feel incorporated in their host communities.
Significantly, both of these pieces of information are centered on the experience of the volunteer in the process. In my experience, this is the only information that the Peace Corps gathers. As Mr. Strauss writes, the agency does survey its volunteers periodically, but does not attempt to look at the effects of the program through any independent data analysis. Going back to E. H. Carr's analogy, the Peace Corps is only fishing for information on the volunteers' experiences, not on the agency's progress fighting the incredible development challenges facing a given developing country. What does the fact that 91% of volunteers are satisfied with their integration in the community (or, as purists would note, told the Peace Corps that they were satisfied with their integration in the community) tell us about the agency? It tells us a lot about what the volunteers think about the experience and nothing about the experience of the host country nationals or the progress toward combating the Peace Corps' self-stated goals, such as improving water and sanitation, decreasing the spread of HIV, or raising per capita income.
As for the oft-cited statistic that only one in three applicants to the Peace Corps becomes a volunteer, Mr. Tschetter fails to show that the program is somehow selecting the most mature, professional, and experienced people to fill these spots. As I have written in previous posts on this blog and in a response to Jonathan Lancton's blog entry on this issue, in my experience the opposite is almost true. The more professional and mature volunteers are less likely to have the time or the patience to navigate the opaque selection process from interview to nomination to placement that is designed to place as many volunteers as possible into as many places as possible, while often giving only superficial attention to the volunteers' unique academic and professional backgrounds (see my previous entry). Why do volunteers drop out of the process? We have no way of knowing whether it is because they receive a better offer, are not medically cleared for service, or simply become impatient with the way they are treated during the process. In fact, the Peace Corps routinely nominates several people for any given position because it plans on several dropping out of the selection process for personal or professional reasons. This is why my husband and I were nominated for two different positions before being sent to the third. The frequently-repeated mantra among Peace Corps staff (many of them being recently-returned volunteers with little experience) is that "the Peace Corps isn't for everyone." This is true, but whether it is not for everyone because of the time commitment (upwards of three years if one counts the application and approval process), the poor living conditions in-country, or the lack of professionalism in the organization remains to be seen. If the Peace Corps is truly committed to attracting the best and the brightest, I suggest they invest more time in answering these questions.
How else does the agency gather information about its work? Peace Corps volunteers know that every six months each volunteer must submit a report on their progress toward project goals. How do country officials measure this progress? By counting how many different people take part in volunteer-led or co-led activities. There is no way to measure the quality of these interventions, or even the accuracy of a given volunteer's information. One day talking to 100 people superficially about money looks better than months and months of assisting 20 aspiring entrepreneurs create viable business plans. In my year and a half in Omoa, I was never visited by my Project Manager, and my visit with the Project Assistant was more about my social experience in-site than my professional one. I could have easily lied on my six month reports, or, as was more commonly done, worked a day or two per week in big groups without any follow-up and used the rest of the time to travel and party.
At the end of his letter, Mr. Tschetter says that the agency has "created evaluation plans to better quantify the volunteers’ impact." Carrying out these plans would be an excellent step if the agency dares to ask difficult questions about the positive and negative influence of volunteers in their host country. But one has to ask why, after nearly 50 years of service, the agency is only now working on plans to quantify its development impact. There are several possible reasons. Maybe the real goal of the Peace Corps is not its development impact on the host country. Maybe the agency thought that the qualitative, anecdotal evidence was enough to show that impact. Most likely, the agency never bothered to collect this information because we the taxpayers have never demanded this of them. Because the Peace Corps is a feel-good organization with a good reputation, it, like other charities or development NGOs, has never been subjected to a sufficient level of scrutiny. Contrary to the assertions of its defenders, critically examining the Peace Corps is the only way to ensure that it backs up the glossy brochures and heart-warming anecdotes with real service to the world's poor.
The great historian E. H. Carr wrote that data and facts are like "fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean" and that the factual information a researcher ends up with "will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use--these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch." In short, the end result of any investigation depends on how the original research question is framed and investigated, and these two things are always predetermined by the researcher's determination of what information is pertinent to their investigation. Through looking at how the researcher asks the guiding question, one can already tell a little bit about her background, beliefs, and priorities.
What does this have to do with the Peace Corps? In my experience, Mr. Strauss' assertion that the Peace Corps lacks "organizational introspection" cuts to the crux of the problem. As a volunteer, I was astounded by the lack of critical thinking the agency either exhibited itself or countenanced among others in Honduras. When an agency stops asking itself difficult questions about its development progress, it stops being a serious development organization. Case in point: Mr. Tschetter's rebuttal letter to the editor.
Mr. Tschetter begins with the agency's usual anecdotal claim that it is proudly carrying on President Kennedy's vision, with very little substantial evidence that this is the case. He points out that he has heard good things from Peace Corps counterparts and that more countries are hoping to take part in the program. Wishing to prove that "the agency's success is more than anecdotal," he then brings in a few telling quantitative statistics: first, that only one out of three applicants to the agency becomes a volunteer, second, that 91% of volunteers feel incorporated in their host communities.
Significantly, both of these pieces of information are centered on the experience of the volunteer in the process. In my experience, this is the only information that the Peace Corps gathers. As Mr. Strauss writes, the agency does survey its volunteers periodically, but does not attempt to look at the effects of the program through any independent data analysis. Going back to E. H. Carr's analogy, the Peace Corps is only fishing for information on the volunteers' experiences, not on the agency's progress fighting the incredible development challenges facing a given developing country. What does the fact that 91% of volunteers are satisfied with their integration in the community (or, as purists would note, told the Peace Corps that they were satisfied with their integration in the community) tell us about the agency? It tells us a lot about what the volunteers think about the experience and nothing about the experience of the host country nationals or the progress toward combating the Peace Corps' self-stated goals, such as improving water and sanitation, decreasing the spread of HIV, or raising per capita income.
As for the oft-cited statistic that only one in three applicants to the Peace Corps becomes a volunteer, Mr. Tschetter fails to show that the program is somehow selecting the most mature, professional, and experienced people to fill these spots. As I have written in previous posts on this blog and in a response to Jonathan Lancton's blog entry on this issue, in my experience the opposite is almost true. The more professional and mature volunteers are less likely to have the time or the patience to navigate the opaque selection process from interview to nomination to placement that is designed to place as many volunteers as possible into as many places as possible, while often giving only superficial attention to the volunteers' unique academic and professional backgrounds (see my previous entry). Why do volunteers drop out of the process? We have no way of knowing whether it is because they receive a better offer, are not medically cleared for service, or simply become impatient with the way they are treated during the process. In fact, the Peace Corps routinely nominates several people for any given position because it plans on several dropping out of the selection process for personal or professional reasons. This is why my husband and I were nominated for two different positions before being sent to the third. The frequently-repeated mantra among Peace Corps staff (many of them being recently-returned volunteers with little experience) is that "the Peace Corps isn't for everyone." This is true, but whether it is not for everyone because of the time commitment (upwards of three years if one counts the application and approval process), the poor living conditions in-country, or the lack of professionalism in the organization remains to be seen. If the Peace Corps is truly committed to attracting the best and the brightest, I suggest they invest more time in answering these questions.
How else does the agency gather information about its work? Peace Corps volunteers know that every six months each volunteer must submit a report on their progress toward project goals. How do country officials measure this progress? By counting how many different people take part in volunteer-led or co-led activities. There is no way to measure the quality of these interventions, or even the accuracy of a given volunteer's information. One day talking to 100 people superficially about money looks better than months and months of assisting 20 aspiring entrepreneurs create viable business plans. In my year and a half in Omoa, I was never visited by my Project Manager, and my visit with the Project Assistant was more about my social experience in-site than my professional one. I could have easily lied on my six month reports, or, as was more commonly done, worked a day or two per week in big groups without any follow-up and used the rest of the time to travel and party.
At the end of his letter, Mr. Tschetter says that the agency has "created evaluation plans to better quantify the volunteers’ impact." Carrying out these plans would be an excellent step if the agency dares to ask difficult questions about the positive and negative influence of volunteers in their host country. But one has to ask why, after nearly 50 years of service, the agency is only now working on plans to quantify its development impact. There are several possible reasons. Maybe the real goal of the Peace Corps is not its development impact on the host country. Maybe the agency thought that the qualitative, anecdotal evidence was enough to show that impact. Most likely, the agency never bothered to collect this information because we the taxpayers have never demanded this of them. Because the Peace Corps is a feel-good organization with a good reputation, it, like other charities or development NGOs, has never been subjected to a sufficient level of scrutiny. Contrary to the assertions of its defenders, critically examining the Peace Corps is the only way to ensure that it backs up the glossy brochures and heart-warming anecdotes with real service to the world's poor.
My Return (and some loose ends)
Hello all,
I apologize for my lengthy absence, but now that my grad school applications are done and I no longer have to do extended shifts at the bookstore for the holidays, I should have more time to write.
When we last left off, I was in the middle of a look at foreign aid as a security instrument. I ended up using that as one of the topics for a grad school essay. Here's what I wrote with an 800-word limit:
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 we have come to realize that the most severe national security threats of the new millennium come from poor “rogue” nations and non-state actors. The threats of terrorism, transnational crime, nuclear proliferation and state failure are not concentrated around a cohesive center and thus cannot be as easily contained as the threat of the Soviet Union once was. Many claim that these threats are partially caused by poverty and desperation in places like the Gaza Strip and Sudan. Proponents and critics of the "War on Terror" alike have cited this violence-poverty link to justify more development spending. But how compelling is their argument?
Property crime has long been linked with income level. As anyone living in Honduras can attest, it is hard to climb out of poverty when the constant barrage of violence and crime provides a strong disincentive to produce, buy, or sell anything. Terrorism, however, is not property crime. Alan B. Krueger, a professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, has contributed a great deal to the study of the political economy of terrorism through several journal articles, his book What Makes a Terrorist, and his "Economic Scene" column in the New York Times. As Krueger notes, there is no evidence to support the poverty-violence causal loop, especially when it comes to terrorism. Indeed, terrorists rarely claim a direct economic incentive for committing their crimes; most, if not all, terrorist attacks are carried out for political and social reasons. In this way, as Krueger noted, terrorism is more like voting, an activity that increases as income increases. The data collected by Krueger indicate that, on average, Palestinian terrorists are actually wealthier and better educated than the population at large. An effective terrorist needs good reasoning skills, a good education, good connections, and money. As Krueger put it, "There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed."
Though the link between poverty and terrorism is tenuous, Krueger notes that several studies have shown a link between poverty and a society's propensity to collapse or fall into civil war. A study by Foreign Policy Magazine showed that failed states, which offer a haven for terrorism and other illicit activities, generally have very little foreign aid income per capita. However, whether increasing foreign aid to corrupt, brutal, and failing regimes would improve outcomes is a matter of no small debate. The link between foreign aid money and the atrocities in Somalia and Rwanda during the 1990’s has been well documented in many studies and books such as Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell and Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence. This history of abuse explains why donors are reluctant to send money to conflict-prone areas. Yet as economists Lisa Chauvet and Paul Collier point out, the danger of letting the countries “stew in their own juice” may be worse than any of the risks associated with aid. If a country is a known host for terrorist activities or in imminent danger of collapse, military intervention alone may not be enough to prevent the outbreak of war. Foreign aid money, if focused, studied, and closely monitored, may be able to promote the policy and economic changes necessary to move countries from the brink of violence.
Achieving this requires careful study and meticulous planning. In order to reap the security benefits of foreign aid, America cannot simply throw money at the problem of poverty. Traditional top-heavy approaches, such as those practiced by the World Bank and USAID in Honduras, have not shown themselves to be effective at fighting poverty or increasing security. Though terrorism is not correlated with income level, targeting poor, fragile states for foreign assistance can ensure that terrorists will not find a hospitable climate in which to commit their crimes. The American foreign aid system needs to modernize and couple its projects with the political engagement called for by Stephen Browne of the UN International Trade Centre in order to change the political climate of poor countries, strengthen good institutions, and make crime and terrorism less attractive. A well-designed foreign aid system can obviate the need for future military intervention and avert future conflict, but only when these political components are carefully considered.
I apologize for my lengthy absence, but now that my grad school applications are done and I no longer have to do extended shifts at the bookstore for the holidays, I should have more time to write.
When we last left off, I was in the middle of a look at foreign aid as a security instrument. I ended up using that as one of the topics for a grad school essay. Here's what I wrote with an 800-word limit:
Foreign Aid as a Security Instrument
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 we have come to realize that the most severe national security threats of the new millennium come from poor “rogue” nations and non-state actors. The threats of terrorism, transnational crime, nuclear proliferation and state failure are not concentrated around a cohesive center and thus cannot be as easily contained as the threat of the Soviet Union once was. Many claim that these threats are partially caused by poverty and desperation in places like the Gaza Strip and Sudan. Proponents and critics of the "War on Terror" alike have cited this violence-poverty link to justify more development spending. But how compelling is their argument?
Property crime has long been linked with income level. As anyone living in Honduras can attest, it is hard to climb out of poverty when the constant barrage of violence and crime provides a strong disincentive to produce, buy, or sell anything. Terrorism, however, is not property crime. Alan B. Krueger, a professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, has contributed a great deal to the study of the political economy of terrorism through several journal articles, his book What Makes a Terrorist, and his "Economic Scene" column in the New York Times. As Krueger notes, there is no evidence to support the poverty-violence causal loop, especially when it comes to terrorism. Indeed, terrorists rarely claim a direct economic incentive for committing their crimes; most, if not all, terrorist attacks are carried out for political and social reasons. In this way, as Krueger noted, terrorism is more like voting, an activity that increases as income increases. The data collected by Krueger indicate that, on average, Palestinian terrorists are actually wealthier and better educated than the population at large. An effective terrorist needs good reasoning skills, a good education, good connections, and money. As Krueger put it, "There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed."
Though the link between poverty and terrorism is tenuous, Krueger notes that several studies have shown a link between poverty and a society's propensity to collapse or fall into civil war. A study by Foreign Policy Magazine showed that failed states, which offer a haven for terrorism and other illicit activities, generally have very little foreign aid income per capita. However, whether increasing foreign aid to corrupt, brutal, and failing regimes would improve outcomes is a matter of no small debate. The link between foreign aid money and the atrocities in Somalia and Rwanda during the 1990’s has been well documented in many studies and books such as Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell and Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence. This history of abuse explains why donors are reluctant to send money to conflict-prone areas. Yet as economists Lisa Chauvet and Paul Collier point out, the danger of letting the countries “stew in their own juice” may be worse than any of the risks associated with aid. If a country is a known host for terrorist activities or in imminent danger of collapse, military intervention alone may not be enough to prevent the outbreak of war. Foreign aid money, if focused, studied, and closely monitored, may be able to promote the policy and economic changes necessary to move countries from the brink of violence.
Achieving this requires careful study and meticulous planning. In order to reap the security benefits of foreign aid, America cannot simply throw money at the problem of poverty. Traditional top-heavy approaches, such as those practiced by the World Bank and USAID in Honduras, have not shown themselves to be effective at fighting poverty or increasing security. Though terrorism is not correlated with income level, targeting poor, fragile states for foreign assistance can ensure that terrorists will not find a hospitable climate in which to commit their crimes. The American foreign aid system needs to modernize and couple its projects with the political engagement called for by Stephen Browne of the UN International Trade Centre in order to change the political climate of poor countries, strengthen good institutions, and make crime and terrorism less attractive. A well-designed foreign aid system can obviate the need for future military intervention and avert future conflict, but only when these political components are carefully considered.
Monday, October 22, 2007
On the Tyranny of the Majority and the Will of the People
Hello, everyone. I apologize for not writing the last couple weeks, but I hope to make up for it with several posts over the next several days. After this post, we will return to the discussion of foreign aid, security, terrorism, war, and peace.
In the first volume of his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about the danger of the "tyranny of the majority" in a democratic society such as the United States of America. What is meant by the tyranny of the majority? In a democracy, the majority rules, and it rules quite literally through direct vote and through voting for proxies to represent the people at all levels of government. Congressmen, governors, mayors, and presidents are elected by the people over whom they rule. In some states, even judges are directly elected by the people, and when they are not, they are appointed by people who are accountable to the will of the majority. Accusations of conspiracy theories and massive corruption scandals aside, Americans are given the government the majority want at any given time.
When de Toucqueville visited America in the mid-19th century, Europe was watching the democracy experiment across the ocean worried about the weakness in such a system because there was no central authority figure. No paternal tsar could show the people the correct way to live; there was no Napoleon to lead them into battle. But de Tocqueville was pessimistic about the wisdom of the American model for the opposite reason. As he put it, "[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise...from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed as the excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as in the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny."
What is tyrannical about a democracy? Democracy is seen as a good thing by most Americans, and most Americans would be unwilling to submit to an authority that did not answer to the will of the people. There is something that seems inherently fair about it. We have the freedom to choose, collectively, the direction of our nation and the decisions made at all levels of government. Recent proposals to eliminate the Electoral College have focused on the inequity of a system where some votes matter more than others. The very idea of democracy is something America stands for, and even our foreign policy from Eisenhower to Bush 43 has put democracy front and center. We often talk of Kant's liberal peace (or as Thomas Friedman has put it, the fact that no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with one another) and hope for a day when all countries are democratic and open to the free exchange of ideas and trade. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world applauded as we watched democracy's third wave hit the shores of Eastern Europe. We saw democratization as a way to make the world safe, just, and comfortable for all.
The only problem is that de Tocqueville was right -- there is something inherently tyrannical about democracy: the fact that the majority rules completely and entirely. To paraphrase de Tocqueville, should you be wronged in the United States, to whom should you turn? Every organ of power is accountable to the majority, and technically only to the majority. If the majority holds the opinion that an unjust law or rule should exist in the United States, the minority of those who believe it is unjust or unfair have very little legal recourse except to lobby the majority to take their position. The only other option that a minority faces is taking action outside the law, either through widespread civil disobedience or use of force. When this happens, the very integrity of the state is at stake.
The US founding fathers did their best to ensure the nation would not fall into anarchy by dividing power between directly proportional forms of government (like the House of Representatives) and institutions that would give minorities a disproportionately large voice to protect their interests (as in the Senate and the Electoral College). They made it difficult to alter the Constitution to strengthen the document against volatile waves of public opinion that could seek to deprive members of a minority of their most basic rights. This was the idea of checks and balances that James Madison wrote about in The Federalist #51: "The Structure of Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances between the Different Departments." Madison wrote that, "In a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be stated to reign as in a state of nature."
Yet in spite of their work, our checkered history includes some chapters (such as segregation and Jim Crow, the expulsion of Native Americans from their land, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II) when the majority of citizens used their power tyrannically to subdue and abuse the minority. This is the difficulty of democracy. In a (thankfully!) secular state such as ours there is no outside source of legitimacy except for the will of the people. So what happens when the will of the people is wrong?
There is injustice all over the world today, and not all of it is caused by dictators and autocrats. The American system of government and liberal economic policies is designed to please the will of the people, economically, politically, and socially. Our American philosophy can be summed up as the following: give the people what they want. If the people want cheap, plastic toys from China, give them cheap, plastic toys from China. If the people want to watch hours and hours of morally-bankrupt, intellectually-empty reality television shows, we will fill their airwaves with them. If the majority of Americans choose a leader, he shall lead. People often point to the lobbying and marketing that goes into decision-making (Do people really want more TV dinners? Does the average American understand how disastrous the Iraq War has been for the stability of the Middle East?), but in the end the American public gets to vote in the ballot box, at the stores, and with their feet. Saying that Americans are incapable of making the right decisions means cutting right to the center of democracy. The point of our government is that we all collectively choose our fate, even if it is a deplorable one. The point of laissez-faire economics is that we should let the consumers of Dubai have a Taco Bell if they so choose, even though we outsiders hate what it does to the landscape and the nutrition of their diets.
Perhaps these examples seem trivial, but what happens when the majority of people in a country choose to cause harm to a minority or to the society as a whole? What happens when what the majority of people want is something morally repugnant, like genocide, war, and torture? Let's look back to September 12th, 2001 when shocked and angry citizens reacted violently to the attack on our nation. What if the majority of Americans had voted to place all Muslims in internment camps as we did to the Japanese in World War II? Would that have been right because it was the will of the people? What if the majority of Germans supported Hitler and the extermination of the Jews, is that their right as a nation? We like to think that the "Wisdom of Crowds" (to borrow the title of New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book) will keep our society from making any unwise or radical decisions such as these. But the history shows that more democracy does not always lead to more stability and more justice.
Consider the idea of Kant's liberal or democratic peace. The basic idea is that two democratic countries have never gone to war with one another because it is not in their interest and because the costs of war would be borne by those who decide whether to fight. It is the people, and not the autocrat, who will fight, die, starve, and suffer because of the war and those are the people who decide to fight. For this reason, democracies are considered to be inherently less militant than other forms of government. To some extent, this is true. Two established democracies have never gone to war with one another. However, studies have shown that countries moving from autocracy to democracy, especially those with weak institutions and incomplete transitions, tend to go to war more often than autocracies because elites can use nationalist rhetoric to rile up the masses and prepare them for war (see Columbia professor Jack Snyder's From Voting to Violence and Snyder and Edward D. Mansfield's Electing to Fight). Indeed we often forget that the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet power was a very bloody one. Wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the conflicts in Kosovo, Abkhazia, and Ossetia caused widespread chaos. As Francis Fukuyama points out, much of this violence is due to the process of state-building and perhaps not due to democracy per se. However, leaders such as Vladimir Putin have used nationalist and ethnic tensions in their country to gain power and justify military action. Here, democratization may have hurt more than helped peace and stability.
The question of the rights of minorities is pertinent to established countries as well. Citizens of a democracy have to submit to the will of the people in order for the state to function. But a case study shows that the balance between personal freedom and the will of the people can be a difficult one to draw. Most people agree that citizens should not be allowed to kill other citizens. But is it right that it is illegal for French girls to wear headscarves to school even if their religion demands it? Is it right that Germans have made it illegal to deny the Holocaust and Austrians have made it illegal for people to purchase or own Mein Kampf? If you think these examples sound reasonable, consider the decision of Putin to limit the right of people to gather to oppose his government? Here is an example of an elected leader who uses his office to consolidate his power. The same can be said of Hugo Chavez, who has used his (democratically won) power to extend his term of office and silence his critics. The majority of people in some countries are opposed to democracy as we see it in the west. Speaking about the Middle East and even Russia, many analysts have pointed to a "democracy paradox" existing in those nations: given the opportunity to vote democratically, most citizens would vote to remove democracy. Democracy in an of itself does not always produce freedom. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, there can be illiberal democracies. Not everyone in the world shares our belief that that the tyranny of the majority is preferable to the tyranny of the church or the tyranny of an individual.
So what is one to do? Should we intervene in a sovereign nation to stop these "democratic" abuses of freedom? What if lives are at stake? What if human rights are denied? If the majority of people choose to have a strict, totalitarian government, do they have the right to subject the dissident minority to that same government? If Spain voted to jail all of the Basque people without charges or any reason, should Britain intervene against the Spanish people's will? What if they shot all of the Valencians or banned the use of Catalan? Ignoring the problem is dangerous (see Weimar Germany) but invading a country and starting a war without cause can be disastrous (see Iraq).
We are free to disagree with the decisions of the masses, but overruling the will of the people means being a paternalist; it necessarily implies a better knowledge of what is good than the rest of the nation or the world. This paternalism can come from many sources, but it always includes submitting to a higher moral authority. As de Tocqueville put it, "God alone can be omnipotent because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power." The Pope could speak out against a commonly-accepted practice, such as abortion, citing the teachings of the Church. An expert could oppose commonly-accepted doctrine, such as the widely held belief that torturing detainees saves American lives, by showing empirically that this is untrue. And a leader like Stalin or Kim Jong-il could use their self-assessed exceptional wisdom and power to kill and maim those who stand in the way of "progress."
This is the problem with objecting to the tyranny of the majority. Whatever the problems with it, the tyranny of any individual is usually worse. For every Lee Kwan Yew benevolently leading Singapore through occasionally unpopular economic reforms, there are dozens of Robert Mugabes and Slobodan Miloševics who use their power over the people for ill and not for good. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy looks bad, except when compared to the alternative.
How then can we work to ensure that the tyranny of the majority does not overrun the rights of the minority? As outsiders, the best we can do is pressure governments to uphold a basic level of human rights for all inhabitants of their land. Forceful intervention should only be considered when the situation is dire, such as when a genocide is imminent or has begun. Within our own country, we must always remember that no matter how much we might hate or distrust our neighbor, the stability and viability of this form of government is predicated on the protection of minorities. If minorities have nowhere to turn within the system, they will turn outside the system and destabilize it. This is the anarchy de Tocqueville and Madison talked about. Perhaps more importantly, we should remember that at any time we may find ourselves as part of the minority and will depend on the strength of these checks and balances to protect us.
In the first volume of his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about the danger of the "tyranny of the majority" in a democratic society such as the United States of America. What is meant by the tyranny of the majority? In a democracy, the majority rules, and it rules quite literally through direct vote and through voting for proxies to represent the people at all levels of government. Congressmen, governors, mayors, and presidents are elected by the people over whom they rule. In some states, even judges are directly elected by the people, and when they are not, they are appointed by people who are accountable to the will of the majority. Accusations of conspiracy theories and massive corruption scandals aside, Americans are given the government the majority want at any given time.
When de Toucqueville visited America in the mid-19th century, Europe was watching the democracy experiment across the ocean worried about the weakness in such a system because there was no central authority figure. No paternal tsar could show the people the correct way to live; there was no Napoleon to lead them into battle. But de Tocqueville was pessimistic about the wisdom of the American model for the opposite reason. As he put it, "[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise...from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed as the excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as in the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny."
What is tyrannical about a democracy? Democracy is seen as a good thing by most Americans, and most Americans would be unwilling to submit to an authority that did not answer to the will of the people. There is something that seems inherently fair about it. We have the freedom to choose, collectively, the direction of our nation and the decisions made at all levels of government. Recent proposals to eliminate the Electoral College have focused on the inequity of a system where some votes matter more than others. The very idea of democracy is something America stands for, and even our foreign policy from Eisenhower to Bush 43 has put democracy front and center. We often talk of Kant's liberal peace (or as Thomas Friedman has put it, the fact that no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with one another) and hope for a day when all countries are democratic and open to the free exchange of ideas and trade. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world applauded as we watched democracy's third wave hit the shores of Eastern Europe. We saw democratization as a way to make the world safe, just, and comfortable for all.
The only problem is that de Tocqueville was right -- there is something inherently tyrannical about democracy: the fact that the majority rules completely and entirely. To paraphrase de Tocqueville, should you be wronged in the United States, to whom should you turn? Every organ of power is accountable to the majority, and technically only to the majority. If the majority holds the opinion that an unjust law or rule should exist in the United States, the minority of those who believe it is unjust or unfair have very little legal recourse except to lobby the majority to take their position. The only other option that a minority faces is taking action outside the law, either through widespread civil disobedience or use of force. When this happens, the very integrity of the state is at stake.
The US founding fathers did their best to ensure the nation would not fall into anarchy by dividing power between directly proportional forms of government (like the House of Representatives) and institutions that would give minorities a disproportionately large voice to protect their interests (as in the Senate and the Electoral College). They made it difficult to alter the Constitution to strengthen the document against volatile waves of public opinion that could seek to deprive members of a minority of their most basic rights. This was the idea of checks and balances that James Madison wrote about in The Federalist #51: "The Structure of Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances between the Different Departments." Madison wrote that, "In a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be stated to reign as in a state of nature."
Yet in spite of their work, our checkered history includes some chapters (such as segregation and Jim Crow, the expulsion of Native Americans from their land, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II) when the majority of citizens used their power tyrannically to subdue and abuse the minority. This is the difficulty of democracy. In a (thankfully!) secular state such as ours there is no outside source of legitimacy except for the will of the people. So what happens when the will of the people is wrong?
There is injustice all over the world today, and not all of it is caused by dictators and autocrats. The American system of government and liberal economic policies is designed to please the will of the people, economically, politically, and socially. Our American philosophy can be summed up as the following: give the people what they want. If the people want cheap, plastic toys from China, give them cheap, plastic toys from China. If the people want to watch hours and hours of morally-bankrupt, intellectually-empty reality television shows, we will fill their airwaves with them. If the majority of Americans choose a leader, he shall lead. People often point to the lobbying and marketing that goes into decision-making (Do people really want more TV dinners? Does the average American understand how disastrous the Iraq War has been for the stability of the Middle East?), but in the end the American public gets to vote in the ballot box, at the stores, and with their feet. Saying that Americans are incapable of making the right decisions means cutting right to the center of democracy. The point of our government is that we all collectively choose our fate, even if it is a deplorable one. The point of laissez-faire economics is that we should let the consumers of Dubai have a Taco Bell if they so choose, even though we outsiders hate what it does to the landscape and the nutrition of their diets.
Perhaps these examples seem trivial, but what happens when the majority of people in a country choose to cause harm to a minority or to the society as a whole? What happens when what the majority of people want is something morally repugnant, like genocide, war, and torture? Let's look back to September 12th, 2001 when shocked and angry citizens reacted violently to the attack on our nation. What if the majority of Americans had voted to place all Muslims in internment camps as we did to the Japanese in World War II? Would that have been right because it was the will of the people? What if the majority of Germans supported Hitler and the extermination of the Jews, is that their right as a nation? We like to think that the "Wisdom of Crowds" (to borrow the title of New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book) will keep our society from making any unwise or radical decisions such as these. But the history shows that more democracy does not always lead to more stability and more justice.
Consider the idea of Kant's liberal or democratic peace. The basic idea is that two democratic countries have never gone to war with one another because it is not in their interest and because the costs of war would be borne by those who decide whether to fight. It is the people, and not the autocrat, who will fight, die, starve, and suffer because of the war and those are the people who decide to fight. For this reason, democracies are considered to be inherently less militant than other forms of government. To some extent, this is true. Two established democracies have never gone to war with one another. However, studies have shown that countries moving from autocracy to democracy, especially those with weak institutions and incomplete transitions, tend to go to war more often than autocracies because elites can use nationalist rhetoric to rile up the masses and prepare them for war (see Columbia professor Jack Snyder's From Voting to Violence and Snyder and Edward D. Mansfield's Electing to Fight). Indeed we often forget that the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet power was a very bloody one. Wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the conflicts in Kosovo, Abkhazia, and Ossetia caused widespread chaos. As Francis Fukuyama points out, much of this violence is due to the process of state-building and perhaps not due to democracy per se. However, leaders such as Vladimir Putin have used nationalist and ethnic tensions in their country to gain power and justify military action. Here, democratization may have hurt more than helped peace and stability.
The question of the rights of minorities is pertinent to established countries as well. Citizens of a democracy have to submit to the will of the people in order for the state to function. But a case study shows that the balance between personal freedom and the will of the people can be a difficult one to draw. Most people agree that citizens should not be allowed to kill other citizens. But is it right that it is illegal for French girls to wear headscarves to school even if their religion demands it? Is it right that Germans have made it illegal to deny the Holocaust and Austrians have made it illegal for people to purchase or own Mein Kampf? If you think these examples sound reasonable, consider the decision of Putin to limit the right of people to gather to oppose his government? Here is an example of an elected leader who uses his office to consolidate his power. The same can be said of Hugo Chavez, who has used his (democratically won) power to extend his term of office and silence his critics. The majority of people in some countries are opposed to democracy as we see it in the west. Speaking about the Middle East and even Russia, many analysts have pointed to a "democracy paradox" existing in those nations: given the opportunity to vote democratically, most citizens would vote to remove democracy. Democracy in an of itself does not always produce freedom. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, there can be illiberal democracies. Not everyone in the world shares our belief that that the tyranny of the majority is preferable to the tyranny of the church or the tyranny of an individual.
So what is one to do? Should we intervene in a sovereign nation to stop these "democratic" abuses of freedom? What if lives are at stake? What if human rights are denied? If the majority of people choose to have a strict, totalitarian government, do they have the right to subject the dissident minority to that same government? If Spain voted to jail all of the Basque people without charges or any reason, should Britain intervene against the Spanish people's will? What if they shot all of the Valencians or banned the use of Catalan? Ignoring the problem is dangerous (see Weimar Germany) but invading a country and starting a war without cause can be disastrous (see Iraq).
We are free to disagree with the decisions of the masses, but overruling the will of the people means being a paternalist; it necessarily implies a better knowledge of what is good than the rest of the nation or the world. This paternalism can come from many sources, but it always includes submitting to a higher moral authority. As de Tocqueville put it, "God alone can be omnipotent because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power." The Pope could speak out against a commonly-accepted practice, such as abortion, citing the teachings of the Church. An expert could oppose commonly-accepted doctrine, such as the widely held belief that torturing detainees saves American lives, by showing empirically that this is untrue. And a leader like Stalin or Kim Jong-il could use their self-assessed exceptional wisdom and power to kill and maim those who stand in the way of "progress."
This is the problem with objecting to the tyranny of the majority. Whatever the problems with it, the tyranny of any individual is usually worse. For every Lee Kwan Yew benevolently leading Singapore through occasionally unpopular economic reforms, there are dozens of Robert Mugabes and Slobodan Miloševics who use their power over the people for ill and not for good. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy looks bad, except when compared to the alternative.
How then can we work to ensure that the tyranny of the majority does not overrun the rights of the minority? As outsiders, the best we can do is pressure governments to uphold a basic level of human rights for all inhabitants of their land. Forceful intervention should only be considered when the situation is dire, such as when a genocide is imminent or has begun. Within our own country, we must always remember that no matter how much we might hate or distrust our neighbor, the stability and viability of this form of government is predicated on the protection of minorities. If minorities have nowhere to turn within the system, they will turn outside the system and destabilize it. This is the anarchy de Tocqueville and Madison talked about. Perhaps more importantly, we should remember that at any time we may find ourselves as part of the minority and will depend on the strength of these checks and balances to protect us.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Security, Terrorism, and Foreign Aid Part III: On Poverty and International Security
Poverty begets violence? Violence breeds poverty?
Only after our country was attacked on September 11, 2001 did we realize the true implication of the end of the Cold War: our new national security threats come from poor "rogue" nations and non-state actors, not some Evil Empire like the Soviet Union. Claims of a new "Clash of Civilizations" between the secular, liberal West and the fundamentalist, Islamic East notwithstanding, the threat of terrorism is not concentrated around a cohesive center and thus cannot be easily contained as the threat of the Soviet Union once was. Other threats to our safety, like trans-border crime, nuclear proliferation, and other amorphous dangers are equally hard to target. Many people have claimed that these threats are at least partially caused by the poverty and desperation in places like the Gaza Strip, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. By this explanation, the anger at the rich and powerful United States can be at least partially explained by the fact that the poor of the world grow up starving on the streets while rich, decadent Americans throw their money and power behind corrupt and cruel leaders and morally-bankrupt and socially-empty cultural icons worldwide. Further, if our "terrorists" could grow up with a reasonably good chance at a happy life, they wouldn't decide to strap explosives to their chest and blow themselves up in a crowded cafe or a packed metro car, would they?
The purpose of this series of posts is to try to tackle foreign aid from a national security perspective. Especially since the end of the Cold War, human security studies, a school of thought that focuses specifically on the security of individuals within a state and their "freedom from fear and want," has been gaining ground in foreign policy and international affairs. Several countries, notably Norway, Japan, and Canada, have set aside a place for human security in their foreign policies. (For a good review of the history of this field and a critical look at defining it, see King, Gary and Murray, Christopher L. "Rethinking Human Security." Political Science Quarterly. vol. 116: no. 4, 2001-2002).
First, the obvious: as anyone living in Honduras can attest, it is hard to climb out of poverty when the government and institutions designed to protect the common man are inept, impotent, and corrupt. The constant barrage of gang violence provides a strong disincentive to produce, buy, sell, or grow anything because anyone with money becomes a target for extortion. Young, unemployed, and disenfranchised men in San Pedro Sula grow up seeing the only way out of poverty is shooting a gun, dealing drugs, or paying dues to someone in power.
Proponents and critics of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" alike have often cited this link between poverty and violence to justify both more development spending and more security spending. But how compelling is this argument, and can it justify foreign aid spending for purely selfish reasons?
Alan B. Krueger, a professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, wrote a column debunking the conventional wisdom regarding terrorism and poverty in his "Economic Scene" column in the New York Times back in December of 2001. In the column, Krueger not only finds no evidence to support the poverty-violence causal loop, especially when it comes to terrorism in the Middle East. As he and many others have noted, the September 11th hijackers came from various socioeconomic backgrounds; all four of the pilots had been able to study abroad extensively, and half of the so-called "muscle hijackers" had at minimum some post secondary education (See the 9/11 Commission Report, chapters five and seven).
A more broad analysis by Krueger and Prof. Jitka Malecková in the Journal of Economic Perspectives shows that this is not merely a special case (see "Education, Poverty, and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?" vol. 17, no. 4, Autumn 2003). It seems across cultures, religions, and political causes, terrorism is not correlated with either education or economic status. Indeed, terrorists rarely claim a direct economic incentive for committing their crimes. Most, if not all, terrorist attacks are carried out for political and social reasons, at least explicitly. Contrary to popular belief, people who choose to be terrorists don't do so because they are poor or desperate. In fact, as Krueger notes in a later column, the data collected on Palestinian terrorists show that, on average, terrorists are wealthier and more well educated than the average Palestinian. In fact, in order to be an effective terrorist, one would need good reasoning skills, a good education, good connections, and of course money. And as research scientist Scott Atran writes in a 2003 New York Times Op-Ed, al Qaeda is able to weed out all of their applicants to select precisely those who would be, "intelligent, psychologically balanced and socially poised" enough to pull off a large-scale attack like the one we saw on 9/11 six years ago. In short, I can think of no better summary than the one provided by Prof. Krueger, "There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed. "
So if economic development does not decrease the risk of terrorism, is there any way to rationalize spending money on it for international security reasons? Perhaps. Krueger and Malecková noted that although they could find no link between poverty and terrorism, several other studies have shown a link between the level of poverty in a society and that society's propensity to fall into civil war. If that is indeed the case, this would imply that economic development work would have the added benefit of preventing war and isolating the world from the effects of a civil war in a neighboring country, including refugee movements, border security issues, and an interruption in economic trade to and from the region. However, a paper by Marcus Alexander and Matthew C. Harding presented at the 2005 Econometric Society World Congress casts doubt on whether the poverty-civil war correlation really exists. Alexander and Harding note that earlier studies ignore the complex issue of heterogeneity within a country, and therefore erroneously see a link between poverty and the breakout of civil war. More work could be done analyzing the influence of poverty on failed states specifically. Failed states, which offer a haven for terrorism and other illicit activities, are generally found in very poor areas, but it would be difficult to make the case that states fail because they are poor. It could also be that certain people are poor merely because their state is failing. Certainly, there are many poor, yet fairly stable states. Honduras, though consistently one of the poorest countries in this hemisphere, is not in any danger of collapsing, and whatever one might think of their government, Hondurans have certainly been spared the tumultuous political experience of Haiti and Nicaragua. Why one country and not the others has been spared despite similar income levels is the topic for another paper.
There is one, final, and in my mind most compelling reason that increases in foreign aid can be justified for security reasons: more foreign aid given out can increase a nation's level of what Joseph Nye Jr. at Harvard has called "soft power." Soft power is generally the ability of a country or government to get others to cooperate with it, defer to it, or at the very least allow it some latitude in controversial foreign policy decisions. As Nye says, soft power is attractive power; someone with soft power is able to get his way without resorting to threats or bargaining because he is liked or admired. If the values of a country or group are admired, others are likely to allow the admired country to take a leadership role on international issues.
In his book Soft Power, Nye classifies power into three categories: military, economic, and soft powers. Foreign aid is one of the ways in which a country can use its economic power to increase its soft power. Foreign aid is a good PR instrument. Because aid workers are admired throughout the world, if a country devotes a good deal of its resources to helping the poor and sick, people in other countries will admire its work and will begin to think highly of the country. The recipients of foreign aid in developing countries will begin to think of a powerful country in terms of the help it has given them personally. My host mother in Danli, Honduras first learned about America when a group of American soldiers (working in Honduras during the Contra War in neighboring Nicaragua) handed out food supplies and teddy bears in her village. Her decision to host an American student in her house was at least in part due to the early positive experience she had with America as a result of foreign aid and a foreign intervention.
I still have not come across any studies that treat the link between foreign aid and security in depth, though USAID and the State Department have long adopted the security rhetoric to sell their cause. When it comes to soft power at the very least, there seems to be a good rationale for providing development assistance, even in areas that are not considered of high strategic importance today. Charity is a trait that is admired worldwide, and rightfully so. As perceptions of America and Americans fall in the world due to bellicose anti-terror language and the Iraq War, taking a visible stand in the fight against hunger, HIV and AIDS, and malaria can help mitigate the negative effects.
But as always when speaking of foreign assistance, remember rule number one (with apologies to Hippocrates): Try to help--but first do no harm. Foreign assistance for its own sake can be dangerous and can actually undermine security in a given location. This will be the topic of the final entry in this series.
The purpose of this series of posts is to try to tackle foreign aid from a national security perspective. Especially since the end of the Cold War, human security studies, a school of thought that focuses specifically on the security of individuals within a state and their "freedom from fear and want," has been gaining ground in foreign policy and international affairs. Several countries, notably Norway, Japan, and Canada, have set aside a place for human security in their foreign policies. (For a good review of the history of this field and a critical look at defining it, see King, Gary and Murray, Christopher L. "Rethinking Human Security." Political Science Quarterly. vol. 116: no. 4, 2001-2002).
First, the obvious: as anyone living in Honduras can attest, it is hard to climb out of poverty when the government and institutions designed to protect the common man are inept, impotent, and corrupt. The constant barrage of gang violence provides a strong disincentive to produce, buy, sell, or grow anything because anyone with money becomes a target for extortion. Young, unemployed, and disenfranchised men in San Pedro Sula grow up seeing the only way out of poverty is shooting a gun, dealing drugs, or paying dues to someone in power.
Proponents and critics of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" alike have often cited this link between poverty and violence to justify both more development spending and more security spending. But how compelling is this argument, and can it justify foreign aid spending for purely selfish reasons?
Alan B. Krueger, a professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, wrote a column debunking the conventional wisdom regarding terrorism and poverty in his "Economic Scene" column in the New York Times back in December of 2001. In the column, Krueger not only finds no evidence to support the poverty-violence causal loop, especially when it comes to terrorism in the Middle East. As he and many others have noted, the September 11th hijackers came from various socioeconomic backgrounds; all four of the pilots had been able to study abroad extensively, and half of the so-called "muscle hijackers" had at minimum some post secondary education (See the 9/11 Commission Report, chapters five and seven).
A more broad analysis by Krueger and Prof. Jitka Malecková in the Journal of Economic Perspectives shows that this is not merely a special case (see "Education, Poverty, and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?" vol. 17, no. 4, Autumn 2003). It seems across cultures, religions, and political causes, terrorism is not correlated with either education or economic status. Indeed, terrorists rarely claim a direct economic incentive for committing their crimes. Most, if not all, terrorist attacks are carried out for political and social reasons, at least explicitly. Contrary to popular belief, people who choose to be terrorists don't do so because they are poor or desperate. In fact, as Krueger notes in a later column, the data collected on Palestinian terrorists show that, on average, terrorists are wealthier and more well educated than the average Palestinian. In fact, in order to be an effective terrorist, one would need good reasoning skills, a good education, good connections, and of course money. And as research scientist Scott Atran writes in a 2003 New York Times Op-Ed, al Qaeda is able to weed out all of their applicants to select precisely those who would be, "intelligent, psychologically balanced and socially poised" enough to pull off a large-scale attack like the one we saw on 9/11 six years ago. In short, I can think of no better summary than the one provided by Prof. Krueger, "There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed. "
So if economic development does not decrease the risk of terrorism, is there any way to rationalize spending money on it for international security reasons? Perhaps. Krueger and Malecková noted that although they could find no link between poverty and terrorism, several other studies have shown a link between the level of poverty in a society and that society's propensity to fall into civil war. If that is indeed the case, this would imply that economic development work would have the added benefit of preventing war and isolating the world from the effects of a civil war in a neighboring country, including refugee movements, border security issues, and an interruption in economic trade to and from the region. However, a paper by Marcus Alexander and Matthew C. Harding presented at the 2005 Econometric Society World Congress casts doubt on whether the poverty-civil war correlation really exists. Alexander and Harding note that earlier studies ignore the complex issue of heterogeneity within a country, and therefore erroneously see a link between poverty and the breakout of civil war. More work could be done analyzing the influence of poverty on failed states specifically. Failed states, which offer a haven for terrorism and other illicit activities, are generally found in very poor areas, but it would be difficult to make the case that states fail because they are poor. It could also be that certain people are poor merely because their state is failing. Certainly, there are many poor, yet fairly stable states. Honduras, though consistently one of the poorest countries in this hemisphere, is not in any danger of collapsing, and whatever one might think of their government, Hondurans have certainly been spared the tumultuous political experience of Haiti and Nicaragua. Why one country and not the others has been spared despite similar income levels is the topic for another paper.
There is one, final, and in my mind most compelling reason that increases in foreign aid can be justified for security reasons: more foreign aid given out can increase a nation's level of what Joseph Nye Jr. at Harvard has called "soft power." Soft power is generally the ability of a country or government to get others to cooperate with it, defer to it, or at the very least allow it some latitude in controversial foreign policy decisions. As Nye says, soft power is attractive power; someone with soft power is able to get his way without resorting to threats or bargaining because he is liked or admired. If the values of a country or group are admired, others are likely to allow the admired country to take a leadership role on international issues.
In his book Soft Power, Nye classifies power into three categories: military, economic, and soft powers. Foreign aid is one of the ways in which a country can use its economic power to increase its soft power. Foreign aid is a good PR instrument. Because aid workers are admired throughout the world, if a country devotes a good deal of its resources to helping the poor and sick, people in other countries will admire its work and will begin to think highly of the country. The recipients of foreign aid in developing countries will begin to think of a powerful country in terms of the help it has given them personally. My host mother in Danli, Honduras first learned about America when a group of American soldiers (working in Honduras during the Contra War in neighboring Nicaragua) handed out food supplies and teddy bears in her village. Her decision to host an American student in her house was at least in part due to the early positive experience she had with America as a result of foreign aid and a foreign intervention.
I still have not come across any studies that treat the link between foreign aid and security in depth, though USAID and the State Department have long adopted the security rhetoric to sell their cause. When it comes to soft power at the very least, there seems to be a good rationale for providing development assistance, even in areas that are not considered of high strategic importance today. Charity is a trait that is admired worldwide, and rightfully so. As perceptions of America and Americans fall in the world due to bellicose anti-terror language and the Iraq War, taking a visible stand in the fight against hunger, HIV and AIDS, and malaria can help mitigate the negative effects.
But as always when speaking of foreign assistance, remember rule number one (with apologies to Hippocrates): Try to help--but first do no harm. Foreign assistance for its own sake can be dangerous and can actually undermine security in a given location. This will be the topic of the final entry in this series.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
When two rights make a wrong...
We'll return to the topic of national security and foreign aid soon. But first I wanted to discuss something that I have been thinking about a lot lately.
We tend to paint the struggle against poverty, oppression, and violence in simple black and white terms. On one side we have the oppressors, tyrants, and the apathetic majority. On the other we have the big-hearted NGOs, humanitarian workers, activists, and peace builders. The truth is that things are rarely this simple. Sometimes your choice is between two distasteful outcomes. Sometimes you have to weigh two equally valid needs against one another. Even when there is a clear perpetrator and clear victim, the battle of Good vs. Evil always causes some collateral damage.
I started thinking about this while reading David Rieff's book A Bed for the Night, in which he discusses the crises humanitarianism has faced in the last two decades in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Humanitarianism, like development aid and human rights activism, has been continuously portrayed as altruistic and good in the media, yet in all of the above cases, the struggles on the ground forced the organizations to push the definition of what constituted "humanitarian" work in a war zone. Do you take sides in a conflict or do you try to help all of those in trouble? Do you share what you know with others if that is going to endanger your work in the conflict area? Do you support military action when it is necessary? Do you partner with other organizations working in the field?
World War II, from which Rieff gathers many examples in his book, is one of the few wars that easily lends itself to being portrayed as the classic battle of good vs. evil. The world was united against the evil of fascism, genocide, expansionism, and brutal violence exhibited by the Nazis, fascist Italy, and Japan. On one side we have a racist war machine devoted to the extermination of a people and the subjugation of all others. On the other, those who wished to defy this domination. However, in the struggle against facism and imperialism, the Chinese and Allied forces were forced to stoop to evil themselves. They caused the starvation of thousands. They firebombed Dresden. They sent millions of young men to the front to die. New, deadlier nuclear devices were invented and then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki causing horror the world had never seen. They caused over two million civilian deaths in Japan and Germany alone.
Was the violence justified? You be the judge. I think it was. We will never know what would have happened if others had sat idly by watching the Holocaust unfold and China fall. But let's not pretend that our intervention came without a high cost, not merely to our own men at the front, but in the lives of our enemies, many of whom had done nothing wrong except live in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had the right to live. So did the Jewish Poles of the Warsaw ghetto. And yet saving one meant killing the other. And it is a gruesome and difficult case to make that the gas chamber deaths in Auschwitz were more or less humane than the deaths of those burned alive on Dresden streets.
The Red Cross has been continuously criticized for not publicizing the details of the Nazi concentration camps even though it had become aware of the full scope of the horror through its work bringing aid to prisoners of war behind Axis lines. The Red Cross has subsequently said that it believed publicizing the atrocity would prohibit them from ensuring the safety of the prisoners captured by the Nazis. We can, maybe should, criticize them for their inaction. Does their keeping silent make them implicit accomplices in many Holocaust deaths? Perhaps. If they had spoken out and been removed from the camps, would they have been implicit accomplices in the death and suffering of the soldiers left behind? Perhaps. I think they should have publicized the details of the concentration camps, but I do not envy their position.
Let's move ahead fifty years and look at the predicament of the aid organizations working in Somalia. They knew that the humanitarian and development aid given to the country was being co-opted by warlords and fueling the conflict. They also knew that there were people in the camps who would starve without the continuation of this aid. Should they have stayed? Should they have gone? How about the aid workers assigned to Bosnia? Should they have taken a stronger stance against the ethnic cleansing or maintained their neutrality to allow them access to more victims? Should the aid workers arriving in the Congo following the Rwandan genocide have refused their post because it entailed providing comfort and food to those that had perpetrated the genocide? Or should they have tried their best to help all they could, knowing there were both innocent and guilty in those refugee camps?
How about international development? Is the universal struggle to end poverty free of these moral ambiguities? Hardly. Should development workers continue to spend money on failing programs because there is nothing to take their place? If development organizations are propping up failing governments, should they continue to help people on an individual basis knowing that they are creating total dependency on the organization?
During the 1990's, there was much talk of "humanitarian intervention" and "nation-building." As Rieff points out in his book, there is no such thing as a "humanitarian" intervention. I happen to think that some wars can be "just wars" if they are fought for noble reasons and with fair methods. But wars can never be "humanitarian" because they will necessarily cause the gruesome deaths of the innocent. This does not mean that we should not have intervened in Kosovo, or that our inaction in Rwanda, Chechnya, or Kurdistan was just. This does not mean that we should not have overthrown the Taliban or that we should have let Saddam Hussein continue his reign of terror. There is evil in the world; sometimes one has to confront that evil. But the confrontation always comes at a cost.
Today a lot of campus activism rightly targets the genocide in Darfur. The atrocities in Darfur are horrible, inhumane, and repulsive; this is something that should not exist in the world today. So how much are we willing to give up to stop the genocide? Many people seem willing to divest from the Sudanese government and boycott businesses operating there. Fewer are ready to put pressure on trading partners such as China if it means hurting international cooperation in other areas. Many fewer seem willing to send US soldiers to fight and die to stop the Janjaweed militias. Everything has a cost and everything has a different expected outcome. The question is, how much are we willing to pay?
Let's stop pretending that there is a clear-cut solution to these problems and that there is such a thing as a humanitarian war, a no-fail way out of poverty, an easy way out of Iraq, or a clean way of toppling a totalitarian government. When people talk about issues facing the world in class, at home, at work, or on the streets, we all tend to airbrush away the difficult decisions that lay behind every action. Maybe the cognitive dissonance is too much for our minds. But this is unacceptable. If we are truly serious about something, we should be able to absorb all of the effects of our action, the good and the bad.
This macabre calculus can seem pretty distasteful, but the alternative is to remain in a perpetual state of denial. To all the hawkish neo-cons, dovish liberals, peace-loving UN bureaucrats, fundamentalist warlords, and apathetic centrists out there: life's not fair, easy, or simple. Your enemies are not entirely evil just as you cannot be entirely good. Can we can acknowledge this? There is no other way to muddle through the immoral and repulsive choices we face.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Security, Terrorism, and Foreign Aid, Part II
I would like to acknowledge the work of two excellent authors: William Easterly, a development economist at NYU, and David Rieff, a writer and thinker who covers humanitarian issues. Their respective books The White Man's Burden and A Bed for the Night should be read, dissected, and discussed by anyone familiar with development issues and anyone who feels strongly about poverty and humanitarian concerns. If you happen to read them, please post here and let me know what you think!
When we last left off, we were discussing how foreign policy concerns of countries have influenced (maybe even been influenced by) their policies regarding foreign aid and humanitarian intervention. Let's leave aside questions of whether or not this is moral, ethical, or wise for a second and concentrate on the second questions I asked in my blog entry to introduce the topic: how has the US been using their programs of providing foreign aid and humanitarian assistance to developing countries to forward their foreign policy goals and how effective have those interventions been (either at forwarding foreign policy goals or at relieving the poor and oppressed of their suffering)? I plan on concentrating on the history and current state of US foreign policy and governmental programs because I am an American and more familiar with these. However, it is important to note that America is far from alone in the practice of mixing foreign policy and security concerns with programs aimed at poverty reduction or humanitarian assistance. In fact, Western countries seldom, if ever, ignore foreign policy considerations when determining whether or not to provide assistance to another nation. As David Rieff notes, "It is confusing dream with reality to think otherwise."
I. History and Landscape
Following the bloodbath of World War II, the US did not return to the isolationist foreign policy of the 1930's. After the disaster of the "peace" following the Treaty of Versailles, it became clear that leaving Europe in ruins was neither ethical nor wise. Particularly after George Kennan's "Long Telegram" describing the expansionist ambitions of the "Soviet Menace," US authorities began to see economic development in Europe as an important strategic investment, cordoning their allies off from the threat of Communism. The Marshall Plan in particular was also good for US business, as Europeans used the donated money to purchase US-made goods and pay for their transport on US flag vessels. The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and later the Food for Peace program, were as much about domestic politics and shrewd realpolitik as about taking a moral stance against poverty.
The Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were created in 1961 as the Cold War exploded. This was the year the Berlin Wall was built, the year of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, the year that Eisenhower first described the military-industrial complex, and the year that the Soviets succeeded in launching the first man in space. This was the year after Khrushchev's alleged "shoe banging" speech at the UN, following a decade of McCarthyism at home and Mutually-Assured Destruction all over the world. The Vietnam War was starting to capture US attention, and other left-leaning guerrilla "wars of liberation" were simmering all over the world. Like his predecessors, President Kennedy realized that, to use a familiar cliché, "capturing the hearts and minds" of citizens of the developing world would serve US strategic interests while providing support to some of the poorest human beings on the planet.
While I believe that Kennedy sincerely wanted to relieve the suffering in the Third World, he was able to gain support for his expensive policies in part because he packaged them as important to American national security. Given the landscape of post-colonial warfare in the developing world, the Soviet Union and the United States were the new imperial powers jockeying for influence among these inchoate states. While the arms deals and covert CIA operations are common knowledge, we often fail to recognize the role that foreign aid played in the hostilities. Even leaving aside common rumors about CIA operatives working closely or within USAID, the countries chosen as the beneficiaries of foreign aid programs were chosen not only due to need, but also with regards to their geopolitical position and political beliefs. Aid was given to countries that cooperated with US interests and withheld from those that did not; efforts to coerce countries using aid intensified in the face of geopolitical threats. Hence, Pakistan received a boost in aid when India aligned itself with the Soviet Union, only to lose aid money during the nuclear tests of the 1970's, only to get more aid following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only to lose aid money following the end of the Cold War, only to gain it back following September 11 and the beginning of the War on Terror. During the 1970's the US cut aid to Salvador Allende's leftist government in Chile as part of an effort to destabilize the regime and used foreign aid to reward Egypt for Middle East cooperation. A decade later the US poured aid money into Honduras while using the country as a base of operations for the Contra War in Nicaragua. To this day Honduras is the second-largest recipient of Peace Corps volunteers and the home of the joint US-Honduras Palmerola military base.
Though the rhetoric of the Cold War has disappeared, today's security interests play a leading role in foreign aid distribution. A Congressional Research Service investigation of US foreign aid programs confirms this. Iraq, Israel, and Egypt continue to get a disproportionate amount of foreign aid due to their huge political importance. The "War on Terror" and the "War on Drugs" bring money to places like Pakistan and Colombia. Muslim allies in the Middle East and Eurasia like Jordan and Turkey are given huge sums of aid. As the report notes, because foreign aid is flexible and can act as both "a carrot and a stick," it is an integral tool needed to execute US foreign policy,initiatives. The programs are designed to protect US strategic security interests, but also to forward American economic interests worldwide, whether through encouraging market liberalization in developing countries or through rules requiring exclusive use of US-produced goods and US-owned transport in aid activities. USAID is not altruistic. It has focused a lot of effort in branding itself, essentially acting as a PR representative for the US abroad. As the Agency notes, the re-branding of USAID unveiled during the response to the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia allegedly helped the US recover some political goodwill in the Islamic world. Not insignificantly, placing the name visibly on aid packages also allows Americans abroad to see their tax dollars at work. Of course, this branding backfires when USAID-donated materials are misused (see Michael Maren's discussion of aid in Somalia in The Road to Hell) or when USAID donates unnecessary equipment and materials only to watch them visibly rot and rust away while surrounding poverty continues (see the materials given "del pueblo americano" on the northern coast of Honduras). Yet it cannot be stated that having the American flag plastered on donated goods to developing countries has no effect on the image of America in the mind of the beneficiaries. It has to, and that's the point.
And what of the Peace Corps? Why do we pay to send thousands of amateur development workers to work in remote locations all over the world? Though the program has evolved to become one of "development," the agency is really about intercultural exchange. The second two goals of the Peace Corps, to learn and interact with the host culture and to share American culture abroad, target the "hearts and minds" aspect of foreign relations. And how does the agency choose where to send the volunteers? The choice has as much, arguably more, to do with history and politics as with need in the recipient country. The two largest Peace Corps recipient countries are Ukraine and Honduras, the former due to its strategic location at the crossroads between Europe and the increasingly powerful Russia and the latter as a relic from the Contra War of the 1980's. If you doubt this or hope it is not true, I challenge you to think of a more compelling explanation for the puzzling distribution of Peace Corps volunteers worldwide. My research has shown that it is not correlated with any development metrics, and my experience in the Peace Corps and a revealing conversation with my former Peace Corps supervisor has led me to believe that, like that of many bureaucracies, Peace Corps decision-making is all about inertia.
So, the programs of the American government are as much about politics as about aiding the poor. But what of the countless NGOs and multilateral development organizations working in development and humanitarian aid? Are they more altruistic in their development actions because they have no political agenda? Of course not. The World Bank has a political agenda. The United Nations has a political agenda. Every NGO has a political agenda. While they are in some ways distinct from the American political agenda, to say they all overlap is an understatement. The World Bank, with an American president and a lot of American funding, has been continuously criticized for forcing countries to liberalize economically in line with American economic interests. The interests of the United States always loom large at the UN because the country is a permanent member of the Security Council and because of its economic and military might more generally. It is also worth noting, as David Rieff did in A Bed for the Night, that our country is the single largest contributor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and can be accused of using UNHCR's work to distract from US non-intervention in civil wars, mass murders, and humanitarian crises abroad. But in some ways the most interesting case of politics in foreign aid comes from the NGOs, ostensibly NON-governmental organizations.
I touched on this issue in a previous blog entry on CARE's decision to refuse government money for controversial food aid programs in the developing world. With food aid, and with most other USAID or other government-sponsored programs, NGOs act as subcontractors for the government and are the actors that actually execute American policy on the ground. USAID officials by and large are not the ones actually doing development work. According to the CRS Report, there are only 2000 direct-hire personnel working for the agency, not nearly enough to carry out the millions of dollars of programs the agency oversees. Instead, USAID has a huge, frankly convoluted contracting process where NGOs, religious organizations, and private firms compete to win the million-dollar contracts from the organization. On the ground, USAID dollars are spent by the subcontractors. For example, the USAID-sponsored HIV and AIDS prevention program in the Garifuna communities in Honduras is actually carried out by the Samaritan's Purse religious organization, having won the lucrative contract. Consequently, the program is carried out in accordance with the evangelical Samaritan's Purse philosophy of sexual education (i.e. abstinence only).
Much has been said and written about faith-based initiatives and whether government money is being used to promote a certain religious point of view, but the more interesting question in terms of this discussion is how the process of grants and contracts influences the NGOs themselves. How independent can an NGO be if its finances are so dependent on the government? NGOs like Samaritan's Purse might benefit from the evangelical beliefs of the current administration, but should a liberal president take office in 2009 different NGOs are sure to benefit. Charities lobby in Washington just like any other interest group and are awarded for loyalty just like any other interest group. Just as the government implicitly puts its seal of approval on an NGO's work by granting it money, the NGOs have a major financial interest in buying into the government's philosophy so that it will be awarded more aid money in the future. When CARE decided to stop its food aid program, it lost 45 million dollars of government money. Not all organizations can or are willing to sacrifice that much for principle. Perhaps this is why development NGOs and the government tend to act in concert with one another so often. As David Rieff points out, aid organizations have long collaborated with the government to the point where officials working for an NGO or for USAID can switch positions without changing their philosophical approach to development. During the Cold War and throughout the 1990's American aid agencies tended to parrot officials in Washington when asked about their positions on pertinent issues. The catchphrases of the day find their way into the glossy brochures of the NGOs; we collectively moved from the "gender and development" of the 1980's to the "boosting civil society" of the post-Soviet 1990's to the "winning hearts and minds" we see today. Whether or not this close collaboration is good or bad is a discussion for another day, but the important thing to take away is that if the American government's development and humanitarian priorities are political, then the same can be said for the NGOs. Rieff sums this up best in A Bed for the Night: "mainline US relief organizations [have] collaborated so intimately with the American government that knowing where the NGOs ended and the government began was always difficult to determine and remains so."
Given the political basis for "altruistic" humanitarian and development interventions, have these efforts worked? I have already written extensively on the ineffectiveness of foreign aid interventions at improving the lives of the poor, and readers looking for a more in-depth look should pick up William Easterly's The White Man's Burden. Looking at the question from our selfish, American angle, the results do not seem to be there either. American approval ratings abroad continue to fall and remain very low in the Middle East, the largest recipient of US aid money and still the largest source of worry for security officials in Washington. A more detailed study would have to be done to see if these interventions have hurt or helped the American image at all. Without evidence proving that American image is improving due to these programs., can purely American security, political, and economic interests alone justify sending more and better aid abroad in the future? This is the topic of my next entry. Until then, please let me know what you think about this discussion, and anything else related.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Security, Terrorism, and Foreign Aid, Part I
As some of you know, I have been reading an excellent book: William Easterly's White Man's Burden. I recommend the book to everyone interested in development work. Easterly uses a straightforward, logical, and (when possible) quantitative approach to analyzing the effect of half a century of foreign aid in the developing world. His basic argument is that the traditional top-down approach to development championed in the imperial days and by many "Planners" (as he calls them) in development today is doomed to failure, and a more flexible, focused, local-driven approach to development will be more productive. In fact, he gives some evidence that excessive reliance on foreign aid may have hurt some countries, an "aid curse" to go with the so-called "oil curse" of underdevelopment. More generally, he argues that we need to be as demanding and results-driven when it comes to international development as we are for our own development. As I've said before, every little bit does not necessarily help: we should empirically examine programs and prove that they are more effective at reducing poverty than a simple income transfer from the rich countries to the poor would be. Programs need to be constantly scrutinized by the poor and their feedback should be integrated into program design.
I found myself nodding throughout Easterly's book agreeing with almost everything he said. But one particular point Easterly made got my attention. At one point, he mentions that USAID, "brazenly states its objective is to further 'the foreign policy goals of the United States.'" This got me thinking about a few things:
1) Is it bad (immoral/unethical/unwise) that USAID is explicitly acting primarily to support US foreign policy?
2) How has the US been using humanitarian/development aid to forward its foreign policy goals? How have other nations been using their aid to forward their foreign policy goals?
3) How effective have these interventions been?
4) How is poverty linked to the humanitarian/security issues we face today, such as terrorism and genocide? How would the eradication of poverty forward these goals?
I plan on tackling these issues over the next few entries. Meanwhile let me know what you think...
I found myself nodding throughout Easterly's book agreeing with almost everything he said. But one particular point Easterly made got my attention. At one point, he mentions that USAID, "brazenly states its objective is to further 'the foreign policy goals of the United States.'" This got me thinking about a few things:
1) Is it bad (immoral/unethical/unwise) that USAID is explicitly acting primarily to support US foreign policy?
2) How has the US been using humanitarian/development aid to forward its foreign policy goals? How have other nations been using their aid to forward their foreign policy goals?
3) How effective have these interventions been?
4) How is poverty linked to the humanitarian/security issues we face today, such as terrorism and genocide? How would the eradication of poverty forward these goals?
I plan on tackling these issues over the next few entries. Meanwhile let me know what you think...
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