I first met Johnson Borh at a DC restaurant. It was his first time outside Liberia, and he looked a little overwhelmed and homesick. I’d entertained first-time visitors from Africa before, and the best I felt I could do was find the restaurant with the best grilled meat and rice.
We met again this week in Monrovia, where he is clearly in his element. Johnson helps lead a remarkable peace-building organization called NEPI–the National Ex-combatants Peace Initiative. Like perhaps 50 000 other youth in the country, Johnson was once a fighter. He joined the rebel force led by Charles Taylor in the early 1990s, while still a teenager. This was the same rebel force that had murdered his father and brother before his eyes. Why join? Mostly to avoid the same fate as his family. Survival trumps vengeance.
Today Johnson helps run a small organization he helped found, working to rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-combatants and communities affected by the war. He has come so far first and foremost because he’s intelligent and dynamic; a natural leader, and a generous soul. He’s the first to tell you, however, that he has come this far because of the generosity and actions of a handful of remarkable people. A Reverend’s helping hand here. A small NGO grant there.
Johnson’s story is a reminder to me of the transformative potential of aid. A training course, a small grant, or some other helping hand can catapult dynamic young men and women forward. It’s an approach to assistance, however, that is very distant from the current discourse of aid effectiveness.
I’m reminded that, as an undergraduate student, I was deeply influenced by a book by E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. Schumacher was a British statistician and an influential socialist and economic thinker during the 1970s. He is best known for his plea for a human-scale and decentralized approach to economic development. The subtitle of his book tells it all: Economics as if People Really Mattered.
According to Schumacher, the most powerful actions we can take as individuals are small and personal ones. Help a disadvantaged youth through school. Start a village library. Plant trees. Until being reminded by Johnson’s story, I hadn’t given the book much thought in almost ten years. I aim to pick it up again when I get home.
It’s ironic I should come back to Schumacher after all of these years. In my first attempt to apply to economic graduate programs, I made the (fatal) mistake of devoting my personal statement to Jane Jacobs and E.F. Schumacher–a radical urban planner, and a socialist.
Needless to say, I was roundly rejected from PhDs.
Fortunately I’d applied to the abode of at least one unconventional economist–Dani Rodrik–who didn’t find socialist thinkers of the 1970s quite so unappealing. And so I got my masters.
The second time round, I knew better. “Gosh I love math,” was the general tone of the statement, “math, math, math, math, math.” However half-sincere, it worked. (At least a little. I was only mostly roundly rejected. But all you need is one acceptance, after all.)
To this day, I’m convinced that the only reason I was admitted to Berkeley is that Brad Delong was chair of admissions that year. And Brad has a soft spot for old school socialist urban planners, as his worst critics (and greatest admirers) will all agree.
Now, I actually turned out to like the math much more than I expected, and indeed ended up concentrating as an applied econometrician. Even so, perhaps it’s time to revive some of the old school thinkers…
Focusing on small but unequivocal stories of success in aid / development sounds like a good way to keep from getting disillusioned with this whole development economics business.
And it was nice to hear about your admissions story. I wonder if I would have just gotten into Berkeley Economics if I had revealed my liking for heterodox economics and ethnographic work?
I’m considering choosing Berkeley over some higher ranked programs (Princeton, MIT) with similar interests as you — any thoughts?
you make the Shumacher book sound intriguing. As someone who lived in the Soviet Union and got to see a socialist system up close and personal, I’m interested to see if the book can convince me on the fundamental humanity of the principles, let alone the practice. But I’m intrigued enough to check it out and see (well, it helps that one of the essays is called Buddhist Economics…how could I miss reading that?)
A few years ago I was saying similar things to Greg Cherlin whom I met when he was finishing his thesis in Yale around 1970. He was already involved in similar activities. His recent response is that it is a sensible approach but you can be blown away by a bush fire.
I picked up the Schumacher book and read a bit of it a couple of years ago. I remember wanting to tear my economist hair out most of the time, but I can’t remember the specifics.
However, I think the opposite lesson is wiser. BIG is beautiful. Economies of scale. Globalization. Huge elaborate supply chains extending to every corner of the world. Cargo ships carrying millions of deadweight tons carrying the products of poor countries to markets in the rich world. That’s why export-oriented East Asia succeeded and import-substitution-industrialization Latin America failed. Small is beautiful is the formula of protectionism. Of developmental dead ends. Of squalor, impotence, wasted time, wasted lives.