Chris Blattman

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Development as firefighting

We should also bear in mind that very little aid has so far been given to people in the poorest countries. It is sometimes observed that roughly $500 billion has been given to sub-Saharan Africa since independence and that sounds like a lot of money.  But actually it isn’t very much: over the last twenty years aid per person in sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 41 cents a week.

Does the continued existence of poverty prove that Africans have squandered the 41 cents a week that we have so generously provided for their well-being and self-improvement?  (The British people may be thankful that the United States Marshall Plan after the Second World War provided ten times this amount per person.)

The economist Jeff Sachs compares the current situation in Africa to a forest fire: if we try to put out the fire with one hose, and the fire continues to rage, do we conclude that fighting fires is hopeless? Do we conclude that water is not effective at putting out fires?  Or do we conclude that we have not yet applied enough water and that we do not have enough firefighters and hoses?

That is Owen Barder writing on the OpenDemocracy blog. Discussions on the topic inspired my post on aid and growth last week. His article is worth reading in full.

7 Responses

  1. Let’s accept the firemen analogy.

    What should we think of a firemen who has only a few thousand liters of water available, and decides that therefore the best things to do is to evenly spread a few glasses of water on each tree in the forest ? Instead of realizing that his only choice, if he wants to have any effect, is to select the small portion of forest he *can* protect effectively, and concentrate all the small volume of water he has on that portion ?

    In real life, even those much more effective than aid worker firemen do have to make such choice, do have to give up protecting some portion of the forest because the fire is to strong and concentrate on the places where they can do a difference.

    There another side of that analogy that’s weak, more than that in fact, fallacious actually.

    If we were to actually compare firemen and aid on the terms that are used here, we’d realize that firemen are not using a lot of water at all.

    If we take the volume of water the firemen of California used over the last twenty years, but average it to a volume of water used *per week* for each *single* tree in California, how much does it do ? Well, I don’t have the exact number, but I can expect it’s not more than a few glasses of water per tree per week.
    OMG how were they able to protect the forest with that little water ?
    Well because, there’s a fire only a few weeks a year, and then each time, only a small portion of the forest burning.
    What is the forest was burning every week ? What if in fact some portion of it were constantly burning ? Would we just accept that the firemen come to say “dudes, given the number of fires, we permanently need 5% of California’s drinkable water to stop them” ? (Yes, firemen do not use drinkable water to stop fires, but the *water* that aids uses is very drinkable). Wouldn’t we in that case almost only concentrate on the root cause of those fires, try to find *why* those trees are burning all the time, trying to find what to do about what causes the fire, instead of just accepting to send more water to treat the effects instead of the cause ? Wouldn’t we simply refuse water to the firemen if we knew that next week the same portion of forest will be burning again ?

  2. I got this Google malicious warning for opendemocacy.net when I clicked the link…

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    Over the past 90 days, opendemocracy.net appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 1 site(s) including opendemocracy.com/.

  3. Putting aside the firefighting analogy, it’s hard to think that 41c per week can make much difference, even if it is applied to the problem at 100% efficiency.

    Compared with the amounts spent on health and education in rich countries, the resources available to the poorest countries, even with aid, can’t lift them out of poverty.

    New South Wales spends $28 per person per week on education alone. What is 41c supposed to do? Even if it is all put into education, what sort of boost can it give to the education provided by countries with little tax revenue?

  4. Chris – it is a shame that your commentators are reacting to a quote from Sachs rather than the article itself – which is much more nuanced than Sachs.

    Owen

  5. It is a scientific fact that water extinguishes fire. It is not a scientific fact that the things Sachs might advocate spending aid money on extinguish poverty.

    If the firemen were waving hoses anywhere but the fire, would he still conclude that they needed more hoses? No. It would be a waste of water, in the same way it is a waste of money to continue spending money on aid programs that do nothing to reduce poverty.

  6. Ah yes, the old ‘it just needs a lot more’ argument. How much is enough? He and others can use this argument till the end of time. ‘It failed b/c we didn’t spend enough.’ There’s no test for this. This argument falls on deaf ears, especially in the economist circles.

    It’s actually quite sad that this argument even finds space for discuss still.

  7. Sach’s analogy is not convincing. The relationship between water and fire reduction is stronger by magnitudes than the relationship between foreign aid and poverty reduction.

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