Yesterday, while the Senate worked toward finalizing an important bill “implementing unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to fight the war on terror more effectively, to improve homeland security, and for other purposes,” Senator Maria Cantwell saw an opportunity to offer an amendment of her own. The purpose of that amendment:
To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of vastly reducing global poverty and eliminating extreme global poverty, and to require periodic reports on the progress toward implementation of the strategy.
Eliminating global poverty is surely an admirable goal . . . but how exactly is the president supposed to achieve the elimination of global poverty? Well, that’s all left rather vague–the important thing in Senator Cantwell’s proposal, it seems, is that we’ll have a big plan to figure all this out. Alas, the long, sad history of foreign aid is littered with well-meaning calls for precisely this kind of top-down, centralized plan to end poverty–despite their recurring failure to actually work. Writing in the Washington Post a while back, the distinguished economist William Easterly of New York University explained why. Reviewing a book by Jeffrey Sachs, the leading acolyte of the “big plan,” Easterly wrote:
The broader development successes of recent decades, most of them in Asia, happened without the Big Plan–and without significant foreign aid as a proportion of the recipient country’s income. Gradual free market reforms in China and India in the 1980s and ’90s (which Sachs implausibly argues were shock therapy in disguise) have brought rapid growth. Moreover, the West itself achieved gradual success through piecemeal democratic and market reforms over many centuries, not through top-down Big Plans offered by outsiders. . . .
“Success in ending the poverty trap,” Sachs writes, “will be much easier than it appears.” Really? If it’s so easy, why haven’t five decades of effort gotten the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage at the question of why the previous $2.3 trillion didn’t reach the poor so that the next $2.3 trillion does. In fact, ending poverty is not easy at all. In those five decades, poverty researchers have learned a great deal about the complexity of toxic politics, bad history (including exploitative or inept colonialism), ethnic and regional conflicts, elites’ manipulation of politics and institutions, official corruption, dysfunctional public services, malevolent police forces and armies, the difficulty of honoring contracts and property rights, unaccountable and excessively bureaucratic donors and many other issues. Sachs, however, sees these factors as relatively unimportant. Indeed, he seems deaf to the babble and bungling of the U.N. agencies he calls upon to run the Big Plan, not to mention other unaccountable and ineffectual aid agencies.
Babble and bungling? Unaccountable and ineffectual? Let’s hope that someone in the Senate squashes this crummy idea.
