Tuesday, February 28, 2006

The Man Without a Plan

    Easterly is well aware of the efficiency of market delivery when commodities are bought in a market and backed by suitable purchasing power, and he contrasts that with the usual infelicities and inefficiencies in getting aid to those who need it most. But the distinction between the two scenarios lies not only in the different ways of meeting the respective problems, but also in the nature of the problems themselves. There is something deeply misleading in the contrast he draws between them, which seems to have motivated his entire project: "There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can't get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children." The disparity in the results is indeed heartbreaking. But jumping from there to arguing that the solution to the latter problem is along the same lines as the solution to the former reflects a misunderstanding of what makes the latter so much more difficult. (That major issue is clearly more important than the minor point that J. K. Rowling was on welfare support and received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council when writing the first Harry Potter novel.)
Amartya Sen reviews William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. [Link via Pradeep.]

2 Comments:

At 6:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

When is Amartya Sen going to come up with something of relevance? How long will he keep taking potshots at minor articles while living off his past reputation?

 
At 10:37 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

International aid without any effective means to prevent siphoning off into Swiss bank accounts is money down the drain. The 600 lb gorilla in the discussion is corruption in the third-world delivery mechanism, which undercuts aid.

The aid donors need to come up with strong measures to prosecute elites who missappropriate development funds. Just as we have internation tribunals for war criminals, those with secret foreign accounts need to be prosecuted and prosecuted severely. But such intervention would be used by third-world politicians to demogogue.

 

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