Summer reading
Summer is in full swing. Before it’s over, I’d like to make some book recommendations. These are for anyone interested in international development but who might find the subject a bit heavy to delve into while at the beach. I think that’s pretty much everyone, myself included! None of these books are new, but each is compelling and even entertaining.
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (2013) by Nina Munk will no doubt appeal to the cynics who believe development aid is a waste of money. Munk describes Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages initiative to inject funds into several villages in Africa. This is part of Sachs’ effort to demonstrate that the fundamental problem is one of investments, i.e. that there are not enough being made. Sachs is a well-known economist who has called for a doubling of aid and he should be commended for putting his money where his mouth is (well, not his money, but funds raised from various donors). The results are not, by and large, happy. For anyone, myself included, who thinks the problem with aid is not so much the lack of financing, but cultural and institutional challenges that arise when you try to give shovel money into a place which lacks the enabling environment. It isn’t the quantity of aid financing, but about the quality. This book supports that argument, while describing what, at the time of writing looked like a lost cause. Highly readable and thought provoking.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012) by Katherine Boo is not, strictly speaking, about development aid. I include it here because of the richly detailed descriptions of life among the poorest of the poor, especially their interactions with, and dependence on the world outside their slum. Looming large is the Mumbai International airport, the very reason for the slum’s existence, and a direct or indirect source of livelihood for most of its residents. Although a work of journalism, it reads like fiction, as Boo uses a very close narrative voice to relate what is going on inside the heads of a number of characters. This level of intimacy was achieved by conducting interviews with 168 people over a period of several years.
Adventures in Dystopia (2013) by Daniel Sellen, is an all-too believable and highly enjoyable fictional account of six connected characters, three from the West, three from developing countries. The Westerners are in the business, so to speak, of helping the poor, for a variety of motives. On the other side, the three characters – from Columbia, India and Cameroon – each have their own agenda, which doesn’t necessarily coincide with what the aid workers have in mind. Sellen, a World Bank staff, clearly draws on his own extensive professional and personal experiences to depict a world alternating between comedy and tragedy, and the chemical reactions that can and do occur when people from rich and poor societies encroach on each other’s territory, so to speak.
Don’t be put off by the somewhat hyperbolic title or fooled into thinking that this is an instruction manual. In How to Change the World (2007) David Bornstein describes the work done by social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship differs from straightforward entrepreneurship in that its goals that encompass social, environmental or other common good problems. Bornstein devotes each chapter to a different Ashoka fellows (as well as the founder of Ashoka, one of the original promoters of social entrepreneurship) who, in various ways, have changed the lives of many, many people through creatively tackling problems in their communities. Issues they have addressed include promoting reading, self-employment for women, etc. These are a far cry from Silicon Valley apps which seek to make life slightly more convenient for the urban middle class. They are inspiring stories of how a little assistance can go a long way, and a welcome antidote to the cynicism that can come from seeing insurmountable problems everywhere.
From different perspectives all four books highlight the cultural barriers between rich and poor, between the citizens of Western and developing countries. It turns out – surprise, surprise! – that people in developing countries have agency. They are not a mass of abject, aid-dependent sufferers, but many are hard-working and entrepreneurial with their own rich and complex inner lives. They inhabit worlds every bit as complicated, hierarchical, and full of joys and sorrows, as we in developed countries do. They are not passive recipients, not the ‘meek who will inherit the earth’. They will succeed (if they succeed) because they are entrepreneurial, on the lookout for an opportunity. They are likely to be as morally upright as they are devious or corrupt. In many ways they are not unlike everyone else on the socioeconomic ladder, from the poorest of the poor to the billionaire elites.
What hinders the majority of people in poorer countries from doing better are systemic issues. Country institutions often work against their people, who must deal with arbitrary justice, antagonistic rule of law, and entrenched networks which keep them from finding opportunities to thrive. In this respect, let us hope that developing countries converge with the West, and not the other way around!
(Revised May 5, 2020)