Unconfirmed Reports

I have been reading The Bottom Billion, by Paul Collier, about how the poorest countries in the world can improve their situation.

In the first place, Collier deserves the praise he has received for this book, as it is a serious effort to make the world a better place. He presents a largely original analysis of how the poorest sub-Saharan nations can be pulled out desperate poverty, and my guess is that he is probably right on many points. From another perspective, though, it is a limited, academic economist’s analysis of the problem - Collier simply ignores any consideration that doesn’t fit with his prestigious pseudo-scientific niche.

Content aside, the author’s style and approach was very irritating to me. An example from Chapter 6:

I first came across this problem when I was advising the reforming government of Uganda in the early 1990s … I remember bumping into the Ugandan economic team at a meeting in Hong Kong in 1997. The latest issue of International Investor had just come out, and they rushed up to me in excitement, saying, “Have you seen it?” They had achieved one of the largest improvements in the world…

Collier’s writing makes him appear to be a pompous ass. I don’t recall ever reading a factual monograph in which the word “I” is used so much: he can’t stop inserting himself everywhere, reminding us how much he has achieved, how often he has been called upon for advice by the UN, the World Bank, any other major organisation he can name-check. My guess is that he has moved up through a career where clearly promoting your worth and your experience is a necessary part of professional advancement. But he could still set that aside when writing a book which, according to the blurb, is not actually supposed to be about him.

I am not the first person to accuse him of arrogance, as you can see from the international trade symposium reports here.

The other thing that annoyed me was his attachment to blunt economic measurements. Everything in the book is evaluated according to GDP growth, dollar costs and dollar returns. Admittedly, the first chapter Collier does acknowledge that not all economic growth is good for poor people. However, he then argues that some economic growth is necessary to alleviate poverty, so - non sequitur - we should focus on GDP growth as the strategy for development, with the question of what counts as useful growth is thereafter set aside as not worh discussing. The rest of the book just talks about dollars.

Another huge blind spot: the environment. Collier does not take any interest in what sorts of development may be environmentally sustainable, or environmentally damaging. And even if his book is intended to be about economics, I would argue that to analyse economics while ignoring the natural environment, carbon engine of all our economies, is a near-sighted analysis. Just the sort of analysis that could help raise global temperatures to the point where all our livelihoods will be endangered.

However, back to what’s good about the book. One of its strongest points was its analysis of military coups - how they hold back a national economy by diverting all its resources into military spending. Collier argues quite convincingly that richer nations should mount military interventions whenever there is a coup in the poorest countries - because this guarantee, once proven, would save under-funded goverments from working in constant fear of the next coup, and accordingly having to spend lots of extra money on keeping the army happy.

I’m glad I read the Bottom Billion, because it comes from an ideological position quite different to other books I have read about international development. It’s always good to engage with ideas that you assume you are against. Collier’s main position is that increased trade and investment is what the poorest nations need more of. He’s probably right, up to a point - though I would be more convinced if he had given more attention to arguments from other perspectives, even if just to explain further what he thinks is wrong with them.

In his conclusion Collier makes brief remarks alluding to other perspectives on development:

The countries of the bottom billion are not there to pioneer experiments in socialism; they need to be helped aong the already trodden path of building market economies.

He seems to be saying that Western countries have enjoyed the fruits of capital-driven economic growth, so we have no right to deny these same benefits to other countries, out of some mistaken idea that the path out of poverty should have been otherwise. He is right that such a didactic postion would be insidious, but this doesn’t mean that a narrow focus on GDP growth is necessary or even desirable. Nor does he have any evidence to convince me that the people of the bottom billion want to set off on the path of capital-driven growth. I don’t know what they want, because I haven’t met enough of them. It’s likely to be a complex picture, with different people wanting different things. Some of them might even want to be involved in some kind of “socialist experiment”.

One final little jab at the flimsiness of his economist’s arrogance: In a 2008 postscript, Collier discusses what he sees as the greatest hopes for development in the bottom billion. He observes:

The big story for many countries of the bottom billion is the commodity booms. It is their best opportunity for transformation…

Just a few months after that postscript was published, the “commodity boom” seems now to have gone bust.

Yet Collier has spent the whole book reminding us what a brilliant economist he is, and how his statistical analyses are the only possible saviour for the starving masses. Does he really know as much as he claims to - or is he just a numbers guy, good at picking out trends from past figures, but with no particular insight into what’s coming next?