Tag Archives: william easterly

The Role of the Celebrity Activist

Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton.  Nas vs. Jay-Z.  And now, Easterly vs. Bono.  In an attack reminiscent of Jon Stewart’s epic takedown of the sheepish Jim Cramer after the financial crisis, Bill Easterly, a well-known development economist who favors bottom-up approaches to development rather than top-down technocratic solutions, uses the 30-year anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon to lament the decline of good celebrity activism.  Summing up the comparison in a sentence, Easterly pens:

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Bono is an interesting character.    I am not completely sold that he is not a completely negative force in terms of development, but I do think that he has the tendency to do more harm than good.  First, he aligns himself with a particular school of thought regarding how foreign aid should be delivered.  Then again, I do the same thing (the opposite school of Bono), so I don’t know if I can completely knock him for standing behind what he believes, even if I think he is wrong.  Second, he provides a public face for institutions and organizations that are often disingenuous when it comes to impact, as I have written about in this post about Project (Red) and the trend of cause marketing.  But Easterly sums up my thoughts nicely in his post.  Here, Easterly describes what he sees as the problem of celebrity activism in general:

Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in CongoGeorge Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.

But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?

I agree.  Raising awareness is important, and I like to see celebrities shining a light on critical issues.  I understand the desire and sense of need to use your celebrity for good, but, just like I don’t want to see Bill Easterly dance, I don’t want to hear Bono be a technocrat or an economist.  This, according to Easterly, is the role of a true celebrity dissident:

True dissidents – celebrity or not – play a vital role in democracy. But the celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to groupthink (We must invade Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling!) and need dissidents to shake them out of it.

True dissidents claim no expertise; they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard.

We need more high-profile dissidents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only reinforce this power in their capacity as faux experts. Where have all the celebrity dissidents gone? It’s not a complicated task. All Lennon was saying was to give peace a chance.

Amen.  Keep it simple.

The Aversion to Government-Run Development Programs

Andrew Sullivan of The Altlantic writes a popular blog about politics, economics, culture, and anything else he finds interesting or relevant at the moment.  With 20-30 posts today, it has the depth of a traditional blog and the breadth of a link aggregator. The relative exposure he gives a subject depends on how much he likes the people who are writing about it.  He is a fiscal conservative and likes the idea of market-driven, bottom-up development.  Over the past year, international aid and economic development have been getting a lot more play after he discovered Aidwatch and Texas in Africa, two popular blogs written by development economists.  Most recently, Sullivan linked to an article in the NY Review of Books by William Easterly, author of the former blog, about the misuse of aid dollars to generate political support:

Human Rights Watch contends that the government abuses aid funds for political purposes—in programs intended to help Ethiopia’s most poor and vulnerable. For example, more than fifty farmers in three different regions said that village leaders withheld government-provided seeds and fertilizer, and even micro-loans because they didn’t belong to the ruling party; some were asked to renounce their views and join the party to receive assistance. Investigating one program that gives food and cash in exchange for work on public projects, the report documents farmers who have never been paid for their work and entire families who have been barred from participating because they were thought to belong to the opposition. Still more chilling, local officials have been denying emergency food aid to women, children, and the elderly as punishment for refusing to join the party.

This is a bit like saying that Miss Lippy’s car is green.  This dynamic is not new, and it is certainly not undocumented.  Easterly has been arguing for years that foreign aid in the hands of the local government is misdirected.  But this is on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, which is generalist, and it may well be a new concept, or at least a new example, to his readers.  But this is a concept I have seen in action and heard anecdotally often.  Two cases, in particular, come to mind.

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The Development Umbrella: Systems Trump Solutions

William Easterly is a development economist who runs the blog Aidwatchers.   When I read his posts, I imagine an exasperated and pragmatic man who has had it up to here with people misunderstanding and oversimplifying the problems he has devoted his life to solving.  His latest post, titled “The Answer is 42! Why Development is About Problem-Solving Systems, Not Solutions” fits this category well.   He explains exactly why some things work and some things don’t, and reveals the key to creating long-term solutions.

Here’s why direct solutions to problems cannot foster development. Each direct solution depends on lots of other complementary factors, so the solutions can seldom be generalized across different settings; Solutions must fit each local context. Solutions that generate the highest payoff in each setting should be a higher priority than the lowest payoff solutions. Since there is little or no feedback on how well each solution is working in each local situation, there is little possibility for any such adjustments.

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The Volatility of $2 a Day

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World Lives on $2 a Day has become one of the most talked-about book in the world of development.  It is an analysis of how poor – specifically, the poorest – people live.  The authors chronicle how people make and spend their money – tracking the inflows and outflows to better understand the daily routine.  The subjects keep detailed financial diaries of everything having to do with money in their lives.  The results are as illuminating as they are beneficial in the practice of development.  Here is the description from the website:

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton University Press, 2009) tackles the fundamental question of how the poor make ends meet. Over 250 families in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa participated in this unprecedented study of the financial practices of the world’s poor.

These households were interviewed every two weeks over the course of a year, reporting on their most minute financial transactions. This book shows that many poor people have surprisingly sophisticated financial lives, saving and borrowing with an eye to the future and creating complex “financial portfolios” of formal and informal tools.

Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

The reason research like this is so useful and even groundbreaking is that it blows the doors off the misconception that the poor live on $1-2 a day, everything. Continue reading