Fourth of July Edition

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

What a turning point in history this statement was on the first Fourth of July 233 years ago. Yet this bold ideal was proclaimed long in advance of any practical chance of fulfillment. The author of these words was an owner of African slaves. Nobody at the time worried whether “men” was a generic term that also included “women.” Nor did anyone give any thought to whether it applied to people known at the time by words like “barbarians” and “savages.” Yet it worked pragmatically in the long run as an ideal that reformers could appeal to again and again.

So 87 years later, another eloquent writer and speaker could appeal to these words to fight for the end of slavery in the United States:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

And slavery did indeed end, yet legal equality for African-Americans did not arrive. So 100 years later, another great American would say:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

And thanks to the efforts of the civil rights movement he led, African-Americans achieved legal equality.

“Created equal” is a principle yet to be accepted in most of the world, which perhaps has a lot to do with why most of the world is still not developed. Inequality of rights between elites and majorities, between ethnic and religious groups, between men and women is pervasive. But perhaps we can hope that this ideal still serves as a beacon that crusaders continue to cite in their ongoing struggle for the dignity and rights of every man and woman.

We want your feedback, as long as you speak English

Community groups in Yemen wrote to the local World Bank office asking if they could get an Arabic translation of the conditions the World Bank imposed on the Yemeni government for a $51 million loan. Sorry, the Bank rep told them, English is “the official language to be used in all the transactions and contracts between the Government of the Republic of Yemen and the World Bank.” As Rebecca Harris of the independent Bank Information Center first told the story in an oped on the FP website, the understandably dissatisfied Yemeni activists have now taken their case to the Inspection Panel, the Bank’s dispute mechanism. Lack of interest in translation at the Bank is a symptom of a deeper problem. As our Aid Watch conference in February 2009 discussed, the most direct way to know whether aid is reaching the poor is to find out in some way: what do the poor themselves say about aid? This is going to be a lot more difficult if the poor have to speak in English!

The World Bank has made a lot of noise about consulting with “civil society.” The Bank brags on its web site: "The World Bank has learned...that the participation of [civil society] can enhance their operational performance..."

Further they claim that the Bank's engagement with civil society ("the Bank dialogues and consults with CSOs on issues, policies and programs, by listening to their perspectives and inviting suggestions") allows the Bank to:

Give voice to stakeholders – particularly poor and marginalized populations – and help ensure that their views are factored into policy and program decisions; Promote public sector transparency and accountability...; Promote public consensus and local ownership for reforms...; Bring innovative ideas and solutions, as well as participatory approaches to solve local problems; Strengthen and leverage development programs by providing local knowledge, targeting assistance, and generating social capital at the community level.

Although the Yemeni community groups could not get critical Bank documents in Arabic, they would presumably be glad to know that the above statements about how the Bank will consult them ARE available in Arabic.

This suggests a new objective test of how serious the Bank really is about consulting local populations. How many critical Bank documents are available in the local language? How many “locally owned” Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers are actually prepared in the local language? How many translators does the Bank employ in the field so they can listen to local people? Or best of all but probably a hopeless cause, how many Bank staff working on a project themselves speak the local language? (We may cut them a little slack if the local language is Ucayali-Yurúa Ashéninka, spoken by only seven thousand Peruvians.) Let’s call it “the Rebecca Harris language test” in honor of her raising the issue.

Joe Stiglitz preaches markets to poor countries!

Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair is afraid how poor countries will respond to the global crisis and the record of American hypocrisy on economic policy (like what America prescribed for itself in 2008-2009 vs. what it prescribed for Asia during 1997 crisis). All of this will tarnish market economics so much, fears Stiglitz, that poor countries will turn away from markets altogether in favor of some heavy-handed state planning and socialism. Stiglitz, who is not usually considered market economics’ best friend, is right to be scared.

It’s rare for your regular working-class economist to be the FIRST to worry, so forgive me if I point out that I expressed almost identical fears to Stiglitz’ fears nine months ago in the Wall Street Journal. (On the minus side for crystal ball-gazing, one of my star exhibits for socialism noveau was Honduran president Zelaya, who was just overthrown last weekend.) And then I worried some more about this in Foreign Policy (January/February 2009).

One of the reasons to be worried is the precedent from the 1930s Depression – not the usual worry about a huge wave of global protectionism. No, the worry is about the intellectual precedent that the Depression so discredited markets that government planning and intervention became the default model of development economics for the next 30 years – the 1950s through the 1970s.

I’m thrilled to have a heavyweight like Joe Stiglitz to make this case better and more credibly than I could (along with providing a cheap excuse to recycle a couple of my old columns). The issue now is not subtleties about the right type of financial regulation, global vs. local standards, or calibrating fiscal stimulus. The issue in development now is the revival of the big markets vs. state planning debate. Let’s hope it comes out differently this time than it did for early development economics after the Depression.

The Tipping Point: Fascinating but Mythological?

The “tipping point” is a popular concept covering a whole range of phenomena (and a best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell) where individual behavior depends on the behavior of the herd.

Its original application was to racial segregation. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling developed a beautifully simple model for this. Suppose that whites have different degrees of racism – some would “tolerate” higher shares of nonwhites than others. Schelling showed that the less racist whites would still wind up exiting during tipping because of a chain reaction. At first only the most extreme racist whites exit. But their departure causes the white share to go down, making the second most extreme racist whites uncomfortable, so they also exit. The white share goes down some more, and so now even less racist whites will be uncomfortable being a white minority, and they will wind up exiting too. So the remarkable prediction of the tipping point model is that just a little bit of integration that directly bothered only the most racist whites wound up causing ALL of the whites to exit. So even if the typical white was perfectly happy with integrated neighborhoods, these neighborhoods would be so unstable that the final outcome would be extreme racial segregation. The segregated nonwhite neighborhood will remain permanently nonwhite. Segregated white neighborhoods (with a white share ABOVE the tipping point) will also be stable, because virtually all whites will tolerate a very small nonwhite share. So segregation happens through a chain reaction even though the average white did not want such extreme segregation.

It’s easy to imagine development applications for the tipping point idea. Suppose that people decide to get highly educated based on what is the share of highly educated people in the population. After all, it’s only worthwhile being educated if you can talk to and work with a lot of other highly educated people. If the share of educated people falls below a tipping point, a lot of people will stop getting highly educated, which decreases even further the incentive to get highly educated, and we get the same kind of chain reaction that happened in segregation. So a whole society can tip from high education to low education, below a certain “tipping point” of the share of the highly educated in the population. Assuming that low education causes poverty, this is a “poverty trap” story of low education and underdevelopment.

The tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I got intrigued with this question a while ago, and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story (ungated version here) for its original application: racial segregation of US neighborhoods (reminder to self: my job is not only to blog, also to be a full time academic researcher that must “publish or perish”). The basic prediction is that mixed neighborhoods are unstable but segregated neighborhoods are stable. Data on American neighborhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighborhoods that were unstable. There was as much “white flight” out of all-white neighborhoods as there was out of mixed neighborhoods, and there was a white influx into segregated nonwhite neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are still very segregated in the year 2000, but not because of tipping. Maybe segregation exists because most whites really do want segregation, not because of a chain reaction due to herd behavior.

Of course, this is only one test of the tipping point for racial segregation over one time period. Maybe the tipping point is real in other contexts. But think twice and check for evidence before you accept popular stories like the Tipping Point.

I face my own critics

It’s only fair that I respond to my critics, in the same way I ask others to respond to my criticisms. A comment by Jeff on the poverty tourism controversy was particularly negative, but also succinct and eloquent, and his concerns seem to overlap with those expressed by other, so I will respond to Jeff directly. I put his comments in bold and my response in italics. The main take away from this blog in general seems to be this:

1) for the sake of your reputation and the world, steer your career clear of anything other than making money for yourself.

The intention with criticism is to induce change from bad aid behavior to better aid behavior. You are right, Jeff, that criticism could scare away some people from engagement in aid at all. I could do better in making clear that this is the LAST thing I want.

2) especially if you're famous, be selfish. If you care about problems like poverty, keep your mouth shut.

I think that it is ridiculous that celebrities have a major voice on aid. But you are right that I could do better in recognizing the possibility of more modest and constructive celebrity engagement. I did do an event with Natalie Portman once.

3) only about 5 people in the world know anything about development and aid. Everyone else trying to do something is borderline evil.

That many? (joking)

I am a dissenter from the aid establishment (and not the only one); it badly needs dissent because there is too much group-think. There is a difference between dissent and arrogance, especially when my dissent often takes the form of questioning whether outsiders (including me) know enough to perform social engineering in other societies. But you are right I could do better showing respect to those I am dissenting from.

4) If you think you're part of the solution, you're really part of the problem.

Since you criticized arrogance in the previous point, Jeff, it’s probably worth it for all of us to double-check ourselves on (4).

5) private sector take heed: doing a little to help is usually worse than doing nothing at all.

The private sector should not get a free pass from criticism when they mix social and private enterprise, but social enterprise is often a good thing.

6) misguided good intentions should be dealt with harshly, with righteous indignation, rather than nudged toward more effective paths.

You are right, Jeff, I have to be careful about self-righteousness, particularly when it comes to moral/ethical issues like poverty tourism. I still strongly disapprove of poverty tourism, but I certainly do not get rich-poor interactions perfectly right all the time either. Based on yours and other feedback I have gotten, I think my tone was too harsh in response to Dr. Michael Grosspietsch on the Rwanda Millennium Village project. I apologize to him and to the others involved for my excessively harsh tone.

The US Army fights me back! -- in a nice peaceful way

The following is the text of an email I received today after asking Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV for comment as one of the authors of the United States Army's Manual with some economic development ideas that I criticized: Classification: UNCLASSIFIED

Caveats: FOUO

Dear Dr. Easterly,

LTG Caldwell is currently on personal leave and not regularly receiving

email.

This is a very important topic to him -- the manual to which you refer

represents the most widely-collaborated publication the Army has ever

produced. It was written over the course of a year and involved

representation from each of the services, all the other agencies of the

USG, and our allies and partner nations, as well as significant

contributions from the development and humanitarian communities, and the

private sector. The manual is not intended to serve as military

solution to a much broader and more complex problem, but a guide for

military leaders to better understand and execute their appropriate

roles and responsibilities within the framework of national and

international approaches to these operations. While the goals

articulated within the manual may seem optimistic, they represent the

collective contributions of acknowledged experts from a wide range of

fields, many of whom brought decades of field experience to this effort.

The content in the manual -- as well as the terms, definitions, and

frameworks -- reflects their wisdom, knowledge, and hard-earned

experience.

The manual is certainly not solely a product of the Department of

Defense or the US Army. It is the result of unprecedented collaboration

that, while appearing "utopian" from your perspective, provides a

waypoint from which to navigate the challenges we face now and in the

future. To navigate that path, we relied on a collaborative approach to

best define our own service role within the broad framework articulated

in the manual. While the approach we used to develop the manual was

unique, we believed that this was the most effective was to ensure that

the practitioners in the field had the strongest voice possible and the

end product was shaped with their own words. While the manual will

never be perfect, it has achieved the desired effect of spurring dialog

and discussion on a critical topic -- and your contribution to that

dialog is welcome and appreciated.

Best regards,

LTC Steve Leonard

Director, Commander's Initiatives Group

U.S. Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027

Response to MV tourism operator on “Should starving people be tourist attractions?”

Dear Michael (or Dr. Grosspietsch, whichever you prefer): Thanks for taking the time to respond, which is very admirable in itself (I am still waiting a week later to hear from the US Army Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV on the Army’s approach to development.)

I have also read the comments on both my post and yours on Aid Watch, and I have read the post of Donald Ndahiro, the local director of the Rwandan Millennium Village (MV), on Huffington Post that responded to the Magatte Wade post that began the controversy (I will of course let Ms. Wade speak for herself in response to Mr. Ndahiro).

I have considered your letter and these other responses carefully, and I am open to the possibility that I was wrong.

In the end, however, I don’t find your responses or others have really addressed my central concern from the earlier post. I agree with commentators like geckonomist: “I simply can't find in his text any other tourism attraction than : extremely poor people.” I continue to believe that the whole idea of tourists going to see poor people simply because they are poor -- or to see the interventions targeted at these poor because they are poor -- is degrading. It perpetrates the patronizing view that the poor are some faceless mass of helpless victims which the MV is rescuing, which is part of the flawed philosophy of the MV itself.

Respecting the individuality, humanity, and dignity of every person, no matter how poor, is a sacred and fundamental cause. I believe our debate has generated so much discussion because of the importance of this cause.

As another commentator suggested, let’s apply the Golden Rule: if I was poor and still in my birthplace of West Virginia, would I want tourists coming by to see how poor I was and how some project was rescuing me from my miseries? If I was sitting at the bedside of my child with a life-threatening illness, would I want a tour group coming through to see how the heroic doctors were saving my child? No thank you.

As Moussa Blimpo (an NYU Econ Ph.D. student whom I respect a lot and who posted on this blog a very relevant article on Self-Esteem in Africa) said in his comment: “If you had a market for pornography (yes, the actual) in the MDV with the consent of the local, would you have set up a porn tour? I guess, no, and the reason is a similar reason your critics are raising.” (Yes, I am selectively quoting commentators who agreed with me, not to get any extra credit from having a few in agreement, but because they put my concerns better than I can put them myself.)

You say criticism of the rules (“don’t give them candy”) is unwarranted because it be worse if these rules were broken. You are missing the point -- if it is necessary to announce such rules, then there was a problem with offensive behavior by tourists already, which I believe is inherent in the nature of poverty tourism.

You and Mr. Ndahiro also offer the defense that this tourism project is “community-driven.” I have heard this kind of term abused way too often in aid discussions (as have some of the commentators) and would need a lot more detail about who is involved in the tourism project and who is not, who is for and who is against, how and whether all the villagers subject to tourist view had given their consent, and what alternative choices the villagers had.

You also mention that there was a problem with excess visitors to the MV before your project came along. I agree with you that the “poverty tourism” problem began with the MV itself, and you are not to blame for this.

I am sorry for the pain that my criticism evokes in you and your well-meaning partners. I get a lot of harsh criticism also, including from some of the commentators on these posts, and I try to learn from it. Criticism is a necessary feature of a society of free and equal individuals, to hold everyone accountable for their actions, and to correct mistakes. I salute your good intentions, but I sincerely believe your Millennium Village tourism project is a mistake.

Best regards, Bill

PS Sorry for the delay in responding, I was caught up with some intense activity in the non-blogging part of my job (not involving Argentina, the Appalachian Trail, or South Carolina).

Response from tourism operator to "Should starving people be tourist attractions"

Dear William, While it is generally a pleasure to get to know you, the circumstances are rather sad. I thank you, nevertheless, for inviting me personally to respond to your blog. I'm the Director of the Eos Visions network that got under fire here and - and I'm happy to admit it - the author of the brochure that you and several of your commentators criticize to a point that verges on insult.

I read Ms. Wade's article closely (and will post a response there as well). As a fellow entrepreneur, I can certainly understand her personal problem with the way she was apparently approached by an MVP representative. In fact, our tourism project is doing exactly the opposite - responding to a market demand as I will explain below and just as she does business herself. On top of that - especially as the part-time academic that I also am - I can also understand her general feelings about the MVP approach as a whole (I'll get back to this point later because it is also relevant to your own blog). I also have my doubts about the general sustainability, even though "having doubts" does not necessarily mean "being ready to judge". Where Ms. Wade goes totally wrong, however, is the jumping to conclusions when it comes to our tourism project and the related brochure. Josh Ruxin has already pointed out in his response above that Ms. Wade was totally misguided and misinformed, and used her personal grudge against the MVP to maliciously attack our tourism project and, thereby, our work as a whole.

And, unfortunately, I believe that your blog has taken this even further. Have you ever thought about the reasons why our brochure might display the rules that it displays? Have you ever even tried to understand what the entire tourism project is all about? Well, my first reaction to your blog was total disbelief and rising anger. By now I'm actually grateful for this opportunity to explain our concepts (and the results!) to an audience that - as several of the commentators have pointed out - is certainly not the audience we intended for the brochure. And I can already say at this point: I'd like to officially invite you (and everybody else who was happily throwing criticism around without ever having been on the tour or having talked to those involved) to join one of our tours in the future. You'd be surprised! We even talk about general MVP critics like yourself and their arguments on our tour...

But please allow me to provide a bit more information, adding on what Josh has already written above. When I first visited Mayange, the site of Rwanda's Millennium Village, in 2006, it was a totally desperate area. Among the many obvious problems, one stood out for me, the young social entrepreneur: There was not a single shop to be seen anywhere in the entire area. I was not able to buy anything. The mentality of the community members was entirely relying on hand-outs. My Rwandan (!) partners were equally astonished, and we vowed that we would try to play our role as a private sector company to contribute to a mentality change and allow the community members to help themselves. I then got to know Josh who invited our Rwandan team to get involved and to work with the community members so that they could essentially shape an experience that was, after all, in growing demand. Why? Well, a lot of people (both supporters and critics alike) wanted to learn more about the MVP and its concepts - if only to understand if they really make sense or not. This demand came to Josh and his team, and they basically took a variety of people to the Village, without any real structure and without any coherent way of allowing the community members to participate, to shape the visit and (!) to benefit from it! It was rather clear from the outset that our company as such did not seek any material benefits out of this work - but we were more than happy to become involved because we are a social enterprise and because similar projects are part and parcel of our daily (social) activities. Hence, there was a market (people interested in learning about the MVP approach) and there was a community that was in strong need of an experienced partner in order to help them structure the visits and benefit from them.

Over the course of various months, our Rwandan team facilitated a process of founding a tourism cooperative that now has over 200 members and is entirely managed and run by the community members themselves. We signed MOUs with the cooperative and with the local authorities who vowed to provide their support. We worked with the cooperative members, trained them on a variety of issues (general introductions, presentation skills, guiding skills, language skills, hospitality and customer care, hygiene, environmental management and so on) and also asked them to discuss in participatory ways what we should pass on to the visitors in terms of do's and don'ts. Well, the rules that Ms. Wade, you and some of your commentators are finding so appalling are actually a result of this. The community members found it important to discourage any kind of hand-outs because they knew that they would only encourage more begging and would never achieve the desired mentality change towards more entrepreneurship. They found it equally important to hint to the general cultural issue that it is contrary to local traditions everywhere in Rwanda (and specifically in this region because of the recurrent incidences of malnutrition) to eat or drink in public. You will certainly agree that we - and our clients - should respect the local culture and especially the express wishes of the community. You will hopefully admit that claiming that we do not look at Rwandans living in the MV as "individuals who possess rights and human dignity" BECAUSE of these rules, is outrageous. It would certainly have been better to inform yourself before attacking us and our reputation...

And since you and, even stronger, one of the commentators mentioned that the results are merely good intentions (our "self-proclaimed" 70% profit sharing etc), I'm happy to share the full statistics with you and to show that our little contribution has been well documented and is actually rather significant - contrary to what especially the commentator seems to believe. Over the first 18 months of the project, there were 488 visitors taking a tour of the MV, organized, run and guided by the community members (!!!), with our own guide facilitating the visit and providing additional introductions and information. The experience did expressly NOT include "viewing" the life of the villagers or anything related to poverty or the like. Visitors don't enter homes, and there are absolutely no "voyeuristic" elements involved anywhere. On the contrary, community members take the visitors to various interventions sites where they explain MVP interventions through their own eyes, how the situation used to be before the MVP arrived, what the MVP taught them and how the situation has changed since them. The "tourism product" (if you allow me to use this term) therefore becomes the set of interventions through the local eyes - nothing else, not "poverty porn", no "zoo" and so on. Back to the figures: The 488 visitors paid an average of just below USD 67, a total of USD 33,085. Roughly USD 17,540 were spent on various costs related to the tour, so that a profit remained of roughly USD 15,545. Of this, the community received no less than USD 12,328 or 79.3% (i.e. even more than our promised 70%). I don't know what you think about this, but I believe that over USD 12,000 in 18 months earned through entrepreneurial ventures by a local community that previously did not even have a shop to sell anything is a huge success!! On top of this comes another significant amount for the sale of handicrafts and food items. How was the money disseminated? Well, again we merely facilitated the decision making of the community. They decided that those villagers who are actively involved in presenting and guiding some of the interventions should receive individual remuneration for their service. Groups involved in the activities are paid as groups. Additionally, the community has installed funds for education, health care and general community development (the latter being used e.g. for the construction of homes for the most vulnerable members of the community). Everything is completely accounted for and I could give you exact figures broken down into all these various dissemination mechanisms. Equally importantly, we can see a huge amount of positive immaterial impacts. These include, among many others, the desired mentality change towards more entrepreneurship, stronger local ownership of the entire MVP approach, cultural benefits through a revitalization of arts, crafts, dance and music, and even reconciliation and peace building on a small level.

I truly hope, William, that you are now able to acknowledge that you based your judgment on false conceptions and missing information about our work. You will have noted that I did not attempt to protect or justify the MVP as a whole. As mentioned in the beginning, we have as many doubts as you have. But we still believe that the concept deserves a chance and that it has to prove itself right or wrong. The tourism project has nothing to do with Jeffrey Sachs and his team - they merely invited us to work with the MV community and provided some support (we especially worked with their own community mobilizers). Beyond this, the MVP concepts are not important to us and we ensure that the visitors receive an unbiased view that even talks about criticism from the likes of you. The tour is truly educational and informative - and it provides wonderful opportunities for the local community. I do hope that also the very critical commentators will have found a different perspective on what they call "poverty tourism" or even "poverty porn". Our project is anything but an excursion to the zoo. And calling us "condescending" is a real insult if you really understand our concepts and philosophies.

Let me finish once again by inviting you to visit the project with us. Who knows, you might even learn something yourself about the MVP approach. Apart from that, I strongly encourage you to keep in touch and to do more research on tourism related to development. I may add that I gained my PhD looking at the question how we can "maximize the poverty-reducing impacts of tourism in Rwanda". Much of our current work under the Eos Visions umbrella relates to this. I'd be more than happy to interact more frequently with you on related matters. I also plan to publish our experiences and related statistics in the future in academic journals.

Kind regards,

Michael

Should starving people be tourist attractions?

Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade on the Huffington Post touched a raw nerve about condescension towards Africans. She noted that a tourism operator was marketing one of Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages (MVs) as a vacation destination and quoted from the brochure "Please do not give anything to the villagers -- no sweets.”

I decided to look more into the MV tourism project, not to pile on, but because I believe patronizing attitudes towards Africans is a BIG issue in aid. The web site gives this introduction:

The Millennium Village Tour is a unique experience that introduces the … poverty traps in south-eastern Rwanda and the successful intervention package of the UN Millennium Villages Project.

I agree with Wade that it is dehumanizing that the villagers are just exhibits for tourists teaching them about abstractions like “poverty traps,” and are also to be used as propaganda for the MVs’ “successful intervention.”

The brochure that bothered Wade really is cringe-inducing, including also this line:

Please do not eat or drink in public. Many people in Bugesera District are still suffering from malnutrition…

If the MV is so successful, why are people still starving? Instead of worrying about hiding their food, why don’t the tourists pitch in on some MV project that helps the starving get food and nutritional supplements?

The tourism company offering the Rwanda MV tour is called EOS Visions and is headed by some German professionals. They have country subsidiaries, and it was the Rwanda one (staffed by Rwandans) that offered the MV tour. There are some benefits for the villagers as the company advertises 70 percent profit sharing with the local community. Obviously, there were some good intentions here. It’s never easy to negotiate encounters between very rich and very poor people, and some might think that these quotes from a tourist project are a minor issue.

The real problem is that patronizing attitudes towards the African beneficiaries of the MVs follow naturally from the ideas that inspire the MVs – that the poor are helpless victims and it is up to foreigners with superior expertise and funds to rescue them. Condescension towards Africans is both offensive AND a sign of a counterproductive approach to development.

Try looking at the poor Rwandans living in the MV not as anonymous and interchangeable exhibits for a “poverty trap,” but as individuals who possess rights and human dignity just like us. Then we maybe we will understand that the most impressive, knowledgeable, and motivated soldiers in the war on poverty are usually poor individuals themselves.

J’accuse: the US Army’s Development Delusions

A wise economist that I met recently tipped me off that I would find the latest Army field manual interesting reading. He was more than right about that. The 2009 US ARMY STABILITY OPERATIONS FIELD MANUAL (available in a University of Michigan paperback as well as an earlier version online ) is remarkably full of utopian dreams of transforming other societies into oases of prosperity, peace, and democracy through the coordinated use of military force, foreign aid, and expert knowledge.

My usual MO is to ridicule such documents. But my wells of satire are starting to run dry after years of deployment against utopians like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier. More in sorrow than in anger, I see the utopian social engineering craze might affect actions of people with guns. I am sad for Iraqis and Afghans that the U.S. Army is operating in their countries guided by such misguided ideas.

To document a little of what seems utopian, the foreword by Lieutentant General William B. Caldwell IV, Commander, US Army Combined Arms Center, says:

we will …defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering. …. to promote participation in government, spur economic development, and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world….{with} a comprehensive approach to stability operations that integrates the tools of statecraft with our military forces, international partners, humanitarian organizations, and the private sector.

The Manual, with a foreword by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, says the US Army will be

leveraging the coercive…force to establish a safe and secure environment; …establish political, legal, social, and ….economic institutions; and help transition responsibility to a legitimate civil authority {my emphasis} operating under the rule of law…. toward long-term developmental activities where military forces support broader efforts in pursuit of national and international objectives.

The definition of a legitmate civil authority is then given:

Respects freedom of religion, conscience, speech, assembly, association, and press. Submits to the will of the people, especially when people vote to change their government. Maintains order within its own borders, protects independent and impartial systems of justice, punishes crime, embraces the rule of law, and resists corruption. Protects the institutions of civil society, including the family, religious communities, voluntary associations, private property, independent businesses, and a market economy.

Even in the most dysfunctional societies (“fragile states”):

national strategy aims to—Promote freedom, justice, and human dignity while working to end tyranny, to promote effective democracies, and to extend prosperity through free trade and wise development policies.

Who is going to do all this? The US Army is going to be assisted by other US government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, international and region organizations and the private sector, i.e people who have different approaches, different objectives, different incentives, and answer to different bosses, with no credible mechanism for coordination (the Manual suggests a “Civil-Military Operations Center”)

The danger is that, if put into practice, such delusions create excessive ambition, which creates excessive use of military force, which kills real human beings, Afghans and Iraqis.

US Army and Defense Department thinkers – please go back to the drawing board. Think about American values that guide us at home. These values don’t include utopian social engineering, and certainly not by outside armies.

Links to other blogs to make you taller, happier, smarter

Secret to development is to be taller! taller makes you happier, richer, smarter – thanks a lot from us short people, tall Anne Case and Angus Deaton! False pessimism exposé: American children still doing better than their parents (Café Hayek) are they taller?

FT first newspaper to figure out that other countries’ banking crisis experience might be relevant (Brazil) and that it might help to consult experts on such experience (Ross Levine, Brown University)

Economists' own record on addressing current crisis is good (Economist’s View)

Chris Blattman reviews new book on corruption crusader John Githongo by Michela Wrong (the Empress of serious journalistic writing on Africa – read her previous two books on Eritrea and Zaire also!)

Thank goodness Wronging Rights is back, after some wedding thing. Who else can you count on to cover war criminal Charles Taylor’s conversion to Judaism?

Will Wilkinson is rare non-hysterical voice on whether Mexican immigrants are altering our culture (on development-relevant values)

Darfurian asks “Are we part of Sudan”? (Alex de Waal)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence that better health causes development (David Weil, Brown University)

Economists have hearts! Greg Mankiw celebrates his spouse on their 25th anniversary

(with 5 dozen cyber-roses also to my own amazingly wonderful spouse)

Fund for Unsolvable Problems: is the IMF the new UN?

Scarcely another G-8 handshake goes by without piling another responsibility on the International Monetary Fund. The communiqué after the latest G8 Finance Ministers’ meeting last weekend asked the Fund to help devise “exit strategies” from stimulus at the exact right time in the exact right manner, which nobody knows and the G-8 cannot agree upon. Then they asked IMF should do more concessional lending to poor countries. So the IMF is only being put in charge of (1) the rich countries, and (2) the poor countries. Of course, no G8 country would really yield sovereignty on policy to the IMF, or even allow it to determine its bilateral foreign aid policies. What seems to be going on is the same kind of shadow play the Great Powers have long played with the UN: (1) a terrible international problem appears, (2) the Great Powers do not want to commit any real capital to reach a solution, or they cannot agree on a solution, or they simply don’t know the solution, (3) but the Great Powers must appear to act anyway, (4) so they put the UN in charge of the unsolvable problem, and then (5) blame the UN when the problem remains unsolved.

This five-act shadow play has worked out so well for the Great Powers in places like Somalia, the Congo, and Darfur that the G8 appears to have decided to try the same thing with the global financial crisis. Here, they don’t want to commit real capital to international coordination or cushioning the blow to poor countries, they can’t agree what to do anyhow, and they really don’t know the solution in the first place. So let’s put the IMF in charge! And then blame the IMF when things continue to go badly!

In other news, the G8 Finance Ministers hid out during the meeting in a previously unknown place called “Lecce” somewhere in Italy in a medieval castle, but still couldn’t escape protesters who shouted out their own much shorter communiqué: "G8, economy, lies."

A $3 million book with 8 readers? The impact of donor-driven research

One of aid donors’ less discussed activities is financing research. The Global Development Network (GDN) is probably the best known effort, a World Bank-sponsored effort to promote development research by researchers in the developing world, founded in December 1999, with an annual budget now of over $9 million (roughly the same as the entire annual budget for all National Science Foundation (NSF) funding of all economics research). In GDN’s own words, it exists to “promote research excellence in developing countries.” It has attracted contributions also from many bilateral aid agencies and from the Gates Foundation. (Meanwhile, scholarship programs for Africans and individuals from other under-represented regions to achieve their own academic success are chronically under-funded.) How excellent is GDN research? It is difficult to measure, but there are two common measures of research quality in academia (which affect big things like tenure decisions, as in “publish or perish”): publication in peer-reviewed journals and citations by other publications. Because it takes a while to accumulate citations and publications, we thought we would look at papers and books produced in the early years of the GDN and see what happened with subsequent publications and citations.

Surprisingly, GDN was unable to provide us with a list of publications that had resulted from GDN-sponsored research, nor did any of several outside evaluations put together such a list. So we unleashed Aid Watch’s crack one-woman investigative team, who assembled the record on publications and citations from two types of GDN outputs: (1) the GDN’s first Global Research Project “Explaining Growth”, and (2) papers that won Global Development Awards & Medals Competitions from GDN during the three years 2000-2002.

The Explaining Growth project involved over 200 researchers from 2000 to 2005. Its 2002-2003 budget was $3 million. The publications from this project are a direct measure of GDN impact in this effort, since these publications would not have happened otherwise. The main publication was the 2003 book, also called Explaining Growth, which as of June 14, 2009 in Google Scholar had gotten 8 citations. There were other later books on explaining growth in the Commonwealth of Independent States (6 citations), Latin America (5 citations), South Asia (6 citations), and the Middle East (1 citation) – curiously, there was no book on Africa. The editors of these volumes typically had distinguished academic careers outside of GDN, with many more citations for their personal publications.

There were 51 papers that won Global Development Awards & Medals from 2000-2002, resulting from a competition involving $1 million and about 2000 researchers. We chose to focus on these to make the number of publications manageable to follow, and to focus on the “cream of the crop.” This procedure is biased towards finding the highest quality publications. It also establishes only an upper bound on the GDN impact from this set of papers, since journal publication may have happened anyway. We tracked all 51 papers and found that they resulted in 5 tenure-quality journal publications (publication in a top general interest journal or field journal). Four of the five publications were by Latin American economists, a group that had already achieved plenty of academic success before GDN came along.

Why was there so little academic success that seemed to result from GDN efforts? Perhaps a decision taken early on was partly to blame. As a 2004 World Bank evaluation put it:

One model was to promote open competition among various institutions, with funding going to the most qualified institutions that had submitted research proposals. A second model centered on pre-selected institutions within regions, which would serve as regional hubs and nominate members to the board. The second model prevailed.

Translation: they had to decide on competition by merit vs. research bureaucracy and they chose bureaucracy. As the GDN results illustrate, academic research cannot be planned by bureaucrats.

Is USAID about Aid or Development?

Guest blog by Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of Economic Development, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University The name of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is too clever by half. By forming the acronym “aid” it attempts to create popularity (who could be against “aid” broadly interpreted as “assistance” to the world’s poorest?) at the expense of perhaps confusing everyone, including itself, about its actual mission. There are many ways of providing assistance to people in poor countries that do little or nothing to produce development. While we might all whole-heartedly agree that de-worming is demonstrated to be cost-effective assistance, its impact on development is, at best, tiny. An existential question the next leader of USAID has to face is whether USAID is about assistance—in whatever forms and for whatever goals political support can be mobilized and logistics can be arranged—or whether it really is an agency whose mission is to promote development.

The difference matters. One reaction to the critics of aid effectiveness who point to failures in development despite historically high and sustained levels of foreign assistance is to circle the wagons by arguing the goal of aid is just assistance, full stop. In this case the debate is only about whether aid is assistance: “Did this aid support an activity that has some positive benefit to human well-being?” This makes the question easy to address with available methods, likely to often produce a positive answer, and almost certainly irrelevant to development.

Development, for better or worse, has always been defined as a deliberate acceleration of modernization, conceived as a synchronized (if not simultaneous), complex, four-fold transition of economy, polity, administration, and society. Modernization is a one-word description of what the West accomplished from the nineteenth century onwards. Development, as accelerated modernization (which may or may not follow exactly the West’s historical trajectory or modalities), is what Japan accomplished following the Meiji Restoration, rising from an isolated backwater to global power; development is what Korea achieved from 1962 to today, rising from a poor, weak, powerless, post-conflict state to what it is today. The goals that are the aim of development—having a productive and prosperous economy, a polity guided by the wishes and in the interests of its citizens, a administratively capable state, a cohesive society—are desirable goals. Moreover, development is the only demonstrated and sustained way to achieve the objectives of increased well-being.

Being an agency for international development implies more than that the agency provides assistance to improve the well-being of individuals in countries that are not developed, but that the central goal of the organization is to promote development. Promoting economic development, for instance, means supporting actions and policies that create widespread opportunities for people to improve their incomes. Unfortunately, as any reader of this blog likely realizes, this is much more difficult—and much less photogenic—than planting the flag over the delivery of specific services addressing popular causes.

A new leader could make USAID exclusively about aid and focus on the narrowly prescribed goal of making aid effective assistance, but the real problem pressing the Obama administration is not that aid has not been effective assistance but rather that development needs to happen. Development needs to happen in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Zambia, in Guatemala, in Bolivia—and continue to happen in India and China. Even addressing a series of important problems for well-being like vaccinations, schools for girls, HIV/AIDS prevention or malaria does not add up to a development agenda. If the next leader of USAID does not own that objective and mission—putting the big “D” in USAID and not just little “a” in aid—he or she is sealing USAID’s irrelevance.

“Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles”

by Diane Bennett

The poor can’t sleep

Because their stomachs are empty.

The rich have full stomachs,

But they can’t sleep

Because the poor are awake.

-Copper miner

Lusaka, Zambia

I have been privileged to work with some of the poorest people in the world in South Sudan. Their daily life is a constant struggle to feed, shelter and clothe their families. I have been, quite literally, the rich person who couldn’t sleep. So I was pleasantly surprised to read In the River They Swim, a collection of essays edited by Michael Fairbanks, Malik Fal, Marcela Escobari-Rose and Elizabeth Hooper, providing first-person case studies in going from poverty to prosperity that are informative and inspiring.

The title is based on a Sufi anecdote about three ways to know a river: to read about it, take a long journey to see it, or to enter it and be surrounded by the reality. Each essay plunges the reader into the river of being poor and overcoming it. Each essay left me wanting to hear more from the author, (except Rick Warren, author of the foreword).

The essays are not intended to be systematic or comprehensive and often leave the reader hanging with unresolved issues, much like real life (and unlike most aid reports). For example, Eric Kacou’s essay “Deciding What Not to Do” gives insight into a trade policy decision a Minister of Trade has to make (or not) that can substantially affect the financial progress of his country and the livelihood of five hundred thousand of coffee-growing families. The essay leaves the reader hanging as the author prepares for a meeting …

The book aims to be “the antithesis to the search for solutions in the next big theory of global poverty.” Instead it powerfully illustrates the power of individual creativity and resourcefulness.

Malik Fal, a Senegalese executive for PepsiCo in east Africa, describes his family’s struggles with poverty and racism in “Locomotives, Needles and Aid.” His father’s school experience under colonial rule included a teacher’s daily denigrating assertion, “Whites make locomotives; Negroes cannot make simple needles. Whites are civilized; Negroes are savages.” As his father “earned everything the hard way,” he worked his way through French engineering school, rising out of poverty through hard work. Malik compares the challenges of his father with his post-colonial business experience where Africans still struggle to receive equal treatment. Yet he himself overcame the odds anyway.

Rulers, communities, and revolution

by William Easterly “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to [the pursuit of liberty], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

These inspirational words may have been in the mind of courageous rebels who revolted recently against tyrannical Rulers.

I’m not sure what words were on their minds, though, because some of the rebels were dogs and toddlers.

Welcome to the Great NYU Play-In Revolution that occurred at 5pm on Sunday, June 7, 2009. A community living in a high-rise NYU housing complex rose up in revolt after the Rulers tried to crack down on such criminal behavior as kids playing with balls and skateboards in the plaza around the high-rises.

When the Official History of the Revolution is written, it will be noted that the Rulers had long been trying unsuccessfully to crack down on kids having fun. Small metal signs indicated that ball-playing and skateboards were forbidden. The high-rise community had however long ago evolved different norms – kids can have fun – and so the community ignored the signs for many years.

Local child tells anti-ball-playing
signs to get stuffed But recently, the Rulers escalated matters -- by erecting many big, expensive, glossy signs (at a time of severe financial austerity at NYU) to replace the few small cheap metal signs against fun. As often happens, the de facto power-monger operated in the shadows – some unknown official in NYU Housing (an authority unaccountable to the community) decided on the Oppressive Signs. The threat of enforcement loomed. It was at this point that the Great NYU Play-In Revolution broke out.

As the crowd gathered, the Rulers responded with a show of force, but ultimately backed down before the impressive show of people power.

What does this (ridiculously whimsical) example teach us about institutional rules in development? Some have had a simplistic view of institutions in development as deriving only from top-down formal rules and laws. This example and much research indicates otherwise.

First, formal rules that are incompatible with community norms often have no effect (this extends to things like trying to have registered land titles when the local community already has customary allocation of land rights, research on paper land titles in Africa confirms they have little effect on anything).

Second, if the rulers are especially oppressive they could enforce the incompatible formal rules by force, which would make communities worse off. But in a free society, the community can resist the rulers, which is part of the benefit of a free society.

Third, most rules we live by in a free society are more the product of community norms than they are of formal laws. (Fancy version: Rules emerge out of complex social interactions in a spontaneous order.) This is a good thing, as it makes the rules more responsive to local circumstances and needs. Down with arbitrary rules, up with community norms.

Paul Farmer and the Human Right to Development

by William Easterly

I’ll write one final post to complete the human rights trilogy, then collapse from exhaustion and go back to easy topics like World Bank follies.

Paul Farmer is my hero as a man of action, who has done amazing things for poor people at great personal sacrifice. He is also a forceful advocate for the human rights of the poor to health care, to food, to housing, to literacy, and to jobs. (I will be quoting from his Tanner Lecture from 2005.)

In his words, “poor people deserve access to food, education, housing, and medical services.” He calls “for these basic rights to be extended to all those who need them.” Poverty is indeed tragic, which all of us care about, which all of us are working on.

But who will be held responsible to satisfy these rights? Farmer struggles for an answer. With health care, for example: “we’ve learned that the public sector, however weak in these places, is often the sole guarantor of the right(his emphasis) of the poor to health care.”

Yes, the poor country government is weak and has a limited budget (as they would, even after aid). What if after satisfying the right to health care, there is nothing left to satisfy the right to food? Who decides between health and food? What if there is not enough even to treat all illnesses as completely as they deserve (as there is not enough even for most rich people)? Who decides which diseases get treated and which patients get treated? Farmer treats all of these as absolutes, so there is no way to choose in a human rights approach. We are left in the end only with the original problem – there is global poverty.

No single actor gets any guidance from human rights what step that actor could take to do the MOST good for the MOST poor people. Such concrete steps by specialized actors, both public and private, already worked to reduce mortality, to reduce malnutrition, to reduce illiteracy considerably over the last half century.

Farmer is deeply inspirational on the tragedy of world poverty, but his human rights approach is vague on who is to blame or where to go next:

only a social movement involving millions, most of us living far from these difficult settings, could allow us to change the course of history….troves of attention are required to reconfigure existing arrangements if we are to slow the steady movement of resources from poor to rich—transfers that have always been associated… with violence and epidemic disease… whether or not we can say “never again” with any conviction—will depend on our collective courage to examine and understand the roots of modern violence and the violation of a broad array of rights, including social and economic rights.

I will always venerate Paul Farmer as a hero in the fight against poverty.

Guidance how to fight poverty will have to come somewhere else than from economic and social human rights.

UN Human Rights and Wrongs

Last Friday’s post “Poverty is not a human rights violation” spurred a very healthy dialogue on rights, including a response from Amnesty International , which mentioned the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I will not be a last word freak and answer Amnesty directly. But let’s talk about rights at the UN. The UN publicizes such positive rights as “right to water,” “right to housing,” “right to health”, etc. These rights sound wonderful, while not imposing any specific obligation whatsoever on any specific actor to do any specific thing for any specific poor person. It is impossible for the UN or any other body to allocate responsibilities for observing the “right to water,” and also decide who will be first in line among the 884 million people now without clean water. So even if the UN creates international pressure to observe these “rights,” the pressure is diffused across so many potential actors with unclear responsibility that it has no effect, accomplishing nothing for poor people.

What about the UN’s record on the more traditionally defined “negative” human rights, like freedom from state killings and torture? These human rights are a lot easier to specifically address – the UN could denounce human rights violations, identifying the violator and the victim each time. Here international pressure could have more of an effect, because it is applied to very specific wrong-doers to stop very specific actions against specific victims -- some of whom are in the Amnesty International 2009 report

According to Amnesty, among those who could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council are:

--the families of the 100 Cameroonian demonstrators that dictator Paul Biya’s forces killed in February 2008, shooting some in the head at point blank range

-- the family of Paltsal Kyab, 45, a Tibetan from Sichuan province, who died in Chinese police custody on May 26, 2008, after having been present at a protest march on March 17, 2008. The Chinese government did not allow his family to visit him in detention. When his family members went to claim his body, “they found it bruised and covered with blister burns, discovering later that he had internal injuries.”

---the 49 people the Egyptian government arrested after violent protests on April 6, 2008 in Egypt. The trial began in August 2008 before “the (Emergency) Supreme State Security Court…The defendants said they were blindfolded for nine days and tortured by State Security Investigation (SSI) officials …{including} beatings, electric shocks and threats that their female relatives would be sexually abused…Twenty-two of the defendants were sentenced in December to up to five years in prison.”

So such victims could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council for their rights vis-à-vis the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt – except that the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt are MEMBERS of the UN Human Rights Council. The UN is perpetrating a sick joke on such victims, by filling the Human Rights Council with human rights violators. This travesty is already well known, but that doesn’t mean anyone who cares should stop talking about it.

So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator's side.

Amnesty International Responds to "Poverty is Not a Human Rights Violation"

by Sameer Dossani, Demand Dignity Campaign Director at Amnesty International Bill Easterly takes on Amnesty International’s 2009 Annual Report. I know and respect Easterly’s work; I’ve even been on a few panels with him over the years on aid effectiveness and the World Bank, but I have to say he’s pretty off base here.

The basic premise of his post is this:

The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. That is what historically has led to progress on human rights. The government officers of the slave-owning antebellum US and the slave-owners were violating the rights of slaves – leading to activism against such violators that eventually yielded the Emancipation Proclamation. The local southern government officers were violating the civil rights of southern blacks under Jim Crow, leading to activism against these violators that yielded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The apartheid government officers in South Africa violated the rights of black South Africans, and activism against these violators brought the end of apartheid.

Easterly then claims that poverty does not fit this definition of rights because "who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income?"

It’s true that lack of income, in and of itself, isn’t a human rights violation. But poverty is about a lot more than just income. As Easterly knows, those who live on less than a dollar a day are poor not just because they lack income; the lack of income implies lack of access to services, clean drinking water, adequate education, housing, employment and so on. All of these are violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. To give just one of many possible examples, estimates indicate that as many as 8,000 children die daily in Africa alone from preventable diseases such as cholera and dysentery. It’s certainly true to say that these are diseases of poverty – the rich can ensure that their water is not contaminated and can seek treatment at private hospitals as opposed to understaffed government clinics – but they are more than that. They are violations of the right to health and the right to clean water.

And people living in poverty are vulnerable to violations of their civil and political rights as well. In the Favelas (shanty towns) of Sao Paolo in Brazil, police and gangs are in daily conflict. There are allegations of human rights abuse on all sides, and the government feels little pressure to respect due process in large part because this violence is taking place in an extremely poor part of the city. Ordinary people are in danger from gangs on the one hand and from a state takes their rights less seriously because they live in a poor community.

These are all human rights violations, and it is ultimately the responsibility of governments to end them. In some cases those actually committing the abuse may not be governments; such as when Dow Chemical refuses to clean up the toxic mess that is still poisoning impoverished communities in Bhopal, India from a disaster that killed thousands in 1984. But in all cases it is ultimately the responsibility of governments to ensure that human rights – including the right to live a life of dignity – are respected.

Human rights abuses cause poverty and keep people poor – and living in poverty makes you more likely to suffer violations of your human rights. So human rights must be part of any solution to poverty.

Poverty is not a human rights violation

The title of this blog will make many think I am callous, and yet I definitely agree that poverty is an EXTREMELY BAD THING. Perhaps some use the words “human rights violation” to be equivalent to “extremely bad thing,” but why? There are many different “extremely bad things,” and it helps if everybody discriminates between them.

The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. That is what historically has led to progress on human rights. The government officers of the slave-owning antebellum US and the slave-owners were violating the rights of slaves – leading to activism against such violators that eventually yielded the Emancipation Proclamation. The local southern government officers were violating the civil rights of southern blacks under Jim Crow, leading to activism against these violators that yielded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The apartheid government officers in South Africa violated the rights of black South Africans, and activism against these violators brought the end of apartheid.

Poverty does not fit this definition of rights. Who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income? There are many theories of poverty, but few of them lead to a clear identification of the Violator of this right. Moreover, human rights are a clear dichotomy – someone violates your rights or they do not. But the line between poor and not-poor is arbitrary – it is different in different countries, and on a global scale, many still argue what is the right dividing line that constitutes poverty. So calling poverty a “human rights violation” does not point to any concrete actions that the “violator” must stop in order to restore rights to the “violated.”

So it’s disappointing that the 2009 report of Amnesty International is blurring its previous clear focus on human rights to a fuzzy vision that now includes poverty:

So many people are living in utter destitution…As the global economic outlook appears more and more gloomy, hope lies in the … determination of human rights defenders willing to challenge entrenched interests despite the risks they face. (p. 9)

Social and political progress arguably happens the same way as progress in science or as progress in business: somebody precisely defines a problem and somebody (possibly somebody else?) hits upon a way to solve that well-defined problem. To confuse poverty and human rights violations is to slow down the solutions to both.

P.S. also see the excellent 2009 book by Chauffour