Little Ghana: Where each World Cup team's fans are in New York City

The Wall Street Journal has a great map feature today in its New York section showing where each World Cup country's nationals live in New York City. The map to the left shows the Ghanaians in New York in green.  Morris Heights in The Bronx seems to lay the strongest claim to a Little Ghana, although there are also outposts in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The soccer balls show where there are bars or restaurants showing the World Cup -- looks like not manysuch  bars available in Little Ghana.

The map below shows where a big Cup favorite's fans live: Brazil (in yellow).  Apparently there are both wealthy Brazilians on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and poorer ones in Harlem and Queens.  Maybe class differences are one reason Brazilian New Yorkers complain about the lack of any community spirit among themselves.

Of course, Aid Watch must draw at least 3 major development insights from all this, which is that

(1) nationals are remarkably concentrated, which may be both a strength (helping new immigrants adapt) and a weakness (persistent segregation prevents economic assimilation) not to mention blah, blah, and blah,

(2) too bad the soccer bars are so unequally distributed, moreover blah, blah, and blah,  and

(3) forget all that and enjoy the World Cup, the event that unites all development folks, even soccer-challenged Americans.

Why the World Bank supports tyrants: the Gerund Defense

World Bank Ethiopia country director Ken Ohashi has a letter in the New York Review of Books responding to Helen Epstein’s charge that the Bank is supporting tyranny (which we also blogged). Ken’s letter defends World Bank aid to Ethiopia:

There are concerns about the overall governance of the country, efficiency and fairness of resource use, the risk of dependence on aid, and protection of basic human rights, as Ms. Epstein points out. We recognize these concerns, and development partners in Ethiopia take them seriously.

We start, however, with a belief that in every country people want to be self-reliant and prosperous, and to develop a transparent, accountable, effective, and efficient governance system. Ethiopia is no exception. Our task, as an external development partner, is to support that innate tendency.

However, building institutions, public and private, that assure every citizen’s right to and effective delivery of public services takes a long time; indeed, it never ends, as we can see even in the most industrialized countries. Changes are incremental, and at times they may suffer serious setbacks. It is, therefore, crucial that development partners work with the long-term process of change, always in support of it, not in control of it (which is impossible in any case).

Fascinating defense, Ken! You are saying the World Bank sees all countries with an “innate tendency” towards better governance (nicely conflating citizens’ aspirations and the frequently opposite tendencies of those in power). You can then use an all-powerful Gerund like “building institutions” to suggest that you and the autocrat of Ethiopia are benevolently working together on that “innate tendency.” The Gerund  Defense implies that any horrible tyrant can be supported under the assumption that this tyrant is merely a temporary stage in a country “in transition to democracy,” part of an “innate tendency” towards “building institutions.”

The alternative to the disingenuous Gerund Defense is to take a look at the current regime’s political, economic and human rights track record. Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s party and its allies swept the elections, winning over 99 percent of parliamentary seats. Election observers from the EU found that the electoral process "fell short of certain international commitments, notably regarding the transparency of the process and the lack of a level playing field for all contesting parties."

A report from Human Rights Watch criticized the ruling party’s “total control of local and district administration” which they have used to “monitor and intimidate individuals at a household level, punish and undermine the livelihoods of citizens who do not abide by the ruling party, and create a climate of fear that suppresses freedom of expression and opinion.”

The government’s centralized control of land ownership, banks, the internet and even the mobile telecom industry has stymied enterprise and depressed economic growth, while the regime is accused of using the food aid upon which 1/6^th of the population depend as a political tool to reward supporters and punish those who dare to join opposition parties.

The US State Department went even further, citing reports of “unlawful killings, torture, beating, abuse and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, often acting with evident impunity,” in their Human Rights report published last year.

At least you are being consistent. After Meles and his security forces perpetrated election fraud, jailed opposition leaders, and killed over 200 student demonstrators in 2005, the World Bank continued to provide aid.  We have it from a reliable source that your predecessor as Ethiopia Country Director won an award for keeping the lending going despite all the hardship Bank staff inconveniently had to endure.

Sorry, Ken, it’s hard to drown out these realities even with your clever use of the classic Gerund Defense.

Universities in Africa: the forgotten link?

The following post is by Moussa P. Blimpo, who just received his Ph.D. in Economics from NYU, and has recently returned from conducting fieldwork in Benin and The Gambia. He is from Togo. The working conditions are very poor in many African universities. I had a chance a few days ago to attend a class at The University of Lome, in Togo. My high school buddy, Zakari, is an assistant professor of mathematics there. With a meager salary, he has a daunting task to accomplish every semester. When he started teaching over a year ago, he was assigned to share an office with three tenured professors and another assistant professor. There is one computer and one printer to share, no copier, and no internet.

Zakari teaches four classes this term, with about 18 instructional hours per week. This year, he says, he has graded over 7000 exams already, and the academic year is yet to finish.

I attended one of his classes. It was a lab session with third year biology students. I could count over 120 students in the classroom. As you can see from the picture here, some students in the back of the room were kneeling down to take notes and many others were standing. The room was fairly large, but there were not enough seats to accommodate all the students.

I am not complaining for Zakari. Two of Zakari’s officemates left last year for Europe and they have no intention of returning.

My concern was for these students who are so eager to learn. As I stood there, I asked myself a few questions: Why is it that so little attention and funding is given to universities?  With practical training, wouldn’t these young men and women be the one who will create jobs tomorrow? Shouldn’t African universities be strengthened to enable Africans to think about African problems?

Andrew Mwenda suggested, at the Best and Worst of Aid conference, that aid might be more effective if it is more often targeted to reinforce the strengths of a country rather than focusing on weaknesses all the time. He made a similar point here on TED.

I believe that universities may be one place where aid, coupled with a smart higher education reform, could be very productive.

When you might want a skeptic...

UPDATE 3:41pm June 7: see end of post.

I am a passenger in a car with my friend Owen driving...we're chatting.

Me: did you see that sign? I think we better turn around.

Owen: why are you always so negative!?

Me: but the sign said...

Owen: if people listen to you skeptics, there'll be no more funding for roads.

Me: I just think this time that...

Owen: why are you so negative when us drivers work so hard and have such good intentions?

Me: I really think we should turn around

Owen: instead of always being so critical of my direction, why don't you start your own Proper Driving Direction Promotion (PDDP) project?

Me: there's a truck coming toward us!!!!

Owen: you know, you're never going to be taken seriously if you can't have a more positive message

(sounds of screams and glass breaking)

Owen in the ambulance just before he loses consciousness:   next time I'll let the f&@$ing skeptic drive

Note: See Owen Barder's 'Open Letter to Aid Skeptics' on page 21 of the recent Africa issue of the International Affairs Forum - download the pdf file here.

UPDATE 3:41pm June 7: I said on Twitter that the above was "kind of a response" to Owen. If you are wondering why I didn't have a more direct response, it's because I thought his open letter reflected much more a generalized fear of aid skeptics than anything about my specific views. For example, I have never said we should eliminate aid or even cut aid, I argue we should shift the focus away from obsessive focus on aid spending to getting feedback on aid spent and holding aid agencies accountable for that feedback. This kind of argument has not had any negative effect on aid budgets, contrary to Owen's fears. On Cash on Delivery, I actually wrote a blurb promoting the original Cash on Delivery book:

The authors deserve a serious hearing for their very creative Cash on Delivery proposal. It would change aid in two welcome directions: emphasizing outcomes rather than inputs and giving recipient governments freedom to choose how to reach their goals.

Since Owen so badly misunderstood or misremembered my previous arguments, it was clear to me that he was reacting to the idea of aid skepticism in general and not to any particular argument of mine.  He seems to want to stamp out skepticism in general by some kind of foolproof test, which also seemed to me far from foolproof for either optimists or skeptics.

(By the way, despite our sometimes spirited arguments in print, I know Owen personally and like him a lot, so I was expecting him to take the above as  affectionate teasing and not in any way malicious.)

He may be an evil Afghan warlord...

But he's OUR evil Afghan warlord (NYT)

Humanizing poor people

A certain economist praises the Portfolios of the Poor book in a thrilling and moving video -- for showing us the complexity and resourcefulness of poor individuals. See here.

If an evaluation is released on the internet and no one comments, does it make a sound?

The release of the Millennium Villages Project mid-point evaluation has so far been met with no discernable public response. Strange, since the release is billed as the “first major scientific report on progress after three years of MVP activity.” Doubly strange, since the MVP is an ambitious project that reaches into nearly all areas of its 500,000 recipients’ lives, and proposes, in scaled-up version, to completely change the architecture and delivery of aid to Africa.

So why the silence? Two possible reasons come to mind. Perhaps:

1. The evaluation doesn’t contain much that is unexpected or useful, and/or
2. No one really cares about evaluation.

We knew that the report would give the mid-point results of a longitudinal study comparing data from 300 Millennium Village families collected when the project began and again three, and five years later. (Although this is no longer the midpoint of anything, as the project has since expanded from 5 to 10 years.)

The new data give a picture of encouraging results across all sectors compared to the baseline. In Mwandama, Malawi, for example, bednet use for children under five increased from 14 percent to 60 percent and malaria prevalence for all age groups fell from 19 percent to 15 percent. Maize yields increased dramatically from .8 tons per hectare to 4.5 tons per hectare.

Such short-term results are positive in the sense that they describe real, immediate changes in the lives of thousands of very poor people. But they are not surprising given what we know about the level of resources and intensive technical expertise invested in these villages: the project doubles the size of the local economy—it is roughly equivalent to a 100 percent increase of per capita income per year (see here for calculations from Michael Clemens).

Unfortunately the results are also not that useful: Three years is too short a period to know how to interpret this dramatic increase in maize yields, for example. Is this consistent with normal variation in crop yields? Was 2006 an unusually good or bad year for maize? We don’t know.

The results also don’t help us determine whether current and future resources should be shifted away from other existing or even yet-to-be invented approaches, towards the MVP template. Will those short-term gains last beyond the timeline of the project? Can the project become self-sustaining?

Again, we don’t know, in part because not enough time has passed. Consider this anecdote from a New York Times blog series by Jeff Marlow on the Millennium Village of  Koraro, Ethiopia:

In 2005, all fertilizer was given away, leading to a significant increase in food production. Fertilizer subsidies were then progressively rolled back; by last year, only 50% of the cost was covered. For the 2009 growing season, the project tried something new: farmers were given loans for fertilizer, but they are expected to pay back the full cost plus interest when the harvest comes.

For many Koraro farmers, this is a daunting challenge. “The project used to help us with fertilizer,” says Brhana Syum…“But now it’s very expensive, and there’s no way to pay for it all.” Many farmers facing similar constraints have chosen to scale back their farms, thereby requiring less fertilizer, rather than face enormous debts…

So this particular push towards sustainability has come up against some obstacles. It may yet succeed, or it may fail. We don’t know the end of the story.

Supporters of the project argue that the individual interventions have already been proven: for example, we know that using better seeds and adding fertilizer will increase crop yield. But what the MVP says it is proving with this evaluation is the “value and feasibility of integrated community-based investments”—that is, the whole package of interventions, as well as the management systems used to deliver them. And this is precisely what the MVP does not have the data to demonstrate.

This evaluation repeats the call to scale up the project within existing project countries and expand to new ones, as quickly as possible. But the MVP as a whole remains an untested and unproven intervention, while the lives of Millennium Villagers—their habits, beliefs, livelihoods, and sources of authority—are  inevitably being changed in profound ways. This evaluation does nothing to change the argument of my previous post that the MVP should live up to their promise to be a ‘proof of concept:’ to be seriously and independently evaluated, and proven to work—beyond immediate short-term effects—before it is scaled up.

If you were sick and someone offered you a drug that hadn’t been tested, would you take it? And even if you would, would you want hundreds of millions of people whose lives depended on it to forego other types of treatment and take that drug too?

Gulf Oil Spill: The Development Edition

Vijaya Ramachandran and Julia Barmeier of the Center for Global Development are among the many commentators now looking at the development angle of the continuing, horrifying oil spill in the Gulf. They write:

Spills of this magnitude are not new to the developing world. Take Nigeria, for example. Due to poor regulation and pervasive corruption, we do not know for certain how much oil has leaked into the Niger Delta region. In 2006, it was reported that 47 million gallons of oil—a quantity not that different from the new estimates of the Gulf leak –has been spilt in the Delta over the past 50 years. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corp estimates that some 650,000 gallons of oil were spilled in 300 separate incidents each year; other reports indicate that Shell (which is now looking to drill in the Arctic) spilled nearly 4.5 million gallons of oil into the Niger Delta in the last year alone.

A widely-cited article in the UK’s Guardian (hat tip @cblatts) quoted the Nigerian head of an international environmental group on double-standards for corporations operating in rich and poor countries:

We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US but in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

As America and other rich countries import oil from faraway places, we are effectively exporting the risk of disastrous oil spills and the responsibility to enforce regulation and cleanup to countries even less well-equipped to deal with those spills than the US has turned out to be. As a recent New York Times op-ed put it:

All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.) Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

The Counter-Revolution of Development Economics: Hayek vs. Duflo

This post is by Adam Martin, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI. F.A. Hayek, well known as a critic of central planning, also criticized what he called “scientism,” a blind commitment to the methods of the physical sciences beyond their realm of applicability. In The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek opposed to “scientism” the genuine spirit of scientific inquiry.

Esther Duflo’s emphasis on small-scale experimentation has affinity with Hayek’s critique of grand schemes of central planning. As Duflo said in an interview with Philanthropy Action: “I think another untested and potentially wrong idea is that you have to do everything at the same time or else. This is a pretty convenient untested belief because if you live in that world, it is almost impossible to evaluate what you do.”

But Hayek’s concerns about “scientism” might yet apply to Duflo. She continues in the same interview:

Whereas if you say, I am going to press on this button and see whether it provides this result, you might find there are many things that do work surprisingly well with surprising consistency. So it is not that the world is so incredibly complex that every place needs a unique combination of five factors just to produce anything. I don’t know that we would have been able to say the same thing five years ago, but now we are starting to be in the position to say that a number of things, if well designed, just work pretty well in a lot of contexts.

Hayek, in contrast, argues that sheer, context-independent experimentation is not a viable path to development:

An experiment can tell us only whether any innovation does or does not fit into a given framework. But to hope that we can build a coherent order by random experimentation with particular solutions of individual problems and without following guiding principles is an illusion. Experience tells us much about the effectiveness of different social and economic systems as a whole. But an order of the complexity of modern society can be designed neither as a whole, nor by shaping each part separately without regard to the rest, but only by consistently adhering to certain principles throughout a process of evolution. (Law, Legislation, and Liberty Vol. I, p. 60)

Experimentation, for Hayek as well as Duflo, is the chief instrument of social change. Making experimentation work for development requires institutional feedback mechanisms which can fit together newly-discovered ways of doing things in mutually reinforcing ways. What Hayek defends as "liberal" principles are the ways of coordinating individual experiments in a way that enhances human welfare. Ad hoc, "pragmatic" approaches might solve some local problem, but without coordination with other projects the progress will not be reinforcing and self-sustaining.

Promoting progress is like playing leap-frog in the dark. Big leaps into the unknown can easily end in disaster. Experiments are small leaps. Only when we combine those small leaps together according to some rules do we leap-frog in a definite direction and reinforce each other's progress, rather than ambling about and running into each other. Without systematic feedback mechanisms that are effective at coordinating different projects, randomized trials are like those small leaps. They might be able to solve particular problems--especially in mitigating the ill effects of poverty--but they would not lead to the self-reinforcing process of wealth generation necessary to eliminate poverty.

Was Africa set up to fail on the Millennium Development Goals?

“Africa far from reaching Millennium Development Goals”

News report on African Development Bank conference, May 28, 2010

“No country in sub-Saharan Africa is on course to achieve all the Goals by 2015.”

United Nations, Key Messages for September 2010 Summit

“It is easy to see that Sub-Saharan Africa lags on all the MDGs.”

World Bank and IMF, Global Monitoring Report 2010, full text download page here

Africa has had some successes and good news in the last decade, and has made much progress on some social indicators over a longer period. Why isn’t that reflected in this drumbeat of universal failure on the MDGs?  The answer is that Africa was set up (probably unintentionally) to fail on the MDGs.

This set-up to fail is not well known, probably because you have to go through some really boring details to document it. One problem with the MDGs is that success on a goal is very sensitive to how you define the goal. There are actually three different choices you have to make to define a goal in 2015 relative to the 1990 baseline. Let’s use primary enrollment as an example, and say that a random country went from 50 percent primary enrollment in 1990 to 90 percent enrollment in 2015.

(1) Do you define the goal in CHANGES or in LEVELS (e.g. the change in primary enrollment from 1990 to 2015, or the level of primary enrollment attained in 2015)?

If your answer to (1) is CHANGES, you still need to make two more decisions:

(2) Will it be PERCENT CHANGE or ABSOLUTE CHANGE (e.g. percentage change in primary enrollment (90-50)/50=80%, or the absolute change (40 percentage points)?

(3) Will you use the USUAL social indicator or its REVERSE (e.g. percent enrolled OR percent NOT enrolled)?

(1) defines two possible indicators of LEVELS vs. CHANGES, and the different combinations of (2) and (3) create 4 different ways to define CHANGES. The MDGs did not make consistent choices, but actually use 4 out of the 5 possible combinations for MDGs 1 through 7, as shown in the table (where the actual indicator used is highlighted in yellow).

These choices are not neutral. Initial conditions determine whether a given choice makes it easier or harder to meet the Goal. Most obviously, if you have a LEVEL goal (primary enrollment, gender equality), the further away you are at the beginning, the harder it is to meet the goal.  This was true for Africa for MDGs 2 and 3. (A plus sign shows whether each way of stating the goal would have INCREASED the probability of Africa making it, a MINUS sign indicates the choice of goal made it harder for Africa, relative to other countries with different initial conditions).

If you have a high initial level then a PERCENTAGE DECREASE is harder to achieve.  This was true for poverty (MDG 1)  and child mortality (MDG 4) in Africa. It was also true for MDG 7, because the REVERSE INDICATOR was used (percent WITHOUT clean water instead of the USUAL INDICATOR:  percent WITH clean water).

If you have a low initial level, on the other hand, a PERCENTAGE INCREASE would be easier to achieve. If the MDGs had been set in terms of PERCENT CHANGE in the USUAL INDICATOR (as it was for MDGs 1 and 4), then Africa would have easily met MDGs 2,3, and 7 on primary enrollment, gender equality in enrollment, and percent with clean water, and all of the above statements about universal African MDG failure would be nonsense.

Instead, each of the goal choices made for MDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 made it HARDER (if not impossible) for Africa to meet the goals, compared to alternative, equally plausible choices. ANY consistent choice of goal type except LEVELS would have made it easier for Africa to meet some of the goals.

The craziest statements implicitly made above are that Africa is failing on MDGs 5 and 6 (67% reduction in maternal mortality and reversing spread of AIDS), since there were NO data on these indicators for the benchmark year of 1990 (actually  hardly ANY reliable data for any year until very recently).

So this is SO boring, and who cares? Nobody, apparently, because the sweeping statements about Africa failing are made every year without anyone bothering to check the details. Because Africa ALWAYS fails, right?

I published an academic paper on all this here in 2009, with a working paper version available since 2007. Michael Clemens and Todd Moss and Clemens, Moss, and Charles Kenny had made related criticisms as early as 2004-2005. Michael Clemens in 2004 described how Africa's progress in education was impressive by both historical and contemporary standards. The MDG crowd are aware of these papers. For example, the World Bank and IMF quote them in their recent Global Monitoring Report 2010 . This report acknowledges “what low-income countries {mainly African} achieved before the crisis {on the poverty and social indicators}  is indeed remarkable.” But this point was soft-pedaled and has had no effect on the endlessly reiterated "Africa fails on all MDGs" line.

I think the MDG design was unintentional after some conversation with the original creators of the goals, who did not intend the MDGs to be applied at the regional or country levels. What is less forgivable is the aquiescence in making Africa look like a failure after the bias was clear to anyone who would bother to check. Of course, there are areas and time periods where Africa has done badly, but is that any reason to take the successes and make them look like failures?

Touristiness

This map of how popular different tourist places are was generated by an Estonian programmer using the number of photo uploads to a popular site. Yellow is the most touristy, followed by red, blue is not very touristy, but grey is nowheresville.

I am a little suspicious about the methodology after I saw Toledo, Ohio show up pretty yellow. However, otherwise the map seems plausible. Coasts and mountains show up about as much as you would expect, the BosWash and LosAngeSanEattle regions are hot, and nothing beats European Ye Olde Towne Squares. In the developing world, tourist spots are as expected, including the unjust and sad omission of Africa.

The next image shows a blow up of Africa.  The no-go regions are mostly the obvious ones (better book that vacation to Chad before it's spoiled!), as are the Safaris and Coasts in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. Lesser known tourist success stories in Namibia and Ethiopia also show up.

I'm a little more mystified by a blow-up of West Africa. I know vaguely about the tourist success in Gambia and to a lesser extent, along the coast of Ghana. The hot spots in Bissau, Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, Niamey, Bamako, Abidjan, Ouagadougou, and Abuja are a little more surprising -- perhaps camera trigger-happy aid workers?

Memorial Day

Readers of this blog know that I am not a big fan of military solutions to development problems, AKA "fixing failed states",  and am unhappy about wars that are justified on development grounds. Yet I believe all of us should admire, respect, and pay tribute to those who put their lives on the line in dangerous places, which includes all of our soldiers and our aid workers in Afghanistan and Iraq, and honor the memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Is it easier to start an NGO than a business in Haiti?

From today's NYT:

Alain Armand, 36, a Haitian-American lawyer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who is now trying to open several businesses here in Port-au-Prince, the capital, including a bed and breakfast.

Trying is the operative word, he said: “It costs $3,000, and it takes at least three months to get incorporated. There is no organized structure in which we, outsiders to NGO-land, can operate.”

Meanwhile, one list for Haiti lists 822 NGOs operating.

The Child Mortality Map

The Age of Democratic Capitalism is Over

Washington Post reviews three new books arguing this. Very convincing, except for the "over" part.

Fail fast

Failure is inevitable. Just be sure you fail fast, so you leave time to figure out how to succeed. UPDATE 5/31 2:35PM Sorry, just got around to giving credit to the original source, an interview with futurist/thinker Freeman Dyson by Wired magazine.

Say something about failure in experiments or businesses or anything else. What's the value of failure?

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. ... But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential....

This brings up an interesting issue of where theory fits in. Presumably there was not a theory of planes before there were planes.

There was an attempt at a theory of airplanes, but it was completely misleading. The Wright brothers, in fact, did much better without it.

So you're saying just go ahead and try stuff and you'll sort out the right way.

That's what nature did. And it's almost always true in technology. That's why computers never really took off until they built them small.

Why is small good?

Because it's cheaper and faster, and you can make many more. Speed is the most important thing - to be able to try something out on a small scale quickly.

Fail fast.

Yes. These big projects are guaranteed to fail because you never have time to fix everything.

Of mangos and plastic crates

Sometimes the things that keep people in poverty seem so small and so insignificant, and the remedies seem so simple, that it’s hard for people from rich countries to understand why they remain impoverished.

Jelen, a Haitian farmer living on about $2 a day, can’t get enough water to her mango trees, even though there is a river just beside her property. She needs a simple canal dug from the river to irrigate her trees. But this investment remains out of reach for her.

Many small Haitian mango farmers, including Jelen, could increase their income if their fruit didn’t get bruised and damaged on the way to market. If the farmers would just protect their fruit by storing and transporting it in basic plastic milk crates, then one of Haiti’s biggest mango exporters says he could sell twice as many mangoes to picky American consumers.

This is the story told in a segment of this week’s This American Life. I’ve always loved this National Public Radio program for the way it tackles big, complex issues by weaving together the stories of ordinary people, and I’d always hoped they would take on foreign aid.

In this particular segment, produced by Planet Money, we meet the mango exporter, named Jean-Maurice, who first tries simply driving out to the farmers and giving them the plastic crates. This fails completely, as the crates get broken, or used as chairs or in schools as bookshelves. The farmers probably don’t know where their fruit ends up, and can’t easily imagine the American consumers for whom it would be so important that their mangoes arrive unblemished.

The business man Jean-Maurice overcomes his distrust of NGOs to partner with an organization that will train farmers how to clean and store their fruit using the crates. The NGO’s job will be to explain why they should change the way they harvest and store their mangos, connect that to a future increase in profits, and distribute the crates.

But once the NGO is involved, Jean-Maurice—known to friends as “the Mango Man” – and the Haitian farmers are plunged into an unfamiliar world of paperwork and regulations. The USAID-funded NGO requires a piece of land from which to distribute the crates, and this piece of land has to be donated by agreement from the group of 60 farmers that owns it. They also need the deed, which was never transferred from its original owners, and resides in an expatriate Haitian’s New York basement. The partners finally complete these Herculean tasks and are ready to start…a few weeks before the earthquake hits.

After the devastation of the earthquake, of course, comes the international outpouring of concern, attention and money, and the arrival of development experts from all over the world. The correspondent asks:

But what if now there’s an opportunity to take all the attention, all the money, and work together like never before? What if this is the shot? Instead of solving one small problem at a time, to address all the country’s problems, all at once?

I won’t ruin the ending by divulging whether the correspondent’s optimism remains in place by the time the story is over. But don’t miss her conversation with USAID’s Deputy Director in Haiti, towards the end of the segment.

The whole episode is a fascinating look into the aid world and Haiti. You can listen or download it here.

(photo credit)

The Asian Man's Burden? China worried about prospects of Europe

According to the FT, China's Investment Corporation is "very concerned" about threats of further instability in the Eurozone. Considering also China's big new role in aid to Africa, is it time to start wondering whether both World Bank and IMF should be moved to Beijing?

Not that I am willing to join the China-worship cult, but I DO love historical ironies that deflate pretensions of the White Man as Savior.

Oops, did I just prove "Confessions of a hit man" conspiracy?

Ray Fisman in Slate takes my paper with Daniel Berger, Nathan Nunn, and Shanker Satyanath on Commercial Imperialism as partial confirmation of John Perkins' allegation of a global conspiracy to take down poor nations for the benefit of rich corporations. This is fun, so let's run with it. Of course there's a eeny weeny difference between conspiracy theories and social science that just says, yes, CIA interventions could have been helpful to US corporations making a few export sales in US client states (Fisman knows this as he makes clear in the article). The full-fledged conspiracy version has the World Bank coordinate and centrally plan the actions of myriads of large corporations, US government agencies, and other aid agencies, all with their own separate interests, to all work for the general obscene profit of all corporations. Which is a bit implausible when the World Bank can't even plan malaria control.

Alright, you got me, I'm part of the conspiracy. They threatened my dog Lucy if I did not recant my candid research. Which is also kind of the problem with conspiracy theories: if there is no evidence for them -- it just means the conspiracy hid the evidence! Conspiracy theories never go out of fashion because it's impossible to disprove them.

The NYT today had a front pager about a conspiracy theory in Pakistan that sees a vast effort to destroy Pakistan led by an American "think tank." I wonder which one? Some think tanks I know (NOT including my good friends in think tanks) could possibly wield deadly weapons of mass boredom.  Let me investigate further and get back to you.

Unfortunately for those fighting the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the US military is doing it's best to spread mass paranoia about Americans everywhere. According to the headline story in yesterday's NYT, General David Petraeus has ordered a vast secret intelligence gathering program around the world, among other things:

General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

Thanks a lot General Petraeus! Now no American academic can go anywhere in the world with being seen as a spy. John Perkins knew it all along...

What in the world is going on with Turkish democracy and Dani Rodrik's father-in-law?

Dani Rodrik and his wife Pinar Doğan, a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, have a piece in The New Republic called Turkey's Other Dirty War. Dani also discusses the issue in his blog.