Indices on hunger and African governance and problems with mashups; technology and development; 10 trends to watch; currency wars and Evo puts the boot in: Links I liked

Wonks like a good index (or even a bad one), so here are a couple – first IFPRI’s 2010 Global Hunger Index with interactive map (drag and drop the pointer over the country you are interested in)

And the latest index of African governance from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation – as usual, Mauritius comes top, Somalia bottom, but what’s interesting is what’s happening in between. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to provide a comparison with previous such exercises, but if anyone has the time to go to the full database of the last 10 years of league tables and work out who is improving/deteriorating relative to other countries in the region, let me know the results. Economist summary here.

Speaking of indices, following the surprisingly popular ‘nerd war’ on this blog over multidimensional poverty indicators, involving polite skirmishing between the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion, the UN’s Sabina Alkire and lots of others, Martin has written a more general reflection on ‘Mashup Indices of Development’. Since when did the Bank start using words like ‘mashup’?

10 key issues in development, from the always thought-provoking Alex Evans. The one that jumped out at me? ‘The face of conflict is changing – with 2 trends especially worth highlighting. One is the growth of subnational, relatively low-intensity forms of violence in rural areas – like the Naxalite insurgency in India. We can expect to see more of this kind  of violence in future, as disputes over land and water (and the livelihoods that they enable) become more common. At the same time, I think we’ll also come to hear more about failed cities as well as failed states. Mexico remains a prosperous country – a member of the G20 and of the OECD – but in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, 27,000 people have been killed in armed conflict since 2006.’

The technologies a country had in the year 1000 or 1500 are a pretty good guide to its current state of development, argues William Easterly, reprising his planners v searchers argument. The implications for today’s development wonks? ‘We’ve been doing development wrong. The World Bank imperative approach gave us Africa’s stagnation, the failure of economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, and the disastrous transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. These and many other disappointments over the past half-century do not predict a cheery future for the great-men-cum-great-experts approach. If there’s anything that “must be done” to spur future development, it’s to create the conditions necessary to empower the ordinary individuals who will create new and unforeseen technologies out of old ones. There’s a Thomas Edison born every minute. We just have to help them turn the lights on.’  

Are we sliding into a global currency war? The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott thinks so

And finally, harsh, and not particularly fair, but Bolivian President Evo Morales certainly knows how to assert his authority on the football pitch – by kneeing his opponent in the groin. OK, the recipient is a political rival and he had just fouled the Pres, but is this compatible with all that ‘Living Well’ stuff? Or separation of powers and respect for the constitutional authority (aka ‘the referee’)?

Inspiring news on child mortality from Hans Rosling, showman extraordinaire

He’s looking a little frail, and his sword-swallowing days may be over, but Hans Rosling’s presentational skills are undiminished – who else would praise a UN report, but rip out one page that he doesn’t like, screw it into a ball, hurl it away and announce to a lecture theatre full of listeners, ‘it’s crap’?

This time his topic is child mortality, with a brilliant overview of how we collect statistics, how to get child mortality rates down (educating girls accounts for fully half of the improvements), and a lot of good news on development. Fantastic stuff.

For previous posts on his work, see here

What does global aging mean for development?

Following on last week’s post on obesity, here’s another trend that’s rarely talked about (at least in development circles, with the honourable exception of Helpage International) – global aging. c/o Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy magazine.

“The global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.

It’s true that the world’s population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before — driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. Indeed, the global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of mid-century, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion.

Today we see that birth rates are dipping below replacement levels even in countries hardly known for luxury. Emerging first in Scandinavia in the 1970s, what the experts call “subreplacement fertility” quickly spread to the rest of Europe, Russia, most of Asia, much of South America, the Caribbean, Southern India, and even Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. Of the 59 countries now producing fewer children than needed to sustain their populations, 18 are characterized by the United Nations as “developing,” i.e., not rich.

Indeed, most developing countries are experiencing population aging at unprecedented rates. Consider Iran. As recently as the late 1970s, the average Iranian woman had nearly seven children. Today, for reasons not well understood, she has just 1.74, far below the average 2.1 children needed to sustain a population over time. Accordingly, between 2010 and 2050, the share of Iran’s population 60 and older is expected to increase from 7.1 to 28.1 percent. This is well above the share of 60-plus people found in Western Europe today and about the same percentage that is expected for most Northern European countries in 2050. But unlike Western Europe, Iran and many other developing regions experiencing the same hyper-aging — from Cuba to Croatia, Lebanon to the Wallis and Futuna Islands — will not necessarily have a chance to get rich before they get old.

One contributing factor is urbanization; more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, where children are an expensive economic liability, not another pair of hands to till fields or care for livestock. Two other oft-cited reasons are expanded work opportunities for women and the increasing prevalence of pensions and other old-age financial support that doesn’t depend on having large numbers of children to finance retirement.

Surprisingly, this graying of the world is not by any means the exclusive result of programs deliberately aimed at population control. For though there are countries such as India, which embraced population control even to the point of forced sterilization programs during the 1970s and saw dramatic reduction in birth rates, there are also counterexamples such as Brazil, where the government never promoted family planning and yet its birth rate went down even more. Why? In both countries and elsewhere, changing cultural norms appear to be the primary force driving down birth rates — think TV, not government decrees. In Brazil, television was introduced sequentially province by province, and in each new region the boob tube reached, birth rates plummeted soon after. (Discuss among yourselves whether this was because of what’s on Brazilian television — mostly soap operas depicting rich people living the high life — or simply because a television was now on at night in many more bedrooms.)

Those who predict a coming Asian Century have not come to terms with the region’s approaching era of hyper-aging. Japan, whose “lost decade” began just as its labor force started to shrink in the late 1980s, now appears to be not an exception, but a vanguard of Asian demographics. South Korea and Taiwan, with some of the lowest birth rates of any major country, will be losing population within 15 years. Singapore’s government is so worried about its birth dearth that it not only offers new mothers a “baby bonus” of up to about $3,000 each for the first or second child and about $4,500 for a third or fourth child, paid maternity leave, and other enticements to have children, it has even started sponsoring speed-dating events.

China, for now, continues to enjoy the economic benefits associated with the early phase of birth-rate decline, when a society has fewer children to support and more available female labor for the workforce. But with its stringent one-child policy and exceptionally low birth rate, China is rapidly evolving into what demographers call a “4-2-1″ society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.”

The pics are taken from the rather nice accompanying photo essay http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/the_grayest_generation

There’s a striking pattern here. Whether it’s aging, obesity, falling fertility and mortality rates or improving literacy, the transitions (both good and bad) that a country typically goes through as it develops are happening at lower and lower levels of GDP per capita, raising new development challenges (e.g. aging without pensions, obesity coinciding with hunger).

And what does aging mean for policy? Off the top of my head, it should shift us away from just thinking about jobs and growth to broader aspects of well-being that are more relevant to older people, such as social and pensions; a more welcoming attitude to immigration in population deficit countries; working with and supporting self organization by older people (who are often more politically active anyway). And it may even help out in tackling climate change. But I’m sure Helpage and others will have lots of things to add ……

Is the aid industry’s audit culture becoming a threat to accountability?

I’m a big fan of Rosalind Eyben, of IDS, so got her permission to cut and paste her note of a meeting she organized recently while I was wandering around Ethiopia. It brought together some 70 development practitioners and researchers worried about the current trend for funding organisations to support only those programmes designed to deliver easily measurable results. Here are some highlights.

“Funding agencies are increasingly imposing extraordinary demands in terms of reporting against indicators of achievement that bear little relation to social transformation. As Andrew Natsios, former USAID Director notes, ‘those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.’

There are different views on how change happens: linear cause-effect or emergent. With linear change it is easier to imagine oneself in control and therefore claim attribution, whereas with emergent change the most we can claim is a contribution to a complex, only partially controllable process in which local actors may have conflicting views on what is happening, why, and what can be done about it. Whose voice and whose knowledge count risks being ignored when organisations report on their achievements with indicators of number of farmers contacted or hectares irrigated.

Thus ‘value for money’ becomes equated with aggregated numbers rather than with effectiveness in supporting social transformation. Symptoms are treated as goals and turned into indicators of success. A participant mentioned an encounter with a high-level official who said, ‘I want a simple problem with a simple solution so that I can measure value for money.’

Why are many funders – philanthropic foundations as well as government ministries – placing ever-greater stress on demonstrating tangible results in terms of aggregate numbers?

Supporters/taxpayers have little appetite for complex messages but international NGOs have been complicit in pretending that development is simple – the ‘goats-for-Christmas syndrome’. Organisations are competing for financing so they comply with donor requirements to meet their income targets and thereby confirm and reinforce the current trend. Aid has been around for a long time and there is increasing pressure for quick ‘wins’ to demonstrate that it works. The shift to the right in European politics puts aid flows at risk. Numbers can be very misleading but they provide a comfort blanket when reporting achievements.

What to do?

· Build counter-narratives of development and change that stress the significance of history, challenge the primacy of numbers and emphasize accountability to those who international aid exists for.

· Communicate to the general public in more innovative ways the complex nature of development by facilitating debates and expanding spaces for voices from the South, while building up our knowledge of how the public in the North understands development.

· Building on already available methods, develop different methods of reporting, so that the requirement for aggregated numbers at Northern policy level does not distort the character of programming in complex development contexts.

· Collaborate with people inside donor agencies who are equally dissatisfied with the prevailing ‘audit culture’.

· Re-claim ‘value for money’ by communicating to donors and the public that some aspects of development work are valuable even though irreducible to numbers.”

I think the conclusions try and straddle both sides of a difficult dilemma. If you are sceptical of ‘impact fundamentalism’ and fear it will drive out some good development practices, do you ‘push back’ against the demand for measurement, or try and change what is measured?

I used to argue for the former, endlessly quoting Einstein’s dictum that ‘not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted, counts’. But I am coming round to the view that unless it can be measured, it is not going to be taken seriously – so the task is twofold: to develop the best possible metrics for showing impact in terms of improved well-being, rights, empowerment etc and to work out a way of establishing a plausible link between our actions and changes in a real world of emergent change. After all, if we can’t do that, why should anyone believe (or fund) us?

But this is still all a very donor-centric argument. My colleague Martin Walsh, who attended the meeting, agrees with fellow participants that we also need to ask deeper questions – ‘accountable to whom? Who audits the auditors?’ A move to an audit culture could very easily end up with the only accountability that matters being that to the providers of the funds, rather than to the people the funds are trying to benefit. To be fair, DFID at least is adamant that it wants to ensure downwards as well as donor accountability, but once the audit genie is out of the bottle, it could prove very hard to contain. If everyone is running around collecting data to prove impact to donors, how much time will they have to worry about accountability to the people they are trying to help? So audit and accountability are not the same, and may even work against each other. On the other hand, not measuring impact invites lazy thinking and prevents us being open to challenge. Conclusion? We need to think more about this one.

Read Ros’ report on the meeting here and another account here. Last word to the wonderful Dilbert

Crowdsourcing v bribes; top temperatures; the decaffeinated Other; food sovereignty; decoupling 2.0; praying for the MDGs; referendums are cool: links I liked

Crowdsourcing bribe payments (and the occasional honest official too) in India. ‘You can report on the nature, number, pattern, types, location, frequency and values of actual corrupt acts on this website. We will use them to argue for improving governance systems and procedures, tightening law enforcement and regulation and thereby reduce the scope for corruption’ Could catch on. [h/t Eddy Lambert]

Countries that set new temperature records in 2010 – 17 in all (previous record was 14). Click on the chart. Why not put the next climate change negotiations in Pakistan and threaten to turn the AC off? [h/t John Magrath]

Multiculturalism and ‘the decaffeinated Other’. Brilliant dissection of the new politics of Europe by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek [h/t Catherine Matheson]

Food sovereignty – what about countries with no arable land?

Decoupling is back: Dani Rodrik discusses the idea that the developing countries can be the growth engine of the global economy, and no longer need the economies of Europe or North America to flourish and concludes: ‘We can be certain of two things: only those countries that adopt growth strategies based on stimulating domestic structural change will do well, and the conundrum of global governance – how to manage a world economy that has become unruly – will almost certainly get worse.’

Now that’s mobilization. 60 million evangelical Protestants prayed for the MDGs yesterday in the ‘Micah challenge’. Guardian blog here. Don’t envy the person doing the impact measurement.

The South Sudan referendum on independence is coming up in January, amid dire warnings of civil war, but boy, do they know how to do voter recruitment. Why are UK elections never this cool? [h/t Texas in Africa]

Why Facebook and Twitter won’t be leading the revolution

Bah humbug. Great piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker taking apart the hype over twitter and facebook as a tool for social change. And being Malcolm Gladwell of tipping point fame, it’s much more interesting than that. Here are some highlights:

“The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution. [But] in the outsized enthusiasm for social media, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

Truly transformatory activism, like the US civil rights movement just celebrating its 50th anniversary, ‘is a “strong-tie” phenomenon’, based on close friendships and community ties that bind in the face of danger. In contrast,

‘The kind of activism associated with social media is built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. There is strength in weak ties -our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet is terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism….. Social networks are effective at increasing [not motivation but] participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece… Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.’

In contrast

'I have a tweet'

‘The civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign… It was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose. This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. [Networks] can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy…. Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised.

[Some proponents] consider the new model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.”

Go Malcolm. Grumpy old lefties and technophobes everywhere will be raising a glass. And of course none of this applies to blogs……

h/t Megan Weintraub

Social networkers fight back on the Guardian

Is Obesity a Development Issue?

At a recent meeting of Oxfam’s country directors, I asked if they thought Oxfam should treat obesity as a development issue, just another form of ‘mal-nutrition’. The reaction was pretty negative. Innocent Nkata, from South Africa (left), summed it up by saying that whereas hunger was an issue of rights, obesity is a ‘question of morality’ i.e. is it right or wrong that some people should be overeating while others are starving? He sees it as a complex debate with potential to be very subjective and relative. I was happy to drop the issue, in part because even writing about it made me feel uncomfortable and judgemental (regular readers of this blog may be surprised to hear it, but that bothers me). But it’s been niggling away at me ever since, so here are some thoughts about how we might frame obesity as a development issue.

First, and most obviously, it’s a health issue: the World Health Organization reckons that worldwide, approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight and at least 400 million adults were obese in 2005. The WHO further projects that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese. (The WHO defines “overweight” as a body mass index (BMI) over 25, and “obesity” as a BMI over 30.) 

Because of urbanization, sedentary lifestyles, changing diets and increased incomes, an increasing proportion of those people live in developing countries – Mexico is fast overtaking the US in the obesity stakes (see chart). The WHO confirms that many low- and middle-income countries are now facing a “double burden” of disease:

· While they continue to deal with the problems of infectious disease and under-nutrition, at the same time they are experiencing a rapid upsurge in chronic disease risk factors such as obesity and overweight, particularly in urban settings. That is leading to rapidly increasing rates of diabetes, heart disease and strokes.
· It is not uncommon to find under-nutrition and obesity existing side-by-side within the same country, the same community and even within the same household.
· This double burden is caused by inadequate pre-natal, infant and young child nutrition followed by exposure to high-fat, energy-dense, micronutrient-poor foods and lack of physical activity.

But body size and image are about much more than physical health. I think Innocent’s remark also reflects the fact that traditionally, Africans have often been much less judgemental about body image (’body fascism’) than Europeans, and sometimes even see large size as a sign of success (a British friend of mine working in Mozambique found it hard to look pleased when she came back from holiday and was told ‘you’re looking fat’!). On the other hand Latin American countries such as Brazil and Argentina have alarming levels of anorexia and bulimia, especially among young women. Attitudes to body size are definitely culturally specific.

The link between obesity and income is also complex. In poor countries, unsurprisingly, obesity is generally confined to the wealthier parts of the population. In the rich countries, it is often seen as linked to poverty. According to a new (gated) paper in the Development Policy Review journal, the tipping point between the two occurs at a GDP of about $2,500 per capita, albeit with lots of variation based on diet and culture.

Of course it’s not just about quantity but quality – part of the reason for the surge in obesity in developing countries is the spread of Western diets, including fast food and sugary soft drinks, often driven by transnational corporations. And policies, as we know from our own countries, can make a difference. South Korea has vigorously promoted local foods rather than a high fat Western diet, and has lower rates of obesity than comparable economies.

So if all this is true, and obesity rates are rising, why does no aid agency ever talk about it?

Firstly, we feel more comfortable talking about what poor people need more of (schools, medicines, clean water, food, cash). Self denial is strictly for the rich. But a lot of obese people in developing countries aren’t particularly rich. So our simplistic divisions break down.

Secondly, as with population and family planning, talk of ‘public education’ makes us anxious in case it comes across as patronising and ‘blaming the poor’. But we’re comfortable with it in our own countries, so why not in development?

Thirdly there’s our institutional identity and culture. After all, Oxfam was originally called the ‘Oxford Committee for Famine Relief’. How can it start talking about over-nutrition?

On a global scale, the ‘well-nourished’ constitute only about half of the world’s 6 billion people, with legions of the mal-nourished at either end of the BMI spectrum – roughly a billion hungry and two billion overweight. The number of overweight people in developing countries is bound to continue rising, along with urbanization and rising incomes. So is it time to redefine mal-nourishment as eating too much, or the wrong stuff, as well as too little? To talk about the two billion (over-large) bottoms as well as the Bottom Billion?

If so, what sort of policies or institutions might be worth lobbying for? Controls (whether regulatory, soft law or voluntary) on food and drink companies? Investment in public education on nutrition? Any other ideas?

What should aid focus on, poor people or poor countries?

Finally got round to reading the paper that’s been making waves in wonk-land, ‘Global poverty and the new bottom billion: Three-quarters of the World’s poor live in middle-income countries’, by Andy Sumner from the UK’s Institute of Development Studies. In a classic bit of number crunching, Andy takes a fresh look at where poor people now live, and comes to a striking conclusion:

‘In 1990, we estimate that 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in low income countries (LICs). In contrast, in 2007-8 we

wonk of the month

estimate that three-quarters of the world’s approximately 1.3bn poor people now live in middle-income countries (MICs) and only about a quarter of the world’s poor – about 370mn people – live in the remaining 39 low-income countries, which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa.’

So much for Paul Collier’s ‘bottom billion’, living in Africa and/or fragile states. In fact most of them live in stable, middle-income countries, and that finding applies across economic, nutritional and multi-dimensional poverty measures (although intriguingly, not to education, where underperformance remains more weighted towards the LICs).

So what? On one level, most of the change results from former LICs graduating to MIC status (the paper also provides a really useful overview of the ridiculously complicated world of overlapping but slightly different country classifications – low income, least developed etc). Over the last decade the number of LICs has fallen from around 60 to just 39. In particular, the graduation of India, Nigeria, Indonesia and Pakistan account for most of the change in poverty distribution.

So the finding is to some extent an artifice of country classification  – poor people live in roughly the same countries as in 1990, but those countries have got a little bit richer, and so joined the bottom tier of MICs. But there are at least two ways that the paper challenges our thinking on development:

1. Direction of travel: the upward march of countries like India doesn’t stop when they graduate to MIC status. GDP per capita is likely to increase steadily over coming years. If poverty persists, it will become much more the result of internal inequality, and the solution one of internal redistribution. In those circumstances, the paper asks ‘whose ‘responsibility’ are the poor in MICs – donors or governments or both?’ The challenge for aid becomes dual – how to catalyse mass poverty reduction in the remaining LICs, but how to support and stimulate that struggle for redistribution in the MICs. In Andy’s words:

‘This might mean that long-term poverty reduction requires more focus on structural economic transformation (assessed perhaps by the percentage of employment in agriculture) or a social transformation to a low level of inequality (assessed by gini coefficient and implied emergence of a middle/consuming class), or political transformation (assessed by tax revenue as percentage of GDP and the implied accountability that follows).’

2. Stability: the paper finds that 61% of the world’s poor live in stable MICs. Only 23% of the world’s poor lie in fragile states, roughly evenly split between LICs and MICs. So if you are using poverty as your compass, the development industry’s increasing focus on fragile states (and attention to issues of security and stability) looks a bit overdone. Two thirds of poor people live in stable settings where issues such as politics, inequality, livelihoods, essential services can be debated and resolved without the threat of civil war.

What does all this mean for DFID? Well, in recent years it has focused much more on LICs and conflict-affected countries, and that process is likely to continue with the findings of the current bilateral aid review, which is expected to lead to DFID’s withdrawal from dozens of countries, many of them MICs. Andy’s paper suggests that might not be the right answer, at least in terms of poverty reduction. Andy’s boss at IDS, Lawrence Haddad certainly thinks so, judging by his recent defence of giving aid to India.

On the other hand, working in MICs is not so much about money as influence, and aid donors (not just DFID) have always found that a much harder nut to crack. Maybe DFID should be prepared to abandon 75% of the world’s poor to their domestic political processes, and focus instead on the 25% where it can make a difference?

For more on the paper see the Economist, Global Dashboard and Lawrence Haddad

What will future generations condemn us for?

That’s the intriguing question tackled by Ghanaian philosopher, novelist and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post.

“Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones?”

Appiah suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation,

“First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks”

what's next?

Curious that his list doesn’t include unnecessary infliction of suffering, but he’s probably taking that for granted as a criterion. Anyway, on this basis, his top four candidates for future shame are the prison system, the institutionalisation of the elderly, industrial meat production and environmental abuse, including climate change.

Good list. I would add a few more

Limits to growth, both environmental and conceptual (GDP is looking increasingly flawed as a measure of progress, as Joe Stiglitz among others argues)

The world’s simultaneous toleration of mass hunger and mass obesity, when there’s enough food for everyone and we know what a good diet requires

The absence of effective global governance delivering at least a minimal basic level of income and welfare for everyone, funded by global taxation

And there’s probably something there on our treatment of mental illness, but I can’t quite pin it down. Feel free to add your candidates ……….

h/t Climate Progress, c/o John Magrath

MDG narratives; Barder v Bono; the world’s forests; aid data crunching; Ha-Joon Chang fanclub; dictators and growth; the girl effect: links I liked

Best analysis I’ve seen so far of last month’s UN development fest in New York: Owen Barder identifies three competing development narratives at work: the big heave; accountability; inequality. Owen also spells out why a dollar of trade is not better than a dollar of aid, whatever Mr and Mrs Bono say

An excellent (and occasionally optimistic) Economist special report on the world’s forests

Handy data crunching from the Guardian’s new development portal: Which countries gave the most aid for the Pakistan floods? And a funky visual representation of where British aid money goes

Fellow members of the Ha-Joon Chang fan club should check out his new personal website, with podcasts, papers, reviews etc  and this ‘in praise’ editorial in the Guardian, based on his new book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism 

Does autocracy lead to higher growth? Yes, and also to lower growth – autocracies have much higher variance of growth rates, so they have both the best and the worst growth rates

And finally, the girl effect, as designed by Nike’s marketing team. Superficially seductive, as you’d expect, but where’s the politics and power? Remember patriarchy? For a sharp parody, see here [h/t John Magrath]