Are you a Progressive? If so, what’s your footprint?

I get irritated sometimes when a nameless Oxfam colleague (and no, there aren’t any prizes for guessing) asks ‘yes, but are you/they left wing?’, to which I of course, respond ‘depends what you mean by ‘left wing’’ (I think he finds me pretty annoying too). So in an effort to improve on this rather un-nuanced discussion, how about moving from 1D (left-right) to two (are you a progressive?). Off the top of my head, here are six plausible axes for assessing your degree of progressivity on development issues:

Grassroots Revolutionist: your priority is celebrating and supporting grassroots movements eg Occupy and the Arab Spring

Statist: you see state control of the economy, hands on industrial policy, and a high degree of regulation as the core to development

Anti-Capitalist: you know what you oppose (capitalism, large transnationals etc)

Social Democrat/Welfarist: you want everywhere to be like Sweden

Environmentalist: you increasingly focus on One Planet living and the implications for human activity in terms of consumerism, fossil fuel use etc

Human Rights: you focus on the recognition and respect of basic human rights, as set out in international law

Any improvements on the categories? Quite hard to distinguish between ends and means, but then progressives have always mixed up the two.  You can try filling out this powerpoint slide (one notch from the centre is ‘a bit’, 5 notches is ‘a lot’, use line draw to fill in your footprint) and let me know what you think of the exercise. Anyone putting five notches on every axis is more likely to be an indecisive wimp than a saint.

I suspect that comparing colleagues’ footprints might help us understand why you some people tend to disagree with each other/get on each other’s nerves.

Since coming up with these axes, I have done some in-depth research with Oxfam India colleagues (OK, we talked over a beer). Turns out (amazing, eh?) that your definition of ‘progressive’ depends on where/who you are. After deep discussion (and another beer), they came up with the following set of axes:

• Gender equality
• Minority Inclusion (dalits, tribals etc)
• Pro-poor deregulation (e.g. scrapping regressive subsidies)
• People power (opposing an over centralizing state)
• Progressive tax reform
• Secularism

Would love to see what other country contexts produce. So here’s a bit of homework – decide your own axes, fill in your progressive footprint, send it in, and I’ll upload the best ones. And here’s mine (for what it’s worth – regular readers feel free to put me straight, and anyway, I would probably arrive at totally different conclusions from one day to the next.) And if anyone has a less clunky way to do the spider diagrams, I would love to hear about it.

And here’s a less clunky version of the ppt, c/o reader Ian Hanham. Uses spreadsheet instead of line draw.

Why ‘Why Nations Fail’ Fails (mostly): review of Acemoglu and Robinson – 2012’s big development book

Every now and then, a ‘Big Book on Development’ comes along that triggers a storm of arguments in my head (it’s a rather disturbing experience). One such is Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and James Robinson (Harvard). Judging by the proliferation of reviews and debates the book has provoked, my experience is widely shared.

First, what does the book say?

‘The focus of our book is on explaining world inequality’, which is essentially a phenomenon of the last 200 years (certainly at its current extreme levels) – the average income of a conquistador was only about twice that of a citizen of the Inca empire.

Inclusive Institutions rock: ‘Countries like Great Britain and the US became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.’

Politics trumps economics: ‘While economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.’

Failure is the norm: ‘To understand world inequality we have to understand why some societies are organized in very inefficient and socially undesirable ways. Nations sometimes do manage to adopt efficient institutions and achieve prosperity, but alas, these are the rare cases. Most economists have focused on ‘getting it right’, while what is really needed is an explanation for why poor nations ‘get it wrong.’

One of the core problems of most institutional arrangements is that those in power have ‘a fear of creative destruction’ – that the disruptive effect of innovation and capitalism will undermine their power base. The luddites in the presidential palace or the chamber of commerce do far more damage than the protesters on the streets. They therefore act to stifle it – elites’ interests are opposed to those of the long-term development of their country. An ‘iron law of oligarchy’ means that even when oligarchs are overthrown, the revolutionaries, like the pigs in Animal Farm, often come to resemble them. ‘New leaders overthrowing old ones with promises of radical change bring nothing but more of the same’. Understanding how change doesn’t happen is as important as understanding why it does.

In contrast, when a combination of institutional accident and inspired leadership leads to an elite that is willing to accept creative destruction (as, the authors argue, is historically the case in the US), then a take off can occur.

The style is captivating – dotted with great historical accounts, amusing and telling anecdotes (in the 16^th Century African kingdom of the Kongo ‘taxes were arbitrary: one tax was even collected every time the king’s beret fell off’). Great use of contrasts and ‘natural experiments’ – Mexico v US at the border; Bill Gates v Carlos Slim; North Korea v South. The pace is breakneck, hopping manically between countries and centuries, from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to the disappearance of the Mayas to the rise of Japan, plucking examples to illustrate the thesis.

The strongest part of the book for me was its focus on the dynamics of change. It almost feels like physics – path dependence is key; minor ‘butterfly’s wing’ differences in initial conditions caused by gentle ‘institutional drift’ make a huge difference when a country hits a ‘critical juncture’ (e.g. the French Revolution, or the Black Death in 14^th Century Europe (left), which wiped out a large part of the labour force and so transformed economies), and can set them on diametrically different paths. ‘The richly divergent patterns of economic development around the world hinge on the interplay of critical junctures and institutional drift. Existing political and economic institutions – sometimes shaped by a long process of institutional drift, and sometimes resulting from divergent responses to prior critical junctures, create the anvil upon which future change will be forged.’

The problem is, much of this only really works in hindsight – almost by definition, there are always lots of minor differences floating around, and it’s impossible to tell in advance which are going to provide the butterfly’s wing that determines that (for example) the industrial revolution takes place in Britain and not Spain. This is a book written almost entirely in the rear view mirror.

The trouble with these grand theories is that when they coincide with your own prejudices, they feel like a flawless romp through history. But if you are uncomfortable with the numerous assumptions, explicit and implicit, you get a sense of suspicion and vertigo – it feels like you’re being conned (and the complete absence of footnotes make it harder to check the source of some of the sweeping claims). The reader is being asked to take an awful lot on trust here. And I kept hearing a phrase of Thandika Mkandawire’s  in my head: ‘a theory that explains everything, explains nothing.’

The book’s biggest problem (at least for me) is the authors’ love affair with the American Dream (though not perhaps, American Reality). In their account, successful institutions bear a remarkable resemblance to America’s constitution, separation of powers etc etc. That means that the China question hovers over the book throughout, and their fairly perfunctory attempt to answer it is deeply unconvincing. China is portrayed as on the wrong side of history, pursuing ‘authoritarian growth’, while trying to defy an inexorable push towards matching economic inclusion with the political equivalent.

But can this book really be arguing that China’s economic transformation is substantially more fragile than that of, say, Brazil? Apparently

so. ‘Growth under extractive political institutions, as in China, will not bring sustained growth and is likely to run out of steam’ is a hell of a throwaway line, especially when you don’t say whether that might be in one year or a hundred. Nor do they buy into the optimistic liberal account that holds that China’s growth will create pressure for political reform – A & R think it will hit a growth ceiling before that reform happens, with unforeseeable, but chaotic consequences.

More generally on the role of the state, the book seems to swallow the rather discredited argument of the ‘East Asian Miracle’ school that ‘South Korea is a market economy, built on private property.’ (Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang beg to differ.) The authors systematically downplay the role of industrial policy and a hands-on state in its take-off . ‘[The] process of innovation is made possible by economic institutions that encourage private property, uphold contracts, create a level playing field and encourage and allow the entry of new businesses…. It should therefore be no surprise that it was South Korea, not North Korea, that today produces technologically innovative companies such as Samsung and Hyundai.’. There is no real attempt to explore the concept of ‘developmental states’, a term originally coined to describe Japan’s take-off, but one which is increasingly interesting a range of developing countries as they see the more liberal capitalist economies being rapidly overtaken by ‘state capitalists’ like China and Brazil. But for A & R, the high growth figures of countries like South Korea are always ‘in spite of’ a hands-on state, not ‘because of’.

Which all reminds me of a baffling exchange in 2003 with the FT’s Guy de Jonquieres, as we looked out over the beach at the WTO summit in Cancun (NGO advocacy’s a tough gig sometimes). Me: ‘how can you say state intervention destroys economies, when South Korean industrial policy has been so successful’. Guy: ‘But think how much better South Korea would have done if the state had stayed out of it.’ Err, right.

Overall, the book left me with a sensation of raised expectations, which were then disappointed. That was summed up in the book’s bizarre finale. After a hyperactive romp across the millennia this purported survey of what works fizzles out, pinning its hopes on – wait for it – the media, Facebook and Twitter. Oh dear. All that history ends not with a bang but a tweet.

For more erudite reviews and arguments, with my entirely unscientific assessement of the star rating they give the book (I guess I’d give it three, slightly above the average), take your pick from

Jeff Sachs 1 star, which provoked A&R’s tetchy response,

Edward Laws and Adrian Leftwich 3 stars

Peer Vries 2 stars

Jared Diamond 4 stars

Martin Wolf 3 stars

Michael Heller 2 stars

Francis Fukuyama 2 stars

Feel free to suggest others. All men, I notice – is it book reviewing that’s a male preserve, or pontificating about the broad sweep of history?

Women in Political Dynasties

From this week’s Economist:

‘There are now more than 20 female relatives of former leaders active in national politics around the world. They include three presidents or prime ministers and at least half a dozen leaders of the opposition or presidential candidates (see table). There are no historical numbers for proper comparison, but it is hard to think of another period—certainly no recent one—when so much dynastic authority has been flowing down the female line.’

And some interesting ideas on why that might be:

‘Some of these women have made it on their own.’ [Hilary Clinton for example]

‘Family name confers brand recognition, useful contacts and financial contributions’

‘As politics becomes more professional and specialised —with politicians increasingly knowing no other walk of life—the advantages of being brought up in its ways and wiles grow greater.’

‘In the West it is no longer exceptional for women such as Martine Aubry or Marine Le Pen to run for the highest office. In Asian countries it now seems easier for a dynasty’s founder to pass over talentless playboys in favour of more intelligent and perceptive daughters (like Thailand’s new Prime Minister delegate, Yingluck Shinawatra).’ [i.e. intra-elite meritocracy is coming along nicely]

Term limits make it an obvious way to extend a family’s period in office.

Update: Allison asks the great question ‘what about male dynasties’, i.e. men in power now (so no Bushes or Kennedys please). All we can come up with is Raul Castro + just about every monarch. Please add to the list.

The new Future of Food and Farming Report: excellent diagnosis; patchy cure; no power and politics

I attended the launch at the UK Treasury this week of The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability. It’s a high level UK government report from some top scientists, and should have significant influence over the next few years on much of the terrain Oxfam will be exploring in its new campaign on food and resource constraints. Here are some initial impressions, based on the 40 page (!) executive summary.

Overall Message: ‘The food system is failing humanity’, John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK Government at the launch.

The report argues that there are both major failings in the food system today, and five key future challenges, namely:

1. Balancing future supply and demand sustainably (i.e. feed the 9 billion without destroying the planet)

2. Managing volatility and protecting the vulnerable from unavoidable volatility

3. Ending hunger (the social justice/Amartya Sen bit)

4. Mitigating climate change in agriculture

5. Maintaining biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ (which seems to be what we now call the environment)

It sees small farmers as ‘an important component of both hunger and poverty reduction’ (p. 25)

In terms of policy asks, it lists the key priorities for action for policy makers as:
1. Spread best practice.
2. Invest in new knowledge.
3. Make sustainable food production central in development.
4. Work on the assumption that there is little new land for agriculture.
5. Ensure long-term sustainability of fish stocks.
6. Promote sustainable intensification.
7. Include the environment in food system economics.
8. Reduce waste – both in high- and low-income countries.
9. Improve the evidence base upon which decisions are made and develop metrics to assess progress.
10. Anticipate major issues with water availability for food production.
11. Work to change consumption patterns.
12. Empower citizens.

What do I disagree with? Not much. The report is maybe a bit too starry-eyed about science and technology, both old and new (hardly surprising given its authorship), but even there, with caveats:

‘New technologies (such as the genetic modification of living organisms and the use of cloned livestock and nanotechnology) should not be excluded a priori on ethical or moral grounds, though there is a need to respect the views of people who take a contrary view….. Decisions about the acceptability of new technologies need to be made in the context of competing risks (rather than by simplistic versions of the precautionary principle); the potential costs of not utilising new technology must be taken into account.’ (exec sum, p. 11)

Economically, the report is fairly liberal – arguing strongly for liberalized trade and against government intervention in a number of areas such as the regulation of corporate oligopolies (exec sum p 21). In contrast to its explicit criticism of export bans, it is more ambivalent (and vague) about land grabs.

The limits to liberalism are particularly evident in the lack of ideas on reducing volatility, where the report prefers transparency, information and safety nets to any kind of more forceful regulation (pp. 23/4). It says the jury is still out on whether speculation is a significant cause of volatility and is sceptical on global and virtual reserves apart from for WFP stocks for specific emergencies (p. 24).

It is pretty timid on the need to reduce meat consumption, merely mentioning it as a future possibility (p. 22)

But what worries me much more are the gaps. The report follows the unfortunate standard pattern of strong diagnosis, weak cure and absolute vacuum on issues of power and politics. There are several welcome but vague references to empowering women and northern consumers, but there it ends. There is almost no mention of producer organizations or more generally how to achieve a fairer distribution of power in markets, even though it is clear that the benefits of participation in such markets are shaped to a large extent by the relative power of the players involved.

When it comes to a model of change, there isn’t one. No discussion of what to do when those who profit from the status quo resist change. Instead the report takes refuge in the passive tense ‘a stronger constituency for hunger reduction needs to be built’. No power analysis, or sense of how the reforms it proposes might actually come about, and which are more/less politically feasible. No discussion of the likely role of climate and economic shocks like the food price spike in triggering change. Another depressing ‘if I ruled the world’ technocrats’ report, in fact.

It really is striking how many of these reports and processes refuse to stray from the happy sunlit uplands of evidence-based policy-making and win-win solutions. They see the global food system is dysfunctional, but talk as if this is just through some kind of accidental oversight or lack of research, rather than as an outcome of historical processes, including distributive conflicts and political struggle. Instead, the authors assume they can talk of a collective ‘we’, with shared interests and common solutions. The contrast between the subtlety of the science and the crudity/absence of politics (beyond largely vacuous appeals to ‘political will’ and ‘good governance’) is striking. It echoes the kind of ‘magical thinking’ on climate change that ran aground in Cancun, and which is regularly and brilliantly critiqued on the Political Climate blog.

When confronted with trade-offs – win-lose issues – such reports generally deny or avoid them, and have little idea how to discuss, let alone influence, non evidence-based approaches, even though those are an essential (some would argue much more important) part of political reality. The gulf between the polite debate in Whitehall and the turmoil on the streets of Cairo and Tunis (driven in part by high food prices) could not be greater.

In a sense, I guess that’s OK. Reports like these try to influence governments and other decision makers by expanding the boundary of rational policy making against the forces of ‘irrational’ (or at least non evidence-based) conflicts and political power. Talking of conflicts and power could mean taking sides and would risk compromising their objectivity in the eyes of their target audience. Instead, they aim to strengthen the hand of the Platonic guardians, be they civil servants or scientists, in shaping public policy and that is (generally) a good thing.

But even if the rationalist bubble is expanding over time, this approach still leaves a huge chunk of real life outside the remit of such reports, and that seems a serious weakness. Wouldn’t it be great if some body had the courage and the funding to take 10 of the major international reports (Stern on Climate Change, others on development, MDGs etc etc) and produced a parallel series of ‘the politics of X’ reports for each (and Anthony Giddens’ effort on climate change doesn’t count)? Any takers?

The Five Standard Excuses of all politicians, everywhere, for everything: this week’s Friday Formula

Listening to the exchanges in the British Parliament recently brings back the genius of Yes Minister, a long gone British political comedy that, I am told, has been used to train French civil servants in understanding their Brit rivals, counterparts. The references are from 1981 (with links for younger readers, non-anglophiles and amnesiacs), but the excuses are as good as ever. The exchange is between Jim Hacker – the Minister, and his senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey. Script here.

Jim: Five standard excuses?

Sir Humphrey: Yes. First there’s the excuse we used for instance in the Anthony Blunt case.

Jim: Which was?

Sir Humphrey: That there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security forbids its disclosure. Second there is the excuse we used for comprehensive schools, that it has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limits.

Jim: But that’s not true is it?

Sir Humphrey: No, but it’s a good excuse. Then there’s the excuse we used for Concorde, it was a worthwhile experiment, now abandoned, but not before it had provided much valuable data and considerable employment.

Jim: But that is true isn’t it? Oh no, of course it isn’t.

Sir Humphrey: The fourth, there’s the excuse we used for the Munich agreement. It occurred before certain important facts were known, and couldn’t happen again

Jim: What important facts?

Sir Humphrey: Well, that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe.

Jim: I thought everybody knew that.

Sir Humphrey: Not the Foreign Office.

Jim: Five?

Sir Humphrey: Five, there’s the Charge of the Light Brigade excuse. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual, which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures.

Clip here YM – five standard excuses

[h/t Wayne Diamond]

Feel free to add to the five. In development I would probably add the ‘Sex Pistols’ excuse  – when the punk band’s lead singer was asked why he had just flatly contradicted an earlier statement, he replied ‘that was then; this is now’. The development equivalent is ‘The case for [industrial policy, capital controls, taxation etc] may have been convincing in the past, but because of globalization, we should now all default to [insert random ideological preference here], despite the absence of any historical example of its success.’  

Anyone got more candidates for favourite/most-annoying formulae in the field of development, politics etc? If so, send them over.

Book Review: Small Acts of Resistance

Writing a blog is a mixed blessing when it comes to freebies. You get sent some real turkeys in the shape of papers and books to review. But every now and then an unexpected treat drops into your pigeon hole. One such is ‘Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World’, by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson. It’s an unashamed paean to activism, bringing together 80 examples from across geography and the last 100 years.

There’s a passing attempt to cluster these (e.g. sport, the law, women, digital), but not much in the way of analysis – this is definitely a dip-into-for-fun-and-inspiration feelgood book, rather than a serious piece of political science. There is no discussion of why some protests succeed and some fail, the importance of coalitions with progressives or reformists in positions of power, the impact of shocks, or the differences between movements aiming to overthrow repressive regimes and those seeking reforms within the given system. And there are some very overblown claims for the actual impact of these ’small acts’ that should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

My favourites? The Solidarity activists in Communist Poland who, to demonstrate publicly both that they didn’t believe the state TV news and were boycotting it, took their disconnected sets out for a walk in baby buggies (strollers); one of the acts covered is even the one that gave rise to the word ‘boycott’ – the unfortunate Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a much-disliked land agent in British-ruled Ireland whose name became a byword for protest when his servants walked out on him, in protest against unjust rents and evictions. Local shopkeepers joined in, refusing to serve the captain and his family; the post office stopped delivering mail, and in the end the Captain eventually gave up and returned to England.

Then there are the Peruvians who protested against the Fujimori regime by washing the national flag in public every Friday in the centre of Lima. And the Turkish dissidents who clogged and eventually defeated the courts by getting hundreds of people to sign up as co-authors to dissident texts. But my favourite is another story from Poland– the Solidarity activists who dumbfounded the authorities by organizing ironic demonstrations in support of the regime, demanding an eight hour day for secret police and showering police cars with flowers. The government could hardly jail them, and the Polish public loved it.

Some common themes jump out in these more modern, urban versions of what James C Scott famously termed the ‘weapons of the weak’. Humour and irony usually baffle dictators; using repressive regime’s rhetoric and symbols against them often confounds the bad guys (I remember how the Argentine junta, with all its rhetoric about the sacredness of the family, did not know how to deal with the Mothers of the Disappeared – how could they jail mothers?). Protesting en masse, without identifiable leaders, can bring safety (the protesters banging pots and pans at night in Latin America’s cacerolazo protests are invisible and untouchable).

Targeting the most absurd aspects of a repressive regime – as when Gandhi marched to the ocean and made salt, a practice banned by the British, can be particularly effective. Bad guys seldom have a grasp of youth culture – under Slobodan Milosevic one Serbian radio station fought back against a media crackdown by broadcasting rock music with lyrics that implicitly criticised the regime (the Clash’s ‘White Riot’; Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’)

But often, cleverness is not enough – plenty of the small acts described in the book involve straightforward courage – people taking huge personal risks to ‘speak truth to power’.

Looking for a Christmas present for an activist friend? This might be the answer. Check out the book website for photos, videos etc, plus you can add your own stories of small acts. And here are the authors hyping their book in a short promo video:  Small Acts of Resistance Final.

Eight introductory powerpoints on development – please plunder

I recently gave a two week introduction to development (undergrad level) at the University of Notre Dame, consisting of eight 45 minute lectures – here are the powerpoints for anyone wanting to nick them. Each lecture includes a brief illustrative video clip of campaigns, social movements etc. Subjects covered are:

Risk and Vulnerability; The Global Economic Crisis; The International System; Climate Change; Poverty and Wealth; Power and Politics; NGOs and Advocacy; How Change Happens

All feedback welcome. If you have a Slideshare account you can download and share the presentations by clicking on the menu button in the Slideshare preview below. All From Poverty to Power presentations are also available to download here.

Why demanding ‘political will’ is lazy and unproductive

I find myself getting increasingly exasperated by the term ‘political will’. Let me explain. The standard NGO shtick, whether on development, environment or pretty much anything else, is a three parter
a) description of the problem
b) clever proposal for solving the problem
c) call for leaders to show ‘political will’ in adopting the proposed solution

A talk on climate change I attended recently followed this pattern, with some consumer action thrown in on point c. What’s wrong with that? After all, leaders are there to solve problems and some show more determination (‘will’) than others in doing so.

My concern is that a default to ‘political will’ gets us of the hook of actually examining what is either driving or blocking the proposed reforms, and what to do about it. Change happens in many ways other than the ‘political will’ of leaders (or for that matter mass campaigning) – for example, technological and demographic change, long term shifts in attitudes and beliefs, the rise and fall of different business sectors, coalitions and alliances of very dissimilar groups and organizations, or the power of big shocks and events – disasters, wars or elections. This interplay can make change more or less likely, rendering ‘political will’ either effective or useless. Mandela triumphed because of a number of factors – the end of the Cold War, strength of international opposition to apartheid, domestic forces within South Africa – as well as his own extraordinary willpower.

If you consider political capital rather than will, any leader is going to be more likely to back winnable changes than blatantly lost causes. The nitty

gritty of advocacy must start with that kind of ‘power analysis’, to establish how to make a given demand can be made winnable. That means investing in political literacy, rather than being satisfied with vague exhortations to ‘political will’. The trick is to use this understanding to improve your chances of successful influencing, so we observe mobile phone usage rising exponentially and think how we can use this to drive greater equity or accountability.

The role played by political will for NGOs and other social movements reminds me of ‘good governance’, as deployed by governments and international institutions like the World Bank or DFID. They also set out the problem/solution format, but then default to ‘good governance’ as the magic wand that will guarantee implementation – no power, no politics, just good governance. Words that fill a vacuum where political analysis should be.

So next time you hear someone (including me) banging on about ‘political will’, ask them for their power analysis: what might make the speaker’s proposals more/less likely? Who are the drivers/blockers to those reforms? Then you can decide if they have actually thought it through.

Global Social Democracy – Why I disagree with Walden Bello

Just came across ‘The Coming Capitalist Consensus’, a thought-provoking polemic by Walden Bello, the Filipino anti-globalization guru and sociology professor based at Focus on the Global South. Walden argues that a new form of ‘Global Social Democracy’ (GSD) is emerging from the crisis of market fundamentalism and finance capitalism. He sums up its key propositions as: Read More …

Agonizing over Aid

Nothing makes me feel more like a woolly liberal than the aid debate. I seem condemned to see both sides of the argument and veer between the ‘aid as salvation’ and ‘aid as imperialism’ camps. With equal vehemence and seemingly absolute certainty, aid pessimists slug it out with aid optimists, often citing the same evidence, but arriving at completely opposed conclusions. What’s particularly odd is that the most scathing sceptics often work for the aid industry, or at least for the NGOs. It’s a bit like the Automobile Association urging a mass switch to rail (if only). Read More …