China? Seriously Dambisa?
I suppose
intellectual vacillation is inevitable – perhaps even desirable. And even changing one’s mind is ok –
following a process of inquiry, introspection, examination, reflection, alteration,
adaptation, as the case might require. The
fact is that for most people such rethinking of one’s position, when it does
happen, typically comes about slowly and with deliberation. And when it arrives – well, we respect and
commend the process of inquiry and discovery.
It’s the
radical about-faces that are puzzling and perplexing. Alan Greenspan’s post-fallout and much
ballyhooed “I've found the flaw" volte-face comes to mind.
How can he
have been so wrong? – We inevitably ask of the flip-floppers. We question their motives, their interests,
their original understanding, and even their intellectual capabilities – hell,
even their sanity.
But as much
as we lament Greenspan uncharacteristic outburst – he seems to be well on his
way to being exonerated and vindicated. I dunno about Dambisa Moyo. It’s
frankly a little sad to see her turnabout.
Many of you
may recall Dambisa Moyo – who burst into prominence in 2009 with her seemingly
startling claim that aid (as in foreign) was keeping Africa poor. This was the theme of her book: Dead Aid.
But it was her eloquence, and passion – and the fact that she was
Zambian- that really propelled the message - MEMO TO THE WEST: we don't need your frickin' aid! Speaking for Africans – especially sub-saharan
Africa, her message was simple, straightforward, and appealing: stop the aid, its curtailing our
entrepreneurship, our initiative our ability to pick ourselves up by our
bootstraps!
It wasn’t
the first time we heard that provocative message. And Dambisa Moyo wasn’t the
first African either. There was not too
long ago George Ayittey - drawing from in his aptly named
2005 book Africa Unchained - angrily railing that the
“externalist orthodoxy … which portrays Africa as a “victim” and suggests that
the solutions to Africa’s problems must come from external sources.” We
applauded his vision and his choosing to cast his lot with the “cheetah
generation” the new breed of Africans taking their future into their own hands. Other, less familiar but equally articulate
coreligionists are Andrew Mwenda and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and my personal favorite Eleni Gabre-Madhin. The view is also
very much present in the West; William Easterly, for instance – whose subtitle
on his take on the matter says it all: The White Man’s Burden: Why theWest’s Effort s to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
Critics of
aid have been around for awhile. The
great P.T.Bauer whose Dissent on Development
published in 1972 – outed conventional development theory, and was
shunned for it. As an important aside, once an intellectual outcast, Bauer is
now celebrated – see the laudatory tome by Dorn, Hanke and Walters – The Revolution in Development Economics.
But this
compelling counterfactual was not enough for Ms. Moyo – she opted out of the
cheetah generation. She has become
enamored of China’s economic success – and is now peddling its development
model to the rest of the world; she gushes over and talks-up China’s ability to
pull up millions of its citizens out of a once dismal poverty and conveniently
dismisses and overlooks the accompanying atrophied political environment and
social unrest. In a bizarre Ted Talk, and warming up to the
task in a NY Times editorial last year, – Ms. Moyo presumes to take down the West and (what she considers) its fetish with
democracy and political rights – she manages to argue, after rhetorically
asking “Is China the New Idol for Emerging Economies?” that the choice before
third world developing economies is either economic security or market
democracy – full stop. And thus, in one
fell swoop Ms. Moyo conveniently forgets how it was market capitalism that enabled
the infrastructure, the trading spaces, the open markets, student-exchanges, the
free-flow of ideas, in which China has prospered. It is because of the wide-expanse of markets
that now traverse the world that allows firms to distribute costs across
considerably larger domains and the reduced restriction to the free flow of
capital facilitate investments across the world. Clearly China has benefited. Is China growth limitless? Doubtful.
We’ve seen this before. Here is Josef Joffe in a comment from a brilliant essay
in the Wall Street Journal (10.25.13):
The
rise-of-the-rest school assumes that tomorrow will be a remake of yesterday—that
it is up, up, and away for China. Yet history bids us to be wary. Rapid growth
characterized every "economic miracle" in the past. It started with
Britain, the U.S. and Germany in the 19th century, and it continued with Japan,
Taiwan, Korea and West Germany after World War II. But none of them managed to
sustain the wondrous pace of the early decades, and all of them eventually
slowed down. They all declined to a "normal" rate as youthful
exuberance gave way to maturity.
China? Seriously
Dambisa? How about a tonic? And then you
can reconnect with the Dambisa who deserved
that Hayekaward. Here’s a dabble of Alex Tabarrok to remind you of how the entire world benefits from the global
free market umbrella created by supporters of free trade since the end of the
second world war. And here’s touch of William Bernstein on how TRADE (and free markets) shaped
the world. And last, a little helping of
Douglass North – to remind you that the fundamental
“sauce” responsible for sustainable benefits from market capitalism are the
formal and informal institutions associated with democratic capitalism; you
can’t just pluck one and not the other - and expect it to work.
arod
arodriguez@newhaven.edu
