Chris | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo

I wrote here previously about my distaste for a new Oxfam ad, which seemed to me to perpetuate the nauseating stereotype of Africa as a pathetic and helpless victim dependent for its salvation on the outside world. (I wonder how much investment has been lost to Africa as a result of this stereotype, perpetuated, ironically, by aid agencies trying to use pity to get money from us to help Africa?)

My daughter Nancy recently spent a year in Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest countries, and my wife and I spent two weeks there with her. As we drove across the country, the delivery end of the aid business was everywhere in evidence. One after another along the wayside were clinics, schools and orphanages funded by European and American aid agencies. The Malawian government itself has something like half of its budget provided by foreign aid.

Malawi is a delightful country – its people are friendly, interested, and courteous in a charming old-fashioned kind of way, and certainly not pathetic or helpless – but I felt uncomfortable about what I was seeing. Where was all this going? Is it useful, healthy, or even sustainable in the long run, for a country to have its basic services largely provided by external donors, and often administered by them as well? Was this really ever going to help the country reach a point where it could fund its own institutions? Where were the industries, where were even the beginnings of the industries, that would make this possible?

So I found myself asking the question: does aid really help?

Certainly the evidence thus far is not encouraging. As the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, observed: “In the last 50 years, you’ve [the rest of the world] spent US$400 billion in aid to Africa. But what is there to show for it?” Dambisa Moyo – she is a Zambian economist – observes that just 30 years ago Malawi (among other countries) had a per capita income that was higher than that of China. Why has one country shot ahead, and the other remained stuck in a state of dependency?

Well of course there are a number of possible reasons for this, and I couldn’t help feeling that Moyo skated rather lightly over some of them. (China, after all, has been a state and an urban civilization for thousands of years, long before any country in Europe, while Malawi, like most African countries, is a recent invention, and its modest cities have only existed for a century or so). However I remained struck by Moyo’s thesis, which is that, far from being a solution to Africa’s problem with development, aid is in very large part its cause.

Aid supports rent-seeking – that is, the use of governmental authority to take and make money without trade or production of wealth. At a very basic level, an example of this is where a government official with access to aid money set aside for public welfare takes the money for his own personal use. Obviously there cannot be rent-seeking without rent.

It isn’t just a matter of outright corruption, though. In all kinds of ways, Moyo argues, aid creates a system where the best way for ambitious people to get on is to gain access to the money tap, rather than to create wealth themselves. A mineral resource such as oil can have a similar effect, resulting in a country’s elite simply living on the income derived from the sale of that resource, rather than building up an economy that would deliver wealth when the oil has gone.

Indeed, aid may not only discourage local economic activity, it may even actively undermine it:

There’s a mosquito net manufacturer in Africa. He manufactures around 500 nets a week. He employs ten people who (as with many African countries) each have to support upwards of fifteen relatives…

Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who… goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets… at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed and a ‘good’ deed is done.

With the market flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business. His ten workers can no longer support their 150 dependents (who are now forced to depend on handouts) and one mustn’t forget that in a maximum of five years the majority of the imported nets will be torn, damaged and of no further use….

The gift of nets, in other words, creates a need for more gifts, and so on and on. It’s not hard to see how such a pattern, repeated in many different ways and at many different levels, could indeed result in a permanent dependency on external aid.

Moyo advocates a gradual phasing out of aid as we now understand it, and discusses a range of different ways in which Africa could begin to finance its own development. Her suggestions include trade, a sore point for Africa since most donor countries take away with the left hand what the right hand has given by denying Africa fair access to their markets, but Moyo points out that there are other new trading partners in the rest of the developing world (notably China and India), and opportunities for trade within Africa itself, or indeed within single countries. They also include foreign direct investment in capital projects (such as China is now enthusiastically engaged in), borrowing money in capital markets, use of micro-finance (a means of providing small loans for local businesses which has been very effective in other parts of the world), and making better and more effective use of Africa’s own savings. (Apparently there are huge quantities of savings in developing countries, but in the absence of access to an appropriate banking system, they are often simply held in cash, or in the form of other assets like gold, with the result that they are not available to the economy: ‘borrowers cannot borrow, and lenders do not lend’). To those who might object that African countries would find it difficult in raising money in these kinds of ways, Moyo’s response is that dependence on aid is one of the things that make it difficult.

I’m no economist, and I’m not familiar with the literature on aid and development (as I am sure would be evident to any development expert reading this post), but I found her arguments compelling. I suspect many people of a leftish persuasion would be inclined to dismiss her essentially market- and business-orientated solutions out of hand, but I don’t feel so inclined myself. Another thing that struck me about Malawi (based on my own observations and those of my daughter) was the very visible presence of European and American development professionals, travelling back and forth across the country in their SUVs, doing deals, attending meetings, enjoying a bit of R & R with their families in lakeside resorts. I’m not saying these weren’t good people doing their best, but I would much rather have seen business people looking for opportunities for investment and trade.

“Us” and “them”

I observed in a recent post that, for people on different sides of a political argument, “‘their’ views are always based on ignorance, fear, self-interest, or a refusal to face reality, while ‘ours’ are always based on wisdom, courage, decency and deep understanding of the world.”

‘Always’ is an exaggeration I admit, but if you look at the incredibly abusive and ill-tempered political debates that happen online, where the normal veneer of politeness is stripped away, ‘people who don’t agree with me are just ignorant shits’ does seem to be a pretty prevalent view.

This article here (about working class people being more right-wing than middle class people) caught my eye a while ago. I found it interesting. But look at the comment thread underneath it. So much of the argument consists of applying ugly labels to people, in order to define them as ‘other’, and therefore not worth considering.

For example, one post reflects as follows on why working class people are (according to the poll under discussion) more opposed to immigration than middle class ones: ‘Perhaps the working classes don’t care for a few million new workers competing for a diminishing pool of work’. The next post retorts: ‘I guess the BNP is your party of choice’ and ‘Pretend you aren’t a nazi if it makes you feel better.’

If you’re going to call someone a Nazi for thinking that working class people may be worried about immigrants taking their jobs, what word have you got left to describe someone who thinks (just for instance) that Jews should be exterminated and Aryans should take over the world?

But then again, calling someone a Nazi (or a bullshitter, or whatever), is a very quick way of not engaging with what they have to say at all. Yes, and let’s at all costs stick to two camps, ‘us’ and ‘them’, rather than deal with the anxiety of not always being certain that we’re right.

Waterloo Sunset

I very much enjoyed this programme about Ray Davies. I was struck by his comment about one of his songs (I think it was ‘Days’) that the words might seem ‘a bit naff’ on their own, but he felt that the music transformed them. Actually that is true, I think, of quite a bit of his stuff. People usually praise the words, the little observations and stories, but on their own the observations are not necessarily all that original. There are a lot of songs, for instance, about the fears and longings of suburban life (‘Mr Pleasant’ or ‘Shangri-la’) which, taken just as stories and observations, are amusing but quite commonplace. But the music really does transform them into something else.

In fact I’d say his musical inventiveness is, if anything, rather underrated, or at any rate not so often remarked on. His back catalogue of songs (imagine having written ‘You really got me’, ‘Days’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Autumn Almanac’, ‘Lola’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’!) is quite exceptionally varied in terms of moods, rhythms and musical colours, and is full of lovely details and surprises. Listen, for instance, to the way that the strange and melancholy song ‘See my friends’ changes its feel and rhythm in the middle of each verse, opening up, and then drawing back again.

For various reasons, although I grew up in the 60s and 70s, I didn’t encounter ‘Waterloo Sunset’ at all until about 5 years after it came out. But when I did finally come across it I was really blown away, and I still am. It really is the most amazing marriage of words and music. There is actually not one single word of description of the sunset itself, yet when I listen to this song, the harmonies rising up over the melody instantly evoke to me an enormous brightly coloured sky, towering up over the little figures of Terry and Julie, and the people swarming out of the underground, and the song’s narrator, watching the whole scene from his window.

(As I’ve observed before, vivid descriptive writing isn’t so much a matter of providing detailed instructions of a scene, as of giving readers/listeners permission to construct the scene for themselves. This is a perfect example. We all know what sunsets look like, and don’t need to be told, but we do need something to trigger off the whole set of associations, something to allow us to pretend that a sunset is happening right now.)

The Glastonbury version of the song here is performed with the Crouch End Chorus, which includes my good friend Clive among its tenors. Lucky man.

(Clive lives in North London, where Davies grew up and still lives, very much in the surroundings in which the programme is filmed. The programme reminded a bit too of an odd but interesting book by another North Londoner that I wrote about here.)

Saliency or efficacy

By way of footnote to previous post. Thought this post about the impact of images on the way we think about climate change was interesting. It connects well with some thoughts I’ve had about the difficulty of writing fiction about climate change. Images of the effects of climate change get the message over about the threat (saliency), but make people feel fatalistic. Images of attempts to mitigate climate change make people feel something can be done about it (efficacy), but don’t get over the seriousness of the threat. Tricky!

Giant wind turbine at Nigg Yard by John Wright

The Politics of Climate Change, 2nd ed, by Anthony Giddens

In a previous post, I discussed this video clip of an American woman, emerging from a cinema after seeing the film ‘Chasing Ice.’ She’s clearly on the conservative side of the American political spectrum. ‘I love Bill O’Reilly,’ she says (he’s a right-wing commentator on the Fox News channel), ‘I watch Bill O’Reilly every day, and I’m proud to be an American, but…’

It’s the ‘but’ that fascinated me, the ‘but’ that she felt obliged to insert before she went on to say how badly she’d been shaken by the movie and how, in spite of previous scepticism, she now recognised climate change as a reality and a threat. Why a ‘but’ rather than an ‘and’? If you are proud of your country, doesn’t it logically follow you’d want to protect it from being ravaged by drought, storms and global chaos? Surely protecting a thing is something you do because of your love for it, not in spite of it?

I’m only pretending to be surprised though. Politics is a very tribal thing. All of us (liberals and lefties as much as conservatives) tend to subscribe to approved clusters of beliefs, rather than working out for ourselves what we think about each individual issue. The newspapers we read, peer group pressure, our own inertia – all tend to have the effect of homogenising these clusters of beliefs, so that we end up with a comforting ‘us’ and ‘them’ (and thus a linear dimension – left-right, liberal-conservative – to represent the entire multi-dimensional space of possibilities). These are ‘our’ views. Those are ‘theirs’. And of course ‘their’ views are always based on ignorance, fear, self-interest, or a refusal to face reality, while ‘ours’ are always based on wisdom, courage, decency and deep understanding of the world.

It so happens that a concern about climate change has come in America and elsewhere to be associated with the political left. Research cited by Giddens in this book shows that Democrats are almost twice as likely as Republicans to believe that global warming is a reality, and more than three times as likely to believe that it is the result of human activity. That’s why the woman in the clip says ‘but’. She knows this is an idea that is associated with ‘them’, and she wants to make clear that her essential loyalties remain, nevertheless, unchanged. (I know how she feels. It’s uncomfortable to admit to a view that doesn’t fit the consensus of the group that assumes you are ‘one of us’.)

One of things that I appreciated about this book is that Giddens identifies this as a problem. A concern about climate change really should not be associated with a particular political position: (a) because a change in the global weather system is going to affect everyone’s children and grandchildren, whatever they happen to believe about the appropriate mix in society between state and private enterprise (and all the other issues on which we disagree politically), (b) because nothing useful is going to happen if this remains just another political football to be kicked back and forth between two teams:

“Responding to climate change should not be seen as a left-right issue. Climate change has to be a question that transcends party politics, and about which there is an overall framework of agreement that will endure across changes of government. (p 74)”

In the same vein, Giddens also argues that we need to be very careful not to automatically conflate climate change with the usual ‘green’ concerns. Being ‘green’ is of course another cluster of beliefs and lifestyles, which are assumed to all belong together but may in fact need to be disaggregated:

“For example, a key green value is that of ‘staying close to nature’ – or, more briefly put – conservation. It is a value that has a certain aesthetic quality to it. It is very possibly important to the good life, but it has no direct relevance to climate change. Clashes can easily occur between conservationist values and policies relevant to global warming – for example, conservationists might resist the building of a nuclear power station, or a wind farm, in a particular area of the country.”

Greens of course (with a few exceptions) usually hate nuclear power, and Giddens acknowledges that “the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the possibility of nuclear terrorism and the difficulty of disposing of nuclear waste” but one of the overall thrusts of this book is that “no course of action (or inaction) is without risks; and that, consequently, there is always a balance of risks and opportunities to be considered in any policy context.”

He calls this ‘the percentage principle’ (as opposed to the precautionary one). I know it well from my career in social work. We can’t eliminate the possibility of nasty thing happenings, not least because reducing the risk of one nasty thing typically increases the risk of others. If we are to avoid the worst consequences of runaway climate change, therefore, we will be need to willing to take some risks, and to accept some changes that, in themselves, we don’t particularly welcome.

I wouldn’t say this was a great book. It helped me to crystallise a few existing thoughts, rather than providing me with new ones that had never occurred to me. But it was worth reading.

Climate change is an odd kind of threat, as Giddens points out:

“Since the dangers… aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, many will sit on their hands and do nothing… Yes waiting until such dangers are visible and acute… before being stirred to serious action will be too late.”

He calls this Gidden’s paradox. I’m not sure the thought is so original as to justify him naming it after himself, but the problem is real enough. The way to get round it is to keep foregrounding the issue, and for that reason, as much as any other, I think this book is to be welcomed.

The sound of the underground train

I was sitting the other day in an underground train in London, surrounded by strangers.

Books and films often turn underground trains into symbols of urban alienation and loneliness, as in the Eurythmics song ‘This city never sleeps.’ And, if I think about it at all, that’s how I tend to see them: machines hurtling through dark tunnels, people who don’t know each other avoiding eye contact or interaction of any kind.

But it struck me on this occasion that there was entirely different way to see it. How amazing that so many people can coexist so peacefully in such close proximity, feeling so unthreatened that they can peacefully read, listen to music, play with their smartphones, until the point where the path of their individual lives diverges from the route of the train, when they join other peaceful streams of people, on moving stairways, streets, buses, and continue on their way. Why call this alienation, why not call it a remarkable ability to respect each other’s space? I suddenly found the scene incredibly reassuring and benign. Cram this many chimpanzees into a space this size and they’d go crazy with aggression and fear.

Why go for the gloomier image, the darker story, when there is more than one alternative? David Brin raises a related question here, when he wonders why books and films routinely portay society and its institutions as stupid, dangerous and malign when, after all, they are also what delivers the food to our plates, the power to our plugs, the roads we travel on, the ambulances that pick us up when we fall…

I think we rather like the fantasy of being surrounded by darkness and danger. It allows us to imagine we aren’t the tame and domesticated creatures that most of us really are.

Belgium’s doughnut island

In order to move away from fossil fuels, we need to move towards either nuclear or renewable energy . Both of these, for different reasons, create problems of inflexibility of supply. Nuclear can’t just turned on and off to respond to fluctuations in demand (actually, this isn’t so easy with gas or coal stations either), and renewables are dependant on sources outside of human control. Gloomier souls sometimes suggest that renewables, for this reason, are very little use.

But there just needs to be a way of storing surplus energy when demand is lower than supply. Dinorwig power station in N Wales is an example of a large-scale solution to this problem. It pumps water uphill at times of surplus power, and then lets it run downhill again to generate power when extra power is needed.

I’m no engineer, I’m not even someone that likes to fix his own bike, but I enjoy thinking about these problems, and what interests me is that it isn’t so very hard, even for a not-particularly well-informed lay person, to dream up solutions. I wondered whether fly-wheels could be used, for instance, and when I did a little internet search, it turned out that one fairly large fly-wheel-based plant actually does exist.

A more fanciful idea of mine (or so I thought) was to construct a large doughnut-shaped island in the sea out of which water could be pumped and then allowed to flow back in again. I’ve just found that the Belgian government really does propose to build just such an island (Details here.)

I’m not suggesting here that flywheels and doughnuts islands are ‘the answer’. I’m saying that, if even I can think of solutions, then this really isn’t such an insurmountable problem.

Climate change denialists are one thing, but climate change fatalists are also pretty dangerous: the ones who say that change is happening alright but it’s just too difficult to fix. That could so easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy, and therefore yet another one of those dangerous positive feedback loops that threaten to exacerbate the problem.

Look at the resources, brainpower and effort that is now put into extracting petrochemicals from ever more difficult places (tar sands, the arctic, mile-deep ocean beds). Is it really so difficult to imagine that a low-carbon economy could not be achieved by the same kind of commitment and effort?

Dark Eden shortlisted for BSFA award

Dark Eden is shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA award for best novel. I’m pleased pleased.

Si Scott is also in the Best Artwork shortlist for the beautiful dark cover he made for the book.

The other four novels shortlisted are:

Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

2312 by Kim Stanley-Robinson (Orbit)

More details here.

The White Man’s Burden

I was nauseated on sight by a new ad from Oxfam: “Let’s make Africa famous for its epic landscapes, not hunger,” it said. And then “Help end hunger”.

It struck me as pretty patronising to suggest that Africa isn’t known for anything other than either beautiful scenery or starving people. And what arrogance, to suggest that somehow foreign NGOs could ‘end hunger’ in Africa. Do African people themselves have no agency? Might as well talk about ‘benighted heathens’ or ‘the dark continent’ or the ‘white man’s burden’.

It seems I wasn’t the only one to react this way. See this piece for instance.

Meanwhile here’s a picture of a street scene in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Neither beautiful scenery nor starving children, just people getting on with things, the same as anywhere.

Street scene Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

From Wikipedia. Photo by Helge Fahrnberger. Full credits and copyright details here

A stranger

There is my wife, my two daughters and my son, and then there is a fifth family member who they all know but I have never met.

Oh I know what he looks like, at least in the sense that I can identity him in a picture, but if I hear a recording of his voice it’s the voice of a stranger, and if I see a video of him, his mannerisms and body language are quite different from those I’d expect. I’ve very rarely seen what he looks like when he doesn’t know he’s being observed, only momentary glimpses in the background of pictures of other people.

I’ve been told many things about him: the things he characteristically does do and the things he characteristically doesn’t. As I grow older, these stories add up in my mind into a somewhat more rounded picture than I used to have, but I’m still capable of being completely surprised, and there are still some characteristics which baffle me, even though I’ve been told about them so often that I know they must be real.

I wonder if I’d really have any sense of him at all, if it wasn’t for these reports from others. It’s true that I have access to lots of information about him that no one else has, but it would be such a strange and limited picture if I had to rely on that information alone, like that odd remote view you get of the sky and the outside world from underwater, looking up through the silvered undersides of waves.