I'm temporarily breaking my thesis-enforced embargo on blogging to bring you this little nugget. It seems that, in celebration of the UN MDG summit, Bono's ONE campaign has been giving out gift boxes to journalists:
The items were part of a pricey pile of puzzling loot, which also included a $15 bag of Starbucks coffee, a $15 Moleskine leather notebook, a $20 water bottle and a plastic ruler.
Even better, spot the allocation problem:
Another container held the oversized cookie and water bottle in an odd pitch for funds for clean water and "sustainable sources of food."Â Poverty-stricken African kids live on less than $1.25 a day -- "about the cost of the cookie in this box," ONE contended. [Emphasis added]
Also, Rupa Subramanya Dehejia, quoted by Martina Hyde of The Guardian, nails the MDGs-are-responsible-for-all-progress fallacy:
And yet, if only Bono had spent a little less time thinking about goody bags, and a little bit more on his weekend column in the New York Times, he might not have muddled cause and effect as far as the MDGs were concerned. "The gains made by countries like Ghana," ran a typical statement, "show the progress the Millennium Goals have helped create." Mmm. As Rupa Subramanya Dehejia, who covers the political economy of India for the Wall Street Journal, wrote this week: Bono "would have you believe that Ghana's progress is because of the [Millennium Development] Goals! He further suggests that poor performance in the Congo is due to the financial crises and food shortages. Gasp! Where is my oxygen mask? Have you not heard that Ghana is growing rapidly because of smart economic policies and that Congo is the centre of a war zone which barely has an economy?"
Dehejia probably should be using her dire descriptors of the DRC in the past tense, but her point is still very valid: We tend to attribute MDG successes to the wonderful design of the goals and international action, rather than the hard work, capacity and luck that developing countries themselves have needed to actually make that progress. The problem with massive international goals is that they leave no room for counterfactuals.
PS. why isn't The Guardian, who now has a whole tab dedicated to global development, keeping this piece in the 'Lost in Showbiz' blog and not, oh, I don't know, as part of their massive MDG coverage? It seems it is linked on the main development page as well.
1 Comment
hhmmm, yeah, given that many of the MDGs were designed by taking pre-existing trends and projecting them forwards, the claim that they're responsible for their being met does seem pretty tenuous.