Responding to Easterly's post on development systems, Meredith Startz at IPA posits that perhaps aid's main role is to help developing countries tread water while we wait to find real solutions:
On a deep level, Easterly is right, and not just because identifying the right solutions requires local knowledge. It’s also about sustainability, in a literal sense. In order for actual development to occur, solutions have to be imbedded in a local system that drives and sustains them without constant flows of money from NGOs or donor governments. Otherwise, it’s not development, but rather a permanent system of redistribution from wealthy countries to poor ones. It’s like claiming to cure an ill person by keeping her on life support. A person who is on dialysis and pain medication is alive and comfortable – and that is almost certainly better than the alternative. But, real healing would imply that we have figured out what’s wrong with the liver and fixed it, so that the body’s system is doing its own miraculous thing without mechanical intervention. Forcibly simulating the outcomes of good system can temporarily get you better health and education and housing, but it only goes so far.I think most of us agree that a permanent system of wealth-redistribution is undesirable - what some of us might disagree on is whether or not aid-as-relief is beneficial, neutral, or detrimental to development in the long run.
First and foremost: The way to build a better problem-solving system is NOT to simply take the body off life support. Now, that may sound obvious, and we won’t accuse Easterly of suggesting that all aid flows be brought to a screeching halt just because they’re not imbedded in good local systems. However, it does suggest two types of action that ought to be taken. First, use the time you are buying with life support to diagnose the problem. Second, look for solutions that provide the spark needed to jump-start the system.To challenge a medical analogy with another: what if aid isn't just a life-saving intervention, but one that temporarily mitigates suffering - like morphine. If handled carefully, one can be weaned off slowly as they pick themselves up again. If given carelessly in large doses it can be highly addictive and distortive, hampering or even impeding one's recovery.
1 Comment
I think most people are for a permanent system of wealth redistribution. In the U.S. we have medicare and social security, which will eventually be bailed out by the rich (means testing, etc.), the EITC, and now conditional cash transfers in NYC. We like intracountry wealth redistribution, so why not, in the long run, have global wealth redistribution? (If the point is that we won't have it on the scale we do now, the EITC alone might cost more than foreign aid for the U.S.)