Massive Change Weekly Issue #19, Monday, May 8, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
We will eradicate poverty.
It is not crazy for us to think about having within our power, uniquely for the first time in the history of the world, the chance to end extreme poverty within a generation. That is what the numbers show.
- Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute
In Massive Change we argued, in unison with Sachs, that “when citizens of the one world we share - in Africa’s heartland, most poignantly - are starving and dying of curable diseases every day, it is our duty to direct our dollars to sustainable economic development, not already bloated military budgets. An integrated strategy will result in the deepening of global security and the alleviation of abject poverty and its indicators: violence, terror, and disease. It will depend on the formation of policies for the prevention of future conflict and partnerships between the world’s rich and the world’s poor. Countries in need can’t do this alone.”
The millennium development goals put in place by all UN member states in 2000 to reduce extreme poverty by 2015 required that poor countries pursue good governance and responsible economic and social stewardship, while rich countries helped “well-governed poor countries through expanded aid, trade, and technology transfer.” Many African countries - Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Benin, Ethiopia - have shown exceptional leadership and effort in the transformation of dire political scenarios into thriving democracies. They have the will, but they still lack the way.
Although the governance is admirably in place in many instances - in Africa and elsewhere - the means are sorely lacking to build the necessary infrastructure and social services that will help impoverished nations on the road to self-sustainability and eventual prosperity. Now that we can create a world of shared prosperity, what will we do?
In The End of Poverty, Sachs wrote that “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor”, reversing the usual assumption. Not that Sachs doesn’t argue that stable government is part of the solution: his work is always comprehensive.
Sachs argues that we can eliminate mass destitution (eg, more than 1 billion people living on less than $1 a day) within 20 years. Sachs observes that China has lifted 300m people out of poverty in the last two decades. Much of Africa is landlocked and disease-prone, but Sachs argues that these problems can be overcome: disease (such as malaria) can be controlled, and infrastructure created. Without specifically addressing these issues, political elites will continue to focus on getting resource-based wealth out of the country as fast as possible, and investment and development remain mirages.
In Massive Change we interviewed Jeffrey Sachs on the topic of poverty reduction. The following are some brief excerpts, followed by more recent considerations of the Millennium Development Goals by others.
Since the UN Millennium Development Goals were put forth as a global challenge, how well have we rallied together to meet the needs of the world’s poor?
These goals were set in September 2000 at the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations. In fact, most of them were recycled from commitments at international gatherings during the 1990s. Some countries are making progress, but the stunning and sad fact is that the very poorest countries in the world, in general, are falling further and further behind in meeting those goals; and the rich countries that promised to help them to do more have really lost attention, I’m afraid, and are focusing so much on issues of terrorism, war and peace, and their own internal issues, that they’re just not paying the attention that they promised to global poverty.
This is necessarily a contract between the rich and the poor?
When the goals were set at the Millennium Assembly and then followed up in several important gatherings in which the United States was the key participant - such as at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, which President Bush attended - the rich and the poor countries said, “We have to do this together.” The rich countries acknowledged that the impoverished countries could not fight disease on their own or solve the problems of hunger on their own. They would need help - a lot more help than they receive today. This commitment was put in a very specific promise: The rich countries would make concrete efforts toward raising their development assistance to 0.7% of their gross national product (GNP). But despite this promise, the situation is worsening throughout Africa and in many other impoverished regions of the world. I think it is really a terrible mistake on the part of the rich world not to be paying more attention to this. It hurts us in the end by contributing to global instability.
When you look at the numbers, however, it appears as though we have a real shot at ending poverty sometime soon.
Well, the crazy thing about all of this is that you’d think we’d be paying more attention to these life-and-death issues. There are millions of children dying every year of readily preventable or treatable conditions, like the nearly one million children dying of measles, even though there’s a vaccine to stop it. There are nearly three million children dying of malaria, even though we have medicines that cure it. So you have this stunning challenge, but at the same time there are very specific, relatively straightforward interventions in a lot of cases that could address these problems. Poverty reduction is not rocket science, but the gap between where we are and what we could do if we fulfilled our promises is stunning.
With the work you’ve done at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, how have you come to know science and its importance in the role of ending global poverty?
It’s a wonderful thing to talk to the real practitioners who can help guide you through these problems because sometimes we look at these issues and assume they’re too big to confront. Then we talk to people who work on these problems for a living - the scientists, the technology experts, and the engineers - all of whom have very well-targeted, well-designed, often quite straightforward approaches to the problem.
Take the case of hunger, for example. I’ve been visiting farms in Africa in recent years with my colleague Dr. Pedro Sanchez, who is one of the world’s leading soil scientists and winner of the 2002 World Food Prize. He is the co-coordinator of the Task Force on Hunger for the Millennium Project. When we go through the African farms in very poor areas of western Kenya or Ethiopia, for example, what look like incidental weeds or bushes to me are for Dr. Sanchez the solution to the problem. When the landscape is explained properly, Dr. Sanchez has made me understand that the farms in Africa are now operating on soils virtually depleted of nutrients. It’s a cruelty that the women of Africa go out to perform backbreaking labor, farming their land, when the land doesn’t even have nutrients anymore to sustain crops. Dr. Sanchez shows how various techniques can triple the yields of these poor farmers pretty quickly, in two or three years. These include straightforward chemical fertilizers but also approaches that he’s been championing, like agroforestry (planting certain kinds of plants near the crops in order to replenish soil nutrients). The right kind of agricultural extension and some access to these technologies would result in huge increases of crop yields. Farmers would be able to feed themselves and their families. They would be healthier. They would be more resistant to disease. They would actually have a surplus to take to the market and engage in the economy.
How much would it take on the part of the rich world to turn the conditions around in the world’s poorest areas?
When I chaired the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health for the World Health Organization (WHO) during 2000 and 2001, we did a very detailed analysis of what it would cost to address the key killers: AIDS, TB, malaria, vaccine-preventable diseases, respiratory infection in children, diarrheal disease that kills millions of children every year, unsafe childbirth, micronutrient deficiencies, and so on. A team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led by professor Anne Mills, made a very thorough and detailed costing. What they found was that if you added all the costs, subtracted what poor countries spend on health today, and subtracted a plausible increase in health spending by those countries, then the remaining costs (which would have to be paid by the rich countries) would be on the order of about $25 billion per year. That actually used to sound like a big number, until now: We spent $87 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan (editor’s note: this interview was conducted in 2004 and now that number is much higher) and we gave away $250 billion in the Bush Administration’s tax cuts. Twenty-five billion dollars a year, from the whole rich world, actually is not all that much, since the combined income of the entire rich world is about $25 trillion. The $25 billion that one would need to launch a serious attack on the killer diseases in the poorest countries is about one-thousandth of our annual income, or around ten cents for every hundred dollars of our income. In other words, utterly affordable. This would not break the bank. In fact, it would hardly be noticed in terms of our own income. But it would make a world of difference for the poorest countries in the world.
It’s astounding to me that this message isn’t more widely distributed and broadcast on a daily basis, as a reminder.
I’ve wondered why President Bush doesn’t get up every day and state these things. Then I thought, “Why doesn’t he say it even once?” The fact of the matter is that this message is not understood. The American people, who are very generous people, believe that we’re already doing everything we can do. This is a big mistake. Their own leaders say, “Yes, we are generous people.” But they don’t tell them that because we’re generous people we should be doing what we promised, not what we’re pretending to do. The United States actually gives the smallest amount of development aid as a share of national income of any donor country in the world. We’re just giving about 0.13% of our national income to development assistance. Most Americans think we give 5% of our income, or more! We only give 13 cents out of every hundred dollars, no more than that. That’s not enough, nor is it anywhere close to what we’ve promised to do.
The result is tragedy in Africa, instability, and crises. These crises come back to haunt us in the form of international transmission of disease, bases for terrorism, U.S. involvement in emergency interventions like emergency food aid (which is quite expensive compared to what preventing the emergency would have cost), emergency military intervention, and now the rising cost of security spending in Africa. None of it makes sense if we would just follow through on what we promised, and took serious steps toward solving these problems.
Sachs’s arguments have not gone uncriticized. While much of the criticism has been outright dismissive (without providing counter-proposals), there are definitely criticisms worth noting. William Easterly, an NYU Professor of Economics, wrote a comprehensive critique in the Washington Post that is certainly worth considering. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25562-2005Mar10.html
Easterly opens with this: “Jeffrey D. Sachs’s guided tour to the poorest regions of the Earth is enthralling and maddening at the same time — enthralling, because his eloquence and compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening, because he offers solutions that range all the way from practical to absurd. It’s a shame that Sachs’s prescriptions are unconvincing because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty. As he puts it, newspapers should (but don’t) report every morning, ‘More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty’.”
He goes on to criticize Sachs’s plan a “sort of Great Leap Forward”, and we all know the upshot of that utopian approach. “His characteristically comprehensive approach to eliminating world poverty derives from his conviction that everything depends on everything else — that, for instance, you cannot cure poverty in Africa without beating AIDS, which requires infrastructure, which requires stable government, and so forth.
“Social reformers have found two ways to respond to this complexity; Karl Popper summed them up best a half-century ago as ‘utopian social engineering’ versus ‘piecemeal democratic reform’. Sachs is the intellectual leader of the utopian camp. To end world poverty once and for all, he offers a detailed Big Plan that covers just about everything, in mind-numbing technical jargon, from planting nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations and so on.”
Our own Massive Change project seems to straddle both approaches and is therefore sympathetic to Sachs, on the one hand, and embraces the piecemeal approach, which, according to Easterly, “would humbly acknowledge that nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty. It would eschew the arrogance that ‘we’ know exactly how to fix ‘them’. It would shy away from the hubris of what [Sachs] labels the “breathtaking opportunity” that “we” have to spread democracy, technology, prosperity and perpetual peace to the entire planet. Large-scale crash programs, especially by outsiders, often produce unintended consequences. The simple dreams at the top run afoul of insufficient knowledge of the complex realities at the bottom. The Big Plans are impossible to evaluate scientifically afterward. Nor can you hold any specific agency accountable for their success or failure. Piecemeal reform, by contrast, motivates specific actors to take small steps, one at a time, then tests whether that small step made poor people better off, holds accountable the agency that implemented the small step, and considers the next small step.”
Easterly argues that the evidence supports the piecemeal approach. Sachs’s plan is similar in approach to ideas that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to “bureaucratic approach to economic development that’s been followed ever since — albeit with some lip service to free markets — by the World Bank, regional development banks, national aid agencies like USAID and the U.N. development agencies. Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today’s dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it’s fair to say this approach has not been a great success. (By the way, utopian social engineering does not just fail for the left; in Iraq, it’s not working too well now for the right either.)”
In contrast, Easterly argues that piecemeal endeavors have brought success. Again, Massive Change has documented many of these as well (eg, the work of the Gates Foundation). “Vaccination campaigns, oral rehydration therapy to prevent diarrhea and other aid-financed health programs have likely contributed to a fall in infant mortality in every region, including Africa. Aid projects have probably helped increase access to primary and secondary education, clean water and sanitation. Perhaps it is also easier to hold aid agencies accountable for results in these tangible areas. (Many of Sachs’s specific recommendations might make sense as piecemeal reforms — i.e., if done one at a time in small steps, with subsequent evaluation and accountability.)”
Easterly concludes that “the danger is that when the utopian dreams fail (as they will again), the rich-country public will get even more disillusioned about foreign aid. Sachs rightly notes that we need not worry whether the pathetic amount of current U.S. foreign aid — little more than a 10th of a penny for every dollar of U.S. income — is wasted. Foreign aid’s prospects will brighten only if aid agencies become more accountable for results, and demonstrate to the public that some piecemeal interventions improve the lives of desperate people. So yes, do read Sachs’s eloquent descriptions of poverty and his compelling ethical case for the rich to help the poor. Just say no to the Big Plan.”
BRUCE MAU SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS:
Wednesday, May 10 - 2 pm
Innotown Conference, Fredericia, Denmark
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth: Creativity and Innovation from the Bruce Mau Design Studio
For more information please contact Soren Madsen, 452.163.8846, sm@trekantomraadet.dk
WRITERS WANTED! In early summer, 2006, massivechange.com will revert to the blog format that it enjoyed from in the first year of its existence. We are looking for a number of volunteer writers to submit stories regularly. If you are interested, please contact me at shedden@brucemaudesign.com
COMING SOON: Massive Change at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.
Check out http://www.mcachicago.org for preliminary information. Watch this space for more details.
Massive Change originated as an exhibition and tour by Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries, commissioned and organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery ( http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca ). A book, co-authored by Mau, Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries, is available from Phaidon Press ( http://www.phaidon.com ), and through Amazon and Indigo. Some of the texts in this newsletter are derived from the book.
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