Big Bag of Ethics: Soylent Green, Mandela, and Aid

Terrible ideas in ethics: run the country like a business, Soylent Green edition. “If you’re trying to look at America from a balance-sheet perspective the problem is very clear … it’s the existence of old people. … The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auctions.”

Much better thoughts on ethics about Mandela’s transformation into the Mandela we (think we) know today: “It was not because he was removed from others, removed from evil, removed from the weaknesses of a frail humanity, that he prevailed. It was by plunging into what was negative in himself and the aching world around him that he was able to develop “whatever is good,” as he puts it in his book. How to do this? One word keeps cropping up, over and over: integrity.”

Beyond a desire to save the world:

Someone very smart once said to me that “the reasons why you stay married are usually different from the reasons why you got married.” And very much like marriage, humanitarian work is one of those things that has good days and not so good days.”

On the ethics of pop stars associating with autocrats.

Successes: Disaster Response in Indonesia

From Tales in the Hood:

By the time Haiti was but a few hours old on CNN, the rest of the world had forgotten about Padang. And Manila, Kompong Thom, Savannakhet, Quang Nam, and southern Taiwan… All of those places slammed by Typhoons and small tsunamis and earthquakes last fall. ...

I’m also impressed with how well the overall response has gone. Not that everything in Padang is fabulous. But amazing progress has been made in the nine or so months since the earthquake.

Good coordination, straightforward response by the right agencies, lack of celebrities, shortage of well-meaning interveners, no peanut gallery or politicians to play for ... just professionals helping people.

No, the Padang earthquake response ran the old-fashioned way: professional aid organizations, whether international, local or governmental, planned and then implemented a straightforward emergency response. They figured out what the earthquake survivors needed by asking them, and then got them that – not something like the thing that they wanted, not something altogether different but that could, with some imagination, be used in place of what they needed… No, simply got them what they needed in the most direct and efficient manner possible.
And you can tell. The people I talked to today were happy about how things had gone and were going, the terrible disaster of last September notwithstanding. They expressed hope.
…
That’s the way you do emergency response.

Brought to you by the letter M

MDGs, MVs, Migrants, and Monsters

How to make the inevitable next round of development goals more realistic, achievable, and productive.- Todd Moss of CGD says:

1. Bottom up, not global down.
2. Based on ambitious yet reasonably achievable expectations.
3. Aimed, where possible, on intermediate outcomes.
4. Considered warning markers rather than operational goals.
5. Able to identify success. 

Speaking of the MDGs, the one where we have made the least progress worldwide is reducing maternal mortality. Canada and the US are trying to raise more money to focus on them maternal mortality rates at the G8 and G20 meetings in two weeks.

Of course, we all know that Africa is failing most of the MDGs. Easterly points out, however, that that is partly an artifact of the way the goals were set up: some in levels, some in percentage change, other using other criteria. The thing is, a percentage increase of something good of which you have little is much easier than rising to a set limit the farther you are from it. Similarly, reducing something bad by a given percentage is harder than reducing it by a specific amount if you have a lot of that bad thing. Nearly every goal, however, was chosen in the hardest possible way:

Had the goals been chosen at the + signs instead - reducing poverty and increasing school enrollment by a fixed percent, for instance, Africa would look like it's doing much better.

I think the MDG design was unintentional after some conversation with the original creators of the goals, who did not intend the MDGs to be applied at the regional or country levels. What is less forgivable is the aquiescence in making Africa look like a failure after the bias was clear to anyone who would bother to check. Of course, there are areas and time periods where Africa has done badly, but is that any reason to take the successes and make them look like failures?

How have the Millennium Villages been doing? The first report is in, but not many people have been commenting on it, according to Aid Watch:

The new data give a picture of encouraging results across all sectors compared to the baseline. In Mwandama, Malawi, for example, bednet use for children under five increased from 14 percent to 60 percent and malaria prevalence for all age groups fell from 19 percent to 15 percent. Maize yields increased dramatically from .8 tons per hectare to 4.5 tons per hectare. 

Note: crop increases do not necessarily imply profit increases, but given the high subsidies they're receiving, I think that's a safe bet. The question is whether incomes increase by more than the subsidies and how long lasting the increases are after the donors leave: ie - is this enough to get the farmers out of the assumed poverty trap?

Unfortunately the results are also not that useful: Three years is too short a period to know how to interpret this dramatic increase in maize yields, for example. Is this consistent with normal variation in crop yields? Was 2006 an unusually good or bad year for maize? We don’t know.
The results also don’t help us determine whether current and future resources should be shifted away from other existing or even yet-to-be invented approaches, towards the MVP template. Will those short-term gains last beyond the timeline of the project? Can the project become self-sustaining?
Again, we don’t know, in part because not enough time has passed.

Investing in migration, Michael Clemens does some quick and dirty calculations for Bangladesh:

Hussain reports that the average Bangladeshi pays about $3,150 to migrate—mostly to the Middle East—covering costs of travel, intermediaries, and so on.  A stint abroad earns the average migrant $3,690 per year, or about $11,050 total for a typical three-year spell.  Of that, about $6,850 is either remitted home or brought home as savings. ...
That’s a stunningly profitable investment.  The large, up-front cost of emigration is yielding these migrants a 117% annual return. Most of that is spent in Bangladesh. For comparison, Mark Pitt and Shahidur Khandker estimate the returns to much-vaunted microcredit for Bangladeshi men at just 11%... .

Does Bill Easterly want to eliminate aid? Vote in the comments section.

Rotting Brains and Saving the World

It's your television, from Aid Watch

Social change from soap operas? Kenny is referring to the research of U. Chicago Professor Emily Oster joint with Robert Jensen, which found in a rigorous study that the introduction of cable TV in rural India was associated with decreased acceptability of domestic violence, decreased preference for sons over daughters, and increased school enrollment for young children. Cable TV in India features mainly game shows and soap operas.

The love child of imperialism and muzak

With thanks to Texas in Africa, a textual deconstruction of Toto's "I Bless the Rain Down in Africa"



There are delightful zingers throughout. My favorite:

Quintessentially American attitudes:
1 - The consumption of televised suffering grants me moral depth.  [my favorite]
2 - Benevolence begins and ends in my imagination
3 - Africa sure be exotic
4 - All this consuming and appropriating is tiring. Break time!

Five Second ... Capitalism and Freedom

One of the parts that has stayed with me the most since I read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962) this last year was his first argument from the introduction. I caught myself rehearsing it just this week, in fact, without remembering who made it until I reread it today:

In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." ... Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" ... is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your countrry" implies that government is the master or the deity... . To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. ...

The free man will ask ... rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep that government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

The two questions form the crux of the book's discussion.

Keynes vs. Hayek Rap

I'm delighted Cafe Hayek finally posted this on their website. For all they were talking it up, they sure kept it ... under raps: The Hayek and Keynes Rap Off.



Chorus: We've been going back and forth for a century
K: I want to steer markets
H: I want them set free
There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
H: Blame low interest rates
K: No, it's the animal spirits.

Best line from Hayek:
In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead.
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective.
Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective.

Brought to you by Russ Roberts, author of The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance, and John Papola who seems to like posting comments on blogs I visit that didn't credit him until he posted there.

Malthus wasn't Malthusian

Yi Wen, one of my macroeconomics professors, once asked the class why economics was different from physics in the context of a particular model we were covering that predicted certain doom. The answer was that humans have agency to choose to do something other than what was modeled. Adam Martin, guest blogging at Aid Watch, demonstrates that this was something Malthus understood, but that neither his supporters nor most of his critics have realized he did:
Malthus was not arguing in a vacuum. He was responding to William Godwin’s proposal to overthrow basic social institutions like private property and the family. In a free love-fest where no one is responsible for the offspring resultant from their passions, Malthus argued, population growth would run amok. If individuals don’t bear the cost of procreation, they will procreate too much. If they do bear costs of offspring, “preventative checks” such as birth control and delayed marriage will make population self-regulating. In his own words: “Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world, for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence.” An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter II). Reproductive choices respond to incentives. The laws of economics are more powerful than the laws of attraction. …

A top-down perspective on population that treats individuals like mindless lemmings will panic: “Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.”

Malthus gets right what both his followers and his more technocratic critics get wrong: the institutions within which individuals make reproductive decisions matter. The way to increase GDP per capita is not to cut the denominator. And while today’s scare tactics (Mali is “really in for a Malthusian disaster,”) and recommendations to stop having babies are not as monstrous as those of yesteryear, we should be wary of those who would intrude on one of the most personal and sacred choices individuals confront – whether to have a child.

Update: I was highly entertained when I read the comment section from a Krugamn post last July defending himself against the accusation that his climate change advocacy makes him "Malthusian." He said, great, Malthus was right 58 of the last 60 centuries. Then the kicker:“We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.”

The first comment came from someone thrilling to the name of mugwump:

Only an economist could say that with a straight face.

Shorter version: “Malthus was wrong because his theory had zero predictive ability”.

Economists always have an explanation (usually several competing explanations) for past events. They’re just lousy at predicting what’s going to happen.

Paul Samuelson dies

Read all about it, particularly his contributions to economics, which are many, varied, pervasive, important, praiseworthy, and unique.

The leaders

Platon, the New Yorker photographer, did a pretty major photo shoot with a lot of top world leaders at the UN general meeting in September. Africa is a Country very kindly posts the pictures of a handful of African leaders with a bit of their descriptions. Particularly the Mugabe story is fascinating: another leader saw Mugabe get up and waited to sit down; when asked what was wrong, he answered, "There's blood on that chair." (hat tip Texas in Africa):

You can see the entire collection here but most of the stories Platon tells aren't worth it. "Beautiful" is his favorite word. A few of his comments, however, are quite interesting, so let's make a game of it, shall we?

Can you match the world leader with his description by New Yorker photographer Platon?

A. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Iran
B. Silvio Burlisconi - Italy
C. Yukio Hatoyama - Japan
D. Andry Rayjoelina - Madagascar
E. Jacob Zuma - South Africa
F. Ban Ki-moon - UN Secretary General

1) "said, 'You have to separate yourself from your job. I wouldn't be criticized if I didn't have this responsibility.'"

2) "had a warmth and exuberance, it wasn't natural, perhaps," "perhaps no photographer has ever shouted at him 'You look wicked' before, but that tickles him"

3) is "incredible, so cheeky," "he gave me that cheeky, naughty kind of smile," he was "loving every second of it"

4) "looks like he's 15," "I thought this guy was an intern"

5) is "totally Fred Astaire"

6) is "a very childlike man," "he giggles like a little boy," "this irony that there's this innocence about his eyes."

Lessons in Fungibility and Gratitude

During the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, Bob Geldorf was one of the celebrities who drew increasing attention to the plight of millions of starving people. He was affected by the news images he saw and raised money to send food to them through his music and a song called "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Around 100 million British pounds were raised.

On his return trip to Ethiopia, he recently learned that the money he helped raise didn't actually go to food.

One of the survivors told him: "We were reduced to a sub-human situation. When someone died, we went to bury him, and by the time we came back someone else had died. ... Our respect for you, our brother in hard times, is boundless. At a time when our dignity was questioned, you came and paid for people with energy to bury our dead."

In other words, aid is fungible, even in a famine.

To me, the shining question whenever this comes up is: Whose preferences matter? In-kind transfers and conditionalities answer, "It's my money. If they want it, they need to follow my preferences." Unconditional cash transfers answer that they are better placed to decide their own needs; their preferences matter. Is there any way to satisfy both?

I don't know. In December, though, I have to think about Christmas present parallels. How much of the gift is decided by the giver and how much by the recipient? Why are some of us offended when someone exchanges 'our' gift? When is cash the best gift, and when does the 'in-kind' gift show more thoughtfulness? What about gift cards? When does "the thought count" in international aid?

Now that the area is prosperous, Geldorf asked what else they want. "Well," I paraphrase them, "there is one thing. It's not a priority for the government or the aid agencies, but we need a fence to protect the bodies of the dead." He assures them they'll get it. Merry Christmas.

(Hat tip to Owen Barder, who focuses on a different part of the article where Geldorf asks, "Who says aid doesn't work?")