What it’s like to work for Donald Rumsfeld Alex Evans2

Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic (who still have yet to send me a copy of their magazine two months after the subscription was paid for…).

Update: Searching through the full archive of Rumsfeld papers (online here), I find this gem from May 2003, in a memo from Rumsfeld to the President:

Mr President, we were concerned that going to war in Iraq could alienate our allies in the Gulf – today, our relationships there are stronger than ever. There was concern about the US acting unilaterally. Instead, you formed a 65-nation coalition and in the process strengthened the bonds of friendship with Britain and many other nations in Europe, both old and new.

A glass half full kind of guy, then.

Update 2: Donald shows how to do interagency cooperation in a 2002 memo to Paul Wolfowitz:

Call Condi Rice. She said to me that we have got to get the detainee mess sorted out, that nobody is able to get answers. I think she is getting this from the UK. Call her and find out what she is talking about. She always comes in with these cryptic messages as though the Pentagon is messed up, and I don’t have any idea what she is talking about.

America’s backwards development trajectory Alex Evans-

Blimey. From the NYT - large version here.

Aid to India? Er…I’m not sure Claire Melamed-

Last week was aid to India week.  There were three pieces on the subject on the Guardian website, plus the predictable ‘why oh why’ articles in the Daily Mail and the Express , and a five minute slot on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’.  And not forgetting Andy Sumner right here on GD. But you know, I’ve read it all and I still don’t know what I think.  

Let’s leave aside the national interest argument for a minute.  Is there a development case for giving aid to India? And can we put numbers on it?

For some, the fact that one third of all poor people in the world live in India is reason enough to give it aid.  Half of all India’s children are malnourished; our money can help them, so let’s send it over.  And maybe that should be all there is to it.  But for most people, somewhere in the moral calculus of aid is the idea that some countries, as well as some people, are needier than others.

How does India fare on the scale of need at a country level?  India’s (in)famous space programme is of course exhibit A for cutting aid, and its plentiful supply of billionaires is exhibit B.  But hold on a minute.  According to Martin Ravallion of the World Bank, even if marginal tax rates on the Indian middle class were 100% this would still only provide enough money to reduce dollar a day poverty in the country by 20%.  India is not rich enough to end poverty right now with its own resources, space programme or no space programme.

India’s growth rates are also sometimes cited as a reason not to give aid.  The argument is that economic growth, forecast at nearly 9 per cent for next year, will end poverty without our help.   Sadly, not for a very long time.  Growth in India is surprisingly inefficient at reducing poverty.  A comparison between India, China and Brazil found that each percentage increase in GDP reduced poverty by 3.2 per cent in Brazil, by 0.8 per cent in China, but by only 0.3 per cent in India.   So even though the country is growing fast that doesn’t mean that poverty is going to be ending any time soon. 

So – a country that has a space programme but is still too poor to end poverty.  And a country where economic growth is firmly in the fast lane but where poverty reduction is stuck in a tailback behind a caravan.  As ever, it’s the politics, stupid.  Poverty reduction is frequently low on the list of priorities for national and local leaders. Instead, the focus is on showcasing India’s credentials as a big power – that space programme again – and on growing as fast as China, whatever the cost. 

Perhaps all the arguments against aid to India are actually arguments in favour – if India is rich and fast growing but people are still so poor then maybe aid is justified on the grounds that people need support more if their government seems less able or willing to tackle the problem.  But the aid that the UK sends to India is tiny – a fraction of one per cent of GDP.  It can’t plug the gap.  Anyway, some argue that aid can slow down political change by letting the government off the hook – though again, the amounts involved are probably too small to make this a serious problem.   On the other side of the fence, the optimists hope that aid will speed up political change and poverty reduction, by catalysing changes and showing what can be done.  That’s just as plausible.

Last week Andrew Mitchell made his choice clear. For the foreseeable future, aid to India continues.  Politicians have to take these decisions.  The rest of us have the luxury of uncertainty.

Poverty, Inequality and Revolution: Who’s next? Andy Sumner2

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain. Who’s next? Yemen or Libya or… Sudan, or Angola?

The race is on for a small set of numbers to predict major upheavals. Violence begins at $7000 per person (PPP) tweets Hans Rosling noting the flare up of pro-democracy protests seem to start at that level of income in Tunisia and last year in Thailand (Egypt is a bit under US$6000 per capita). The Economist has gone for a more sophisticated ‘Shoe Throwers Index’ adding more data. Whilst the NY times special has gone much further with a full range of data for the middle east and north Africa.

What do the countries have in common? Actually seems to boil down to 5 things…

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The Great Stagnation! (don’t panic) Jules Evans3

According to the FT, the “most talked-about non-fiction book of the year” is the economist Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, more of a long essay really, which you can only get in e-book format. It’s worth reading, particularly for what it says about the politics of well-being.

Cowen suggests that we in the West are in the midst of a great economic stagnation, because all the “low-hanging fruit” of technological innovation, which drove the economic boom of the last two centuries, have already been picked. Life in 1800 was, for the average westerner, markedly different to life in 1960. Scientific advances in transport, energy, hygiene and medicine, housing, education and government made the material conditions of life significantly better for someone born in 1950 than for someone born in 1800. But the pace of technological advance slowed significantly in the last few decades, Cowen says, so that “life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953…The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack.”

Tyler Cowen? Tyler Durden more like! Kind of reminds me of that other Tyler, snarling: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Just to consider T’other Tyler’s main point – how does Cowen know how high or low the ‘fruit’ of future technological advances are? The whole point about future inventions is we don’t see the fruit at all until they fall on some genius’s head, like Newton’s apple. We can’t tell how low or high the remaining fruit is.

And Cowen doesn’t provide enough evidence that innovation has slowed. I’m not a scientist, but in the last 30 years others have decoded the human genome, come up with a totally new hypothesis about how organisms interact to preserve life on Earth, started to analyse the climate and realized we’re in danger of destroying it, begun to map the universe, made advances in analysing dark matter with the Hadron collider, invented brain scanning and made major advances in neuroscience, brought new empirical rigour to the study of wellbeing, and, um, invented the personal computer, the Internet, the kindle, the smart phone, the smart home, the smart car and all the other gadgetry of the Digital Age. To me, the present is like the Jetsons.

Despite the fact that government spending on education, health and welfare continues to rise, Cowen argues that performance in these areas is not necessarily rising and may, in fact, be getting slowly worse. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, says Cowen. The low-hanging fruit have been picked, and we’re now in an ‘ideas slow-down’. We must simply get used to annual GDP growth of 1% a year, rather than 3% – unlike the emerging markets, who can attain 6-8% growth simply by copying and disseminating ideas invented in the past by western scientists, like the car.

The Credit Crunch was really part of a broader phenomenon of over-optimism, Cowen argues. This over-optimism wasn’t just confined to investment bankers. We all thought everything would simply carry on getting better, median income would continue to grow and GDP would continue to rise – so we all bet on future growth through personal, corporate and government borrowing. But this was a mistake, based on a failure to recognize what Daniel Pink describes as “a period of truly staggering underachievement in business, technology and social progress”.

A lot of the social unrest and personal suffering of our times comes, Cowen argues, from a frustration that material progress is not continuing at its past rate, and that governments are struggling to meet spending commitments made in times of faster economic growth. He writes: “Low-hanging fruit means there are lots of material goodies to hand out, and lots of fairly easy ways to make people happier, namely by giving them more stuff. That’s not the case now, as we are struggling fiscally to make good on previous promises to Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as bondholders.”

That’s why the politics of stagnation can be pretty acrimonious. On the Right, it can lead to the voodoo economics of tax cuts supposedly leading to greater economic growth, which Cowen thinks is one of the great delusions of our age. On the Left, it can lead to demands for greater redistribution through programmes like Medicare. But Cowen warns: “Like unfunded tax cuts, the remedy cannot be applied forever. Taxpayers in the top 5% of income already pay for more than 43% of the US government, and taxpayers in the top 1% pay for more than 27%; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns.”

At its worst, the politics of stagnation becomes a “dysfunctional politics”, as the public coffers grow emptier, populist politicians and special interest groups attack each other, and an indignant populace used to higher government spending takes to the streets. Cowen worries about the “honest middle” of politics becoming drowned out by angry, irrational and shrill political voices (ie Glenn Beck).

And yet, all is not entirely bleak. more »

An amoral perspective on the UN Richard Gowan3

David Bosco has an interesting post over at FP riffing on a Reuters piece about Ban Ki-moon’s record at the UN. The Reuters article basically says that most diplomats think that Ban’s OK but that he’s no Kofi Annan. David takes exception:

I’m afraid that this type of invidious comparison is by now part of the accepted institutional history. Kofi Annan was charismatic; Ban is not. Annan had moral authority; Ban doesn’t. You get the idea. I don’t have a particular view on Ban, but I have always thought that Kofi Annan’s vaunted moral authority had a very weak foundation. In fact, I’ll go further–I don’t think he had the moral authority to get the job in the first place.

Why so?

Kofi Annan was the first secretary-general to rise from the ranks of the UN bureaucracy. Before he got the top job, he served as head of UN peacekeeping. As his Nobel Prize biography reports, “he was Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at a time when nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed in UN operations around the world.”

The Nobel bio neglects to mention that while he was in that post, two of the most shocking episodes in UN history occurred: the Rwanda genocide and the massacre at Srebrenica. In both cases, UN peacekeeping forces were essentially eyewitnesses to genocide. The greatest portion of the blame, of course, goes to the Security Council member states that authorized weak peacekeeping forces incapable of defending civilians and that balked at bolstering them once the bloodletting started. But it is fair to say that Annan’s office did not cover itself in glory.

For all of Ban Ki-moon’s evident shortcomings, at least he doesn’t have that as part of his record.

You can agree or disagree with this assessment – I concur with David’s basic point that a near-ubiquitous nostalgia for Kofi clouds assessments of Ban’s work. Conversely, if are going to judge every UN leader by the horrors that took place on their watch, should we mention’s Ban’s association with humanitarian mega-crises in the DRC (2008), Sri Lanka (2009) and Darfur (ongoing)? Maybe so. But my main problem with this argument is that I’m wary of the whole moral yardstick thing anyway.

Annan’s strongest qualifications to run the UN were his instinctive sense of the organization’s capabilities and his political ability to charm the Clinton administration – which obviously failed to transfer to the Bush administration. Annan got hold of the UN at a time when it was in well-nigh terminal disarray after the Balkan and Rwandan fiascoes (which, in fairness, he took responsibility for while SG) and used his institutional and political skills to restore its relevance, as the 70K blue helmets attest.

And Ban? I have a piece coming out in Internationale Politik assessing his performance in similar institutional/political terms – but you’ll have to wait until April to read that. Suffice it to say that I think that, after four years in the job, he has still to get the real sense of what the UN can achieve that Annan had. Equally, it’s harder for Ban in 2011 than it was for Annan in 1999 or 2000: Annan worked in a straightforward context of American power. Mr. Ban navigates less well-charted waters.

Aid, India and the billion pound peanuts (again) Andy Sumner1

UK aid to India is in the news again following a speech on emerging powers by UK Aid’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell at Chatham House which was carried in a range of the UK media and in the Guardian today and trailed in the FT before the speech. The temperature is rising in some parts of the UK media such the Daily Express and  Daily Mail. The later probably outraged more so because 6 months ago they were presumably briefed by aides on the axing of the India programme.

Mitchell’s take is now this – focus aid in India on the poor and poorest (side-stepping the various diplomatic elephants in the room – on the one hand aid is peanuts to India versus India is home to 450m or one in three of the world’s poor which sits uneasily with the image of an emerging world power).

Basically Mitchell’s line is ignore the contradictions and focus on the poor and poorest:

Some people – in both the UK and India – have been asking whether the time has come to end British aid to India. In my view, we are not there yet. The whole rationale for my Department is, eventually, to work ourselves out of a job. But having discussed this with the Government of India, I believe that, for the next few years, it is in both India’s interest and in Britain’s interest for us to continue our highly successful collaboration on development, not least so we can support the Government of India’s own successful programmes in the poorest priority areas.

If India doesn’t need the money why does the UK give aid to India and why does India accept?

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The benefits and costs of altruism Jules Evans-

Daniel Batson, the social psychologist, has recently brought out what is probably his defining work on the topic he has studied for 30 years, Altruism In Humans. I bought it after hearing Martha Nussbaum rave about it when she spoke at the RSA in December. She says on the dust jacket that it’s “simply one of the most important books in our time for anyone who wants to ponder the problems and prospects of our species”. Casting my eye around Google, I think this might actually be the first review of the book. Woohoo, first! more »

Blame this man for France’s foreign policy woes Richard Gowan-

Who is he? Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez, of course.

In 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his intention to found a new history museum in Paris. In recent weeks, he may have been cursing the memories of two of France’s lesser-known historical figures, Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez and Jules Ferry. Both men died over a century ago, but they are still causing Sarkozy trouble.

Bouët-Willaumez was a French naval hero who began the colonisation of what is now Côte d’Ivoire in the 1840s. Ferry was the prime minister who authorised an invasion of Tunisia in 1881. Although France renounced control over Tunisia in 1957 and Côte d’Ivoire in 1960, officials in Paris have always viewed them as important elements of the French sphere of influence in Africa. Now that sphere of influence seems to be falling apart – a strategic challenge for France that has been overshadowed by events in Egypt.

Read more about this challenge here.

Now that’s what I call policy coherence Alex Evans-

Sure, everyone talks about policy coherence, joined-up thinking, connecting the dots, overcoming silos and all the rest of it. But if you want to see the real deal, form an orderly queue at the door of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. They organised a Valentine’s Day party for junior diplomats, with ‘policy speed dating’ and a chocolate fondue to lubricate the evening’s proceedings. And diplomats were only allowed to attend if they brought with them two friends from other government departments.

Mubarak #Fail Casper ter Kuile-

As campaigners start to chase down the billions that Mubarak took with him, many outsiders are trying to figure out how the Egyptian revolution came to be. During the heady three-week protests, cameras naturally focused on large crowds full of anger and hope. But were they missing something?

Creative, humorous protest.

Activists in Tahrir Square released fake press releases to major news outlets, to give them a voice in the rolling coverage. (They didn’t have highly placed Washington lobbyists of course, unlike the regime.) Before the protests started, viral jokes about Mubarak were spreading through social networks and eliminating the problem that Steven Pinker calls ‘individual knowledge vs mutual knowledge‘.

This subversive protest can’t have been too much of a secret though – even CNN had a comment.

h/t Eric Stoner

And for the 80′s fans amongst you – this classic by Chicago get’s a thematic overhaul.

Are you ready for MDGs 2.0? Andy Sumner6

The UN this week announced a June MDG review meeting in Tokyo. This is the conference that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the MDGs Summit proposed that Japan convene in 2011 (see page 4, paragraph 1 of his speech).

One thing it may or may not discuss (depending on who you speak to) is what might replace the MDGs in 2015 which is likely to be one of the big global development policy debate of the next few years.

At the MDG summit last September the outcome document requested the President of the UN general assembly to organise a ‘special event’ in 2013 ‘to follow up on efforts made’. However, it is not yet clear exactly what this will mean. The outcome document also mandated the UN Secretary General to initiate a consultation process of what would come after 2015, and to recommend in his annual reports ‘further steps to advance the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015’.

It is possible though that there will be neither an agreement on any post-2015 framework nor an extension of the current MDGs.

Not surprisingly, the subject of what a new global framework might look like in detail is really starting to bubble up in debates.

The NGOs via GCAP are already discussing MDGs 2.0 and there was a workshop at the World Social Forum recently and blog convened by the UK NGOs. UNDP’s Helen Clark has it on her radar in a recent interview as does UNDP assistant SG, Olav Kjorven at UNDP in comments on a Guardian blog.

There’s also a global group convened by the International Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a recent Lancet Commission report and one by International Alert and papers by MDG architects such as the former chair of the OECD DAC, Richard Manning and former UN official, Jan Vandemoortele (and a set of papers from a Brussels Forum on the ‘MDGs and Beyond’) as well as work at the Center for Global Development (for example, here in Global Policy, and here), a symposium at Harvard and – launching soon – CAFOD’s work on Voices of the South on the MDGs and post-MDGs.

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Cable Cars for Development? Claire Melamed1

Step forward today’s candidate for least likely development hero of the week. It’s the cable car.  Traffic in some of the  big cities of the developing world is unimaginably awful, with two or three hour commutes to work absolutely normal.  And the poorest, living in new, informal settlements on the edges of cities often have the longest journeys.  But building mass transport systems like metros or trams is expensive, and takes years.  Luckily a quicker solution is at hand.  Last week it was reported that Brazil’s government are planning to build cable cars to connect the sprawling favelas to the centre of Rio. They are following in the footsteps of Colombia, where the cable car in the city of Medellin is estimated to have cut commuting times for those living in far flung urban settlements from over two hours to as little as 40 minutes. Cable cars are, apparently, easier to build than other mass-transport systems. They can float over inhospitable, steep, rocky or muddy terrain.   And cutting commuting times from hours to minutes changes lives. 

Cable cars – for life, not just for skiing?

The Boy Effect Alex Evans-

First we had the Girl Effect. Now this. It’s hilarious.

(H/t @davilalu on Twitter.)