Does your president pay his taxes?

Wonderful 'direct talk" from writer Alain Mabanckou...

Avril 2009 : tous les américains ont pu lire la feuille de déclaration des revenus de la famille Obama. Le président américain et son épouse ont déclaré des revenus annuels d’un peu plus de 2. 650.000 dollars. Le couple a ainsi payé plus de 850,000 dollars à l’Etat fédéral et près de 78,000 dollars à l’Etat de l’Illinois… (cf. lien en fin de cette chronique)

Obama millionnaire ? Ce sont les droits d’auteur des deux livres publiés par le président qui ont « gonflé » les revenus du foyer. On ne devient pas président dans le dessein de s’enrichir ! En regardant de près cette déclaration des revenus, j’ai songé aux présidents africains. Quel africain en effet a déjà « vu de ses propres yeux » la déclaration d’impôts de son président ? Mystère… Payent-ils vraiment les impôts, nos présidents des tropiques ? Si oui - parce qu’il faut en tout temps accorder le bénéfice de la bonne foi - comment alors se calculerait leur assiette d’imposition si leur fortune personnelle correspond au centime près à la richesse entière de leur pays ?

Payer les impôts signifie déclarer ce qu’on a. Or depuis « les soleils des indépendances » le dirigeant politique africain pratique l’opacité absolue des revenus. Les taxes et autres contributions payées par les populations viennent gonfler une « caisse noire » dans laquelle les ministres et le président puisent sans vergogne.

Let's digress... Economics and modeling

Lee over at RovingBandit had some discussion of the value of economists making assumptions that people are rational and self-interested (as opposed to ordinary humans who are far more complex). I wrote a longish comment. Today I just happened to be reading an abstract of a new paper (see below) and the thought occurred to me: regardless of whether you think their results are simply an interesting math problem or some serious deep insight, the simple likelihood is that only the rational and self-interested assumption lets you do this kind of modeling. Anything else is simply too complex at this time! And the math results that come from this modeling form the stepping stones for more complex modeling that will happen when some math-oriented breakthrough economist comes up with clever algorithms or theorems (there's one in economics that was revolutionary, called the "revelation principle") so that we can model people who are bounded in their rationality, emotional, and often weird.

So both camps can be right at the same time- most models of rational self-interested actors are just sometimes fun sometimes boring math problems, but solving thousands of those math problems generates tools that will be useful down the road, and is the only way to generate the tools, and they are probably better in the meantime than just repeating "in my opinion based on what I had for lunch today" stories back and forth.

Foreign Influence and Welfare
Pol Antràs
Harvard University and NBER
Gerard Padró i Miquel
London School of Economics and NBER
February 4, 2009
Abstract
How do foreign interests influence the policy determination process? How is trade policy affected? What are the welfare implications of such foreign influence? In this paper we develop a model of foreign influence and apply it to the study of optimal tariffs. We develop a two-country voting model of electoral competition, where we allow the incumbent party in each country to take costly actions that probabilistically affect the electoral outcome in the other country. We show that policies end up maximizing a weighted sum of domestic and foreign welfare, and we study the determinants of this weight. We show that foreign influence may be welfare-enhancing from the point of view of aggregate world welfare because it helps alleviate externalities arising from crossborder effects of policies. Foreign influence can however prove harmful in the presence of large imbalances in influence power across countries. We apply our model of foreign influence to the study of optimal trade policy. We derive a modified formula for the optimal import tariff and show that a country’s import tariff is more distorted whenever the influenced country is small relative to the influencing country and whenever natural trade barriers between the two countries are small. We also show that the viability of free trade agreements can be hampered by large imbalances in power across countries.

Three Cups of Tea... over coffee

I spent the last four days up in the Sierras at San Jose Family Camp (our city's socialized but market-priced camp site), blissfully reading Three Cups of Tea in between poker matches with kids, beautiful hikes with friends into the Hetch Hetchy/Yosemite watersheds... and lots of coffee (in socialism, bad coffee will be available for free in copious quantities, as long as policemen's pensions can be capped at under 95% of salary...that last strictly for San Jose insiders).

Anyways, odd that the two premier development blogs (Blattman and Easterly) apparently have never mentioned Mortenson (at least a search of the blogs was empty on both sites). Too bad, because it's a good book, with lots to discuss, and more importantly, is probably the single most widely read "tract" about development aid in the last decade, and so what it says, or does not say, is probably shaping the perceptions of millions of persons around the globe, far more than the development studies academics' wishy-washy "we don't know the answers" style.

So just so you know the book's main message: heroes are taking care of the problems, just like they always did. Sure, things were smelly in the Augean stables, but Hercules was ready! So here comes Mortenson, ready to tackle world poverty (one girl at a time^TM).

So I'll say up front that while I obviously find Mortenson's work and devotion and success very inspirational and fantastic and laudable, I find the book raises all kinds of interesting questions, and raising those questions will inevitably make me appear less laudable than Mortenson. But hell, I'm an academic and the whole schtick is to raise questions.

And questions to be raised, there are. Only two paragraphs in the 330 page book are "questioning," in the sense that they diverge from the standard 40-something-American "it's all good" refrain, and these deal with an important issue, non-profit governance. Otherwise there is nary a questioning attitude to be seen. Weird, cause the guy writing it is a journalist (David Oliver Relin, who keeps himself completely out of the text, but must have insisted on inserting two photos of himself that make no sense at all... the captions just use his last name, and for 2/3 of the book I thought the guy in the pictures was some Pakistani dude who would be introduced later on).

So we have a book about a hero. It's a thrilling book, but it brings to mind the Brecht line (yes, Michael Watts did influence my reading habits...) from his play Galileo: “ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes! . . . GALILEO: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.”

I could go into literary analysis- what is a hero and all that... but since this blog is about development and literacy, better to focus on that. Mortenson is basically doing what FAVL would have been doing if someone had given *us* a million dollars! So of course one can't help the sour grapes. But I do feel that gives me a rather unique perspective. Most people reading the book probably feel unqualified to be critical. They have never slept with a yak, nor befriended an authentic representative of "The Other"... Haji Ali. Of course, Haji Ali turns out to be Yoda, a very nice, reasonably wise uncle figure prone to platitudes about listening to the wind. Anecdotes and trials and tribulations are played to maximum effect... and some are downright bizarre- Mortenson's "bodyguard" beats up someone leering at his wife breastfeeding. A Pakistani general cowboying around with Mortenson in a helicopter buzzes "like an angry bee" the compound of some local chief who's fallen afoul of Mortenson. These anecdotes, and much of the book, serve to make clear to the reader that there are good guys (hero allies) and bad guys (hero enemies) and the hero can tell the difference (loyalty... everyone is ready to "give their life for Mortenson") except when the hero is tricked. Oops, no more literary analysis!

One more aside. My overall impression is that Relin was more interested in name-dropping mountaineers killed here and there than Pakistanis or Afghans killed during the various stages of the wars in the region. The brand-name turn in American literature is there, instead of riding around in an "old helicopter" it has to be an Alouettte. Instead of wearing an "old parka," he has to give the brand name. I confess I never understood the reader interest inknowing the brands of their book-characters, but then again, I wear a cheap watch, cheap pants, and cheap shoes.

As you can see, I am meandering around my thoughts, and it is now late, so I'll come back to the development and literacy stuff tomorrow.

What is development studies good for?

Most people who come to the topic of development studies do so because they are interested in a particular region or problem. They realize that sometimes it is useful to have exposure to both broader views and narrower perspectives and analyses. For example, someone visits Ghana and becomes interested in learning more about why the people of Ghana are so much poorer than people in the developed countries (the broad view), and also whether spending two weeks volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity building site in Tamale, Ghana, would be a worthwhile way to spend their time (the narrow view).

The broad view enhances the contextual knowledge required to be a person of solidarity operating in a globalizing environment of increasing connections and significant inequality. Certainly we would think it somewhat arrogant to express opinions about poverty in Ghana and know nothing about how the economy and society of Ghana functioned. The minimum we might expect from a person interested in poverty in Ghana would be the capacity to fit Ghana into a broad schema, or model, of the essential features of developing countries. Such a schema or model makes generalizations about the multitude of regions that one might think of grouping under the rubric of “developing.” Some of the generalizations might be commonplaces: “In Ghana as elsewhere, people are motivated by a mix of material incentives and non-material goals.” Analyzing these commonplace generalizations is important, because often newcomers to development studies fall into the lazy trap of thinking that poverty is due to an indecipherable “culture.” A good chunk of the work in mounting a general schema is in leveraging people’s intuitive sense that culture matters into a more nuanced sense of how cultures matter.

The narrow view develops the analytical tools and experiences that enable a person of solidarity to be an effective agent of change. We should not applaud the do-gooder who botches a job, even as we acknowledge that botching a job is an important way that people learn! Some due diligence should happen before a job is undertaken. All sorts of examples come to mind. Some are simple common sense, involving learning from the experiences of others. Should a small village library classify books according to the complicated Dewey Decimal System? When installing a borehole well, will the villagers have the ability to maintain and repair the mechanical parts? Others are more complex and have to be thought about. When installing the borehole well, should it be the private property of a villager or should it be owned collectively? In setting up a computer lab where digitally-challenged villagers will pay a small fee for use, what incentives guide the computer lab manager in straddling the challenge of ensuring lots of users and minimizing costly breakdowns?

As these questions illustrate, some of the reflections in the broad approach (about what motivates people) are important for the narrow view (how to structure a contract to ensure long-term success).

Great posting on the One Laptop per Child

Of course the same could be said of many a library project. Human personnel and incentives are critical.

At the end of the day I am still asking myself if the computers are worth the money spent on them. The cost of the laptops was about $2300, enough to pay the tuition for 23 students for a year. Jes and I plan on using them occasionally, but I suspect that after we leave they will be relegated back to the stockroom. The computer teacher may use them to illustrate networking, but without commercial software, he can’t use them regularly in his classes. I am afraid that in the case of MCV the tech project has failed. In many ways the OPLC laptops at MCV illustrate why high-tech projects are so risky. The computer required charging, a difficult proposition with intermittent power, no converters, few plugs, and no power strips. The laptop design also failed to accommodate the population to which they were given. These inconveniences, combined with a lack of prerequisite computer knowledge, doomed the project and wasted thousands of dollars. This example would seem to demonstrate why appropriate technology should be embraced and high-tech projects dismissed. However, living in Malawi I have been exposed to a perspective which also should be given credence.

Read more...

HT: Kim Dionne... great blog!

Simon Oczkowski... The bitten man Reflections on international health

From the open source journal Open Medicine...

Tucked away somewhere in the twisting innards of Mulago Hospital, Kampala, Uganda, there lies the pink, neatly stapled medical file of a man who is doomed to die. I know this because I saw him on Thursday night.

“There’s an interesting case you should see if you have time,” said the attending physician cheerily. “You should look up his condition in your book and take a history. It might be good for a case write-up when you get home.”

We had just stepped into the casualty department, hoping to catch some of the evening’s action. It seemed as though the action had found us. Puzzled, one of us asked what the patient had.

“Rabies, a classic case,” the physician said. She paused. “But I’m not sure what to do about it.” Having had her say, she closed the door to the treatment room behind her, leaving us alone in the crowded hallway.

Read more...

Great discussion of complex issue of poverty tourism

From Glenna Gordon... in her Context Africa series... an excerpt...

The debate about "poverty tourism" rages on the blogosphere on the pages of the HuffPo, Bill Eastery's blog, and elsewhere. But, as Jina Moore (previous Context Africa feature), who wrote a great, nuanced piece about this for Christian Science Monitor, says,

If it’s that easy to be flip, you’re probably missing something.

Part of my goal in Context Africa is to look at projects that aren't interested in easy answers. There are people out there asking difficult questions, and coming back with stories, photos, and other works that don't provide straight answers. There's a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

Today, I'm happy to highlight the work of Samantha Reinders, who is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her take on Township Tourism shows that nothing is as straightforward as it might seem and even something as divisive as "poverty tourism" can be looked at with nuance.

Easterlyisms... poverty tourism

Bill Easterly had a casual blog post about a serious subject, poverty tourism. In his post, he lampooned some effort by the Millennium Village movement to extract more money out of frequent visitors. Now, I could see myself, at some conference in Rwanda, thinking it might be interesting to go visit a Millenium Village, because after all, according to the website, they "are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape from the poverty trap." So it would be interesting to see. And why not have the MV charge me for that visit, instead of making it a freebie. After all, if I'm taking up project participant time while they explain their latest crop technology, why not earn something on the side? Is there really something wrong with this?

In Burkina Faso, all the guidebooks point visitors to the village of Tiebele, near the Ghana border, where women paint fantastic geometric designs on the houses. It is pretty clear, when you visit the village, that the steady stream of tourists means houses are painted more often and better, and that plenty of people make decent livelihoods through the tourism. I grew up in Puerto Rico, a tourist destination par excellence, and remember vividly the government's efforts to educate the population about what is in everyone's collective self-interest: Smile at the tourists! Is it such a big deal? Safeway famously does it in the U.S.; heck, my "customers" (the students at the university) get the treatment all the time. We want you to be happy so you give us your money.

But Easterly has a big problem with this- he thinks its sick. He's really worried about "patronizing attitudes towards Africans." As if a book (his) called "The White Man's Burden" wasn't a patronizing attempt to separate readers' from their money. Or have you noticed the paperback cover of "The Elusive Quest for Growth"? An old-time compass and map, patronizingly reinforcing the illusion that "explorers" read about darkest Africa... and the Amazon jungle too... Cast first stone, etc.

Easterly concludes, "Try looking at the poor Rwandans living in the MV not as anonymous and interchangeable exhibits for a “poverty trap,” but as individuals who possess rights and human dignity just like us. Then we maybe we will understand that the most impressive, knowledgeable, and motivated soldiers in the war on poverty are usually poor individuals themselves." But he's so hopelessly misrepresenting the MV or other development projects, which are usually 99% local (with a couple expatriate directors or experts or low-level volunteers or grad students etc.) At FAVL, for instance, 95% of the work on the ground in the libraries and camps is done by locals. And they, like in MV, are the ones explaining to visitors what is going on, and making sure visitors understand the purposes of the libraries and how they work. How can it be dehumaizing for a village resident who works for FAVL (or MV) to be explaining to an outsider what the project is doing in terms of reading or farming or whatever. What exactly does Easterly think is dehumanizing? Does he think a village resident is "dehumanized" when he or she sees a bunch of rich people step out of an air-conditioned bus and point at a goat sitting in a tree and take pictures?

To answer my own rhetorical question, an anecdote; When I lived in a little village in Sudan for a year back in the 1980s, one day a "development worker" came by to promote bee-keeping. He was a wild guy, with a big long beard. The NGO called a meeting, and everyone in the village came and sat around. Everyone politely listened. Afterwards, not a single person grumbled about wasting an hour. They all completely dismissed the bee-keeping as pie in the sky. But that weird khuwaja (westerner) with the BEARD... he was HILARIOUS. He was talked about for weeks. So where was the dehumanization?

E-waste in Ghana... looks good

Thought you might be interested in the following:
Be sure to tune into the next episode of PBS's Frontline for their segment titled, "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" this upcoming Tuesday, June 23rd at 9:00 p.m ET. Click here to check local listings and to see a preview.

HT: Chad Raphael

For your enjoyment... some photos from Dogon country on the Mali-Burkina border

Amy Reggio, a student at Santa Clara University who was studying abroad in Dakar and who is now in Burkina Faso working on developing a number of children's books for the libraries, sent us some amazing pictures from her trip to Dogon country. Stunning.

In the other corner, wearing the blue trunks... A book about aid to Africa...

Boy if you thought the radical critique had little merit, wait until you read the other side...

Many people are talking about Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid. I haven't read it (hey, when reading Coetzee and Le Clézio, why bother with Moyo?) but many people I respect have... and their response is pretty uniformly negative. Here's David Roodman:

Last month I blogged a New York Times interview with Dambisa Moyo, whom the paper aptly dubbed the “Anti-Bono.” A youngish woman who grew up in Zambia and holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, she launches a frontal assault on foreign assistance in her new book, Dead Aid. For her, ODA is DOA. I worried in my post about her simplistic interview answers, which implied that aid has nothing to do with microfinance even though donors helped make it what it is today. I ended carefully:

I look forward to reading her book, where perhaps she recognizes these complexities.

Well, I did, and she doesn’t.

Trends in incomes in five African countries

Here's what's been happening in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Sierra Leone (we're not there yet...), Tanzania and Uganda over the past three decades. GNI stands for Gross National Income, and is measured here in "standardized" dollars and divided by the population, so it is roughly "income per person". That income may be distributed quite unequally, especially between urban and rural population. The effects of the war in Sierra Leone are evident, and the legacy of the Ugandan disarray explains why it is poorer than the others. The other three countries seem to be having a very similar experience, and the general upwards trend illustrates why economists are lately more optimistic about the continent.

Photography exhibit... if you happen to be in Paris?

Interesting portraits in black and white by Philippe Guionie

“Le tirailleur et les trois fleuves, regards croisés”

Ce projet intitulé « le tirailleur et les trois fleuves, regards croisés » propose un regard contemporain et artistique sur la mémoire méconnue et oubliée des anciens combattants africains. Il est le prolongement du projet “le tirailleur et les trois fleuves” réalisé par Philippe Guionie.

Sénégal, Niger et Congo étaient les trois grands fleuves de l’ex-Empire colonial français. Trois chemins de pénétration et d’influence française que le tirailleur africain a emprunté dans son parcours d’homme et de soldat. Aujourd’hui, il s’agit de reprendre ces trois itinérances africaines pour poser un regard artistique et mémoriel sur ce patrimoine humain méconnu. Pour quelques années encore, ces tirailleurs sont encore nos contemporains. Dépositaire d’une mémoire unique et originale de la francophonie, ils sont devenus des témoins privilégiés des relations entre la France et l’Afrique.Cette valorisation d’un patrimoine humain prend une acuité particulière, à l’heure où se manifeste la nécessité d’ancrer l’immigration dans la mémoire collective et de lui rendre sa juste place dans une perspective d’histoire commune et partagée

Le photographe Philippe Guionie réalise une série photographique depuis plus de dix ans en France et en Afrique en associant le portrait N&B et des enregistrements sonores. En 2006, il publie un premier ouvrage sur ce thème, « Anciens combattants africains » aux éditions Les Imaginayres.

A nice essay by John Ryle, from Granta , in 2005

Introduction: The Many Voices of Africa

Kwani? is a literary and political magazine published in Nairobi. (The name means ‘So What?’ in Sheng.) Although most of the contents of Kwani? are in English, the magazine includes pieces where Sheng gets one of its earliest outings as a literary language. In the same spirit, the editor of Kwani?, Binyavanga Wainaina, has celebrated the visual art of matatus, intricately customized vehicles whose paintwork is startling enough to cause a traffic accident. ‘Brash, garish public transport vehicles,’ he calls them, ‘so irritating to every Kenyan except those who own one, or work for one‘. On the streets of Nairobi the turnboys hang from the doors of matatus, half-cut on miraa (the stimulant leaf favoured by Somalis, grown in central Kenya), calling out destinations at the stopping points and cramming passengers into the vehicle until the wheels splay outward and the transmission hangs a few inches from the ground. Herds of these matatus careen around Nairobi with cool disregard for other road users. It is hard not to be struck by them, or be struck down while trying to make out the intricate typography of the slogans that bedeck them: HARD TARGET, SWEET BABY, HAPPINESS, SLANDER, DOWN WITH HOMEBOYS, TOLERANCE OF LADIES, DESTINATION. And, seeming to confirm the upbeat conclusion of the Commission for Africa, NO CONDITION PERMANENT. Another Kenyan commentator, Joyce Nyairo, compares the traffic in Nairobi to music. Matatus, she says, are jazz.

Read more...

In Sierra Leone, by Michael Jackson

Many years ago I was terribly impressed by a book Paths Toward a Clearing by the anthropologist Michael Jackson. I just picked up his interesting short book chock-full of vignettes and anecdotes, centered on Jackson's recent stay in Sierra Leone while he "ghost-authored" the autobiography of S.B. Marah, a very prominent political figure and friend. I knew very little about politics and the war, so everything was quite interesting. Jackson writes at a nice clip, though the seemingly regular asides about how a particular feature of life in Sierra Leone illustrated/deepened a sentence here or there from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition was disconcerting. Surely she is not the source of all insights into the human condition? Was it deliberate, to refer to her enough times to be noted by the reader? Part of the strategy of this otherwise aimless reflection? Don't get me wrong, the book is fascinating and a great read for someone not knowledgeable about Sierra Leone.

There is a nice meditation on what young men want, when they leave their villages and commit awful atrocities. Power, of course, but what kind of power? "...A vast array of imperatives, any one of which an individual may consider vital to his very existence-- manhood, wealth, work, education, status, strength, renown-- though it eludes his grasp." (p. 147)

Another interesting point is asking why the young soldiers dressed up. "Because no laws or rules applied to them; it was to show that they could do anything," is the answer proffered by a young friend.

I liked S.B. Marah's observation on p. 165: "In some countries you see photographs of all the past leaders, whether good or bad, but in other countries, as soon as a new leader comes along, they drop all the photographs and things associated with the former leader. That, I feel, is not good."