Duncan Green has a review up of a new book on cash transfers, currently all the rage in social welfare thinking in the South. Cash transfers–simply giving money, at times without conditions–too the poor, is positioned as a truly ‘Southern’ solution to poverty. And one that, incidentally, seems to work. In general, people who need money use money well, and create demands for services from hospitals and other service providers, not to mention demands for food and small consumer goods. Green’s own employer has tested cash transfers in Vietnam with interesting results. Some questions remain about who pushes for cash transfers and why.

James Ferguson spoke about cash transfers a couple of years ago during a visit to U of Toronto. Nothing published yet, but this interview seems to sum up at least part of his argument nicely:

I think it’s partly about labor. For so long, there was this sort of terror of undermining the incentive to work, because what you needed to do was to get poor people (and this holds particularly in South Africa), and force them to work. Get them off their land and get them into the mine. Get them into the wage labor market so that their wage labor could be exploited and put to work. And we’re now looking at a world where there are loads of people willing to be exploited: there are actually loads of people willing to offer their labor yet there are no takers. So I think one of the things that may be going on is that poverty technocrats are starting to say, ‘Well, maybe undermining the motive to work is not such a problem because we don’t have jobs for these people anyway’. That’s one of the things I’m thinking about at least.

Capital does not need the poor. So why keep them in the labour pool anyway?

Kay seems to conveniently ignore the spread of Transition Towns, Slow Food and other movements that, taken together, are cobbling together a rather distinct political philosophy from the ground up. What ties these tother is that they don’t know where they are going – A Postcapitalist political philosophy that drives the right and the left bonkers.

Well, it seems that geographers no longer live on the periphery of economic policy. The [World Bank](http://www.worldbank.org/”World Bank”)’s new [World Development Report](http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2009/Resources/Outline.pdf”World Development Report Outline”) is on the topic of spatial disparities and development policy. Having looked through the outline, it seems that they have been reading too much Paul Krugman, and perhaps not enough of anything else in economic geography. But more on that later.

Nextbillion.net links to an interview with Harvard’s George Lodge on the topic of a potential World Development Corporation, which he had advocated for over the years.

Lodge feels that MNCs are not involved enough in issues of development, and that their participation will be key to sustained poverty reduction.  He cites the examples of the Asian Tigers as proof that business, and small business in particular, will be the driver for poverty reduction in most developing countries.

–SNIP–

Many big companies are now spending substantial amounts of time and money on being “socially responsible.” I would ask them to think more imaginatively than they have about how this time and money could be more effectively spent. Philanthropy is not the answer. A way must be found to align the profit-making capabilities of MNCs more effectively to poverty reduction, especially in those countries that now have little if any MNC investment.

No company can act successfully alone. The risks are too high. I would ask them first to call a meeting of CEOs of major MNCs concerned with global poverty and explore the idea of establishing the World Development Corporation, proceeding experimentally and in collaboration with carefully selected NGOs and representatives from the UN and the World Bank. Trying a few projects and seeing how they worked would risk little.

–SNIP–

Lodge is calling for increased cooperation between MNCs, NGOs and governments (a good thing).  But his examples of possible programs, inwhich multiple MNCs work with poor regions to deliver services and offer development programs seems a little far fetched.  Corporate philanthropy can only go so far : letting the Nestles of the world into the centre of development programming as ‘partners’ may avert our gazes from the potential wolf in our midst.  This is not to claim that they do not have a legitimate role – but rather that those who promote partnership approaches to development would do well to examine the incentives for all of those who participate, and especially those who may want to keep their motiviations less than clear.
Link 

A recent survey by Gallup International found that Africans – residents the poorest continent in the world – are the happiest people. See NYT link here.

…a recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes.

There are many ways to explain this, but it is interesting just how little most measures of poverty and development have to say about happiness. A recent conference here in Antigonish tried to grapple with some of these questions.

Amartya Sen has also chimed in or Easterly’s recent critiques of the development world. His recent review of Easterly’s new book, The White Man’s Burden, says that while the critiques are valid, Easterly offers little in the way of solutions:

–SNIP–

In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly offers important insights about the pitfalls of foreign aid. Unfortunately, his overblown attack on global “do-gooders” obscures the real point: that aid can work, but only if done right.

Many of my colleagues are divided on the issue of celebrities such as Bono pontificating on the issues of poverty and world affairs. Activism on a private jet, they argue, may be sincere in its own way, but cannot truly promote change. And how does being able to carry a tune qualify you to advise on issues of social policy?

I’m a little less cynical. Last week’s American National Prayer Breakfast speech by Bono was, in my mind, a moving address that could only but do good. Bono stood up in front of George Bush and much of the Administration’s elite and spoke of justice, and the need for change.  He did not talk of charity – and indeed said that charity was not enough.  He couched the speech in his own faith, and did so with grace and elegance.

Those who have developed a political currency, through talent or other means, have the ability to use it to promote good, or to simply purchase more and more expensive watches and host parties in LA.  Bono has committed more time than I (a supposed development professional) to moving the world to deal with poverty in Africa, and he seems to have a grasp of the complexities involved.  Perhaps we need more Bonos.

LINK to mp3 of speech.

LINK to video (via CSPAN)

LINK to text

See the text here

I spent some time this morning at a student symposium sponsored by WUSC on campus here at St. Francis Xavier University. The goal of my little talk and workshop was to see what the various students at the conference knew about the Millennium Development Goals, and how they saw them relating to their own lives. I was pleasantly surprised.

While few of the students could recite the Goals (who could???) they were very reflective and curious about what role they could play. There was a healthy mix of criticism and optimism as they broke into different groups to discuss whether the Goals matter, and if they do, what they can do about it them.

Accepting that these students don’t necessarily represent the norm in most universities, I was still left with the impression that apathy does not, in fact, the rule on Canadian campuses.

This month’s New Yorker contains and article by Malcolm Gladwell on a power law approach to social and environmental policy. Power Law holds that in many cases, social problems are primarily caused by a small minority of cases that are statistical outliers.  For example, he argues that up to half of automobile pollution in Denver is caused by a small percentage of the most inefficient and ill-kept automobiles.
Gladwell thinks that too much inefficiency takes place in current social policy – such inefficiency comes from an assumption that people comply with laws, and that current approaches have a possibility of alleviating social policies.

He uses the example of homelessness:

The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street.

Efficiency tells us that it is more effective to simply pay for apartments and services for the homeless. This is a small fraction of the hospital and policing costs of the most hard to do cases. And while this may not provide the transition to wellness and respectability that is expected by most social programs, it is far more reasonable to accept that some of the most difficult cases may never be able to live a life without this support.
The problem, he says, is that while efficiency tells us to simply deal with the problem by providing apartments and direct care for the hardest cases, our sense of justice and equality tells us otherwise – that we should offer similar services to all people; why should the working poor not get a free apartment? The solutions offered by power-law are palatable neither by the left of the right.

However, Gladwell runs into a problem that he seems ill-prepared to solve. If it is more efficient to simply treat the worst cases, then why is it not more efficient to treat the problem as a whole? And what is the line that divides the problem cases from those that are solvable? The problem is the dividing line between the hard and the very hard problems, and deciding at what point power law should rule.

LINK