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Jeff Sachs's Millennium Village
The excellent Wilson Quarterly article, which I blogged here, is now on-line.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 5, 2007 at 01:50 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Despite its mild tone, that article is a devastating critique of the Millenium Village Project. Everything that is not working was pretty predictable from reading the many people, including Easterly, who have written about development in Africa.
The point that disturbed me the most, because I've read it a lot and can't see how it can be fixed, was the anecdote about how the guy who'd made a lot of money due to the project but was unable to save any due to demands from relatives elsewhere. That kind of communal responsibility is laudable in some ways, and clearly would have been socially beneficial in a subsistence environment, but it pretty much neutralizes incentives to save and invest in favor of current consumption, plus it works as a tax on labor and entrepreneurship. Unless some new religious group or other cultural innovator can import something more like "as you sow, so shall you reap" or an equivalent doctrine more favorable to wealth accumulation, it's hard to see how places like this can ever get off the ground.
Posted by: srp at Jun 8, 2007 5:04:02 PM
it seems inaccurate to me to assume that the sense of "communal responsibility" will somehow doom these people to never escape their poverty. although our american culture tends to put less value on supporting one's family and community than many countries, this doesn't mean this is the only way to effectively structure a capitalist economic system. consider the successes of asia, or even the much more modest, but still notable development of latin america. both areas have seen economic development without sacrificing their cultural value on family and community.
sure development may occur more quickly if people in these areas had an ideal culture and mindset for adopting american-style capitalism. but they don't. furthermore, i think it's important to remain sensative to their particular cultural mindsets when working with them to promote economic development.
Posted by: jsc at Jun 25, 2007 11:06:08 PM
