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Should you be approached by anyone seeking charitable contributions to support East Africa, by all means give all you can — unless the solicitor attempts to justify his pitch with the claim the “rains failed” this year. Tanzania, at least, has many problems, but the rains most definitely have not failed this year. The only thing they have failed to do is stop, for three weeks.
As a result, people have suddenly sprung to work in almost every corner, cultivating small vegetable plots in the suddenly fertile soil. Suddenly maize is growing along roads and highways, in patches along paths in backwoods, in all sorts of places with no obvious ownership. It’s not entirely clear how they are allocated but somehow it works. Private property is kind of an amorphous concept here; squatters rights seems to be the operative legal framework. Gardeners and housekeepers for expats seem to claim some longstanding right to set up remarkably extensive farms in the yards of the houses where they work and keep the fruits of their labor. Apparently, it’s just poor form, if you have some claim to the land and are not really using it, to kick them out.
In any case, Tanzania certainly looks greener and more fertile these days, though the labor-capital ratio remains pretty appalling. The farming tools — machetes and hoes mostly — are still pretty much medieval. Nobody I’ve seen seems to use fertilizer and, outside a coffee plantation, I have yet to see a single tractor. Most of this food will be consumed or sold for tiny amounts of cash in local markets. Of course, with its tiny labor costs, Africa could and should be growing a wide range of crops for Western markets, trading agricultural products for the other things it desperately needs and can’t make. For the most part, that still doesn’t happen, partly for lack of infrastructure (mainly roads to transport goods) and public and private investment, but in substantial part because of huge farm subsidies held in place by Midwestern U.S. senators and members of the European Parliament. It’s still U.S. law that the vast majority of even U.S. food aid comes from surplus from American farms. This not only deprives African farmers of a potential large customers, it is wholly inefficient and ineffective in terms of distributing the aid. Bill Clinton recently called the policy the central flaw of all of U.S. development policy. Nobody seems to think it likely Congress will change the law.
I spent yesterday afternoon and evening at the Watering Hole, the main local expat hangout. It’s down a winding, muddy road outside of town, behind a big fence and a locked gate. The owner, Shoshi, is a quarter-Tanzanian (and three-quarters German, I believe) local who also runs a big-game hunting company in addition to the bar. Sometimes I go there in the late afternoon for the half-decent Internet connection (when the power works), a mediocre dinner, and — on Thursday-Saturday — a fairly recent movie on their big projector they set up under a tent by the river.
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Sitting last night with five friends, after not visiting in a while, I had the odd realization I’ve now been here too long to know anybody. Moshi is a very transient place, with most Western visitors coming in for a few weeks or months. Everyone seems to be social and meet each other in the first few months they’re here, but eventually you kind of bunker down, go into town less, hang out with the same small group of people. I actually knew more people two months ago. Another sign I’m starting to hit the wall. Fortunately, I leave for Europe in 12 days.
It’s an interesting crowd at the Watering Hole — probably a solid majority come from Scandinavia, thanks to those countries’ generous development budgets and adventuresome citizens. Most nights several groups of tall, blonde Norwegian nurses or Swedish public health researchers will come in — all of them female. Single men would be well advised to enter the field of public health; it is heavily lopsided toward women, and blonde northern European ones at that.
I admire all the public health people coming here, but the nonsense and jargon they all spout is really astounding. I don’t fully blame the nobly intended field of public health, but the terrible culture of research. On one insufferable afternoon a few weeks ago, several of them sat at a table next to me smoking (even the public health people!) and reading aloud in English portions of the papers they were writing to summarize whatever projects they were working on. Among their shocking conclusions were gems like: “better education about the causes of HIV among the public would help stop its spread” and “Our study found people without regular access to health care are more likely to suffer from a range of preventable diseases.”
What 23-year-old masters students are doing in their month abroad is of no great global consequence, and perhaps they are learning skills that will help them address better questions down the line. The failings of the broader culture of academic research (science and otherwise) are more severe. One of the most discouraging things on display here is how dependent everyone is on research funding. There is also a visible disconnect between the abundant need for good research in the world and the pointlessness of much of the research that is actually done.
From my distant vantage, the problem is the perversity of the system of rewards and incentives in Western academic research careers. Nobody wants to fund clinical work, so even the people here doing that have to do research to bring in the dollars. Thus research becomes the currency of an academic career. Thus everyone is desperate to publish something. The system is overwhelmed by the demand to publish and fails to efficiently allocate funding in the most socially useful way. Journals proliferate, enabling the academic community to sidestep its responsibility to weed out poor work.
Studies go forward destined to create the most miniscule and predictable findings. These mountains of rubbish have become essential resume items for moving up the career ladder. There is so much information that it cannot be processed, and the shortcut proxy for good work becomes whether someone served as second or fourth author on a paper with a well-regarded first author (who invariably did nothing but lend his name to the paper, but became famous by playing the game himself as a third and then second and finally first author).
This is not an argument for less research, just better. Then perhaps thousands of obscure and usually unreadable scientific journals would mercifully go under, clearing the way for a few dozen or perhaps hundred well-regarded, thoroughly refereed journals that could focus on the most genuinely important questions examined by the people best-qualified to examine them.
Meanwhile, if clinical work and better research were more duly rewarded, you might see more papers with useful but not headline-grabbing (and thus career-boosting) findings. People might share their data more widely, to the public’s benefit, if their promotions didn’t depend on getting something first. And in global health, you might also see more real clinical work. It is beyond depressing to visit KCMC (the big hospital here) and see a half-dozen American doctors sitting in an office running numbers on Stata instead of out in the villages and on the wards. They all do some of that, but their funding here is to do research, so that must come first.
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For three months I’ve enjoyed what I think is a pretty thorough self-guided tutorial on the question: Why are countries like Tanzania poor? It has involved time to read, as well as to visit communities here, meet people who work with them and live in them, tag along with researchers, and — to some extent, at least — get off the beaten path. Unfortunately, I am no closer to any answer, besides: It’s complicated. Anyone who provides a simple answer is wrong, and probably revealing more about themselves and their personal politics than the issue itself.
The most basic answer, of course, is that Tanzania, like other poor countries, is largely unable to make things other people need or want, and with whom they can trade. But that doesn’t explain why THAT is the case, and unless you answer that question for a particular country, the prescriptions for fixing it won’t work. Is that a function of geography and natural resources? The actions or selfishness of other countries? Poor governance? Internal cultural pathologies? Every country is probably different.
Students of the topic will be familiar with the two leading antagonists in the debate. In one corner is Jeffrey Sachs, the much-fawned-over development economist and globe-trotting FOB (Friend of Bono). He wants to spend more money. Sachs believes development aid can work, and that the West has been exceptionally stingy, especially toward Africa. He thinks a substantial though affordable increase in development aid — health care, education, water, micro-finance — would jump-start a virtuous circle and help Africa grow itself out of extreme poverty.
In the other corner stands his nemesis William Easterly of NYU, (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/) whose book “The White Man’s Burden” is a pretty damning indictment of the record of Western aid to Africa. Adding it all up, he argues quite a lot has been spent in the last 50 years. Today, many countries are poorer than they were 30 years ago. Much of development aid, he argues, has done more harm than good, distorting the economies it is supposed to help and encouraging corruption. It’s idealism versus hard-truth realism. (Easterly also has an interesting new contrarian book chapter on African brain drain, arguing it’s not necessarily so bad for Africa, and that the rights of Africans should be considered more carefully in attempts to limit it: http://bit.ly/96ptgD ).
Another key and contentious element of Sachs’ argument (his main book is “The End of Poverty”) is to diminish — indeed practically dismiss — the role of cultural factors in poverty. It’s easy to see why. “Culture” becomes an excuse for stinginess. If poverty is the fault of the victims themselves, aid is useless. Corruption, meanwhile, is also too often bandied out as an excuse for Western greed. Sachs argues many African countries are in fact better governed than they are given credit for. And if corruption is so important, he argues, why are incredibly corrupt countries like India and Pakistan growing rapidly while relatively well-governed ones like Senegal are stuck? The problem, Sachs believes, is a lack of investment and capital to get Africa out of its current poverty trap and on a track of sustainable growth. Everything else is just an excuse.
I am sympathetic with Sachs in the sense that we could certainly be far more generous. I think his description of the poverty trap — where Africans simply cannot generate enough income to create savings for investment and insurance (especially insurance, which is often overlooked in the micro-credit craze) — is basically right. I don’t know if his solutions are realistic but that is another argument.
His arguments about culture are tougher to swallow. The cases of Pakistan and India, it seems to me, could just as easily prove the opposite point: that culture is so important that it can generate or retard economic growth regardless of how corrupt a country is. The only economically consequential cultural issue Sachs seems to take seriously in his book is the oppression of women. Yet many of the very idealistic people I’ve met here — no doubt “Sachsians” in their own minds — return constantly to cultural explanations. These are not people pre-disposed to this kind of view, so I find it noteworthy how many of them do so.
Let me be clear: culture is not, as it sometimes seems, a cultural code word for laziness. Most people here are not lazy, just as East Asians have long since demonstrated they are not remotely lazy despite what many Westerners said about them just a generation or two ago. Many Tanzanians work harder than most Westerners could stand. Sometimes I run early in the mornings and sometimes late in the afternoon; in either case I often see the same people working away in their patches of land, doing backbreaking labor literally from sunup to sundown. Our “askari” (guard) works seven nights a week, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. with no vacation and I see him working in fields and on gardening jobs often during the day. You can call a taxi driver on his cell phone 24 hours a day and he will come get you for a few thousand shillings. Along the roads in and around Moshi you see women walking miles with giant sacks of fruits or flour or other goods balanced on their heads, taking them to market — so heavy that the hospitals see a steady stream of women with neck injuries and even paralysis from compressed nerves.
So no, Tanzanians are not lazy. But work ethic is not the only economically consequential element of culture. The challenge is how to have an honest debate and evaluation of such a loaded term. There are also a much broader range of factors and behaviors that affect economic outcomes: attitudes toward work and reward, accountability, public and personal responsibility, short-and-long-term planning and even the value of human life. In many of these aspects, the culture here is virtuous: there is a much greater sense of responsibility to care for members of one’s extended family than in the West. Hospitality is more highly honored. Other aspects are plainly economically and morally destructive. Misogyny is rife. Particularly among the middle and upper classes, there is a highly destructive absence of shame around male adultery (which is partly why HIV is more commonly spread among the better off).
In the workplace, there is a complicated and perhaps inscrutable combination of cultural and economic factors that severely undermine a culture of accountability. Jobs are found and held based on connections, not performance. Mistakes are tolerated. Life, I am sorry to say so bluntly, is often cheap. People die in hospitals while nurses stand around on tea breaks. Nobody sues a doctor when he really screws up — something that even American physicians, filled with fear and contempt for the American malpractice system, lament. Journalism fails to provide the level and detail of accountability the country requires.
So how to reconcile all this? I don’t think the answer is to dismiss Sachs’ call for more generosity on the grounds the culture hasn’t “earned” it. You can’t fall into the excuse that there is something inherent in the culture here and elsewhere, going back millenia, that condemns these places to poverty. Sachs may well be right that a substantial investment of aid would create a virtuous cycle and help solve these problems. But if it does it will be in part because it helps the economically destructive aspects of the culture correct themselves. Or put differently, it will fail to help in the long run if it fails in that correction. I’d rather see Sachs acknowledge as much, and that East Asia’s ascent is proof Africa deserves a chance, not that it will succeed. To ignore the cultural aspects of poverty is not to avoid lecturing, but to deprive yourself of a whole facet of the problem’s explanation and potential tools to work on it.
The only progress I can make on answering my question is to compare it to the moment when I finally had enough science explained to me to understand that “nature vs. nurture” just isn’t how genetics works. Nature affects nurture, and nurture in turn affects nature; our genes and their surrounding environment constantly evolve and affect one another. Putting explanations firmly into one category or another simplifies things for us but creates misunderstanding with enormous moral consequences.
It is the same here. Poverty creates culture and culture creates poverty.
When you see a lot of senseless death, it is predictable to steel yourself against it, at the end of that chain of events, to allow yourself to care less about it. More importantly, when you have a system where merit is not rewarded, and all advancement is based on who you know and how successfully you can grease the wheels, it is a rational response to play that game. The whole society suffers from the lack of accountability and innovation and the wasted potential that results. There is a failure of modeling that compounds on itself. When you don’t see anyone in your community planning for the long-term because they do not have enough faith in the institutions around them to make that planning worthwhile, you plan for the short-term instead. When you see other people cheat and get away with it, you cheat, too.
When an education system rewards all the wrong things — money, rote memorization, even sex (demanded, appallingly often, by teachers of students in return for good grades), promising people are unjustly weeded out. Those who rise to the top are those who stand to lose from accountability, and thus it is not on their agendas when they rise to positions of leadership and influence.
Those are all horrendous, intractable problems. I think Sachs is naive to ignore them. But perhaps he right to focus on problems like clean water in every village, better roads, trade liberalization, debt relief. They are actually the easier ones to solve.
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Great excitement yesterday with the arrival of a package from home. The contents: a few drugstore items that are very expensive here and a stash of back issues of the Economist and Spectator. Also inserted by my father: the latest catalogue from “Allen Brothers: The Great Steakhouse Steaks.” This is a hundred pages of artfully photographed, high-quality and ludicrously expensive cuts of beef for order — essentially “steak porn.” The cruelty of this taunt is beyond the pale. If you see him, please have him arrested for child abuse; even though I am 35 no judge would show mercy.
