"I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing." - Johnny Carson
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Aiding is Abetting
"Dambisa Moyo's prescription for economic sustainability in Africa—which includes cutting off all aid within five years—might seem insane if the statistics weren't so grim: despite one trillion dollars in western aid over the past sixty years, the economic lot of the average African has only gotten worse...
Systematic western aid, Moyo argues in Dead Aid, has essentially turned Africa into one giant welfare state. The unending stream of money has created a situation where governments aren't accountable to their citizens: since they don't depend on tax revenue, leaders don't think they owe their people anything—and the people don't expect anything from their leaders...
Furthermore, aid stamps out entrepreneurship... We have centuries of evidence that [capitalism] generates wealth and delivers jobs, and yet here we are after one bad year and we're ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater...
I think the whole aid model is couched in pity [rather than] logic and evidence... [the] whole rationale for giving more aid to Africa is not couched in logic or evidence; it's based largely on emotion and pity...
In Madagascar, some aid money had been cut and the government was not investing in the domestic citizenry or even paying the army. So the army staged a coup...
A friend of mine had a great quote: "Africa is to the development industry what Mars is to NASA."... The Chinese have created jobs; they've built roads. The West has failed to do that in sixty years in Africa...
Aside from the corrupt leaders, aid supports over five hundred thousand people (mainly in the West) working in the aid industry and virtually none of it reaches the people for whom it was intended."
This is another tragic tale of what happens when you think with your heart instead of your head.
Comment elsewhere:
"[No Western politicians or Economists] draw an outright battle line between logic and pity. Oh, there are plenty of demagogues who claim the evidence is on their side, but they won't be so outright condemning of emotion... Moyo says she's gotten a better reception in Africa than in the West. Maybe you need to see your whole continent wrecked by emotion and pity before "logic and evidence" start to sound appealing."