The Times: Poverty

Poor standards of housing in Port-au-Prince have contributed to the disaster says the director of Missio Jamaica, formerly resident in Haiti

Sr Janet Fearns reports about the horrible earthquake in Haiti in his article. The only thing the people have right now is their faith. Their believe God will rescue them and bring them out of their misery. The earthquake killed 100.000 people already and no one knows how many will still be added to this number. The problem of poverty and the bad infrastructure, is a big part of why the earthquake was so bad. Following five hurricanes in 5 years, the people situations worsened in Haiti day by day. The simple houses, which do not meet the building code made this such a big catastrophe. The buildings collapsed and buried the people under them. This is part of the poverty - vicious cycle. The people have no money, so the infrastructure is bad, so one day nature will bring them back on the ground. People that have nothing but tragedy in their lives, and this point is not even the worst. We can not imagine what they go though in their lives, and for them it’s reality.

William Easterly- The White Man's Burden

Chapter 3

You cant plan a market

- Difficult to get a market going in a socially beneficial way
- Need to set rules, otherwise specific people will benefit on cost of others
- Most African countries that have received intensive treatment from structural adjustment have had negative or zero growth. Also, ex-communist countries have had sharp negative growth.
- Low trust in economy and market, low per capita income!
- Another problem of society: we must solve the problem of protection of property and person
- Property rights also determine whether markets work as well as good laws
○ Property rights are an incentive to accumulate assets over time and across generations, which is often necessary to have the productive capacity to meet consumer needs

William Easterly- The White Man's Burden

Chapter 2

- Legend that gave birth to foreign aid in the 1950s
○ Legend: the poorest countries are in a poverty trap, from which they cannot emerge without an aid-financed Big Push, involving investments and actions to address all constraints to development , after which they will have a take-off into self-sustained growth, and aid will no longer be needed.
- Chapter tests the legend

Legend part two:
- Whenever poor countries have lousy growth, it is because of a poverty trap rather than bad government
- Why does it matter whether it is bad government or a technological poverty trap?
○ Bad government is bad for fund-raising for aid
○ Bad government explains slower growth-- brings country into poverty trap
○ "big Push" not going to work if the problem is bad government rather than poverty trap

Legend part three:
- Foreign aid gives a push to countries to achieve a takeoff into self sustained growth
○ Africa received more than 15% of its income from foreign donors in the 1990s
○ Aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor countries
○ Small amount of money doesn’t work- need a lot so can fix problems simultaneously
○ NO EVIDENCE THAT AID HAS EFFECT ON GROWTH

The problem of evaluating the white man's burden

Against big push: hard to evaluate

William Easterly- The White Man's Burden

Chapter 1

- 2 tragedies of the world's poor
○ Three dollars for a net--> prevents malaria--> death of thousands of children each year
○ West spent 2.3$ trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades, though still not managed to get malaria medicine to prevent half of the deaths of children
- The book is about "second tragedy"
- "the right plan is to have no plan"

Planner's Failure, Searcher's success
- advocates of traditional approach: planners
- Agents for change in alternative approach: searchers
- Planner think he already knows the answer, thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answer will solve
- Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answer from the beginning , he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find the answer to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.
- Lack of local information

Big Problems and big plans
- Our dream Is a world free of poverty- president james wolfensohn of the world bank
- Different ideas of how to get rid of poverty in past which did not work--> learn from mistake

The backward question that cripples foreign aid
- What can foreign aid do for poor people?

Getting bed nets to the poor
- Bed nets to sure poverty? Is that of any help?
- If that is of good use..then why didn’t the planners do it yet? Problem: How to get it to the poor…
- If they get the nets, use it for different stuff: fishing etc

Philosophy of social Change:
- The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineeringr

Feedback and accountability
- Two key elements that make searchers work and whose absence is fatal to plans are feedback and accountability
- At a higher level accountability is necessary to motivate is necessary to motivate a whole organizations of government to use searchers. In contrast, planners flourish where there is little accountability.

Poverty #9

Mexican president says poverty now first priority

In this article Mark Stevenson talks about poverty in Mexico that this will be the first priority of the Mexican president, Felipe Calderon. In the second half of his term he will be reducing poverty, after the war against drug cartels took center stage in the first three years of his administration. With the offensive bogged down amid drug-related violence in some Mexican cities, poverty increased. Next to poverty Calderon will also continue with his greatest commitment to public, job creation.
Figures published in July by the government showed that extreme poverty in Mexico — defined as people who cannot buy enough food — rose from 13.8 million in 2006 to 19.5 million in 2008, in a country of almost 107 million inhabitants. To change poverty Calderon needs to have a lot of patient. There is not only one strategy that will solve poverty, there are many factors that need to be taken in consideration so the setting of the goal to solve poverty is the start of a long and probably also expensive journey.

The Times: Poverty

Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
The article, written by Nigel Lawson is about the fact that we should not force developing countries to cut back their carbon emission. The discussion over this topic took place in Copenhagen at the United Nations climate change conference.
The conference included the reason why we use carbon-based energy. It is simply that it is far and away the cheapest source of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable for us in the developed world. But in the developing world, there are still tens of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of preventable disease, malnutrition and premature death. It is important in times where we start to cut back carbon emissions that all factors are being taken care of. Though the attempt for the poor countries to also cut back their carbon emission is contradicting because the developing countries do not have to knowledge how to do so and the people need to be educated how to cut back their personal carbon emissions. Those countries have the highest carbon emission at the moment in compare to the developed countries so this is the point. It is important for carbon emissions to reduce though for countries like India this is not possible at the moment so a decision has to be made and a plan how to raise awareness in there poor countries.

1st half of chapter 1: The White Man's Burden

- 2 tragedies of the world's poor
○ Three dollars for a net--> prevents malaria--> death of thousands of children each year
○ West spent 2.3$ trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades, though still not managed to get malaria medicine to prevent half of the deaths of children
- The book is about "second tragedy"
- "the right plan is to have no plan"

Planner's Failure, Searcher's success
- advocates of traditional approach: planners
- Agents for change in alternative approach: searchers
- Planner think he already knows the answer, thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answer will solve
- Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answer from the beginning , he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors. A searcher hopes to find the answer to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.
- Lack of local information

Big Problems and big plans
- Our dream Is a world free of poverty- president james wolfensohn of the world bank
- Different ideas of how to get rid of poverty in past which did not work--> learn from mistake

The backward question that cripples foreign aid
- What can foreign aid do for poor people?

Getting bed nets to the poor
- Bed nets to sure poverty? Is that of any help?
- If that is of good use..then why didn’t the planners do it yet? Problem: How to get it to the poor…
- If they get the nets, use it for different stuff: fishing etc

Philosophy of social Change:
- The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering

Feedback and accountability
- Two key elements that make searchers work and whose absence is fatal to plans are feedback and accountability
- At a higher level accountability is necessary to motivate is necessary to motivate a whole organizations of government to use searchers. In contrast, planners flourish where there is little accountability.