See here for a quick summary of the recent debate over Prof Kaushik Basu's idea of legalising bribe-giving in India. I am not reviewing the debate. I just want to put out there, the last couple of lines by Jean Dreze, from his critique of Kaushik Basu's idea.
Creative and thought-provoking as it may be, Kaushik Basu’s paper is symptomatic of a common disease in the economics profession: the tendency to make sweeping policy recommendations based on analytical models that have a very limited domain of validity. In this case, the problem is compounded by analytical flaws as well as tensions between economic arguments and ethical concerns. Basu’s proposal is excellent fodder for intellectual debate, but rather dangerous as far as real-world policy-making is concerned.
Needless to say, I agree with Dreze. Important lesson: must remember at all times, when talking/thinking real-world policy.
Today, I prayed aloud, for the first time ever. It was at the end of a public workshop on the education sector in Ghana. I was asked to lead the closing prayer. Those who know me probably have an idea how traumatic it must have been for me. And those who are familiar with this norm of opening and closing meetings with prayers must know its significance in meetings, workshops and trainings. Once called upon, you cannot wiggle out!
Those two minutes were my most nervous minutes of the day and afterwards, a colleague told me how there was a lot of 'hope' in my prayer. I am glad it was over - my fumbles included. A first, this one. It wasn't all that bad - but it left me pretty nervous and stuttering for a few minutes after.
I remember I prayed for optimism, strength, faith and inspiration - all of which now sounds like synonyms to me - for all the participants as they go forth in their efforts to improve the education sector in Ghana. The lesson probably is that I should have a script for the future. You never know when you may be called upon to pray! And there is so much I could have said...a missed opportunity, now that I think of it.
I guess I should start believing in God - for (s)he made me pray. Or maybe, it was just Maame.
How closely should universities work with governments - while advising governments on policy, when does one go from being a policy advocate to being an instrument of government policy?
Should we expect academic institutions to have better foresight? Is that even possible when it comes to politics and power?
You must convince yourself (and others) that your help is sought not to legitimize the regime but to further ordinary citizens' interests, that there is transparency with regard to the financial relationship (if any), and that you constantly re-evaluate your entanglement to prevent "mission creep"
Transparency is of paramount importance. Such engagements must not just be foot-notes. They should be acknowledged and explained. Rodrik also acknowledges the limitations of the unforeseeable future.
But it is much easier to reach such judgments with hindsight. Were the moral overtones of dealing with the Qaddafis so obvious before the Arab revolutions spread to Libya? Or to pose the question more broadly, is it so clear that advisers should always steer clear of dictatorial regimes?
Qaddafis are probably not the best example, but there isn't a dearth of other leaders/regimes that have changed or risk changing over time. Rodrik refers to China and Ethiopia in his piece.
This is a choice local academics have to make for themselves as well, working on their own. Can they choose not to engage with their governments - irrespective of how the regimes they live under are - although the possibility of a truly authoritarian regime permitting/prompting independent academic work seems quite unlikely. Even in normal times, local academics and think-tanks have to be wary of their political engagements so they are not perceived to be biased or favouring one political party over another. But these organisations survive and are vital in their respective countries' policy processes.
Coming back to the 'dilemma of dirty hands' - not everyone has the luxury of hindsight and in many circumstances, it can be a slippery slope. What might be a way out? Would it work if western universities/think-tanks/consultancies work only with their counterparts in developing countries. So an LSE will work directly with say, a University of Libya or Misurata University, or with other non-governmental organisations - not only avoiding having to make political choices (only to some extent, of course), but also contributing to a stronger local capacity in organisations that could affect policy processes. And if a government doesn't allow that, it would be a clear sign that something is not quite right.
There has been a bit of a lull in the e-debates over microfinance recently. Duncan Green helps restart the chatter by inviting three varying perspectives on microfinance and its future. Unsurprisingly, I most closely identify with Malcolm Harper's take. As part of his agenda for change in the Indian microfinance sector, one of the points Harper makes is -
National regulators, and donors, should certainly not support (and perhaps should not allow) MFIs to operate unless they are also licensed to offer savings, to take demand deposits, that is, they are licensed banks. This does not mean that the requirements for licensing should be less stringent; it means that existing and perhaps some new banks should become directly involved in microfinance, perhaps in some cases starting by buying heavily discounted loan portfolios from bankrupt or troubled MFIs. Governments and donors should push banks in this direction.
I wholeheartedly agree. Yes, there is still the unresolved question of the impact of microcredit. Impact studies (even RCTs) have looked at microcredit and have only confirmed that while the impacts are modest at best, there also don't seem to be reasons to fear microcredit wiping out its clients. However, as a sector, microfinance practitioners haven't done enough to protect the industry from risks that should have been easily visible to all. I still believe that while politics might be a factor, it is certainly not the biggest one and that the sector has in the past, refused to learn from its mistakes. And now, "denial is no longer an option".
Microfinance is broader than microcredit - one that could be a holistic model that combines an array of financial services with complementary support services. This distinction between microcredit and microfinance is easily lost in the microfinance debate where we tend to focus on the future of 'loans' and 'MFIs'.
My agenda for the microfinance sector is this: MFIs have to help their clients graduate to banks. Harper's point about mainstreaming microfinance through banks is an important one in this context. This might have been an improbable point to make even a decade back - that banks are in a better position to provide superior quality financial products and services. But now that the microfinance industry has demonstrated financial viability, banks will find a way to move in; in fact, donors and governments, as Harper says, should actively encourage them to move in.
The biggest reason we need banks and other deposit-taking institutions is of course, savings. We cannot ignore savings any longer. Savings services for the poor will continue to expand through mobile phones and other innovations, but banks need to be the institution that provides it the big push. Recently, there has been considerable focus on savings, but gaps remain. Banks - both in the public and private sector - should be the ones to step up and fill the gap. In the process, MFIs that can transform themselves to full service banks will survive; others will die or sell-out to banks. And in the capitalist system that the industry has fostered for itself, no tears will be shed.
The coming years should be years of consolidation - not just of MFIs into one another, but into organisations with higher levels of complexity, reflecting better financial products and services for its clients.
The unfortunate reality, however, is that talent is NOT universal. There’s a tendency to take a truth that is meant to apply to whole groups — i.e., that no particular ethnic group has more or less talent than others — and apply it to individuals. But, people are not equally talented, by any reasonable definition of “talent.” Whether one believes talent to be fully inherited or sculpted by a range of environmental forces (including genetic endowments, nutrition, upbringing, education, social influences, individual efforts, etc.), talent is universal only in the same way that height is universal. Sure, everyone has some height. But, some people are taller than others.
Smith, as a VP at Google, is herself well aware of talent disparities. Her company goes to great lengths to hire people based on talent, weeding out anyone who cannot pass a few IQ tests or muster the many talents needed to impress interviewers. If talent really were universal, and Google.org were hoping to do something about equalizing opportunity, why don’t they randomly select people from the low-income parts of the world and hire them to fill out the team? Why waste the opportunity of a high-paying job on someone who needs the wealth less than another person of equal talent? Obviously, talent is not universal.
It seems like such an obvious fact that gets lost in the rhetoric of ICT4D. Children need basic education from motivated teachers. Even before that, they need an environment where their families will prioritise their education and can provide enough nutrition for them to be healthy and active. I hope the rush to push technology does not obscure the need to address these basic problems (by crowding out policymaker and donor attention or resources).
Their big idea is that stereotypes, being a set of simplified categories and judgements, can help people to cope with chaos. They are “a mental cleaning device in the face of disorder”. When our surroundings are full of chaos – be it dirt or uncertainty – we react by seeking order, structure and predictability. Stereotypes, for all their problems, satisfy that need.
To test that, the duo went to Utrecht station after it hadn’t been cleaned for a few days and asked 40 travellers to fill in a questionnaire. Their task was to say how much Dutch, Muslim and homosexual people conform to different personality traits. When the cleaners returned to work, and the station had reverted to its usual spick self, Stapel and Lindenberg repeated their experiment.
They found that the volunteers held more strongly to stereotyped views when they sat in a dirty station, compared to a clean one. For example, they were more likely to rate Muslims as being ‘loyal’ and ‘aggressive’, gay people as ‘sweet’ and ‘feminine’, and Dutch people as ‘tolerant’ and ‘stingy’. The moods of the different volunteers didn’t differ between the two days, and didn’t affect their behaviour.
...(GCC) reportedly strong-armed the White House by playing on fears that Iran might benefit if Bahrain embraced democracy and that, as a result, the entire region might become destabilised in ways inimical to US power-projection policies.
"Starting with Bahrain, the administration has moved a few notches toward emphasising stability over majority rule," according to a US official quoted by the Journal. "Everybody realised that Bahrain was just too important to fail."
and so, they hand out dough nuts instead
...Last week, peaceful protesters aligned against Bahrain's monarchy gathered outside the US embassy in Manama carrying signs reading "Stop Supporting Dictators", "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death", and "The People Want Democracy". Many of them were women. Ludovic Hood, a US embassy official, reportedly brought a box of doughnuts out to the protesters...
...The United States is, however, already deeply involved. To one side it's given a box of doughnuts; to the other, helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers, and millions of bullets – equipment that played a significant role in the recent violent crackdowns...
"...the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete..."
'Single Stories' exist everywhere - about everyone.
via TED - I agree with almost everything in this great talk...Adichie does take her 'room-mate' to task though, giving us almost a 'single story' about her. I know she is using her as an example/symbol - but could that be how 'single stories' start?
Protesting US pressure on Bangladesh over Yunus, this article says
The pressure by the United States to "reinstate" the "respect" of Professor Yunus in his own motherland is simply counterproductive and humiliating for him as well. In fact, the US action has put Professor Yunus on a murky ground. Firstly, if the government agrees to the US demand and reinstates him in one way or the other, will it "satisfy" him to witness a breach of diplomatic niceties? Secondly, if the US intimidation brings him back the "respect," as they see it; would it not simply add credence to the criticisms of his detractors who portray him as a blue-eyed boy of Washington? Will these situations make Professor Yunus "satisfied"?
I agree. Whether Yunus is allowed to continue at the helm of Grameen or not is Bangladesh's domestic concern. While the microfinance community in particular and civil society in general have a right to voice their concerns and protest the alleged injustice, there is no case for undue diplomatic pressure by a superpower on a very poor country.
