Loomnie

… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.

Gideon Rachman of FT writes:

It is ironic that the democratic movements in the Arab world broke out just as autocracy seemed to be coming back into fashion. Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis epitomised the democratic triumphalism of 1989, recently wrote an article for this newspaper that lauded China’s ability to “make large complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well”, while lamenting that American democracy “will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern”. This month has also seen the publication of Dambisa Moyo’s much-discussed How The West Was Lost, which laments the “economic folly” of western democracies and lauds the dynamism of China.

Placed in the context of the wider debate between democracy and authoritarianism, the sight of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo demanding freedom should be immensely cheering to the west. The neoconservatives who always argued that the Arab world could not forever be an exception to the global spread of democracy may be tempted to claim vindication.

1. Ethan Zuckerman warns against calling Tunisia a Twitter revolution

2. Paul Collier reviews Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost

3. What do you feel about eating insects?

4. Watch Darren Aronofsky talk about his latest movie, Black Swan.

5. “The [Chinese] government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy.” Francis Fukuyama.

Remember that Ms Dambisa Moyo recommends that African countries raise money through the international bonds market? The Nigerian Debt Management Office is planning to do just that:

From Reuters: The head of Nigeria’s debt management office said on Friday he was hopeful of gaining parliamentary approval for its $500 million debut global bond now that conditions in the world economy had improved.

Parliamentary approval for the planned naira-denominated bond is one of the last major hurdles for launching the offer, which the government hopes will establish a sovereign benchmark in the international capital market.

“The $500 million 10-year bond was suspended because of the global economic meltdown. Now things are resetting and we are restructuring … We are optimistic that the bond will be approved by parliament,” Abraham Nwankwo, head of the Debt Management Office (DMO), told reporters.

Nwankwo said the DMO would need to raise 867.5 billion naira to help plug this year’s government spending shortfalls.

Still looking for the details of the bonds.

I thought to draw attention to Jeffrey Sachs comments on Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and Ms Moyo’s response. Mr Sachs’s comments were a bit disapointing. I have expected more in substance from him. Read the opening, for instance:

The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in opposing aid, Bill Easterly, received large-scale government support from the National Science Foundation for his own graduate training.

I certainly don’t begrudge any of them the help that they got. Far from it. I believe in this kind of help. And I’d find Moyo’s views cruel and mistaken even she did not get the scholarships that have been reported (Easterly mentioned his receipt of NSF support in the same book in which he denounces aid). I begrudge them trying to pull up the ladder for those still left behind. Before peddling their simplistic concoction of free markets and self-help, they and we should think about the realities of life, in which all of us need help at some time or other and in countless ways, and even more importantly we should think about the life-and-death consequences for impoverished people who are denied that help.

Kind of bellow the belt, don’t you think?

My copy of the book should arrive today.

Fukuyama wrote a review of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and the somewhat less popular The Challenge for Africa by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. The following paragraph raises a very important issue about the problem with African countries.

The roots of Africa’s political malaise go far deeper than the post-independence foreign-aid regime. Unlike East Asia before its encounter with colonialism, more than half of sub-Saharan Africa was not governed by a state structure at the time of the European scramble for Africa that began in the 1870s. The Europeans built colonial institutions on the cheap, seeking to govern vast tracts of territory with skeleton administrations. The big man of contemporary African politics is in many ways a colonial creation, since Europeans sought to rule indirectly by empowering a series of local dictators to carry out their purposes. And, finally, colonialism imposed a set of irrational borders on their colonies. South Sudan fought a 30-year civil war with the regime in Khartoum only because a long-dead British administrator in Cairo didn’t want to offend Egypt by giving it to Uganda, where it more naturally belonged.

The more I read these reviews the more I think I should order a copy of Dead Aid. In fact I am going to do that now.