Loomnie

Where next for Political Science in Africa? Debating Patrick Chabal’s ‘Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling’ [link downloads a pdf file].

Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute is getting worried about methodological individualism:

I’m getting worried about methodological individualism. Yes, I know that ‘society’ has no life or will or organizing mind of its own, as Marx seemed to assume, and that it is just the aggregation of individuals’ decisions and actions. I know that the ‘price level’ does not affect ‘aggregate supply’ or ‘aggregate demand’, and that these are mere statistics, summing individuals’ reactions to particular prices. And I don’t fall the the scientist guff that ‘we can predict the behaviour of a piece of a gas, even though we don’t know what any particular molecule is doing’, because I know that the ‘molecules’ that social science deals with are individuals who are themselves so complex that their behaviour would fry the brain of the average chemist. And yet…

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously (or infamously) told Women’s Own magazine that “there is no such thing as society”, and yes, I see her point. But she went on to say: “There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Aye, there’s the rub. Are we methodological individualists (the term was, I think, coined by Schumpeter, who I wrote about here recently) obliged to insist that everything comes down to the minds, thoughts, values, and actions of individuals alone? Or can we admit that relationships between individuals, like family ties, are pretty basic too? And what about culture, or history, or religion, or even class? These all shape and constrain our individual thoughts and actions. But to admit them as significant is the thin end of the methodological wedge, because these are social phenomena.

An analogy, if I may. A physicist could describe a football match in terms of kinetic energy, friction, and the forces on the ball that sent it in this direction or that. It would be a perfectly correct description, but a pretty dull one: most of us would prefer to hear the commentator talking about the skill of the players, the positioning of the teams, the tactics and strategy, the chances taken and the goals scored. The physicist’s account might be the right way to talk about the workings of the Large Hadron Collider, but it’s not much good for a ball game. Likewise, an individualist account of economic or social phenomena may be true in a trivial sense; but to understand what’s going on, you do need to know that culture, or history, or religion do in fact shape how people act.

And again, if we do detect statistical relationships between social phenomena like a price index and a money supply figure, isn’t that actually rather useful, even if only up to a point? Yes, I know that unless we refer to the individuals, we will make mistakes. A Martian observer may note that every Monday to Friday morning, Grand Central Station becomes packed with Earthlings, and predict this as a scientific law. Except that, one Monday, no Earthlings show up at all. The Martian’s ‘law’ did not account for the fact it was a public holiday. But then, this is how science works – we make a hypothesis, then have to revise it when the unexpected happens. Sure, if we understand the motives of the actors, our predictions will be better. But just because we can’t do that very easily, do we still have to throw out statistics that seem to work?

Krugman speaking on Finland: Speaking at a forum on Finland’s economic development organised by the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, Krugman said that technically the global economy began to rebound at the end of the summer. He added, however, that unemployment could worsen for up to a year and a half, despite growth.

“Prospects for slow growth–maybe even some quarters of negative growth are really quite strong. The forces of recovery now are largely temporary factors. We don’t have very much reason to think we’ve got a solid recovery on tap,” said Krugman.

While Krugman sees some bright spots, he added that the recession in Finland could last for quite some time. The effects of the government’s stimulus efforts are wearing off and exports offer little remedy in global markets still gripped by the downturn.

“From the general grounds that Finland is a manufacturing, exporting economy, I would expect GDP growth to turn positive quite soon because we’re seeing a worldwide bounce back in manufacturing–but that’s a long way from full recovery,” Krugman explained.

For now, Krugman says Finland’s best bet is to stick to its stimulus efforts to protect jobs.

“There are times when it’s good to run deficits and this is one of them, so don’t try to balance the budget right now,” advised Krugman.

While Africa is blessed with much natural wealth — gold, diamonds, ores from tin to uranium, oil and ivory — it has also long been a target for plunder. Listen to Ian Fisher recount how some, mostly outsiders, built great fortunes off of Africa’s material riches — and for centuries its people as well — while it remained the poorest continent in the world.

Check out the graphics and audio of the plunder here.

H/T Kiwanja

From Foreign Policy:

Imagine a tiny country flush with oil money, where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy. Now picture a place quite the opposite, where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Impossible as it sounds, these two sentences describe the same place: Equatorial Guinea, a West African country home to roughly a half-million people. Earlier this month, the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, marked the 30th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

Continue reading.

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.

The bottom billion blog says Africa is open for business. Didn’t know it was ever closed, but….

Paul Krugman: China is in a dollar trap.

The IMF is still busy cleaning up its image. Dominique Strauss-Kahn writes about a lending overhaul.

On Obama’s Special Olympics gaffe .

And, Nigeria records first all-female crew flight.

Last week we commissioned Akin to do a review of the coverage of the Nigerian re-branding excercise by bloggers and he delivered a really beautiful post. Please go over to NigeriansTalk.org to have a look at it. Probably the only group of people who have covered the re-branding excercise very well are bloggers. There are probably are reasons for that, but that is not the point of focus at the moment. If you are interested in hosting a review – a copy each on your blog and NigeriansTalk.org – please send an email to loomnie-at-loomnie.com or nnwachuku-at-gmail.com.

And the guys over at Turenchi.com are doing a really beautiful job. Their site indexes news sources and lists the news stories as they are posted on the original sites. Part of the beauty of the site is that it is uncluttered and very easy to navigate. Plus there is a mobile version at www.turenchi.com/mobile They promise that it will soon move to www.m.turenchi.com News buffs and junkies, a site to bookmark.

Nneoma of Pyoowata and I have started a blog review – NigeriansTalk. It is going to be a weekly review of blog posts on Nigeria/ blogs from Nigerians. From the introductory post:

NigeriansTalk is a weekly review of posts written by bloggers of Nigerian extraction, bloggers living in Nigeria and bloggers who blog about Nigeria. NigeriansTalk seeks to cover the wide spectrum of perspectives on various social, political, and personal issues, issues that affect Nigerians at home and abroad. We would like to recognize those bloggers who through their efforts sustain a much needed dialogue on the state of the nation. We hope that through our collective voices, we will bring about the future we seek for our country.

It is a collaborative project. This means that we will regularly invite bloggers to review blog posts that they find interesting during the past week. It could be themed, in which case a reviewer could choose a certain topic of interest to them – say technology, music, education – and review blogpost on the topic. It could also be about the coverage of a particular news event by bloggers. Or just about the issues that bloggers found interesting during the past week. Reviewers have a certain level of freedom in choosing the topic and the format. Again, from the site:

We hope to involve as many Nigerian bloggers in this pan-Nigerian blogging project. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor for NigeriansTalks.com, please email (Loomnie at loomnie-at-loomnie.com or Nneoma at nnwachuku-at-gmail.com). Becoming a contributor for NigeriansTalk requires a minimal time commitment as contributors will at most post about once a month.

One of its ambitions is to become a site through which people can network: Reviews written for and posted on the NigeriansTalk site will also go on your blog.

The first post, from Nneoma, is going to be on the site on Monday. We look forward to having your contributions.

BBc’s Matt Frei on Senator Obama:

And although Obama is really quite down to earth and millions of Americans would love to sit down with him for a drink and a chat, they might be too awestruck and hamstrung to think of anything to say, for fear of sounding crass, offensive or stupid.

Policies apart, therein lies a danger.

If unchecked it breeds a resentment that could express itself in the privacy of the ballot booth with a vote for the grumpy old maverick who looks as if he would be happy to down vodka shots with you, even if his doctors did not allow it.

You can read it in full here.