the bottom billion

Richard John Neuhaus in the October and December issues of First Things on global poverty in general-- and Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion in particular...

There is a very big and very important argument underway about what is to be done, if anything can be done, about the really poor of the world. An admirably lucid and informed contribution to the argument is Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford). There are approximately six billion people on earth; the top billion are enjoying historically unprecedented prosperity; the next four billion are on their way to similar affluence; the bottom billion, writes Collier, “coexist with the twenty-first century but their reality is the fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance.”

Why should we care? Collier answers, “A future world with a billion people living in impoverished and stagnant countries is just not a scenario we can countenance.” At another point he writes: “I have a little boy who is six. I do not want him to grow up in a world with a vast running sore—a billion people stuck in desperate conditions alongside unprecedented prosperity.”

In short, the argument is moral. But make no mistake about it, The Bottom Billion is not a moralistic tract. It is a practical, even a disturbingly practical, guide to what can be done. Collier is professor of economics at Oxford University and the former director of development research at the World Bank, with a lifelong special interest in Africa. Seventy percent of the “bottom billion” are in Africa. If nothing is done, the bottom billion “will gradually diverge from the rest of the world economy over the next couple of decades, forming a ghetto of misery and discontent.”

It is a mistake, Collier contends, to talk about world poverty in general. The four billion in the middle are, albeit at an uneven pace, on their way to prosperity. As a generality, the poor are not getting poorer; they are getting much, much richer. Except for the bottom billion, who are disconnected from the dynamics of productivity and exchange and, as a consequence, are getting poorer and will likely get poorer still.

From there, Neuhaus moves to a discussion of books by William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.

The aforementioned debate about world poverty is largely framed by books offering dramatically different analyses and remedies. I have earlier discussed William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden (November 2006). Easterly, too, has a long history of working in development programs, and his book is a withering critique of the waste, corruption, and wrongheadedness that make such programs not just frequently but typically counterproductive. It is certainly not Easterly’s intention, but it is understandable, that many invoke The White Man’s Burden in their argument against development aid as such. Better, they say, to leave the world’s poor to their own resources or, as the case may be, to their fate.

Easterly’s book is in sharpest contrast to Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty, a passionate call to action by multiplying the amount of development aid from the rich nations to the poor of the world. Sachs is an economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University who would convince us that the end of poverty is a matter of the generosity of the rich in doing their moral duty. Niall Ferguson reviewed The Bottom Billion for the New York Times and, quite rightly, underscored its differences with Jeffrey Sachs’ argument. In a subsequent letter to the Times, Sachs complained that Ferguson was trying to “pick a fight” between him and Paul Collier. Sachs had words of high praise for Collier and said that they are in agreement on their analysis of “the poverty trap.” One has to wonder whether Sachs read Collier’s book.

And then, back to Collier's work...

It is precisely Collier’s argument that poverty itself is not a trap. If poverty were a trap, the whole world would be as poor as it once was. Collier writes: “Nor do I believe that poverty itself is a trap. These development failures occurred against a backdrop of global development success—poverty is something that most people are managing to escape. Since 1980 world poverty has been falling for the first time in history. Nor was it just a matter of Africa. Elsewhere there were also development failures: countries such as Haiti, Laos, Burma, and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular. A one-size-fits-all explanation for development failure doesn’t ring true against such diversity.” In sum, and contra Jeffrey Sachs, the great challenge is not world poverty but the plight of the bottom billion.

Instead of the “poverty trap,” Collier contends that the bottom billion are caught in four other traps: the conflict trap, involving civil wars and genocides; the natural resource trap, in which oil or other riches deflect attention from economic development; the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, which results in the stifling of trade and communications; and the trap of bad governance in a small state, creating pervasive governmental corruption and the undermining of legal economic order.

These four traps, individually and working in combination, result in the marginalization of the bottom billion from the dynamics of global development....

Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion is one of the most important books on poverty in a global context to have appeared in years. Based on solid research and free of sentimentality, it offers neither easy solutions nor support for indifference or despair....

Then from the December issue...

[O]ver the years [Collier] has been forced by statistical evidence to conclude that most of our thinking about world poverty is dead wrong—and deadly wrong for the “bottom billion” of the world’s population that is falling ever further behind.

The poor are poor because they are exploited by the rich. That is what Collier once thought, along with many others for whom the answer was revolution of one kind or another against capitalist oppression....

Of course there are starving children, heartless businesses, and crooked politicians. The last are particularly prevalent in the poorest countries, constituting what Collier calls the bad-government or corruption “trap” that impedes development. But the celebrities and politicians who beat the drums for development aid are prone to exploiting the notion that we in the West have somehow caused world poverty and are morally obliged to pay for our guilt. Voting for massive aid programs makes us feel better but, more often than not, is of slight benefit to the really poor. [But] the goal is not to pay for our sins but to encourage economic growth....

Celebrity advocates for the world’s poor talk about finding a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, which usually means socialism....

Facing up to the realities of world poverty and what can be done about it requires concern, intelligence, and long-term commitment....

That it will be the work of generations should not intimidate Christians, who think in terms of centuries. Yes, Our Lord may return tomorrow. And yes, we may be the early Church in a twenty-first century that is still in the opening chapter of the human drama. And yes, we are told that the poor we will always have with us. As we are also told that we will be judged by what we do for “the least of these.” The least of these is by no means limited to, but certainly includes, the people whose plight is so persuasively depicted in Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion. Against the delusions of the left and the skepticism of the right, he offers a believable way forward for this generation in the work of generations.