If I gave an award for the most naive article I read in a day, week, month, or year this one at RealClearDefense by Rathna K. Muralidharan, encouraging investment in infrastructure in Africa:
Washington should develop and modify programs to support FDI by American companies in Africa to build out infrastructure. These developments can be leveraged by U.S. federal organizations when carrying out security and aid missions. They would also benefit local communities trying to grow and expand their economies.
would have to be considered a strong contender.
I have no doubt that African countries need better infrastructure but that’s isn’t their gravest problem. Their most serious problems are corruption and bad government which go hand in hand. There isn’t enough money in the whole world to build useable infrastructure in Africa as long as every dollar that’s, er, invested goes to line somebody’s pocket.
And there’s operations and maintenance. We can come in a build a rail system, but can the locals maintain and operate it over the long term?
There was, for example, a ton of money poured into projects in Afghanistan – the vast majority were complete failures.
I think he envisions the U. S. just sending money and the projects being built using local resources. A better formula for money simply disappearing cannot be imagined.
He seems barely employable……
Read a book once, wish I could remember it’s name, made the claim that there are no advanced civilizations inside a two thousand mile wide band around the equator. Seems It’s because of insect- borne disease.
Hard to get serious about infrastructure planning when everyone is sick and dying.
I’m not sure I agree with that assessment. It smacks of “no true Scotsman”. What did the author make of the Maya, Inca, Benin, Songhai?
Reading between the lines, I gather this is part of a continuous US military presence in Africa since the job of hunting terrorists, military assistance and training and/or countering growing Chinese influence never ends. Could be cerebrovascular insufficiency speaking on my part.
Africa’s problems are very low mean IQ’s, in the 70’s for the Bantu and ranging down to the 50’s for the Pygmies, plus low impulse control, excessive violence etc. This is a population that is incapable of sustaining any civilization at any level. Viz.,all of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, numerous American cities. Ethnic cleansing of blacks always improves the crime and sociological statistics of cities. Los Angeles is a good example.
The fact is, Homo sapiens is a bad species, and includes several different species, probably 10 to 20 world wide. Many of these species are simply incompatible, e.g. Eurasians vs Africans, and should live apart. In fact, the US is largely segregated by mutual choice. We should seek to enhance segregation.
There’s a notion about that China and India are competing to replace the US as the world’s dominant military/economic power. GNP is one component, of course; sheer size is another. Both countries are in the range of 1.4-1.5 billion people, in a world of 7 billion people; projections are that both will hit a maximum of 1.8-1.9 billion before the end of the century, in a world with 10-11 billion people.
For comparison, Africa as a whole has a population of about 2 billion people today, and I’ve seen estimates this will grow to 5 billion people by the year 2100. It’s reasonable to think that a world with a prosperous Africa, having well governed states and decent social institutions , will be a much better place for all humanity than a world with poor and ill-governed African states. It’s also reasonable to think that the actions we take in Africa might influence outcomes there — even if we can’t agree right now on what those actions shoudl be. And it’s reasonable to think Americans as a group would benefit if Africans as a group come to see the USA as a place which extended help and assistance toward them over the long decades.
On a less cerebral note, I suspect there are statistics and social studies which attempt to monitor levels of corruption and crime and the extent of dictatorships and other phenomena and how these are changing over time. I don’t think anyone here is an authority on such matters.
FWIW, I’ll point out that economists and social scientists elsewhere on the Web who do have sizable experience in Africa seem reasonably content with its prospects. I don’t get the impression that we ought to subsidize Intel for building factories in Nairobi and Jo’burg; we might do considerable good by persuading 10,000 retired American businessmen to join the Peace Corps and spend their tours in African cities, giving advice to local businessmen.
What in the world gives you that idea? It’s not reasonable; it’s wishful thinking.
That is a fallacy called “the appeal to an unnamed authority”. Please cite actual authorities so we can examine their claims. There are very good reasons to believe we cannot influence outcomes in countries far away about which we have little knowledge and on which we have little influence. We have spent tens or hundreds of billions trying to influence outcomes in Afghanistan and Iraq for going on 20 years. If we’re influencing outcomes in those places, is it for the better?
Um er er er …. Tim Blake at Easily Distracted http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/ comes to mind, also Chris Blattman https://chrisblattman.com/.
Those are bloggers; I’ve skimmed over stuff from other folks which I encountered while web-surfing. Sorry, I don’t bother to make notes.
But y’know, sending 20-something American kids to Swaziland to teach some English and the pleasures of home sanitation, and maybe sending a portly 70-ish businessman off to Addis Ababa do he can tell some local merchant “Put the calicos in the back, bring your bright red and blue fabrics towards the front, where the light shines on them and people will see them through your window. Also, wash the windows, often. Pay a kid a nickel and you can get him to show up every day of the week.” That’s a little different from sending the Marines in to break down doors and search houses for possible insurgents in some godforsaken Arab village. Yeah, they’re both attempts at “influencing outcomes” but ….
Those bloggers have some authority. I don’t see that they support the idea that U. S. government-driven infrastructure projects are an effective way of influencing development in Africa. That’s what the original article was claiming and that’s what I disagree with. We can barely monitor infrastructure projects here in the United States. They are very frequently corrupt boondoggles. We’re supposed to be able to monitor them 5,000 miles away in countries with very different political, social, and legal systems?
Chris Blattman in particular seems to put more emphasis on very small scale people-to-people interactions, a very different strategy, and one that I think is more likely to be effective. Heck, even Bill Gates’s distribution of mosquito netting is a better approach than infrastructure projects.
African people are not stupid. Lack of intelligence is not the issue – the main issue, IMO, is culture and how societies in Africa are organized. Internal politics in African countries is based on ethnic, cultural and religious lines. Most countries in Africa lack internal stability because of these issues and the result is corruption, weak governance, patronage systems instead of civil law and society, etc.