The research I’ve seen indicates that one of the biggest impediments to making people want to do more to help resolve problems associated with extreme poverty in the third world is a sense of futility. People believe that Africa is just hopelessly mired in poverty, and any effort to help would prove futile. So I think it’s important to highlight the considerable evidence that this isn’t the case.
Today, Tyler Cowen offers this from Alwyn Young:
Measures of real consumption based upon the ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub-Saharan living standards have, for the past two decades, been growing in excess of 3 percent per annum, i.e. more than three times the rate indicated in international data sets.
And I think it’s worth taking a relatively holistic view of what “being helpful to Africa” entails. Trade policy and foreign aid policy and debt issues are the obvious chestnuts. But there’s also a lot that could be done around migration and intellectual property issues. And there are broad structural concerns. Catastrophic climate change will fall much more heavily on poor countries with weak institutions. And Africa has benefitted enormously from the decline of superpower rivalry—you know longer have the US and USSR arming and financing rival gangs of vicious killers—and would suffer enormously if US-China animosity really broke out.
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