Why 2.3 Trillion in 50 Years On Foreign Aid=Failure

[Annie]

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/04/03/william-easterly/why-doesnt-aid-work/

Lots more at site:

Why Doesn’t Aid Work?*

by William Easterly
Lead Essay
April 3rd, 2006

I am driving out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to the countryside. An endless line of women and girls is marching in the opposite direction into the city. They range in age from 9 to 59. Each one is bent nearly double under a load of firewood. The heavy load propels them forward almost at a trot. I think of slaves driven along by an invisible slave-driver. They are carrying the firewood from miles outside of Addis Ababa, where there are eucalyptus forests, across the denuded lands circling the city. They bring the wood to the main city market, where they will sell the load for a couple of dollars. That will be it for their day’s income, as it takes all day to heft firewood into Addis and to walk back.

I later found that BBC News had posted a story about one of the firewood collectors. Amaretch, age 10, woke up at 3 a.m. to collect eucalyptus branches and leaves, then began the long and painful march into the city. Amaretch, whose name means “beautiful one,” is the youngest of 4 children in her family. She says:

I don’t want to have to carry wood all my life. But at the moment I have no choice because we are so poor. All of us children carry wood to help our mother and father buy food for us. I would prefer to be able to just go to school and not have to worry about getting money. [1]

The two tragedies

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown recently gave a compassionate speech about the tragedy of extreme poverty afflicting billions of people, with millions of children dying from easily preventable diseases. He called for a doubling of foreign aid, a Marshall Plan for the world’s poor. He offered hope by pointing out how easy it is to do good. Medicine that would prevent half of malaria deaths costs only 12 cents a dose. A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only $4. Preventing 5 million child deaths over the next 10 years would cost just $3 for each new mother. A program to get Amaretch into school would cost little.

However, Gordon Brown was silent about the other tragedy of the world’s poor. This is the tragedy in which the West already spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent 5 million child deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and Amaretch is still carrying firewood. It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people.

The West’s efforts to aid the Rest have been even less successful at goals such as promoting rapid economic growth, changes in government economic policy to facilitate markets, or promotion of honest and democratic government. The evidence is stark: $568 billion spent on aid to Africa, and yet the typical African country no richer today than 40 years ago. Dozens of “structural adjustment” loans (aid loans conditional on policy reforms) made to Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America, only to see the failure of both policy reform and economic growth. The evidence suggests that aid results in less democratic and honest government, not more. Yet, unchastened by this experience, we still have such absurdities as the grandiose plans by Jeffrey Sachs and the United Nations to do 449 separate interventions to reach 54 separate goals by the year 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals), accompanied by urgent pleas to double aid money.

Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets. Once aid agencies realize that aid CANNOT achieve general economic and political development, they could start concentrating on fixing the system that fails to get 12-cent medicines to malaria victims....

 

[insein]

lol. So thats where are debt came from. No wonder. We send money straight down the shitter when we sign those foreign aid checks. Then usually the shit comes back up the drain and gets us all dirty.

Here's a wild concept. We only give support to nations that like us. See how long the world lasts and how quickly the tone changes when the checks stop coming.

 

[Hobbit]

Welfare to foreign nations works much like welfare to our own systems. As soon a people figure out they don't have to work to get money, they stop working and focus their efforts on how to get more free money. Some African governments have entire committees devoted to getting more U.S. foreign aid while their infastructure crumbles and their people starve.

 

[insein]

Welfare to foreign nations works much like welfare to our own systems. As soon a people figure out they don't have to work to get money, they stop working and focus their efforts on how to get more free money. Some African governments have entire committees devoted to getting more U.S. foreign aid while their infastructure crumbles and their people starve.

In a way then, Leftities are right. America is the cause of all the problems in the world. By giving out to many free handouts to people that odnt need and and shouldnt get it. We've turned the world into a welfare state ripe for a China to pick clean over the next century.