The debate about how to combat poverty in the developing world has been fueled in the last couple of years by two New Yorkers. On one side of the argument is Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and author of “The End of Poverty.” On the other is Professor William Easterly of New York University and author of “The White Man’s Burden.” Both are excellent, well-researched books that should be by your bedside.
Into this debate, there now enters another white man, Paul Collier of Oxford University and author of “The Bottom Billion.” If Sachs’s book appears too optimistic and Easterly’s too pessimistic, then Collier’s book does an excellent job of capturing the middle ground. Its analysis of the causes of poverty is compelling and the remedies it offers are more reasonable.
Collier argues that with the phenomenal growth in Asia, the world will soon consist of a top one-sixth (one billion) of rich people, a middle two-thirds (four billion) who are O.K., and another one-sixth (one billion) who will be poor. Collier refers to the bottom one billion as people living in “trapped countries, clearly heading toward what might be described as a black hole.”
He suggests that there are four traps into which really poor countries tend to fall: internal conflict or civil war, possession of natural resources, landlocked with bad neighbor, and bad governance.
It’s the second trap that provides the motivation for this article. Collier is the one who first came up with the phrase “diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend.” A substantial part of his book concerns itself with this “resource curse.” As he sees it, the real problem about being a poor country with mineral wealth, like Nigeria, is that “resource rents make democracy malfunction”; they give rise to “a new law of the jungle . . . the survival of the fattest.”
In resource-rich countries there is little pressure for government accountability, and hence fewer checks and balances.
Looking back at the last eight years, it seems like the U.S has had fewer checks and balances and almost no government accountability. Halliburton and a few select owners of “resource diamonds” have become “fat” and while democracy is not malfunctioning I am not sure whether it has functioned the way the Founding Fathers intended it to.
Regardless of your views on the candidates running for the Democratic Presidential nomination and their fairly contentious campaigns, you should NOT make the mistake of continuing the present “guerrilla leadership” under John McCain. If you do so, then we may find ourselves headed toward the same poverty black hole like many other bottom billion nations.
