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May 17, 2005
MAKING POVERTY HISTORY, OR JUST MAKING POVERTY? PART I; ARGH
Few things are as dangerous as the crusades of the good intentioned and clueless. None make this more obvious than the Make Poverty History campaign.
It would be a simpler job to point out the parts of their manifesto which are not, to anyone aware of basic economics and the facts of poverty, egregious errors. I shall not do so, if only because whining is a lot more fun. But I will say that the demand that export subsidies be dropped is a fundamentally good one (see Support Our Non-Farmers). Why? Because export subsidies distort that advantages that third world producers would otherwise have in producing certain kinds of labour-intensive goods. Not only is this wasteful, it deprives them of the ability to accumulate wealth for both immediate needs and future investment.
If the manifesto were left at this, it would earn my whole-hearted endorsement -- but it doesn't, and it won't. The first, most obvious error beyond is the claim that the "best solutions to end poverty...will not always be free trade policies", as if "free trade" were some Voodoo incantation which right-wing occultists invoke to make poverty disappear -- or, indeed, anything less than a thoroughly proven theory. Yet, I challenge them (and will make a donation to an arbitrary left-wing cause if they succeed) to name a single example of a country that has been harmed by free trade undistorted by export subsidies. It would likely be accurate to say that no country in recent history has ever pulled itself out of poverty without lowering trade barriers. There are numerous, almost countless examples of free trade being beneficial and trade barriers being harmful to poor countries.
Of course, I could be wrong, and the Make Poverty History campaign may well have evidence to refute the centuries of economic research that has proven free trade to be beneficial. If they have, they're not going to any efforts to show it to the public.
What about the assertion that:
[P]overty eradication, human rights and environmental protection come a poor second to the goal of "eliminating trade barriers".
This would suggest that lowering trade barriers is orthoonal, if not antithetical, to the other three goals. But the other possibility, one supported by evidence, is that free trade goes some way to achieving the other three. That free trade makes all participants richer -- i.e. alleviates poverty -- was once accurately described as the only proposition in all the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial. But it has also been shown that richer countries have cleaner environments and more environmental regulations than poorer ones. Likewise, richer countries have far higher standards of human rights than poorer ones do -- and the correlation is strong enough to suggest causation. If facts are any guid, the way to reduce poverty, improve human rights, and clean up the environment is to allow countries to get richer. Little is more detrimental to this goal than barriers to free trade.
That is, of course, if facts are any guide -- and rational debate rooted in facts is usually the first casualty of the crusades of the noble-sounding.
In part II, dropping the debt and international aid. Stay tuned.
ARGH: Arrrrgggh. My scanner still hasn't come yet. If the time the same company took to deliver the new TV is any guide, I expect it some time after Jesus returns to earth. :/
Posted by Lewis at May 17, 2005 10:43 PM