Economic Geographies

A friend recently asked me for a list of interesting books on development, and I thought I’d share the results here.  I read almost randomly in the field when I was still trying to narrow my initial broad interest in development down into something of which a career could be made, and the books below generally struck me as the most interesting, accessible, and generally well-supported introductions to their respective subject areas that I came across.  (I haven’t read some of these in years, but in retrospect I think they’d all stand up decently to a reader with greater existing knowledge of development.)  In roughly descending order of intellectual impact upon me:

1. Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, is one of the best books I’ve read on the general concept of “development.”  It addresses a number of common critiques, and creates a strong philosophical framework to support the argument that “development” is still necessary.
2. Portfolios of the Poor is my favorite book of 2009 – an incredibly thoroughly-researched look into what poor people do with their money.  I don’t remember learning more from a single book, well, probably ever.
3. Understanding Poverty is a great introduction to a huge range of issues in development, from food security to education to microfinance.  It’s written by a group of leading development economists, often from a behavioral perspective, and the thought contained here is both wide-ranging and rigorous.
4. This is a bit quirky compared to the other recommendations, but I very much liked Expectations of Modernity, an ethnography of Zambian copper miners in the ’70s and ’80s.  The description probably sounds boring, but it’s actually a great critique of the idea that people from the developing world who act in “Western” styles are blindly mimicking the West, instead of consciously bringing elements of Western culture into their lives in ways that reflect their own social & economic interests.  It basically lays out a strong case for relativistic understandings of culture, which I find hugely important for any development worker, without framing it with that potentially off-putting phrase.
5. The Bottom Billion has held up better in retrospect than its two better-known contemporaries, The End of Poverty and The White Man’s Burden, at least in my recollection.  In a foreshadowing of my current interests, I liked its focus on research methodology in macroeconomics (i.e. where all that data underlying cross-country regressions comes from), and its quantitative look at the connections between war, governance and poverty.  (Edit: David Roodman points out his own and Easterly’s critiques of Collier for data mining in Wars, Guns and Votes, and believes that they’re applicable to The Bottom Billion as well.  I’d suggest enjoying the intellectual curiosity of Collier’s research, but taking his statistical results with a grain of salt.)
6. I can’t offer too much on the subject of public health, but I did greatly enjoy The Wisdom of Whores, which is an engaging book about health systems responses to HIV from the ’80s onwards, told by an irreverent epidemiologist with whom I would very much like to have a drink one day.  It’s also a great critical look at where public health data comes from, how it’s used, and to some degree why governments and international organizations choose the health priorities that they do.
7. Making Globalization Work is something I recalled as insightful on the topics of global financial institutions, markets and trade at the time I read it.
8. I’ve been trying to find a good overview of the World Bank that I read for a geography class a few years ago, and while I’m not sure that I’ve identified it, The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity looks like it covers similar subject matter. I found tracing the Bank’s historical evolution quite interesting, as it also captures the variety of Western thought on “development” that’s occurred over the past 50 years, and explains quite a lot as well about current bilateral and multilateral aid regimes.

Tell me, dear readers, what else would you recommend for the interested lay reader?

A bit of a rant, so feel free to find the egress if that’s not what you’re here for. But: beyond the standard stereotypes (either “savage tribal wars” or “happy villagers living in harmony with nature”), there are several slightly more complex cliches about Africa that make me want to grind my teeth. In fact, one could create a taxonomy of the African Cliche (genus Africanus) as follows:

• Africanus stereotypicus: The most common type of cliche, the Africanus stereotypicus typicus feeds off of broad generalizations of African history. It is characterized by its Manichean coloring, varying between the black of moral depravity and ancient ethnic hatreds, and the snowy white of peaceful farmers who live “as nature intended.”  Other subspecies include the Africanus stereotypicus puerilis, known for its grating proclamations that Africans are too childlike to make decisions about their own lives, and the Africanus stereotypicus type-419, which exhibits severe distrust of Africans in the belief that they are all corrupt, dishonest, and/or Nigerian scam artists.

• Africanus journalisticus: Cliches of the the journalisticus group are most often found lurking in the mediocre Africa coverage of otherwise well-respected news publications.  The Africanus journalisticus natura is frequently sighted in Madagascar, where international coverage of recent coup attempts uniformly begins with glowing descriptions of the country’s vibrant plant and animal life, in the belief that they must suck readers in with images of lush vegetation before seguing into actual African politics.  The Africanus journalisticus spillover, on the other hand, is more often found in Congo and Somalia, where articles on the real suffering of millions of human beings justify the space they take up in Western newspapers either by A) referring to the current conflict as the spillover of a more interesting conflict (e.g. the Rwandese genocide), or B) explaining that the conflict is important because it could create terrorist threats that might spill over into the readers’ comfortable lives.  A final subspecies, the Africanus journalisticus darfurensis, has seen a dramatic fall in its numbers after the population explosion of 2003-2004.  However, the darfurensis still retains its unique ability to reduce the interwoven political, economic, environmental, and social roots of the genocide in Darfur into a simple morality tale of evil Arabs and innocent Africans.

• Africanus occidentalis: This cliche is at home in a broad variety of habitats, be it among development practitioners or wide-eyed teenagers visiting Africa for the first time.  It can be distinguished by its prominent belief that concerted Western action can solve all of Africa’s problems.  The Africanus occidentalis studentia lives a peaceful life in the dorm rooms of university students, who often react to its presence by talking at length about the spiritual connection and cultural vitality that they experienced while visiting one country in a very large continent for two weeks last summer.  (The tragedy of receiving a university education whilst children in Africa are dying is an alternate topic, although this should not be confused with actual discussions of Rawlsian justice.)  The Africanus occidentalis interventionis, on the other hand, prefers to settle among career development workers who really should know better.  These include advocates of poorly thought-out boycotts that don’t address the roots of the labor issue in question, World Bank officials who support oil pipelines in Chad, and bloggers who duly repeat that the West must pay more attention to Africa’s suffering, as though the Western gaze has always been the missing ingredient for African development.

• Africanus impecunius: The Africanus impecunius is a specialized breed, whose natural habitats include NGO websites, blogs written by economics professors, and the Twitter streams of thousands of people with a passing interest in African poverty.  Many subspecies in the impecunius group appear outwardly similar, but the practiced African Cliche-ist can easily spot their differences.  For instance, the Africanus impecunius donatio is usually spotted at fundraisers in major Western cities, wooing potential donors with pictures of malnourished African children and practicing its “you have the power to save a life” call.  The donatio’s primary competitor is the Africanus impecunius entrepreneurius.  The entrepreneurius prefers a stealth attack, often sneaking up behind the donatio at conferences and beating it over the head with large sets of panel data on import substitution policies.  (Meanwhile, the Africanus impecunius polisci avoids these territorial clashes in favor of migrating from think tank to think tank, seeking a credible way to actually implement all of its theoretical insights about the importance of good governance.)

Ok, taxonomic rant finished.  (Although I guess the entrepreneurius and the polisci are more stock characters than cliches.)  The common thread among many of these tropes is my impatience with people who don’t make an effort to move past their Western points of reference when studying/discussing/visiting/speaking with/working with Africans.  And I am saying “Africans” and not “Africa” very intentionally.  There’s a large lexical difference between thinking of a place primarily in terms of the people who live there, and thinking of it almost as an anthropomorphized piece of suffering land.  Consider sentences like, “Africa is unlikely to achieve the MDGs,” or “Africa suffers disproportionately from AIDS.”  They don’t make any sense unless one interpolates some people in there to do the suffering, but this type of statement – endowing the continent as a whole with sentience and linguistically skipping over the people who actually live there – is usually taken at face value.

Anyway, I mention the perils of not questioning Western frames of reference not because I believe Western capitalist culture is evil, but because it’s at the least misguided and at the most dangerous to view everything in the world through the lenses of one’s own national affiliation.  Misguided is assuming that Western actions are the only important actions in the world, as though non-Western political leaders or private individuals can’t impact a situation as well.  (C.f. the movement for American companies to boycott Congolese minerals, which I guarantee will accomplish nothing besides making a bunch of Chinese manufacturers happy about their increased access to the mines.)  Dangerous is failing to move beyond assumptions in situations where one’s actions actually may have a large impact – and where one is working in the midst of great power disparities to boot.  (C.f. the assumption that structural adjustment would provide sufficient trickle-down benefits for the poor to counterbalance the loss of government-funded social services in the short run.)  The fact that cross-cultural work is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. But cross-cultural work in the face of extremely uneven power relations demands that one actually take the time to thoroughly learn the environment in which and the demands of the people with whom one will be working, instead of resting on cliches.

When I was researching microinsurance and maternal mortality last year, I was struck by some of the observations that other researchers felt it necessary to include in their results.  One of them was the finding that distance to a health center affects people’s access to care.  In other news, water quenches thirst!  I had to wonder if this was a relic of the general lack of forethought that must be put into procuring transport in the global North, where it’s more or less equally simple to reach a doctor one kilometer from one’s home as thirty kilometers.  I otherwise fail to see how it’s notable that people who live farther from a clinic may use it less often.

This does highlight the fact that there are fundamental issues of healthcare access that aren’t purely microeconomic in nature.  Distance is one, but the challenge of retaining skilled doctors in a low-wage environment is a second, and difficulties in obtaining and maintaining quality equipment and medication stocks (non-counterfeit medications!) are a third.  The attitudes of healthcare workers also appeared extremely important to low-income patients, who seemed understandably sensitive about their social status, and hesitant to use centers where they would be treated disrespectfully because of their poverty.

The other thing I’ve been thinking of, however, was a little-discussed (at least in the papers that I read) corollary to the observations that microinsurance increases healthcare access, and health centers are favorably inclined towards patients who can actually pay for their care. My immediate concern upon reading these statements was, if access to microinsurance is still uneven, isn’t there a real possibility that patients who are even slightly better off will crowd out those who are too poor to afford $2-a-year insurance at all? If the resource base of health centers is fixed (and it may not be – I don’t have info on that), dramatic increases in patients covered by microinsurance could very well make the poorest of the poor even more vulnerable. I wonder how you’d best be able to test that.  I imagine you’d have to look at the effects of a growing resource base (if the increased payments are used at the local level) or the improved quality of care referenced in the last post, and sort out what effects those have on the healthcare uptake rates of the poorest.  Perhaps the question actually is, does extending microinsurance to some harm the uninsured by crowding them out, or does it improve their situation by letting them get a bit of a free ride on some improvements brought about by the insurance payments?  Interesting.