Tim Harford has produced an excellent article on his impressions on Cameroon and why that country remains so desperately poor; what he has to say should prove a real eye-opener to do-gooders who think yet more grants, loan write-offs and aid appeals are the answer to ending poverty in the Third World. Those of us who know that part of the world well and refuse to subscribe to rosy visions of aid-bought uplift aren't the way we are out of hatred for the poor, but due to a cynicism inculcated by a lifetime of experiences of the sort Harford lays out in his article. When you know a society is rotten from top to bottom, no promise of jumbo loan writeoffs or messianism driven by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs will ever convince you that it'll make a damn bit of difference.
If I have one criticism to make of Tim Harford's essay, it is that while he manages to do a marvellous job of describing the systematic nature of Cameroonian corruption and the powerful incentives self-interested political elites have in perpetuating such thievery and misrule, he fails to touch upon the crucial issue which separates such kleptocracies from those countries which manage to make it out of the hole: what is it that the likes of Botswana and Korea have that Cameroon doesn't? Why is it that some countries are able to get leaders who transcend their rational self-interest in stealing and running in order to achieve something for the greater good?
Harford asks, "why can’t the Cameroonian people seem to do anything about it?", but in this very question is the answer to the puzzle: because there is no such thing as "the Cameroonian people", only a wide array of disparate peoples who happen to share a common border. Indeed, Harford hints at this obliquely in describing the "Bakut Mafia" which is supposedly responsible for the despoliation of Cameroon's education system - in countries in which ethnic ties outweigh all other considerations, and in which there are several ethnicities, none absolutely large enough in numbers to dominate the rest, constant fighting for the power of ethnocentric patronage can be taken as a given, and the result is the very instability and short-termism of which individuals like Tim Harford and Mancur Olson write. The sheer extent of Korean group-think and the intensity of the country's nationalism can make for an extremely ugly, intolerant, racist and xenophobic society (see my previous post for an illustration), but the upside to this same thinking is that at least a conception of the public good does exist, and rulers like Park Chung Hee can emerge whose tenures accomplish more for those they lord it over than the mass looting of the Mobutu Sese Sekos, Sani Abachas and Ferdinand Marcoses of this world.
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