The bottom billion
"In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world. Collier identifies and explains the four traps that prevent the homelands of the world's billion poorest people from growing and receiving the benefits of globalization - civil war, the discovery and export of natural resources in otherwise unstable economies, being landlocked and therefore unable to participate in the global economy without great cost, and finally, ineffective governance. As he demonstrates that these billion people are quite likely in danger of being irretrievably left behind, Collier argues that we cannot take a "headless heart" approach to these seemingly intractable problems; rather, that we must harness our despair and our moral outrage at these inequities to a reasoned and thorough understanding of the complex and interconnected problems that the world's poorest people face." -- Publisher's description.
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What Hacker News says
- The Bottom Billion is a good book about the factors that make the poorest regions in the world, of which Sub-Saharan Africa is the largest block.
- Don't just read Moyo.
Read 'Poor Economics' by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Duflo is at MIT and is all about trials to figure out what works with aid.
Read 'The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier who is a development economist at Oxford.
Read 'The Idealist' by Nina Munk which is about how we can say that Geoffrey Sach's millennium village project has failed.
Read 'Africa Rising' by Vijay Mahajan about how many countries in Africa are actually been doing well economically for the first time in decades.
Read 'The White Man's Burden' by Bill Easterly about how he thinks aid has all failed.
The development of the poorest countries is incredibly important. These people all have thought heaps about it and are very serious about wanting to help.
Nobody really knows what the answer is but at least get a picture of the different viewpoints.
- That is simply not true. Charity is not just about throwing money at poor
This is an important and underappreciated point. Ken Stern makes it in his book With Charity For All, which I wrote more about here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/06/02/with-charity-for-all-ken-... . In essence, we spend a lot of money on various charitable efforts without knowing what those efforts are really doing.
Foreign aid is probably the most interesting part. Since 1945, I've seen estimates that say the U.S. and Western Europe have donated in the neighborhood of $1 – $2 trillion (with a "t") dollars to various developing countries. It hasn't done much. Why not?
That's a question that a host of books have attempted to answer (I recommend Dead Aid, The Bottom Billion, and Why Nations Fail to the curious). I don't think we'll ever get a complete answer but we should at least be asking the right questions.
(Relevant observation: I'm a grant writing consultant for nonprofit and public agencies. I see a lot of stuff that makes me. . . very skeptical, let's say. . . of many aid efforts.)
- I'm surprised by the anti-world bank sentiment here. You should read 'The Bottom Billion', which was written by the director of the Development Research Group at the World bank (2003-2008)
- > From the outside it just looks like you guys are resting on a giant warchest with feuding petty fiefdoms while the king is asleep at the throne.
They're probably operating like a third world nation that finds a natural resource like Oil or diamonds or something.
That was google search / ads.
The company now is full of internal corruption which is just the petty fiefdoms all squabbling over the spoils, while the industry is being badly managed.
Lets see if I can find the economics book on that...
The Bottom Billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion
Chapter 3 is on "the natural resources trap"
I haven't read it in over a decade and the analogy may fall apart, particularly when it comes to stuff like trade and currency -- but the problems of governance when a country is overflowing with natural resources is the narrow slice I'm talking about being analogous.
- Just because a business is losing money, doesn't mean it has zero value.
Paul Collier, author of the "Bottom Billion", said poor countries get screwed for their resources because they don't put them up to bid. He even said the British government valued certain frequencies at 2 billion, but they later sold for 20 billion during bidding, so it's better for all governments to auction assets instead of pricing them or giving them away.
