Klein's Shock Doctrine

[Surferbeetle]

Humanitarian aid is important and necessary. It can alleviate the worst effects of poverty, but it does not eliminate or even reduce poverty. If you give a poor community a water system, they will have water and be healthier, but they will still be poor, and they will probably depend on you to come back and maintain that water system.

If you want a poor community to stop being poor, you have to create sustainable employment. That means somebody has to invest money in producing and/or distributing goods and services that can be profitably sold in a free market - if the production is not profitable or requires external subsidy, it's not sustainable. Once a community has jobs and income, they can build their own water system, buy their own mosquito nets, etc, etc...

As a person who has worked in Central America and Iraq these are topics that I wrestle with. What's appropriate, acceptable, sustainable, and will be perceived as a hand up as opposed to hand out given the time and resource limitations that I am working under? How do I apply my language/cultural, biology, civil engineering, and business administration skills to produce sustainable quantifiable change?

Loss of the Cold-War construct has allowed for rapid observable changes in international affairs. Although they are only analogies, and many caveats of course apply, I find it helpful to use the concepts of ecological succession and geomorphology when considering the why's of what is occurring.

I find China's approach to international development and other things pretty fascinating. It's an interesting study to compare their methodologies with ours. When I do this I keep in mind that the 2009 Economist's Pocket World in Figures reports China's GDP at $2,645 bn and the US at $13,164bn.

Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Central Europe, and Central Asia are on my radar screen as places of rapid change where the application of various international development strategies are particularly visible. Tom Odum used the phrase Gunpowder or Gold the other day, and it's one that captures neatly the approaches on display.

On the other hand, almost no one--not even in the World Bank or IMF—believes that unrestricted free markets are a good thing, or that you can get equitable and sustainable growth without effective state institutions to provide an enabling environment (rule of law, anti-corruption measures, security, critical infrastructure, education, health, social safety nets, environmental regulation, enforcement of labour standards, etc). It is also important that stakeholder consultation be done properly, ideally through a political system that is responsive to the needs of all affected groups, not just those with money.

The World Bank in particular has made major adjustments in the way it works, partly because of external and internal criticism, and partly out of learning from experience. The IMF remains more of a bastion of narrow classical economics, but critics miss the point that it should be—it is an institution that is all about promoting fiscal solvency. In doing so it provides a useful reminder of the dangers of unsustainable state expenditure. Think of the IMF as your parents: No, they weren't always right, and certainly not very cool, but in retrospect aren't you glad they lectured/reminded/nagged you at times?

Sadly, it was the case that some of the initial US development personnel in Iraq—political appointees or recent hires in most cases, not career USAID folks— were ideologically blinkered neoliberal/neocons, who treated it as a bit of a sandbox for ideas about radical privatization. Almost none of this worked out very well, and much of it was later abandoned or revised.

The IMF provides interesting datapoints and can be commended for many things but its relevance/authority/direction is being challenged. This is not necessarily a knock, but if you are up for sharing references, as always, they would be greatly appreciated.