Metal Reviews

I assume that book is arguing for infrastructure development which is the general response to the failure of direct aid but why would have to cut off aid as we seek to develop their infrastructure? Address the issue but don't leave people starving. This idea of a dependent, entitled mentality is hokey to say the least. I assume that book tackles the political economy which destabilizes the countries, creating the need for aid right? Oh wait I don't think it does after looking it up.

It turns out the author used to work for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. I wonder which route he is going to take. A Neoliberal approach no doubt.

I think I agree with this review I found:

The problem with relying on market mechanisms is that they are fickle. Markets may or may not solve public health problems. That is not what they are designed to do. Their function is to maximize profit and increase market share. To allow the market, which does not take into consideration the well-being of the individuals who it provides for, be our guide in tackling an issues that the lives of countless people and the future of our entire world depends on seems irrational. Problems created by the free market need more free markets to solve the issue.

I'm afraid that might be a misuse of the dialectic declaring necessity after the fact.

Possibly, possibly. I wish David Harvey lived next door so I could go round and bother him whenever I had a question about his book.

I wish I had actually read some of his work that was applicable to this discussion so I wasn't half-blind in this discussion. Can't wait to read some Zizek and Foucault come summer break. Three more days of writing essays and then I'll be cozying up to some good old theory.

She argues for a gradual reduction of direct aid over time, rather than cutting if off completely. At the same time attempting to replace it (amongst other things) with community microcredit, infrastructure development, encouraging individual savings, reducing middlemen fees on diaspora remittances, increasing inter-African trade, reducing Western tariffs on agriculture and encouraging African governments to issue bonds, and start collecting taxes from their rich citizens.



If you mean a dependent, entitled mentality is hokey, then I agree. If you mean that the idea that they possess one is hokey, then I disagree.



She argues aid is a destabilizing force, because it allows corrupt goverments to remain in power. Governments that rely on taxes from their citizenry to exist tend to pay more attention to their citizens interests.



What she argues is that after 60 years of Western effort, it's obvious aid isn't working, and it's time to try a different approach, using financing models which are based on accountability. As it turns out, market based financing models are more accountable than sending aid to a corrupt government.

She argues for some things which based on the pure market, such as tapping the international bond market (something which only a couple of African countries have done in the past few decades). But many other things are just greasing the wheels so the existing market can work.

For example, instead of sending mosquito nets to Africa, buy them from local producers. Reduce the number of steps it takes to get a business license. Pay your civil servants so they don't need to accept bribes. Many of the ideas along these lines borrow heavily from De Soto ("Why Capitalism Works in the West but Not Elsewhere").

However, it may turn out the West never gets their answer, as the Chinese will have developed the continent right under our noses (increasing trade with the Chinese is the subject of an entire chapter).



Markets are fickle, sure. But so are dictators.

And surely the financial crisis of 2008 taught you that nobody completely relies on market mechanisms? We still have that stable force lurking in the background called the government to make sure the system doesn't completely collapse. But we still use the markets to run the economy on a day to day basis because it's more efficient than any other system yet devised.

Haven't read the book so can't address the rest but this I think is completely silly. Her being a member of the World Bank makes her espousing any type of responsibility to the government is laughable as their loan conditions have often stipulated privatization, rending control from the gov't to give it to MNCs.

All the things which you described were supposed to be brought about by IMF and World Bank loans so I'm curious as to why they never happened.

That Mingus fellow was effing crazy!

Another jazz lover on the forums? Or just in it for the crazy?

I cannot say I'm a jazz lover... I like it when it's a little rough around the edges and as far from mainstream as possible while not being free jazz. I sure like Mingus and the crazy doesn't hurt.

room mate went shopping to some American border town (Magellan i think), so i asked her to bring me a few books:
Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid
Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual
Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams

Going away for about a week! Will be reading:

Salman Rushdie- Midnight Children
Donald Kagan- The Archidamian War
Mark Blake- Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd
Gene Wolfe- Pirate Freedom

It's summer time so I picked Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute back up. Arguing for Christianity as a revolutionary ideal is pretty awesome.

After that I'm going to read Living in the End Times by Zizek then going to get into some Raymond Williams and re-read Discipline and Punish by Foucault with a friend.

Finished this. Saddened by the lack of a bombastic ending. Pretty weak compared to the more revolutionary stuff he's been putting out lately.

room mate returned empty-handed (in terms of books, i mean, she did pick up several bags full of clothes).

anyway, Portuguese author José Saramago died today. he won a Nobel Prize in 1998.

i only read one of his books, Intermitências da Morte, or Death at Intervals, and loved it. it's about a country where people suddenly stop dying, and the moral and economic consequences of this. my friend lent me Cain but i forgot it while packing up for the trip to Mexico, facepalm.

he's famous for some pretty imaginative premises, like in (literally translating book titles here) The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, where Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Ricardo Reis lives on a year after the death of Pessoa himself, or Blindness, about a country where everyone suddenly goes blind, or The Stone Raft, where the iberian peninsula breaks apart from continental Europe and drifts like a, er, stone raft; another thing is the writing style, with some very long sentences where he barely uses full stops, and introducing lines of dialogue right in the middle of sentences, with no quote marks or anything.

i'm definitely going to check out more of his work when i get back to Portugal and suggest you do too.

They made a movie based on Blindness?

yeah, if i'm not mistaken directed by the same fellow behind City of God.

Currently reading Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens, and his new memoirs, Hitch-22.

Being a contrarian means just being a whiny bitch doesn't it?

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

And I'm thinking I'm gonna read some of Saramogo's stuff after hearing about it. Sounds very interesting and Borges-esque, just from the premises of the stories, and if it's anything like Borges, I'll enjoy it.

Just finished 'My Lobotomy' by Howard Dully and I am now reading 'Look Me In The Eye (My Life With Asperger's) by John Robison.