Oxford professor of economics or not, former head of the World Bank?s research department or not, hanging Chad crisis or not, one rather suspects Paul Collier would have wanted to shape the G-8 agenda on global deprivation anyway. This is not only because ?poverty? can easily be turned into a hot-button issue, and he?s familiar with Africa, but because warfare is a popular tool of upliftment these days, not least because of the so-called ?conflict trap?, on which Collier is an expert.
The Bottom Billion?s basic point, as the cover imagery so vividly conveys, is that while there are about four billion people in emerging economies ready to join one billion of the world?s rich, another whole billion are stuck in such a rut that they are about to fall off the map. These are ?the bottom billion? of the book?s title, and it is the burden of this phenomenon that motivates the author?s analysis and interventionism.
The professor claims to have done all kinds of statistical research on poverty and its circumstances, and it all adds to his air of academic authority. Shake the book, and a correlation tumbles out. ?There is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war,? he finds, having looked at datasheets for lock-in-step patterns of regression. Causation, of course, is of much too grave a consequence for such honest trifles, so that part comes later ? after Collier has warned (or winked?) how easy it is to squash skews cleverly into larger datafields and slice statistics in select ways to portray the picture you want.
If this book has won some acclaim, it might possibly be because it does not yield space to crude genetic determinism in its study of poverty. What keeps people poor? Other than being conflict ridden, the poverty traps identified by Collier?s research include being landlocked with bad neighbours and being a small country with bad governance. The problem that interests him most, however, is the natural resources trap. Underground endowments of oil reserves, for instance, could turn a country vulnerable to stagnancy on account of the ?Dutch disease?. This happens when vast oil exports keep the dollar?s domestic value so low that no other local industry gets an incentive or chance to sell competitively overseas and ascend the development curve. And if a cartel somehow widens the gap between the costs borne and prices obtained for such resources, the economy is observed to be better served by autocracy than democracy. An autocratic order results in long-horizon investments and plans, while democratic processes typically result in the politics of patronage and redistribution.
Bad news for the prospect of democracy in Iraq, then? Wait, there?s another variable Collier defines and drags onto the scene. Too much ?ethnic diversity?, and autocracy fails the economy. And what, in this context, might too much be? Clues are littered across the text. China, he assesses, is ?homogenous?. Nigeria is not. Nor is Iraq, to his mind, riven the way it is.
This setpiece act is Collier?s Oscar moment, one senses, the point at which his own little labelling is about to lead him into his own little trap. And he doesn?t disappoint. The chivalrous tools he offers to rescue the bottom billion say it all. Aid and trade, a la Bononomics, don?t work. Aid is another variant of the Dutch disease, since the dollar inflows take the local currency?s value too high to let the country export its way out of poverty. Trade won?t help unless the rich grant the poor preferential market access (which he does recommend, by the way, to be fair). There?s also the tool of governance charters, which involves ceding sovereignty to Oxford types who know the propah way to auction oilfields. Finally, there?s military intervention, which to the author is about getting the cost-benefit ratio right, with costs calculated widely enough to include the odd key deserter who refuses to play ball, presumably; by Collier?s arithmetic, the expected value of an ?Iraq turnaround? must be quite high to justify such a big war bill.
It always takes analysis of various kinds to set the stage for an aggressive course of action. The exalted status of economics makes the task easier. Collier describes World War II as an ?avoidable catastrophe?, if only, if only the US and Europe had not fallen for policies of ?isolationism and pacificism?. So, there you have it. Dr Do-good?s labour of logic reaches its terminus thus, with a blare of the bugle.
Maybe there?s another tool he could use, this time to lift himself out of his statistical wire-mesh ? time off for an illusion check. He might discover how a brain can be shrinkwrapped by labels of its own affixing.