THE BOTTOM BILLION
Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
By Paul Collier.

205 pp. Oxford University Press. $28.

 
By NIALL FERGUSON
Published: July 1, 2007
It is perhaps a sign of how far sub-Saharan Africa still has to go that the most vigorous — and certainly the best publicized — debate about its economic future in recent years has been between two American economists based in New York. On one side of the argument is Jeffrey D. Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author of “The End of Poverty.” On the other is William Easterly of New York University, whose ironically titled “White Man’s Burden” lampoons Sachs as a modern version of a 19th-century utopian.

There is indeed something faintly Victorian about Sachs’s messianic yet parsimonious conviction that Africa can be saved with $75 billion a year in Western aid. Having spent so much of his energies in the 1990s extolling the virtues of the free market to any Eastern European government that would listen, Sachs now argues — with equally unshakable conviction — that the elimination of African poverty can be achieved through state planning. All governments need do is improve agricultural technology, provide antimalaria bed nets, treat diseases like hookworm and distribute antiretroviral treatments to the H.I.V.-infected.

At times, he is rather reminiscent of Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby in “Bleak House,” “a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who ... has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives.” In Easterly’s opinion, the present generation of white philanthropists is no more likely than earlier ones to succeed in a self-appointed (and at times unwittingly imperial) mission of enlightening the Dark Continent.

Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa: Paul Collier, the director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. A former World Bank economist like Easterly, Collier shares his onetime colleague’s aversion to what he calls the “headless heart” syndrome — meaning the tendency of people in rich countries to approach Africa’s problems with more emotion than empirical evidence. It was Collier who pointed out that nearly two-fifths of Africa’s private wealth is held abroad, much of it in Swiss bank accounts. It was he who exposed the British charity Christian Aid for commissioning dubious Marxist research on free trade. And it was he who pioneered a new and unsentimental approach to the study of civil wars, demonstrating that most rebels in sub-Saharan Africa are not heroic freedom fighters but self-interested brigands.

Collier is certainly much closer to Easterly on the question of aid. (He cites a recent survey that tracked money released by the Chad Ministry of Finance to help rural health clinics. Less than 1 percent reached the clinics.) Yet “The Bottom Billion” proves to be a far more constructive work than “The White Man’s Burden.” Like Sachs, Collier believes rich countries really can do something for Africa. But it involves more — much more — than handouts.

Collier’s title refers to the 980 million people living in what he calls “trapped countries,” those that are “clearly heading toward what might be described as a black hole.” Not all these people are Africans. Some live in Bolivia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, North Korea and Yemen. But 70 percent of the bottom billion live in Africa, and there is good reason to expect that proportion to rise.

The notion of the bottom billion matters because most of today’s development strategies (for example, the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals) focus much less discriminatingly on all developing economies — what used to be called “the third world.” But the world is no longer (as it used to be) one-sixth rich and five-sixths poor. Thanks to explosive growth in Asia, it will soon be more like one-sixth rich, two-thirds O.K. and one-sixth poor. It is this last group, according to Collier, that we need to worry about. Average life expectancy for the bottom billion is just 50 years. Around one in seven children dies before the age of 5.

Collier’s is a better book than either Sachs’s or Easterly’s for two reasons. First, its analysis of the causes of poverty is more convincing. Second, its remedies are more plausible.

There are, he suggests, four traps into which really poor countries tend to fall. The first is civil war. Nearly three-quarters of the people in the bottom billion, Collier points out, have recently been through, or are still in the midst of, a civil war. Such wars usually drag on for years and have economically disastrous consequences. Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo) would need 50 years of peace at its present growth rate to get back to the income level it had in 1960. Unfortunately, there is a vicious circle, because the poorer a country becomes, the more likely it is to succumb to civil war (“halve the ... income of the country and you double the risk of civil war” is a characteristic Collier formulation). And once you’ve had one civil war, you’re likely to have more: “Half of all civil wars are postconflict relapses.”

Why, aside from their poverty, have so many sub-Saharan countries become mired in internal conflict? Collier has spent years trying to answer this question, and his conclusions are central to this book. Civil war, it turns out, has nothing much to do with the legacy of colonialism, or income inequality, or the political repression of minorities. Three things turn out to increase the risk of conflict: a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men; an imbalance between ethnic groups, with one tending to outnumber the rest; and a supply of natural resources like diamonds or oil, which simultaneously encourages and helps to finance rebellion.

It was in fact Collier who first came up with the line “diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend,” and a substantial part of this book concerns itself with what economists like to call the “resource curse,” his No. 2 trap. As he sees it, the real problem about being a poor country with mineral wealth, like Nigeria, is that “resource rents make democracy malfunction”; they give rise to “a new law of the jungle of electoral competition ... the survival of the fattest.” Resource-rich countries don’t need to levy taxes, so there is little pressure for government accountability, and hence fewer checks and balances.

Countries don’t get to choose their resource endowment, of course; nor do they get to choose their location. Trap No. 3 is that landlocked countries are economically handicapped, because they are dependent on their neighbors’ transportation systems if they want to trade. Yet this is a minor handicap compared with Trap No. 4: bad governance. Collier has no time for those who still seek to blame Africa’s problems on European imperialists. As he puts it bluntly: “President Robert Mugabe must take responsibility for the economic collapse in Zimbabwe since 1998, culminating in inflation of over 1,000 percent a year.”

If these four things are the main causes of extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere, what can the rich countries do? Clearly we can’t relocate Chad or rid Nigeria of its oil fields. Nor, Collier argues, can we rely on our standard remedies of aid or trade, without significant modifications. As a general rule, aid tends to retard the growth of the labor-intensive export industries that are a poor country’s most effective engine of growth. And much aid gets diverted into military spending. As for emergency relief, all too often it arrives in the wrong quantity at the wrong time, flooding into postconflict zones when no adequate channels exist to allocate it.

Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa’s lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Once manufacturing activity started to relocate to Asia, African economies simply got left behind. Now, to stand any chance of survival, African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. So long as rich countries retain tariffs to shelter their own manufacturers from cut-price Asian imports, they should exempt products from bottom billion countries.

This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier’s prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.

At a time when the idea of humanitarian intervention is selling at a considerable discount, this is a vital insight. (One recent finding by Collier and his associates, not reproduced here, is that until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than other comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French effectively gave informal security guarantees to postindependence governments.) Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide.

Still, it would be wrong to portray Collier as a proponent of gunboat development. In the end, he pins more hope on the growth of international law than on global policing. Perhaps the best help we can offer the bottom billion, he suggests, comes in the form of laws and charters: laws requiring Western banks to report deposits by kleptocrats, for example, or charters to regulate the exploitation of natural resources, to uphold media freedom and to prevent fiscal fraud. We may not be able to force corrupt governments to sign such conventions. But simply by creating them we give reformers in Africa some extra leverage.

Although it stands on a foundation of painstaking quantitative research, “The Bottom Billion” is an elegant edifice: admirably succinct and pithily written. Few economists today can match Collier when it comes to one-liners. “A flagrant grievance is to a rebel movement what an image is to a business.” Calling the present trade negotiations a “development round” is like calling “tomorrow’s trading on eBay a ‘development round.’ ” And “If Iraq is allowed to become another Somalia, with the cry ‘Never intervene,’ the consequences will be as bad as Rwanda.”

If Sachs seems too saintly and Easterly too cynical, then Collier is the authentic old Africa hand: he knows the terrain and has a keen ear. They know it’s garbage, one aid official told him when he queried Christian Aid’s research, “but it sells the T-shirts.”

As Collier rightly says, it is time to dispense with the false dichotomies that bedevil the current debate on Africa: “ ‘Globalization will fix it’ versus ‘They need more protection,’ ‘They need more money’ versus ‘Aid feeds corruption,’ ‘They need democracy’ versus ‘They’re locked in ethnic hatreds,’ ‘Go back to empire’ versus ‘Respect their sovereignty,’ ‘Support their armed struggles’ versus ‘Prop up our allies.’ ” If you’ve ever found yourself on one side or the other of those arguments — and who hasn’t? — then you simply must read this book.

 

Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard University and the author of “Empire: The Rise and Fall of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.”

看到电视里在搞“赛诗会”，令人哑然。不过既然节目放在娱乐频道，其本身宗旨也只娱乐而已。
若是说到诗歌作为娱乐，则不独今日电视频道里轰轰烈烈的节目可作如是观。前日读到杂文家伍立杨的文章，记录郭沫若老的轶事一则。据说在“1921年4月，郭沫若赴杭州游览，在郊区见一锄地老农，诗兴大发，”，写道：

这样的诗令人愕然，狂笑，继而无语。关于诗歌的争论去年已经很热闹，不想置评。我只是觉得对诗歌分类最本质的标准仍然在于：好的和不好的。好诗未必处处完美，然而必然有些地方不是俗笔，于沉静处展示它的力量。比如同样是前日在《九叶集》（大概有两、三年没有翻开这本书了！）中读到的杜运燮的《夜》，最后二段如下：

 

这两段让我想起奥登的《夜行记》，洗练、俏皮又带点淡淡的忧愁。彼时奥登好似还没写出《夜行记》，或者奥登懂中文，也会写出类似灵秀的句子吧！

明天仍然接着去教堂的干活。顺便去“逸夫舞台”买戏票。

演出时间：6月22日 夜场19：15
《失子惊疯》 韩宜珈 付亚维
《走麦城》奚中路 陈麟 杨东虎 李建普 徐建忠 任广平 洪小鹏 虞伟 粱国辉 王易山等

 

演出时间：6月23日 日场13：30
《打焦赞》 冯蕴 刘大可 周春光 仇一品

《上天台 打金砖》傅希如 高明博 任广平 郭睿玥 陈宇 刘长江 王世杰等

 
演出时间：6月24日 日场13：30
上海青年京昆剧团 上海戏剧学院戏曲学院演出

京剧旦角流派专场 传统折子戏

《昭君出塞》石晓珺
《状元媒》 蔡筱滢
《红娘》（佳期 拷红）杨扬
《锁麟囊》（珠楼）隋晓庆
《霸王别姬》 田慧、奚中路（特邀）

 

 
演出时间：6月29日 夜场19:15
"菊坛名角、走马换将"
-天津京剧院·上海京剧院联合演出

京剧《卧虎沟》陈 麟 杨一驹
京剧《大保国·探皇陵·二进宫》李经文 康万生 吴 凡

6月7号。破口大骂。

现在的高考作文题给我的感觉是：这是由一帮太监出的题，目的是把下一代培养成没有逻辑、没有个性、没有修养、没有独立思考精神的废物、庸才。或许把所有的错归于高考有失公允――掉价的高考题只是掉价的现行教育制度的一部分――这种教育制度的罪恶不说也罢。让人抓狂的考题并不是残害青少年的元凶，我们甚至于可以想象，在这样的制度下生长出来的学生只能更适合于这样的考题――这些鼓励学生把精力才智花费在既无内容又没有逻辑性，远离社会民生，缺乏思辩又俗不可耐，只能充满了空话、套话和废话的矫揉造作的话题上。这样的高考作文题，显而易见是对中华民族未来智识的犯罪。并且同样显而易见，命题人自己也是受害者。

 

一句话简评部分考题：

全国卷Ⅱ(贵州等省)高考作文题为：材料作文关于“帮助”。

　　材料：

　　一、著名歌手丛飞节衣缩食，为一贫困企业捐款300万，但当他生病后，该厂员工竟无一人探望，其中一名受助者还说：“这让丛飞很没面子”，丛飞很伤心，但他说：“我现在已经无需钱来治疗了。”

　　二、华南农大学生小李通过卖废品捐款给一所希望小学，但不久他被查出来患白血病，该校师生纷纷捐款，其中一位四年级女孩捐了十元，当被问到为什么把自己的压岁钱都捐出来的时候，这位小女孩说，我们要记得李姐姐说的话：“要学会帮助那些需要帮助的人，要帮助别人。

根据以上材料自命题作文，体裁不限。

 

评：体裁不限，观点却已明了，这样的“话语捐税”还要横行几时？

 

北京地区：“细雨湿衣看不见，闲花落地听无声”是唐朝诗人刘长卿在《别严士元》中的诗句。

 

曾经有人这样理解这句诗：1、这是歌颂春天的美好意境。2、闲花、细雨表达了不为人知的寂寞。3、看不见、听不见不等于无所作为，是一种恬淡的处世之道。4、这种意境已经不适合当今的世界……根据你的看法写一篇作文。题目自拟，体裁不限。字数800以上。

 

评：“曾经有人”就是命题人自己，实在算不上“高明”的理解。

 

上海地区高考作文题为：“必须跨过这道坎”。(70分)

 

　　以“必须跨过这道坎”为题，写一篇文章。

 

要求(1)不少于800字。(2)不要写成诗歌。(3)不得透露个人相关信息。

 

评：除了忍受命题人的愚蠢，看来没有更大的坎需要学生跨过；但不管怎么说，总算是比“厄要握住你的手”强了些。

 

2007年江苏地区高考作文题为：

　　人人头顶一方天。每个人的生活都与天空紧密相连，每个人的心中都有一片天。明净的天空，辽阔的天空，深邃的天空，引人遐思，令人神望。

请以“怀想天空”为题写一篇不少于800字的文章，立意自定，除诗歌外，文体不限。

评：看到“令人神往”，我想，若我是考生，除了在心里骂一百遍那四个字母组成的单词外不做他想：凭什么让考生跟着你一起发春？

 

 

　2007年山东地区高考作文题为：请以“时间不会使记忆风化”为题写800字文章，自拟题目，自选主题自选文体，文体特征明显。

评：这道题的毛病在于1，在一个无关痛痒的所谓主题上给出了斩钉截铁的结论；2，“记忆风化”属于典型三流小资读物的用语习惯，严格地说是用语不当。 

 

 

我的高考题：

要出一道看上去不那么愚蠢的高考作文题，真的有那么难吗？

假设，我是高考作文的命题人，我会考虑出类似下面的考题，当然这样的题目是不可能获得通过的：

 

作文题：800字左右，在以下三题中选作一题，若选作两题或以上者以质量（分数）较高的一篇计分。

 

1，“论勇敢”――《荀子·荣辱》篇中说，“有狗彘之勇者，有贾盗之勇者，有小人之勇者，有士君子之勇者。”请结合现实谈谈：勇敢在我们的时代是否仍然是一种美德，什么样的勇敢是现时代需要的？

 

2，科学和技术的进步是否提升了人类的幸福感？

 

3，在边远的少数族群聚居区，促进当地经济发展和保护文化多样性，二者孰为重要？

 

 

作文题二：800字左右，在以下三题中选作一题，若选作两题或以上者以质量（分数）较高的一篇计分。

 

1，政府应当致力于改善弱势群体的生活条件，还是创造出更多机会，使他们凭借自身的努力改善其处境？

 

2，教育的第一要务是探求知识，还是追寻美德？

 

3，在“全球化”的今天，传统伦理观念的地位是否正在被一种更普遍的道德所取代？

在一些实证政治学模型中，政治人物的目标常常被假定为最大化选票的数量或者当选的几率。然而在现实中，也不乏坚持原则立场，甚至输掉选举也在所不惜的理想主义者。能够在灵活性和原则之间取得一种平衡，可能是衡量一流政治人物的基本要件之一？然而，在二者不可兼得时，我们是宁可看到理想主义者的失败，而不要犬儒主义者的胜利。至少这是我个人的偏好。

在昨天《时代》周刊对John McCain的访问中，他承认说对移民法案的支持可能对他在政治上的打击：

that his support of the bill, which is backed by President Bush, has hurt him with the Republican base and could end his quest for the nomination. But he told TIME: "It would be worth it, because it's a matter of national security, it's a matter of economic security, and it's a matter of what kind of nation we are."

McCain做的不符合“理性人”假设的事情还有：牵头通过Campaign Finance Reform 法案，在国内对伊战民怨重重之际站在布什一边，等等等。

在接受胡佛研究所Peter Robinson的访问时，McCain承认自己的偶像是老罗斯福，一个不合时宜的理想主义者，美国历史上最伟大的总统之一。问题是，现代民主能够再贡献一个老罗斯福吗？

 

Youtube上共和党总统候选人关于移民问题的辩论。

 

“鼎鼎大名”的沙袋教授和杜维明教授在复旦的公开演讲已经快2周了，趁着对讲座内容还有一点印象，赶快涂两笔。

沙袋是哈佛的明星教授，公共知识分子，在中国常被人文知识分子挂在嘴上的政治哲学家。很奇怪，我的一个美国朋友，她本人来自于常春藤大学的政治学博士候选人，不知道沙袋，问我“他是谁啊？”知识分子在美国公众舆论的影响力和影响方式和我们的认知有距离。不管怎么说，这个情况对于强调伦理观的可辩论性和公共参与的沙袋教授来说，算是个遗憾。

再说两句八卦的：

1，时过境迁，现在学生的环境和“眼界”可能真的不一样。我本科的时候，杜维明教授在相辉堂的讲座，听众“满坑满谷”；王元化先生在五教的讲座，走廊上坐满人；李政道教授老逸夫楼讲座，需一大早去排队抢座……而这次新逸夫楼不大的场子，开场前十分钟也不过六七成人。

2，沙袋的气质不错，到底是有哈佛的大家风范。让我稍感到意外的是他说话的语速比较慢，没有东海岸知识精英常见的那种咄咄逼人，倒像是刚从加州海滩上晒够了太阳，懒洋洋，暖洋洋的。（这是不是使人在半途想打瞌睡的重要原因？）

 

因为是对话，不是正规讲座，话题也比较发散。现在记得已经不像两个礼拜以前那么清除，大概有这么些观点吧：

1，他和自由主义的分歧并不在于基本价值观。而是，沙袋强调“美德”在现代生活的意义和“权利”、“平等”这些价值相比至少同等重要。

2，也就是说，关于什么是一种好的生活的认识（和实践）本身，至少和保护这种认识的自主性一样重要。

3，政治生活中的公共道德问题的解决，不能够像一些自由主义者那样，通过建构由尽可能一般的，抽象命题的系统来实现。顺便谈到政治和道德分离的问题，批评了罗尔斯和哈贝马斯。

4，强调，解决各种伦理体系的价值分歧，仅有“宽容”不够，仅仅“对话”也不够。需要一种朝向美德的，公共辩论以及通过辩论的相互学习和达成共识。

 

演讲后的提问没什么印象了。我的问题是倒数第二个。问题大概是这样的：解决不同价值观的分歧，这不仅是认识问题，还是实践问题。而在实践中的现状，一是多元，二是不平等的多元。你把公共辩论看作解决分歧的唯一/主要方式，但我们怎么知道这个辩论过程本身是公正的，我们怎么知道舆论不会被操控，公众不被误导，那些被多数派看作异端的少数群体的表达自由不受到威胁？

 

沙袋的回答很长，基本意思是两点。

第一，不能够因为这种既有的误解和不平等而回避参与、对话。实际上最好的解决办法是多沟通，多参与辩论。（这一点我同意）

第二，对舆论的manipulation，很讨厌，很危险，在各国都一样。我们需要靠制度的制约，要有更好的权力制衡，进一步发展公共空间的作用，等等。（这一点本身我是同意的，但在这个地方不切题。回到制度前提不正是某些自由主义政治哲学强调的？）

 

从这个演讲能想到很多东西，以后慢慢再写吧。沙袋强调“美德”和政治的公共性，不过另一种声音倒是一直在为美国公众担心。

刚看到5月31日的Atlantic上Jack Beatty的文章，就反映出这种担忧：

As the "empire of television" has colonized more and more of our waking hours, so has civic ignorance. One survey found that after a recent election only 4% could name both candidates in their congressional district. Only 43% of Americans can name a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2006 poll revealed that "more than a third of the respondents believed the executive branch has the final say on all issues and can override the legislative and judicial branches." If you ask a college student where the line "we hold these truths to be self-evident…" comes from, odds are he or she won’t know. A terrifying 35% of high school students believe the First Amendment "goes too far in the rights it guarantees." Television is not the only cause of civic ignorance, just the greatest one.

看来，在教育Arabians之前，教授们首先要考虑的是怎么教育Anglo-Americans.