Change and The Bottom Billion

For Social Studies this weekend, we were supposed to read the first chapter of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, a book addressing the issue of the poverty of much of the world (link to Wikipedia page). So on Saturday, I sat down to read it. A little while later, I looked up at the clock and realized I had been reading for a few hours. Then I looked at the page number and realized that I had just read more than a third of the book. Of course, I regret none of it; it was obviously very interesting, and I would have had to read it later anyways.

Much of the book, as one might imagine, focuses on African countries, and it identifies several traps that failing countries can get caught in. It struck me how easy the traps were to enter, and how difficult they were to exit. For example, it just takes one person with $10,000 to start a rebellion, but once started, the chances of future conflict increase dramatically. All the while, the country gets poorer. Or more accurately, it sometimes gets poorer and often doesn't change.

And that's the really striking thing about the traps; those horrifying changes in the country's political and economic statuses essentially halt change in incomes. That may not seem like a huge problem until you realize that as the income of the rest of the world is steadily climbing. However, in Africa, that isn't happening because the traps prevent economic growth, and the countries of the bottom billion end up with stagnant economies.

Now that was an interesting concept, at least to me. The worst thing about the changes that these societies face is the lack of change that it engenders. What struck me as worse was that our attempts to fight these changes have, ironically, remained largely static. As Collier discusses, after 9/11 (possibly the most world-changing event thus far in the 21st century), US aid to failing states didn't really change other than increasing by 50%. While this may seem like a major change, it really wasn't, for one major reason: it doesn't work.

We have empirical evidence that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't work. And yet, we still continue to fight our problems in the same way. It's as if we believe that the situation really isn't all that different from what we've faced before, such as with Europe after World War II, and that if we stay the course and don't get tempted to change, we will succeed.

And so, we have an interesting and tragic situation. The countries of the bottom billion, most of which are African, faced changes (namely, decolonization) that led to other changes that ended up creating stagnation. Their response to the change was to largely flounder and keep doing what they were doing.  Over here in the United States, we tried to fight those changes by essentially not changing our plan, but rather, staying the course more strongly than ever.

Both societies didn't know what to do in the face of such changes, and so, they largely decided that the current way was the only way. They resisted changes to their plans of action.

And all the while, the divide between the countries of the bottom billion and the rest of the world only grew -- and grows -- larger.