The youth hostel dorm in Quetzaltenango was lots of things. It was bustling. It was friendly. It was anarchic. It was communal. A single room, a tin roof, plywood walls and 30 beds in rows, it was home to aged hippies and earnest Spanish students. It was busy, it was transient, it was a good place to meet people. It was not restful. Plastic bags cackled through the night. People stumbled in the dark. Toilets flushed. The French woman three beds down snored like a hibernating bear. After a while I got used to it. The sub-conscious sentinels that keep watch during sleep relaxed a little. Decided that I didn’t need to be woken with every noise. They relaxed but not so much so as to stop me from waking in an instant, when a drunken Dane peed on the floor nearby. The sound was unmistakeable.

“Hey!” I didn’t need to say anything. An outraged American, even closer to the urine stream, was springing to action.
“Huh”
“Not here. The toilet. The toilet.”
“Nuugghhh.”
“THE TOILET”
“Auuggghhh” The weeing stopped and he shambled off.
I pulled my pack up onto my bed and slept next to it for the rest of the night.

The next morning the Danish guy didn’t remember a thing. Drunk. Sleep walking. The urine had already soaked into the floor.

Three months later and a long way further south, in a much smaller room in Puerto Natales, I woke to the same sound. This time there were only four of us. Me, Christine the French Canadian, and Sandra and Eddie, two English travelling companions. We’d just walked round the Torres del Paine. And had celebrated that night by getting pleasantly drunk.

Once again. I didn’t have to say anything. Sandra was closer to the action.
“Eddie? Eddie! Good God Eddie what are you doing?” Sandra, was well heeled, with an accent from an expensive school somewhere. Her tone I thought was just about right for the situation. Eddie, however, was having none of it.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m having a piss.”
His voice had a grumpy certainty to it. Quite convincing, and for a moment, still only half awake I wondered whether peeing on the floor was normal after all. Or, at least, normal where Eddie came from.

He finished his toileting and got back into bed and for a moment there was silence. Sandra was clearly as confused as me. And if Christine was awake she wasn’t saying anything. Maybe it really was normal. Maybe…
“Arrrrgghhhhh!” That was Eddie. “Where are we?”
“The youth hostel in Puerto Natales.” My chance to contribute to the conversation.
“And I was just…”
“Pissing on the floor.” Sandra finished the sentence for Eddie. Sounding rather cross.
“Fuck. I thought we were still on the trail. I was outside the tent. I couldn’t figure out why you were asking.”
“Right.”
Christine began to giggle.
“Maybe,” I wondered aloud, “you might want to mop that up?”

My mental maps from my first years of travel are much like the maps drawn by ancient mariners. Coastlines carefully plotted but with great empty spaces inland (save for the odd dragon or airport or two). If it was more than 50 miles from a surf spot, I wasn’t interested. The temples of Ubud? No thanks. Not while Padang Padang was breaking. Komodo dragons? Just big lizards really and at least two days travel from Lakey Peak. Celtic Castles? If they were on the coast, perhaps.

I arrived in Mexico in this frame of mind. And all went more or less according to plan. Arriving at night, flying over city lights that stretched horizon to horizon, we slept over at the airport. The next morning we used my carefully researched notes to get us to the right bus station on onto a bus to Puerto Escondido. For six weeks we surfed up and down the coast. In the melting heat and thumping marcismo of Puerto Escondido. In the sleepy surf camps in bandito country in Michoacan. In the dilapidated concrete shell hotels of Pascuales. I didn’t go any further inland than Tecoman. That was a trip to the bank.

We did end up, after all that, stuck for couple of days in Mexico City though. It was just the way the bus and plane schedules worked out. The first evening we were wandering round the safe but still hectic Zona Rosa, half-heartedly trying to do something, when the sky began to rain ash on us.

“Yuck”

“Pretty bad smog, aye”

“Yeah, wow what a polluted city.”

Pete scrapped a big glob of the stuff off a car windscreen. “Glad I don’t live here.”

“Yeah. It’s actually pretty hard to breath. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

The next morning skies had cleared. Big billowing clouds puffed and bulged above the horizon but above us it was fine. And the pollution seemed to have gone.

“Let’s do something.” I think it was Bill’s idea. He went and asked at the reception about day trips and they told us to go to Teotihuacan.

“Las Pyramidas”

My Spanish was still pretty bad but it sounded, I told Pete and Bill, “like there might be Pyramids there, or something.”

And so, with misplaced accents and forlorn verbs searching for objects, I navigated us via the metro to the right bus station and on to the ancient city.

We bickered a bit wandering through the tourist stalls. Pete was driving irritating me. I was bugging him. And we were both driving Bill nuts. I’m not sure we really started paying attention until we made it to the top of the, ‘Pyramid of the Moon.’

“These buildings,” a guide explained to some tourists next to us. “We ancient even to the Aztecs. They didn’t know who built them. Their legends had that the pyramids were the creations of an ancient race. Or Gods, perhaps.”

“That Pyramid of the Sun, which we are looking at, is the World’s largest pyramid outside Egypt.”

It was impressive. Hewn geometry. Jabbing into the sky. It shone lazy yellow in the sun. Behind it, the dark clouds billowed, threatening.

“Looks like thunder,” I wondered allowed.

“Thunder?” a German tourist looked at me like I was an imbecile. “That’s the eruption. You know, the Volcano?”

“Volcano?”

“Yes the one that everyone’s talking about. In the news. The ash cloud that smothered the city yesterday?”

“Ash shower? Oh. That ash shower.”

The German gave up on me and I went back to staring over the ruins. The ancient city and monuments, as old as legends, sun-gold against the eruption-dark sky north of us. And I decided that seeing I’d come all this way I should probably take notice of the land as well as the sea. Every once and a while, at least.

90% of love songs suck. Here’s two that don’t.

For what it’s worth, I think Classic Girl works because it’s about actual human experience rather than some sort of idealised form of it. While Ash on the other hand aren’t quite singing about love but instead that giddy feeling of falling into it. Which works just fine amongst the tumbling guitars and space cadet lyrics.

Oh, and, “they may say those were the days; but in a way you know for us these are the days…” has to be one of the happiest lines in pop.

Skydives, sandy drives and the ghost of a seal.

Here’s the story that stemmed from this, and which AA directions published.

Below is the story I would have preferred they published.

And here (at the old blog) is what really happened.

–

Falling for Nelson

One of the best things about backpacking is the lessons you learn, not only about the places you go but also about yourself. There are parts of your personality that you will never meet until you’re stranded in unfamiliar territory – making your way map-less across an unfriendly city, or trying to buy tickets in a train station where you can’t read the place names let alone speak the language. The discoveries you make will stay with you long after Rio is only a faded memory and Xinjiang a stack of photos in the cupboard.

You don’t need to lug your pack to the ends of the Earth to learn these lessons either. All you need is somewhere new. Recently, not far from home at all, travel gifted me just such a moment of self-discovery. I was poised, my feet dangling out the door of a Cessna, four kilometres above Motueka, when I learnt that I was afraid of heights.

Desperately.

Back on the ground skydiving had seemed like a great idea. ‘Why not?’ I thought. Now, as Thomas my tandem partner made the last adjustments to our gear, I had all the answers I needed to that question. We were several hundred feet higher than Mount Cook, for a start. So high that small fluffy clouds grazed like sheep way below us. And, in a few seconds, we would be travelling at over 150 kilometres per hour – straight down.

“Ready?” Thomas’s voice was as sunny as the sky above us.
“Nuuerrk,” I croaked.

With that, he accepted gravity’s invitation on our behalf and we pitched forward into nothing…

My trip to Nelson and Golden Bay hadn’t started this way. Not at all – my first mode of transport was defiantly sedate, a 1952 Bedford school bus, which took me from the airport to the World of Wearable Art and Classic Cars museum.

Why the decision to mix cars and costumes was made I don’t know, but apparently the combination is a winner. “Couples,” our museum guide advised us, “come here all the time. The women come to look at the wearable art, the men the cars. Well at least the men say they come to look at the cars but sometimes they spend more time with the dresses.”

I only had to spend a few moments with the dresses myself to realise that the men who ditched the automobiles were onto something. Woven within the wearable art is a magic of sorts and you don’t need to be interested in fashion to find it. All that is required is an eye for imagination: dreams are spliced to legends, ideas stitched to stories and fables sewn into science fiction.  After an hour at the museum it was easy to understand the tale of Russell Sutherland, the retired mechanic from Invercargill who was so inspired on visiting the museum he entered the awards himself. His design, an incredibly engineered if uncomfortable looking undergarment, won him the Bizarre Bra award for 2006 and second place in the overall event. Not bad for someone who was probably only there to see the cars.

After the museum I exchanged the bus for a car of my own and headed west, over the switchbacks of Takaka Hill and into Golden Bay. By the time I got to Collingwood the wind had gathered grey clouds, folding them over the peaks and valleys of the Kahurangi National Park. I pulled over on the edge of town to consult my directions and found myself next to the war memorial. On impulse I got out and had a look.

The story set in stone was the same in Collingwood as it is in hundreds of other small New Zealand towns: a long list of names; some surnames repeated two, three or four times. Families ended and small towns emptied. With the first footprints of rain falling on the windscreen and now feeling as glum as the thick evening sky I got back in the car and drove off to find the hostel.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the war remained. As we bumped along the track out onto Farewell Spit, Paddy our guide recounted the story of Jack Ashford, the first person to regularly traverse the spit in an automobile. Jack had been gassed at the Battle of Passchendaele, his lungs ruined. After the war, as his breathing got worse, he was told by a doctor that he had three years left to live, maybe a bit more if he got a job that kept him close to the sea. The salt air, the doctor said, might just help. So Jack found himself the one job that guaranteed salt air in abundance: Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper.

Creeping cautiously over the sand in Farewell Spit Eco Tours’s four-wheel drive bus it was hard to imagine how Jack managed the journey with rattling lungs and a rattling 1928 Chevy. But Jack did more than manage. He thrived, living to see his 99th birthday. And, by the time we reached the lighthouse at the end of the sand’s empty curve, I could see how life in one of New Zealand’s loneliest places could be curative. Sitting in the shade amongst the sighing Macrocarpa – watching as clouds, sand and sea blew by – it was impossible to escape the two things that Farewell Spit had in abundance: space and peace. Each, I thought, as good an antidote to the doom of trench warfare as one could hope for.

The last lighthouse keeper left the Spit in 1984. Since then the closest thing to permanent residents to be found on the slender strip of sand are the Gannets who set up a colony on the shell banks beyond the light in 1982. From a handful of pioneer breading pairs the colony has grown to nearly 5,000 birds. It’s New Zealand’s only sea level Gannet colony and a rare example of a native bird reclaiming territory on the mainland, so we kept a respectful distance. Gannets, though, are naturally curious and pretty soon we were treated to an up-close display of aerobatic skill as inquisitive birds, their wings bent back like bows, swept by us, checking out their awkward, earthbound guests.

Later, as we headed home along the beach, impatient sand dunes casting shadows in the early evening light, I decided that out there, on the edge of the spit, I had made it as close to the horizon as I was ever going to get. I eased back in my seat, enjoying the particular type of content that comes with having been somewhere truly special, and watched as the sun fell towards the sea.

…Meanwhile, back in the sky above Motueka, 50 seconds after it started and now some two kilometres lower, my own plunge towards the Earth came to an abrupt halt. The parachute opened.

The parachute opened! And all of a sudden everything changed. The roar of the wind was replaced by silence as clear as the sky itself. I looked around, we were still a long, long way above the Earth, but now – with my fear left billowing behind me in the strengthened-nylon chute – I began to take in the world we floated over. Down below, the tiny houses and roads were still too small even for matchbox cars. While, to the south, snow covered peaks shared the altitude with us. We spun slowly, looking out over Tasman bay, where stray clouds dragged patterns of shade and light. In the distance, Nelson twinkled in the sun. And I revised my initial assessment; I wasn’t afraid of heights at all, only of falling and, once you got beyond that, the view from up there is like nothing else.

Ok, so busy, busy, and post free until next weekend.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to say that I’m still kinda chuffed that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize.  :)

As I opened my mouth I was certain I knew what I was talking about, by the time I closed it again I wasn’t nearly so sure…

Tidy and tended, trailing off between sandy hills, the road took hold like a story. We’d stopped halfway, camped among the acacia trees, next to the sea, waiting for waves. We had stopped halfway, but the road kept on, like a set down book, and after a few days watching the surfless sea we decided we needed to know how it ended.

It was made of cobblestones; laid by hand, by a team of men, tapping; one stone at a time. We wandered out on to it one morning, sitting on its verge waiting for a ride. After maybe half an hour we got a lift in a rundown van held together by cheery splashes of paint.

Onde?
O fin da rua?

The end of the road? Both a question of his destination and a statement of ours.

Sem.

And so we got in. After about a kilometre curving right, towards Sao Nicolau’s northern edge.

There were houses along the way, every once in a while, in clusters, but it wasn’t until the road’s end that we hit the village proper. Worn houses square and white, or pastel pink and green, caught the light carried between the puffy rainless clouds. By then we were on the Island’s weather coast, up from a rocky shore, swept by the break and swash of trade-wind swell.

Benji and I wandered into the square. We’d lost track of the days of the week, but figured, from all the people milling outside the church, that it must have been a Sunday. We stood and watched for a bit, not quite sure what to do with our destination now we’d found it.

The bar is closed but come back to my place; I’ll get you a drink

He was old, in a frayed but otherwise tidy jacket and shirt, round around the waste and with brown skin that hung like old sails. He smelt slightly of spirits.

I’m always uneasy round drunks. Or, maybe more truly, I’m always uneasy round people full stop. I was about to thank him and politely decline, when Benji piped up.

Great, we’d love too.

Benji was a few years younger than me but an effortless traveller. From the north of France he spoke French and English fluently, and was reading a book in German. He spoke ok Cape Verde Criole too. His Portuguese wasn’t as good as mine (a small win I jealously guarded) but he was relaxed, casually taking in his stride things that set me on edge.

The old guy’s house was small and carefully kept. He and Benji chatted.

Where are you from?

France and New Zealand.

When I worked on a fishing boat we went to lots of places, but never New Zealand. That’s a long way.

The fishing boat explained his English. Throughout the lusophone countries I’d run into old men who spoke English, who’d learnt it on boats. No education, yet amongst the hard work, time to pick up enough words to thread together conversations in another tongue.

What are you doing here?

We’re surfers, camped at Barril?

Ah, I see. Come on. Finish your drinks. It’s time to go.

Where?

To the funeral. That’s what they were waiting for in the square. The graveyard is back down the road. You can catch a lift.

And that’s how we joined the funeral procession, invited by a drunk old fisherman. Piling into the back of one of a fleet of coloured, rusty Utes. The whole village was going to the burial and no one, apparently, saw anything strange in two scruffy Europeans joining them.

After maybe a twenty minute drive, following the flow of people, we wandered into the graveyard. The old guy was quietly crying now. We still had no idea who’d died. As the body arrived all the women around us, wearing dresses and headscarves, starting wailing, singing their grief into the sky. The words must have been different but the sound was strangely familiar, like that at a Tangi. The same cries in song, different words but with the same meaning. Conscious now of our intrusion into someone else’s sorrow, I touched Benji on the arm and we walked back up to the road.

A bright red pick-up pulled up. Its driver’s name written on the side: Juao de Deus – John of God. We hopped onboard and he started for home, back now from the end of the road, and away from the funeral. Back to the camp amongst the Acacias. In the small bay of Barril.

From here:

The combined GDP of the 58 countries of the bottom billion is about $350 billion per year — smaller than the GDP of metropolitan Chicago.

Duncan Green links to an interesting attempt by the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion to answer the question, can the world’s poorest countries eliminate extreme poverty by redistribution? The short answer is that for wealthier developing countries (like Brazil), they actually could. However, for the World’s poorest countries there simply isn’t the money to redistribute.

This got me thinking about the global distribution of wealth and so I jotted a few numbers down on the back of a very small envelope (or, in other words, these are very rough scribbles, they could be wrong and I haven’t double checked them…)

In 2005 global income per capita was $8,730 (US purchasing power parity dollars.) Or, in other words, if the globe’s income was distributed equally everyone would have had earnt $8,730 in 2005. (Purchasing Power Parity takes into account the fact that US$1 goes further in developing countries so everyone would have earnt $8,730 and the cost of living would have been the same as it was in the US in 2005).

The Globe’s income isn’t distributed equally however, and, in fact, in 2005 nearly half the World’s population lived off less than $912/year (US PPP) or $2.50 a day. Approximately 80% of the World lived below the US poverty line of $13/day.

Had the World’s income been distributed equally, the percentage living off less than $2.50/day would have been 0. The percentage living off less than $13/day would have been 0 too. In fact everyone would have been living of $24/day: 1.85 times the US poverty line.

In other words, poverty – as measured by a US poverty line – would have been well and truly eliminated globally. Instead, in the real world 8 out of every 10 people live below that line.

In table form…

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should strive to equalise global income as a tool to eliminate poverty. Let’s consider that proposition using Eric Olin Wright’s 3 criteria for utopian thinking.

As far as desirability goes, using a simple utilitarian calculus the equalised globe would certainly be desirable. The welfare of the vast majority of the World’s population would be dramatically improved.

The trouble is, such an equalisation would not be (to use Wright’s terms) either viable or, realistically, achievable.

In terms of viability, such radical equalisation of wealth would eliminate the incentives that play a role in generating wealth in the first place. And equality of this degree could only be maintained by the sort of police state that used to keep George Orwell awake at night.

And, in terms of achievablity , the sad truth is that, while redistribution of the nature described above would improve the welfare of most of the world’s population it would dramatically decrease the welfare of one particular group: the already very powerful, who would no doubt resist tooth and claw. Meaning that even if such a world could feasibly exist, getting there would be next to impossible.

Still, it’s worth noting that the staggering phenomenon that is global poverty doesn’t in exist the current day and age because the planet as a whole is too poor. Rather it exists because we are too unequal.

Refs:

Global Figures.

Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

Chen and Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

The Boston Review has an interesting essay debate on Paul Collier’s thinking and the potential for international intervention to help the World’s poorest countries. Definitely worth a read.

As I read through it I took some notes. When I get time I’d like to write them up into a post of their own, with my own thoughts. For now, they’re over the fold.

The Collier Thesis:

Paul Collier would have us distinguish between the parts of the developing world that are, indeed, developing and the parts that are not. Countries such as India and China, along with much of south East Asia are still poor but they are on the pathway to development. Their economies are growing rapidly and this won’t be reversed. Poverty is being reduced. On the other hand there are a group of about 60 countries, home to approximately a billion people, mostly (but not exclusively) in sub-Saharan Africa, which have shown little progress over recent decades. They are trapped. Condemned by a vicious cycle of poverty, poor-governance and conflict.

Elites in these countries are confronted by a perverse set of incentives which reward the extremes of bad governance, preventing the provision of essential public goods and impeding the functioning of markets.

The nations of the bottom billion are usually small (in an economic sense), resource rich, landlocked, former colonies, and conflict prone.

Size matters because it renders them unable to afford essential public goods. Being landlocked hinders trade. And in the absence of good governance, the irony of resource wealth is that it makes nations poor by rewarding rent seeking and corruption amongst elites. Most important, perhaps, is former colony status – these ‘nations’ are in fact collections of different peoples cobbled together by colonial map drawers. They lack a strong enough national identity to override internal divisions. This contrasts to European states, which formed “organically”, over time through and in response to warfare, which allowed the crafting of national identities and necessitated taxation, which in turn lead to demands for accountability.

Lack of national level identity means that politicians often find the easiest route to power being to appeal to a particular ethnic group and reward them with some of the trappings of rule. This contributes to atrocious governance and conflict and tensions.

Finally, often the biggest threat to despotic leaders in the bottom billion is their own armies, thus they are incentivised to keep them weak; however, this leaves such countries prone to civil war.

In the poorest country, ‘nominal’ democracy doesn’t help solve these problems, in fact it actually makes them more conflict prone as leaders use patronage politics to win votes from their own ethnic group, which enhances underlying divisions.

The solution? The developed world needs to intervene, the countries of the bottom billion won’t escape on their own. As intervention collier suggests: aid, (to governments conditional on democracy), but more importantly peace-keeping and, most controversially an over the horizon guarantee; that is a promise to would-be bottom billion leaders: if you govern democratically and with some ability we promise to protect you. To intervene on your behalf if a coup should occur. On the other hand, should you subvert the democratic process or govern poorly we will withdraw our protection. Providing a ‘green light’ for your army to topple you should it wish. This, Collier argues, will provide an incentive for good governance and nation building.

Stephen D. Krasner:

“Stephen D. Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford University, is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution”

Essentially agrees with Collier, citing RAMSI as a successful intervention in this vein. Does point out that external intervention can be very difficult to undertake, but argues that sometimes it is the least worth option.

Highlights the Millennium Challenge Account as an example of incentivising good governance – it rewards better governance through more money.

William Easterly:

“William Easterly, Professor of Economics at New York University”

Charges that Paul Collier has fallen prey the human impulse to see patterns where there are none. The bottom billion isn’t a homogenous group of countries facing the same problems but rather a mishmash of countries, some which have always been poor, others that have recently declined. At the end of any two decades you will always have a ‘bottom billion’ but this doesn’t mean they will be so two decades from now.  In fact, if there’s one thing we know about grow episodes their volatile, across countries and across time.

Collier places great weight on his statistical studies but methodologically they are unsound. He is guilty of ‘data mining’ and running enough regressions until he gets one that tells the story he wants to tell. He’s also guilty of claiming causation where in fact all that exists is correlation.

Easterly, fulminates against Collier’s arguments for peace keeps (a euphemism for people who nevertheless kill people) and argues that Colliers arguments are imperialism reheated. And that they provide an excuse for international intervention – something that has all too blood a history to be any type of a solution. As an alternative Easterly argues for evolution from below and incremental change, rather than big ideas.

Easterly’s points are often unfair (Collier does try and tackle endogenaity in his regressions; and what he’s doing doesn’t really seem like data mining to me). Moreover, peacekeepers may sometimes kill people, but that’s not the purpose of their work. And evidence does suggest that what they do, however messy and imperfect, does – to a degree – work.

Easterly, is more interesting when he charges that the bottom billion is coincidence not category (were Collier’s book a couple of decades older he could have easily included India – diverse, terribly governed, dirt poor, home to several civil wars– in his list.) His point about the unintended consequences of grand interventions is also a good one.

Larry Diamond:

“Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.”

Takes Collier to task on his categorisation of the bottom billion. India is large and heterogeneous, and has managed this. While Botswana and Mauritius should have been bottom billion countries but have actually done well.

In terms of solutions Diamond, supports the Millennium Challenge account – financially incentivising good governance. While arguing that the ‘green light’ should never, ever be given to the military, who are too destructive to be relied on, in any way, as a pro-democracy force. Instead we should be discouraging the military’s involvement in politics, through sanctions international actions and the international court.

Edward Miguel:

“Edward Miguel, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of Africa’s Turn? and coauthor with Raymond Fisman of Economic Gangsters.”

Argues along a similar line to Easterly – Africa has grown recently. Since 2000 up until the GFC the continent has had respectable growth, including Sub-Saharan Africa. We shouldn’t assume that being in today’s bottom billion is inevitability or even that it necessitates major intervention.

Miguel also argues that the trouble with promising intervention is that interventions to date have often been very poor – the problem in Rwanda wasn’t absence of intervention but terrible intervention (witness the culpability of the French). Also Miguel argues harder still than intervention is nation building.

Mike McGovern:

“Mike McGovern is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.”

Contests Collier’s taxonomy of the bottom billion arguing that there are too many exceptions to Collier’s defining characteristics. (Singapore and Belgium ‘work’ for example).

He also argues that while intervention can be warranted success depends on context and defies grand proposals for global promises: what works in Liberia and Sierra Leone won’t work in the DRC.

Finally, he argues that Collier falls into a common trap: comparing the realities of Africa, with the non-existent idea of Europe and America. (Where all the problems of the bottom billion can be seen to some extent, without apparently being crippling).

Nancy Birdsall:

“Nancy Birdsall is President of the Center for Global Development.”

Agrees with much of the diagnosis but is much less keen on Collier’s prescribed cure. She agrees with him on sovereignty and intervention – sovereignty is of the people, not of their rulers. And if rulers are terrible, then there’s no good ethical reason to allow them to hide behind borders. But argues for less grand, although not necessarily convincing interventions: rewarding leaders who step down, conditional aid, non-national leaders, regional infrastructure building, strengthening police forces, and good old fashioned peace keeping.

Collier’s Rejoinder:

Argues with Miguel that while Africa has grown recently there’s no guarantee that this will be sustained, some indicators of performance have improved but others have got worse. Let’s wait and see.

Against William Easterly he defends his statistical methodology and defends collective action and intervention – it can work!

To McGovern argues that actually there is good evidence across countries to highlight the problems of the bottom billion (such as ethno-linguistic fragmentation).

To the proponents of less grand intervention rather than defend his particular position he effectively retreats to a position that he is simply trying provoke informed debate about interventions, where they can work and how they should be undertaken.