Aid in a New Dimension
RITNER, PETER
Aid in a New Dimension The Diplomacy of Economic Development. By Eugene R. Black. Harvard. 74 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Peter Ritner Author, "The Death of Africa"; Editor, The Macmillan...
...He is a banker, and cautions us that everything we do for "development" must be sound fiscally...
...He feels the way a poor man almost always feels when he talks to a rich man—that the rich man just doesn't understand what life is all about...
...But Black wants us to see again that the differences in the two halves of the world are what are important to understand...
...And what about the countries outside Africa...
...His motives are above reproach and he knows precisely what it is he would like to achieve...
...What of India, the heart of the "Free World's" position in Asia, which for want of capital and other kinds of assistance is falling further and further behind on its current Five Year Plan, a plan in explicit competition with the fabulous successes racked up by the appalling and bestial Chinese Communist programs to the north...
...The United States itself, the world's largest holder of capital, has contributed about $100 million in an emergency fund to Africa, about $20 million in technical assistance, about $13 million as part of the Development Loan Fund (scarcely more than 100th of its world-wide loan total...
...Black's own go d-child, the International Development Association, is prospectively capitalized at $1 billion—for the whole world...
...In Africa, for example, a man's loyalty to custom or constitutional doctrine may be considered to be entirely contingent on the state of his belly...
...Black explains, as an example, that it is perhaps not so much "rising expectations" which press hard on the leaders of the impoverished world as the "loss of traditional expectations...
...Black goes on to explain, "To the age-old task of maintaining the balance of power must now be added the task of maintaining the balance of hope—hope in the proposition that the underdeveloped societies of the world can take science and technology into their lives without in the process denying the values of freedom and tolerance...
...When one considers the host of wrong ideas that jostle for our attention these days, one does not feel like denying Black the praise which he has legitimately earned, and is earning...
...He is not about to enlist in any internal revolutions...
...What does an African, or an Indian, or a Venezuelan feel like when he is confronted with Black's wisdom and moderation...
...Our role in history seems to be primarily that of the humanitarian engineer who harnesses the elements and makes them serve free men...
...He still seems to believe that the incredible world-wide social conflagration whose outlines he has presented can, or must, be mastered by more-or-less conventional and "respectable" means...
...The powerfully disintegrative blows which the Technological Revolution aims at traditional social balances are also a continuing problem for the West, of course...
...schools, agricultural institutes, studies of water tables, etc...
...But he is unable, or unwilling, to pursue the implications of his own insights through the portals of total personal commitment...
...But having gone so far, Black has not gone far enough...
...He commands all the requisite information, past and present...
...What Black wants to do in this book is strike sparks from Americans...
...The "bush" is overloaded already, in Latin America and Asia as well as in Africa...
...Black is too slow, too portly, too respectable a lover of his own subject and profession...
...If anything, the carrying capacity of the agricultural sector in the underdeveloped regions is rapidly declining...
...The overall Volta Dam project, on which all the hopes of rationalizing Ghana's economy rest, will cost about $1 billion...
...Black urges us to make sure that development gets "status" in our public life, collectively to make it one of our main common thrusts in this historical period...
...He asks for a "new awareness of the predicament of free peoples in the age out of which can come a new sense of purpose...
...True, Black is doing something, and has done a great deal more than most of us ever will do, and this is better than nothing...
...At his pace he is not —and we are not—going to win...
...These are only the most prominent "heavy" projects...
...They can't go home again...
...That is to say, the Congolese Government might be able to cope with an insistent clamor on the part of every male Congolese for a pair of shoes...
...As Black says, this is an adventure which ought to bear a particular meaning for Americans...
...Of these, some S1.4 billion are loans to European countries, while Africa has received only about $750 million...
...Black does not go hog-wild, of course...
...It is we of the West who can afford to think about "our forefathers' ways of doing things," or of what does or does not square with the letter of the Declaration of Independence...
...He properly emphasizes the challenge and the adventure involved in subduing this process, in accomplishing something of unprecedented size in the socioeconomic sphere, in rescuing millions of innocent people from hopelessness and dilapidation...
...Young men squeezed off the land into the new cities either find jobs there or they don't, but in the cities they must remain...
...In the poorer countries what we commonly term "social and economic factors" play proportionately much larger roles in forming public policy than they do in the nations of Western Europe and North America...
...With the aid of a literary style of considerable quality, Black is able to make very clear in this little book the crucial differences in the dynamics of the political economies of "underdeveloped" and "advanced" regions...
...But what it cannot handle is that once a new Leopoldviller has clambered out of the bush he is forever an urbanite—with all that this implies for administrative control, responsibility and expenditure...
...But fiscal caution is not the same thing as niggardliness...
...Pitiful though these quantities are, they represent the largest source of capital supply accessible to Africa...
...Editor, The Macmillan Company EUGENE BLACK on the subject of "economic development" reads like Kierkegaard on the subject of love...
...There is no return to the land—or to the past...
...The World Bank, which Black heads, has a total of about $5 billion in outstanding loans...
...But he is very far from telling us how we are going to stop the catastrophe which is building up all over the world, which is what the concept of "economic development" really involves...
...He urges us to grasp a sense of the dimensions, of the intellectual and spiritual dimensions, of this process which is devouring the peace of three-quarters of our world...
...What are African governments supposed to accomplish with these pittances...
...The great Inga Falls project on the Congo River would cost $4 billion—it would be the largest installation of its kind in the world and would remake the whole economic structure of Central Africa...
...We, too, have the duty of reconciling vastly engorged and emboldened institutions with our ancient libertarian culture and preferences...
...What of roads...
...What it comes down to is that the institutions with whose work Black is associated, and which he hails, are inadequate and underpowered to the point of utter futility...
...Two other dams in West Africa, Kuilu and Konkoure, would cost about $1 billion apiece...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 48
