Busting Our Mental Blocks About Foreign Aid

...One of the best examples is irrigation projects, which can not only boost the food output of a country, but also make work for a great many peasants who have gone into the cities...

...In modern times, only Red China tried to modernize in a non-Western way,” he says...

...Once a culture or a country accepts death control, all else follows...

...While one may find petty flaws in Church’s argument (for example, he laments at one point that our aid dollars could not buy us UN votes when we needed them against Red China), there is a more fundamental problem here...

...But more often, it tempts governments to import a whole Western system of monetary incentives...

...The thing to do, then, was to keep money out of the hands of the lower classes, who spent it all for food and housing, and funnel it to the thrifty rich...

...The aid bureaucracy could find some way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the field...

...I hope the book’s first few chapters become mandatory reading at AID...

...One scene James Fallows is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Natives in Overalls -~Stripped of its haranguing overtones, this view would fit right in with what Dumont, Myrdal, Hapgood, and others say...

...In Farmer’s view, it is frivolous to think of other modes of culture-busting, since the Western path to development is the only available choice...

...suggesting similar ideas to people in the host country...

...The meaning here is so unpleasant that it is preferable not to think about it...

...feeding the one or two billion malnourished in the world rnean~f inding ~ o mwe ay to Coax more food Out of the crowdeld land...

...With a hundred years’ hindsight, we now condemn the British and French for imposing their ethnocentric values on Africa and Asia...

...If the most that the colorful, if hungry, people of South America and Asia can hope for is to be turned into replica Babbits, competing for a share of the U. S. import market, then what is the point...

...In some Asian countries, the hand-tool industry has triggered a chain reaction: farmers are able to plow the land...

...For several months, we had lived with two irreconcilable visions of the world: with one half of our minds, we remembered the abundance and waste of American life...

...Mao tried to counter this suspicion with his attacks on the family structure...

...These included performing simple jobs like teaching and nursing in places where they needed to be done...

...While this sounds like a disinterred Malthus stalking through Congress, it points toward the second apparent reason for the liberal defection from foreign aid: completely apart from its cold-war orientation, there is the disheartening fact that our aid has done little discernible good...

...In what may be their single biggest blow against orthodoxy, they also announce that international aid programs-from the World Bank to the UN-don’t know how, either, since they’re largely run by the same people as AID and make the same mistakes...

...But the nasty fact liberals must face is that the world’s cultures have already been mixed, none retains its original purity...

...There was a time, not long past, when the missionary streak transcended all others in our foreign policy...

...Not all of the mixing has been bad: just as Zen Buddhism and French bread have enriched American culture, so American medicine and rock music have been bright additions in Ghana and Guinea...

...One of the finest examples is a theory called “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor,” or the “Lewis model,” after its creator, Sir Arthur Lewis...

...but where the Paddocks are inclined to give up in the face of problems, Farmer is ready with a whole pack of solutions...

...and second, what our foreign policy can do to encourage these ideas...

...In doing so, we give ourselves another opportunity: to turn our aid flows which so often seem wasted into effective tools of development...

...The problem, as later became obvious, was that there were many more available workers than potential factory jobs...

...The trouble with this compromise was that no one bothered to bring up the real reasons for giving aid, and liberals were trapped into supporting military aid for its own sake...

...Observers have noted the difference between Peking’s streets and the slums of Djakarta or Sao Paulo...

...This is not the kind of challenge designed to rouse liberal enthusiasm, for two reasons...

...government budgets big on machine guns and luxury imports but short on the agricultural basics needed to feed the populace...

...SO you get your power plants, your irrigation systems, your fertilizers, your factories, and all the rest-and in the process change men and women to be able to handle these new tools...

...Praeger...

...But the book presents a complex theory of development, with important implications...

...The factories and tractors in China are not much different from those used elsewhere...

...By their mere presence, Westerners have been responsible for much of the elites’ genteel lifestyle: what Pakistani, having seen a group of white-shirted UN experts drive through town, can doubt what the Good Life means...

...Farmer is saying that 100, or even 25, years ago the West might have avoided the process that turns tribesmen into starched-collar unemployables...

...Israel is perhaps the prime example of what determined people can do on sub-standard real estate (although the economists always dismiss it as having the head start of “pre-conditioned” citizens...

...By Time, the Voice of America, and the broadcast commercials which so clearly impart the materialist flavor of Western life...

...Recently there has been a nostalgia for “tribal” ties in America and especially in Europe-as our roots give way, we think fondly of the tribesmen who kn’ow who they are and where they belong...

...China’s innovation seems to be the emphasis on individual sacrifice and self-discipline, for the general community welfare...

...A major contribution that the U. S. can make is to offer alternate models...

...In Cyprus, for example, Greek schools teach hatred of the Turks, and Turkish schools teach hatred of the Greeks...

...Despite a few throwaway lines about reforming aid programs by channeling them through the UN, the thrust of his speech is to stop aid now, and worry later about finding something to replace it...

...What better record could a committee make...

...One need not entertain romantic views of happy tribal life to feel a sense of tragedy and loss: if the world’s future is that it be remade in the image of Pittsburgh or Miami Beach, why should we hurry...

...Church is too smart not to see the implications of his words, so what he leaves out of his speech is as important as what he puts in...

...William and Elizabeth Paddock...

...Wallace and the Literati Conservatives have been complaining about foreign aid for years...

...The combined forces of nature and institutionsfrom diseases and floods to the church and local government-naturally make people feel they are victims of fate and the environment...

...Then you m u s t i m i t a t e o u r discipline scheming and saving, working hard, and foregoing the lavish wakes and parties that gobble so much money: Examination of the affluent of the world does suggest that they behave quite differently from the poor, even when they are in the same country...

...The first is working to reduce the tribal and racial divisions in many poor countries...

...vast strata of “overeducated unemployables ” who have learned enough English or French to know they don’t want to stay in the jungle towns any more...

...The cultural mixing of the world has already gone on to such an extent that it is pointless to worry about “interference” with other ways of life...

...as Farmer points out on many an Adam Smith-ish page, the only way to get people to do anything is to make it economically worth their while...

...A second task, which raises all our hackles about “cultural imperialism” but which must be faced, is to encourage ambition and individual motivation...

...Like Church, the Paddocks do have a point-but one which the circumstances of the argument tell more than the Point itself...

...Its central idea was that, in Pakistan as in Britain, labor was the most valuable economic commodity...

...The Asian Development Bark wanted $100 million...

...To find guidelines for these “better” ideas, we have two questions to answer: first, whether there is an alternative to the grubby path of industrial development whose consequences we mourn in much of the third world...

...The book says: I can no longer advocate foreign aid until we first learn how to make it achieve its goals...

...Farmer is wrong, and the mistake is crucial...

...One of Mao’s first efforts, then, was to dispel1 that atmosphere of suspicion...

...In a rocky region above the town of Winneba, a woman and her several children worked from morning until night, digging stones from the ground with sticks...

...In development planning, this can lead to some healthy measures-such as land reform...

...What is needed is the introduction of teachers from other countries into these schools, third parties who would reduce hatred by not preaching it...

...It is easy to dismiss China as the lone example of what a country can do if it successfully seals itself off from the West...

...In Hong Kong, the agent of change was British Law, which lowered the risks of dealing with strangers...

...The reason7 I blelieve, is not unhappiness with the failures of foreign aid, but rather an increasing distaste for what its Success would mean...

...Few of my friends at home seemed to understand this feeling...

...I can no longer cast my vote to prolong the bilateral aid program as it is now administered...

...Afteir a while, if you looked where the money was going, more was being spent for machine guns and tanks than for constructive, humanitarian projects...

...The book contains some insightsnotably the idea that the U. S. should curb its own military spending before lecturing Pakistan about the same thing-but in general the sense of disproportion is stunning...

...Second, and more important, there is the danger of “cultural imperialism...

...Until that feeling is removed, it is often impossible to free the talents and energies the country needs...

...Without this, he says, the countries are consigned to permanent retardation...

...Church implies that it is...

...But the goal of all the manipulation is still the same: economic development-the same industrialized end as before...

...There Chinese advise.rs stupefied old Africa hands by inspiring Tanzanians and Zambians into group effort...

...While we should not idealize China as a model for the rest of the world, it is undeniable that the country has “worked” in a way that few other poor countries have...

...That may meanas Frank Church concluded in his Senate speech-that we should sit and wait for the revolution to come to Brazil and the Ivory Coast, but this is an unpredictable, slow route...

...When “interference” is accompanied by military power, it is of course a different matter...

...The moment we develop an elite in Cuba, voluntary labor is dead, and the country runs on voluntary labor,” a Cuban official told writer Barry Reckord...

...Population expands...

...and Maoism, the animating philosophy of China’s growth, is a combination of Chinese traditions and Marxism, an imported Western theory...

...Perhaps the easiest way to sum up the development malaise is to consider two of the countries which have, by AID’S standards, succeeded: Taiwan and South Korea...

...we only gave them half of that...

...It is astonishing, in retrospect, how little we questioned the seeming verities of the cold war during the 1950s and 1960~~C’h’ urch says...

...That some of the qualities of discipline and commitment may be exported was shown in East Africa by the Tanzam Railroad...

...The economists reply that it’s all a matter of adjustment...

...The Inter-American Development Bank wanted $836 million...

...we might have shied from the now-distasteful role as cultural dictators to the world...

...Which doesn’t mean that the cane cutters aren’t still dreaming of the beach scenes...

...Finally, we can kieep looking for those aid projects which, unlike the usual heavy industries or dams, will open doors to a whole chain of economic development...

...But recently, as pollution, anomie, and the other costs of technological advancement have become clear, the liberal gusto for exporting development has faded...

...we did not give them a dime...

...This is developing that sense of community, or group effort, which distinguishes China from the Philippines, North Vietnam from the South...

...If, as Farmer says, the only way to indoctrinate the indolent peoples in correct behavior is through “culture-busting”-a phrase that calls up images of people trading in their bright native robes for factory drab, or regulating their lives by the 40-hour week rather than by rice-planting cycles-it would be hard to drum up much enthusiasm for the venture among Americans who now lament that their own culture has been so thoroughly busted...

...Senegal and other African countries have put on big campaigns for a return to thle bush (called “animation rurale” in Senegal), but in most cases the leaders’ evident distaste for rustic living dooms the plans from the start...

...As administrative critics, the Paddocks have few peers...

...unemployment rates ranging from 25 to 60 per cent of the available working force...

...If we have absorbed nothing else from Vietnam, we have learned that our values aren’t always right and can’t be grafted whole onto another culture...

...artisans are kept working...

...We could simply revive the Peace Corps, make it forget its old anti-communist junior-am bassad or role and concentrate on the things it did at its best...

...A second step, whxh we can take with little fear of cultural imperialism, is to reverse some of the handicaps we now impose on export industries in poor countries...

...and trying to replace rote learning with educational systems that opened people’s minds...

...The Paddocks presumably sense this, as do the other former supporters of foreign aid...

...During the fifties and sixties, aid supporters thought that the program might be easier to sell if it were advertised as part of a holy war against the Russians...

...Perhaps if more leaders would emulate Castro or Nyerere and work in the fields, there would be more Chinas and Tanzanias, and fewer Brazils or South Koreals...

...It requires an extraordinary amount of either romanticism or hubris to think that, if only America would curb its foreignaid meddling in the third world, all Western influences would go away...

...Moreover, in the short run, we can pick out those forms of aid we know to be effective, and enlarge them...

...As two of the most perceptive members of the development establishment-Paul Streeten of Oxford, and Sweden’s ubiquitous Gunnar Myrdal-have pointed out, many of the sins we associated with economic development came from half-baked economics...

...Farmer’s book shows that the impulse is still there, waiting to convert the natives...

...But as reams of “neo-imperialism” tracts have shown, in most poor countries the price of raw material exports keeps falling as imports from the West cost more and more...

...But among its old liberal-internationalis t promoters, this zeal has nearly died in the last decade, mainly because of the war...

...From a starting point fully as impoverished as that of any other Asian country, the Chinese have made impressive economic advances (certified beyond questioning when Joe Alsop visited China this year and pronounced it a success...

...By the universities, especially British and French, which persist in imposing their absurd, useless notions of “education” on people who should be more concerned with tractors and village life...

...The AID experts who fly in for a week or two, or serve a two-year spell at the consulate, have rarely managed such a feat...

...They were there, stooping and digging, each day we were in the region, and they are probably there now...

...Even among the most progressive of the modem economists, this process has hardly been challenged...

...The Paddock clan-brothers Paul and William, and william’s wife Elizabeth-is an eccentric group, producing incisive books that are always queered by a touch of the berserk...

...Benevolent Aggression provides a starting point...

...Because we are too polite nowadays to suggest directly to someone that he should change ‘his behavior, we normally talk about power plants and engineering technologies rather than behavior...

...The anti-aid alliance between Wallace and J. William Fulbright, or Passrnan and the New York literati, has been explained by Senator Frank Church, in a forceful speech expressing the soured-liberal viewpoint.* Church said that aid’s failure is “not technical and administrative, but conceptual and political, and can be understood only as an aspect of the larger failure of American foreign policy over the last decade...

...Moreover, the Chinese have done so without the social strains that predominate in the rest of the developing world...

...And anyone who has followed Rep...

...Reducing this irrational hatred is one of the few jobs outsiders can do especially well, operating as go-betweens for groups that would otherwise be slaughtering each other...

...The Western way is the only one we know that works...

...In Cuba, Fidel Castro wisely avoided the Russian mistake of assuming that slothful, overgrown bureaucracies would somehow be more creative than slothful, overgrown economic elites...

...Liberal administrators of aid programs, always soft of heart, refuse to face this fact...

...Hence I urge that we first use our own country as a laboratory...

...Before the book loses its way in tirades against the Rockefeller Foundation and a missionary doctor who has let himself become a media hero, it makes one point brilliantly: our aid programs are as badly run as any other part of the bureaucracy, and they have done very little good...

...it could protect its Programs against political manipulation...

...Unless we accept restored “death control” through famine, the only chance is to speed world economic development to keep up with the two to three percent annual growth in population...

...captured for me the human cost of that kind of life...

...To provide housing in restless Bombay, let us first learn how to rebuild our own ghettos...

...The challenge now is to identify the best elements of different cultures, and try to encourage them where they can do some good...

...In China, there has been a serious attempt to share the economic benefits...

...Hong Kong provides another example of how an external idea, this one non-Marxist, can break through old barriers...

...Farmer is a business professor at Indiana University, and much of his book reads like a tract extolling the work ethic...

...Western economic patterns usually assume perverse, distorted forms when transported to the poor world...

...There can be no more powerful barrier to progress than the knowledge that, whatever gains are made, half will be siphoned off in corruption and the rest will go to the junta or strong men in control...

...Like China, Hong Kong had to cope with the pervasive air of suspicion: members of one family would hardly deal with another family, for fear they’d be cheated...

...In this regard the Peace Corps was onto the right idea: when “rich” Westerners spend several years living in the countryside doing agricultural work, they can be far more persuasive than govern m en t broadcasts exhorting young students to return to their villages...

...Some of the other symptoms of “development” are even more alarming: cities doubling in size every decade, choked with emigrants from the countryside...

...But the usual response is to find ways to make it work rather than abandoning the whole idea...

...The aim of the development adviser was to remove the barriers that stand between the poor country and what Rostow called its “take-off” point...

...The foreign aid Problems the Paddocks illustrate are not ordained by God...

...For the first time, university students in Ethiopia have gone out to the bush to see what the real problems are there...

...Here, Kid, Have a Coke During most of the life span of our aid Proflams7 from War ‘I to the mid-sixties7 the goal seemed unquestionable: what more could the U. S. want for the rest of the world than the Western-style industrialization which had brought the plenty to America...

...It is this sense of grim inevitability which, I believe, is making liberals draw back from foreign aid...

...The lesson came at too high a price to be easily ignored...

...Through the years, dozens of other groups have been noted for it (the Lebanese and Chinese, the Ibo and Kikuyu tribes, are a few examples...

...and the cold war...

...In short, we want an uptight super-achiever...

...In Benevolent Aggression,* Richard N. Farmer, like the Paddocks, tries to explain why foreign *Benevolent Aggression...

...Helping the Gnomes of Zurich The list of similar theories is long-some economists have made a career out of adding items-but there is one other major theoretical “error” worth noting...

...Iowa State University Press...

...Drawing on patterns shown in Europe and the U. S., where the wealthy provide the capital for economic growth, some economists expected the same patterns to emerge in the underdeveloped countries...

...this, in turn, leads to the impractical education, white-collar elites, and the general social chaos of the third world...

...The most obvious similarity between the countries with a communal spirit-China, Cuba, Tanzania, Israelis that they are all revolutionary societies, where a ne~7o rder has been deliberately created...

...Several other countries have tried to involve their people in the country’s growth, with varying degrees of success...

...The answer was to get them off the land and into the cities, where they could be put to work at factory benches...

...When the advisers speak of “balanced growth,” they are talking not about ways to contain some of the social strains of turning a tribal land into a modem economy, but only of the fastest route to industrialization...

...Myrdal deecribes the “soft state” syndrome-when a government refuses to correct corruption and laziness-as one of the greatest impediments to progress in the poor countries...

...A handy mnemonic device, for use whenever tribal nostalgia comes on, is to remember what Amin has done in Uganda, the Hausas did to the Ibos in Nigeria, or the Hindus and Moslems do to each other in India...

...In direct proportion to their exposure to Western development experts, poor countries exhibit malignant syndromes: tin dictators, or at least an elite that pretends never to have heard of agriculture or manual work...

...Since its beginnings, the foreign aid program has illustrated the dangers of doing the right thing for the wrong reason...

...If all the third world were in the position of the Arabshaving near-monopoly control over a commodity whose price is certain to rise-then we could alll relax and let normal economic forces do their work...

...Realizing that these facets of the West are going to interfere, no matter what nice reservations we have about cultural imperialism, we must try to present another, better, set of ideas...

...Now, nearly 20 Years after the Brown v & ~ ~ rOdf Education decision, one could have said that school integration had failed...

...Economics is still in the shakedown phase, and a lot of mistakes that were made in the early days of foreign aid have been corrected by now...

...Church has a point...

...And it need not carry with it the competitive, cutthroat spirit that is the worst of the American ethic...

...He might, for example, have praised the parts of the aid program that have done unequivocal good, such as the famine relief shipments that kept India fed during the sixties, or the similar project now under way in Bangladesh...

...A possible answer to that question, and a hint of a new liberal rationale for foreign aid, comes from an unlikely source...

...American companies would pay higher prices for the raw materials they exported, and England and the United States would stop collecting interest payments from Ghana for debts run up in the gay old Nkrumah days...

...Those interested in fuller details on this pattern should consult two fine books, Rene Dumont’s False Start in Africa and David Hapgood’s Africa, From Independence to Tomorrow, both of which have implications far beyond their African subjects...

...The Kentucky Colonel in Cuba Enough other countries have toyed with this altered value system to show that it can work...

...In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere has tried to bring the educational system down to earth, with more emphasis on practical, agrarian skills and less on ways to get a job at the UN or the finance ministry...

...It is equally astonishing how little Church and his allies question the seeming link between foreign aid *in Development Today...

...Now, how do you increase production...

...To Africans who asked, we said that someday there might be a different relation between our two countries...

...This is a hard idea to accept, for it calls up all our worst memories of American do-gooders abroad-Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, or the bright, young Peace Corps trainees ready to bring George Washington and Horatio Alger to the peoples of the third world...

...The fust of these, which is crucial though obvious, is simply providing enough food to keep people from starving...

...It all comes down to the same thing...

...unless the economic base gets changed very fast to cover the increase, someone starves sooner or later...

...To advise how to prevent Uruguay's socialism from destroying the nation’s stability, let us first learn how to make Medicare pay as it goes...

...It is important to remember that “tribalism” is only a shorthand for all the limitations-racial, religious, cultural, or national-on man’s concern for his fellows...

...Clearly no man is going to cut cane if the Major is at the beach with his wife and a basketful of fried chicken...

...Prior to going on to fame in other areas, Walt Rostow made this point well in The Stages of Economic Growth, outlining the steps that countries must pass through while growing to maturity...

...Three Ways to Help From the examples of good and bad development, we can find several common ideas to apply to our aid efforts...

...Along with hunger and elitism, tribalism is one of the three great debilitating forces of the poor world...

...Why, then, their Policy of benign neglect...

...After hearing of it I walked, literally amazed, through the desert town of Bolgatanga, wondering what delusion could have made Americans feel they no longer had anything to share with the world’s poor...

...In the old China, for example, trust and sympathy dried up at the borders of one’s own family...

...an educational system in which children learn, as African expert Stanley Meisler put it, “that life has no more meaning than a starched white collar and a red Mercedes...

...Farmer’s main premise is that all foreign aid projects have overlooked the rnost influential factor of all: the managerial, profitmotivated, go-get-’em spirit that the carefree poor must learn if they want to master Western technology...

...In country after country, the Paddocks show how aid administrators have made the same mistakes for years, conducting studies and setting up projects, without having much impact...

...But now we’ve been to the jungles with our doctors and our malaria sprays, and the choice is out of anyone’s hands...

...with the other, we propelled ourselves through the days, waking in huts without water or lights, walking through towns in the sun, eating the same meal of rice and yams a hundred times...

...The seeds require such fancy inputs-fertilizer and pesticidesthat only the large farmers can use them...

...Later they sold the stones by the hundredweight for building projects...

...there is more food to eat and fewer tools to import...

...Even the brightest hope of development advisers, the “green revolution” of miracle grains, has brought its share of industrial-revolution-type social disruption...

...Farmer answers, in the most significant passage of his book, by describing what happens after Western medicine introduces “death control” into poor countries: It comes down to this: all cultures are going to get busted, and the most painful busting is going to happen in the poorer countries and subcultures...

...tion wanted $640 million., We denied them that and gave them $3210 million...

...A more responsible course would be to do what we can now to encourage those qualities that seem to set the successful countries off from the ones we think of as sores...

...These examples do not mean that we should incorporate Marxism, or the Common Law, into our foreign aid programs, but only that outsiders can work significant, healthy changes...

...But the solution seems just as bad...

...In Ethiopia, for example, the Peace Corps’ presence has contributed to formation of a domestic service corps...

...This idea may be phrased several ways: the need to achieve, the entrepreneurial spirit, taking pleasure in work...

...Knowing that, do we dare do the same today...

...trying to get people to work together across family boundaries...

...But when they do, Farmer concludes, they will say something like this to their clients: Want to join in the wealth...

...Consciences in Gear None of these approaches, it might seem, requires any formal foreign aid program...

...While this hesitancy about exporting our culture mjght have done marvels for our foreign policy 10 years ago, it has a quaint, anachronistic touch when applied to our current foreign-aid dilemma...

...Richard N. Farmer McKay . aid has failed...

...When George Wallace used to make speeches denouncing money-wasting boondoggles in the no-good little countries, the theme was in perfect harmony with his attacks on welfare loafers...

...It didn’t work...

...We Don’t Know How...

...In the meantime, the Senate vote came...

...All development agencies naturally claim that they are on the lookout for key projects, but too often the advisers fall1 back on their gut feeling that England, the U. S., and Germany all had big steel mills at this stage of life, so the Congo should, too...

...in many parts of India, the green revolution has mainly meant that small farmers have been driven from their land...

...By Coca-Cola, the United Fruit Company, Texaco, and the hundred other multinationals that do business in every part of the world...

...This, after all, is the lesson of China and Cuba: individual energies which have not been used before can be stimulated by something other than the profit system...

...They are especially sharp in showing how aid programs suffer from those classic bureaucratic hazards, institutional amnesia-“AID has no memory”-and information block (see excerpt in the February issue of The Washington Monthly...

...It is easy, from this perspective, to overlook how clumsy and cruel tribal divisions can be in countries suffering enough from other impediments...

...Our feelings about our own achievements are sufficiently mixed that we hesitate to promote the same goals overseas...

...While we cannot provide internal motivation, we can help break one of the main restraining forces: the debilitating, imitation-Western elites that seem to pop up everywhere, convincing the people that independence is the same as colonial rule, only with bosses of a different color...

...So what do we do...

...The answers are easier to outline than to execute, but with at least a glimpse of where to start, we should be able to put our liberal consciences back into gear...

...Is our only choice really between giving aid to antiCommunist dictators, and not giving it at all...

...Time Marches On If we draw back from our foreign aid program, culture-busting will still go on-but by whom...

...In the standard Western view, Mao’s appeals for self-sacrifice seem absurd...

...Otto Passman’s record as an appropriations subcommittee chairman for foreign aid would have been shocked if his 1972 report were much different from this: The International Development AssociaAnswers to Februaly puzzle...

...If you’re going to get rich the way we did, you’re going to have to behave the way we did...

...When other government entities (such as the Subversive Activities Control Board) have outlived their original raison d’etre, their supporters have come up with ingenious new reasons for continuing them...

...whenever the theory went into action, the net result was the creation of an unfed, idle urban horde where previously there had been peasants earning their share of the harvest...

...It may be hard to find noble elements in our recent foreign policy, but one which the country can be proud of is its commitment in the sixties to make up the food deficits in India and later Biafra and Bangladesh...

...It is still better to be a scientist or party boss than a rice farmer or laborer, but the gap between the masses and the leaders is less extreme in China than elsewhere...

...Shortly before we were to head back to a more familiar life, news came that the U. S. Senate had voted to cut off foreign aid programs, apparently as a slap at the President’s war policies...

...Unfortunately, the theories did not reckon with the special kind of elite that often prevails in poor countries, especially in Latin America, and which tends to stash its money in Swiss banks rather than local factories...

...He ended his speech not with an agonizing meditation about how we should improve the aid system, but by saying, “Essentially, the question is whether we’re prepared to recognize the limits of our own capacity...

...e c on omics has caught up with many of these errors...

...and allow nature to take what may well be an uncongenial course in many countries in the third world...

...To wage their war against bureaucracy, the Cubans tried to build a new ethic based on manual labor and communal work-all of which is the furthest possible extreme from the starchedcollar values of most other poor countries...

...The third element is by far the most difficult, and the most dependent on the peoples’ own efforts rather than help from outside...

...That’s the rub-the kind of person who can figure out what to do in a power plant or fertilizer warehouse is not going to be anything but a Western man...

...It is hard to know whether the famine predicted this year for North Africa and India will be as serious as that of the mid-sixties, but here is certainly an opportunity for humanitarian, successful aid...

...Church, however, was certainly not hunting for a motive to replace cold-warism...

...But much of China’s progress has been based on Western techniques and ideas...

...Yet enough of themwhen confronted by dramatic images of suffering from Biafra and Bangladeshexperienced, at least momentarily, enough of what I felt in Ghana to lead me to write this article...

...dams and other gaudy industrial projects more useful for show than production...

...Presumably, Church could have done the same if he thought the cold war was the problem and not aid itself...

...To eliminate hunger in the world, let us first learn how to improve the diets of the five million malnourished Americans who cannot afford the food they need...

...Before this could make any headway at all, the Chinese had to do something about the pervasive fear of being gypped which exists throughout the developing world...

...Their crackpot wisdom prevails again in We Don’t Know How...

...But ambition is not a purely American trait...

...China suggests that there may be other ways to develop, based on different forms of rewardpsychic rather than monetary...

...The latest evidence is in a forthcoming book by William and Elizabeth Paddock, We Don’t Know How...

...Taking care of the five million hungry in America means changing income distribution patterns...

...They said that the Vietnam experience had soured them on foreign aid, and they disliked anything smacking of cultural imperialism...

...Robert Hunter, ed...

...In most of Africa and Asia, the “economic growth rates” the governments announce rarely show up in improved living conditions for the peasants...

...Therefore, the theory reasoned, the poor countries were actually lucky, since they had so many people who had nothing to do...

...From the mess of wrecked programs they observed, the Paddocks conclude that “we don’t know how” to speed development in poor coup tries, even if we spend more money...

...First, the future seems only to mean that the other countries of the world will follow our route to a life of big cities, clogged highways, and standardized shopping centers...

...What it means, in concrete terms, is breaking down the overwhelming feeling of impotence that predominates among the peasants of most poor countries...

...From this mixture, the Chinese have done what Farmer, and indeed most experts, would consider impossible: carrying out economic development without strictly imitating Western society...

...We want people who get the job done, who will drive forward across obstacles to win, at whatever cost to themselves...

...now, the fashionable talk is about agricultural projects, “practical” education, and other down-to-earth concepts...