A rare cool academic find...

In the midst of doing my essay on the efficacy of foreign aid. I rarely talk about school work here, considering it boring. But realised that my often soapy drones about life didn't figure any better on the boredom scale, that I might as well share some school work anyway.

Here is William Easterly, an American economist from NYU [click here for more info from (in)famous wiki]. His sacarstic academic writings crack me up, and here he aptly employs the sacarsm to teach all of us laymen about development economics and helping the poor. Enjoy!

"So Jeff Sachs, the U.N., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have come up with a big plan to solve all the problems of the poor by the
year 2015. It’s a pretty modest plan: There are only
449 separate interventions, and there’s a very
doable agenda of 54 different Millennium Development
Goal target indicators, which represent 18
targets, which represent 8 millennium goals, and
the plan is all nicely laid out very clearly and concisely
in a 451-page main report with 3,300 pages of technical annexes.

How exactly would this plan be implemented?
Jeff says in his book that the U.N. Secretary General
should personally run the plan. He would not have
to do much: He would just have to coordinate the
actions of thousands of officials in six U.N. agencies,
the U.N. country teams, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, all consistent with
the World Bank and IMF Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers, which have their own 1,246-page
“PRSP sourcebook.”

Just think about the incentives that are created
by this grandiose global plan. You have all the aid
donors and recipients collectively responsible.
They all share responsibility for implementing all of
these actions, for meeting 54 different goals, which
also depend on lots of other things besides what the
donors and recipient governments do. If anything
goes wrong, you can blame the other aid donors,
you can blame the other factors that affected
whether the goals were achieved or not, or you
could even just say, “The reason I didn’t achieve
that goal was that I was working on this other goal.”

That’s what happens when you have multiple
goals, collective responsibility, and goals depending
on things besides what the aid agents themselves
do. This is the worst possible incentive
system of all time. When you really read the fine
print of the very long documents that set out the
goals, you reach this conclusion: In this great, grandiose
campaign to end world poverty and achieve
the Millennium Development Goals, nobody is
individually responsible for any one result."

Uncle T