Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category

Ravi Kanbur has written an interesting paper (pdf) about how he feels as someone who makes a good living from analysing and writing about poverty. Here is an extract, but it is worth reading the whole, thoughtful piece:

What is striking about the class of poverty professionals (of whom I am one) is that the good living (granted, not at the billionaire or millionaire level, but pretty good nevertheless) is made through the very process of analyzing, writing, recommending on poverty. To me, at least, this is discomforting and disconcerting. I feel slightly ashamed within myself when I turn up to a poverty conference (perhaps even one where I am the keynote speaker), having flown business class, staying in an expensive hotel and (sometimes) being paid handsomely for attending. I recall many years ago, when I was in my twenties, telling the anthropologist Mary Douglas about how I was starting to do consulting for the World Bank on poverty issues, and how important it was to do this work. “And it’s not too bad for one’s own poverty either, is it?” came her worldly, knowing, reply. The seeds of discomfort sown by that comment have germinated and taken root, and now won’t let go.

Ravi suggests that everyone working in development should reconnect with poverty through a poverty immersion:

each poverty professional should engage in an “exposure” to poverty (also known as “immersions”) every 12 to 18 months. I do not mean by this rural sector missions for aid agency officials, nor the running of training workshops by NGO staff. What I mean is well captured by Eyben (2004); these are exercises that “are designed for visitors to stay for a period of several days, living with their hosts as participants, as well as observers, in their daily lives. They are distinct from project monitoring or highly structured ‘red carpet’ trips when officials make brief visits to a village or an urban slum….”

A friend of mine from DFID did this recently and came back saying how valuable it was.  I am in favour of immersions, though I don’t think it gets close to addressing the problem that Ravi is grappling with.

This reminds me that in March 2008, the Conservative development spokesman (and, since yesterday, the UK Secretary of State for International Development) announced that all DFID staff would be required to undertake a week-long immersion living in a poorer community. Andrew Mitchell said:

These immersions will serve as a valuable ‘reality check’ from the usual round of meetings, paperwork and spreadsheets. It will help keep everyone at DfID focused on their core mission: serving and helping poor people to work their way, sustainably, out of poverty.

I hope that they will implement this proposal now that they are in Government, and I hope DFID’s new Ministers will consider doing an immersion themselves, perhaps during the summer recess.

(via Suvojit)

When Google decided to set up a censored version of its search engine in China in 2006, I was among those who criticised the company for its decision (here and here).

As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing (“Don’t Be Evil”) and does another will eventually suffer from the contradiction between their values and their actions.

So I applaud their announcement today that they are taking a new approach in China and their threat to pull out of the market.

(Ironically, Google’s own blog is censored here in Ethiopia. You cannot access blogspot blogs.)

Google is standing up to dictatorship and speaking out for free speech, and putting this ahead of their immediate commercial interests.

It is hard to imagine other companies standing up for their – and our – values in this way. (Can you imagine Microsoft withdrawing their Bing search engine instead of producing sanitized results?)

Bloggers are quick to criticise when companies do the wrong thing.  So let’s be equally unstinting in our praise when they do things right.

Good on yer, Google.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times says he is calling for “a debate” about immigration but his article is, in truth, a thinly-veiled diatribe against immigration on the grounds that it harms the economy, the environment and society.

The most important step in his argument is the first one.   Wolf says:

I, for one, have no difficulty with arguing that immigration is a privilege, not a right. Most people agree.

The assertion that “immigration is a privilege not a right” seems to me to be the wrong starting point.  I would begin with an opposite premise that seems to me to be much more basic and compelling:  “The burden of proof rests on those who would restrict human freedom.” If someone wants to move from one part of the planet to another, to live and work and raise their family, then we ought to have a very good reason before we set up a system to stop them.

To construct his argument, Martin Wolf wants us to believe both the following claims:

1. Immigration has a negative impact on the existing population; and
2. We ought to pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than the interests of the migrants.

On the first leg of this argument, Martin Wolf (under the guise of “calling for a debate”) claims that immigration is harmful to the economy, environment and society of the existing population.  As it happens, I don’t agree with any of this, though since that is not the point I want to focus on, I shall restrict myself to pointing to the economic and social success of countries that have been open to large-scale immigration.   But while I think the first leg of the argument is wrong, it is the second leg of the argument that I most want to challenge.

I doubt if anyone would seriously contest the view that even if if immigration causes some harm to the existing population, this harm is in total is far less than the very significant benefits to the migrants themselves.   So the case for restricting the freedom of people to live where they choose can only be made if you accept that we should pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than to the interests of the migrants.

There is no question that it is a widely-held view that we should give more weight to the interests of the existing population.  For example, Wolf says:

My view is that the interests of the existing citizens are of decisive weight, though we should also place some weight, too, on the interests of immigrants.

Perhaps I was born with faulty wiring, but I simply do not understand this view.

I believe we should give equal weight to the rights and interests of every human being. The idea that the interests of people born in our own country should weigh more in our moral calculus than the interests of people born elsewhere is, in my view, indefensible.  To say that we will less attention to the interests of another human  because they happen to have been born far away is organised racism, directly comparable with the pass laws under apartheid.

The United States Declaration of Independence asserts:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence does not limit its assertion of equality to people born within a single country. Nor is the pursuit of happiness bounded by national borders created by man. (This is just as well, as in the period following US independence one third of Europe’s population migrated to the Americas.)

Of course, the view that we should give equal weight to the interests of all human beings is unlikely to get very far in political systems designed to represent the interests of the citizens within existing borders.  But just because a political system makes it possible to ignore the rights and interests of a group of people who are weakly represented in it does not mean that it is morally right to do so.

My view is that the burden of proof lies with those who would restrict the freedom of people to live anywhere they choose.   This argument would require, at minimum, weighing up the costs and benefits of a restriction to show that we are better off in total if we curtail this freedom.  A case could only be made by placing more weight on the interests of the existing population than on the interests of other people.  I understand that there is a a widely-held view that we should do exactly that, but I nonetheless think it is profoundly wrong.   When we weigh up the argument for a policy to restrict people’s freedom based on the benefits that such a restriction will bring, we should place equal weight on the rights and interests of all people, and not privilege the interests of some people who happen to be like ourselves.  The case for restricting immigration rests on denying the equal humanity of people born abroad.  I hope that, over time, we will come to see this with the same moral outrage as we now view slavery and apartheid.

When I was a teenager, I visited Berlin, and read the grafitti on the Berlin Wall that said “No wall can stand forever”.  Now on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we look back with horror at the way the wall was used to keep people in.  Perhaps in another twenty years we will look back with equal disgust at the walls we build today to keep people out.

I’ve just watched Steve Jobs at the Apple event today. I was glad he paid tribute to the man whose liver he received, and that he called on others to register as organ donors.

But it is  less impressive to see people come to this issue only after they themselves need an organ.  I don’t recall Mr Jobs using his celebrity to promote this issue before.

I think it would be a good idea to introduce the presumption that people who register as organ donors will jump the queue if they themselves subsequently need an organ.  Perhaps that would focus some minds.

For the record, if I should die, please use anything that still works; and sent the rest to med school for dissection training or whatever they do.  I won’t care then, and as a person living today I like to think that I might be useful.

The New York Times describes what happens if women do not have access to safe abortions:

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. …

Here in Ethiopia around a third of maternal deaths are the result of unsafe abortions.

Well done to the New York Times for addressing this. Too often this problem is swept under the carpet.

Reich on Palin:

while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.

I’ve just heard Jack Straw tell the Today programme that one of Mr Blair’s great successes was to persuade the United States at Gleneagles to increase aid to Africa.

The transcript of the briefing by US officials on Air Force One going home from Gleneagles says different.

Two weeks in Club La Santa in Lanzarote. Feeling fitter, more tanned, and (oddly) a little heavier than when we left.

From the Adam Smith Institute.

Brilliant.  I've asked for some.

Hat tip: Tim. 

Update: they arrived. Proving that even if there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is such a thing as a free wristband. 

Much of the literature about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of aid revolves around whether aid accelerates economic growth.

But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor.  If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of people who would otherwise go to bed hungry, it might have no lasting or measurable impact on the economy, but the world would be a better place as a result of this redistribution.

A new paper by World Bank economists Francois Borguignon, Victoria Levin and David Rosenblatt looks at the impact of aid on global inequality (ignoring, for these purposes, any dynamic effects on growth).  The paper finds that aid does indeed reduce global inequality; and that while it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by trade barriers imposed by high-income countries.

They make this interesting observation: 

Although this paper is about international inequality, we know that the actual level of global inequality of income is extremely high ­ with a Gini coefficient between 0.64 (Milanovic 2005) and 0.66 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). If this level of inequality were to exist within a single country, that country would probably experience substantial social strife. That this does not happen in the world simply means that, as of today, there is nothing like a global community.

When writers such as Charles Dickens wrote about the lives of the poor in England and other newly industrialised countries, they made it impossible for society to continue tolerate or sustain the inequality and poverty in their midst.  We desperately need that same realisation for the world. 

Hat tip: PSD blog 

From the Center for Global Development website:

Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing countries can absorb and use effectively — and that large aid flows might even be harmful. Could a large increase in aid be “too much of a good thing?”

In this essay, CGD Senior Program Associate Owen Barder disentangles the seven possible reasons why additional aid might not be effective. These include microeconomic effects (e.g. transactions costs), macroeconomic effects (e.g. ‘Dutch Disease’) and the impact on political economy (e.g. the ‘Resource Curse’). The paper looks at each possible constraint in turn.

The paper finds that there are indeed serious obstacles to effective use of increased aid, but than none is immutable. All of the constraints which limit the effective use of additional aid can be addressed by a relatively small set of practical improvements in the way that aid is provided and used. Donors have already committed themselves to a significant program of aid reform. If the measures to which donors are committed were consistently implemented, the seven constraints to effective aid absorption could be relaxed.

The paper concludes that, provided that increased aid is accompanied by reforms to the way aid is delivered, the capacity of developing countries to absorb and use aid should not be presented as a barrier to the increases in aid which would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The US Congress is currently discussing an issue which sounds rather technical and dull but which could have profound implications for the future of the internet.  If you care about whether the internet remains innovative, vibrant and open you should pay attention to the obscure-sounding question of net neutrality.

The issue is simple: should internet service providers be under an obligation to carry all network traffic without discrimination? Those in favour of net neutrality say that such a requirement is needed to protect the open, innovative nature of the net. Those against net neutrality say that market forces will ensure continued innovation and that legislating this requirement will stifle investment in new broadband services.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have got a blog post up at the Center for Global Development blog, Views from the Center, saying that we have got a long way to go.

It is irritating to see opponents of abortion seeking to restrict abortion by opportunistically using arguments which they think are superficially persuasive but which bear no relationship to their real views and which they know to be irrelevant.

There are people who believe that a human foetus is a human life with full moral rights and that all abortion is therefore wrong.  That is a coherent point of view, though it is not one that I agree with.  There are those who believe that – at least during the early stages of pregnancy – a foetus does not have characteristics which would confer moral worth sufficient to outweigh the rights of the mother.  That alternative view is also coherent.

What does not make any sense is to say that the moral worth of the foetus depends on whether it is "viable" – that is, whether it could survive outside the womb.  Yet time and again, the abortion debate is argued on this territory.

According to the BBC a Catholic Cardinal has called upon the government to revise the abortion laws on just this basis:

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor argues that technological advances mean the abortion laws are outdated. Modern medicine can now ensure the survival of some foetuses born before 24 weeks gestation.

This does not make any sense.  If we should attach moral worth to a foetus, it is because of the characteristics it has (e.g because it feels pain or because God has infused it with a soul) or because we attach value to what it has the potential to become.  Whether or not a foetus has moral worth cannot possibly depend on whether scientists have yet developed an effective artificial incubator.   Whether or not a foetus is a bearer of rights does not change over time with scientific progress, nor does it vary between countries according to the state of the health care system.  (Whether or not those rights will in practice be recognized may well depend on these factors.)

Linking the rights of the foetuses to viability is not only sloppy thinking, it is cynical opportunism on the part of the anti-abortionists.  They know that one day in the not too distant future it will be possible for a human egg to be fertilized in vitro and incubated entirely in an artificial womb.  That means that all embryos will be "viable" from the moment of fertilization (it also means that a freezer full of egg and sperm will be "viable" but we will leave that aside).   By linking the moral value of the foetus to viability, they are hoping to make it easier to criminalize all abortions one day. 

We are being asked to abdicate the important moral judgement (what characteristics are sufficient for a living object to have rights that would compete with the rights of the mother?) by asking a different, empirical question (how likely is it that a foetus will survive outside the womb?).  For example, on the BBC's Any Questions this week, Sir Mark Tully (a journalist who is a Christian) said:

I also think that of course it is very important that we do consider the scientific evidence of this as to what actually we are doing when we abort a child, when we reach the stage when really that is that child is beyond any doubt a living being …

I think this is something which has to be left to science very much. I think if people like us or indeed religious leaders or anyone who is an amateur starts actually speculating about that question it's very dangerous indeed.  [my emphasis]

This is clearly nonsense.  Scientists can tell us the probability that a particular foetus might survive outside the womb, or at what stage a foetus is likely to be able to feel pain.  But they are in no better position than anyone else ("amateurs") to form a view about which of these characteristics ought to be regarded as determining the moral worth of the foetus.

Those who oppose abortion should stand their ground on a meaningful claim about the characteristics of the foetus.  If you take the religious view that a foetus has rights because it has been unobservably infused by a transcendental soul at the moment of conception, then say so.   If you believe that the foetus has some other characteristic that give it a moral claim – such as the ability to feel pain, or consciousness – then let's hear what these characteristics are and we can consider together whether we find it persuasive that having those characteristics is a sufficient basis to trump the rights of the mother. 

The religious fundamentalists know that they won't win the argument by saying that a foetus has moral rights because God has entered its soul at conception.   So they try to sidestep the question about what characteristics are significant in determining moral worth by pretending that it matters whether a foetus could survive outside the womb.  That is not the point, and they know it.

I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, and I wear plastic rather than leather shoes.  I do this because I believe that animals have a rights, and that it is wrong to kill animals simply for pleasure.

I do not regard this as a purely personal choice: I would readily vote for a political party which was committed to making it a criminal offence to eat an animal for pleasure. 

Even so I would have no hesitation in eating an animal if my life depended on it. To say that animals have rights is not the same as saying that they have the same rights as humans.  (I would also have few qualms about a group of people killing and eating a fellow passenger in a shipwreck if there is no other way to survive.  Rights can be trumped by other rights.)

I believe that the qualitities that attract moral consideration – essentially, consciousness and especially self-consciousness – are present in many animals but are more significant in humans than in guinea pigs and rats. I believe that a human being has a more signficant claim on our moral attention than a guinea pig.

I today signed ‘The People’s Petition‘ supporting the use of animals in medical research in the UK.  The petition says

‘I believe that medical research is essential for developing new medical and veterinary treatments.  I understand that finding safe and effective treatments and medicines requires some studies using animals. 

I believe that medical research using animals, carried out to the highest standards of care and welfare, and where there is not alternative available, should continue in the UK.

I believe that people involved in medical research using animals have a right to work and live without fear of intimidation or attack.’

I do not support animal testing for cosmetics.  But I believe that the good to mankind of medical research far exceeds the harm done to animals.  I understand that animal models are not perfect measures of the risk and benefit to humans, but they are not, as the critics would have us believe, useless. They provide essential information that saves millions of lives and reduces suffering and disability. Even as a committed member of the vegetarian jihad, I therefore support the controlled use of animal testing.

I am not one of those who believe the World Bank should be shut down.  Indeed, if anything, I would prefer to see the multiplicity of bilateral aid agencies and NGOs shut down, and all the money put through a single world institution instead.    The World Bank is far from perfect; but it is an absolutely vital part of the fight against global poverty.

One problem with the World Bank is that decisions continue to be made on the basis of "one dollar one vote", reflecting the continuing pretense that it is nothing more than a lending insitution owned by its shareholders, rather than the strategic international institution that it is.

Over on the Center for Global Development blog (CGD is my employer), Ngaire Woods makes a very interesting proposal for the reform of the governance of the World Bank.

… for about 174 members of the Bank, there is little incentive to engage in decisions being made by the Board. Eight Directors can marshal a majority among themselves with little if any consultation with others.

This does not have to be the case. If Directors had to marshal not just 50% of votes (which might be just 8 members), but also 50% of members (92 countries) to make decisions, there would be a clear incentive for to consult and bring on board Directors who represent a large number of countries but wield few votes (such as the two Directors who represent over twenty African countries each yet each wield less than 3.5% of voting power).

This is not a difficult reform. The Bank’s Articles already provide for double-majority voting (Article VIII) for any amendment to the Articles. This could be extended to other decisions. Along with transparency of the Board’s process such as publication of the full minutes of any Board meeting so that countries can read exactly what their Director has said in Board meetings, would be first steps towards a more effective Board.

This seems to me a splendid proposal.  We also need to stop the board from micromanaging every decision taken by the World Bank, focusing instead on strategic direction – perhaps a change like that would help to force the Board to move more "upstream" in its deliberations? 

NB: I’ve disallowed comments on this post here: if you agree (or not), visit the CGD blog and comment there.

Everybody knows that E-Bay was a great innovation. By reducing transactions costs, and enabling users to establish
reputations, it has enabled millions of people to buy and sell goods in small quantities and of lower value than would have been possible in traditional bricks and mortar stores.

But there is another important, and little understood, innovation in the E-Bay model: the second price auction. “Oh, the second price auction”, I hear you cry in unison, “WTF is that?”

Read the rest of this entry »

According to Michael Crichton, writing in the New York Times the observation that doctor should test for the existence of a particular amino acid to determine if a patient needs a vitamin supplement has been patented:

• The Earth revolves around the Sun.
• The speed of light is a constant.
• Apples fall to earth because of gravity.
• Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.
• Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

ACTUALLY, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

Now I think that Michael Crichton made a fool of himself with State of Fear, which claims that the threat of climate change is merely alarmism. But if he is right on this, then it is indeed something that should concern us.

I have written here before about the failure of the rich countries to take action to prevent the worsening suffering in Sudan (see here, here, here).  Two million people are displaced – living in refugee camps – and three million people are dependent in international relief.  The peace talks are grinding slowly, with no immediate hope of a conclusion.  The AU force of 5,000 troops is insufficient to maintain peace in a region the size of France.

Rich countries accepted last year that they have a “responsibility to protect” people from genocide and crimes against humanity.  Over the coming weeks our governments must live up to that responsiblity. They must adopt a meaningful mandate for the UN operation that will be taking over form the AU peacekeepers in a few months; they need to supply troops, equipment, logistics and other military support for the AU forces and for the UN peacekeepers; and they need to provide sufficient food, blankets, water and other essentials for the people of Darfur.

Kofi Annan, writing in today’s Washington Post says this:

When I visited Darfur last May, I felt hopeful. Today I am pessimistic, unless a major new international effort is mustered in the coming weeks.

Please write to your MP or write to your Congressional representatives.  Now is the time for us to act.  Please do not be one of those people who passed by on the other side.

I had lunch with Quentin Stafford Fraser, the Executive Director of Ndiyo.

Ndiyo! is a project set up to foster an approach to networked computing that is simple, affordable and open.

The idea is to use very thin clients – basically small enough and cheap enough to build directly into a monitor – to access a central Linux or Windows server, over ethernet or over USB.

Technologies are being developed (see Newnham Research, for example) which could revolutionise the cost of providing computing services, for example in schools, internet cafes, businesses or government departments. Instead of providing each user with a beige box, with processing power, memory and in most cases a sotware licence, each user would access their own account on a central server. The result would be computing that is cheaper and easier to maintain.

I’m much more excited about this than I am about Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop.