I begin with a confession that I am an admirer of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan. He deserves praise for his courage and clarity in speaking out against vicious human rights abuses by the dictatorial regime of Islam Karimov, which (deplorably) receives funding and support from the US and the UK Governments. As well as calling the world’s attention to the repressive regime in Uzbekistan, Mr Murray has been outspoken against the use of information gathered through torture and the practice of extraordinary rendition.
Recently, Mr Murray has published a series of confidential documents which purport to show that the UK Government government knowingly received information extracted by the Uzbekistan government using torture. This revelation has caused quite a storm in the blogosphere, including at Bloggerheads and at Daily Kos.
Mr Murray says (and the documents appear to confirm) that he warned the UK Government that information being passed on by the Uzbek security services was torture-tainted. But in a thoughtful post, another former Ambassador, Sir Brian Barder (who happens to be my father) makes an important distinction between using information tainted by torture as evidence in court (which is, and should be, inadmissable) and acting upon intelligence, however obtained, as the basis of further investigation.
As my father says, if our security services get information about a possible terrorist attack they should investigate it further, knowing that information gathered under duress of torture is likely to be far less reliable than information from other sources. That is what Mr Murray says has been happening, and it isn’t obvious to me that it it is either ethically wrong or illegal.
Furthermore, I don’t think UK Government Ministers have ever said that we don’t, or shouldn’t, act upon information even it is has been obtained by torture. So it not clear to me that Mr Murray’s documents demonstrate that the Government has in any way misled us about receiving or using such information.
I suppose it might be said that our willingness to receive and use information obtained from torture somehow encourages the Uzbek government to torture people that they otherwise wouldn’t. But given the nature of that regime, I doubt if it makes any difference to them if we do, or don’t, use the information they provide.
What Mr Murray is surely right about is the need for the UK and US to be much more robust in isolating the brutal, dictatorial regime and putting maximum economic and political pressure for change (read Mr Murray’s comments on my father’s blog for some idea of the nature of the government). It is deplorable that the relationship between the Uzbek government and the US or UK is sufficiently friendly for us to be receiving any intelligence information at all from their security services, let alone doing anything to encourage them to torture people.
So on this precise point, I don’t think Mr Murray is right, as it is not necessarily ethically wrong, nor is it illegal, for our services to use whatever information they can get in the fight against terrorism; and it is not clear to me that our Ministers have ever said otherwise.
A group of K-Stars ran the Silicon Valley Half Marathon this morning. All enjoyed it, and Tomas (1:29:53) and Dave O’Connor (1:24:50) achieved personal records. Christine (1:40:20) won her age group. Grethe ran 1:38:07 and I ran 1:21:49. Andy (1:22:56), Dave and I scored for the team. We were not the fastest team but don’t know if we were in the top three. (Update: we were third team.)
Now for a large breakfast.
In the photo (clockwise): Tomas, Mike (1:55:54), Owen, Andy, John (1:27:43), Dave O’C, Dave P (1:30:02), Christine, Grethe. Missing from photo Heather (1:42:03 – second in age group). In the 5km (not in photo) were Janet and Malinda.
Full results here.
I’ve got a piece up at my Vaccines for Development blog which looks at a new paper summarizing the cost-effectiveness of vaccination as a development intervention.
I don’t normally bother to cross-post from here, but this is a very interesting paper.
John Densmore, the drummer for The Doors, has turned down $15 million offered by Cadillac last year for the right to use “Break On Through” to promote its luxury SUVs:
People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.
Apparently Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger and not too pleased with John Densmore’s principled stance.
What would Jim Morrison think?
Here are the lyrics from Black Polished Chrome, which apparently Cadillac didn’t want to use:
Someone knew the tv showman
He came to our homeroom party
And played records
And when he left in the hot noon sun
And walked to his car
We saw the chooks had written
F-u-c-k on his windshield
He wiped it off with a rag
And smiling cooly drove away
He’s rich. got a big car.
Two quotations from the last two days, worth reading together.
Jack Straw’s Labour Party Conference Speech, 28 September 2005
At the Millennium Summit two weeks ago, with the UK in the vanguard, major reforms were agreed. New development aid targets; a peace-building commission; a new and more effective human rights council; and, most important of all, a new recognition that sovereign states themselves and the nations of the world as a whole, have a clear “responsibility to protect” all citizens from genocide, from ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
And if this new responsibility had been in place a decade ago, thousands in Srebrenica and Rwanda would have been saved. We would not have had to take action in Kosovo without an explicit UN mandate; and the later divisions over Iraq might (just) have been avoided.
And my pledge to you is to ensure that the fine words on responsibility to protect are translated into collective action.
Sleepless in Sudan - An aid worker diary from Darfur, 29 September 2005
The UN’s aid chief, Jan Egeland, has been making some noise this week about insecurity in Darfur and how unacceptable the situation is getting – close on the heels of similar remarks by the UN’s genocide envoy, Juan Mendez, who visited Darfur recently. …
Any man, woman or child in a typical Darfur town, be it Geneina or Kebkabaya, will tell you that the Janjaweed are still walking through the market with their guns – or jogging through the streets with the military as new recruits, as the case may be. And that the SLA are again rumoured to be on the cusp of launching an attack against one of the major towns soon. And that no, that road is NOT safe to use – you WILL be robbed, possibly beaten and maybe shot if you keep going that way.
What would really be news is if someone actually prosecuted the people behind the violence for their crimes – or, perhaps more importantly, their bosses. Unfortunately, there’s little hope that this will happen in the Sudanese tribunals that have been set up to deal with Darfur. And as the International Criminal Court, the one body who might have an impact on ending impunity in Darfur, sits around and mulls over its options I suppose the United Nations officials will be content with continuing to state the obvious.
Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon splendidly refutes the graph published by Fredrik Erixon that purports to show a negative relationship between aid and growth. (See also Jeff Sachs’s response to Erixon).
As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing. Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and growth finds a robust positive relationship.
As a public service, I have transcribed verbatim the interview with Tony Blair on the Today Programme on 16 September. You can read the full text here.
The interview touches on the Government’s draft anti-terrorism legislation, the UN summit, development, Iraq, and Tony Blair’s legacy of reform of public services.
If I have time, I will post soon about the Government’s proposed anti-terrorism laws. In the meantime, I will let the Prime Minister’s words speak for themselves:
let’s be absolutely clear: there will be all sorts of people who say for all sorts of reasons: "look, I understand why the terrorists do it, and you know, you can sympathise with their motivation." Now I happen profoundly to disagree with that, but I am not suggesting that you make that a criminal offence. Er, what I am suggesting should be an offence is somebody who in effect by glorifying is inciting and is saying to people – particularly impressionable people – and we know, look, that this is a modern phenomenon that we have, this extremism based on a perversion of Islam – is in effect saying to impressionable young people: this is something you should do.
I remain unclear what statements the Government wishes to make illegal. Are there statements which are not incitement, which is already illegal, and which are not merely expressing sympathy with a terrorist’s motivation, which Mr Blair does not think should be illegal. Can anyone think of an example of such a statement?
I do not understand why extraordinary rendition is not causing more outrage in the UK. Read this to find out what it is like to be tortured, and British complicity.
Credit, though, to BlairWatch, who highlights a recent article in the Guardian.
And to my father, Brian Barder, who resigned from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in protest at the Government’s attempts to use the immigration system to imprison people without a fair trial (which the High Court subsequently found to be illegal) and whose blog is an essential resource for anyone interested in civil liberties.
And to Tony Hatfield, who continues to plug away on this.
And to Stephen Grey, a remarkable journalist who has probably done more than any other British journalist to hold the Government to account (see his website, online news article here, radio transcript here, newspaper article here).
And we should acknowledge Kenneth Clarke for raising the issue in his recent speech on foreign affairs.
Apologies to anyone I’ve missed (let me know in the comments section if there are other great blogs about this.)
The British Government should not condone, tolerate, participate in or benefit from torture. Full stop.
I was playing Transformer by Lou Reed the other day. Grethe walked in, and demanded to know, in that forthright Scandinavian way, why I was listening to this man who cannot sing. After a moment’s thought, I replied that there are many great songs by bands or artists who can’t, you know, sing. At least, not very well.
Thinking about it some more, this seems to be particularly true of some of the greatest musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. Here is my top five list of great singers who can’t actually sing:
- Bob Dylan
- Lou Reed
- Paul Simon
- Van Morrison
- Mark Knopfler
Other nominations gratefully received.
I met a man from Mississippi the other day. We sat next to each other over dinner at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. When he heard my British accent, he thanked me for our support for the United States military in Iraq. He said that America had rescued freedom and democracy in Europe in two world wars, and was pleased that Britain was, in return, standing now with America.
It is quite a common perception in America that it stood up for democracy and freedom in Europe. Just this week, President George W. Bush compared the war in Iraq with the two World Wars
We defeated fascism; we defeated communism; and we will defeat the hateful ideology of the terrorists who attacked America. Each of these struggles for freedom required great sacrifice. From the beaches of Normandy to the snows of Korea, courageous Americans gave their lives so others could live in freedom.
I am not making a point about Republicans: a decade ago Bill Clinton said:
Our people fought two world wars so that freedom could triumph over tyranny.
I am an economist, not a historian, so doubtless somebody will put me right if I have got this wrong, but that isn't how I understand America's involvement in either of the World Wars. The way I heard it, America was a determined isolationist in the run up to both wars:
- Britain went to war on August 4th 1914 in response to an unprovoked invasion of Belgium. The US entered the war on April 6th 1917, nearly three years later, following aggression against American shipping by German submarines (and about two years after the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7th, 1915).
- Britain went to war again on September 3rd 1939 when Poland was invaded. Canada, Australia, New Zealand & South Africa all immediately joined Britain by declaring war on Hitler in 1939, and the United States did not. It wasn't until more than two years later, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6th 1941, that the United States entered the war. Hitler declared war on the United States, not the other way round. Though some brave and principled Americans chose to join the Canadian armed forces to help fight the Nazis, the US Government remained officially neutral until it was attacked, and most Americans opposed joining the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor.
What's more, as the third volume of Robert Skidelsky's magisterial biography of J. M. Keynes describes, Britain paid a heavy price for US support. The United States demanded that in return for Lend Lease, which Britain desperately needed to sustain its war effort, Britain pledge itself to abandon any aspirations of post-war empire, dismantle the system of imperial preference and shrink the sterling area to prevent it from competing with the dollar. Skidelsky describes the way that Washington managed the flow of Lend-Lease supplies which had the effect, and perhaps the intention, of leaving Britain dependent on US help after the war on whatever terms America chose to impose. And the terms they imposed were not generous. Did you know that, even today, Britain is still re-paying America for its World War II debt? The British Treasury still has to write cheques to the US Treasury, year after year, to pay back the costs of fighting the Nazis. (Britain will make its final payment in December 2006.) Not exactly the behaviour of a close friend and ally, fighting shoulder to shoulder for democracy and freedom.
Of course, I realise that without the help of America, Britain would almost certainly not have won either war; and I pay tribute to the brave American men and women who fought in those wars. I certainly don't mean to belittle their sacrifice. (And we should also remember that without the superhuman efforts of the Russians, America might not have won the second world war either.)
The way I see it, Britain stood up for democracy and freedom, reflexively and immediately. The United States, by contrast, was dragged kicking and screaming out of isolationism. When the US join the second world war, several years later, it exploited the opportunity to pursue its global objectives, including making sure that Britain's economic and military power would be sharply reduced, to strengthen America's position as a global power.
Now I don't hold this against America, or Americans, today. All water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned. I understand the reasons for America's isolationism then, and, as I say, I'm glad they joined the war on our side eventually. Better late than never and all that. I'd rather they hadn't screwed us on Lend Lease, but let's let bygones be bygones, eh? But if Americans are going to boast about their involvement as an example of America's commitment to liberty and democracy, then they must expect to be reminded of the inconvenient facts.
I didn't say anything to the man from Mississipi about any of this, as I didn't (and don't) want to be rude to my hosts here in America. I didn't want to have a fight with a big man at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Maybe I've got this all wrong – I'm an economist not a historian. In which case, please put me right.
Update: have a look at Neil Hall's interesting comment on this post which describes how the United States profited from the second world war.
TalkPolitics takes a well-aimed shot at the new arrangements for establishing and operating public enquiries in the UK. Apparently, a cosy deal between Government and Opposition saw the passage of a bill, without a vote, of the Inquiries Act 2005, which
changed the process by which public and other governmental inquiries are convened, conducted and, ultimately, reported on, not a single one of which serves the public interest. It does this by taking away from the independent chair of such an enquiry and from Parliament itself, a whole series of rights which have been in place since the 1920′s, rights which the government has now, through its ministers, reserved solely and exclusive to itself.
One of New Labour’s weaknesses, in my opinion, is that they are insufficiently interested in establishing and sustaining institutions that nurture and protect the rights and values that they espouse, preferring wherever possible to grant themselves discretion to act as they choose. This is a myopia that we will come to regret in time.
Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow sets out a compelling moral case for the people of rich countries to help the world’s poor. He argues that, whether you take a utilitarian, rights-based, or a social contract view, we have a duty to assist.
I agree with this as far as it goes, but it seems to me that there are four categories of reasons why we should help the world’s poor.
- First, we have a moral duty to our fellow human beings
Chris covers this in some detail, and I have little to add. I would, however, particularly endorse the thought that we have just as much responsibility for helping the people of Lusaka as we do the people of Liverpool. Just because they are further away does not reduce our obligations to them. - Second, we bear some responsibility for poverty in developing countries
A part (and only a part) of the reason why there is poverty in developing countries is because of the behaviour of rich countries; and they are part (and only a part) of the reason that we are rich. I suspect this will be controversial, so I’ll set out a number of reasons why I believe this is true (and you don’t have to believe them all to agree with the conclusion.) The obscenity of slavery deprived Africa of generations of its most economically active young men, and traumatised many communities. The colonial powers – especially France – benefited enormously from the products of slave labour, such as sugar and cotton. Through the period of colonialisation we exploited natural resources of developing countries, such as minerals and timber, accumulating capital for the colonisers but leaving nothing for the colonised. At the Berlin Conference 1884-1885, the colonial powers drew political boundaries in Africa which did not reflect linguistic, ethnic, historical or geographical boundaries, burdening Africa with deep complications in the governance of nation states. The European tactics of divide and rule created conflicts in societies that persist today (for example, see Gourevitch’s account of how the Europeans invented a conflict between Tutsi and Hutus, in order to govern the Great Lakes regions; an artificial and recent division which eventually erupted into the Rwanda genocide). Through the colonial era and in to the Cold War, the rich countries installed and supported dictators such as Mobuto, Mengistu, Houphouët-Boigny, Eyadéma, Traoré, and Banda, because we thought it was in our strategic and commerical interests to do so. Our opposition to the evolution of democratic institutions during the colonial period and Cold War has contributed to the lack of democracy, freedom and good governance that is now recognised as a major cause of poverty in Africa. More recently, we continue to provide the money which feeds widespread corruption, for example through oil royalties or mineral extraction rights, while our companies refuse to publish details of the payments they make. (This is not generally true of aid, which is now carefully monitored to ensure that the funds are well spent; but it remains true of the much larger flow of private sector funds.) And through the emmission of greenhouse gases, it seems increasingly likely that we have contributed to global warming which leads to desertification and the destruction of the habitats and livelihoods of people in the developing world. (I have deliberately excluded from this list the many ways in which things we don’t do contribute to poverty – such as allowing poor countries access to our markets). - Third, reducing poverty will reduce the risk of bad things happening to us
We have strong reasons of self interest to fight poverty. We have seen from recent terrorism that our security is threatened as much by weak states as by strong states. Growing international inequality contributes to a sense of injustice among young people – for example, the would-be bombers in London on July 21 2005 were from East Africa. Conflict between and within developing countries is never completely contained, and we sometimes become involved to keep peace or prevent humanitarian disasters. As well as violent unrest and conflict, we are at risk of organised crime, export of drugs, the spread of infectious diseases, and widespread environmental degradation which will reduce the quality of all our lives if we do not tackle it. - Fourth, reducing poverty will increase the economic opportunities available to us
It is in our interests to have economically strong trading partners. Rather than feel threatened by the loss of jobs overseas, we have the opportunity to build large and growing markets which, at least in the case of Africa and Europe, are on the doorstep. If conditions improved in developing countries, there would be opportunities for greater trade, cheaper raw materials, and greater economic diversity.
I suspect that the second reason given above will be the most controversial, and I would emphasise that it is only part of the reason why I think we should help the world’s poor. Each of these four categories would, in my view, be sufficient to make a compelling case. Taken together, I believe the case is unanswerable.
There is also a debate about who exactly should bear this responsibility. Some libertarians would argue that it is for private individuals, not governments, to determine whether and to what extent we should help other people. (See the comments on Chris’s post at Stumbling and Mumbling for some flavour of this argument.) I think the case for leaving this to individual decision is strongest if the justification for helping others is entirely moral: in that case, you might think we should each make an ethical decision for ourselves. But if you believe the second, third and fourth category of reason given above, this creates a stronger case for public involvement in aid. In particular, reducing the risks to us and creating greater economic opportunities are public goods, in the sense that they are non-excludable, and in the absence of government intervention there would be a strong incentive for some people to free ride on the generosity of others, leading to an underprovision of these goods.
In 1987, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen showed that many famines are not caused by a lack of food production, but by a change in the incomes of poor people.
For example, a group of peasants may suffer entitlement losses when food output in their area declines, perhaps because of a local drought, even when there is no general lack of food in the country. The victims would not have the means to buy food from elsewhere, since they wouldn’t have anything much to sell to earn an income, given their own production loss. Others with more secure earnings in other occupations or in other locations may be able to get by well enough by buying food from elsewhere. Something very like this happened in the famous Wollo famine in Ethiopia in 1973, with impoverished residents of the province of Wollo unable to buy food, despite the fact that food prices in Dessie (the capital of Wollo) were no higher than in Addis Ababa and Asmera. Indeed, there is evidence of some food moving out of Wollo to the more prosperous regions of Ethiopia where people had more income to buy food.
In other cases, food prices may shoot up because of the increased purchasing power of some occupation groups, and as a result others who have to buy food may be ruined because the real purchasing power of their money incomes may have shrunk sharply. Such a famine may occur without any decline in food output, resulting as it does from a rise in competing demand rather than a fall in total supply. This is what started off the famine in Bengal in 1943, with urban dwellers gaining from the "war boom" – the Japanese army was round the corner and the British and Indian defence expenditures were heavy in urban Bengal, including Calcutta. Once the rice prices started moving up sharply, public panic as well as manipulative speculation played its part in pushing the prices sky high, beyond the reach of a substantial part of the population of rural Bengal.
What is striking about these cases is that food aid – that is, buying surplus production from rich countries and shipping it to the places where people are hungry – may do more harm than good. What the poor people need in these circumstances is buying power, to enable them to buy the food that is already being produced but is not available to them. Food aid may depress local food prices, and thereby cause some harm to food producers and perhaps reduce future production. In these circumstances, it would be better to drop dollar bills out of helicopters than sacks of food.
It seems that we may be in something like this situation right now in Niger. According to this news report, there is food in the markets in Niger: the problem is that the poorest people there do not have money to buy it:
Johanne Sekkenes, the mission head of MSF which is mounting the biggest emergency exercise in its history in Niger, says the current emergency could have been avoided. ‘This is not a famine, in the Somalian way,’ she said. ‘The harvest was bad in 2004 and the millet granaries are empty. Yet there is food on the markets. The trouble is that the price of the food is beyond anyone’s reach.
It has been encouraging to hear that there is now some international response to the crisis in Niger. But we we must do so in ways which deal with the real causes of the problem. Too often, our own self interest (we can provide income for our own farmers) combines with an ill-informed set of assumptions about Africa ("they can’t grow enough food to feed themselves") and leads us to support inappropriate solutions.
Hat tip: Ian
Quentin Stafford-Fraser debunks the idea that businesses (or the IT shops of a business) should be focused on what customers say they want.
How many of those people now carrying iPods could have told you a few years ago that that was what they really wanted? … in the words of Wayne Gretzky, you want to skate to where the puck is going to be, rather than where it is now. And to do that, you can’t usually rely on the customers. Nor can you relay on the business guys, or the sales guys, or the marketing guys. They’ll learn what the customer wants at about the same time as the customer does. No, to be ready for the future, at least to some degree, you need to be a technology-focused company.
Tyler Cowen says that the debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid has improved in the last ten years. If so, then things must have been really bad a decade ago: it continues to astound me how many people are allowed to get away with peddling their prejudices without any meaningful evidence.
James Surowiecki has an interesting piece in the New Yorker which seems to support the case for aid:
Between 1946 and 1978, in fact, South Korea received nearly as much U.S. aid as the whole of Africa. Meanwhile, the billions that Taiwan got allowed it to fund a vast land-reform program and to eradicate malaria. And the U.S. gave the Asian Tigers more than money; it provided technical assistance and some military defense, and it offered preferential access to American markets. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the two Middle Eastern countries that have shown relatively steady and substantial economic growth—Israel and Turkey—have also received tens of billions of dollars in U.S. aid.
But this anecdotal analysis is no more valid than the opposite argument which was put by Bill Easterly in the New York Times on July 3rd:
From 1960 to 2003, we spent $568 billion (in today’s dollars) to end poverty in Africa. Yet these efforts still did not lift Africa from misery and stagnation.
Saying that we have given aid to Africa and yet Africans stayed poor is not an argument against aid; just as saying that we gave aid to Korea and they got rich is not an argument in favour of it.
As I argued here on June 30th, the question is whether aid makes a difference – and that requires some evidence about what would have happened in the absence of aid. You need to do a proper statistical analysis, controlling for other variables, to establish what difference, if any, aid makes to a country’s growth.
Plenty of studies have been done, and they nearly all find that aid is strongly, positively correlated with sustained economic growth in the medium term. My colleagues at the Center for Global Development did a study which looked at the relationship between aid and growth which finds:
higher-than-average short-impact aid to sub-Saharan Africa raised per capita growth rates there by about half a percentage point over the growth that would have been achieved by average aid flows. The results are highly statistically significant and stand up to a demanding array of tests …
And in a comprehensive survey of all the empirical research on thiark McGillivray at the OECD (pdf file here) finds that poverty would have been much higher in the absence of aid.
I’ve done a series of blog postings on aid effectiveness which set out the compelling micro and macro evidence for the effectiveness of aid. Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon is also a reliable source of evidence-based analysis.
Ed Harriman’s article in the London Review of Books is a thorough review of financial mis-management by the coalition forces in Iraq. (For those who do not want to read the full article, The Guardian carried an edited version.)
By 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds. …
The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’. …
The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries. …
Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq’s wealth while most of Iraq’s oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam’s favour, grew rich. Today the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the country’s money with impunity.
This is a staggering indictment of the US, UK and other coalition governments. If even some of this report is true, it should be a resigning matter for the politicians and senior officials responsible.
The money that is missing or unaccounted for dwarfs the alleged impropriety at the United Nations, for which members of US Congress have been baying for blood.
Normally I tried to avoid blogging about blogging – it is all too self referential. But three recent articles (see below) got me thinking.
It seems to me that there are three distinct roles for blogs in relation to conventional media:
- first, blogs give a chance for experts to communicate directly, without being intermediated by the media. They can express themselves at length, and impartially without the constraints that inevitably constrain commercial news outlets to simplfy and sensationalize, to be balanced (as opposed to objective); I know only too well the frustration of trying to convey ideas through newspapers and broadcast media, and when in charge of communications for a Government department, often wished that I could speak directly to the readers;
- second, blogs are a way for well-written opinions to be written in the true voice of the author – with passion and personality, rather than adhering to the political position of a commercial news organisation. These are not necessarily written by experts: the value lies in the judgement and eloquence of the commentator; this point is made by Paul Mason, in his very interesting reflections on his experience blogging Live8 for Newsnight.
- third, blogs act as a sort of watchful eye on the conventional media, correcting mistakes, challenging biases both in reporting and ommission, and so helping to raise the quality of journalism. This point is well made by Daniel Glover in a speech to a Heritage Foundation round table.
At least for now, blogs are not replacing conventional journalism. Most blogging is derivative on news reported by the mainstream media – commenting on news, criticising the way it has been reported, and selectively drawing attention to it. Almost no bloggers engage in the patient investigative journalism that makes great newspapers (think of Bernstein and Woodward, for example); and there is very little primary newsgathering by the blogging community. Sarah Boxer remarked in the New York Times noted that the Flickr collection of photographs about London were "not about the tragedy itself but about how news is passed."
It is quite remarkable how much blogging is in this third category: commenting on the mainstream media. I’ve been surprised by the popularity of Tim Worstall’s blog, which is sometimes referred to as an influential blog in the print media (how these things come full circle!). Tim has a jovial and popular style, a voracious appetite for the writings of others, and he is never short of an opinion. But the contribution of his blog – and many others like it – is almost entirely based on synthesising and critiquing the work of the traditional print and broadcast press. This type of blogging is no more a journalism than drama criticism is acting. This is not intended to be a criticism of Tim or other bloggers – and the point applies in large measure to my own blog – but an observation on the limits of our contribution.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."–Theodore Roosevelt.
I’d like to think that President Bush knows the difference between an Attorney General and a General. Perhaps not. In his speech today, according to a press release put out by the White House, he welcomed his audience as follows:
I appreciate our Attorney General, Al Gonzales, who has joined us today. General, thank you for being here.
There is now a 50% chance of being infected by an internet worm in just 12 minutes of being online using an unprotected, unpatched Windows PC, according to Sophos.
Credit where it is due: President Bush made a speech about Africa yesterday. Two quick comments. First, I cannot see how the White House reckons it has trebled aid to Africa. President Bush said yesterday:
Over the last four years, the United States has stood squarely with reformers in Africa on the side of prosperity and progress. We’ve tripled our aid to Africa; we plan to double it once again.
The figures show that from FY 2000 to FY 2005 (estimated), U.S. aid to Africa will have increased by 78% in real terms or 93% in nominal dollars – not quite a doubling, much less a “tripling” of aid. Of this increase, 50% consists of emergency food aid (PL 480 Title II). You can see the full figures here. Second, it isn’t true that aid is only effective when given to good governments. President Bush said yesterday:
Over the decades, we’ve learned that without economic and social freedom, without the rule of law and effective, honest government, international aid has little impact or value. But where there’s freedom and the rule of law, every dollar of aid, trade, charitable giving, and foreign and local investment can rapidly improve people’s lives. (Applause.)
This sounds plausible; but none of the aid-growth regressions find that aid is completely ineffective in poor policy environments, and many of them find that the quality of the policy environment makes little or no difference to the effectiveness of aid. I have no objection to donors choosing to channel their aid to better governments where possible, but they should not mislead themselves or the public into thinking that this is justified by evidence that shows that aid is not effective in badly governed countries, or that it is substantially more effective where policy is good.
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