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Hair vs. Mask: Could the war of words between Jeff Sachs and Bill Easterly over Aid result in collateral damage?

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Juan-Manuel-26-300x270Juan Manuel Urrutia has worked for 25 years as a Manager and Technical Advisor to development programs funded by all major donors in the area of Aid for development.  His work covered over 20 countries throughout the world, mostly in social marketing and public private partnerships.

Marquee fights at the Arena Mexico, the wrestling cathedral in Mexico City, are billed with the title “Hair vs. Mask”. Most fights are staged but hair vs. mask matches are serious affairs with wrestlers battling until one loses either his mask or hair along with his pride.

Tom Murphy, a blogger who covers International Aid and Development, published a couple of days ago a letter referring to a years-long debate that that I have been following with particular interest.

It’s the debate between Jeff Sachs and Bill Easterly, which after an extended period of détente, appears to have reignited, giving us what looks like a typical “Hair vs. Mask” meet.

Jeff Sachs, is a Harvard-trained economist. Today he is a teaches at Columbia University where he is the director of the Earth Institute. From that pulpit, he has strongly promoted a welfare vision of international Aid.

After his failures as economic advisor in Russia and Bolivia, Sachs aimed his batteries towards the eradication of poverty. He proposed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) claiming that they would successfully eradicate world poverty.

As part of his crusade, he has promoted a strategy to eradicate malaria in Africa. Without taking into account the model’s sustainability, he fosteres free, universal distribution of Insecticide-treated bed nets — oblivious to the fact that not all Africans need free handouts.

He has also been the promoter and manager of a program called the Millenium Development Villages. The program is implemented in some 20 countries in Africa and essentially proposes a strategy of intensive support for the rural development of small towns to achieve the MDGs which according to Sachs will result in the elimination of poverty.

Bill Easterly is an economist with a Ph.D from MIT. He worked for 16 years at the World Bank and currently teaches New York University. As of lately, Easterly has devoted his efforts to analyzing the impact of international Aid on sustainable Development. In addition to writing many articles and essays, Easterly has published two significant books: The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man’s Burden.

Both raise serious doubts about the limited impact of Western Aid to the rest of the world.

The Elusive Quest for Growth, his first work, discusses why international Aid has failed to produce sustainable development in many third world countries.

In the White Man’s Burden, following on the same thesis, Easterly goes further and criticizes welfare models driven by people like Bob Geldof and Bono. Easterly also critiques with special zeal Jeff Sachs’ work and philosophy.

From then on, the international Aid community has witnessed a strong debate between these two economists, a debate that has influenced donors and on-the-ground implementers.

Sachs proposes a paternalistic approach to foreign Aid that Easterly defines as “colonialist.” Said approach establishes that rich countries and experts, like Sachs, know what poor countries require.

Easterly calls them “planners” who believe that rich countries should impose big plans on poor countries for their own good.

Easterly believes that the correct approach is that of “researchers” who propose piecemeal solutions in response to specific needs.

Both Sachs and Easterly have a numerous loyal following.

The Nobel Prize laureate, Amartya Sen, has praised Easterly’s work in general, although he criticizes him for being too pessimistic and for giving too little credit to organizations providing international Aid.

In defense of Sachs, the prestigious and quite heterodox Economist Ha-Joon Chang, of the University of Cambridge, has widely disputed Easterly’s thesis.

The debate centers primarily aroun two distinct philosophies of Aid and Development.

Sachs and his followers consider that foreign assistance is first and foremost humanitarian Aid and it should be voluminous without worrying about the generation of sustainable models.

Easterly and his followers, on the other hand, consider that Aid is primarily, development assistance and should therefore build sustainable impact that is not perpetually reliant on donor funding that, he also argues, can be harmful and delay economic growth if done the Sachs way.

Recent evidence seemed to prove that Sachs was right to a certain degree. On the one hand he managed to convince the international community — with the help of bednet, chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers who, by the way, obtained huge profits from this procurement-focused strategy — that the only possible model for the eradication of malaria was to flood Africa with free commodities (e.g., insecticide-treated nets, anti-malarial drugs, insecticides, etc.) regardless of cost and without looking at the socio-economics realities of the different segments of African socitey.

Using resources from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis and the US President´s Malaria Initiative created by George Bush and continued by Obama, massive distribution programs have taken place and coverage has significantly increased. Sachs cites a 50% decrease of malaria mortality rates in children under 5 as a concrete result.

This seems to be true. Unfortunately this does not mean the eradication of malaria; a battle has been won, not the war.

But these programs wiped out significant efforts to develop complementary partially subsidized and commercial programs to create sustainable supply and demand for malaria bednets and medicines targeting those who do not need or necessarily want standardized, generic handouts, thereby allowing for more targeted and cost-effective investments by donors to increase impact among the most needy while creating lasting local solutions.

A treated bed net lasts a maximum of five years. At current population growth rates in many African countries, it will be necessary to repeat massive, free distribution campaigns every three to five years. What will happen if and when, as has been the case many previous occasions, donors decide that malaria is no longer a priority, particulary in an enviroment where budget cuts are inevitable?

In the 1950s, following the same welfare model, intense and extensive DDT-based Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) campaigns were implemented. Donor fatigue set in due to the daunting challenge of the endeavor, despite widespread success and significant impact. Donor funding dried up, DDT became politically incorrect, the programs were halted and malaria returned with greater momentum. I hope the victory claimed by Sachs does not prove to be a Pyrrhic one.

In 2013, journalist Nina Munk published a book titled The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. After years of reporting on the MDV program, Munk published her list of the program’s shortcomings and failures.

Sachs and his followers have dismissed Munk’s work, arguing that it is based upon incomplete observations.

In October, Easterly published a review of Munk’s book in the magazine Reason in which he praised her work and underlined the failure of Sachs’ approach.  

The article had not received much attention until it was expanded in the January issue of the same journal, including a perfunctory statement declaring the debate over. “[Sachs’] idea that Aid could rapidly bring the end of poverty was wrong. It’s time to move on,” concluded Easterly.

Far from accepting that the debate is over Sachs, and his friends have embarked on a Twitter campaign where “debates are often devoid of any substance and nuance”.

At first sight the journalistic work of Munk seems serious.

Sachs has responded that it is necessary to wait for the 2016 impact evaluation of the MDV.

This is not the first time that Sachs has embarked on an intense public relations campaign to undermine criticism from academics or international Aid program managers, the so-called “practitioners.”

His critics however do not use the same methods. Easterly, as well as former colleagues of Sachs, Amir Attaran, Daniel Ben Ami and Nancy Holmstrom published their critiques in serious media rather than in sets of 40 characters via Twitter.

Sadly, the use of data allows both sides to defend their thesis, support their own position. A serious concern is that data can be used to declare victory in the short term as was the case with Indoor Residual Spraying in the 1950s.

The unfortunate thing is that while scholars argue, poverty and disease remain rampant.

Editor’s note: El Molino shared via Twitter JM Urrutia’s note with @JeffDSachs who responded as follows.

Some worry that while the debate continues, donors may feel forced to choose between models rather than embracing approaches that borrow from each and simultaneously address both the humanitarian and development imperatives of foreign Aid. This debate is ideologically charged. My concern is that the program’s beneficiaries will be losing their hair, their mask or both.

Spanish-language original “MÁSCARA CONTRA PELO”

 

 

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