Two Cheers for Imperialism

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion

I recently reread this book after assigning it to my introduction to macroeconomics course.  It is part of the genre "Books trying to explain recent thinking among economists about how to turn poor countries into rich countries."  This one, like most of the others, suffers from being less a general overview and more "Let me, the author, tell you why my research is the most important research in the whole world explaining how to turn poor countries into rich countries."  So, in effect, the book is also just a summary of Paul Collier's research.

But, at least Paul Collier's research is interesting.  The "Bottom Billion" are the roughly billion people living in countries which are not only not growing, but stagnating or regressing with no real hope that they will start growing anytime soon.  So, while the other 5 billion people on earth can reasonably expect that the quality of their lives will improve over time, the bottom billion have no such expectation.  Figuring out what could be done to help the Bottom Billion is easily the most pressing economic problem in the world today.  Yet, it is a problem which does lend itself to an easy solution.

Collier does a nice job identifying what it is that keeps the Bottom Billion from improving--a combination of bad government and bad neighbors and wars and too many natural resources.  (Note the last is too many, not too few--if you are sitting on a lot of natural resources, it is bad for you because you spend all your time extracting wealth from the natural resources, which does not lead to economic growth, instead of doing all the sorts of things which lead to a vibrant economy.)

But  here is the ultimately depressing thing about this book and all the other books like it--identifying the problem is relatively easy.  Writing down solutions is also relatively easy.  But, the very things that create the problem in the first place also prevent the solution from ever being implemented.  If your problem is that your rulers are power-hungry kleptomaniacs, then saying you need a better government is not the sort of policy recommendation likely to be implemented.  If your problem is that a few people can get very wealthy selling off the country's natural resources, saying that you should switch your economy over to something more broad-based isn't going to be very persuasive to those who are enriching themselves.

Collier has lots of nice sounding ideas, but ultimately he founders on this implementation problem.  He seems aware of this problem, and thus one of his solutions is, and I kid you not, military occupation.  If the wealthy stable countries would just take over the governments of the poor, dysfunctional countries, then there is some hope for reform.  Now saying that sort of thing does not make you popular at the cocktail parties which all the Right and Beautiful People attend, and in the wake of Iraq, Collier certainly has his work cut out for him to avoid sounding like one of Them (you know, the Neanderthals voted for Bush).  So, Collier hints here and there that Iraq isn't really what he means, it is just, you know, other military occupations.

So, the real virtue of Collier's book is not exactly what he intended--it presents a pretty coherent case that rich countries are morally obligated to intervene in the countries in which the Bottom Billion live, whether the  rulers of those countries want such intervention or not.  That argument is a nice Rorschach Test--which is more important: 1) Improving the lives of the Bottom Billion or 2) Keeping you hands clean of anything that might even appear to be imperialistic?  If you can't have both, which do you choose?