Appreciation: Paul Collier

I had tagged Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion when it first came out but I hadn’t got round to reading it when my sister Sally said she was going to be reading it with her church group. Not wanting to be upstaged by my sister, I finally tackled it. Lucky me. It’s the best current events book I’ve read in months. Collier is an ideal expositor: he’s got lots of on-the-ground experience, an intelligible conceptual framework (lightly worn), a non-dogmatic openness to possibilities, all bound together with an easy, energetic engaging style.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is even a cheerful book. Note for starters that the title is not “The Bottom Five Billion.” Collier begins by pointing out that in terms of wealth and well-being, as a planet, we’ve made lots of visible progress over the past half century or so and that large swaths of what we used to see as hopelessness are now theatres of energy and advancement. The great exception is Africa—also parts of Central Asia—so this book really ends up being a book about Africa.

Collier builds his case around “the four traps” (and cf. marketing note, infra.” That would be: “conflict” (really, civil war); “natural resources”; “landlocked with bad neighbors”; “bad government in a small country.” Of these four, “landlocked” is perhaps easiest to corral, though not particularly easy to solve: turns out that even today, access to the ocean matters, and if you are stuck inland, you are stuck: the Central African Republic is reduced to dreaming that itmight be Burkina Faso. Meanwhile Chinese Turkestan (my example) may have its problems, but at least the Uighurs are part of a single nation that has to offer some pretense of protection.

His discussion of “the natural resources trap” is perhaps most interesting. He makes the plausible general case that too much wealth is corrupting because it masks a lot of mistakes (think trustafarians, lottery winners). But he also does a superb job of sketching out the more technical economic argument that resources riches tend to damage other parts of the economy. This is valuable stuff and it’s no real criticism to point out that the problem is hardly limited to Africa—the jargon label is, after all “the Dutch disease,” after the fate of Dutch manufacturing, following the discovery of North Sea gas.

“Conflict” is good not because of the theoretical framework—no surprise that civil war is a bad thing—but because it displays Collier’s formidable command of on-the-ground examples. With a ton of evidence, he is able to drive home the point that there is nothing, really nothing, so helpful in fending off conflict than steady economic growth.

The stuff on “bad government” is absorbing and instructive, if somewhat more protean. And why, exactly, does he say “in a small country?” Is bad government any less bad in, say, Russia, merely because it happens not to be small?

On the development political spectrum, readers naturally tend to situate Collier as the “centrist alternative” to Jeffrey Sachs (the true believer) and William Easterly (the ultimate skeptic). This is probably fair enough, although I suspect Collier is on the whole a lot closer to Easterly—read either one and you come away convinced that we’ve spent a lot of money that hasn’t done any good. The big difference is that Collier takes it upon himself to try to offer some solutions. This is surely a heroic undertaking in itself and I don’t have the space to canvass much of it here. Suffice to say, first, that he’s willing to leave lots of room for first-world technical advise and leadership; and second, that he’s willing to accept a substantial, if tightly defined, role for the military.

Indeed, this suggests an assignment to Collier for his next project. Specifically, I’d love to hear Collier on impediments that may bar first-world countries from playing the role they should. For example, Collier offers a lot of shrewd commentary on the role of the military as a dead-loss drain on economic growth in African nations. Has he any advice to offer on how to run a government in a nation where military spending equals that of all other countries combined? Get back to me on that one, will you Paul? Paul? Hello operator, I’ve been cut off….

[As an aside—this isn’t a complaint, but I must say Collier knows something about marketing. “The Bottom Billion” is a catchy line all its own (soon to be a major musical!), and a book about poverty in general is bound to catch more attention than one about Africa per se. “Poverty traps” is good; “survival of the fattest” is cute and, in context, apt. Remarkable that with Collier and Easterley and, okay, even Sachs, this field of development economics attracts such good non-technical writers.]