Produktivität schön und gut, aber wenn die Menschen in extremer Armut in gewissen Bereichen ihres Lebens in einer Armutsfalle sitzen und gar nicht erst am Markt teilnehmen können, wieso sollte man ihnen dabei nicht helfen? Klar mag es ab und zu nur Symptombekämpfung sein. So what? Solange man damit Leid minimieren kann und die Leute davon profitieren (schlussendlich auch in Bezug auf ihre zukünftige Produktivität!), dann sollte dies aus ethischer Sicht getan werden.
Dass Produktivität vor allem durch freien Handel, Besitzrechte, transparente Märkte usw gesteigert wird, würd ich nicht bestreiten. Das sind definitiv sehr wichtige Faktoren der Armutsbekämpfung. Aber wieso sollten sie die einzigen sein? Wieso sollte man den Menschen nicht in ihrem Alltagsleben zusätzlich noch unterstützen, so dass sie überhaupt erst produktiver werden können. Sei dies zum einen durch bessere Bildung (wo sie nachgefragt und angeboten wird, privat oder staatlich) oder durch Entwurmungsprogramme. Auch Hilfe im Ernährungsbereich ist extrem wichtig (sieh z.B. micronitrients) oder bei der Bekämpfung von Krankheiten wie Malaria oder AIDS/HIV. Wirtschaftswachstum und Produktivität verlangt gesunde und ausgebildete Menschen, sowie deren finanzielle Mittel um in ihre Kinder investieren zu können.
Klar sind gewisse Länder intrinsisch arm. Aber auch hier wieder: so what? Wir können ihnen ein besseres Leben ermöglichen (wenn auch nicht unbedingt ein Leben nach unserem Wohlstands-Massstab, aber das ist in dieser Frage auch irrelevant), wenn wir gewisse Krankheiten ausrotten, ihnen sauberes Trinkwasser und bessere Bildungsmöglichkeiten zur Verfügung stellen usw. Dies ist in den letzten Jahren/Jahrzehnten auch getan worden, sogar mit einigem Erfolg. Nicht nur wegen Produktivitätssteigerung, sondern hauptsächlich auch wegen effizienter Hilfeleistung. Somit: ja, von meiner Seite steht definitiv der Vorwurf im Raum, dass in dieser Hinsicht noch immer zu wenig getan wird.
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Wie kann man wissen, wann ein Optimum erreicht ist? Solange noch Millionen von Menschen auf der Welt leiden kann und sollte doch immer was gemacht werden? Dabei auf "Naturgesetze" zu verweisen, halte ich für viel zu vereinfacht bzw verlangt nach einer viel grösseren Beweislast dass dieses Gesetz überhaupt existiert und ausschlaggebend für unsere Handlungen sein sollte, da zu viel auf dem Spiel steht. Solange wir also wissen wie und wo wir (extreme) Armut bekämpfen können, gibt es keinen Grund wieso wir das Leben und die Talente der armen Menschen nicht retten sollen.
Die BWL fokussiert sich doch fast ausschliesslich auf die effiziente Führung von profitorientierten Unternehmen, wieso sollte dies nicht auch auf Hilfwerke zutreffen? Es gibt einige Hilfswerke die ihre Massnahmen transparent gemacht haben und von GWWC und GiveWell untersucht worden sind. Es ist also machbar. Armi, du hast mir doch mal einen Link geschickt zu einer anderen Organisation, die Hilfswerke untersucht. Hast du den noch?
Bezüglich Institutionen: Ich schreib hier eins zu eins aus dem Buch ihre Antworten ab.
But every INSTITUTION at this level is realized, on the ground, trough many specific local institutions. Property rights, for example, are constituted by a combination of a whole range of laws - about who can own what (Switzerland, for example, restricts foreignw ownership of chalets), what ownership means (in Sweden poeple have the right to walk everywhere, including on other people's private land), how the combination of the legal system and the police acts to enforce thosw laws (jury trials are common in the United States, but not in France or Spain), and much more. Democracies have rules about who is eligible to run for what office, who can vote, how campaigns should be run, and legal protection systems that make it more or less easy to buy voters or intimidate citizens. For that matter, even autocratic regimes sometimes leave some limited space for citizen participation. We have seen it over and over in this book: Details matter. Institutions are no expection. To really understand the effect of institutions on the lives of the poor, what is needed is a shift in perspective from INSITUTIONS in capital letters to institutions in lower case - the "view from below".
[...] Altough wholesale democratic reforms are few and far between, there are many instances where democracy has been introduced, to a limited extend and at the local level, within an authoritarian regime. (Sie geben dann einige Beispiele z.B. von Korruptionsbekämpfung in Indien durch sogenannte "Köder", Einführung von Dorf-Wahlen in China, elektronisches Wählen in Brasilien)
[...] It would be tempting to coclude that the iron law of oligarchy was reasserting itself at the village level. But a small change in the rules changed everything (Darauf folgen Beispiele von RCT's in Indonesien und Indien). If the rules make such a difference, then it beomes very important who gets to make them. If the village is left to its own devices, it seems likely that the rule making would be captured by the elite. It might therefore be better for the decentralization to be designed ba a centralized authority, with the interest of the less advataged or less powerful in mind. Power to the people, but not all the power. One specific example of such top-down intervention is to restrict whom villagers can elect as representatives. These restrictions may be needed in order to ensure adequate representation of the minorities, and they make a difference. (Wichtig ist zudem auch die Förderung von Frauen in der Politik und dafür braucht es oftmals Hilfeleistungen von aussen. Die Auswirkung von einer z.B. 10% Regelung für Frauen wird später dann an einem Beispiel aus Delhi gezeigt. Kann das gerne ausführlicher schreiben, falls Interesse)
[...]
Is it inevitable that voting in developing countries will end up being dominated by ethnicity? There is a long tradition of scholars who think so. Their view is that ethnic loyalties are the basis of traditional societies and are bound to dominate political attidues until the society modernizes. Yet the evidence suggest that ethnic voting is not as entrenched as is often believed In one experiment in Uttar Pradesh during the 2007 state elections , Abhijit worked with an NGO that ran a nonpartisan campaing (using street plays and puppet shows) around a simple slogan, "Dont vote on caste, vote on development issues," in randomly selected villages. This simple message reduced the probability that voters would choose a candidate from their own caste from 25 percent to 18 percent.
Why do some people vote based on caste but readily change their minds when an NGO asks them to rethink? One answer is that, often, voters actually know very little about what they are choosing - they typically never met the candidate exept at election time, when everyone shows up and makes more or less the same promises. There is no obvious mechanism for finding out, for example, who is corrupt and who is not, and there is a tendency to assume that everyone is equally corrupt. Nor do voters know very much about the actual powers of the legislators: In India, we have often heard ufban dwellers blaming the state legislator for the condition of the drains in their slums, when in fact it is their local legislator who is supposed to take care of such problems, with the result that legislators feel that they will be blamed for whatever goes wrong, which does not create a strong incentive to perform.
Given that all the candidates look more or less the same to voters (and perhaps equally bad), the voters may feel that they might as well vote on caste: There is a small chance that caste loyality will pay off and the politician will help, and in any case, what do they have to lose? But many of them probably dont feel particulary strongly about it, which is why they are also easily swayed. (Dann geben sie zwei weitere Beispiele aus Brasilien und New Delhi.)
[...]
So politics is not very different from policy: It can (and must) be improved at the margin, and seemingly minor interventions can make a significant difference. The same kind of philosophy we have advocated throughout this book applies as much to politics as it does to everything else.
[...]
The fact that there are powerful people who stand to lose from the reforms does impose limits on how far you can take things, but there is a lot that remains possible: The politicians in Brazil who were going to be exposed by the audit did not manage to stop the legislation, nor did the newspapers in Delhi balk at publishing the records of the legislators (Verweis auf die zwei vorherigen Beispiele, die ich erwähnt aber nicht beschreiben habe). In Indonesia and China, the autocratic regimes themselves decided to allow a measure of democracy. The important lesson is to take advantage of whatever slack there is. The same is true for policies. Policies are not completely determined by politics. Good policies (sometimes) happen in bad political environments. And, perhaps more important, bad policies (often) happen in quite good ones.
[...]
What these two examples (the nurses and the school committees; wenn ihr mehr darüber wissen wollt kann ichs gerne noch schreiben) illustrate ist that large-scale waste and policy failure often happen not because of any deep structural problem but because of lazy thinking at stage of policy design. Good politics may or may not be neccessary for good policies; it is certainly not sufficient.
[...]
Good policies can also help break the vicious cycle of low expectations: If the government starts to deliver, people will start taking politics more seriously and put pressure on the government to deliver more, rather than opting out or voting unthinkingly for their co-ethnics or taking up arms against the government.
[...]
Lack of trust can explain why in the 2001 experiment in Benin, Wantchekon found that the clientelist message was more successful than an appeal to general interest. When politicians talked in broad terms about the "public interest", no one took them seriously. At least, voters could more or less trust a clientelist message. If the "general interest" message had been clearer, more focused on some specific proposals, and had proposed an agenda that voters could hold the candidates accountable to if elected, they might have been more swayed.
A follow-up experiment that Wantchekon conducted before the 2006 election suggests that voters are indeed prepared to support those politicians who take seriously the job to design and explain social policies. Wantchekon and other civil society leaders in Benin startet by organizing a broad consultation: "Election 2006: What Policy Alternative?" There were four panels on education, public health, governance, and urban planning, and four experts provided a white paper with policy recommendations. These were all broad proposals, without clientelist appeal. All the parties represented in the National Assembly, as well as representatives from various NGOs, attended the conference. After the converence, several parties volunteered to use the proposals made at the conference as electoral platforms on an experimental basis. They did this in randomly selected villages, in town meetings, where the proposals were presented in detail and participants had a chance to respond and react. In the comparison villages, the usual festive political meeting took place, with the usual mix of clientelist messages, and broad but vague policy proposals. This time, the results were reversed: nstead of showing support for the clientelist message, the turnout and support for the party running the campaign were higher in villages where the town meetings were held and specific policy proposals were discussed. This result suggests that a credible message can convince the voters to vote in favor of general-interest policies. Once the trust is there, the individual politician's incentives also change. He can start to feel that if he does something good he will be appreciated an reelected. Many people in positions of power have mixed motives - they want to be loved or do good, both because they care and because it secures their position, even when they are corrupt. These individuals will do things to promote change, as long as they are not entirely inconsistent with their economic objectives. Once the government proves that it is trying to deliver, and wins the people's trust, a further possibility arises. The government can now afford to be less concerned with the short term, less keen to win the voters' approval at all costs, less compelled to indulge in giveaways. This is its chance to design better and more farsighted policies.
[...]
Many Western scholars and policy makers are extremely pessimistic about political institutions in the developing world. Depending on their political leanings, they may blame old agrarian institutions, or the original sin from the West - colonization and its extractive political institutions - or just the unfortunate culture that countries are stuck with. Whatever the reason, this viewpoint holds that bad political institutions are in large part responsible for keeping poor countries poor, and getting out of that state is difficult. Some feel this is a reason to give up; others want to impose institutional change from outside.
Easterly and Sachs are both somewhat impatient with these arguments, for different reasons. Easterly sees no reasons for "experts" from the West to judge whether a set of political institutions in another place is necessarily good or bad in that specific context. Sachs believes that poor institutions are a disease of poor countries: We can successfully address poverty, perhaps in a limited way, even in bad institutional environments, by focusing on concrete, measurable programs; and making people richer and more educated can start a virtuouse circle where good institutions will emerge.
We agree with both of them: The focus on the broad INSTITUIONS as a necessary and sufficient condition for anything good to happen is somewhat misplaced. The political constraints are real, and they make it difficult to find big solutions to big problems. But there is considerable slack to improve institutions and policy at the margin. Careful understanding of the motivations and the constraints of everyone (poor people, civil servants, taxpayers, elected politicians, and so on) can lead to policies and institutions that are better designed, and less likely to be perverted by corruption or dereliction of duty. These changes will be incremental, but they will sustain and buld on themselves. They can be the start of a quiet revolution.
[...]
Poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor, or because they have had an unfortunate history. It is true that things often do not work in these countries: Programs intended to help the poor end up in the wrong hands, teachers teach desultorily or not at all, roads weakened by theft of materials collapse under the weight of overburdened trucks, and so forth. But many of these failures have less to do with some grand conspiracy of the elites to maintain their hold on the economy and more to do with some avoidable flaw in the detailed design of policies, and the ubiquitous three I's: ignorance, ideology, and inertia. Nurses are expected to carry out jobs that no ordinary human being would be able to complete, and yet no one feels compelled to change their job description. The fad of the moment (be it dams, barefoot doctors, microcreti, or whatever) is turned into a policy without any attention to the reality within which it is supposed to function.
The good news, if that is the right expression, is that it is possible to improve governance and policy without changing the existing social and poitical structures. There is tremendous scope for improvement even in "good" institutional environments, and some margin for action even in bad ones. A small revolution can be achieved by making sure that everyone is invited to village meeting; by monitoring government workers and holding them accountable for failures in performing their duties; by monitoring politicians at all levels and sharing this information with voters; and by making clear to users of public services what they should expect - what the exact health center hours are, how much money (or how many bags of rice) they are entitled to.
Bezüglich sparen:
- Poor people have no safe place to save because the regulatory standards that governments set for institutions that are allowed to legally accept their savings are absurdly high.
- There are good reasons that some markets are missing for the poor, or that the poor face unfavorable prices in them. The poor get a negative interest rate from their savings accounts (if they are lucky enough to have an account) and pay exorbitant rates on their loans (if they can get one) because handling even a small quantity of money entails a fxed cost. The market for health insurance for the poor has not developed, despite the devastating effects of serious health problems in their lives, because the limited insurance options that can be sustained in the market (catastrophic health insurance, formulaic weather insurance) are not what the poor want. In some cases, a technological or an institutional innovation may allow a market to develop where it was missing. This happened in the case of microcredit, which made small loans at more affordable rates available to millions of poor people, altough perhaps not the poorest. Electronic money transfer systems and unique identification for individuals may radically cut the cost of providing savings and remittance services to the poor over the next few years. But we also have to recognize that in some cases, the conditions for a market to emerge on its own are simply not there. In such cases, governments should step in to support the market to provide the necessary conditions, or failing that, consider providing the service themselves.
Sorry das dies ein so extrem langer Beitrag war, aber ich fand es wichtig ihre wichtigsten Punkte in dieser Hinsicht zu erwähnen. Als Abschluss noch folgende Passage und einen Vortrag von zwei Kollegen von mir, der gut zum Thema passt:
We also have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world - elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepeneurs - in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day.
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