Causes: interesting but irrelevant

Everyone agrees that Africans are desperately poor and typically endure governments that are, to varying degrees, corrupt and capricious. The dispute is about causes and consequences. One group--call it the poverty-first camp--believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor. The other group--the governance-first camp--holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way. The argument may seem pedantic, but there are billions of dollars at stake, and millions of lives. The fundamental question is whether those who are well-off can salve a continent's suffering, or if, for all our good intentions, Africans are really on their own. Why is Africa still poor?, Andrew Rice, The Nation, 24 Oct 2005

I disagree: I don't think looking for causes is necessary when it comes to devising policies that will eradicate poverty. Doing so might even be a distraction. In this, I share common ground with Tolstoy who, when writing about conflict, wrote:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event. 'War and peace', Signet Classic, 1968 (page 730)

Life is so rich and varied that anybody can ascribe anything they don't like to a racial group, set of persons, ideas or sequence of events they don't like. This is the stuff of demonology, ideologues and party politics. Tyrants in some African countries seize any chance they can to blame colonisers for the problems they themselves inflict on their subjects.

I don't think it's necessary for any single person, ideology, government or international agency to try to explain why Africa is poor. Rather, the challenge is to set up a system that will subordinate all activity, policies and programmes to the desired outcome: the eradication of poverty. This is what Social Policy Bonds would do. We could issue Social Policy Bonds that would not be redeemed until poverty had been at a low level for a sustained period. We would, in effect, be contracting out the eradication of poverty to whoever will be most efficient at achieving that targeted outcome. Whoever buys the bonds might well spend some time trying to analyse causes of poverty, but they will be rewarded only if that is a necessary and efficient way of eradicating it. More likely, the people who buy bonds will just get on with the job. Looking for causes is probably best left to ideologues and academics.