mad world
The insane world outside antarchia...
See all nuggets together here.
Of course, a lot of the insanity is intentional - and then it becomes not merely mad, but mad and bad. The distinction is not always very clear.
AID FOR THE RICH
One would think that the goal of any international ngo aiming to minimise the scandalous disbalance in the distribution of the world's resources ought to be, gradually, to put itself out of business. Or at least - to 'devolve' most of its business to those parts of the world where the aid is meant to be destined for.
Given the scandalous disbalance, and given the minute fraction of the rich world's enormous girth line that it is prepared to shed for the sake of the poorer world, there should need to be overpowering arguments to justify the continued existence of huge managerial structures, staffed by internationals at a rate from 10 to anything up to 100 times higher than locals would be paid, and located in cities which demand the highest office rents and day-to-day running costs of any in the world.
One would think. One might also think that one small thing that a huge ngo could do, at least over a 10 year period or so, would be to strengthen the capacity of local ngos - something they love to do - but to such a degree that the local ngos are doing the work, not the internationals. And one would surely think that the sign of a really successful international ngo - one which actually manages to alter the balance of power to some degree - would be that it gradually dies out, or at least slims down, as those in the recipient countries expand.
One would have thought that if we were doing our jobs well, we in the donor countries ought soon to be out of work, at least in this field. Or at the very least, we ought to be in work for the same rates that we deign to pay those in the 'recipient' countries.
Some nuggets to show how very far that thought is from the real world of so-called international aid.
See them all at this page.
$37 billion of phantom aid
We estimate that a massive $37 billion (47%) of the $79 billion in headline aid in 2004 was ‘phantom’, while real aid stood at only $42 billion. There was some improvement from 2003, with nearly all the increase in aid – otherwise known as Overseas Development Assistance or ODA – between 2003 and 2004 counting as real aid. However, even with this increase, our analysis suggests donors still contributed an average of only 0.14% of gross national income in real aid in 2004, or only one fifth of the UN target level. On average, donors give only $48 for each of their citizens in real aid each year – less than $1 a week.
foreign aid for school fees
* One quarter of the aid [provided by rich countries] – $20bn a year – funds expensive and often ineffective western consultants, research and training.
* In the UK, for example, almost half of TA spending goes on consultants and other experts, the vast majority of them British.
* A typical cost of an expatriate consultant will be in the region of $200,000 a year. According to the OECD, in typical cases more than one third of this is spent on school fees and child allowances – spending which would not be needed if local consultants were used.
ILL-LOGIC
Among the valuable properties that logical systems can have are:
* Consistency, which means that none of the theorems of the system contradict one another.
* Soundness, which means that the system's rules of proof will never allow a false inference from a true premise. If a system is sound and its axioms are true then its theorems are also guaranteed to be true.
* Completeness, which means that there are no true sentences in the system that cannot, at least in principle, be proved in the system.
From wikipedia
Some stunning examples of the human capacity to think illogically, inconsistently, incompletely, blindly. See them all together here.
LUNACIES OF THE MARKET
'Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is often cited as arguing for the “invisible hand” and free markets: firms, in the pursuit of profits, are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do what is best for the world. But unlike his followers, Adam Smith was aware of some of the limitations of free markets, and research since then has further clarified why free markets, by themselves, often do not lead to what is best. As I put it in my new book, Making Globalization Work, the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.'
Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalisation Work
A selection of the inanities, insanities and inconsistencies that the invisible hand - there or not there - manages to conjure out of thin air. The Believers live the madness, certain that the hand knows best, certain it will lead us into sanity (or else believing this is sanity).
Blaming the invisible hand makes the following examples of a mad world rather than a mad bad one. In fact, there are more than enough people behind the hand that isn't there who understand full well what it is doing (or not doing). The insane ones are those of us who continue to believe that it is doing or not doing anything at all, let alone that it is noble and intelligent and full of good intentions.
DEBT
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.
Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again...
Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit’.”
Sir Josiah Stamp Director, Bank of England 1928-1941 (reputed to be the 2nd richest man in Britain at the time)
Quotes taken from this superb video on banking, money and debt. Watch it.
See more debt nuggets here
A CAPITALIST MAXIM
'Printing more money doesn’t improve economic output in any way. It merely causes inflation.'
Source: Any economics text book - or, for example Economics Help
Woops!?
So ... 'printing' money is fine, it seems, as long as it is the banks that are doing it, not the government. And in addition to being inflation-free (apparently), there are other advantages to the banks printing money rather than the government.
- The money is not just a means of exchange, it is also a debt, because banks create money by making loans against other people's deposits1. The loans are of course not actually the deposits, they are newly created money which can be withdrawn as well as the deposits (rather than instead of them - which would be the case if the 'loans' were really the deposits themselves).
- The loan (newly created money) is owed not to those who made the original deposits, nor to the taxpayer-citizen who is supposed, in a democracy, to be the source of governance - but to the banks. Who obviously need it more than any of the rest of us.
- When the economy crashes and people realise what the banks have known all along - that the banks are bankrupt because they have 'lent out' more money than they are able to supply, then the heavily indebted taxpayer citizen leaps in to save the banks, which have created the mess through their greed.
- If, in addition to saving the banks in their hour of need, everyone decided to go debt-free, and pay back their loans to the banks (and live off grass), then the banks would be even more fabulously rich than they are at the moment - and the rest of us would be moneyless, in every sense. There would simply be no money in the economy becasue it would all be in the banks' vaults (or at least, on their valueless pieces of paper). And we would be back to traditional methods of exchange - like barter - unless we thought to be so stupid as to print some (debt-free) money we could use instead.
Advantage No. 3 reminds me of another capitalist maxim, spouted regularly in relation to those developing countries which were forced to take out huge loans in order to swell the western banks' coffers: what message would it send to people - asked the banks - if we were to forgive past debts and simply write them off?
Indeed, dear banks - dear capitalists. What messages have you sent to all of us. That 'loans' can be made without having anything to lend; that when they are repaid, the 'lender' (who had nothing to lend) takes possession of the payment; that loans can be pushed on those unable to take them on, and they will pay with blood; and that if they cannot be made to pay with blood because they happen not to be victims in distant parts of the world, but western citizens who vote for those that keep you in power, then those that keep you in power will still make sure it is not you that suffer. The citizens will pay, regardless. They will pay off your bad debts.
And in the meantime, you will reap the interest from the loans you should never have made because you did not have the money, and you will keep your jobs and 6-figure salaries while others have none, and you will continue to preach economic probity and the importance of living within your means. And they - the citizens of other countries - who 'took on' debt in the same way that a slave takes on his master's chains, will be paying it off for the rest of their lives, and the rest of their children and grandchildren's lives.
See this page for some facts and figures on debt
Detail showing bottom part of graph
(figures, chart and ideas taken from Michael Rowbotham's 'The Grip of Death')
MAPS OF MADNESS
woops!?
(See below for detail on bottom part of graph)
Well... 'Money Supply' is perhaps the wrong title for this graph. What's interesting is the woops in the debt curve, shadowing almost exactly the woops in the 'money supply' curve.
Are they by any chance related?
Detail showing bottom part of graph
(figures and chart taken from Michael Rowbotham's 'The Grip of Death')