David Brooks: Liberals, Conservatives and Aid

[Wetzelbill]

I'll add my thoughts later with the replies. This is an odd argument though.

Liberals, Conservatives and Aid
By David Brooks

Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine. Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush.

Jeffrey Sachs, as you may know, is the Columbia University economist who has done more to put poverty in Africa atop the global agenda than anybody else. He has hectored and lobbied the developed world to forgive debts, set goals and increase aid to ameliorate the suffering of the extremely poor.

But Sachs is a child of the French Enlightenment. At the end of his new book, "The End of Poverty," he delivers an unreconstructed tribute to the 18th-century Enlightenment, when leading thinkers had an amazing confidence in their ability to refashion reality so that it would conform to reason.

Throughout the book, Sachs comes across as a philosophe for our times. He is, he writes, a "clinical economist," who diagnoses the maladies that affect nations the way a doctor diagnoses and holds life-or-death sway over a human organism. One of the striking features of his book is the absence of individual Africans. There is just the undifferentiated mass of the suffering poor, trapped in systems, and Sachs traveling around the globe prescribing treatments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/opinion/26brooks.html?hp

[weldon berger]

1. Hurrah for Sachs, apparently

There is just the undifferentiated mass of the suffering poor, trapped in systems, and Sachs traveling around the globe prescribing treatments.

As opposed to what, I wonder? Stopping in every village and chatting with every villager?

Among the things Sachs advocates are micro-loans as opposed to macro projects. That's prescriptive, and it works; it puts money in the hands of villagers who can use it to establish collective businesses and buy stuff like new wells that produce potable water, as opposed to giving billions to corrupt governments who then give it to Bechtel to build environment-wrecking megastructures.

Brooks has an astonishing ability to undermine his own arguments, when he troubles to make an honest one.

[Wetzelbill]

2. My promised reply.....

Brooks argument against giving more aid to Africa is hypocritical, because it is the opposite of the same arguments that he used about going into Iraq. He is not a Neo-Con per se' but he is buddies with Bill Kristol and Co., so he preaches that Neo-Con idealism which is imperialistic and quite foolish, as it require perpetual war for perpetual peace. Yet, he dismisses the idealistic vision of Sachs, except that Sachs' vision is more realistic than the Neo-Con version of Iraq ever was. They can't even do the job in Iraq let alone enforce Pax Americana on the world. Brooks should have listened to Bono on MTP this morning.