Dan Banik and Paul Collier discuss development traps, whether and how the bottom billion countries have benefited from globalization, the extent to which democracy fosters development, why mainstream economics has largely ignored the concept of sustainable development and the growing popularity of the de-growth movement.
Welcome to season 3!
Our first guest this season is Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. In 2014, Professor Collier received a knighthood for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa.
Sir Paul's research covers the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural resources rich societies; urbanisation in low-income countries; private investment in African infrastructure and changing organisational cultures. He has authored numerous books, including The Bottom Billion (Oxford University Press, 2007) which in 2008 won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes and in May 2009 was the joint winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book prize; Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (Vintage Books, 2009); The Plundered Planet: How to reconcile prosperity with nature (Oxford University Press, 2010); Exodus: How migration is changing our world (Oxford University Press, 2013); and The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties (Penguin Books, 2018). His latest book, co-authored with John Kay, is Greed is Dead: Politics After Individualism (Penguin Books, 2020).
Banik I'm a huge fan of your work, Paul, welcome to the show.
Collier Thanks for inviting me. It's a good chance to reach so many people. Very impressive what you've built.
Banik Let's begin with the Bottom Billion, one of my favourite books. And by the way, I have almost all of your books, they are taking too much space on my bookshelves these days. In Bottom Billion and other books, you've argued that development can be viewed as chutes and ladders and that many countries are using these ladders, e.g. in Asia to improve societal wellbeing and some are stuck, they can't climb these ladders. And you identified five traps in this book, you talk about the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbours, and the trap of bad governance. Before we go on to discuss these traps, in hindsight, almost a decade and a half since that book, what has actually changed? Have some of these 58 countries that you identified as part of the bottom billion - have some of these countries successfully come out of these traps?
Collier Yes, a few. It's something I'm working on. Some have, not many. And things were disguised for a while, because the decade from 2003-13 was a very denying decade for a lot of poor countries, because there was a natural resource boom, so powerful, it was called the super cycle, and a lot of poor countries were already natural resource exporters and a lot more became natural resource exporters and that provided a pulse of income which in the short term raised growth rates, but of course one of the traps is the natural resource trap, and some of them stumbled into that trap. So it's a two-edged sword, discovering natural resources. An example is Mozambique where they discovered offshore gas, and you would have thought that offshore gas wouldn't be problematic but it was off the coast of a poor and remote region, and that has now created very serious conflict which the government is unable to contain and today's news is that Rwanda has sent 1000 troops in. Rwanda is one of the countries that has succeeded in emerging from the Bottom Billion. It’s a very impressive story. So, a few have escaped. That decade flattered the situation so it looked better than it really is.
Banik I'm particularly interested in hearing your views on globalisation - the general consensus seems to be that it has benefitted a lot of countries, mainly in Asia, but my question to you is how and to what extent you think that has benefitted some of these bottom billion countries? There has been on the one hand countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh or India and China that are doing well but that kind of success has also generated dissatisfaction in the west, something that you write about, you have cutbacks in aid. But in Africa, what has globalisation given them?
Collier It's a mixed bag. One example of something that is damaging is brain drain. One of the most successful countries in Africa is Ghana, with a pretty competent and decent democratically elected government, won re-election in a properly contested and verified election, no question that it ticks the boxes of democracy and the government is clearly trying to provide benefits for the population. I know the government quite well and I'm impressed with them. But, if we take something very practical like health, Ghana has to train 2 doctors for every one that it is able to retain. Why? Overwhelmingly, half go to Britain and why? Because, I think, Britain has abused globalisation dreadfully in the case of its health service. So, Britain has 18 of the top 100 universities in the world, which is an amazing number, no other countries has that amount of top universities relative to its population. Africa hasn't got a single university in the top 100. So, where is it sensible to train doctors? In Britain, but because training doctors is expensive, the British health service has been run by recruiting more than half its doctors from Africa and South Asia. And so there has been a deliberate policy of not using Britain's brilliant universities for training the doctors we need. Less than half of our doctors are trained by British universities.
Banik The same applies to nurses from Malawi.
Collier Absolutely. This is just an ethical disgrace. Where do we get them? From Ghana. It's absolutely obvious that a doctor would be a more benefit to mankind in Ghana than in Britain. Ghana is far more short of doctors. When we move to a really poor country like Sudan, there are more Sudanese doctors in London than in the whole of Sudan. This seems to be to be completely indefensible abuse of globalisation. We brag about giving aid, but actually we're plundering the most important resource that Africa has, which is its trained manpower. And Africa is very short of trained people and so that sort of globalisation has been in my mind an ethical disgrace.
Banik Paul, another side of the story, I've spoken to some of these Malawian nurses who work in the UK and many others who have emigrated. Some of these immigrants would say, we also have to think about ourselves, not just our country. We're not really getting the benefits, the incomes, it is better for us to work in another country and send this money back home. That is better for the country than us being here, being demotivated and underpaid.
Collier Well, let's unpack that a bit. First, the evidence on remittances is that the average migrant only sends about 1000 dollars per year back, so that's less than 3 dollars a day. Not very much. Those people would be much more productive in the country than 3 dollars a day. It's true they wouldn't earn as much working in Africa as working in Britain, of course. They would earn a lot relative to other people in their society, relative to living standards in Ghana, doctors are well-paid. Of course there is a clear tension, individuals are being tempted to say well, my own society educated me, they paid for my education and I was one of the few lucky people who got a good university education in Ghana and I'm now a qualified doctor. So there's a tension being created by British recruitment policy. Where is the ethical fault there? I think it's unreasonable to expect a doctor trained in Ghana to sacrifice myself for the interest of society, but I do think it's important for Britain, not to tempt people. Deliberately having a policy where you only train less than half the doctors you need and get them cheap from pre-trained doctors in Africa, that seems to me deeply unethical and the moral fault is not with the individuals who move, it's with the governments that run policies in such a way that they're not providing enough trained people. And Britain should be training a lot of African doctors to go back to Africa. Far from that, it's not even training enough of its own doctors to work in Britain.
Banik The politics of Great Britain of late has been hotly debated, not just Brexit but also cutbacks in aid and the image of global Britain taking a beating...
Collier I'm not against globalisation, but I think let's recognise that it's actually several different things. It's capital movements, and there we've got the tragic situation that far too little money is heading into Africa, far too little, and so capital movements have not been working at all well for Africa, so capital is globalised but working in the wrong way, whenever there is a global financial panic, people move their money into the safe haven of America. Even when it's America that's caused the problem. So capital movements are globalised but not working well for Africa. Human capital movements, the trained labour force, is globalised but not working well for Africa.
Banik So what about Rwanda, Paul, you mentioned that as a successful country? You have, many would say, a non-democratic country but charismatic, visionary leadership from Paul Kagame. He's able to attract the Starbucks to Rwanda, Rwandan coffee is being sold everywhere, so there is a positive narrative about Rwanda, is that helping the country get the capital or is it still struggling?
Collier It is helping the country get the capital. Most spectacularly, yesterday, Rwanda was able to launch the largest bond issue that it's every launched on global markets. It was 620 million dollars, which it was able to borrow at an interest rate of just over 5%. That's not bad. That is capital movements working well for once. Because the government of Rwanda has now got some money, as long as it can use that money on investments that pay more than 5% a year, which it very likely can, there are so many opportunities to improve the economic infrastructure in Rwanda, so that's capital working well. But it's a relatively rare case. Rwanda is obviously not a full democracy, it's what my colleague Tim Besley calls a common interest state. By that, Tim means there are two possible ways in which a state can be run for the common interest of its citizens. One is if it's a properly functioning democracy. And by properly functioning, that's quite a demanding task. It means that ordinary people are getting a government that delivers on their anxieties and concerns and hopes. A lot of countries that look to be democratic, actually turn out to not be doing that.
Banik Yes and this is something that you address in several books, in addition to identifying this trap of bad governance in a small country in the Bottom Billion, Paul, there's been considerable talk of the importance of democracy, good governance, in the global development discourse and you have consistently argued that democracy is not enough, democracies without proper restraints, that is the problem. That even replacing autocracy with democracy may not be enough. There are so few incentives in democratic transitions to build these restraints. Have your views evolved over the years?
Collier No, I still believe that, but I've added to them. I think what really matters is not just the political checks and balances, it's very important what ideas are circulating in the societies. My recent work has been on how ideas change in a society, how they spread through social networks. And ideas do change, but they take a long time. If you look at Afghanistan, quite clearly the underlying problem is not the mechanics of democracy, it's the ideas in people's heads. A lot of the population has got Islamic fundamentalist ideas, which have enabled the Taliban to take root, and people are willing to fight and die for those ideas. It's unreal to try and get democracies established in social contexts in which the ideas of a lot of the people in society are really antithetic towards democracy. There is a slower process of the evolution of ideas in society. And that can't be done very well by foreigners. The shift in ideas is really a domestic struggle internal to a society and in Afghanistan it was a very unrealistic approach taken to shifting ideas. One practical example: in the West, we believe passionately in gender equality. One of the ministers in Afghanistan, told me that every foreign government that came to visit him, had told him of the importance of gender equality and 20 of the visiting governments had said: to help you in this task of gender equality, I'm going to leave you an adviser on gender equality. And so, literally, he had 20 foreign advisers on gender equality. He said: what can I do? Obviously I'm as keen on gender equality as anyone, but the idea that Afghanistan's ideas on gender equality could be changed within a few years by foreign advisers is clearly ridiculous. Dangerously ridiculous. Now, we're confronted by the prospect of a complete collapse of government in Afghanistan. If that happens, gender equality will collapse for a long time. This was a case where a preachy-sense of moral superiority in the West, I think is very damaging. Afghanistan became hugely dependent on foreign aid, and it became dependent on foreign troops. For nearly 20 years we've been in Afghanistan and we left no sustainable legacy because we didn't build the state, we provided moral preachiness by 20 gender advisers.
Banik I've had numerous discussions with Ashraf Ghani before he became president, and I suppose many countries in the world have placed perhaps too much faith in leadership, thinking that there will be a saviour and hoping for the best, but that has not happened and it's shocking what has happened a couple of days ago in Kandahar, there was this comedian that was slaughtered by the Taliban and it is absolute chaos. Let's move on to a trap that you've identified that of being landlocked with bad neighbours. Coming back to the African continent, there are huge transport costs for many African countries. In 2006-7, you identified almost 40% of the population in the Bottom Billion countries living in landlocked countries, Uganda, Malawi, CAR, but some countries like Botswana, which is also landlocked have fared a bit better than others? What explains that relative success?
Collier Of course Botswana, its export good is diamonds. And diamonds are so light that transport costs are irrelevant. Diamonds are the classic example of something that is immensely valuable in relation to its weight. So transport costs for diamonds really don't matter. So, Botswana was able to develop its diamond sector without any worries. If I were writing the Bottom Billion again, I would change the chapter on landlocked, because I underestimated the growth of air freight. And cheap air travel. There are two countries, both landlocked, which have really used air links very well. One is Rwanda and what Rwanda did, is it realised that if you're going to be landlocked, you better not be air locked, so they created a new airline, Air Rwanda, they made sure it was very efficient, which it is, I've flown it, and they turned Kigali into a regional hub with competitive airline services. So, it's not just Air Rwanda but several companies flying between the neighbouring capitals, Dar Es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala, you can fly from these capitals to Rwanda using competitive services. Rwanda has become a local hub but also a hub for tourists, and this was brilliant. Imagine, go back to 1994, less than 30 years ago, and what did people identify with Rwanda? Genocide and the collapse into total violence. That was the image 29 years ago. Through a very clever strategy, Rwanda decided to target the world tourist industry. Rwanda doesn't have beaches, didn't even have that many animals, but first of all with animals, they realised that if animals can walk out of Rwanda, they can walk back or be flown in. Rwanda attracted the animals and created game parks. It then realised that a lot of tourism is actually piggybacked of conferences. So it built a world-class conference centre and then it created a very good hotel industry. It also made sure that Kigali is a clean and safe city. I've walked across Kigali at midnight on my own and felt completely safe, something I wouldn't do in London.
Banik And the cleanest in the world.
Collier Absolutely. It's a very fine city. A few years ago, President Kagame who'd read my work on urbanisation made me the chair of a new advisory committee on Kigali, so I chaired a committee where the rest of the people on the committee are architects from around the world. Our instruction were "don't let Kigali become the mess that the other East African capital cities are." Indeed, Kigali is still very good. We were just promoted on the eve of Covid, we were told that now we were on the committee for all the other urbanisation in Rwanda because they are very concerned that they don't want to get the usual primary city problem, where the only city that matters is the capital city. They want cities around Rwanda to be offering opportunities for people. Very sensible.
Banik Paul, I just have to ask you this, because this is a debate that I'm often involved in, in terms of Rwanda, every time one praises Rwanda, there is an equal amount of criticism about the country being undemocratic, and so maybe it is sometimes uncomfortable to talk about the fact that non-democratic governments can maybe also have good policies?
Collier Two points here: one is the concept of common interest states, which Tim Besley developed, one of the most distinguished academic economists in the world, and the concept of common interest claims that democracy is actually irrelevant to common interests. Some democratic states manage to do common interest, common interest means the government is broadly aligned with the interest of ordinary people, but you can equally get to common interest through a non-democratic system as long as the elite running the country finds that it's basic interest in how to run the state, is pretty closely aligned to ordinary people. That was the achievement of Kagame, was to win the fight within the ruling party, he won it 3 or 4 years after they came to power in 1994. There was a dispute within the political party as to whether the Tutsis who's won power, militarily, should use it for their own benefit, or whether they should use it for the interest of the whole society. Kagame led the faction which said: if we just run Rwanda for the Tutsi, our children will all get slaughtered again. He said we've got now choice but to run Rwanda in the interest of the mass population, and that's what he's tried to do. He's done pretty well. So just to finish the story on trying to become a tourist destination, they then spent a lot of money advertising. I took my kid to watch a football match at Arsenal, and all around the stadium and all around on the players' t-shirts, it said: come to Rwanda. That was much-criticised by the British NGO community. They want Rwanda to spend all its money on putting a smile on children's faces, but actually getting mass tourism and advertising worked. By 2019, Rwanda was the 2nd most visited country in the whole of Africa. Only beaten by South Africa. It was an amazing achievement for a small landlocked country to become so popular as a destination for foreigners to go. That was a staggering achievement, achieved through a very integrated strategy - conference centre, nature reserves, wildlife parks, advertising, hotels, clean and safe city - it was a very clever strategy in a very highly-constrained situation. Rwanda is a common interest state. It's not a democracy, but it is benefitting the large mass of the population. That to my mind is good enough for the moment and a larger point is that instantly becoming Denmark or Norway, just isn't feasible. Denmark, I use it because it is an example of a country without natural resources which is right up there with Norway in terms of living standards and human satisfaction. Denmark did not become Denmark instantly. Modern Denmark. It got there through a very long process of struggle, where the first thing that happened was that Denmark developed an effective state. Developed an effective military that could provide security, and an effective tax system. It then moved towards a more democratic society. But it was a long, internal struggle. Denmark didn't become Denmark thanks to preaching from the University of Michigan. The same will be true of Rwanda.
Banik This reminds me of my friend Francis Fukuyama's point about getting to Denmark, about certain institutions, certain processes taking place. You can't have a country making that transition very quickly. Staying on this chapter on landlocked trap, Paul, I remember reading two very interesting points in the Bottom Billion about - and you're right that if you're a coastal country you serve the world, if you're landlocked, you serve your neighbours - so that was one, and related to this - just as living in a good neighbourhood matters for all of us, a good nice neighbourhood is also important at the national level - geography matters in terms of having countries, neighbouring countries whose economies are growing at a fast pace, maybe that could also benefit a landlocked country. Now in a recent study I did with my colleagues in Malawi, we were actually looking at Malawi's dependence on Mozambique. Now, it turns out Malawi uses four so-called transport corridors to access the ports, and three of these pass through Mozambique and a few years ago, then-President Bingu wa Mutharika came up with this very ambitious plan to construct the so-called Shire Zambezi Waterway. The purpose was to provide Malawi with access to the Indian Ocean through a city called Chinde in Mozambique. The project spectacularly failed. One of the reasons was the unilateral actions by Malawi's president, we use the term megaphone-diplomacy, he went about planning and implementing this project without really consulting his counterparts in Mozambique and another reason was that there was a total lack of interest in Mozambique to actually sacrifice their land-based corridors in terms of this new waterway project. My point is that any time a landlocked country like Malawi is trying to address this challenge - you're right about air freight - even though I still think it's expensive to fly within the African continent - every time Malawi is trying to explore these new options, it is very much hindered by its lack of diplomatic consultations, but most importantly, when the neighbouring country, when Mozambique isn't interested, Malawi is stuck.
Collier Absolutely. Same is true with railway connections. I work on Malawi too. If we take air travel to Malawi, it's very uncompetitive because it's a small market and so basically there is a monopoly by South African Airways, and that route from Johannesburg to Malawi per km flown, is the most expensive route in the whole of South African Airways network. In other words, it's exploiting its monopoly mercilessly against a very poor landlocked country. If we look at other situations with landlocked countries with bad neighbours, at the moment, Tunisia Airlines in the Sahel. You just look at the neighbours and say that's a problem. A very fundamental problem of insecurity. The new president of Niger has just appealed for help on the security situation. He says what I most need is aircraft and satellite technology, I need to know where the Jihadi forces are lurking in this huge country, which is twice the size of France, and of course Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, and so it just doesn't have the money to provide that famous phrase, a monopoly of security over its territory. Just to finish the story on air freight and where I was wrong in the Bottom Billion, is the example of Ethiopia. Ethiopia really has managed to break into light manufacturing by making Addis an air hub, which can fly in cheap imports and then fly out the production that uses those things. And the starting point was the production of footwear, of trainers, and that began in 2011 with a Chinese company relocating to Addis and it was a very close run thing, because being the first footwear company in Ethiopia, there was no cluster-scale economies. It was the only firm there. So, its labour costs fell massively. In coastal China, where it moved from, it was paying 500 dollars a month wage, in Ethiopia people were perfectly willing to get 50 dollars a month. That was a good job in Ethiopia because people were so poor. So, labour costs fell 90% but then the meter started ticking, because all the other costs were higher. The strategy of the amazing woman who got that firm to transfer and then made a success of the footwear industry in Ethiopia called Helen Hai, what she managed to do, is she realised the vital thing was to create a cluster as fast as possible. How? You don't do it by saying: we're just hanging on, please come, you do it by bragging, and producing trainers in Ethiopia is really good business. I know Helen Hai because we were at the same conferences repeatedly around the world, her bragging about how wonderful her business was in Ethiopia and it worked. Other firms came and now they've got a cluster. But of course, at the moment, Ethiopia has plunged into the conflict trap, and so it got out of the landlocked trap by virtue of building a railway to the coast and creating this air hub but it's plunged into the conflict trap.
Banik The point you make about Addis being the hub is important and we've seen this already during the Covid crisis how Chinese vaccines were transported to Latin America using Addis and returning to the Malawi example, South African ended up being in competition with Ethiopian and Ethiopian was much more popular, I believe, the flights from Addis to Lilongwe than the Johannesburg...
Collier Indeed I've taken those flights, yes.
Banik I once heard you say that while visiting Angola, you told the authorities that the best investment decision they could make was to buy two sets of airline tickets - one to Kuala Lumpur and the other to Lagos and you apparently told them at that time they were booked on the plane to Lagos. Following your visit, apparently, they invited the government of Malaysia to provide them with advice. We don't thing Angola has made the kind of progress that they should have made, what I'm trying to get at is in terms of natural resource governance, to go right, what is the advice you have? Is it about learning from others, because the Nigerias and Angolas haven't done very well? Some are debunking the resource curse thesis saying that's inadequate, we should be talking more about economic diversification. What are your thoughts there, when you think about your trip to Angola and the advice you gave the Angolan government?
Collier For Angola, two things: one was natural resource management but the other was about urbanisation. Lagos, at the time, was an example of a mega-city that didn't work very well, whereas KL was a city that worked a lot better. And unfortunately, Angola has still not really made a success of urbanisation. It is urbanising very fast, I'm now working a bit with the Chinese authorities here because there's a huge influence of China in Africa, but it's not actually been anything as helpful as it could have been. If we look at the process of urbanisation, China is about as good as it gets. They transitioned from a low to middle income country without the cities collapsing into congested mega-slums. Chinese cities are far from perfect, they made mistakes, but they did manage to keep the growth of the physical infrastructure and housing ahead of the flow of settlement. And in Africa that hasn't happened. In Rwanda that hasn't happened. That was part of my message. To try and learn from the Chinese on urbanisation. And the tragedy has been that the Chinese who know a lot about urbanisation have not transferred any of that learning into Africa and that's a great shame. On the issue of natural resource management, Angola actually has cleaned up its act a bit and that's because the former president tried to pass power to his family. This is a feature that's really quite common. Zuma tried the same in South Africa. Wanted to pass power to his former wife. In Angola, the president tried to pass power to his daughter. And of course Mugabe in Zimbabwe also tried to pass power basically to his wife. And in all three situations, what happened was the political party, the ruling party, realised that it wasn't in their interest to keep power in the family, it was in their interest to keep power in the party and so in each case, the ruling party ousted the chosen successor of the president and that's led in Angola to something of a clean-up of the abuse of natural resource revenues. Far from perfect, but a big improvement. That's been a fascinating power struggle in which over-powerful presidents tried to keep it in the family, and that produced a tension, a battle between the political party and the family. In each case, the presidents narrowly lost.
Banik You've also written this wonderful book from 2010 called the Plundered Planet and I think you mention two types of plunder. One is the few stealing the property of the many, looting, that takes place in many countries, and another type of plunder has to do with the rights of future generations. While reading that book again a few weeks ago, I was reminded of some of the discussions I've had with my youngest, August, he's 13 years, and actually he's going to be one of my guests in Season 3 of my show, we're going to talk about his ideas and thoughts for the future, very similar to the kind of discussions I believe you've had with your son, that the present generations needs vs. the needs of future generations, and issues related to our custody of current assets, our responsibility to preserve the value of assets for the future. Earlier this year I spoke with Gro Harlem Brundtland, the mother of sustainable development, and I asked her: It's taken 3 decades for SD to become mainstream, and she said, well, it wasn't that long if you think about an idea, a new revolutionary idea, it took 3 decades but it was worth the wait. The question to you, Paul, is the SD concept or the idea hasn't attracted that much attention in mainstream economics, has it?
Collier No, it hasn't. Mainstream economics is really a long way behind the intellectual frontiers. First, I fully agree that 3 decades for a shift in ideas is not very long. It's an unfinished business, as you implied. Because this very influential profession, the economics profession, hasn't really woken up to the idea of sustainability yet. It's just starting and the cutting edge happens to be through the financial community because the big fund managers have realised that pension funds now want to put some of their money into impact and impact comes down to two concepts: the social sustainability and environmental sustainability. And so the big investment funds like Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, they are now creating funds which claim to be environmentally sustainable. This is the battlefront of the next three years, and I'm very much engaged in it. Quite a lot of those so-called impact funds won't be for real. They will tick a few boxes and achieve what's called sustainability through very foolish rules. One rule that's likely to become quite common is no investments in Africa that will be disastrous for Africa, if the big financial agencies like Black Rock, lure money into funds which say they're not investing in Africa. That will leave Africa just to the Chinese, which will be disastrous. That over the next three years, the norms of what counts as an investment in sustainability, will get set. That's the battlefront now, is that trying to establish practical, measurable norms of what counts and there are two dangers. One danger is that it will become bogus, it will become fraudulent and it will be no surprise if some of the investment companies came up with things that claim to be environmentally sustainable but aren't. And the other danger is that we get rules which are short sighted and foolish, like we won't invest in any non-renewable energy. We'll need non-renewable energy in the next 50 years, oil, it's no good pretending we won't, and there just aren't the technologies there to enable us to fly long-distance aircrafts on electricity. We're a lot way from very light batteries, sufficiently light, to enable us to fly planes long distances without stopping.
Banik I've been studying this in terms of the embrace of the concept of sustainability and it turns out that it's the private sector that for the first time are showing genuine interest in development, talking about SD, making all the right noises, but very few in my view are operationalising that rhetoric. It's much more about virtue signalling, making all the right noises but not necessarily showing the follow up that they're doing. I wanted to ask you something that is now being hotly debated and throughout your work there's been considerable focus - you make the argument that economic growth is good for the poor, good for development, but in recent years, Paul there's been this growing popularity of the de-growth movements.
Collier I think it's an indulgent fantasy of people whose lives are very comfortable. The idea that we should be preaching to Africa the virtue of continued poverty, let alone that we should try and impose on Africa continued poverty, it would be an ethical disgrace of the first order. Of course poor countries have got to catch up with us and of course, they need to catch up with us using technologies which are compatible with environmental sustainability but here's a good question - who should be producing the last barrel of oil ever produced? Or the last cubic meter of gas? Where should it be coming from? Or the last ton of coal? It seems to me perfectly evident that the last carbon based resources should be extracted in the poorest countries so that they get the revenues. Instead, we're in danger of using our economic and political power over the poorest countries to make them close their carbon based energy first and that to my mind would be just shameful. It's an abuse of our economic and political power if we tell Africa it can't dig coal, while who is digging coal? Sweden, Germany, US, Australia - these are all super rich countries digging coal really fast. They are the ones that need to close their coal industries first. And so, the idea that there should be no coal discoveries in Africa will just mean that the last barrel of oil comes from Saudi Arabia or Russia or Iran, and that doesn't seem to be either a geopolitically desirable outcome or a very ethically fair outcome.
Banik In response to that, Paul, I've heard the de-growth advocates saying it's more about reducing consumption in our countries, it is not so much about what poorer countries should be doing, but we should be reducing consumption -surely that is something they have a good point about?
Collier Yes, we should be changing our consumption and of course we are. My 20 year old is vegan and we probably eat vegan or vegetarian half the week. That's a very sensible response where each person can take some individual responsibility for these low-cost changes in lifestyle. It turns out that once you start eating vegetarian, it's really delicious. Switching to a lower intake of meat makes sense. The switch to zero meat, to my mind - chicken turns out to be a very high protein content, it's right up there with any other source of protein in terms of environmental imports, so you might for religious reasons not want to eat chicken but you can't justify not using chicken on environmental grounds.
Banik There are lots of things that we didn't get to talk about, among them the conflict trap, aid, we briefly touched upon aid and your critique on how aid is done and the preaching, but one final issue I want you to reflect on has to do with the global development agenda. In the Bottom Billion and subsequent books, including the Plundered Planet, you're often critical of these overarching developmental goals, like the MDGs, you argue that the MDGs lacked focus, these goals apply to too many countries instead of focusing on the challenges of the poorest of the poor countries. But Paul now we have 17 SDG unlike the 8 MDGs and this SDG Agenda has now been widened to not just apply to developing countries but also the whole world, Britain, France and Norway, so also rich countries. I would imagine this lack of focus in the SDGs must infuriate you?
Collier I think it's not very practical - I remember talking with a Finish journalist about this a couple of years ago and she was asking me about the SDGs. First, she didn't know what the S stood for, and secondly, how are they changing policy in Finland? And she looked at me completely baffled and said who said they're not changing policy in Finland? In Finland we set policies by election campaigns and basically we've got a democratic government that's trying to meet the concerns of voters, so I said why do you think it should be different in Africa? In a way, it's a very artificial top-down thing measuring all this, 161 targets, and so on, I remember talking to Chinese officials a year ago, they said: no countries have every developed like that. Now it is important to change people's ideas on sustainability and so getting a debate on these ideas is a good thing, getting some quantity and indicators that actually we can judge firms by and countries by, that's not a bad thing, but this sort of top-down proliferation, seems to me a bit unreal. I pose the question, what money will move as a result of the SDGs? And when I asked that question, the problem with the SDGs is that there's so many of them that everybody can justify what they're doing at the moment in terms of some SDG.
Banik SDG-proofing everything.
Collier Yes. And so if everybody can justify what they're doing at the moment according to furthering one of the SDGs, then really, nothing is going to change. And that's the ultimate critique that we need things that are sufficiently targeted, that things have to change. So I think the campaign on 'eat less meat' is a good one, but that's a much more focused thing where gradually, ideas a shifting around the world. Again, I don't think it's to be done by preaching, I think the tone of moral superiority adopted by some vegans is not helpful, whereas the argument that actually we can all do our bit by eating less meat, that I think is helpful. And we need to have norms that are not dividing us into saints and sinners, but which all normal people can actually meet, because most of us are, in the end, morally load-bearing. We are capable of thinking about concerns greater than just me now, very few of us are capable of being saints. So, we don't need saints, we need these norms which most people can meet, and so most people are capable of being moral. That's the wonderful message that comes from the latest research in evolutionary biology. We are hard-wired, we devolved to be unusually pro-social mammals, and that makes us capable of being morally load-bearing.
Banik It's always such a pleasure listening to you, Paul, thank you so much for coming on my show today.
Collier Thanks very much for inviting me, Dan. Thank you and do continue your work in Norway, your own migration has obviously been a very good thing.
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Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banik from the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment@gmail.com.