Can There Be a Decent Jeffrey Sachs Profile?

The man with the hair helmet is Jeffrey Sachs, and his organization gets money when you buy the shirt Bono tells you to buy. And then Sachs helps the kids.

But a series of unreadable articles points out the same recurring problem: What happens when Sachs isn't around?

• The April issue of Harper's explained (in a horribly boring way) how local politicians and elites in Kenya ignored Sachs' advice as soon as he was out of sight.
• Bono's Vanity Fair issue explains how Uganda's president couldn't be bothered to act like he was listening to Sachs' in-person advice.
• Today's Times looks at how Sachs' attempt guide oil development the tiny island country of Sao Tome and Principe got bulldozed by the corrupt oil interests in neighboring Nigeria. No one with real power would do what Sachs said.
  

In each (dry as toast) report, some optimistic doctors, technocrats, and reform-minded politicians are very happy with Sachs. But the peasants and presidents just wait for the ruddy-faced man to leave, already.

From the Times' gargantuan Murdoch profile

Cash:

In October 2002, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch had a lunch meeting at Mr. Clinton’s office in Harlem. It was arranged by Mr. Ginsberg, who had worked in the White House counsel’s office in the Clinton administration and is now the News Corporation’s executive vice president for corporate affairs.

More recently, Mr. Murdoch donated $500,000 to the former president’s Global Initiative and was one of its featured panelists at a 2005 event in New York. In 2006, The Post issued a surprising endorsement of Mrs. Clinton in her Senate re-election bid. On June 5 and 6 of this year, Mr. Ginsberg and Peter A. Chernin, president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, were hosts of back-to-back fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, one in New York and one in Los Angeles.

$500k is very generous for a charity donation, but pretty cheap for the goodwill of one, possibly two, presidents. News Corp threw $4.5m Gingrich's way, for Pete's sake.

Maybe Philanthropy Writing Is Just Inherently Awful

Kind of like how movies about the American Revolution always stink.

I just read Victoria Schlesinger's unconvincing "The Continuation of Poverty" article in this month's Harper's. (Link goes to a WSJ blog about the article, because Harper's so very ugly website doesn't allow you to read current articles.)

Schlesinger is trying to cast a skeptical eye on Jeffrey Sach's Millennium Village Project, which is all the rage with Bono and Bono's friends. MVP's (kind of) original approach lies in giving disadvantaged Third World folks access to credit, higher-yielding seeds, clean water, and a dozen other things simultaneously.

She makes (by my count) five decent critiques which I truly doubt you're interested in. So I sum them below in very small easy-to-skip type.

1) Many local politicians disagree with MVP policy, 2) MVP choose the ideal Kenyan village to serve as its template, 3) MVP makes Kenyan villagers attend too many meetings, 4) MVP administrators seem at times ignorant of how similar attempts have failed in the past, and 5) Man, wealthy MVP donors sometimes make themselves look stupid walking around these villages.

But, common sense dictates that 1) Local politicians are always going to disagree when there's patronage to be handed out, 2) Starting with the village that will be most receptive to aid just makes sense, 3) Everyone everywhere attends too many meetings, but much of humanity still gets stuff done, 4) MVP administrators can't read about everything, and you wouldn't want them to. 5) You try to have a conversation next to some poor people in Kenya and try to not sound like a self-important ass. It's impossible.

Honestly, Schlesinger's nitpicking was such that even the WSJ doesn't make much hay, and this is right up their alley. There's just no narrative there to grab onto.

And this is a recurring thing I've noticed with critiques of aid to the Third World: they're usually almost unreadable. The only exceptions I can think of are Paul Theroux (rambling a complaint about how the school he gave his youth to went to seed) in Dark Star Safari, and Blaine Harden's "Good Intentions" chapter in Dispatches from a Fragile Continent.

Bono can lament that the aid community sucks at storytelling, but he can take heart that critics generally suck at it, too.