Speigel has a very interesting interview with Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati where he says that aid to Africa is doing more harm than good. Excerpts:

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

And later:

Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

I know nothing about Africa, or aid to Africa. I don’t have enough information to decide whether to agree with Shikwati or not. But this sure is a contrarian viewpoint – a side to the argument that most people are unfamiliar with. Hence, I believe it is a must read. I love contrarian points of view. Read the full article.

Recently found this article by Bertrand Russell lamenting that modern society (the article was written in 1932) puts far too much emphasis on “work”. He makes an intriguing argument that everyone should do less “work” and should have more leisure to pursue other activities. Excerpt:

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

See full article. It is a long article, and a little slow in the beginning but it has lots of insightful snippets and is well worth the effort.