Unravelling Complexity Tim's Learning Portfolio

This panel was run by Dr Stephen Howes and Dr Sango Mahanty, from the Crawford School of Economics and Government. (where I attended a seminar on Federal Rivers.) Stephen gave a brief overview of aid and development, and Sango told us about the complexity of sustainable development in Vietnam’s craft villages.

Last week’s tutorial looked at how ideas have changed over time. So it was interesting to hear how economists have changed their thinking about what drives development. It is now thought that institutions are the biggest key to development. Paul Graham describes this as “stopping the bullies stealing the nerds’ lunch money“.

Aid data is often analysed using case-studies because it is too complex to analyse any other way. Network diagrams were used to explain the principal agent framework.

Governments tend to operate on assumptions, rather than understanding the underlying issues. There is a focus on technical issues rather than governance issues. (I think Sango must have been at this seminar too)

My question was: How do you chose who to give aid to? I thought this would raise some insights into how to respond to multiple competing priorities, as well as the ethical considerations to dealing with complex issues.

I didn’t ask the question because it had already been answered in response to Rebecca’s question.  Australian aid is a balance between humanitarian concerns, commercial interests and national security.

Tutorial Reflection

• Aid can be given for political reasons  but, as Nat pointed out, the recipient countries can also play political games with aid by blocking it.
• The effectiveness of aid can be limited by there only being a weak feedback loop to the aid donors
• During the tutorial, development was analysed using case studies. However, it seemed that some of these examples were contrived by the participants.
• As Chris mentioned at the end, aid is short term and development is what we are all doing all the time.

Connections within this course

Aid is a post-WWII phenomenon. One motivation for it is to discourage remote poor countries from acting in ways that are detrimental to the rich “empire“  countries. Aid peaked during the Cold War and again during the “War on Terror”.

Connections to other courses

Sango told us that life expectancy in Vietnamese craft villages is 10 years lower than the national average. No doubt this was determined using survival models, and probably involving the Kaplan-Meier estimator.

There was a 3-dimensional pie chart in one of the presentations. These graph’s are not highly regarded in Graphical Data Analysis because they tend to exaggerate differences in data.  Unnecessarily complicated graphics do not assist in understanding complex problems, clarity is required.

One view of aid is that it can reduce the number of refugees trying to get to Australia, a topical issue in the federal election campaign. Another solution to this “problem” is to put up a “big fence” (hence the photo  above).

On the same day as the panel, The Australian carried a story: Afghan police chief blamed for aid killings. It highlights the complexity of working in Afghanistan, where different government institutions have different (sometimes opposing) ways of dealing with the Taliban. According to Stephen Howes definition of aid, the medical workers who were killed were not providing aid because it was provided by a Christian charity and not by a government. Common usage of the word aid is clearly broader than that suggested during the panel.

“The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want” – Jesus (Mark 14:7)

Tools to Address Complexity

• case studies / stories
• network diagrams