Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations [NOOK Book]

ECONOMIC GANGSTERS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

In the summer of 2004, world-renowned Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong'o returned to his homeland after twenty-two years in exile. He flew to Nairobi to launch his new novel, Wizard of the Crow, his first in over a decade. Ngugi's earlier works-a dozen or so novels and collections of stories, which he began publishing just after Kenyan independence in 1963-had been wildly successful, not only in Kenya but throughout the world. Through his carefully wrought characters and achingly familiar plots of loss and suffering, Ngugi captured the bewildering contradictions left behind in the wake of European colonialism.

Ngugi had lived those contradictions and drew inspiration from his experiences, which were shared by so many of his fellow Kenyans. Ngugi had grown up during the 1950s, when Kenya had been rocked by the Mau Mau rebellion against its British colonizers. He had witnessed the murder of his brother, who had died along with thousands of other Kenyans in opposing the British. And he had celebrated with his countrymen as they watched the British imperial machinery retreat in 1963 at the birth of the Kenyan nation. He had also suffered at the hands of the second free Kenyan government-for despite the country's turn to self-rule and hopes for a bright future, Ngugi had been forced to flee Kenya in the 1980s following years of persecution and imprisonment for his sharp criticism of the post-independence regime.

Novels like A Grain of Wheat, published in 1967, just four years after Jomo Kenyatta became independent Kenya's first president, provided a window into the hopes and frustrations that came with the dismantling of the Western empires-dreams of economic prosperity measured against tales of corruption seeded throughout the new government. A Grain of Wheat is a fable about the early, tumultuous years of a free Kenya, and captures the unwavering hope for a bright future coupled with the fear of what the British legacy of corruption and violence might bring. "Would independence bring the land into African hands? And would that make a difference to the small man in the village?" asks Ngugi through the novel's main character, Gikonyo.

In the 1950s and 1960s, that same question echoed in the minds of the citizens of newly independent countries from Kenya and Sierra Leone to Indonesia and Pakistan. What would the future hold? Would freedom bring jobs, peace, and wealth? The sentiment that drove these concerns would help make Ngugi's novels international sensations; they've been translated into more than thirty languages and are considered classics of African literature. For Ngugi himself, the post-independence years spent in exile had brought professional acclaim and prosperity. He had taught at New York University as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and is now a professor at the University of California at Irvine, where he directs the Center for Writing and Translation. And he returned to Kenya in 2004 not with bitterness about the past but with optimism for the future. "I come back with an open mind, an open heart and open arms. I have come to touch base. I have come to learn," he told the crowds of well-wishers upon landing in Nairobi.

But even in the face of the enthusiasm, hope, and joy that greeted his return-a visit that came not long after Kenya's longtime dictator Daniel arap Moi, his longtime persecutor, had stepped down to make way for a democratically elected government-Ngugi was brutally assaulted in his rented Nairobi apartment, beaten, his face burned with cigarettes; his wife, Njeeri, was raped. Many interpreted the attack as payback from the earlier regime for Ngugi's outspoken criticism of Kenyan politicians and politics, and served as yet another reminder of the despair and unfulfilled aspirations of Kenya's people. The parallels were made even more poignant by the widespread political violence in Kenya in early 2008.

This isn't the way it was supposed to be.

* * *

Over the past four decades, we've witnessed some of the greatest economic miracles in human history. In 1963, an average person in South Korea or Kenya earned only a few hundred dollars a year. Most eked out a living as peasant farmers. Back then, it wasn't so clear where you'd lay your bets if you had to guess which country would be rich at the end of the millennium. Both countries were recovering from the devastating armed conflicts that had accompanied decolonization. South Korea had already boosted its literacy rates by the early 1960s, but Kenya had much greater natural resource wealth to exploit, including some of the world's richest soil for growing coffee, cotton, and tea.

After decades of first manufacturing textiles, then refining steel, and finally producing high-end consumer goods and advanced electronics, South Korea pulled off an economic leapfrog that today puts it among the world's wealthy nations. South Korean citizens now enjoy a standard of living rivaling the Japanese, their former colonizers, and that of many European nations. But the average Kenyan is no better off today than he was in 1963.

What went wrong? In looking back over four decades of history, what can we learn of why South Korea-and Malaysia and Thailand and now China-began to close the income gap with Europe and North America, while Bangladesh, Pakistan, Central America, and most of sub-Saharan Africa remain mired in extreme poverty?

This is the puzzle that gets the two of us out of bed and into the office each morning, and solving it is the ultimate purpose of the research that we'll share with you. This book isn't about finding the singular explanation for why poor countries are poor. You should probably be suspicious of anyone selling you a grand unified theory of poverty (or anything else). Human societies are far too complicated for that.

But neither do we subscribe to the view that no one can make progress on such a vexing problem. Many hard lessons have been learned since 1963. The experiences of newly independent Kenyans-the fruits of their hard labor lost to corruption or destroyed by violence-foreshadow the twin evils of corruption and violence that have been so central to Kenya's modern economic experience as to be inseparable from it. As we'll see, Kenya's story is far from unique: from the post-colonial plundering in Indonesia to the bloody civil wars of Central America and Africa, the destructive power of corruption and violence is clear for all to see.

The Lives and Times of Economic Gangsters

Al Capone is remembered as a gangster and a brutal, cold-blooded killer. It is perhaps less widely known that Capone was also an accountant for a Baltimore construction firm before joining and eventually leading Chicago's North Side Gang. We don't normally associate the relatively humble and perhaps humdrum vocation of bookkeeping with mob icons like Capone. There are no scenes of Al Pacino struggling to balance the books or poring over financial statements in the films Scarface or The Godfather. But Capone's training as an accountant was instrumental in helping him organize a vast criminal business empire. The emphasis was on business-it's just that Capone's business happened to be in prostitution, gambling, racketeering, and selling booze during Prohibition, illicit trades where disputes were settled with machine guns rather than lawyers.

According to biographer Robert Schoenberg, Capone was "a businessman of crime [with] lucid, rational, and discoverable reasons for his actions." He is the quintessential economic gangster: a violent and lawless criminal who wrought havoc on 1920s Chicago, but did so in a rational, calculating way. A cold-blooded killer, yes, but violence was simply a tool Capone used to keep the money rolling in.

The pathological cruelty of gangsters like Capone makes them particularly repellant-they're guilty of crimes of calculation, never passion-but also the source of endless fascination. Yet their narrow self-interest, driven by money and power, makes them more understandable to economists, not less. It's not that we economists do not realize how important emotions can be in governing behavior (we are in fact people too). But the side to human behavior that economists choose to study is embodied in the species Homo economicus, or Economic man-a rational, self-serving being whose actions and choices are based on logical decisions, not rash impulses. If the criminal mind, like Capone's, really is very close to the self-serving ideal in our models, then economic analysis can be a useful tool in figuring out how to combat corruption and other forms of lawbreaking.

There's good reason to believe that the characters that populate this book-from the despotic warlords of sub-Saharan Africa to the smugglers of the South China Sea-do indeed obey the logical laws of economics. To understand why, it's useful to think about what keeps you from cheating a little on your taxes, or slipping out of a restaurant without paying the bill. It's in part a fear of the legal consequences if you get caught. But the punishment of tax cheats is rare and usually light, and you could stiff a waiter his tip without risking any legal penalties (although you may not be welcome back at that particular restaurant). Yet most people still do the right thing most of the time. Probably more than fines or jail time, what constrains us from breaking the law is the fact that it just isn't right. We're constrained by conscience.

But antisocial personalities like Capone were blessed with relatively few such encumbrances. So if anyone is going to behave in their narrowest self-interest-by cheating on taxes or restaurant bills, or even killing off business rivals to earn a few dollars more-we would expect it to be a criminal character unconstrained by scruples, what we call the "economic gangster." And as we'll see, there's a bit of economic gangster in each of us. When placed in desperate circumstances all people are reduced to the rational calculus of survival, with conscience a forgone luxury.

The goal of this book, and the research it's based on, is to understand the havoc wrought by the corruption and violence of the world's economic gangsters, and to place their impacts on economic development in sharper relief. (To appreciate the problem, imagine what life would be like under Mayor Capone of Chicago or even President Capone. Unfortunately, many people in the developing world don't need to use their imaginations to grasp what it means to be ruled by thuggish bandits.)

While we certainly don't have all the answers, in our research odyssey to make sense of corruption and violence over the past decade, we have uncovered some amazing facts-and surprising solutions.

We are researchers and professors in development economics at U.S. academic institutions (Ray at the Columbia Business School and Ted at the University of California, Berkeley). But our research forces us out of the ivory tower to get a closer look at the real world. Our economic detective work has taken us from remote Kenyan villages to the floor of the Indonesian stock exchange for new angles on the sources of global poverty. Unexpected answers about corruption and violence are found in the most unlikely of places: in tales of smuggled Chinese chickens, diplomatic parking tickets in Manhattan, and even Tanzanian witch-hunts.

This book brings together the lessons we've learned by marrying economic analysis with the insights gained in our expeditions through the rural back roads and glittery new skyscrapers of the developing world. We hope these lessons can, in some small way, help Kenyans and the rest of the developing world finally realize the economic aspirations they hold for themselves and their children.

It's not an overstatement to say that the question that we confront-how best to fight global poverty-is of epochal importance. The well-being of most human beings is at stake. Recent World Bank calculations estimate that a billion people live on less than one dollar a day, while half the world's population-about three billion-gets by on a daily income of less than two dollars.

How do people survive on so little? The answer is brutally simple: not well. Hunger plagues daily life for hundreds of millions, and health care is scarce or nonexistent. In war-torn Chad, Niger, and Sierra Leone, adult literacy rates still hover under 30 percent, and children have a better chance of dying before age one than they have of graduating from high school.

Global poverty matters a lot even to those Americans (and other privileged citizens of the Western world) who generally have little regard for what goes on beyond their own borders-even if they aren't conscious of it. As we'll see repeatedly throughout this book, we're all stuck with one another on this planet. Poverty breeds desperation and discontent: we wake up daily to headlines of terrorist threats, environmental degradation, and other global ills that find their origins in Middle Eastern slums and the rainforest clear-cuts scarring the Congo River basin. Tackling the problem of global poverty is an imperative for the entire world, both rich and poor.

Hope For a New Generation?

International economic development returns to the public eye in the United States every few years. Lately, renewed interest in Africa's plight in particular has been fueled by the star power of Angelina Jolie and U2's Bono, combined with devastating images of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and genocide in Darfur, Sudan. We hear pleas for debt relief and more generous international aid from America and Europe. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are spending tens of billions of their own dollars to fight malaria, treat AIDS, and educate Africans, to ultimately "make poverty history."

But we've been here before. Our generation had its LiveAid concerts and "We Are the World" albums following the horrific 1984 famine during the Ethiopian civil war-star power (there's Bono again) mixed with the iconic image of a starving child left to die on the dusty earth. Private charities and countries' foreign aid agencies have spent billions annually for decades now hoping to wipe out poverty. We've seen round after round of debt relief since the 1970s. But despite all this the average Kenyan is still no richer today than in 1963. Will things really be any different this time around?

Well-informed people hold widely divergent and passionate views on this fundamental question. You might think economists mainly spend their time engaged in emotionally inert conversations on the niceties of monetary policy or crunching numbers on next month's inflation (and this does describe what many economists do). Yet these otherwise mild-mannered, monotone academics have almost come to blows over the question of why foreign aid to developing countries seems to have failed so spectacularly.

Fundamentally, it boils down to whether rich countries have already provided too much money to help Kenya and others out of poverty-or not nearly enough. Leading academic researchers have lined up on both sides. The answer turns out to hinge critically on one's views of the role that corruption and violence play in the impoverishment of nations. Maybe corruption and violence are mainly just the symptoms of poverty. If this is the case, once rich-country donors finally send enough money to Kenya to jump-start economic growth, its citizens will no longer have to fight one another to survive. On the other hand, if most foreign aid is lost to the grabbing hands of corrupt officials or destroyed in civil strife, then how could aid dollars ever lift countries like Kenya out of poverty? More aid would just enrich an already corrupt elite, and could even make the twin problems of corruption and violence worse by giving people even more money to fight over.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ECONOMIC GANGSTERS by Raymond Fisman Edward Miguel Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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