Reviews for Attacking Poverty in the Developing World: Christian Practitioners and Academics in Collaboration

The average rating for Attacking Poverty in the Developing World: Christian Practitioners and Academics in Collaboration based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-13 00:00:00 Joseph Caravello It is unclear exactly to which audience this book is aimed.  In reading this book I found it rather bereft of biblical language, and instead very full of the wonky language that is used to discuss issues of policy, or the technical language of seeking statistical verification of the efficacy of various methods of providing aid to the developing world.  I found the book intriguing and certainly worthwhile, but part of that is because I'm a fairly wonky and technical person myself and part of that is because I have been a Christian practitioner involved in providing education to people in the developing world [1].  Not everyone has that sort of background and therefore I hesitate to recommend this book unless one has a high degree of interest in technical discussion about aid and how it may be best delivered or one is a Christian practitioner of such aid in one's own vocational work.  This book is not an easy one get through and deals with questions of politics and public policy in the developing world in language that will likely be unfamiliar to a reader who is not informed about such matters. That said, the contents of this book are a series of eighteen papers totaling close to 300 pages on the subject of providing aid to people in developing nations from a wide variety of academic and institutional authors.  The first four essays look at the role of Christian institutions in collaborating with other institutions in poverty reduction efforts.  After this the next nine essays look at the design of Christian poverty reduction efforts, including such issues as sustainability in microfinance, dealing with the threat/opportunity of supermarkets to rural development, meeting local education needs, understanding health economics and practice, and partnering with local organizations.  The next two essays look at the evaluation of Christian development efforts through formal statistical assessment.  The final three essays of the book examine Christian engagement in poverty reduction policy making, including the Millennium Development Goals, the importance of trade for the poor, and the vital role of macroeconomic stability in aiding poverty reduction.  As might be readily imagined, each paper is written very technically in a high academic style and is full of endnotes that show the author's research and provide additional commentary on what is said. In reading this book I was interested, as I often am, in the context in which this book was written.  The authors, in varied ways, dealt with the divide that often exists between the humanitarian goals of Christian donors and aid organizations and the problem of anti-Christian bias in donor nations (which may support ungodly policies), recipient nations (which may be hostile to Christianity and the perceived threat of missionary activity), and academic or other institutions with little understanding of or sympathy for Christianity.  It was also interesting as well to see several of the authors wrestle with the question of ensuring that aid helps and not hurts recipients, although they did not put it quite like that, in part through genuine partnerships with local institutions as well as the use of rigorous data collection and assessment.  This was a book that certainly presents a challenge to its readers to make sure that good intentions are paved with sound practice and a willingness to change based on an understanding of the facts on the ground.  Delivering aid in a thoughtful manner is by no means an easy or straightforward task in our present world, and this book does a good job in presenting those challenges in a nuanced manner and letting the readers work out those issues in their own practice. [1] See, for example:

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-01 00:00:00 Hiram Acevedo Recommended by EJMR as I looked for good philosophy readings. Sen in this essay criticizes the implicit assumptions grounding the First Welfare Theorem and other assumptions of welfare economics. Sen argues that ethics and economics have gotten too disconnected to the detriment of both. Economics had its start in two traditions: an Aristotelian stew in which concepts which we would today call ethics, politics, and economics were all mixed up and one in which economics is viewed as separate and instrumental. After the first generation of modern economists such as Adam Smith and John Stewart Mill, for whom morality was central, the engineering approach has been emphasized. Sen examines the assumptions economics makes about human behavior. A core assumption of the vast majority of economics is that people behave rationally. Sen breaks rationality down into two sub-concepts: consistency (or rationalizability) and self-interest maximization. He later breaks self-interest maximization into sub-concepts as well. A rationality is the system of rules by which an agent decides on an action given their preferences, beliefs, and options. It may also include rules restricting the types of preferences allowed and how beliefs are formed. Economic models assume many subtly different versions of rationality in different contexts. But the standard bare-bones version entails that an agent have complete and transitive preferences. Complete preferences means being able to make a choice between any two options that might conceivably be presented. Transitive preferences mean that if an agent prefers A to B, and B to C, he prefers A to C. While a person with intransitive preferences is conceivable, he might find it very difficult to go shopping because he'd cyclically replace stuff in his shopping cart with other preferred stuff. A neat thing about rational preferences is that they can be represented as mathematical 'utility functions'. An individual doesn't need to be conscious of their utility function: to be 'consistently rational' they just need to act as though they were consciously maximizing it. Further, for a person to be consistent, their preferences don't necessarily have to have any connection to their good or pleasure or anything. If a suicide bomber or a drug addict acts sensibly in pursuit of their goals, they might be acting consistently, but you might not think they are acting in their self-interest. The other definition of rationality economists work with is self-interest maximization. Why do economists want to assume that the utility function people maximize represents their well-being? First, factually, self-interest seems to be at least a powerful motivation. More fundamentally, if we want to be liberals and not automatically assume that the good for everyone is the same, then we need some other access to what individuals' goods' are. It makes sense to assume that individuals have better access to what their own flourishing entails than any outsider. Letting individuals tell us what their good is through their revealed preferences allows economists to dodge hard utilitarian problems of higher versus lower pleasures and the like. We don't have to decide what the good life entails: the consumer gets to. Sen argues that self-interest maximization, while certainly compatible with rationality, is not required by it. Sen then moves from positive economics to normative economics. Sen argues welfare economics is grounded in a version of utilitarianism. Sen divides classic utilitarianism into three parts: a) Welfarism - A state's goodness is completely described by its utility information b) Sum Ranking - The best state is the one that has the highest total utility c) Consequentialism - A choice should be judged based on its forseeable consequences Sen thinks economics' strength is its embrace of consequentialism, as any moral theory must employ at least some consequential reasoning. For example, even if rights are intrinsically valuable, we still need to be consequentialists to deal with situations where different rights come into conflict. As for sum-ranking, in PEL's utilitarianism episode, one of the huge problems that arose was inter-personal comparisons of utility. Utilitarianism sounds great until you are actually faced with practical problems of weighing the relative merits of saving one man's life versus the inconveniencing ten thousand people. Utility monsters also lead to paradoxes. And Arrow's Impossiblity theorem tells us that there is no voting system that can sensibly decide between a set of pareto efficient options. Engineering economics dodges these hard problems by dropping the sum-ranking criteria. Economists only feel on solid ground normatively when advocating for pareto efficiency. But Sen thinks the pareto criteria is too conservative. Extremely unequal societies can still be pareto efficiency, so long as the richest guy has some value from his hoard at the margin. Sen also critiques welfarism. The move economists want to make is to say that people act to maximize their self-interest. By designing policies to get people more of their revealed preferences, economists hope to make them and society better off. Due to his analysis of rationality, Sen thinks extrapolating interests from actions is problematic. His analysis also suggests that there are at least two different things we should care about: getting people more of what they want and getting people more of what's good for them. If these two things don't line up perfectly, then a one dimensional measure of the good is inadequate. Sen is attracted to the idea of other intrinsic values as well. So Sen rejects moral monism. A ranking of social outcomes which squeezes heterogeneous considerations into a unidimensional scale may be desirable, but it is not necessary. In the years since Sen's lecture, much progress has been made in economics, led by behavioral economists and decision theorists, in understanding a wider range of behavior. Many economists today shy away from using the loaded term 'rational' for any set of behavioral assumptions. However, versions of utilitarianism remain the dominant paradigm for understanding welfare.