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What Africa Really Needs To Fight Ebola
Lasrick writes Laura Kahn, a physician on the research staff of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, writes that the high tech solutions being promoted to help fight Ebola in Africa will make no difference. What Africa really needs is anti-corruption efforts, now. "A case in point is Liberia, which has received billions of dollars in international aid for over a decade, with little to show for it. The country ranks near the bottom of the United Nation's Human Development Index and near the bottom of Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer. And while international aid groups and non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the International Medical Corps provide important humanitarian assistance and medical care, they also inadvertently absolve African political leaders from developing medical and public health infrastructures."
The rich white woman is telling you what you need!
Did you ever stop to think, dear, that the ones providing financial aid (the doctors are mostly sweet and a little naive, though some are involved in weird deals where they end up getting paid handsomely) are complicit in the corruption? They know where the money is going, but it's certianly not coming out of their pocket ;-).
That's neat and all, just do long as you pay my taxes :)
Suppose someone there tries to start a medical supply business.
Then along comes a foreign government dumping billions in supplies there and wipes them out.
There are times when foreign aid is required. However, when it becomes the norm,
then it's impossible to build any sort of infrastructure.
I will debate any statist on any argument whatsoever...
And yet, you posted anonymously, thus destroying your own credibility.
Because I speak the truth about statism and because my arguments cannot be defeated, whenever I create accounts on Slashdot I am quickly modded down and/or account revoked.
Er, that'd be because of the constant offtopic posting, fuckwit.
Some see it as a natural thing, that's really sad because now they won't oppose it.
Others see it as the result of colonialism but we're 20-50 years on and things only got worse...
Talking about Ebola, two months ago I arrived in Angola and they had temperature screening for those getting off the plane. :(.
Rather sad was this was only done for foreigners, those with an Angolan passport are apparently immune
Africa is rife with corruption and corruption breeds what we'd otherwise see as stupidity but for individuals it's really just a way of survival.
The only effective way to fight corruption is to have a solid legal system and from European experience we learn that needs to be in place for several generations before it becomes effective.
Since the British occupation of South Africa it had a reasonable judiciary but now Zuma's ANC has taken over it is left to die, laws are watered down and officials installed based on their race and political affiliation.
It is a sad conclusion but even in the best scenario Africa will be corrupt for at least the next century.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If people in other countries have and put up with corrupt governments, and go out and kill and eat "bush meat" and get Ebola, that's too bad but we have our own corrupt politicians here, I don't see how we can take on correcting theirs when we can even correct ours. And we have the flu virus in this country, and even with our first world hospitals and our Obama-care the flu is killing more people in America than Ebola is killing in the entire world. Yet I don't see Obama sending the Army to help out when one of my friends gets the flu. Perhaps we should realize that we are no longer the largest economy in the world (China is, although I think we still give them "foreign aid", and do that with money that Obama borrows from China!) and start trying to solve some of our own problems rather than playing World Doctor and World Cop and World Missionary and World Peacekeeper.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There is corruption of one sort or another everywhere. Most 'functional' countries manage to keep it down to a level where the rest of society functions to some level. In the US, people are routinely tossed into courts over bribery and corruption issues. The Navy is running a big anticorruption scandal at the moment. Of course, some (or perhaps most) of the perpetrators get away - but enough get caught to keep the system functioning.
In a number of African and Middle Eastern countries and likely including Russia at this point, the rule of law is so feeble an distant that overt corruption, nepotism and just outright theft are the rules of the game.
Don't knock the judicial system too hard. It serves as a strong barrier to this sort of thing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Unfortunately, you and the video are focusing on the wrong metric. Things like child mortality, starvation, access to clean water, housing, etc. can all be artificially skewed by foreign aid.
The one true metric that matters is productivity per person. If each person (on average) is producing barely enough economic output to feed himself, then the country is a 3rd world developing country. Most European nations were in this state in the Middle Ages, where people had to work in the fields all day to barely keep themselves fed. And a single bad season or plague sidelining workers meant mass starvation.
If an average person is producing enough to easily feed himself and still have plenty left over to fritter away on extravagances like going to the movies, a high-end GPU for the latest Call of Duty, and the latest iPhone, then the country is a developed nation.
Corruption correlates fairly strongly with productivity per person. The more corrupt you are, the lower your GDP per capita. It's particularly revealing when you look at countries like South Korea, which by all accounts is a modernized country, yet its worker productivity has stalled at about 20%-30% lower than those of Europe and North America. Then you look at the level of corruption and it makes sense. Money which should be going from productive person to productive person thus increasing productivity even more, is instead being diverted into the pockets of corrupt non-productive people. Resulting in a lower amount of productivity per capita even though all the modern infrastructure for a thriving economy is there.
Giving people in developing countries medical care, food, clean water, and modern conveniences is pointless if they're going to continue to be dependent on foreign charity for those things in perpetuity. The primary goal of foreign assistance should always be domestic economic development (secondary being education to help staff those new domestic jobs being developed). Once these people have been set up with a functional economy where they can generate the maximum amount of productive work they're capable of, they will build their own hospitals and train their own doctors, plant their own farms, drill for or desalinate their own water, and build their own utilities and communications infrastructure.
Foreign aid like medical care, food, clean water may make the donor feel better, but its net effect doesn't really help the people in the country. And in some cases it even hurts (e.g. food donated as foreign aid depresses food prices and kills the economic viability of local farms). It should be reserved for times of calamity and bad luck, e.g. when a country which was just barely getting by gets hit by a natural disaster and crosses the threshold into regressing.