The eight commandments: Millennium Development Goals

The Economist: The eight commandments: Millennium Development Goals

In 1990 more than one person in four lacked access to safe water, according to the United Nations. By 2015 that scandal will be only half as large—if the world's leaders keep the grand promises they made at the UN's New York headquarters in September 2000. The pledges, which also include halving poverty and hunger, schooling the world's children, arresting disease and rescuing mothers and their infants from untimely deaths, have been translated into eight “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs). July 7th is officially the halfway point between setting the goals and reaching the 2015 deadline.

Sadly, the UN family is better at making goals than meeting them. In 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the world urged itself to provide safe water and sanitation for all by the end of the 1980s. In 1990 the UN renewed the call, extending the deadline to the end of the century. In 1978 in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, governments promised “health for all” by 2000. In 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, they called for universal primary schooling by 2000, a goal pushed back to 2015 ten years later. Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN's yearly Human Development Report, worries that the pledges the UN mints so readily may become a “debased currency”. In the summer of 2005, at the height of a campaign to “make poverty history”, only 3% of Britons thought the world would meet the 2015 goal of halving poverty, defined as the proportion of people who live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day.

Such fatalism is as unwarranted as complacency. The world is making unprecedented progress against poverty. Thanks to miraculous growth in China and India, the first MDG target should be met. Almost 32% of people in the developing world lived on less than a dollar a day in 1990. In 2004 that figure was 19.2%. It should fall below 16% by 2015 (see chart 2).

I'm finishing William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. (I hope to review it soon.) Easterly is confirming my growing suspicions after 25 years of following this stuff. With all due respect to Jeffrey Sachs, the improvements are not coming from "big push" UN/World Bank/IMF/Government-to-Government aid. The improvements are coming from messy, serendipitous, unplanned innovations happening in regions throughout the world. Conta-Sachs, healthy governmental and societal institutions that nurture economic and political freedom are critical for economic takeoff. It isn't that the above institutions don't have any role to play, but they are minor compared to markets and expanding encounters with economic and political freedom.