A speech at the Oxford Martin School. Richer countries are rapidly ageing and productivity is stagnating. Meanwhile, industry - the motor for rapid economic development in the past - employs ever fewer people worldwide. And yet there is still hope for greater, and shared, global prosperity. Declining working age populations in rich countries are demanding ever-more services. A rising, increasingly educated working age population in lower income economies can provide them. This is an immense, mutually beneficial opportunity to create a new development model, and a new model for development assistance. Aid for economic growth traditionally tried to foster the expansion of export-oriented industrial employment in recipient countries through physical investment. In the future, it can foster the expansion of expatriate employment through skills partnerships.
A CGD Working Paper with Zack Gehan. In absolute dollar amounts official development assistance (ODA) reached an all-time high in 2021. But as a percentage of recipient country GDP, aid (and broader public investment) flows have been declining for some time. This paper looks at the scale of ODA and official financial flows (including multilateral flows) in comparison to donor and recipient GDP, and suggests some scenarios for the range of flows going forward, as well as examining the potential share of resources taken by climate finance. It concludes that there is a non-trivial chance that ODA for non-humanitarian and climate finance falls in absolute terms over the coming years and that aid becomes increasingly focused on richer countries. In terms of increasing aid available, the most promising strategy for bilateral ODA flows may be to increase the generosity of traditional donors but for broader finance for international development, and particularly multilateral finance, increasing the range of donors may have a larger payoff. This will be necessary, because demand for multilateral finance is likely to rise.
A CGD Working Paper with Brian Webster and Ranil Dissanayake. We develop a simple empirical model of sector employment and output shares which, coupled with long-term projections of GDP per capita, provide indicative projections of the evolution and peak of manufacturing in lower income countries to 2050. These indicative projections suggest that cross-country income convergence will continue despite manufacturing peaking as a share of output. This forecast might seem implausible: countries have historically developed and become rich by shifting the composition of their production into manufacturing (and eventually out of manufacturing and into services). But we argue there is reason to think that this is a realistic possibility. First, we argue that there is the potential for a significant relocation of the global manufacturing base in the next two decades that are not fully captured in forecast estimates. Second, notwithstanding this potential relocation, we argue that the role of manufacturing as the unique path to prosperity has likely been overstated. We make the case for cautious, conditional optimism.
A paper written with Zack Gehan and Robert Kenny, forthcoming in Telecommunications Policy. Worldwide there is an ongoing policy and regulatory push to make very high speed broadband available as widely as possible. Underlying the policy interventions to support higher speeds is an implicit assumption that higher speeds will enable different (and socially valuable) use. In this paper we empirically test whether higher speed lines are associated with greater household data usage in the UK. We find that after allowing for demographic factors, higher speed in fact has a very limited relationship to traffic. This suggests that mid-speed broadband is not in fact a constraint on household usage (as measured by traffic), and thus the benefits of policy interventions to support higher speeds remain somewhat speculative.
This was an evidence submission to the UK Parliament's International Development Committee. I argue that while BII (British International Investment) has been a leader amongst development finance institutions (DFIs) in important respects, and has a strong staff and management focused on improving development outcomes, it still suffers from constraints that limit the impact of DFIs as a whole in supporting sustainable development, especially in the poorest countries. Like other DFIs, BII is unable to mobilize significant capital by crowding in private finance to its investments, its efforts to create new markets for private finance have had limited success and its use of subsidized capital has been inefficient.
A CGD Working Paper with Zack Gehan. We develop scenarios for the shape of the global economy in 2050 building on a simple regression of the historic relationship between current income and lagged income, demographic features, climate, and education, using the coefficients to develop a “central” forecast and error terms to set high and low bounds on country outcomes. Scenarios examine combinations of low and high outcomes for different country groupings. “Central” forecasts suggest slowing per capita growth rates for high income countries as well as many upper middle income countries including China, with continued global income convergence. Scenario exercises suggest the potential for considerable variation in outcomes including global share of the economy and voting power in international institutions..
A CGD Working Paper. Julian Simon argued that more people were associated with more prosperity: human talents were the “ultimate resource” and the force behind rising living standards. The last 30 years have been consistent with that view. But, globally, we are making fewer workers—and, more importantly, fewer potential innovators. In rich countries, human capital is growing considerably more slowly than in the past. Meanwhile innovation per researcher appears to be dropping as the population of researchers ages, while it takes longer to get to the knowledge frontier and more collaboration to expand it. Combined with the fact we are increasingly intolerant of risk and increasingly desirous of innovations in sectors where it is particularly hard to increase productivity, it is little surprise that productivity growth is indeed declining. To extend our two-century era of comparatively rapid progress, we need radically reduced discrimination in the global opportunity to innovate.
Technology and trade can ensure water scarcity is not a constraint on progress. In PERC Reports.
This is an *old* paper (2012) that I submitted to CGD for peer review and it got shot down. I can't remember why, and I re-used some of the material in Results not Receipts but it has some interesting data in it and I still think I broadly agree with it so, with that caveat lector, here it is. For many donors throughout most of their history, the major assistance model has involved the tool of the investment project. This is based on a theory of aid and development that the key constraint facing developing countries seeking rapid growth is lack of investment and that donor financing to overcome that ‘investment gap’ can be overseen through the project process to ensure that it is efficiently spent to generate high returns. In reality, filling an ‘investment gap’ is neither an empirically well justified nor a practically well-implemented aid strategy. Furthermore, procurement oversight mechanisms appear to be doing a poor job at ensuring the average effectiveness of an investment portfolio in a country is significantly enhanced, or transferring knowledge, or building institutions. The procurement-focused project investment model should be limited in use to in cases where (i) a project design is significantly innovative and/or delivers regional or global public goods and/or aid is a large percentage of country investment and no agreement can be reached between donors and government on overall investment priorities in that country and (ii) alternate project approaches like output-based or cash on delivery models are deemed inappropriate.
A CGD note. The long run global estimates of climate impact on GDP are small. That hides the fact that there are big volatility shocks and impacts are concentrated in poorer countries. And that matters a lot for policy response.
A CGD Working Paper with George Yang. There is considerable interest in increasing private participation in infrastructure to meet the twin goals of climate mitigation and development in low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, this infrastructure needs to make returns in order to be financially sustainable. This paper reviews evidence on the economics of infrastructure investment and the role of human capital and uses two approaches to provide additional evidence on the link between human capital and infrastructure returns: (i) using estimated returns to individual World Bank infrastructure projects and their relationship to country levels of human capital and (ii) broader approaches linking the macroeconomic impact of infrastructure investment in the presence of varying human capital stocks.
A CGD Note. In short: we want lots of investment in developing countries; it has to be financially sustainable; direct private project investment is very expensive, indirect private finance through multilateral development banks is a lot cheaper; so scaling through WB/AfDB/ADB/IADB is the sustainable (affordable) model.
A co-authored Foreign Affairs piece with Scott Morris. The US should leave infrastructure to the World Bank and 'compete' bilaterally with China on human rather than physical capital.
Co-authored CGD working paper with George Yang. We present data on the global diffusion of technologies over time, updating and adding to Comin and Mestieri’s "CHAT" database. We analyze usage primarily based on per capita measures and divide technologies into the two broad categories of production and consumption. We conclude that there has been strong convergence in use of consumption technologies with somewhat slower and more partial convergence in production technologies. This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income, but we note that universal convergence in use of production technologies is not required for income convergence (only that countries are approaching the technology frontier in the goods and services that they produce). Dataset here.
With Scott Morris in Foreign Policy. Only 3.9 percent of US foreign assistance is actually executed by recipient country governments. Take out Jordan and that's less than one percent. Pathetic and diplomatically counter-productive.
A CGD Working Paper with Amanda Glassman and George Yang. At the start of 2022, profound inequities in the pace of access to COVID-19 vaccines and the level of coverage of COVID-19 vaccination remain, especially with regard to the world’s poorest countries. Yet despite this inequity, we find that global COVID-19 vaccine development and diffusion has been the most rapid in history, and this rapid scale-up is evident not only in high-income countries but also in upper- and lower-middle-income countries, home to the majority of the world’s population. This paper explores the historical record in the development and deployment of vaccines globally and puts the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in that context. Although far more can be done and should be done to speed equitable access to vaccines in the COVID-19 response, it is worth noting the revolutionary speed of both the vaccine development and the diffusion process, and the potential good news that this signals for the future of pandemic preparedness and response.
Three years ago I wrote a 'novel'. Even got as far as getting an agent, and by golly my timing was good. It was a story about a new infectious disease spreading worldwide and the bungling US response. But in the end what the process demonstrated is that I should probably stick to non-fiction. If you can't sell umbrellas when the skies are fast-darkening, maybe it says something about your umbrellas. One editor's response from January 2020: "I thought the story had a certain resonance that might appeal to readers worried about real-world pandemics, but I didn’t always feel the plot had a fresh enough hook." That was kind: there are parts that I already cringe at having written. Still, I find it of minor personal historical interest, --not least that there were things I though were stretching plausibility in fiction that turned out to happen in real life a few months later. Here it is.
For Foreign Policy. More equitable vaccination, new vaccines, more sustainable power, India will be the world's largest country, renewed economic growth and some hope for tigers.
A GCD Policy Paper with Todd Moss and Mohamed Rali Badissy. The purpose of a nation’s power sector is to deliver reliable electricity at the lowest cost and for the greatest benefit. At the heart of any private electricity generation project is a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), a contract that contains key provisions such as price, payment stipulations, and obligations by the offtaker utility and/or host-government. Despite their significant effects on service quality and public finances, these contracts are often negotiated and signed in secret, with even the most basic terms shielded from the citizenry. This opacity has created risks and, in a growing number of cases, contributed to costly and damaging outcomes, such as overpayment, overcapacity, large debts, and grid instability. Drawing on examples from enhanced transparency in public budgets, sovereign debt, and extractive industries, we propose that governments agree to publish PPAs with any public sector obligation and that funders of private generation projects also agree to minimum disclosure standards. The objective is to create incentives for better practice, improve governance of the power sector, reduce transaction costs, and ultimately, to deliver cheaper and more reliable power for people and businesses. Transparency of PPAs would support the efforts of government policymakers and planners, investors, and development finance institutions to accelerate energy market development and to reap the benefits of open competition. Greater disclosure would also provide crucial information for citizens to hold their own governments accountable for the contracts they sign on behalf of the public.
A CGD note. Donors vary considerably in how much they focus their spending on poorer countries. There are good reasons to believe that the utility-maximizing allocation is focused heavily on the world’s poorest countries, where an extra dollar is likely to make the greatest difference to welfare. However, donors may also allocate resources towards humanitarian causes: particularly seeing disadvantaged subgroups within countries including refugees fleeing violence or natural disasters as deserving particular attention. In addition, donors might believe their aid will achieve more in democratic or ‘well governed’ countries. Perhaps less legitimately, donors might prefer to allocate more aid to countries with closer political or economic ties: ex-colonies, allies, supporters in the UN, or trade partners. Similarly, they might choose to focus their aid on the ‘near abroad,’ as a tool of diplomacy or reflecting higher immediate self-interest. This paper uses some of the indicators highlighted as significant by that literature to examine if they can help explain the variation in poverty focus of donor aid.
A CGD note. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is in the process of a considerable transformation, designed to grow its operations and expand their development impact. This paper discusses the rationale and elements of a continuing change agenda, focused on ensuring the IFC best serves its ultimate clients --people in developing countries.
Both CGD notes with George Yang. "New Estimates of the Impact of COVID-19 on Women’s Jobs and Enterprises" estimates majority women owned and equally owned firms were 1.4 times as likely to close during 2020 than majority men-owned firms. "The Global Childcare Workload from School and Preschool Closures During the COVID-19 Pandemic" estimates school and preschool closures created the need for 672 billion hours of additional unpaid childcare in 2020 through October. If the global care split was similar to that prior to COVID-19, it would suggest 173 additional unpaid childcare in 2020 per working age (15-64) woman, and 59 additional hours for men.
A CGD working paper with George Yang. There will be 95 million fewer working-age people in Europe in 2050 than in 2015, under business as usual. This will cause significant fiscal stress as well as slower economic growth. Potential responses include: (a) raising labor force participation by women and older workers; (b) automation; and (c) outsourcing. But none will be sufficient. This leaves immigration: while migrants create demand for jobs as well as fill them, they can help rebalance the ratio of working to non-working populations. The paper compares business as usual estimates of inflows to 2050 with the size of the labor gap in Europe. Under plausible estimates, business as usual will fill one-third of the labor gap. This suggests a need for an urgent shift if Europe is to avoid an aging crisis. Africa is the obvious source of immigrants, to mutual benefit. Here's a short video presenting the paper.
A CGD Policy Paper with Ugonma Nwankwo and Megan O'Donnell. We look at available sources to ask (i) Where is data available on employment and wages allowing for comparisons between women and men, and the public and private sectors? (ii) How do women’s employment, compensation, and seniority compare with men’s in the public and private sectors? (iii) How do gender gaps vary by countries’ income level, education levels, and other factors? What are the policy implications of the data we analyze? (iv) Which countries’ efforts can be modeled by others, and how else can global gender gaps in employment and compensation be narrowed? We suggest the Open Government Partnership as a promising platform through which governments can commit to increased transparency around disaggregated employment and wage data, in turn improving policy decision-making aimed at closing gender gaps (or those rooted in other forms of inequality and discrimination). We suggest the Open Government Partnership as a promising platform through which governments can commit to increased transparency around disaggregated employment and wage data, in turn improving policy decision-making aimed at closing gender gaps (or those rooted in other forms of inequality and discrimination).
Your World, Better: Global Progress and What You Can Do About It is a book written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader's parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression. It talks about the things that have gotten better, the sometimes-intensifying challenges that remain, and what readers can do about them.
Your World Better is optimistic, but it doesn’t shy away from the considerable problems we face: from inequality through discrimination and depression to climate change and infectious threats. It is meant to encourage kids to help make the world better themselves: tip them from a sense of powerlessness toward action, not into complacency.
The pdf of Your World Better is available to download here for free. Or you can buy a kindle version for 99 cents or a hard copy for $8.10 on Amazon (or six pounds on UK Amazon here). Any author royalties from those sales will be donated to UNICEF (so far, a bit more than $800 has been donated, thanks!). I talk about the book to Marian Tupy for the Human Progress podcast and to two (fantastic) middle schoolers for NPR. Then I did a Slack chat with five middle schoolers for Slate. A CGD discussion about the book and talking to children about progress is here. And here's a fifteen minute video about the book (or try it on Youtube). I am happy for the *text* (not pictures) to be copied or redistributed in any medium, and/or remixed or transformed for any purpose, with attribution.
"Everyone, no matter how old, or how young, should read this. I’m sending to grandkids and their parents." --Nancy Birdsall
"Great read for middle school kids who want to understand how the world is getting better -- and can become even more so!" --Parag Khanna
"How can you pass up a free book?! And one that is so relevant for today? If you know a middle school student or teacher, pass this along! Incredibly fresh and honest." --Karen Schulte
"Kids are taught that everything's getting worse and we're all doomed--factually incorrect, and a message that leads to cynicism & fatalism, not constructive action. An antidote: Charles Kenny's new Your World, Better..." --Steven Pinker
A CGD Working Paper with Megan O'Donnell Mayra Buvinic Shelby Bourgault George Yang. When health crises like COVID-19 emerge, the shocks to economic, social, and health systems can have different implications for women and girls, with gendered impacts across various dimensions of wellbeing. This paper, part of a series documenting the gendered impacts of the pandemic, focuses on women’s economic empowerment. It begins with a conceptual framework illustrating how the pandemic, associated response measures, economic contraction and different coping strategies intersect with underlying gender norms and inequality in ways that differentially affect the wellbeing of women and girls. It then synthesizes the existing evidence on how the COVID-19 crisis and associated response measures have impacted women’s paid and unpaid work, entrepreneurship, and earnings across sectors in low- and middle-income countries. The paper proceeds to outline economic response measures from national governments and multilateral development banks and the extent to which gender inequalities have been considered in these measures to date. The paper concludes with recommendations aimed at donors and policymakers to ensure the COVID-19 recovery does not exacerbate pre-existing gender gaps in the economy.
A CGD note with Ian Mitchell and Atousa Tahmasebi. As ministers and officials meet in the coming year, they will make new financing commitments on climate and promise to ensure all of their activities are “Paris-compatible”—against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Any new commitments on climate finance will need to balance existing development challenges with the pressing need to tackle climate-related risks. This note outlines a set of principles to guide climate-related commitments so that they do more for both climate and development.
A CGD note with Scott Morris. Rather than use aid to finance climate mitigation projects (it's the wrong instrument, mis-targeted and inadequate in scale), why not fund a World Bank and IFC capital increase: its cheaper, better targeted, more appropriate to the task, ensures common but differentiated financing, and gives the World Bank Group something useful to do in richer developing countries.
For The Breakthrough Journal. In his Principles of Political Economy, JS Mill wrote a chapter “Of the Stationary State.” In it he argued that the need for economic growth in the richest countries had run its course. “It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.” I discuss that idea and some possible lessons for the modern degrowth movement.
The Plague Cycle, was published by Scribner in January 2021. I tweeted the draft of the book here and have written about some of what is in it in articles for Politico on disease and border control (which I also discussed with Martine Powers of the Washington Post); Slate on anti-vaxxers ,the need for a global treaty on antibiotics the first global vaccination campaign, and travel bans; Barrons on vaccination risks, MIT Technology Review on the role of the WHO; and then more on the WHO in the LA Times. I also summarized parts of the book for a CGD note: Are We entering a New Age of Pandemics? Richard Florida interviewed me about the book for Fast Company and Cardiff Garcia for NPR's The Indicator. At the Simon and Schuster page for the book you can see some generous blurbs from Laurie Garrett, Steven Pinker, Gregg Easterbrook, Dorothy Porter, Michael Kremer, Francis Fukuyama, David Wootton, Richard Florida, Kyle Harper and Tim Harford. So far it has been reviewed by Kirkus, Booklist, Nature, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly, BBC History Magazine, The Diplomat, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times (and again in the FT as a summer reading recommendation), the Irish Independent, Environmental History, Andrew Batson, Diane Coyle, Duncan Green, Kaylie Seed, Cork City Library and AIER. There's an excerpt on Slate, at the OECD, and LitHub, I talked to the Progress Network about the book here, and discussed it with Romesh Ratnesar at Bloomberg, Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch, Greg LaBlanc at Unsiloed, Rob Ferrett on WPR, Steve Paikin on The Agenda, BFM Malaysia and Ireland's Big Issue. I did book events at the Philadelphia Free Library, Utah State, the Hudson Library, the OECD (with pictures and very kind words from Joshua Epstein), the Tucson Festival and NYU, Nicholas Christakis at the San Antonio Book Festival, shared five insights from the book here, and did the Page 99 test here. There was a CGD launch event with Judy Woodruff on January 26th and I talked to Felix Salmon about the book on Slate Money. The Italian version ("La Danza Della Peste") was reviewed here and here.
A working paper for CGD. In the context of an ongoing debate around the role of aid in middle income countries, it is worth revisiting the discussion around aid allocation in general. Accounting for the (disputed) impact of policy and declining marginal returns of aid flows, using a measure designed to focus aid on those in extreme poverty or an approach that accounts for the declining marginal utility of income consistently suggests aid is currently insufficiently focused on the poorest countries. To be equally effective as spending in poor countries, any aid used in upper middle-income countries needs the potential to generate returns that are multiples of those expected in poor countries or have considerable spillover effects in those poorer counties.
A CGD policy paper with Ranil Dissanayake and Mark PlantWe develop screens and principles designed to maximise the impact of aid, especially in richer recipients. All else equal, a dollar spent in the poorest countries will have a larger impact on well-being than a dollar spent in richer countries, so ODA should be concentrated in those countries. But where it is used in middle-income countries, it should be aimed at (i) a major development challenge; (ii) where relatively small amounts of finance can be expected to have a significant return; and (iii) consistent with the political economy of the recipient country or that is likely to induce a shift in the political economy. That implies aid should focus on severe challenges faced by geographic or demographic sub-groups; using a range of tools beyond grants; with the goal of bringing forward, rather than replacing, state capacity; and using multilateral approaches wherever possible. An examination of aid practice suggests it is considerably at odds with what this approach would suggest.
A working paper with George Yang for CGD. Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) including the International Finance Corporation (IFC) tend to look at their development impact using project-level indicators of outputs and employment impacts. Evaluation of the development impact of DFIs should try to estimate the difference between how the country and sector is with the DFI investment com-pared to how the country and sector would be absent the investment. Using a database of IFC and other investments and sector outcomes covering infrastructure and finance, we find the quantity of IFC investment was significantly associated with larger sums of future non-IFC private investment, but it is difficult to find evidence of an impact on outcomes.
A policy paper for CGD. Is research into a Covid-19 vaccine a suitable use of Official Development Assistance (ODA)? What about finance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? Both are clearly good ways to spend money with considerable benefits to developing countries, but is that enough? This note attempts to tease apart a discussion of “is this ODA” from “is this a global public good?” and then separate out again “is this ODA and/or a global public good?” from “is this an efficient way to spend money?” It uses that discussion to frame conclusions about how and what financing of GPGs should be counted as ODA and takes a specific look at the issue of climate change in that regard.
On the fact we're a nation of immigrants worried about immigration. In the Dallas Morning News.
For Slate. Title says it all.
A CGD policy paper with Euan Ritchie and Lee Robinson. This paper outlines the broad rationale for approaches beyond patents to support the development of technologies specifically useful to developing countries and the role for aid-funded approaches within that. It outlines some of the mechanisms that can be used and summarizes their strengths and weaknesses. The exercise suggests the need for an ecosystem of support mechanisms, and a concluding section asks how the United Kingdom’s official development assistance (ODA) for R&D could better support such an ecosystem. The UK government has committed to establishing a new institution to fund non-ODA R&D, modelled on the Advanced Research Projects Agency. We talk about how a similar model would work for development-orientated research, and what amendments may need to be made to ensure ODA-funded R&D reaches its potential. (see also the policy brief on our conclusions of the research overall. Bottom line: ODA for R&D is good, how the UK is spending it is bad).
In Barrons on Operation Warp Speed and why the Pentagon should be part of but shouldn't be leading efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.
A note for CGD with Todd Moss. Answer: competition, make loans less attractive than market, use transparent benchmarks.
In the Washington Post on the COVID-19 stimulus component that is giving cash directly to people.
Leaders around the world have restricted nonessential travel to varying degrees, some sealing off their borders entirely, to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. In the past, these measures may have worked. But the history of disease-driven border lockdowns has some sobering lessons. For Politico.
“You don’t have to be a peacenik or a lefty to be persuaded by this trenchant and witty book that the 21st-century American war machine is stupefyingly wasteful, protecting us against threats that no longer exist and failing to protect us against those that do.”
--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature.
“An agile and effective study concluding that the US military is not only wildly inefficient, but mostly designed to deal with problems that scarcely exist and inadequate or even irrelevant for dealing with problems that actually do exist.”
--John Mueller, Ohio State University and Cato Institute
The Pentagon, famed as the world’s largest office building, recently underwent a renovation. It took ten times as long and four times the cost of constructing the building in the first place. That history leaves the Pentagon as a potent symbol of America’s foreign policy infrastructure: dominated by a massive, increasingly inefficient military machine better suited to the challenges of the mid-Twentieth Century than the early Twenty-First.
My new book Close the Pentagon describes the changing threats to America’s national security: the decline of war and the rise of global challenges that can only be tackled with collective action. It outlines the awesome inefficiency of the Department of Defense at its traditional role of war fighting and its limited capacity to adapt to new tasks. It concludes that America’s foreign policy apparatus should be overhauled –US military spending reduced to the global average with savings used to support economic assistance, global collective action and domestic priorities.
Close the Pentagon is available as a paperback ($7.99) and e-book ($3.99) and the first chapter is available for free here. I wrote about it on the CGD blog in The Hill at Responsible Statecraft, Politico and for Barrons, and talked about it to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. There's a pretty negative review by David Swanson here: beyond the fact he doesn't like my writing style and disagrees on the importance of resource dependency as a cause of conflict, I think perhaps he was looking for a book about the many moral failings of US foreign policy and I wrote one about the ineffectiveness of the Pentagon in responding to national security threats.
Below a brief overview of the book’s argument.
Prophecies of peace have gone awry before and it is too early to declare we are in a totally new era. But the decline of violence means that –currently at least-- we are left with the remnants of war. Violent threats to the US and its allies are from small groups not big armies, and are a serious but exaggerated policing issue.
There are arguments over the causes of the relative peace of the post-1945 era: nuclear weapons, deterrence, hegemony, new institutions, new values, new connections. But while many factors may play a role, there are reasons to doubt the importance of a large US military to peace and reasons to highlight economic and social factors including new norms of behavior.
The changing nature of state power and economic wealth from people and land through resources and manufacturing to institutions, ideas and interconnection means that war is no longer a route to power. Resource reliance is now the curse of poor countries, and fighting for those resources a strategy that only makes sense in broken economies. That suggests the death of zero sum international relations and the importance of integration to global prosperity and peace.
Interconnection is a factor in some of the new threats to national security. New global challenges include the warming atmosphere, polluted seas, disease, financial instability and international crime. These threats require collective response to shore up the global commons and preserve and extend our positive sum gains.
The US military is obscenely, inefficiently, over-fit for the purpose of deterring aggression against America and its allies. At the same time, the Pentagon’s effectiveness in foreign entanglements is demonstrated by its mostly-not-winning-streak over the past seven decades: Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. US military presence doesn’t prevent civil wars and the US Navy is over-equipped for duty against pirates. A massive Pentagon bureaucracy, including a huge army of contractors, runs a dysfunctional military management and procurement system.
That inefficiency is one reason the Pentagon should not lead on new national security threats. It is ill designed to tackle cyber-‘war’ or support research and development programs, let alone lead on global pandemic response. Other tools including aid agencies have a far better track record in delivering results.
How to respond? The Defense Department still has vital roles: sea lanes protection; logistics for the responsibility to protect; training; defending the homeland and allies. But new national security threats take global cooperation best managed outside of the Pentagon. Set a short term goal of cutting military spending to one and a half times our nearest competitor’s as part of a realignment of international relations budgets. The longer term goal should be to reduce defense spending to the global median of 1.5 percent of GDP.
A portion of those savings should be redirected so that the US reaches the United Nations goal of 0.7 percent of GDP going towards aid flows to developing countries. It should also provide finance for reinvigorated engagement in trade and investment agreements as well as international organizations and treaty making.
What could go wrong? Even if it is a significant cause of peace, US primacy won’t last. It is inevitable that America will lose relative power to countries like China, India and Nigeria as they grow richer. The question is, how do we sustain peace in a multipolar world? The answer: bind the new global powers into a peaceful, rules-bound world system. And the problem: Washington DC is busy heading in the other direction. This is the biggest risk to continued global peace and American prosperity that we face.
For Foreign Affairs. The next several decades will see populations in Europe and North America age and shrink as people have fewer and fewer children. That trend will hurt economic growth and dynamism and leave too few workers for every retiree. Robots and artificial intelligence will not save rich countries from the economic consequences of a shrinking population. Nor, without a dramatic reversal of current policies toward immigrants, will a flow of workers from elsewhere. To avoid sclerosis and decline, the rich world will have to compete to attract immigrants, not turn them away.
A CGD note with Julian Duggan. Across the 71 leading US think tanks for which we have data, we find that the average share of trustees and directors that were women was 23 percent, the average share of highly compensated employees that were women was 30 percent, and highly compensated women were paid 92 percent of what highly compensated men were paid.