Charles Kenny

Nationalism Can’t Beat a Global Problem

For slate: America First can't beat a pandemic.

What to Do When You Can’t Prove DFI Additionality

A note for CGD with Todd Moss. Answer: competition, make loans less attractive than market, use transparent benchmarks.

Direct cash payments work. We’re about to see how

In the Washington Post on the COVID-19 stimulus component that is giving cash directly to people.

Pandemics Close Borders—And Keep them Closed

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.

Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive-Sum World

“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.

How America Leads Abroad: An Examination of Multilateral Development Institutions

I gave testimony to the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, International Development, and Monetary Policy (video here). I said the IBRD should get its capital increase, and the IFC should get its capital increase if it reforms.

The Real Immigration Crisis

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.

Gender Equality in US Think Tank Leadership: Data from Tax Records

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.

Can the US Development Finance Corporation Compete?

A CGD Policy Paper. The new US International Development Finance Corporation (USDFC) will be considerably larger than its predecessor, and it will also be more focused on low and lower middle income countries. It will have new tools to deliver but face expanded competition. The major challenge to the DFC is not Chinese investment (which largely funds projects ill-suited to support from the DFC), but other development finance institutions, many of which are deploying increasing quantities of subsidized capital to attract project sponsors. It is not clear that there are sufficient suitable deals in the shrinking set of low and lower-middle income countries to absorb DFI development finance, and the USDFC could lose projects to subsidized finance from elsewhere if this turns out to be the case. Given that, it should be a priority for the United States to agree rules with other donors that prevent development finance institutions from competing on the basis of subsidy. The new DFC needs increased capacity to deliver deals: both the tools provided by the BUILD Act which are being constrained by the administration and the staff and budget to actively build a pipeline of projects. A considerably bolstered administrative budget may involve reducing –potentially to zero—the profitability OPIC traditionally enjoyed.

Automation and AI: Implications for African Development Prospects?

A CGD note. I'm comparatively optimistic about automation: Africa needs more of it, the rate of automation does not appear to be rapid enough to suggest short-term dislocation, manufacturing jobs have moved rather than gone away and services offers another technology-enhanced route to development.

Five Principles for Use of Aid in Subsidies to the Private Sector

A policy paper for CGD. There is a significant and ongoing ramp-up in support for explicitly subsidized official development finance to the private sector around the world, but its role remains poorly defined. Lessons from the aid effectiveness literature as a whole and principles on effective use of aid suggest the need for approaches that do not merely finance the marginal private investment. Regarding experience of government intervention in markets, subsidies are only one of many options to incentivize the private sector, and bespoke subsidies provided by outside actors are rarely likely to be the most efficient form. This paper discusses where outside subsidy of the private sector may make sense and develops principles for the use of aid in subsidies based on that analysis. Subsidies should be allocated on the basis of necessity in meeting public policy goals; the norm for subsidy allocations should be competitive approaches or open offers; non-competitive subsidies should only support market making; subsidy levels should be capped; and subsidy levels should be transparent. Much of the content of these “new” principles is already implied or specified by the existing Multilateral Development Bank Principles to Support Sustainable Private Sector Operations, but they suggest that development finance institutions should not use their standard business model when using subsidies.

New procurement guidelines shed light on secrecy versus public right to know

A piece for the Contracting Excellence Journal with Caroline Anstey, summarizing The Principles on Commercial Transparency in Public Contracts.

When Does “What Works” Work? And What Does that Mean for UK Aid R&D Spend?

A note for CGD with Euan Ritchie and Lee Robinson. This paper argues there is a (fuzzy) spectrum of development procedures, for some of which global innovation, evaluation, or “best practice” can be informative, for some of which local evaluation or experimentation can be useful, and for some of which perhaps only practical experience and local wisdom can help. That there is a spectrum of intervention types and research opportunities, and that local evidence is often required, has implications for the kind of research that UK aid can usefully support as part of its R&D program and where that research should happen. In turn, that suggests a reform agenda for the way UK ODA for R&D is currently spent.

Marginal, Not Transformational: Development Finance Institutions and the Sustainable Development Goals

A policy paper for CGD. Development finance institutions have positioned themselves as key agencies to help the world meet the Sustainable Development Goals. It is doubtful that they can deliver. This paper outlines the challenges facing DFIs in achieving (anywhere near) such an expansion in their impact, particularly in infrastructure and particularly in the poorest countries. It notes that private investment in SDG priority areas is low in the poorest countries, and the record of private investment in rolling out services is mixed. These issues are linked in part to significant supply side constraints based on country characteristics. DFIs do better than the market as a whole at investing in challenging infrastructure–but not by much. And while the scale of their ‘leverage’ in terms of attracting dollars that would otherwise not have been invested is hard to determine, in the poorest markets in infrastructure it is certainly low. Finally, DFIs and donors more broadly have long tried to improve deal flow with limited success, suggesting there are few deals on the margin of occurring which only require small extra incentives to materialize.

How helping families relocate could increase economic mobility

In the Economist: moving really helps poor kids and support for parents can make that happen.

Can gentrification be a force for positive social change?

For the Economist. A new paper suggests it displaces few people and often improves life for those who stay.

UK Research Aid: Tied, Opaque and Off-Topic?

A policy paper for CGD with Lee Robinson and Euan Ritchie who did nearly all of the work. The UK has considerably increased the amount of aid it spends on research in recent years. The information associated with the majority of this research aid is vague, raising questions about transparency. A large amount of the research is financed using an allocation mechanism that effectively ties it to UK institutions. There are also questions as to the poverty focus of some of the research conducted, given the explicit intention of the UK government to find existing activity to reclassify as ODA following the legislating of the 0.7 percent target. We suggest reporting reforms that will increase transparency and allow greater scrutiny of the way UK research aid is spent. We also call for the UK to live up to its reporting to the OECD that all British aid is untied.

Why America lost so many of its black teachers

In the Economist: desegregation led to the rise of teacher testing, which has depressed the number of African American teachers.

How many Americans live on $2 a day?

Probably not very many, but the safety net is still a mess. Me for The Economist.

The benefits of pre-schooling may extend for generations

Me, in The Economist, on pre-K.

Examining the Impact of E-Procurement in Ukraine

A CGD Working Paper examines the impact of Ukraine’s ambitious procurement reform on outcomes amongst a set of procurements that used competitive tendering. The ProZorro system placed all of the country’s government procurement online, introduced an auction approach as the default procurement method, and extended transparency. The reform was introduced with a dramatic increase in the proportion of government procurement that was conducted competitively. This paper examines the impact of ProZorro and reform on contracts that were procured competitively both prior to and after the introduction of the new system. It finds some evidence of impact of the new system on increasing the number of bidders, cost savings, and reduced contracting times.

Depression is increasing among Americans reaching middle age

For The Economist. Across genders and race/ethnicities, Americans get more miserable as they reach middle age. White men still kill themselves more often, though.

Fighting crony capitalism at the World Bank

In The Hill, railing about the the IDA Private Sector Window.

Why illegal crossings on America’s southern border have hit an 11-year high

In large part because the administration is turning away asylum seekers at regular crossing points. Me in The Economist.

How welfare reform has had a negative effect on the children of single mothers

The 1996 welfare reform effort in the US shrank welfare rolls, moved people into work, increased the number of very poor and led to more antisocial behavior among children. For the Economist.

Why Are Apple and Google Hosting an App That Subjugates Saudi Women?

Me in Slate: Absher is used for a number of government services in Saudi Arabia, but it also allows Saudi men to specify when and where adult women under their “guardianship,” including unmarried daughters and wives, are allowed to travel. It is hosted by both Google and Apple. This is bad.

Women and the Future of Work: Fix the Present

A note for CGD. There is a lot we don’t know about what automation will mean for jobs in the future, including its impact (if any) on gender inequality. This note reviews evidence and forecasts on that question and makes four main points: (i) Past automation has been (broadly) positive for women’s average quality of life, economic empowerment, and equality. (ii) Forecasts of the gendered impact of automation and AI going forward based on the current distribution of employment suggest considerable uncertainty and a gender inequality of impact that is marginal compared to the potential impact overall. (iii) The bigger risk—and/or opportunity—is likely to be in the combined impact of automation, policy, and social norms in changing the type of work that is seen as male or female. (iv) Minimizing any potential aggravating impact of automation and AI on inequalities in economic power in the future can best be achieved by maximizing economic equality today.