Okay, so day 33 was on December 1st and was a weird one. It wasn’t weird at the time but going back to my notes and reviewing the lecture slides is confusing me. This day went over some of the same topics from day 32: specifically developmental states, EOGs, and the Pink Tide, but when looking for the slides of day 33 I could not find them. Day 32 ended with the Pink Tide but day 33 goes over the Bottom Billion, there are 0 lecture slides talking about this. I only have my handwritten notes so I apologize in advance. This post will also be shorter due to cutting content covered in my previous post.

So skipping over the Pink Tide (except the fact that hyperinflation in Venezuela may or may not be due to Hugo Chavez’s policies: professor’s words not mine) we will go over the Bottom Billion and African renaissance. The Bottom Billion is a book by Paul Collier and it discusses the poorest countries in the world. I’ve never read this book and I am curious is anyone else has. It looks like we didn’t go too into detail with this book but based on my notes it seems to talk about how the World Bank learned some lessons and changed it’s policies to Keynesianism. Jeffrey Sachs was mentioned in the context that he “helped” East European Socialist countries and aided in shock therapy (damn…), he also advocated for massive aid to African countries. This is where the arrows for Bottom Billion ends, other things I scribbled down was the United Nations’ “Millennium Development Goals” which aim to reduce poverty and promote gender equality, also healthcare is mixed in there. Critics of all of this state that Africa receives the most aid out of every country, its almost monopolized; even with all this aid Africa failed to achieve development and all that aid ended up leading to corruption. I must stress that these are just the notes and not my beliefs. Africa suffers from the resource curse which occurred first in the Netherlands with gas and was then repeated in African countries. The African renaissance wasn’t detailed, or if it was then i cannot find the lecture slides, but what i got is that unfortunately it was driven by the price of Africa’s raw materials. The lesson to learn from all of this is, apparently, the state must provide security for the market.

A question remains: whether there is a causal relation between development and regime type. Some argue that development only happens in democracies. According to Amartya Sen argued that there has been no mass famines in democracies, therefore it must breed development. A student asked “Is that true?” My professor said there has not been any empirical evidence of this so far. He then brought up the Cultural Revolution and Stalin. Was India not a democracy during the famine cased by Churchill? Anyway, a counter argument states that authoritarian regimes have seen development, having a healthy economy before democracy. Capital is needed for development, democracy needs the support of the people but people need to/want to consume, so democracy hinders development. There is a belief that strong parties lead to development, like in China and Latin America. State bureaucracy matters according to Pippa Norris. So why do some succeed while others don’t? Rational Choice theorists argue that it is because of open access orders: “elite compromise as crucial to establishing institutions that allow and secure incentives for wealth creation (property rights, contracts, the rule of law) and broad political participation that allows those gaining wealth to ensure an extractive state does not take it from them. Inclusive or open political and economic institutions can create a “virtuous circle” of success once created.” (Taken directly from the textbook)

Thats where the lecture ended, there’s only two left. Okay, technically there are three days left but the last class was just review before the final.