Aid, Trade, Security and Government
July 3, 2008Another ted.com talk on how to help the bottom billion.
Paul Collier talks on what it takes to help the poorest billion people in the world.
He also cites democracy as a complex mechanism. It may or may not help the economy of an extremely poor country especially when there is a mineral resource boom (oil, gold, etc.). More often than not democracy does not help.
I think that democracy is actually a problem in a developing nation. The Philippines is devoid of a mineral resource boom (or one that’s highly publicized anyway we have our iron, copper and other mineral extraction projects in other parts of the Philippines) yet we suffer from too much freedom. The people are too free to complain about anything, they always want to unseat the President, they always want a revolution. Yes, I claim that the excessive freedom of the FIlipino people is actually stunting the country’s progress. This, however, should be taken with some caution. As the talk stated there might be some problems with a dictatorial form of governance in the sense that it will be more than open to abuse. The situation in the Philippines is that our system is already being abused. The people themselves open up the avenues of abuse. During elections, the people line up to have their ballots bought. I don’t know what else to say anymore. We’re in a bind. Too free yet too poor to do anything right with our freedom.
Watch it and leave a comment if you’d like.
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