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[QUOTE]Originally posted by David Sands: [QB] I must say that international finance is not my bag. However, much of the problem with the World Bank parallels a problem I've seen in law schools with the catch-all subject "poverty law." Allow me to explain. Lots of well-meaning and enthusiastic young lawyers in the law schools of the United States (some of them my friends) want to dedicate their lives to alleviating poverty. They usually demand a specialized course in the subject. They take that one course and graduate, hoping to dedicate a significant portion of their professional lives to causes like the Legal Aid Corporation. (Essentially, free lawyers for the poor in civil cases. Naturally these guys are way overworked. I can speak from firsthand experience on that.) The problem I've noticed is that areas like "poverty law" aren't really concerned with [i]poverty[/i] per se. They usually end up as very shallow introductions to other subjects in which lawyers who deal in poverty work. A better way to learn the skills necessary to helping these people is learning the specialized subjects that poverty lawyers uses from one day to another: criminal procedure, secured credit, bankruptcy, administrative law, negotiation, landlord/tenant law, domestic relations, etc. Learn [i]those[/i] and you�ll be much more useful to your clients than taking a single course that barely gets you into the specific problems the poor have. What those who demand courses in poverty law are asking for is really symbolic. They want to schools to [i]demonstrate[/i] their dedication to helping the poor by educating their students in this area. Too often, they don�t understand that you will have to go deeper than talking about �poverty� if you want to get something done. Now, take this back up to the World Bank. Commonly, I read those of a liberal internationalist bent saying we are not doing enough to alleviate poverty, help the environment, and preserve local cultures by changing the lending practices of the World Bank. They're angry that appointing someone like Wolfowitz is a political signal that we don't care about the world's poor. However, the reasons you have these problems are not necessarily about poverty, the environment, and the sociology of different peoples. Other phenomena are preventing these people from getting out of poverty, preserving their environment, and maintaining their local cultures and traditions. Want to stamp out poverty? [URL=http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/kristoff_on_swe.html]Give them opportunities to work when overseas corporations want to take a chance by outsourcing to foreign labor[/URL]. [URL=http://www.techcentralstation.com/102802M.html]Protect the wealth those workers accumulate with property rights[/URL]. [URL=http://www.techcentralstation.com/071103C.html]Save their environment by making the parents in these countries wealthy enough so that they can use their money to do more than feed starving children[/URL]. If Wolfowitz can steer the World Bank away from just �poverty reduction� and improve associated measures of quality of life (e.g., transparency, property rights, independent judiciaries, local capital investment markets, difficult as it is to measure these) poverty will take care of itself. We all want to help the Third World solve its problems. However, declarative acts that do little to change the internal mechanics that prevent nations from growing are a poor place to start. If there�s a good chance to believe Wolfowitz can make a dent in some of those self-destructive behaviors, I say give the man a chance to prove himself. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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