Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com

War is bad. Now there is a real shocker. Still, the data on the proportion of
extremely poor countries involved in armed conflict are strikingly high. Paul
Collier, head of the Oxford Center for the Study of African Economies and
author of the book The Bottom Billion, points out that nearly three-quarters of
the world’s billion poorest people are caught in a civil war or have recently been
through one. It’s hard to run a business or get an education in the midst of a war.
(Obviously the causality runs in both directions: War devastates countries;
nations in a shambles are more likely to collapse into civil war.) Once again,
natural resources can make things worse by financing weapons and giving the
factions something to fight over. (Collier coined the sadly clever phrase
“Diamonds are a guerilla’s best friend.”)
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The important point is that security
is a prerequisite for most of the other things that have to happen for an economy
to flourish. In 2004, The Economist published a story about the challenges of
doing business in Somalia, a country that had been in the throes of civil war for
thirteen years. The story noted, “There are two ways to run a business in
Somalia. You can pay off the local warlord, not always the most trustworthy of
chaps, and hope he will stop his militiamen from murdering your staff. Or you
can tell him to get stuffed and hire your own militia.”
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Woman power. Imagine two farmers, each with a thousand acres. One of them
cultivates all of his land every year; the other leaves half of his land fallow, year
after year. Who will grow more? It’s not a trick question. The guy who uses all
of his land can grow more. What does this have to do with women? Bill Gates
made the connection when speaking about technological progress to an audience
segregated by sex in Saudi Arabia. A New York Times Magazine article on the
role of women in economic development recounts the incident:
Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth
were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A

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