The Brown Lotus
I have an acquaintance from my Cornell business school contacts who is a very bright Indian-American who operates in the venture capital space. He is a serious writer of editorials and I am on his email list. I have noted that while he is nowhere near being a MAGA Republican, he has a decided disdain for liberal ideology. He grew up in the impoverished areas of Southern India in a family run by a union-member father and an equally hard-working mother. His claim is that he has seen first-hand the waste that is entailed in international aid efforts and it has made him a firm believer in the advantage of privatized efforts to bring about necessary developmental changes, even those as fundamental as clean water and core infrastructure. I read his editorials and I wonder how he can be so non-liberal given his down-in-the-dirt upbringing, but he explains that away the same way most bootstrapped people do, which is to suggest that if he could do it others could equally do it. He fails to see himself as an exception and ignores the lowest and majority common denominator that has people who require more help than he got to lift themselves up.
I was curious to see how he would react to the groundswell of Kamala Harris’ candidacy, especially given his and her shared Indian heritage. He started by calling her a “Brown Lotus”, which apparently in Sanskrit, the historical language of the Hindu, is the translation of the name Kamala. He goes on to praise the strength and determination of Indian women and makes note of the fact that their presence is distinctly on the rise with people like Nikki Halley, Kamala Harris and even Usha Vance in front of the American public. He feels their indomitable spirit is a powerful force to be reckoned with and that they are here to stay as a part of American politics.
But he goes on to talk about her involvement in some $4 billion of aid to Latin American countries in her bid to help ease the southern border crisis. His point is unmistakable, he feels these give-aways go less to solve the problems and more to line the pockets of those administering or intermediating the process. Like him, I have a deep history of involvement in the development aid efforts of the world. It began sitting at my mother’s feet as first worked directly in the field doing development work in Venezuela and Costa Rica and then as she rose to administer large-scale programs through her post as a diplomat Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. In the middle of all of that she was also the Deputy Director of the first women’s Job Corps Center in Poland Spring, Maine at the height of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Baines Johnson. BY the way, while she did all the hands-on work of the Center, with us living “on-campus”, the Director was a while male ex-military man who lived a more comfortable life 40 miles away in Portland, where his family would be more comfortable. This Job Corps experience would have fit neatly into my Indian-American friend’s picture of how development programs do more to benefit the administrators than the recipients. Even my mother said after two years that it was probably for the best that the incoming Nixon administration would be shutting down the program…this as she moved off to the FAO platform. I have also had my own experience with the development monster by virtue of being a Board Member of CARE, the large International Relief and Development Agency. I have lots of stories to tell about that as well.
The point is that there is clearly a balancing point about development. It can be highly effective in raising the standards of living for large numbers of people, but it can also be a wasteful exercise that simply transfers wealth and does so often to the least needy people of the world. It is a conundrum. We cannot exist as a species if we allow those less able or fortunate to suffer while we improve our standard of living. We must work to lift all up to some level of acceptable standard. The question is and may always be how best to do that as efficiently as possible. You have to start with the somewhat cynical view that development largesse, like banks in the John Dillinger example, are where the money is, and that means that the activity is bound to attract flies. It’s like the design of any system. We can never afford a no-default system, so we need to design them for minimal default and we need to be vigilant and transparent in our audits and impact reviews. I do not know the optimal budgetary allocation for this review requirement, but if we look at business, there is probably a solid 20% spent on control and oversight and that is probably equally necessary in development work. Does that provide some professional largesse? Certainly, but that is probably just the cost of doing business, as they say. The goal then is to keep the impact at or above 80% of the dollars spent.
I am a financial professional. That tends to make me fiscally conservative and therefore prone to support notions that liberal profligacy is not healthy for anyone. That makes me no less liberal, but it does make me a bit of a flinty-eyed liberal. I find that many of my most conservative friends choose to ignore the problems of a 10 billion person world (I choose that as the peak population number we are heading towards). Like any problem, ignoring it does not make it better. I am as equally flinty-eyed about conservative approaches to economic prosperity like supply-side or trickle-down economics. I voted for it three times and I can now say with indisputable evidence that it didn’t and doesn’t work. Keynesian economics that involves fiscal stimulus works much better and produces a healthier society and overall economy, but even that needs some constraint to operate at optimal levels and avoid waste and corruption. Corruption is a human condition that simply needs to be minimized, but like defaults, cannot be eliminated altogether. If we treated the fiscally corrupt the way we treat sex offenders, we could probably start to get closer to a true minimization thereof, but the larceny that lurks in all mens’ souls (and perhaps particularly politicians’) may well prevent that from ever happening.
I personally like the profile of our latest Brown Lotus (Kamala) and think she might well bring just the right blend of developmental generosity and a prosecutor’s stringency to rules and corruption that might take us to a very sound and efficient place of giving the biggest boost possible to those who need it while swatting most of the flies away.