Famine, Corruption, the Media
and Democracy
Alexander Tabarrok
December 2005
Why is there Mass Starvation?
• The answer seems obvious –
mass starvation occur because
of a mass scarcity of food.
• The obvious answer, however, is
wrong.
• Sometimes mass starvation
occur when food per capita is
low but mass starvation has also
occurred when there was plenty
of food per capita.
Causes of Mass Starvation
• Many of the biggest mass starvations
have been intentional.
• When Stalin came to power in 1924
he saw Ukranians, particulary the
relatively wealthy independent
farmers known as Kulaks to be a
threat.
• Stalin proceeded to collectivize the
farms, expropriating the land of the
kulaks, killing thousands and sending
thousands more to Siberian gulags.
• A short-lived insurrection was
crushed by turning all of the Ukraine
into a concentration camp.
• While millions starved, food was
shipped out of the Ukraine and no
food was allowed in.
• Desperate Ukraines ate dogs, cats,
bark. Cannibalism was not
uncommon.
• At least 4 million died in the Ukraine.
China’s Great Leap into Barbarism
•
In China during the “Great Leap Forward,” some 30 million people died of starvation.
•
“We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jadegreen weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the
contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the
landscape. Before my eves, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I
had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had
swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the
families as they chewed the flesh of other people’s children. The children
who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the
reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the
children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them
swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents; flesh
that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst
nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the
man “whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not
in several thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen,
with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and
led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh
of others to appease their own hunger. ”
Wei Jingsheng, quoted in Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism. Harvard University
Press.1999.
Quasi-Intentional and Non-Intentional
Causes of Mass Starvation
• When accompanied by other factors, war can
disrupt and aggravate the normal channels of
supply leading to mass starvation. Often there is
a combination of intentional and non-intentional
factors at work.
• The basic non-intentional causes of mass
starvation is lack of purchasing power or
entitlements. i.e. food is available but a certain
class of people cannot afford to buy the food.
Explaining why varies from case to case.
Mass Starvation in Bangladesh, 1974
• The 1974 famine in Bangladesh was not on the size of the Ukraine or
China, perhaps 26,000-100,000 people died of mass starvation but it was
probably the first televised starvation and it illustrates many important
themes.
• Floods destoyed much of the rice
crop of 1974 at the same time as
world rice prices were increasing.
• Overall, however, the fundamental
problem was not a lack of food per-se
as food per capita was in fact at an
all-time high in 1974.
• Starvation began before the rice that
the floods destroyed would have been
available for eating. So what was the
problem?
Source: Sen, Amartya. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger. Arturo Tanco Memorial Lecture given in
London on 2nd August 1990, http://www.thp.org/reports/sen/sen890.htm
Mass Starvation in Bangladesh, 1974
•
•
•
Before the floods destroyed rice they destroyed livelihoods. The floods
meant that there was no work for landless rural labourers who in ordinary
years would have been employed harvesting the rice.
Without income from work and facing rising world rice prices caused for
other reasons there was mass starvation.
As Amartya Sen puts it:
“A food-centred view tells us rather little about starvation. It does not
tell us how starvation can develop even without declines in food availability.
Nor does it tell us – even when starvation is accompanied by a fall in the
food supply – why some groups had to starve while others could feed
themselves…What allows one group rather than another to get hold of the
food that is there? These questions lead to the entitlement approach…For
example, a barber owns his labour power and some specialized skill,
neither of which he can eat, and he has to sell his hairdressing services to
earn an income to buy food. His entitlement to food may collapse even
without any change in food availabilty…”
Poverty and Famines (1981, 155-156).
Mass Starvation is not Inevitable
• The fact that mass starvation is not primarily about mass
scarcity of food tells us something important – mass
starvations need not ocurr.
• Clearly, intentional starvations need not occur and we
know the solution – avoid totalitarian governments.
Totalitarian governments can and have starved their own
people (not just historically consider North Korea today,
for example). Totalitarian governments also kill their own
people. R.J. Rummel estimates that in the twentieth
century governments killed or starved some 262,000,000
of their own citizens.
• Unintentional starvations can also be avoided since the
main thing that is required is the government will to
redistribute wealth or employment, and usually not much
is required, to those people who most need it.
Democracy, Media and Mass Starvations
•
In this context consider the following:
“…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a
functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or
North America) or relatively poor (as in post independence India, or
Botswana or Zimbabwe.”
Amartya Sen. 2001. Development as Freedom. p.16
“Perhaps the most important reform that can contribute to the
elimination of famines, in Africa as well as in Asia, is the enhancement of
democratic practice, unfettered newspapers and – more generally –
adversarial politics.”
Amartya Sen. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger.
•
•
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Democracies for all their problems at least have incentives not to kill or let
starve voters or their friends.
Opposition parties have incentives to bring problems to light.
News media broadcast early warning signs of starvation and they castigate
ruling parties when problems are not solved.
• In The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory
and Evidence from India, Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess test
Amartya Sen’s theory of democracy, newspapers and famine.
• India is a federal democracy with 16 major states. The states vary
considerably in their susceptibilty to food crises, newspaper
circulation, education, political competition and other factors.
• Besley and Burgess ask whether the state government are more
responsive to crises when there is more political competition and
more newspapers.
• Note that both of these factors are important. Newspapers won’t
work without political competition and political competition won’t
without newspapers. (Education is also an interesting interaction
factor. Note that the state of Kerala is the best educated, has the
most political competition and the highest newspaper circulation. It
is not the richest state.)
•
After controlling for a wide
variety of other variables B
and B find:
•
A 1 percent increase in
newspaper circulation is
associated with a 2.4 percent
increase in public food
distribution and a 5.5 percent
increase in calamity relief
expenditures.
•
Greater political competition is
associated with higher levels of
public food distribution. Public
food distribution is also higher
in election and pre-election
years.
•
In addition, government is also
more responsive to a given
shock when newspaper
circulation is higher. That is,
when food production falls or
flood damage occurs
governments increase food
distribution and calamity relief
more in states where
newspaper circulation is higher.
Sex, Lies and Videotape
•
•
•
•
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We have seen that the media can
help to hold government
accountable….the government
does not like to be held
accountable.
Thus it’s not surpising that
governments try very hard to
control the media. A fascinating
and unusual piece of evidence
comes from Peru.
Vladimor Montesinos Torres was
the head of the Peruvian secretpolice. With Alberto Fujimori as
President, Montesinos ran Peru,
methodically bribing judges,
politicians and the news media.
What is unusual is that Montesinos
kept detailed accounts of his bribes
including thousands of bribe
contracts and videotapes.
By examining the prices of bribes
we can see the relative value that
Montesinos placed on different
sources of potential opposition.
Bribes to Politicians
Between $20,000 and
$3,000 per month when
official salaries for a
Congressman were on
the order of $7,000 per
month.
Bribes to Judges
Bribes to judges
were more
irregular and a
little bit less on
average than to
politicians say
$5,000 to $10,000
per month.
Bribes to Newspapers were much higher than to
politicians or judges - Thousands of dollars per
week/per story.
Interesting fact: Montesinos cared about the tabloids
read by the masses not about the refined
newspapers read by the educated.
Bribes to television channel owners were the highest of all – up to
$1,500,000 per month.
• McMillan and Zoido make an important point
about checks and balances – they complement
one another.
“The news media are the most potent of the democratic
checks and balances. This is our main conclusion. Measured
by the bribes Montesinos paid, the legislature and the
judiciary are far less pressing constraints on the executive
branch of government than television. Those other checks
and balances obtain their force via the threat of exposure to
the citizens, and television gives widest exposure. Our
finding applies only to 1990s Peru, of course, but it may
extrapolate to nascent democracies elsewhere.
That the news media are the chief watchdog has
implications for policy. The checks and balances work as a
system, so an independent judiciary and genuine political
competition are needed. But measures to safeguard the
media’s independence from political influence and to ensure
their credibility to the public are perhaps the crucial policies
for shoring up democracy. “
Who Owns the Media?
• Even better than controlling the media with bribes is censoring, even
better than censoring is owning the media.
• In much of the world government ownership of media is common.
For example:
“On average, governments in Africa control 61 percent of the top five
(in circulation) daily newspapers and reach 84 percent of the audience
for the top five television stations. Seventy-one percent of African
countries have state monopolies in television broadcasting.”
Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics.
XLVI: 341-381.
What are the consequences/correlates of government media
ownership?
“Government ownership of the press is associated with (statistically
significantly) lower levels of poltical rights, civil liberties, security of
property, and quality of regulation and higher levels of corruption and
risk of confiscation…These results support the public choice view that
government ownership of the press restricts information flows to the
public, which reduces the quality of the government.
Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics.
XLVI: 341-381.
Isn’t this obvious?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Yes!
But why do we make a big distinction between the market for goods and the market
for ideas?
Consider all the usual stories of why markets need to be regulated and ask whether
they apply to the market for ideas.
Public Goods
Yes!
Externalities
Yes!
Consumer Ignorance
Yes!
Natural Monopoly
Yes!
•
Thus if you believe the standard market failure stories then you should be in favor of
regulating the media but we have just seen that regulating the media is a very bad
ideas. Thus the standard stories need to be modified by public choice.
•
As Coase says in The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas:
“It is hard to believe that the general public is in a better position to evaluate competing views on
economic and social policy than to choose between different kinds of food.”
•
Djankow et al. add:
“Nonetheless, the assumption of benevolent government often stops at the doorstep of the
media, perhaps because economists want to protect their own right to supply information
without being subject to regulation.”
• Government wants to control the media because
the media can be used to mold opinion and
controlling opinion means controlling power.
• What else can be used to mold opinion?
• Education!
• Lott (1999) finds that the more authoritarian the
government the more likely the government is to
own television stations. Also, the more
authoritarian the government the more likely it is
to invest in public education.
• Importantly, Lott finds no relationship between
health care spending and authoritarianism thus
supporting the interpretation that authoritarian
governments invest in public education in order
to indoctrinate.