The Good Country Equation by Simon Anholt

Author:Simon Anholt [Simon Anholt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2020-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

10

From Sierra Leone to Afghanistan

IN 2009, KATE PICKETT AND RICHARD WILKINSON PUBLISHED THE Spirit Level, a book that did much to support the theory that inequality is the reason for much of what is right or wrong in any given society, and that it can literally drive people to crime.14 Wealth and poverty have far less to do with it, which is why the United States and Nigeria, for example, suffer from similar social problems, despite the huge difference in their GDP: they have similar levels of inequality.

Working in Sierra Leone at the invitation of Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative, I heard tell of people there who had spent their life savings on a refrigerator they couldn’t even use because there was no electricity in their village. The trappings of a developed-country lifestyle—like keeping your food in a big shiny refrigerator—had become familiar images throughout the world wherever people had access to media or were exposed to advertising. This created desire, and once desire is triggered in humans, the process of attempting to satisfy that desire must run its course, whether it leads to happiness or to destruction. Obstacles along the way, like not having money or electricity, will be ignored or circumvented. This is how we’re all made, and it’s one of the fundamental drivers of the world we live in.

So it occurred to me that the dynamic of inequality leading to social problems of every kind, as described in The Spirit Level, is also played out globally on a daily basis. Thanks to the globalization of media, the sight of prosperity in the rich world drives social problems in the poor world.

And yet the amount that a society has to offer the world can have remarkably little to do with its economic prosperity, and there are so many things other than refrigerators that can form a country’s gift to the world. This point was emphasized for me on the day that Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma, missed a meeting we’d been scheduled to have because he had to travel back to his village where a baby had been born. I assumed that this was a grandchild or nephew, until he explained to me that it was no relation at all, just somebody from his village, but in Sierra Leone there’s no difference between the two. It was impossible not to wonder how this value might look if elevated to the global dimension.

It was in a conversation with President Koroma, discussing the benefits of collaboration with a wider range of countries than Sierra Leone’s habitual donors, that the idea of “randomized multilateralism” occurred to me. Working together is always more productive than working alone, and the more dappled the mixture of national experience, culture, background, traditions, and worldview that each collaborator brings to the mix, the more unusual and exciting the results are likely to be.

Producing randomness is a fun game as well as a perfectly serious approach to collaboration. I suggested to President Koroma that we might

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