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The Biography of Sir Hans Singer Simon Maxwell∗ Development Policy Review, 2003, 21 (1): 107-110 Book Review Article Capturing All Our Histories: The Biography of Sir Hans Singer Simon Maxwell∗ Sir Hans Singer: The Life and Work of a Development Economist. By D. John Shaw. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 376pp. £62.50 hb. Citing oneself in academic discourse is bad form, the kind of solecism Hans Singer would never commit. But it seems a pity to overlook a pithy quote. And, anyway, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I always carry my own work around so as to have something sensational to read on the train. So, here is my contribution to the dust-jacket of John Shaw’s ambitious and exhaustive biography of Sir Hans Singer: This is more than the life story of Britain’s most highly respected and most-loved development economist. John Shaw’s comprehensive narrative amounts to a history of development thinking over seven decades. That about sums it up. John Shaw gives us both the respected economist and the much-loved man, though perhaps rather more of the former than the latter. On both counts, the tale he has to tell is impressive and engrossing. Personally, I have been Hans’ devoted disciple for over thirty years. But I am far from alone: in a sense, this book captures all our histories. That this should be so is in no small measure because Hans the economist has made contributions to both practice and policy across an extraordinary range of development issues. Shaw provides a meticulous chronicle. He divides Hans’ life into three parts. The first takes the years to 1947 (by which time Hans was 37), covering the flight from Germany, PhD work in Cambridge on urban land values, and early work in the UK, including the path-breaking study on poverty in the UK, Men Without Work. The second period deals with Hans’ work at the United Nations, between 1947 and 1969. It covers the terms-of-trade controversy, of course, but also Hans’ work on development planning, on different kinds of aid, and on issues which have been prominent in his thinking for most of the past seventy years, including the importance of investing in the nutrition and education of children. Many of the contributions here are intellectual. But Hans is also revealed as a man of action: influential in the setting up of the UN Special Fund and the UN technical assistance programme (which later merged to become UNDP), of the World Food Programme, of the UN Research Institute for ∗ Director, Overseas Development Institute and President, Development Studies Association of the UK and Ireland ([email protected]). Overseas Development Institute, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 108 Simon Maxwell Social Development, of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and of the African Development Bank, among others. The third period begins when Hans moved to the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex at the age of 59, and continues to the present day. Here, too, there have been extraordinary contributions: with the ILO to employment issues and to the idea of redistribution with growth; with UNCTAD to science and technology policy; with UNICEF and others to child welfare; with WFP to food aid and food security; and, more generally, to the critique of structural adjustment and the reform of international institutions. In these later years, Hans has also found a role as the standard-bearer for lesson-learning from Keynes, Schumpeter and other mentors: a living embodiment of continuity with earlier thinking. Many people know about some of these contributions. Few know about all. John Shaw’s biography sets the record down in full, and is valuable for that reason alone. The bibliography of Hans’ published work runs to 34 dense pages at the back of the book. Does the biography also provide evidence on substance? Shaw gives a thorough account of the ideas which underpin Hans’ reputation as a ‘pioneer of development’ (Meier and Seers, 1984; Emmerji et al., 2002): 20 pages on terms of trade, 15 or so on redistribution with growth, 20 or so on food aid, and so on. This is not an easy job, and the pace sometimes falters, but most readers will want to be selective. My own selections left some of the peaks for others – John and Richard Toye, for example, have recently completed an exhaustive review of the terms-of-trade issue, arguing, insofar as it matters, that Singer got there before Prebisch (Toye and Toye, forthcoming). I focused on three issues: the early work on poverty, redistribution with growth, and food aid/food security. On each of these topics, Hans’ ideas remain remarkably relevant today. The Pilgrim Trust enquiry into long-term unemployment in the UK was Hans’ first job after leaving Cambridge, in a team including Walter Oakeshott (later Vice- Chancellor of Oxford University) and David Owen (later a senior UN figure). It involved interviews in six towns with around one thousand men and women who had been unemployed for a year or more. And it produced a readable report, Men Without Work, which was influential in its day, but which also speaks to the current poverty agenda in both developed and developing countries. First, the enquiry combined quantitative and qualitative research techniques, pioneering sample survey work on this issue, but making use within the framework of in-depth interviews and extensive case material: Wigan Pier, one might say, with numbers. Second, the report contained analysis of cumulative deprivation and life-cycle variations in poverty which find a direct echo in current poverty analysis. For example, the UK government’s annual reports, Opportunity for All, similarly stress the interaction between employment, health and housing, and also distinguish the problems of men and women, young and old, and those with and those without dependent children. Third, and perhaps most remarkably, the report emphasises the psycho-social aspects of unemployment, including loss of self-esteem, and the importance of community and of local institutions. There is a prescient discussion of social capital, and the observation that ‘the support given to institutions may be regarded as one index of civilization’. John Shaw only has four pages on Men Without Work, but he captures the essence of these points Redistribution from or with growth was the theme of the ILO employment mission to Kenya in 1972, which Hans led jointly with Richard Jolly – and to which my own Capturing All Our Histories: The Biography of Sir Hans Singer 109 contribution, as a Junior Professional Officer with UNDP in Nairobi, working on other things, consisted of an afternoon reading proofs in the Fairview Hotel. John Shaw correctly points to the pivotal influence of the Kenya report in shaping the development discourse of the 1970s: through its emphasis on poverty rather than unemployment as the core problem of development, by identifying the informal sector as the engine of growth in rapidly urbanising African countries, and, of course, by virtue of the salience given to redistribution (and, yes, to growth). Kenya itself is hardly an object lesson in the political feasibility or long-term success of this strategy; its Gini coefficient remains one of the highest in the world, and Shaw rightly observes that the informal sector offers more employment of last resort than it does opportunities for accumulation. Nevertheless, the key themes of the Kenya report are exactly those which dominate the contemporary debate about development pathways in Africa: the strategy underlying NePAD, for example, or the debate about the content of PRSPs. In the end, the hardest part of the package to deliver, as Kenya and other countries fell prey to oil shocks and to structural adjustment, was probably that necessary though insufficient condition, growth. That is still the problem today – and one on which Hans has plenty to offer, for example in his writing on terms of trade, debt and aid. As a final example, Hans’ work on food aid has brought together his interests in child nutrition, aid, and international institutions. He has also shaped a debate which retains contemporary relevance – for example, to the current food crisis in Africa. As Chair of an expert group appointed by the Director General of FAO, Hans provided the intellectual case for setting up the World Food Programme as a multilateral food aid agency. He contributed through many reports and articles to the development of thinking about food aid. And he has remained a passionate supporter of a controversial form of aid, citing particularly its additionality over financial aid, and its ability to reach the poor. As a long-time collaborator on this subject with Hans, and as an authority in his own right, John Shaw is potentially both authoritative and parti-pris. With fewer qualifications to offer, so am I. The difference between us is that John Shaw is somewhat more sanguine about both the additionality of food aid and the long-term viability of a multilateral food aid programme which is restricted to emergency aid and project food aid. My own view is that food aid is not first-best aid, but that a good case can be made, provided that it is additional. However, the strongest case is for programme food aid, transferred in bulk for sale on the markets of developing countries. WFP’s tragedy is that it was specifically debarred from providing this form of food aid in the political horse-trading that followed the publication of Hans Singer’s report: in brief, the US vetoed the idea because it did not want competition in this arena from the UN.
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