In today’s New York Times, Tom Friedman comments on the U.N. Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report, which first came out in 2002, and which has just been updated.
Apparently the news is not good; it seems that, for some reason, the Arab world is rather a depressed and backward place.
Friedman remarks upon the 2002 report:
It was buttressed with sobering statistics: Greece alone translated five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic; the G.D.P. of Spain was greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined; 65 million Arab adults were illiterate. It was a disturbing picture, bravely produced by Arab academics.
You know, this translation problem actually isn’t so new: I happen to know that in the year 906, the Queen of the Franks, Bertha of Tuscany, sent to the Caliph of Baghdad (who was a chap by the name of al-Mutawakkil) a courier bearing a proposal of marriage. The offer was written in Latin, but it turned out that there was nobody in the Caliph’s court who could read it! So it seems that even way back then there was something going on in those parts that made them all kind of lose interest in what was happening in the rest of the world. Strange, huh?
Anyway, the latest report indicates that things have got even worse, and it’s got everybody wondering why:
This new report was triggered by a desire to find out why the obstacles to human development in the Arab world have “proved so stubborn.’
Yes, that’s one heck of a mystery! Wow…
Anyway, reading further, we find:
What the roughly 100 Arab authors of the 2009 study concluded was that too many Arab citizens today lack “human security ”” the kind of material and moral foundation that secures lives, livelihoods and an acceptable quality of life for the majority.’ A sense of personal security ”” economic, political and social ”” “is a prerequisite for human development, and its widespread absence in Arab countries has held back their progress.’
The authors cite a variety of factors undermining human security in the Arab region today ”” beginning with environmental degradation ”” the toxic combination of rising desertification, water shortages and population explosion. In 1980, the Arab region had 150 million people. In 2007, it was home to 317 million people, and by 2015 its population is projected to be 395 million. Some 60 percent of this population is under the age of 25, and they will need 51 million new jobs by 2020.
Hmm, a population explosion. I wonder why? Perhaps there is some cultural factor at work here, but that’s just a wild guess, of course.
Another persistent source of Arab human insecurity is high unemployment. “For nearly two and half decades after 1980, the region witnessed hardly any economic growth,’ the report found. Despite the presence of oil money (or maybe because of it), there is a distinct lack of investment in scientific research, development, knowledge industries and innovation.
Well, that’s certainly odd — especially because, according to the academic experts I’ve consulted, all human groups are of precisely equal intelligence. What on earth could be preventing the Arab world from focusing on scientific research and innovation?
Instead, government jobs and contracts dominate. Average unemployment in the Arab region in 2005 was 14.4 percent, compared with 6.3 percent for the rest of the world. A lot of this is because of a third source of human insecurity: autocratic and unrepresentative Arab governments, whose weaknesses “often combine to turn the state into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support.’
Autocratic governments? Most of the developed world has moved toward democratic, accountable government. Whatever might be different about the Arab world that might predispose them toward abdicating their individual liberties in favor of an all-powerful authority? It almost seems like a kind of “surrender”, or “submission”, or something. Weird!
It appears this conundrum has baffled both Mr. Friedman and the authors of the UN study. And I have to admit, it’s got me stumped, too. But I can’t shake off the nagging feeling that there is something they aren’t mentioning, some shared retrograde influence, some overlooked “X-factor” that the Arab nations all have in common, that might serve to explain the intractable difficulties they all seem to have in making their way in the modern world. I can almost think of it…
Dang! This is going to bother me all night, now.
5 Comments
Well if it’s anywhere near your “almost seems like a kind of “surrender”, or “submission” then I holler, Time to call in Bill Clinton.
Too bad al-Mutawakkil didn’t have him around for counsel.
But then, all this is as baffling to me as it seems it is to you.
What’s really baffling to me is that this sort of bafflement can even exist betwixt us.
Looks like I’ll need a few more beers and a seconal.
I submit that this could all be hammered out over a few beers with the Arab world if Obama has some extra time that Michelle will allow him…
Jeffery Hodges
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That’s a nice ending to Friedman’s piece.
I’ve heard the term Dutch Disease to describe countries with massive resources yet diminishing human capital.
I agree that the Arab world is backwards (that’s actually an understatement). And I’m quite sure that it’s a cultural thing, since people whose ancestors of a generation or two back who emigrated from that part of the world to “the West” seem quite, well, western. If I understand Malcolm’s allusions to “surrender” and “submission,” however, I think we disagree about what cultural factors are behind the backwardness of the Arab world. In other words, I don’t think it’s Islam that’s the problem, since non-Arab muslims as a group seem more forward-looking than their Arab counterparts. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that the misogynistic honor culture of the Arab world is a key factor. Maintaining firm control of women, dangerously sexual creatures that they are, doesn’t leave much time or energy for learning to be part of a modern world.
Hi Bob,
Archness aside: yes, it is of course Islam that I am thinking of. The problem is indeed compounded, as you say, by Arab culture-of-honor tribalism — but the dysfunction referred to in the report affects all Muslim nations, and does so in inverse relation to their degree of secularity. (It is not, after all, as if, say, Afghanistan or Pakistan are on the leading edge of global scientific or political progress.) Even Indonesia, perhaps the best counterexample, is facing an increasing groundswell of Islamic fundamentalism (as are all Muslim countries; this pull toward fundamentalism is an inherent and self-renewing feature of Islam), has a long history of autocratic government, and is beset by corruption and poverty.
Even if Islam is not the only factor dragging down the Arab world (it isn’t), it is certainly an important one, if not the primary one; for it not even to be mentioned in a lengthy analysis of the underlying causes of the region’s difficulties is just ridiculous. It is, as they say, the “elephant in the room” — but everyone is so terrified of criticizing religion, in particular Islam, that to identify it as such is simply not an option, it seems. It’s absurd, and would be laughable if it weren’t indicative of a very serious problem.