BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller

Thanks, Bono, but No Thanks

Photos of celebrities with poor African children don’t ‘help me raise a child who believes she can be a doctor or an engineer.’

Dambisa Moyo is having her moment. The beautiful Zambian economist, formerly of Goldman Sachs and educated at Harvard and Oxford, arrives in New York this week to launch her new book, “Dead Aid.” The billionaire publisher Steve Forbes is throwing her a party at the Four Seasons. She is scheduled to appear on “Charlie Rose.” These titans of the media establishment are not pursuing Moyo for her beauty or her résumé (though these don’t hurt). What attracts them is her provocative argument. “Dead Aid”—a tiny volume, forcefully written—insists that foreign aid (a trillion dollars over the past 60 years) is a waste: it’s bad for Africa, she says—and for Africans. Aid, Moyo argues, keeps Africa in a supplicant’s role when its governments need to become self-sufficient. She recommends shutting off all foreign aid to African within 10 years.