Pity the poor, when public service is such a dirty word

Tom Plate, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

At a conference in Prague several years ago, an irritated World Bank president sort of lost his cool. Snapping at those who likened his Washington-based international anti-poverty bank to a walled-up country club for dilettante economists and bumbling bureaucrats, James D. Wolfensohn thundered that the bank's 10,000 employees were not evil: "They do not get up every day and say, 'How can we screw the poor?' "

But that's more or less what some of the extreme critics had suggested: If the World Bank has been doing such a great job, why is there still so much poverty?

The question is demagogic, of course. The World Bank does have an impact: It's the globe's leading source of anti-Aids funding, and much more. But given the enormity of the earth's poverty, environmental and developmental problems, it falls far short of being a cure-all. Even so, if the World Bank didn't exist, as it has since 1944, we would probably want to invent it.

For it has become increasingly obvious that the only thing worse than a world with a World Bank, creaky or bureaucratic or whatever it may be, would be a world without it.

When the more relaxed Wolfensohn spoke privately to a small group of faculty and students at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) last week, he expressed an appropriate annoyance at wealthy countries for not accepting more responsibility for the dimensions of the poverty bomb that their shortsighted policies are fusing. The world needs that perspective.

The Australian-born lawyer and investment banker, whose World Bank career winds down next year, noted that the world's wealthiest nation commits much less than 1 per cent of its budget to worldwide poverty relief. Before too long, he said, "we will go from a world of six billion people, to a world of eight billion -- with maybe over 6 1/2 billion living in the developing world".

Although public service has fallen somewhat into disrepute these days, international institutions such as the World Bank do considerable good by raising such big questions. Even after more than eight grinding years as World Bank president, at the ripe young age of 70, Wolfensohn caught the idealistic eye of the six UCLA star students in the room who are considering public service.

He spoke of his staff's efforts to get out of Washington to work with civil-society actors in their own countries to develop appropriate programs, such as in war-torn Sri Lanka: "People in poverty know what to do with developmental money a helluva lot better than us bureaucrats in Washington. We need to be listening to them."

Is this the true face, students wondered, of the allegedly cold-blooded, bureaucratically indifferent World Bank? Wolfensohn didn't realize it, but he probably sealed the deal with some of these young citizens about a public-service career.

That's a good thing. But how can first-rate minds remain motivated and committed with a negative media harping at every public-sector miscue and a private-sector salary structure that embarrasses anything governments ordinarily can offer?

It's surprising, therefore, that many young people still decide on public-service careers at all. Since Colin Powell became Secretary of State, 65,000 Americans have applied to join the U.S. Foreign Service -- a record.

Some of those applicants graduated from U.S. public-policy schools, a notable innovation in higher education that took place decades ago. From Harvard to Berkeley, from Duke to UCLA, public- policy schools teach young people to pose the question: Ask not what is in your personal interest, but what is in the public interest.

Why should MBA business schools have any interest in that? Alas, symbolizing our times, one of the nation's premier public- policy schools is under major attack for abandoning the internationalist vision. The Robertson family, whose huge 1961 grant launched Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is asking the courts to force Princeton University to return its money.

Its foundation is claiming it is deeply disappointed that so few Woodrow Wilson School graduates elect to pursue public- service positions in international relations (the primary inspiration for the initial grant).

In fact, many of today's young people -- at Princeton or elsewhere -- are lured upon graduation into high-paying law firms or businesses that reflect our culture of materialism. Neither Princeton nor the Woodrow Wilson School created that culture, but certainly our universities could wage a more vigorous fight against it.

For if our young people are not being actively inspired by their faculty and universities to take the global view, what chance do the Wolfensohns of the world have -- much less the globe's poor? Without more students inspired by the idea of public service, and without even our public-policy schools trying harder to inspire them, what's to stop our MBA culture (to borrow Wolfensohn's phrase) from getting up every day and saying, "How can we screw the poor?"