Most of us will be aware of the Club of Rome. They’re the people who, 52 years back, said we’d all be dead by now as mineral reserves will have run out. The entire idea was based upon ignorance. Mineral reserves and resources are things created by human beings so if we start running out then we’ll just go make some more. They were equating these with mineral deposits, which are the bits God’s Engineer left lying around when he knocked off early for the week. Of such category errors are international reports and howling nonsense made.

The Club, like Liam and Noel, are back. As with the Brothers Gallagher they’re slightly different but also much the same — in gross, snarling error. The Club that is. The new report is: “How Sub-Saharan Africa can achieve the SDGs by 2100” and the mistake they’re making is that we don’t want to achieve the SDGs in the slightest. Or, at least, we don’t want to achieve them as actual goals, even as they’d be nice enough to have as a result of Africa doing that thing we all desire — finally getting rich like what we are.

You’ll no doubt be seeing a few columns and reports on this new piece because a certain sort of bureaucratic lefty just loves the base ideas here. That these are things loved by bureaucratic lefties, is the first indication we should be against ‘em. But we should also be against them because of what they actually recommend. 

They note, for example, that the population of Africa is growing. Indeed it is. Therefore they recommend that the use of fertiliser should decline down to nothing. You know, that idea that dropped food production in Sri Lanka by 95 per cent in just one growing season. This is not sensible to suggest — not unless you’re sitting in your under the volcano lair and cackling as you do so.

SDGs are “Sustainable Development Goals” and they stem from the United Nations. At face value some of them seem sensible enough — empower women, reduce poverty and so on. But when they’re more accurately defined they end up between missing the point and being highly counterproductive. The bulk of it all being a list of all the things we didn’t do to get rich but which appeal to bourgeois fools as ethical flauntings. Who, for example, would be against empowering women (other than perhaps the husbands)? Who would insist poor countries must suffer under their government debt burdens — other than me?    

The reason the SDGs are like this is because they learnt their lesson from the Millennium DGs. This earlier set included “halve absolute poverty by 2015” and this was the only one of those goals which was over-achieved — and before time to boot. The problem for the bourgeois bureaucratic classes is that it was entirely achieved without them. Simple free market capitalism achieved that one. Just trade some more, make stuff people want and the poor get richer. So, the second time around there was a shopping list for how to make the world a better place. The goals — sorry, Goals — were all carefully crafted so that none of them could possibly be achieved without the intermediation of that priestly caste. 

Which then carries over into this report from our Old Muckers — who claim we’re all dead already, murdered in our beds by mineral shortages — the Club of Rome. I can’t claim to have carefully considered every single sentence in this report but I have given it a good going over and I can’t actually see the bit that talks about economic growth as the way a place gets rich. Nor the bit that suggests how a poor place might gain the economic growth that makes it rich.    

I do see eliminating fertiliser in a continent currently hungry with a growing population. I see the empowerment of women. I see the insistence that inequality must be reduced. I see that banks must stop being mean and demanding repayment, that the IMF should stop insisting upon useful economic policy, that we should all just send more money without strings. (Well, a few strings — that once sent it be administered by that priestly class of bourgeois bureaucrats to achieve goals only they can divine or define). This is, in short, drivel. Sadly, it’s likely to be politically influential drivel — which makes it more dangerous. 

The only excuse anyone has for not having economic growth these days is bad governance

We do, these days, know how places get rich. All of those lovely things — better education, falling inequality, decent water supply, plentiful food, even women’s empowerment — are side effects of a place getting rich. So, the aim is for a place to get rich and the rest will follow. There are no rich places which do not have all those things and more. We also really, really, do know how a place gets rich. Which isn’t shipping Tarquin and Jocasta off with our chequebook to make it so. It’s that peace, easy taxes and the tolerable administration of justice Adam Smith recommended. How we got rich — and, in more detail, how China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the rest have been growing at 6 and 8 and 10 per cent a year these past few decades. Going to work and makin’ stuff other people want to buy. 

The only excuse anyone has for not having economic growth these days is bad governance. But the Club of Rome — heck the entire SGD proposals — insist that the way to do it is to give more power, more money and more support to the current bad governments which aren’t producing growth. A few years back there was a rumour of a plot to mount a coup in the about-to-be oil rich Equatorial Guinea. It didn’t happen, or perhaps didn’t work, which is something of a pity. For even the most abrasively, disgustingly, Thatcherite regime would have stolen less of that oil money than the current Presidential family does. Apparently, currently, that’s all of that oil money.

As I say, there will be glowing encomia to this report — for who doesn’t want to find somewhere to send Tarquin and Jocasta on someone else’s money? No doubt the level of praise will increase, be closely linked to perhaps, the likelihood of the readers of that publication naming their kids Tarquin and or Jocasta.

But what we’ve got here is a complete failure to grasp the task at hand. Sure we all want Africa to become rich. We also know how to do that — markets and capitalism. But the report here is not about that at all, it’s about how to enact the laundry list of currently fashionable idiot ideas. You know, just like the first Club of Rome report. It’s worse than wrong — it’s a category error.