Development Aid As Magic

While development aid has been critiqued from various perspectives for a while now, the magical side of aid has hardly been as effectively demonstrated as a very short piece in The Guardian has recently done. While there are many significant insights in this piece, the central point is that developing countries are actually giving aid to developed countries rather than the other way around. The magic in it all is that, like in most magic, there has often been a sleight of hand that causes misdirection - portraying the takers as the givers and the givers as the takers. Thus, even though developing countries have been giving far more aid to developed countries, the narrative has been popularized that it is developed countries that actually give aid to developing countries. In other words, the narrative makes the beggar to become the giver and the giver the beggar. Pulling off such magical feat is astonishing.