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Global view inspires public service

BY TOM PLATE

At a conference in Prague several years ago, an irritated World Bank president 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 critics have 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, 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 UCLA’s Faculty Center on March 4, he expressed an appropriate annoyance at wealthy countries for not accepting more responsibility for the poverty bomb 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, the United States, commits much less than 1% of its budget to worldwide poverty relief. Although public service has somewhat fallen into disrepute these days, international institutions such as the World Bank do considerable good by raising such issues. Even after more than eight grinding years as the World Bank president, Wolfensohn, at the ripe young age of 70, caught the idealistic eye of the half-dozen 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, such as war-torn Sri Lanka. “People in poverty know what to do with developmental money a hell of a lot better than us bureaucrats in Washington,” Wolfensohn said. “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 choose public-service careers at all. Since Colin Powell became secretary of state, 65,000 Americans 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 consider the following: Ask not what is in your personal interest, but what is in the public interest.

But if our young people are not being actively inspired by their faculties 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 our public-policy schools trying even harder to inspire them, what’s to stop our M.B.A. culture from getting up every day and asking, “How can we screw the poor?”

Plate, an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication Studies, is director of the new UCLA Media Center and founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network.