Paul Collier in New York

I went to a great talk by Paul Collier on Friday, at the Cooper Union. I blogged his new book, "The Bottom Billion," in June, and I was looking forward to hearing him in person: after all, he comes impressively blurbed by the likes of Ernesto Zedillo, Nick Stern, George Soros, Martin Wolf, Nick Kristof, and Larry Summers. And boy are they right. Collier is no one's idea of a charismatic public speaker, but he's utterly compelling, and I can easily believe that he managed to persuade EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson to change Europe's trade policy with Africa after a single meeting.

Collier's main plea is for people to really educate themselves on the plight of the world's poorest. At the moment, there's a huge amount of goodwill, but precious little real knowledge – a situation which lends itself to gesture politics, where it's more important to be seen to be Doing Something than it is to actually do the right thing.

Collier made a lot of excellent points in his short talk, and the talk only covered a small part of the scope of his book. But it's worth reprising a few of the main themes.

• Targeting global poverty sounds like a great idea, but global poverty is going to go down substantially no matter what, thanks to the economic development of China and India. It's the "bottom billion" of the book's title who are really falling behind, not the global poor more generally.
• Aid is important, but if the rich really want to help, they need to make efforts on much, much more than just aid. (Collier's other main areas where the rich can help are trade, security, and governance.) The problems of the bottom billion are often problems caused by civil war, or resource curses, or other problems which aid can't solve.
• A big-picture view has to replace the country-by-country approach which dominates now. Some 30% of Africa lives in resource-poor, landlocked countries (compared to just 1% of the world population), and those Africans are doomed unless the whole neighborhood improves. "The best interventions might not be in the countries themselves," says Collier: "the only hope for Niger is that Nigeria grows".
• Details matter, a lot. The difference between the African Growth and Opportunity Act, in the US, and Everything but Arms, in Europe, comes down to pretty technical differences on things like country-of-origin rules. But it turns out that where AGOA has a waiver on country-of-origin restrictions, African exports to the US have gone up sevenfold; meanwhile, EbA, with no such waivers, has done no visible good at all.

"This is what you need to get up to speed on," exhorted Collier of the studenty crowd. Slogans aren't enough: what's needed is pressure on politicians to do very specific things like extend these trade-with-Africa acts to all of Sub-Saharan Africa and not just to the poorest countries which don't have the institutions to make use of the opportunities afforded to them.

If you only read or recommend one book on development issues, this is the one. Collier is a clear-headed realist who knows that if we don't solve the problems of Africa now, they will spill over into the developed world sooner rather than later. He has solutions; the task now is to start enacting legislation.