It has been disheartening to watch the news from Egypt over
the last couple of weeks. The
elected President Muhammed Morsi was deposed by the military. The generals have installed a caretaker
government, and promised new elections in the near future, but the lesson is
clear: any new President has to keep the generals happy.
A friend asked me how things fell apart so fast, after the
hopes raised by the Arab Spring movement that toppled the Mubarrek government,
and allowed for free elections for the first time. My response is that democracy doesn’t necessarily solve
problems. The question for me is
whether any form of government can solve Egypt’s underlying problems.
The population of Egypt is around 84 million people, and the
land area of the country is about the size of the state of Texas. That would lead to a high population
density, but it does not really tell the story. Most of Egypt’s land area is desert, with almost no one
living there. Instead, the vast
majority of the people live in the Nile valley and delta. The arable land area of Egypt is only
about the size of Maryland.
Egypt does not produce enough food to support itself. Without significant natural resources
or manufacturing industries, the primary means of raising foreign currency to buy
food on international markets is tourism.
Even if all the recent unrest hadn’t caused tourism to tank, it still
does not pull in enough wealth to support the population. In recent years, as numbers have
increased, the slices of the economic pie shared by the poor have continued to
shrink. Unemployment is rampant,
and a significant percentage of Egypt’s population spends up to half their
income on food. The phrase “your
daily bread” has real significance to many Egyptians.
This deep and worsening poverty is the true root cause of
the political unrest in the country.
The hope was that, by electing a new government, more economic
opportunities would arise. The problem
is that although governments can redistribute wealth, they are not very good at
creating wealth. Expectations were
high, and the Morsi administration failed to deliver. Although Morsi made significant missteps, it is hard to see
what another administration would have done differently on the economic front.
One of the truisms of foreign policy is that you can’t solve
political problems through military means. It seems every generation of leaders has to relearn this
lesson, as we have found to our sorrow in Afghanistan and Iraq. I want to suggest a corollary for
domestic policy. You can’t solve
economic problems by political methods.
With the miserable track record of stimulus spending and quantitative
easing that we have seen in this country, that should be no surprise. The Egyptians, to their sorrow, appear
to be learning that lesson themselves.
It is disheartening to watch the democratic gains of the
Arab Spring falter. But it is not
surprising.
