theCardinal's Corner

The literacy scheme was one of a clutch of social “missions” organised by Mr Chávez in 2003, when he faced possible defeat in a recall referendum on his presidency. The government claims that by October 2005 it had all but eliminated illiteracy. That claim has become a centrepiece of the international propaganda effort on behalf of Mr Chávez's “revolution”. But there is no data to support it. Many educationalists doubt it. Even the government itself has retreated from its initial figure of “less than 1% illiteracy” to a figure of around 4%, though it is not clear whether this refers just to adults or to the total population.

It is notoriously difficult to obtain precise literacy figures from census data, which rely on self-assessment. But Francisco Rodríguez of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Daniel Ortega of IESA, a Caracas business school, have used household surveys from the national statistical institute to assess the programme. In an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Mr Rodríguez says that they found “little evidence” of any “statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy”. Where the government says it taught 1.5m, the study found that only 1.1m were illiterate to begin with, and that the fall over the 2003-05 period was less than 100,000. Even this improvement could largely be explained by a long-term demographic trend (many illiterate adults are elderly and die off).

Adán Chávez, who is the education minister as well as the president's brother, has complained of statistical “manipulation” by the government's foes. But Mr Rodríguez, for one, is no reactionary; he was the chief economist of Venezuela's National Assembly in 2000-04, and was once a chavista sympathiser.

Last year the statistics institute launched its own study on the impact of the social missions. This was supposed to be ready by January. But delays in buying equipment mean it has yet to start, according to Irene Gurrea, the economist in charge. Asked if there were any reliable statistics on the impact of Misión Robinson, Ms Gurrea said: “As far as we know, no—that's why we're doing the study.”

Staff of an older literacy programme run by Fe y Alegría, a Catholic charity, say they continue to enroll students. In Machiques, near the Colombian border, 100 joined in the past semester. They say that up to 40% of the Warao Indians in the Orinoco delta are illiterate. In 2005 Mr Chávez told local officials to declare their towns officially “illiteracy free”. Knowing this to be untrue, the mayor of Machiques resisted, but gave in to pressure, according to Jesús Vilorio, who works for Fe y Alegría.

It is not hard to find individuals like Ms Silva who say their lives were changed by Misión Robinson. But the missions have gone hand-in-hand with neglect of schools and hospitals. Mr Rodríguez estimates that Robinson spent $1,000 for each of its literate graduates, compared with around $60 for other literacy schemes in Latin America. At the least, that money could have been better spent.

One would expect such a consensus to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any differently from previous Venezuelan governments -- or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations -- in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor. One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

...official statistics show no signs of a substantial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations. The percentage of underweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period, the percentage of households without access to running water rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of families living in dwellings with earthen floors multiplied almost threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

AI: With 11 years gone and one more to go in the Senate, how do you think back on your time here? Some say you’ve moved from many standard conservative positions to more centrist ones. You think that’s a fair description?

Senator Hagel: It is, and part of it has to do with what I’ve learned about the complexity of most of the issues we face as a society. We’re rarely confronted with easy calls, with a clearly “right” and a clearly “wrong” side. Life generally is not that way. But some people, from both parties, like to live in a world of absolutes, and that has polarized politics and strangled any bipartisan progress. People won’t work toward any kind of compromise when they feel they’re giving up their values, standards and beliefs. It has become clear to me, over the course of my 11 years working in this sausage factory here, that without any consensus on how to behave in order to move our country forward, we’re essentially paralyzed. I’ve moved toward the middle because that’s where I think the effective solutions are.

I’ve also learned to better appreciate the importance of personal relationships in how things work here. I’ve seen this President of the United States establish virtually no personal relationships, and it has cost the country. His position has been, “It’s either my way or the highway, because I’m the Decider.” But when you don’t have the lubricant of personal relationships in a democratic government—any form of government, really, but especially a two-party democracy—the gears will lock up, and the system will break down. That’s what has happened, and both sides are to blame.

It’s a very distressing dynamic, but I think the next president will understand that and act on that. Better personal relationships will form, and we’ll see a bipartisan cabinet, among other changes. It’s not a matter of choice, because the challenges facing this country are so immense that we can’t afford another four years of paralysis.