NBA Diplomacy

by Avi Kupfer,
Pierson College, Yale 2010

A strange phenomenon takes place every year during the final weeks of the professional basketball season. With playoff dreams unrealizable and no hope for salvaging a winning season, the league’s worst teams see their supporters turn against them. Many fans will root against their own losing teams because a poorer record increases the likelihood of their teams drafting higher valued players for the coming season. The National Basketball Association (NBA) lottery system is weighted so that the team with the worst record has the best chance of obtaining the highest draft pick.



The leaders of the least developed countries would make particularly cynical basketball fans. Governments of the world’s poorest nations often downplay—or far worse, hijack—their countries’ performance in a host of development categories. The UN has uncovered high ranking officials in several West African countries encouraging their subordinates to fudge numbers in every category from human development to communications and transportation.

This despicable practice has a perverse logic. The leaders of the developing world have rightly realized that wildly deflated statistics will increase aid contributions from the US and other Western nations. In countries like Sierra Leone, where more than half of the national GDP comes from foreign aid, the stakes are high. The poorest governments run on a steady stream of donations and even the most corrupt officials depend on these perpetual contributions. The result is NBA Diplomacy; diplomacy with a striking similarity to the attitudes of disparaging basketball fans.

Whitewashing official figures for the sake of aid officers is rampant in the developing world and will become the norm without a serious effort to restructure Western aid programs. Duplicitous incentives reward lack of development rather than real progress. This does far more harm than good. The US must hold governments accountable for aid funds and base future donations on tangible growth rather than pitiable development statistics. Not surprisingly, in recent years countries like Ghana, with a relatively small infusion of Western aid, have made the steadiest progress. To curb NBA diplomacy and realize concrete returns on the billions of dollars that the US invests in the developing world, we must strategically motivate governments to strengthen economic infrastructure, improve education, and stamp out corruption. Rewarding real improvement, rather than the lack of it, will make this a reality.