Rant: Why Bono should run the World Bank
6 Mar 2005 by Paul Davies
Upon hearing the news that the permanently sun-glassed, wannabe-Bob-Geldof, U2 frontman Bono was being championed as a candidate to take over the helm at the World Bank, my reaction was, amid convulsions of hysterics, one of mild despair: a "how much more insane can this crazy world get?"However, once the initial frenzy had died away, I realised just what a splendid idea it could prove to be.
Thanks to their uniform bungling of just about every major economic crisis and desperate situation of the last decade, highlighted so ably by Joseph Stiglitz, among others, the World Bank has a global image problem to rival even Michael Howard's. This does as much to hinder global economic development as the Bank's startlingly standardized "rescue" packages.
Bono can solve this at the drop of a comedy Irish hat.
Furthermore, if there was one man you thought could bring some entertainment back to the soporific world of politics, it would've been the outspoken, genetically-modified action hero that is Arnie. You would, however, have been wrong. Arnie appears to be taking things far too seriously; the inconsiderate Austrian Gubernator.
Appointing a rock star as president of the most important economic institution in the world has to be worth a try on the entertainment count alone.
It is not just rock 'n' roll that Bono has to offer, there's a serious point too.
Being an artist, Bono has enough time on his hands to actually learn about what is going on, he doesn't need to come up with the solutions, he just needs to highlight the problems effectively and from a position of power, free from the trammels of being a politician. The proper economists at the Bank, of which there are presumably quite a few, can do the sums later.
Behind the glasses ticks a brain already au fait with the problems facing the developing world, Africa especially. Bono led the Drop the Debt campaign in 2000 and in 2002 he co-founded Debt, AIDS and Trade in Africa. More recently he made Tony Blair feel small by stealing the show at a Labour Party conference and being more chummy with Gordon than the proud former member of Ugly Rumours.
Fair enough, he flirts with being an insufferably pretentious arse on an annoyingly regular basis, and some of his albums have been questionable to say the least, but everyone can agree that appointing Bono would be markedly better than another middle-of-the-road American neo-con in a pin-stripe suit, whose ideas are as likely to be focused on their benefits package as they are the genuine plight of the world's poor. Bono's pleadings may border on the excruciating, but they do convey a real passion for the task.
Rightly or wrongly, the power of celebrity cannot be underestimated in the current shallowness of our culture: Bono is certain to make a difference.
