During the Cold War, some Western intellectuals ignored the obvious evidence about the failure of communism and made claims about how wonderful the system was in practice. J K Galbraith infamously claimed that standing on the top of the Berlin Wall it did not matter which way you looked. East Germany was as prosperous as West. The Soviet economy, he said, was superior to the free-market because it fully utilized the productive capabilities of the workforce. Of course, all this was nonsense: communism failed to employ people with the levels of productivity found in freer economies. All communist led to was poverty, bread queues and concentration camps. 100,000,000 people were murdered by communism.

The failure to see the facts is also a trait exhibited by some NGOs. They believe that liberalization is malignant cancer, reducing a country's wealth and increasing poverty. Their hobby horse at the moment is Ghana, which they say is getting poorer and has rising inequality as a result of liberalization over the past 20 years.

There is just one problem with their hobby horse. The evidence clearly shows that Ghana has benefited from liberalization. It has been one the better performing African economies since 1980; in the 1990s was the second-fastest growing West African country. A recent report published by DFID and others (Operationalising Pro-Poor Growth) showed that poverty in has decreased since 1980. Do the NGOs go away and make amends? Do the world's poor get an apology for the NGOs' misguided attacks on policies that have lifted people out of poverty?

Ideology can be a dangerous thing if not corrected and moulded by an appeal to empirical evidence. Many NGOs seem to have a culture of following anecdotal evidence, rather than examining the full picture. Meeting a Ghanaian rice farmer whose produce is worth less because of imports appeals to the ideology that free trade is like slavery. It is easy to believe, after meeting or hearing about such a farmer, that Ghana is getting poorer (without taking into account the effect in the economy as a whole). Such anecdotal evidence can be useful and emotionally-stimulating, but anecdotes alone can be misleading.