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A Small Sacrifice to Help Save the World
Even with the recession, a middle-class American lives like Louis XIV compared to the destitute villagers of the third world
The gods of publishing must have had a good laugh when they arranged for philosopher Peter Singer to bring out The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
in the middle of the worst global economic crisis since the Great
Depression. First worlders have a moral obligation to give away
thousands of dollars - thousands! - a year of personal income to
eradicate third world poverty? Right. Even when Americans had jobs and
401(k)s, they weren't exactly emptying their wallets for the 1.4
billion people who live in absolute destitution - $1.25 a day or less -
in the developing world. How much harder to get people to give when
money is tight, so many are broke and even those who are doing all
right are worried and afraid for their future.
Even today, though, as Singer would be the first to remind us, an ordinary middle-class American lives like Louis XIV compared to the destitute villagers and slum dwellers of Africa, Asia and elsewhere around the globe. Singer can sound a bit puritanical when he scoffs at our outlays on $4 lattes, restaurant meals, concerts, movies, that second glass of wine we don't really want and the $600 worth of clothes in their closet that women supposedly haven't worn for a year. Bottled water comes in for special scorn. His point, though, isn't that we should forgo all pleasure but that we have more disposable income than we think we do - enough to save the lives of many people. If you put it like that - hmm, do I go out for pie or vaccinate ten children? - the answer is pretty clear.
Singer suggests that those in the bottom half of the top 10% - those who make between $105,001 and $148,000 - give 5% of their income, with graduated increases for those who make more. In other words, a person who made $147,000 would give $7,350, leaving him a comfortable $139,650 to live on. If the nearly 15 million people in the top 10% followed his proposal, they would generate $471bn for the third world poor. If those below gave just 1% of their income, the total would increase to $510bn. If the rest of the developed world followed suit, the total would be eight times what the United Nations estimates is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals for global health, education, employment, gender equality and so on by 2015.
How likely is it that people will even take up the challenge? Hard times can make people cling to what they have, but they can also make people think differently. There's more to life than bottled water, after all. The hyper-consumption that was a fun spectator sport for so many during flush times - remember Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? - no longer looks so amusing today. People hate hate hate Bernie Madoff, a criminal, but they also hate hate hate Merrill Lynch's John Thain and his $35,000 commode, Citibank's Sandy Weill and his corporate jet and all those Wall Streeters with their multimillion-dollar bonuses - the very people who just yesterday represented the acme of human aspiration and the generators of that rising tide that was going to lift all boats.
There's a lot of rage and spite and schadenfreude floating about against the privileged - just ask former Self editor in chief and best-selling author Alexandra Penney, who lost her life savings to Madoff and made the mistake of writing in the Daily Beast and elsewhere expecting sympathy because she had to fire the maid, sell her vacation home and, after thirty years of riding in taxis, ask a friend how to use a MetroCard. Never mind that she was the victim of a conman who fooled far shrewder financial minds; most commentators thought she was "greedy" for investing with Madoff and richly deserved her downfall.
The skewed values of the boom years - which I realize were only boom years for some - extend far beyond the corporate world. They corrupted the non-profit world too: the million-dollar galas that raised a million dollars, the college presidents and NGO heads paid like CEOs of major corporations. I stopped donating to the New York Public Library when it gave its president and CEO Paul LeClerc a several-hundred-thousand-dollar raise so his salary would be $800,000 a year. Writing my modest check to the Friends of the Library made me feel pathetic, like one of the Southern Italian peasants in Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli who gave Christmas presents to the local landowners instead of the other way around. If the library needed money, why didn't it start by asking LeClerc to give back, say, half a million dollars a year? That would buy an awful lot of books - or help pay for raises for the severely underpaid librarians who actually keep the system going.
And LeClerc's case, though egregious, is part of a trend: a few minutes clicking around on charitynavigator.org will turn up lots of salaries in the $400,000-and-over range. The usual justification is that you need to pay humongous salaries to get the best people, but I don't believe it. There are lots of "best people" out there. If a Wall Streeter won't take a pay cut to do some good in the world, the heck with him. Nobody needs to make $800,000 a year. That's sixteen times the median household income.
Now that middle-class Americans are getting mad about inequality here at home instead of just getting mad at poor people, can the feeling be extended to the far greater inequalities between global North and South? What would that take? I'm not as sanguine as Singer that philanthropy can turn the world around: we need to look at trade policies, debt, financial regulation and labour laws as well. Obama's budget reportedly doubles foreign aid, but how much of that will go to client states like Israel and Egypt, and how much to build clinics in Liberia and Cambodia?
It's all very well to be outraged by John Thain and his ilk, but to the world's poor billions, Thain is us.
25 Comments so far
Show AllKatha,Brilliant commentary.I remember reading the salary and perks of the director of a huge charity my company sponsored, and promptly dropped out of contributing.
As you mention, the trend in the last decade or two has been basically upper management loots the company they head, taking astronomical salaries and bonuses, with no actual connection to their performance, which is quite often poor, or driven by short term illusory benefit cost cutting frenzies that make the bottom line look good for a quarter or two.
One thing that I hope emerges out of this financial collapse is a new generation of managers that stress fiduciary responsibility, fair compensation that is performance driven, organization of companies that treat their workers fairly, and hire for the long term, etc..
So say I wanted to donate two thousand dollars a year, where would I put it knowing that the money is going to help people who need help?
I do Doctors without Borders,they seem to be first on the scene and operate in areas too dangrous for most groups.
I think the christian organization that gives breeding pairs to farmers to kickstart livestock herds is good.
Also microloan organizations make alot of sense.
Ray Berthiaume
Heifer Internaional is the group that gives livestock to villagers who must share their offspring (livestock, that is) with their neighbors. They are headquartered in neighboring Arkansas. My children have had wonderful experiences with them. Memphis Ray
Funny, I had never heard of them before and just got a magazine from them today, unsolicited. Thanks for the personal experience. I was wondering if their activities would be good for my grandchildren.
Joe
Our country has been taken over by greed, encouraged by the previous selfish administration, who cared only for themselves and their cronies in the big business world. It has been a spreading sickness that has nearly ruined our own country, as people take their cues from their so-called leaders. They claimed to represent "values" which is a great buzzword, but means nothing to many of those using it. We have a chance now to gradually turn that poisonous strategy around with a new administration that really has a concern about people that need help, rather than keeping it all for themselves. Our country has to go back to the philosophies of previous generations of doing an honest day`s work for an honest day`s pay if we are to survive as a great nation.
Sioux Rose
The economic model that is orchestrated by Wall St is the worm eating away at the apple. There is the mentality encouraged at insurance houses that seek ways to cut persons off from benefits; and there's a similar mentality that BETS on what corn or wheat should sell for; and as a result of the "bidding game" drives up prices ARTIFICIALLY with dire impact to impoverished third world citizens. Between NAFTA and trade policies, domestic subsidies acted to unbalance the scales of just transactions so that indigenous popuations turned away from growing staple crops to feed their own in pursuit of luxury cash crops sold to other richer lands.
Charity is like watering a desert. With wealth being ENGINEERED to increasingly aggregate upwards, and so little left for so many, some kind of "peasants' revolution" is imminent. The lifestyles of the "winners" open the royal gates to more and more lackeys and persons willing to sell their souls for fancy trinkets, a process that calls for their willfully turning their backs on morally sound principles and practices, not to mention kicking dirt in the faces of those whose interests they should be serving. With so much corrupted, the very pyramid is inverted and CANNOT remain as thus. A COLLAPSE is occuring, and like Humpty Dumpty's fall, the pieces will never again fit back into the corrupted places the elites kept them in.
With all that being said, there is much reason to be generous with what we have. When Christ purportedly shared the fish and loaves, in the process of sharing, the bounty multiplied. On a personal basis, I have often found that when I was at my lowest ebb financially, the simple act of sharing or giving to another, opened "the flow."
Katha,
You should have seen the way I was battling quite a few self-centered and self-righteous rightwing minded scumbags such as tnmoderate, TXProgressive, and freedomcorpse on the issue of single payer on this site. I hate to tell you this but these are the kind of people I and countless others with a good heart have to put up with everyday. Nothing's gonna change until we can win the war against self-righteous fascism that has infected this country since the 1960s and taking off full steam in the 1980s. I admit that I used to be one when I joined the army to fight in Vietnam but learned my lesson the hard way when I lost my limbs. I also notice on most of the rightwing blogs and outlets that people engage in fake talks about helping the poor but when it comes to policies, they go out of their way to support policies that bring about all this poverty and suffering that could have been avoided in the first place. These rightwingers are like the pols who pretend nicety of planting a "tree" at the expense of burning down an entire forest.
Yeah, and I bet you lived on rice for years, and used newspaper for toilet paper. I'm so sorry for you.
It happens more than you may think.
Joe
"Never said I was opposed to single payer."
But you posted more than enough to prove that you were.
"I asked you how you're going to pay for it, and how much it's going to cost, and who is going to make the rationing decisions. Satisfactory answers to all those questions and I'll be at the front of the line supporting it."
I already answered that all through my posts but I see we can't find any common ground here.
"I'm all for helping the "poor". Helping them get the skills and make the good choices they need to help themselves."
Look man. That's great and I'm proud of you. You just have to understand that no one can do it alone and that when we're in a society where we're stuck with bad policies that bring about all this poverty against those whose fault isn't their own, we have to understand that even our charities are gonna mean NOTHING to them.
"I most likely grew up "poorer" than you have ever been or will ever be. I've gone to bed hungry, I've watched my single mother work 3 jobs to feed us, I saw my father die from his war injuries"
I'm sorry to hear about the trouble your life has been put through. I myself served in Vietnam, lost my limbs, and nearly my life. However, I pulled out of my former pro-war status and realized that dragging others into one's suffering only hurts oneself. I don't believe in supporting policies that puts more of our sweetheart youth in harm's way. It doesn't matter whether or not you grew up poorer than I did. What matters is what you learned from it and unfortunately, your posts indicate that you've been brainwashed into the "I got mine, screw you, nanana booboo !" mentality and have thus learned nothing from your suffering. If your mother was reading all this, given what she went through, I could see her benefitting from single payer healthcare and I think she'd be angry at you for complaining about your tax dollars going towards single payer which would help pay for her healthcare when she needs it. No middleman or extra overhead fees and paperwork. If you went to bed hungry for a great deal of your life, it's amazing that you haven't learned that this is the result of privatizing everything over the last 30 years if not 50. Now I don't know you and up until recently, I didn't know your plight that you've been through. However, this does not give you any legitimate reason to belittle the plight of others by opposing long term policies that are constructive and could alleviate the poverty of more people. If you lost your job and were still struggling to find another one only to find one that offers little to none in healthcare benefits, wouldn't you have at least taken even a few minutes to compare and find out the actual costs of single payer vs privatized care and realize that single payer is sorely needed? Healthcare is as much of a god given right as guns and life.
It makes me sad to hear a disabled veteran and a someone with the scars of a poor childhood fighting. You, we, are all on the bad end of the enormous economic inequality that has developed here.
The fact is that all of us already pay a lot of money in taxes that should be used to help those that need it. Since health care and education are so expensive, we have additional indirect taxes in having to pay for it individually, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy. In most of the industrialized world that is what taxes are used for - so people can focus on education and staying well, not on how in the world they will ever pay for it. Here it is a point of worry. What if someone in the family gets a serious illness? How will I pay for higher education?
Instead our money is used in enormous amounts for wasteful things - finance charges, to bail out speculators, for war contracts. Our pay is constrained so CEO's can get high salaries, perks and bonuses. We see waste, greed, fraud and lack of accountability all around us.
So even those of us who have jobs and a place to live are feeling insecure about providing for necessities. We are in a position of digging into our limited money to help those in need. I get so many things in the mail and online asking for money that I cannot possibly respond to all, even when I really want to.
We should not be fighting with each other over scraps. We should be fighting so that the money we work for is used to help the old, the sick. Also, that our tax money go into positive things that will help people get to work and take care of the earth, like clean energy, green jobs, health care. If we felt more secure ourselves, we would be more generous.
The key to this, in my opinion, is peace. We should play a more positive role in the world instead of sacrificing our own good and killing others on behalf of the greedy energy-finance-military companies that have brought us so far down. If we did that we could easily have single payer and as a nation actually save money on health by cutting out the parasitic middleman. We could be giving free higher education, possibly in return for service.
If we develop clean energy here, then we will not have to spend money to attack and devastate countries to get energy. We could be giving money to countries to develop local agriculture and clean drinking water. That money would then promote friendship in the long run instead of serving as a recruiting campaign for those who resent our violent invasions and occupations.
Meanwhile, since this is not happening yet, we should give up something we want if we possibly can and send the money to people who really need it. $10 has a very different meaning to me or to someone very poor. (I know this in my bones because like tnmoderate I watched my mother slave in a smelly sweatshop for $50 a week for many years and we were often hungry.)
Joe
Joe, you're absolutely correct. The truth is we have to connect the issues if we are to see the picture. I understand tnmoderate misunderstood me on another topic when I related reckless war spending to lack of funding for public healthcare and I've met a lot like him in my life time. Some people think we're asking for "utopia" which we're not. All we're asking for is sanity and fairness. All this "greed is good" and "joining the war is patriotic" is ruining us and even those of us who aren't directly affected are being pushed closer to it. I don't want to fight tnmoderate but perhaps try and help snap him out of his madness. I'm always happy to help others and enlighten them to thinking in a better frame of mind. It's a crazy world but we're not ready to give up correcting this insanity.
While I reject the notion that private acts of charity can offset the widespread injustices and inequities that are inherent in capitalism, I believe that in the face of the immediate increase in global suffering we are now facing, each of us can contribute something to its alleviation. However, we must not confuse limited and individual acts of compassion and giving as susbstitutes for political action. Ultimately, this system of institutionalized greed must fall before there can ever be widespread alleviation of poverty and suffering.
Private charity is ok and all but it too has its limits. See, if I support a policy that supports massive destruction, then that limited charity ain't gonna make a difference. Why not support public policies that don't destroy like bulldozers? At least then, private charity will actually have a value for a change.
Riding on everyone's coattails of comments in the prior 5 or 6 posts, I just wanted to add my 2 cents. It's about the No Child Left behind wave, I work in elementary and high school in a small, rural, poor, Mid-west district where teachers are some of the better compensated folks around here. I am constantly butting heads with them and the administration who are trying to "institute measures to counteract the effects of childhood poverty on their test scores." I have re- iterated over and over "How about eliminating the effects of childhood poverty by eliminating childhood poverty, then ALL its effects will be mitigated." I ALWAYS get dumbfounded stares.
I remember my days when I used to be a substitute professor back in the 1990s long before NCLB kicked in. I was battling professors on teaching in general. Unlike most professors, I actually wanted to help students learn and enjoy computer science rather than work on a fail-as-many-students-as-possible set of orders. Luckily, because more students came to my defense and wanted me to help them learn some more, I couldn't be fired. I eventually left as soon as the department found ways to slowly marginalize me out and then leave. I did get a chance to visit the school and it went back to worse in the CS dept. I'm afraid the blind-thinking syndrome has gotten worse. Good luck out there.
Also send them our old computers and get them online. They need education, communication and information to help them help themselves.
Being hungry sucks..
"clicking around on charitynavigator.org will turn up lots of salaries in the $400,000-and-over range."
These charities snooker the people by suggesting we look at the "glass half full", i.e. look at the positive they do and ignore the negative side of their operations. So someone dumps horse turds in your soup and you're supposed to ignore that and enjoy the potatoes. We really need to give up the "glass half full" argument and consider appyling the hippocratic oath toward all enterprises to the degree they affect people: "drop NO horse turds".
"The usual justification is that you need to pay humongous salaries to get the best people, but I don't believe it."
On the enterprise size/power curve, the performance peak is at around 100 man-powers so anything above that should be axed. On the personal income curve, peak fulfillment happens between one and two times subsistence income. So axed everything above that. 90% of the world's problems are caused by elites and the solution is to limit enterpreise size and asset ownership, ideally to ten man-powers on average. There is no debating this. It's practicaly a law of nature.
"There are lots of "best people" out there."
The potential of the people is mind-boggling. Free them from elite oppression and you will see productivity, prosperity and stability like never before.
Is there any role left for elites in this society? We know their enterprises are about 75% bogus. We simply don't need 'em.
"clicking around on charitynavigator.org will turn up lots of salaries in the $400,000-and-over range."
These charities snooker the people by suggesting we look at the "glass half full", i.e. look at the positive they do and ignore the horse turds. So someone dumps horse turds in your soup and you're supposed to ignore that and enjoy the potatoes. We really need to give up the "glass half full" argument and consider applying the Hippocratic oath toward ALL enterprises to the degree they affect people: "drop NO horse turds".
"The usual justification is that you need to pay humongous salaries to get the best people, but I don't believe it."
On the enterprise size/power curve, the performance peak is at around 50 man-powers so anything above that should be axed. On the personal income curve, peak fulfillment happens between one and two times subsistence income. So axe everything above that. 90% of the world's problems are caused by elites and the solution is to limit enterprise size and asset ownership, ideally to ten man-powers on average. There is no debating this. It's practically a law of nature.
"There are lots of "best people" out there."
The potential of the people is mind-boggling. Free them from elite oppression and you will see productivity, prosperity and stability like never before, and an end to hunger, oppression, and war. Is there any role left for elites in this society? We know their enterprises are about 75% bogus. We simply don't need 'em. Flatten the hierarchy! End the class war aggression! You can help by shifting all of your exchange/association away from the elites and toward your local community.
I'm an American doctor practicing and teaching critical care medicine, caring for Bangladesh's poorest slum dwellers, and it was another of Singer's books, How Are We to Live: Ethics in an Age of Self Interest that motivated me to leave my comfortable life in the US and come to the developing world. It turned out not to be an act of self-sacrifice; I'm happier than I was before.
There is a lot each of us can do, and it's not just in consumer behavior or economics. It's in changing the dominant memes in American society, challenging the consumerism, narcissism, militarism, environmental irresponsibility and acceptance of the status quo that lie at the roots of the world's major problems.
We can collectively make big changes by individually doing small things, changing one mind on one issue at a time. As Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men [sic] to do nothing."
Thank you.
Joe
I'm pretty sure Katha knows better than to imagine poverty and hunger can be ended by a lot of individual philanthropy, and shame on her if she don't.
Poor countries are poor because they are made poor on purpose by global capital, represented by the world bank, the imf and the wto, that is u.s. "free trade" economic policies. So it is that, for one example, Haiti is forced to buy cheap (because subsidized) rice from the u.s. So the Haitian rice farmers are wiped out, and must then move to cities where they eat mud pies. this is not a figure of speech. mud is a staple of poor Haitians' diet. And get this- after impoverishing Haiti to this desperate level of total hunger, the world bank is demanding that Haiti fork over millions of dollars in what they say is "debt" these starving people owe to the fabulously rich u.s. bankers.
this is not to say no one should give money- I do it myself as much as i can. the best way to do it is to find small, local people who know what they are doing, rather than huge famous NGOs. MADRE is one big outfit, but they work through small local groups in the countries where they operate. But it may take some digging to find the best way to give.
meanwhile- i don't know how effective this is, but it's free- click on the hungersite every day when you open your computer
http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
I am very curious. What does 700 billion dollars of our defense (offense excuse me) budget buy now a days besides alot of congressmen? Instead of the killing it would seem to me the charity of the U.S. should be to help those countries we have helped to destroy. The next natural disaster why not attack it like we did Iraq? Planes with food instead of bombs and DR.s and Nurses and water desalination stations and all the help that this great country can throw into helping HUMANS survive.