"The room just erupted in spontaneous applause, very similar to what you hear at Democratic Party dinners when somebody mentions the Poor."
- Dave Barry
There is a tedious self-righteousness to people who bring up The Poor no matter what conversation you start. "Student test scores are improving!" (Yes, but the gap between rich and poor has widened.) "I helped shovel my neighbor's walk!" (That's nice in a petty bourgeois way, but it means nothing to widows and orphans.) "New technologies are going to make our lives longer, more productive, and more fun!" (Sure they are, for a bunch of rich white people.)
Why can't these Poverty Nazis, with their one-issue monotony and their brash italic fonts, give it a rest? We all admire Mother Teresa, but we can't all be Mother Teresa. Let's just try to follow the Golden Rule, write an annual check to the United Way, and let it go at that.
The above two paragraphs represent a point of view I hear all the time. But my purpose in this essay is to convince you of the exact opposite. Poverty deserves more of our time and attention—at both the national and the personal level—than it currently gets. Most of the other issues we worry about, ranging from gay marriage to our angst-ridden relationships, really are superficial and even irrelevant by comparison. Real poverty puts everything else in perspective.
The following scenario comes from my brother, Gary.
You are standing in line for a movie. It's a hot day, and you are nursing a cold bottle of juice. Suddenly, the young woman in front of you faints from the heat. She lies there, not moving.
A doctor (conveniently also on line) performs a quick examination. "This girl is going to die if we don't get her a drink, right now." If you give up your juice, it won't kill you—but you will be awfully uncomfortable for the next half-hour. On the other hand, if you keep your juice, the girl lying on the ground will die.
I have proposed this scenario to a lot of people, and none of them has said "I would probably just drink up, because I really hate that hot sweaty feeling." All of them would offer the juice to save the dying girl. (Don't quibble about whether juice will really save her, or your own dangers of dehydration, etc...this is a moral dilemma.)
Now, let's change the scenario a bit—the dying girl is not right in front of you. Instead, she is a block away. You are still the only available source of juice. (Why? Again, don't argue.) Does your ethical obligation change because she is a block away? OK, let's put her ten miles away and try again...
How hypothetical is that scenario? Are you really allowing someone to die every time you drink a Gatorade? And, does physical distance really have so much to do with it?
It turns out physical distance has everything to do with it. In the U.S., if a baby is born with low birth weight, our medical system spends—on average—an extra $550,000 to save that baby.1 The parents usually don't have that money, of course, so it comes from you and me (in the form of taxes and insurance).
In Africa, if a child gets malaria, it's a death sentence. A $10 mosquito net can prevent the infection. But for millions of infants, the $10 never shows up, and the baby dies.2
It doesn't make any sense, but it is a daily reality—and when I watch my own reactions, it's not hard to see why. A middle-class American woman, someone just like my wife, loses a baby: that's an unspeakable tragedy. Another African baby dies of malaria: that's a statistic. Watch your own emotional response as I throw a few numbers at you.
Because, if I do accept any responsibility at all, here's what those numbers tell me. They tell me that every time I stop at Starbuck's, I could have instead fed eight children. This is Gary's movie-juice scenario in real life: Venti Decaf Mocha, or starving child? Hmm, let me think...hold the whipped cream, please.
What just happened? I'm a nice guy, helpful to my friends, courteous to strangers, and I never push baby ducks over backward in the water. Why did I just choose a luxury coffee over a real need?
One reason I've already discussed: the starving children are so far away from me, and so different from the people I know, that I can't think of them as "real people." Their hopes, fears, and dreams might be similar to mine at the profoundest level, but their day-to-day concerns are completely different. If we were in a room together, even with a translator, we wouldn't find much to talk about. So it just doesn't feel the same as finding out that my neighbor's adorable little boy is terminally ill.
Another reason is scope. If I thought I could skip coffees for a year and solve the problem of hunger, I would go for it. But the reality is, all my time and money for the rest of my life wouldn't make a perceptible dent in the problem. It's a lot easier to vote for Obama and hope he fixes it all.
On a related note, there doesn't seem to be any "right amount" to give. Suppose I give up all my luxury coffees, never go to the movies, and donate all that money. Is that enough? I don't really need a microwave oven: another life saved. I can live without cablevision: that may save a life per month. Away go the cell phones: I'm saving lives by the dozens. (Not video game lives: real people, real children, real mothers, just like my neighbor!) Have I done enough yet? No, I can still do more...
No amount of sacrifice seems sufficient. The obvious solution is to avoid going down this road in the first place. I'll just vote for Obama and...did I say that already?
On this issue, like so many others, I do not practice what I preach and I do not live according to my own beliefs.
I live a lifestyle that is comfortable to the point of extravagant. I send my kids to a private school, as well as piano and other outside lessons, summer camps, and other pricey enrichment opportunities. I live in a pretty big house with heating and AC, TV and stereo, and three computers all hooked up to the wireless network that links us into the high-speed internet. We spend hundreds of dollars a month eating out. It's the middle-class American dream, spiced up by a liberal voting record and an annual check to my favorite charity.
So the point of this essay is not to tell you that you should live like me. As much as anything, the point is to explain the deep sense of hypocrisy that I feel about my entire life. Imagine a science fiction story where a small group of extremely wealthy people live in a domed building with high walls. Inside the wall are beautiful gardens, opulent baths, vines full of grapes, and well-dressed people who are unfailingly nice to each other. Right outside the walls are teeming masses of dirty, hungry people, clawing at the walls, dying in gutters.
Sound a bit like ancient Rome? It sounds to me like the modern world. Over a billion people today live in slum conditions, without water or sanitation, public infrastructure or security of tenure.5 They are cold when it's cold outside, hot when it's hot outside, wet when it rains, and hungry all the time. Try to imagine, for a moment, that among those people is your mother, or your brother, or your best friend, or your child—or all four. Imagine them with absolutely no hope of improving their lives: they are willing to work hard, willing to do absolutely anything, but their children are still going to starve and die. And meanwhile, just a block over, people like you and me sip their cappuccinos and worry about their love lives.
Those "one block over" people are not evil. They did not cheat or steal to get where they are, and in fact they work pretty hard to maintain their lifestyle. And many of them are nice to each other, and have all the best intentions regarding the people in the slum. But they're still wrong.
Sources
1http://karengrepin.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-life-of.html
2http://www.malarianomore.org
3http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats
4http://www.wfp.org/aboutwfp/funding/contribute.html
5http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-whelan190204.htm. While this particular source is socialist and therefore biased, the statistic comes from the UN, and I have seen a number of independent reports corroborating that number.
COMMENTS
I don't remember presenting that particular example to you, but it is a mildly altered version of an example that I got from Peter Singer. I'm pretty sure in the original there was a child drowning in a fountain and your options were to let him die or to save him at the cost of ruining your nice suit.
Needless to say I agree with everything you say in here, including my own glaring failure to live up to that ideal. What you don't really talk about is the in-between option. Yes, I think a logical analysis leads me to conclude that a truly moral life would be one that I simply can't imagine living. It's easy to go from that conclusion to despair and inaction. Bear in mind, however, that each mother whose child you do save doesn't care whether you are living a life of moral purity in which you save every life that you possibly could. She cares that you made the one choice that saved her child. If you're not going to give everything up beyond the bare necessities, at least think about it next time you want a latte, and put that money aside instead. Each time you go shopping try to think of a few fancy items you could do without, and put that money aside. You may not be achieving the perfect moral life envisioned by Singer, but there will still be a few dozen mothers with healthy children because of you by year's end. Then next year you can try to do just a little bit more.
If reading your essay inspires some other people to move in that direction it may be the most important thing you've put on this site.
Gary
P.S. Singer wrote an article on this topic in the New York Times a few years ago. It's at:
www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=peter%20singer&st=cse
Are you suggesting that those things (especially our personal relationships) aren't important enough relative to global poverty for us to worry about?
Imagine that you're having a fight with your wife, and all of a sudden your neighbor calls and says that his child is lying in the street hit by a car. You rush the child to the hospital and spend all night helping out, consoling your neighbor, running errands and so on. Is the fight with your wife gone? Not necessarily, but it is put into perspective, no matter how important it seemed at the time.
I still don't know your bottom line. Decide how much you should have to spend on yourself and your family (presumably much less than $170K) and give the rest to charity? If you're going to call the people one block over—who at least in their own minds are doing the right thing—wrong, I think you have a responsibility of stating what you think is right.
Similarly, I think most people would agree that global poverty is more important than someone's personal relationship or anything else that's personal to that individual (such as his terminal illness). But what point are you making? Should the individual stop being concerned about himself and focus his attention primarily on global poverty?
If everyone stopped going to Starbucks so that they could send that money to the poor, where would the folks at Starbucks work? Granted, you may want to confirm that coffee ground at Starbucks is Fair Trade Certified and that Starbucks is committed to a policy of equal opportunity employment and pays a fair wage before spending your money there. And you may want to buy your coffee from a locally owned merchant who fits those criteria instead. But I'm not sure you should stop buying your daily coffee.
Well, let's do the math. This is all thumbnail, and the first two facts come from the never-reliable Wikipedia, but I think it's a reasonable thumbnail calculation.
Now, here's the interesting thing. One of my favorite ways to help the poor is "microloans"—I've probably talked to you about them— a one-time loan, repaid with interest, can change the life of a family forever. According to one Web site I found, the average microloan is around $110. So that $9.4 Billion could change the lives of roughly 90 Million families.
You see, this is the mistake I think we all make so naturally, because we have spent all our lives surrounded by incredible affluence. We lose sight of the incredible differences in scale. We miss the fact that almost all of those 172,000 people who were suddenly out of a job would still be in immensely better shape than the really poor people of the world. There just isn't any comparison.
Do you see what I mean? This is one of those (many) things that I see clearly sometimes, dimly at others, but never feel that I am communicating really well. I think if you and I spent a year living in an African slum, we would really get what I am trying to say: even the Americans we think of as "poor" are, for the most part, not even close.
Gary's response is on target for me. The either/or argument leaves out many alternatives that help resolve the sense that "doing nothing" is the inevitable alternative if you can't solve the whole problem. And, yes, I do put my own family first and will because I think that is my first responsibility. But, when its a matter of survival or comfort in a situation where my single action makes all the difference, then that is a fairly clear-cut decision.
I suppose my real thought is that this is not a matter of logical argument and persuasion. People will do what they can do and what they feel led to do in actual situations. Just because I can't solve the problem of poverty in the whole world with my own single action, it doesn't mean that I can't write my congressional representatives and tell them to hang on to that public option in the health care reform bill so that, perhaps, someone in Raleigh, in NC, in the US, won't lose their health care when they get sick or lose a job. And, rather than leaving all this to the individual's inclination of the moment, I do think building into our system of government a legal means for assuring that people are not forced "to do without" essential, basic services is a cause worthy of our energy and efforts, not just our money.
To set up the alternatives as "I can't solve the problem worldwide" so, therefore, "I won't do anything" may just give an excuse to folks who don't want to do anything no matter what.
Your examples do help show the urgency of action. I think setting it up in your essay as an either/or choice undermines the power of the examples and the argument. Just my opinion.
Well, I certainly didn't mean to imply that "if you're not going to be Mother Teresa, you might as well not bother." I'm sorry if it came across that way!
On November 6, I received a response from David Cohen that was so long, I decided to give it its own Web page, instead of burying it here in the comments.
Click here to read David Cohen's response to this essay.
Thanks for your long and thoughtful response, David! You might be surprised by how much of it I agree with. I am not a socialist. I've spent much of my life engaged in the free enterprise system, from running a small business to working at Microsoft, and I'm proud of what I accomplished. I believe that those who advance society should be rewarded, and capitalism does a great job of that. I would never "acquiesce" to your hypothetical aliens (unless they had some really kick-butt weaponry).
Our core disagreement, perhaps, lies in your belief that "staying up all night to help a friend is more meaningful than helping a million people a thousand miles away: what you can do for a million people is a drop in the bucket; what you can do for your friend might be life-changing." That may be so if all you can do for those million people is give them a cookie. But if you can offer them micro-loans that will enable them to start their own businesses, pull themselves out of poverty, and send their children to school, that trumps the friend. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Does it sound like I'm contradicting myself? It doesn't feel that way to me. I do not want to live in a world in which all goods and services are distributed evenly. I do want to live in a world in which everyone who is willing to work hard can expect decent food, shelter, and education. From what little I know of Rawls (or Krugman for that matter), I don't think they would find that terribly out of the ballpark.
Kenny Felder's Essays and Commentaries
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