Europeans and Americans sacrifice in order to make the lives of poor Africans better. That’s a picture we all have in our minds about the practice of altruism. Could this ever be anything other than good? Why is it that we focus on the “sacrifices” of Europeans and Americans” rather than upon the lives of Africans whom we seek to make better? What does this say about Americans and Europeans and what does it say about Africans?
First of all have a look at this Der Spiegel interview with African economist James Shikwati.
The reality of aid to Africa says something both good and bad about Europeans and Americans. First, it says that Americans and Europeans are willing to live less well than they could in order to provide a better life to Africans. We are virtuous, willing to sacrifice, that’s good right? Yes, that’s good but the other thing which it says about us is that we don’t really care about the real world effect our aid has upon the Africans whom we seek to help. We focus on the sacrifice which we are willing to make which makes us good persons in our own minds without focusing upon the real world effects of this sacrifice. In order to link our sacrifice to actual good outcomes of the Africans whom we seek to help we would actually have to do a good bit of personal work and this is where we fall down. We will give our money but we won’t give our consistent time and attention in order to see that our money is used in a way which improves African outcomes. We care more about how we feel having made a sacrifice than we care about how the Africans feel after being “helped” by us. We outsource the job of taking care of our neighbors, the Africans. We’re still good people, aren’t we, even if our aid dollars do some real damage to the people who we supposedly want to help by our sacrifice? I’m not so sure. Like the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors, shouldn’t we first seek to do no harm.
But what does this situation say about Africans? Why do they accept the aid if it actually harms them? It says that the Africans who suffer are not the same Africans who have a voice in the acceptance and allocation of aid. Some Africans, of course, are better off by reason of aid, the people in charge, and some people are not better off, the followers and people who lose jobs and who don’t really receive much, if any, benefit from that “aid” anyway. Remember the good intentions of our intervention in Somalia, to see that our aid got to the people and not to the warlords. It says that Africans are not any different than Americans. Those in charge seek to maintain the status quo and those who are not in charge don’t really know how to change that.
I think that this also says something about our recent national election. Americans seem to have voted for a nation where the poor population is helped by the government. I believe that the majority of people who voted for the current Democratic President really want the country to be a place where national sacrifice is somehow connected to bettering conditions for the Americans who are now in poverty or otherwise disadvantaged. The problem is that as a population we really don’t understand how the economy works for us all as an integral whole. We divorce jobs from entrepreneurs. We divorce success from incentive. We divorce work from money. We don’t understand (or apparently even care about) the concept, actually the law, of unintended consequences. We just have no hard headed education in economics even though we are regularly asked to vote about what economic policies to enact through our government. We vote our emotions. We don’t connect good outcomes with good intentions because we don’t understand how and the price of doing so is too high, personal study. We prefer to rely on people we “trust” to study these issues for us and tell us what to think. Can you blame a good hearted people, sorely lacking in economic understanding, for voting for the highest minded altruistic soundbite? Can you blame us for voting to take money from some selfish “rich” or “ultra-rich” people “who don’t really need the money” even though they are not quite sure how, exactly, this will improve the lot of the poor and disadvantaged? What has been a problem for Africa for decades, unintended consequences, will undoubtedly have a similar effect on us here in the U.S. in the wake of the 2012 election. Good intentions are not the same as sound economics. I’m afraid we’ll be finding out how this works and in fact are even now experiencing this reality. I pray that we will learn from our mistakes and make better decisions, as individuals when deciding where to send our aid, and as a population when deciding who to elect, in the future.
Happy New Year.
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