And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
(From President Barack Obama’s inaugural address.)
President Obama’s implication that the Bush Administration stinted on foreign aid was the most disingenuous part of his inaugural speech. It may also have been the most depressing. It signals that he is likely to replace one kind of faith-based policy with another, equally blind variety.
President Bush more than quadrupled aid to sub-Saharan Africa. Driven largely by Michael Gerson, Bush’s self-promoting evangelical speech-writer, the Bush Administration undertook the largest government public health effort targeting a single disease in history, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The scale of the commitment is especially surprising, since PEPFAR exclusively targets AIDS abroad, almost all in Africa. The program has already doled out nearly $19 billion in taxpayer dollars since 2003; it will spend $48 billion over the next five years (a sum that includes some side efforts on TB and malaria as well).
PEPFAR was a classic example of Michael Gerson’s religious politics. Gerson specialized in appropriating other people’s money to pursue his own vision of Christian social justice. Anyone who dared to question the propriety of spending scarce taxpayers dollars abroad on a disease that is 100% preventable by behavioral change would be accused of lack of compassion. Only a “collection of shriveled souls,” Gerson wrote of PEPFAR’s few but doughty Congressional opponents, “would be excited by an attack on AIDS treatment.” PEPFAR critics failed to grasp the “nearly universal Christian conviction that government has obligations to help the weak and pursue social justice.”
Americans have bankrolled antiviral drug treatment for some one million infected Africans, and it is a good thing that their suffering has been diminished. Yet despite the billions spent by Western governments each year on preventing AIDS in Africa, the rate of infection has not gone down. It doesn’t necessarily require foreign dollars to lessen AIDS in Africa, it requires above all that men keep their flies zipped up. That applies in the Tenderloin and on Christopher Street as well. But such low-tech change would not allow Gerson to trumpet his role in “a grand, aggressive international compassion that dwarfs the Peace Corps and is unequaled since the Marshall Plan.”
Gerson’s effect on foreign policy was as unmoored from reality as his effect on foreign aid. He encouraged, if not created, Bush’s belief that America has a divinely-inspired duty to spread freedom abroad, including in tribal societies with absolutely no tradition of limited, constitutional government.
President Obama may or may not decrease the influence of religious claims on government. Jim Wallis and, yes, Rick Warren will continue Gerson-esque arguments for foreign aid and domestic war on poverty programs. But even if all religious dimensions are stripped from the foreign aid machine, it will remain just as irrational.
Foreign aid has had zero effect on improving economic growth in Third World countries, as William Easterly has shown in The White Man’s Burden. From 1970 to 1994, 22 African countries received $187 billion in foreign donations, without experiencing any increase in productivity. The countries that have pulled themselves out of poverty have done so by self-generated capitalist activity. Yet despite the total lack of evidence for the efficacy of large-scale foreign assistance, in 2002, Bush and other foreign leaders committed to a preposterous set of foreign aid goals, including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger in the Third World and engineering universal primary school enrollment by 2015. Can the foreign-aid sinkhole get worse under Obama? Yes, it can. The advocates of top-down government assistance, such as Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs, were hardly rebuffed by the Bush Administration, but they are nevertheless undoubtedly salivating at their prospects under the Obama Administration.
Secular Right opposes faith-based thinking, whether religious or secular. The left-wing dogma that the United States is the source of the world’s problems, and the preening Gersonian dogma that the United States has not just an obligation but the capacity to solve those problems, violate reason and evidence, no matter their source.
I’m not sure I take the same conclusion out of that line from the inaugural. He wasn’t saying th U.S. caused the problems of the world, he addressed wealthy nations and asked that they not be indifferent to suffering in other nations. As for the overconsumption of resources, do you think we are living sustainably?
The things this line didn’t mention:
Giving away money or supplies.
Africa
Bush (he was speaking to other wealthy nations)
Faith
The U.S. being the source of the worlds problems.
I can see how you draw the implication, and I’m not saying you are wrong, just that you are putting an awful lot of words in his mouth.
Well said, as usual!
Technology and communications have changed, but how much the world and its people have changed, I’m not sure. Except for the fact that most of the world’s population has far more leisure time than ever before. Is what we spend on that leisure the source of the unsustainable question?
“President Bush more than quadrupled aid to sub-Saharan Africa. ”
Really? Next week will people be saying he quintupled it? I believe the actual increase was in the range of a 56% increase, accounting for inflation. i.e., still an increase he can take credit for, but not even a doubling, let alone a tripling or quadrupling.
What I think Bush deserves the most credit for was agreeing to forgive multilateral debt as part of a G-8 effort.
I really wish “Yes We Can” was “Some People Can.”
I’m with Steel Phoenix. Can you react to what he actually said? E.g. that “We can no longer ignore suffering beyond our borders” or “nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.” Bonus points if you can put it the context of our relationships with, say, China and Zimbabwe.
But the phrase “We can no longer ignore suffering beyond our borders” directly implies that…we have ignored suffering beyond our borders. It cannot mean anything else. So Heather McDonald got it exactly right, in my estimation. Besides, we’ve been here before. The constant drum beat (now as loud in many “conservative” quarters) that we just don’t give enough ignores the question of what exactly is done with the billions that we give.
On the other hand, if we’re going to give money to the Palestinians then any pretense of standards for charity goes right out the window. But surely we can still argue about the effectiveness of such charity.
People, people. Fine-parsing political speeches, looking for hints about policy decisions, is an utterly pointless activity. Politicians will say whatever they think will be sufficiently popular; what they say is not even remotely a reliable guide to what they’ll do.
Relax. It’s not as though we could change the direction of this society anyway — we can at least wait to be outraged by stupid decisions when we have actual evidence they’ve been made and implemented, instead of jumping at shadows.
In previous speeches, Obama has linked general world poverty with national security. He’s gone to the point of saying things like ‘if there’s kid hungry in Asia, we have to act.’ Heather M.’s interpretation is quite correct if taken in context with everything else he’s said.
Relax, election time is over, even religious (disgruntled) democrats know this.
There are many ways to interpret indifference – and I don’t think that reducing things to the amount of money spent is a particularly constructive way to analyze it. Has the money been efficacious? Were the programs ideologically inspired in spite of the real needs being addressed? My hunch is that Bush Et. al. were to a degree indifferent – being more focused on the ideological than the human aspect. My other hunch is that due to those very same factors, compounded by how aid itself is delivered and administrated, we could have done much more with less investment.
@Steel Phoenix
As for the overconsumption of resources, do you think we are living sustainably?
I mean no offense, but I don’t understand what people mean by this slogan. Are you worried that we’ll wake up one day and just run out of resources? Prices mediate between supply and demand. If the supply drops, the price will rise until the demand also drops. I hear people say we’ll run out of oil. This is nonsense, we’ll never run out of oil. As the supply dwindles (if it does) then the price will rise in proportion. A higher price for oil will be the biggest incentive to develop alternative forms of energy, much like the rising price of copper encouraged the development of fiber optics.
These catastrophic theories have been around seemingly forever, see Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, and they persist despite always being categorically wrong in their predictions.
The Gerson quotes in the post are from a WaPo piece that is also archived here.
Don: You still take it out of context. He started the sentence with “And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty” This makes it less a statement that ‘we personally are the cause of the worlds problems’ and more an inclusive statement of ‘wealthy nations should come together and lead by example’.
Frink: I agree when talking about copper. Things like extinction, deforestation, and pollution are another matter. With some things, when a resource nears zero, you can’t really say, ‘well now there is a big demand for that ecosystem, it will recover faster’.
“Prices mediate between supply and demand. If the supply drops, the price will rise until the demand also drops.”
Um… no.
Some demand doesn’t drop off. Oysters were once so plentiful in England that they were considered food for the poor and were rarely eaten by those with resources. Now they’re a luxury item. As their numbers dropped, the nature of the demand changes. Consider also body parts of endangered animals. As the animals become rarer, owning such an item becomes quite expensive, and thus even more of a status symbol. Some poachers even hope that the animal will become extinct, because the loss of all future sources of the parts means the supplies they’ve built up will become vastly more valuable.
Also, our society requires certain resources to be generally available to function. If our supplies of oil were suddenly cut off, our society would collapse, and resources like food would become unavailable for much of the population.
I suppose that counts as a “demand drop”, and it is a self-regulating system. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to avoid that contingency.
@Caledonian
Um… no.”
No, the law of demand is pretty solid. Oysters that were once eaten by the poor are now only enjoyed by the rich. Seems that the demand has indeed dropped. I dare say that there are more poor people than rich people. If you’re interested in things that might violate the law of demand, try looking up the Giffen paradox.
Although I can see your point (likewise Steel Phoenix) that if an animal is hunted to extinction, it can’t come back. Further, if enough animals are hunted to extinction, I could see some type of cumulative effect that destroys ecosystems, but I still have a hard time envisioning a cataclysmic affect on people. We farm most of our food, so I think we’d make it if oysters went extinct, although my quality of life would take a difficult blow. 😉
If our supplies of oil were suddenly cut off
This seems like a big jump from oysters, and I don’t think there’s a connection. If oil were cut off it would have nothing to do with sustainability, but terrorism or an act of God (figuratively) or something. I mean if the entire world was powered by solar cells and the sun was suddenly “cut off” by a volcanic explosion or asteroid impact throwing dust in the stratosphere for years, all the bad things you mention would happen then too. So is the sun a non-sustainable resource?
Foreign aid is a sick joke. China was as poor as Africa in 1980. Today, aside for the current recession, it has had the fastest growing economy in the world and has received relatively little aid over the decades. Also, countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have developed since WWII while receiving little or no aid.
India has receive more aid and has had less economic growth than China. Sub-Saharan Africa has received the most amount of aid over the decades and is the only region of the world that is as poor today as it was, say, in 1965.
It seems to me that a country’s economic growth prospects is inversely proportional to the amount of foreign “aid” it receives. It is logical to conclude the foreign aid does not work and should, therefor, be discontinued.
This isn’t a matter of whether hippies protect enough spotted owls. If polar bears went extinct, I think the effect on your lifestyle would be negligible. People need to stop thinking of environmental damage being worse when it happens at the top of the food chain. When things go bad it will be a sudden cascade from the bottom up; something like a cyanobacteria bloom killing large sections of ocean, or a small temperature rise killing off all the photosynthesizing cells of corals.
The environment is like the economy, which looked ok to most people a year ago. What has really changed since then? Government put a halt to subprime lending, thats about it. The banks exist at the bottom of the food chain. Businesses, consumers, and home buyers feed from them.
Africa and progress: I put a video up on one of my blogs from a TED Talk about Africa and data visualization. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it: http://www.zogdo.com/innovation/data-visualization/
“Seems that the demand has indeed dropped.”
No, the demand has greatly increased — what was once scorned is now highly desired as a status symbol.
It’s the available quantities of the resource that have dropped. What was once a viable staple is now a scarce luxury.
@Caledonian
Okay Caledonian, I did some reading and you seem to be referring to what economists call Veblen goods:
I will grant you that oysters in Britain may be a theoretical Veblen good, but this seems to have very little to do with sustainability. Like I said, if the oysters go, I’ll be sad, but society will survive.
I agree that Heather is reading a great deal into these words. There are plenty of other ways to relieve suffering in foreign countries. One of them might be diplomatic efforts to end conflicts that destroy societies and preclude meaningful economic development. How do we know that’s not what Obama meant?
“I will grant you that oysters in Britain may be a theoretical Veblen good, but this seems to have very little to do with sustainability.”
That’s *stupid*.
“Like I said, if the oysters go, I’ll be sad, but society will survive.”
1) The destruction of healthy oyster beds means that the oceanic ecology surrounding Britain will be negatively impacted. Oysters do a great deal of filtering — without them, waters will be turbid and full of organic material. This damage to the ecology will impact other aquatic resources in subtle ways.
2) The loss of a plentiful calorie source is a serious harm. We can be opposed to serious harms even if they wouldn’t directly lead to the complete destruction of society.
3) Lots and lots of resources follow the same pattern. If they’re used foolishly, they diminish, eventually to the point of destruction. That’s a self-regulating process — wise use leads to long-term profit, foolish use leads to extinction and loss of long-term profit. But we don’t want to suffer the penalty for foolishness at all.
“Self-regulating” doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about the system. It means we DO have to worry, because if we screw up we’ll pay the price for it.
That’s *stupid*.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have granted you that oysters were a potential Veblen good, because they’re not. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
Geez, is your Uncle an oyster or something?
2) The loss of a plentiful calorie source is a serious harm. We can be opposed to serious harms even if they wouldn’t directly lead to the complete destruction of society.
Strawman. Who has claimed otherwise? Like I said, I find oysters very tasty, no offense to your Uncle, I’m all for saving them.
Lots and lots of resources follow the same pattern.
Animal resources follow this pattern, not oil, corn, iron, timber, copper, water, wheat, etc…
Basically, you seem to be advocating preserving endangered species. That’s great and I’m on board. Send me a bumper sticker and I’ll put it on my Prius: “Save the Oysters!”
I don’t really have a Prius, but my car does get over 40 mpg, that’s pretty good.