Hi Rex,
Much as I hate to say it, and believe me I do hate to say it, "we" have already accepted the moral position to let children die off in a Malthusian fashion. Let me expand on this one....Originally Posted by Rex Brynen
Foreign aid and development work can, indeed, lower the infant mortality rate; no questions there. In every case that I am aware of where this has happened, however (including Western Europe), the birth rate has only gradually dropped over a 60-70 period. I think we both agree on that and on the existence of a culture lag.
That's all fine and dandy, but what it tends to mean is that the increase in population brought about as a result of the reduction in infant mortality has several, macro-level demographic effects. First, it creates a population skewed to the lower age groups, so your population pyramid is quite wide. Second, infrastructural changes, say along the lines of the great sanitation engineering projects of the mid-19th century in Europe, also drop the mortality rate amongst all ages thereby significantly increasing the number of child bearing age people and their life expectancies.
This increase in general population leads to another cultural strain that shows up in many areas but, especially, in the economic divisions of labour. For example, male and female cultural expectations on types of employment, expectations on childrens employment, etc. This produces another round of cultural, hmmm, let's call it "negotiation" that actually tends to last longer than the family size one does. When you say something like
you are quite right; it can, but only at the expense of increased cultural instability centered around gender and age grade roles in the society.
The problem comes about, in part, because of that culture lag issue. "Education", in the West, is a status marker that has managed to retain some of its equation with probable economic benefits despite the continued devaluation of educational credentials (in terms of actual "learning) of the past, say 100 years. For the US and Canada at least, we were incredibly lucky that the boom in educational opportunities also coincided with an economic boom and, when that started to go sour (late 1968 actually, but it doesn't really hit until the 1970's), educational attainment became a gatekeeper function that made it a necessary albeit insufficient condition for achieving economic success.
The same is not true in all cultures and/or societies. In crass, Keynesian terms, what is the value of a "product" when the supply is rapidly inflated? It tends to devalue the product, which is what we have seen happening time and time again with degrees. Now, the key here lies in one distinction that is not usually made, and that is the content of the education rather than the marker of the education, which is why I say that "education" is not a good marker. You can improve literacy rates, which I am all in favour of, but what are they going to read? School attendance? I'm sure that you have had students who just can't make the grade no matter how often they show up for class, I know I have.
But let me return to this content point for a moment since it is the foundation of a lot of my concerns. Our Western belief that education and economic success are tied together creates a set of expectations in our cultures, the current incarnation of which is the Gen X "sense of entitlement". What happens when the expectations run head on into the realities? The Gen X phenomenon is being met by a rather large deployment of "training seminars" for managers to learn to deal with Gen X'ers; it's a multi-million dollar business. How about what happens when these expectations hit in a society which does not have the same socially acceptable options (no, I'm not going to go into Merton's strain theory, but it's a good model).
You mentioned remittances, and that is certainly one option that reduces social strain. You get people who develop enough competence and/or the right set of requirements to enable them to succeed in an extra-social economy. They leave, thereby reducing the local strain on the social fabric, and yet at the same time they send hard money back into the local economy. It's a win-win situation in some ways.
But it has a cost at the local level by draining off local talent and, to some degree, capital. Over a decent time interval, say 50 years or so, it can work out very well as 2nd gen members of the diaspora communities go to their "native" country and invest in it - American Samoa is actually a great example of that. On the down side, during those 50+ years or so, it actually reduces the talent in the country as well as hardening the social structure.
That's not where I'm going with the argument. What I'm trying to argue is that there are consequences for social choices and that one of the primary trade-offs is stability vs. dynamism/change. I'm not marking a moral or ethical argument.
Agreed, and that is, IMHO, part of the problem. Let me try and pull that out in evolutionary terms and at a very general level (i.e. not Haiti specific)....
When "we" decided to get out of the imposed governance business (aka de-colonization plus an entire attitude / culture change towards "imperialism"), our leaving withdrew one of the key factors leading to stability - the external "Other". Many places which got their "independence" (in quotes because it was political at the nation state level, but usually not economic), tended to fracture along long suppressed, and sometimes artificially imposed, lines.
[satirical tone]This created an opportunity for a number of organizations that had been in the "feel good" business, especially since the 19th and early 20th century style moral entrepreneurial content was now considered to be passe. You can no longer sell the London Missionary Society version of the White Man's Burden but, instead, have to recast it into a more palatable version which, coincidentally, is just helped along by all of these conveniently located failing states (many of which "we" "created" in the first place). The old Indulgences con is, once again, in full swing but this time it is backed by unprecedented media access, and one has to wonder what moral entrepreneur wants to actually get rid of the problems that allow them to live in the style to which they have rapidly become accustomed?[/satirical tone]
Okay, I'll drop the satirical tone, but if you look at the actual amount of money that reached the people it was raised to help, it tends to be a very sobering experience. I've known several groups in the aid / development business who I actually do consider quite ethical, and they all had less than a 10% administration overhead, and at least one had a 0% overhead. I'll be very interested to see what the overhead charges on on the recent Haiti telethons Those groups were actually working to solve local problems.
If we compare that with the admin overheads from some of the other groups, you have to wonder. I believe that one of the most egregious examples, since corrected to some degree, was UNICEF with an 80% overhead (or somewhere in that area) and who, by the 1990's, appear to have been spending the vast majority of their money on conferences and symposia (cf. Chattering International: How UNICEF Fails the World’s Poorest Children, James Le Fenu, 1993).
Was progress being made? Certainly everything I had heard said that it was, albeit very slowly (which, BTW, I consider to be quite promising
Cheers,
Marc
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