While chapter 6 of The Life You Can Save was concerned with identifying individual programs that make a real difference in the lives of those they aim to help, chapter 7 looks at criticisms of aid at what we might call the “macro” level.

One prominent critic of international aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Singer quotes Easterly:

The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families….It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people. (p. 105)

However, when you break out the numbers a bit, there doesn’t seem to be quite as much “well-meaning compassion” here as Easterly suggests. For starters, $2.3 trillion over five decades amounts to $46 billion a year, and the average number of people in the affluent nations over that five-decade period is around 750 million people. So, the aid given amounts to about $60 per person per year, or about 30 cents of every $100 earned. Not exactly a staggering proportion of the affluent world’s wealth (see pp. 105-6).

Beyond that, though, much of the aid included in Easterly’s $2.3 trillion figure did not go toward poverty relief, but toward buying political influence. For instance, the West poured money into the coffers of African dictators during the Cold War in order to get them to tilt toward the West. And the countries currently receiving the lion’s share of U.S. foreign aid are places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Egypt, and Jordan. You can tell just from the list that this is politically-directed aid, not aid aimed at maximizing poverty relief. “Only about one fifth of U.S. aid goes to countries classified by the OECD as ‘least developed,’ while about half of all U.S. aid goes to ‘lower-middle income’ nations” (p. 107). Singer also points out that much of the aid that is given is self-interested, such as food aid that, by law, must be grown by U.S. farmers (essentially a domestic agricultural subsidy), which often has the result of depressing local markets in recipient countries.

Moreover, while Singer concedes that much government-to-government aid is corrupt and inefficient, Easterly, he says, doesn’t reckon with the effectiveness of non-governmental charity and hasn’t shown that more of this kind of aid is a bad idea:

Because it hasn’t been tried, no one really knows whether poverty on a global scale can be overcome by a truly substantial amount of aid provided without political interference. The political and bureaucratic constraints that encumber official aid only make private donations to effective nongovernmental agencies all the more important. As Easterly himself says, the annual total amount of foreign aid for the world’s approximately 3 billion poor people (this figure includes those who are living on less than $2 per day, as well as those who are living on less than $1.25 per day) comes to only about $20 per person. Should we be surprised that this paltry sum hasn’t ended poverty? The worst that can be said with any certainty is that in the past, a lot of official aid has been misconceived and misdirected and has done little good. But it scarcely seems possible that, if we truly set out to reduce poverty, and put resources into doing so that match the size of the problem–including resources to evaluate past failures and learn from our mistakes–we will be unable to find ways of making a positive impact. (pp. 110-111)

The balance of chapter 7 discusses some other common objections:

“Trade, not Aid”–It’s sometimes argued that the key to lifting people out of poverty is to include them in the global market, rather than giving aid. Singer agrees, to a point. He singles out rich nations’ agricultural subsidies in particular as causing great harm to the world’s poor. However, aid is still necessary “for those who for whatever reason are not benefiting from economic growth.” Those who just want us to focus on expanding the economic pie are peddling a global version of trickle-down economics where the poor will (someday!) benefit from policies that currently seem to favor the rich.

Bad Institutions Undo Good Projects–Some nations seem to suffer form endemically corrupt and fragile institutions, which can undermine aid projects. This provides a good reason, not for abandoning aid, but for making certain kinds of aid conditional on government reform.

“The Planet Can’t Hold Them”–Does giving aid just encourage a reckless population growth? Are people like Paul Ehrlich right that we’re facing a population explosion and there’s simply not enough to go around? Unsurprisingly, Singer disagrees. First, any “food crisis” could largely be solved by shifting away from a meat-intensive diet to a plant-based one, considering that meat production is a highly inefficient use of the world’s grain. Second, the best way to reduce fertility is to reduce poverty. Not to mention that it would be morally repugnant, as suggested by, for instance, Garrett Hardin, to simply adopt a “lifeboat ethic” and leave starving and sick people to their fate.

The bottom line here is pretty clear: we simply can’t claim that we’ve yet made a truly serious effort to combat global poverty. There are clear examples of programs that make a difference, and the objections that aid is distorted by politics constitute an argument for more and better-designed aid, not giving up. So, if that’s right, what kind of obligation does each one of us have? That’s the topic of part 4.