“By almost any measure, the
world is a better than it has ever been,” begins the 2014 annual
letter of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, written by Bill
Gates.
“People are living longer, healthier lives,” he continues. “Many
nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might
think such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in
fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world
is getting worse.”
So begins a very lengthy debunking of what Gates sees as three
myths first-world citizens tend to have about third-world
countries. His letter can be read here.
There’s a pdf version
here.
His three myths:
Poor countries are doomed to stay poor
Poverty levels are down just about everywhere, not just major
Western countries. Gates goes so far as to say we need to rethink
what we mean when we’re talking about “developing” countries:
The global picture of poverty has been completely redrawn in my
lifetime. Per-person incomes in Turkey and Chile are where the
United States level was in 1960. Malaysia is nearly there, as is
Gabon. And that no-man’s-land between rich and poor countries has
been filled in by China, India, Brazil, and others. Since 1960,
China’s real income per person has gone up eightfold. India’s has
quadrupled, Brazil’s has almost quintupled, and the small country
of Botswana, with shrewd management of its mineral resources, has
seen a thirty-fold increase. There is a class of nations in the
middle that barely existed 50 years ago, and it includes more than
half of the world’s population.
That seems to be a far cry from claims in certain quarters that,
due to trade and globalization, poor countries are little more than
targets for strip mining (figurative and literal) for rich
corporations. Gates goes so far as to predict that by 2035, there
will be almost no poor countries in the world, at least not in the
terms that we think of as poor. He argues, “Countries will learn
from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations
like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their
labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new
investments.”
Foreign aid is a big waste
This may be a tougher sell for libertarians who are so attuned
to recognizing the corruption of government power in nations both
large and small. Gates believes that fears of corruption or waste
are overstated based on anecdotes rather than data and also a
result of a well-established problem of folks who believe Western
governments spend more on foreign aid than they actually do.
Americans tend to believe the U.S. spends a quarter of its budget
on foreign aid. It’s actually less than a percent. Gates calculates
those numbers as adding up to $30 per American per year and does
believe health and education aid have made a major difference in
reducing poverty and increasing life spans in poor countries. Gates
also provides a couple of important caveats:
I should acknowledge up front that no program is perfect, and
there are ways that aid can be made more effective. And aid is only
one of the tools for fighting poverty and disease: Wealthy
countries also need to make policy changes, like opening their
markets and cutting agricultural subsidies, and poor countries need
to spend more on health and development for their own people.
I suspect the criticism of how poor countries spend their money
tends to be what sticks in the craw of Westerners when it comes to
foreign aid. That’s where the corruption and waste seeps in, where
dictators and puffed up princes hoard the nation’s riches, leaving
their own citizenry to starve.
Gates has done the math and calculates that it has cost $5,000
to save a child’s life in a poor country, based on dividing the
amount of donated money that has been spent on health-related aid
by the number of children such aid has saved since 1980.
Gates also addresses the shibboleth that foreign aid merely
creates countries that depend on us to prop them up rather than
actually helping them develop:
Here is a quick list of former major recipients that have grown
so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Botswana, Morocco,
Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius,
Singapore, and Malaysia. South Korea received enormous amounts of
aid after the Korean War, and is now a net donor. China is also a
net aid donor and funds a lot of science to help developing
countries. India receives 0.09 percent of its GDP in aid, down from
1 percent in 1991.
Saving lives leads to overpopulation
I was half-tempted to declare this myth to actually be a straw
man, but Gates says his foundation gets comments like this all the
time. People believe that these poor countries will continue to
grow at the same population rate as they do when they’re no longer
poor, despite all evidence that birth rates drop in wealthier
countries. And as Gates points out, higher mortality rates do
nothing to halt population growth anyway:
Take Afghanistan, where child mortality—the number of children
who die before turning five years old—is very high. Afghan women
have an average of 6.2 children. As a result, even though more than
10 percent of Afghan children don’t survive, the country’s
population is projected to grow from 30 million today to 55 million
by 2050. Clearly, high death rates don’t prevent population growth
(not to mention the fact that Afghanistan is nobody’s idea of a
model for a prosperous future).
I cannot possibly make a better case against overpopulation
panic than Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey, so read what he
had to say back in July here.
For that matter, I also highly recommend reading Bailey’s magazine
piece from last summer providing his own view on how a lot of the
“bad news” we hear about the world
is wrong.
Stepping away from developing countries, or whatever we end up
calling them, Bill Gates also
commented about the minimum wage on Morning Joe on
MSNBC, warning that raising it too much encourages automation and
labor substitution, eliminating jobs entirely, and pointed out that
only a small percentage of people who make the minimum wage (around
11 percent) actually live in households classified as poor.
Hilariously, the tag underneath Gates reads “The Wealth Divide –
The Rich Get Richer, Global Income Inequality Rises.” Way to miss
the point, guys.
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