Helping the poor

Introduction

“You should help the poor.”

This sounds good and noble, and is filled with best intentions. But how should this actually be accomplished? Helping the poor, when it is stated this broadly, is pure from-the-heart-thinking. This means there can be lots of differences between the intent and the results of the action taken to support the intent; those differences can lead to a lot of goat sacrificing.

As pointed out in the chapter “Begging”, Neolithic Village roots that support “help the poor” thinking are that the person being helped will recover from their temporary disability, and after they do they will be positively contributing to the community again. In this context “helping the poor” is helping the community. And because this instinct is strong, it is an indication that it has been successful behavior for many, many generations.

But in prosperous, civilized conditions, when this deeply heart-felt-thinking is not mixed with enough cool-headed-analytic-thinking it leads to gaming the system. And the gaming leads to community waste not community progress.

The bright side is that helping the poor can work. It can lead people out of misery. The dark side is that these good intentions are easily taken advantage of, and pockets are lined rather than poor people helped.

The Bright Side

A human being is a terrible thing to waste. In modern times it takes nine months in the womb and fifteen to twenty years outside it to create an adult human. If this human becomes disabled by some personal catastrophe and can recover in a few days or weeks or even a year, this is great news for the community - a lot of investment has been reclaimed rather than lost. So it makes a lot of sense for the community to invest in this person’s recovery. When viewing things this way, poor people are seen as disabled people - invest in them, and they will recover and once again contribute to their community.

In Neolithic Village, or even Agricultural Age circumstances, how to give support is easy to figure out; it is obvious who is poor and what is needed to restore them to favorable conditions. In modern times, however, things are a lot more complicated, and this opens the door to waste caused by people gaming the system.

Gaming the system

Helping the poor is from-the-heart-thinking that can be gamed outright in many ways resulting in waste. Here are three examples:

Giving to charities that are outright scams. This one is straightforward and easy. A person claims they are running a charity and takes money. Some of the money goes to help people, but a lot of it supports the person running the charity.
Giving to charities that are misguided in their goals. Any charity has two basic goals: getting money to give, and giving it away. These goals are taking place in very different circumstances, which means the priorities of those giving are very different from the priorities of those being given to. My example of the man heading for a firing squad who is criticized by a bystander for smoking is a comical example. A real world example is a church group of volunteers who goes to Africa and spends several months there building a medical clinic. All well and good, and they are praised by the locals. But when they leave, the clinic is abandoned because no one has the funds to staff it. This is a case of volunteers getting satisfaction from helping others (in their circumstance), but the real world in Africa is getting wasted time and wasted resources when the intended help is not sustained (in their circumstance). This difference in circumstance between givers and receivers means that running a charity that is effective in both cases is a difficult task. One style of failure occurs when the people running the charity support a personal agenda that they are deeply enthusiastic about but one that is unrealistic or impractical when it comes to helping the poor out of their poverty. An example is when the charity’s director makes supporting a gender or religious issue the main agenda in deciding how to distribute assistance.
Setting up government-run welfare systems that are self-perpetuating. When the government gets in the middle there can be a huge disconnect between the giver (the tax payer) and the receiver (the welfare recipient). This disconnect makes system gaming even more fruitful and diverse. One example is when the social worker advises a recipient, “Watch out! If you make more than [X] you are out of the program.” The social worker is giving good advice from the point of view of the recipient, but it is not good from the point of view of the giver. An impressively outrageous example of this happening was filmed on secret camera by James O’Keefe in 2009. He and an associate posed as a pimp and prostitute, and they got advice from an ACORN worker about how to set up a brothel. (It is important to note that the ACORN worker clearly had their circumstance in mind as she was giving advice.)

Lost Opportunity

Another waste is the “opportunity cost”, as it is called in business and economics. A person has only so much time and effort that they can devote throughout their life. If they devote it to distractions, not productive goals, this is a big waste of the person’s life. If a person is more concerned about helping the poor than helping themselves prosper, the world isn’t a better place. This 6 Feb 14 WSJ editorial, “James Pierson: What Bill Gates Won’t Tell You About Giving Money Away: Donate to causes you care about, think long term, and remember it’s your money”, provides persuasive head-thinking on this topic. The article is based on businessman and philanthropist Robert Wilson’s thoughts about Bill Gates’s “Giving Pledge”, which asks rich people to make public their pledges to charities. Wilson says in a letter to Gates, “When I talk to young people who seem destined for great success, I tell them to forget about charities and giving. Concentrate on your family and getting rich, which I found very hard work. I personally and the world at large are very glad you were more interested in computer software than the underprivileged when you were young. People who do not make money will never become philanthropists. When rich people reach 50 and are beginning to slow down is the time to begin engaging them in philanthropy.”

Wilson’s advice to help yourself (become successful) before helping the poor is intensely practical in two ways: The more resources you have, the more you can help. And the more experience you have in using resources well, the better you can tell when someone running a help-the-poor-program is doing so effectively. Both help avoid goat sacrificing.

Conclusion

Helping the poor is a noble ambition. Doing so can help the world as well as help the giver to sleep better at night. But if the help is going to be real, as in, be effective at lifting people out of poverty, a lot of head-thinking must be applied as well as a lot of heart-thinking. Without the head-thinking the result will be goat sacrificing.