The Season for Giving

Posted on | December 27, 2006 | Comments Off on The Season for Giving

Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton. He is a philosopher by trade who has thought a lot about poverty, distribution of wealth, and why and how the wealthy give back or don’t. If you’d like to see him in action, look in Dec. 18’s New York Times (What should a billionaire give, and what should you?). In it, you’ll get treated to the views of philosophers like Kant and Hobbes, and economists and social theorists like Herbert Simon. Simon felt the rich should give back — big-time — because they owed most of their wealth to the social capital of others and society. By social capital he meant “not only natural resources, but more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundations on which the rich can begin their work,” according to Singer.

Singer believes that the rich didn’t earn all that money as much as the workers and their communities did. Warren Buffet agrees. He says, “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong type of soil.” So Singer makes the case that a country like the U.S. and its richest rich should be giving a great deal more than they do. A familiar argument, but in addition, he looks at the numbers and that’s when things get interesting. His case? That the top 10% of America’s wage earners can easily afford to address the UN Millennium Development Goals outlined by Jeffrey Sachs. The cost? $121 billion in 2006. (The U.S. Development Aid budget was $73 billion in 2006.) And $189 billion in 2015. (The U.S. budget by then is projected to be $115 billion.)

Singer’s analysis says we’re more than up to the task finacially. Take a look at the chart below, which I’ve created from Singer’s numbers. He segments our top elite wage earners (those in the top 10%) into five categories — giving numbers in each bracket, average annual earnings, proposed sliding scale for donations, and the impact of those donations, total annual revenue without hurting the richest rich is $404 billion. That’s $283 billion more than what Sachs says we need to address the UN Millennium Goals. And that’s if we didn’t apply any of the $73 billion we already spend in foreign aid to the Millennium priorities — reducing by half, extreme poverty and hunger, by two-thirds, early childhood mortality; by three quarters, maternal mortality, by half, those without access to clean water, and providing primary education to all global citizens, and halting sex disparity in education and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Season for giving Chart

Singer finishes with this challenge: “Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them … we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves … (is that) no one needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.”

And I agree — well within our financial reach, but still apparently beyond the reach, it seems, of our inherent human natures.