Socialism and poverty
By Theodore
Dalrymple
To sympathize with
those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to
commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive.
But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking
into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental
condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously
hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to
policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to
combine all three errors.
No subject
provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this
recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the
wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not
affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained
what it had long been--one of the worst countries in the Western world in which
to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense;
it resulted from the various kinds of squalor--moral, familial, psychological,
social, educational, and cultural--that were particularly prevalent in the
country (see "Childhood's End," Summer 2008).
My remarks were
poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of
the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child
psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the
abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most
important charities in Britain's increasingly corporatist society, was the
government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply
the "maldistribution of resources"; we could thus distribute it away.
And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was
poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national
income.
This definition,
of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of
billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single
person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread
than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there
was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the
redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people's
self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption--not only in Britain,
but everywhere in the world where it is held.
I first started
thinking about poverty when I worked as a doctor during the early eighties in
the Gilbert Islands, a group of low coral atolls in an immensity of the Central
Pacific. Much of the population still lived outside the money economy, and the
per-capita GDP was therefore extremely low. It did not seem to me, however,
that the people were very poor. Their traditional way of life afforded them
what anthropologists call a generous subsistence; their coconuts, fish, and
taros gave them an adequate--and, in some respects, elegant--living. They lived
in an almost invariant climate, with the temperature rarely departing more than
a few degrees from 85. Their problems were illness and boredom, which left them
avid for new possibilities when they came into contact with the outside world.
Life in the
islands taught me a lively disrespect for per-capita GDP as an accurate measure
of poverty. I read recently in a prominent liberal newspaper that "the
majority of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day." This statement is
clearly designed less to convey an economic truth than to provoke sympathy,
evoke guilt, and drum up support for foreign aid in the West, where an income
of less than $1 a day would not keep body and soul together for long; whereas
it is frequently said that one of Nigeria's problems is the rapid increase in
its population.
As it happens, an
island next door (in Pacific terms) to the Gilbert Islands was home to an
experiment in the sudden, unearned attainment of wealth. Nauru, a speck in the
ocean just ten miles around, for a time became the richest place on earth. The
source of its sudden riches was phosphate rock. Australia had long administered
the island, and the British Phosphate Commission had mined the phosphate on
behalf of Australia, Britain, and New Zealand; but when Nauru became
independent in 1968, the 4,000 or so Nauruans gained control of the phosphate,
which made them wealthy. The money came as a gift. Most Nauruans made no
contribution to the extraction of the rock, beyond selling their land. The
expertise, the management, the labor, and the transportation arrived from
outside. Within just a few years, the Nauruans went from active subsistence to
being rentiers.
The outcome was
instructive. The Nauruans became bored and listless. One of their chief joys
became eating to excess. On average, they consumed 7,000 calories per day,
mainly rice and canned beef, and they drank Fanta and Chateau d'Yquem by the
caseload. They became the fattest people on earth, and, genetically predisposed
already to the illness, 50 percent of them became diabetic. It was my
experience of Nauru that first suggested to me the possibility that abruptly
distributing wealth has psychological effects as well as economic ones.
By Paul
Gregory
