The Causes of Poverty (68): Rich People Not Giving Enough Money to Poor People

An illustration of Andrew Carnegie, originally published on July 25, 1903

(source)

You can criticize trade policy, immigration restrictions, bad governance or any other commonly cited cause of poverty, but you shouldn’t forget the obvious: there are a lot of wealthy people in the world who could, without losing much wellbeing (due to the diminishing marginal utility of money), help to lift every single poor person in the world to a much higher level of wellbeing.

The fact is that they could but don’t. We do have progressive taxation systems and other means of redistribution, we have development aid, we have charity etc., but none of these things yields enough money to lift everyone out of poverty. And there’s not enough public support to strengthen these redistribution mechanisms. Development aid is already unpopular at current levels, and don’t even start to talk about tax increases. The tireless efforts of Peter Singer and company to promote giving also have only a small effect.

Peter Singer

The insufficiency of giving and other means of redistribution is hard to understand, in particular given the fact that rich people are generally not very dumb and able to understand the law of diminishing marginal utility. Of course, I know about loss aversion, the endowment effect, habit formation, the importance of status etc. But again, wealthy people should in general be the ones best able to overcome biases, to distinguish the important things in life from the unimportant, and to see how helping others can be beneficial to ourselves, both psychologically and socially (helping makes you feel good, and living a good life amid misery is socially untenable). But perhaps I’m wrong about rich people.

And then there’s something else stopping us from giving more (or allowing ourselves to be taxed more, which is roughly the same thing), namely the stories we tell ourselves. For example, you often hear that it’s better to allow people to look after themselves first, so that they can create the conditions in which they unintentionally help. Allowing entrepreneurs to get rich – i.e. not taxing them too heavily and not insisting that they should give their money away rather than invest it – will be much more beneficial to the poor. Many of the poor will get a job thanks to them, and their products and services will also make the lives of many a lot better.

However, this is not incompatible with giving. True, what you give you can’t invest, but we can allow people to delay their giving until the day that they don’t need to invest a lot more. The example of Bill Gates comes to mind. So we can accept that there is some truth to the story that free enterprise takes care of a lot of poverty, and at the same time insist that there should be more giving.

Bill Gates

Another story we tell ourselves goes like this: giving people money isn’t a very good way of helping poor people. Many of them will just waste it, middle men will confiscate it, third world governments will misuse it, people will become to depend on it etc. Well, that doesn’t seem to be completely correct. Experiments with conditional cash transfers are very promising. And even if it’s correct to some extent, that’s just an argument to be smarter when giving money: invest it in businesses, healthcare etc.

And finally, there’s the story about agency: helping people is disrespecting them as self-authors and self-governing moral creatures. You may make them materially better off – at least in the short run because dependence on help may create motivational problems in the long run – but you take away their dignity and make them psychologically and morally worse off. People may not want to be helped, and even if they do it may not be in their best long term interest. The problem with this story is not that it’s false as such; it’s that people may not have a long term if we fail to help, and that starvation or homelessness is also an affront to dignity, and surely one that is a lot worse than receiving help.

More about giving is here. More posts in this series are here.

(image source, image source)

The Ethics of Human Rights (65): The Deserving Poor and the Spectacle of Libertarianism Eating Itself

“this sauce is so good, I can’t help eating myself”

(source)

It’s a common right-wing complaint, especially among right-libertarians, that the welfare state helps the poor whether or not they have only themselves to blame for their poverty. If there should be a duty to help the poor, it should be limited to the deserving poor (although some libertarians think that even this goes too far since it implies a form of slavery for those who have a duty to help). All the others should suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions – their teen pregnancy, their lack of effort at school, their alcohol problem etc.

One could reply that people’s bad decisions aren’t always their own decisions, in the sense that making good decisions is something you have to learn, and this learning may be difficult in an environment of poverty, especially during childhood. However, let’s bracket this objection, for the sake of argument, and assume that there are indeed some people who only have themselves to blame. They may not be as numerous as those on the right tend to believe, but even if there are only a few we should decide what to do with them – help them or not.

The criticism that our current systems of social security don’t differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor is sometimes illustrated with an analogy. If we assume that governments fund their welfare system through taxation, and that taxation is a kind of involuntary charity or enforced charity – the government steps in in order to take the money which we don’t give voluntarily to charity – then it’s only right that the government takes every effort to make sure that our money goes only to the deserving poor. If we voluntarily give money to charity, we also want to be sure that it goes to a good cause, and those collecting our money have a duty to spend it well and not waste in on people that aren’t going to use it constructively. Given the libertarian view that taxation is a form of stealing it’s all the more important that the tax money is spent well; you can perhaps argue in favor of stealing if the harm done by stealing is compensated by the greater good that is done with the stolen money, but you certainly can’t if there is no greater good and if the money goes to undeserving poor who are rewarded for their bad behavior.

Isn’t it especially outrageous to misuse charitable funds if the donors cannot legally discontinue their support? (source)

Now, it’s here that the problem begins and that libertarians who follow this reasoning tend to undermine their own libertarianism. If you want to help only the deserving poor, and if you want to be very strict about helping only those people, then you’ll have to accept systematic and wideranging intrusions into people’s privacy. How else would you be able to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving? You’ll need detailed biographies of all potential welfare or charity beneficiaries, records of their decisions and behavior, of their job applications, their diet, their sexual mores, etc.

You’ll have to accept these intrusions whether or not you believe that charity is the perfect and only solution. If you believe, correctly I think, that charity will never suffice, then you have all the more reason to be worried, since it’s the state who will have to monitor deservingness. Either scenario is anathema to libertarians.

The distinction between deserving and undeserving poor isn’t only difficult in practice. It’s also theoretically fraught with problems. For example, if you assume that you have a system to find out which poor person is an alcoholic and which one isn’t, then you still have to answer the question whether an alcoholic is an undeserving poor person or not. This answer depends on the causes of her alcoholism: maybe the cause is a series of misfortunes combined with a weak character, in which case her alcoholism is obviously not deserved. Perhaps she deserves blame for her weak character was, or perhaps not. One can easily make the case that a strong character and a good amount of effort and discipline depend on our upbringing and the social circumstances in which we are born. And no one deserve those circumstances.

And finally, even if we can identify the deserving both in theory and in practice, and even if we accept the anti-libertarian consequences of this work of identification, then we can still argue against the claim that we should not help the undeserving poor. Perhaps it’s a sign of decency and civilization that we help even the undeserving poor. Maybe the claims of the undeserving aren’t as strong as the claims of the deserving, and maybe we shouldn’t help them as much or as quickly as the deserving. But that doesn’t mean we should let them starve.

More posts in this series are here.

Political Graffiti (181): Charity

(source)

More on charity. More political graffiti.

Political Artist (40b): Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools

Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools (painted c. 1490–1500) is intended to exemplify the human condition. Representatives of the whole of mankind are voyaging through the seas of time. Every one of them is a fool: eating and drinking too much, flirting and cheating, playing silly games, and we don’t look at the poor who fell out of the ship and are now begging for some crumbs. The ship drifts aimlessly and we never reach the harbour. (By the way, the scene where four fools try to eat a hanging pancake without using their hands is based on a folk custom).

According to Foucault, the painting also represents the view that “madmen” should be deported overseas. Madness was often equated with poverty, the incapacity to work and the inability to integrate in the group. In England, it was feared that the country could be overrun by the poor, and it was proposed that they be banished and deported to the colonies.

More political artists here.

Human Rights Cartoon (69): The Other Invisible Hand

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More on the invisible hand and on charity. More human rights cartoons.

Economic Human Rights (35b): What’s So Funny About Charity?

 

I’ve stated before why I believe charity helps to prevent poverty, and why it’s better than government welfare, at least in principle. The welfare state, in my view, is a fallback option when charity fails (as it often does).

The usual argument against this view is that charity is bound to fail because it’s crowded out by the welfare state. People don’t and won’t assist others because they think that they already do enough by paying taxes, whatever the effectiveness or fairness of the tax system. The evidence for the occurrence of crowding out is, however, unclear, and that’s a “charitable” interpretation of the evidence.

Another criticism of charity is closer to the mark:

Charity is counter-cyclical. When the economy is booming and there’s less need, there’s also more capacity. When the [economy] is worse and there’s more need, donations dry up and there’s less capacity. That’s not a criticism of charities: It’s hardly their fault. And nor is it a criticism of the people who donate — or stop donating — to charities. When you’re worried about paying your mortgage, it’s harder to help other people pay theirs. But it’s a big part of why we need a robust, federal safety net that’s immune … from the ravages of the business cycle. (source)

Indeed, as the need for charity rises, the supply diminishes, and vice versa. That is why a theory of poverty alleviation that depends solely on charity is incomplete. However, implicit in this argument is that the welfare state is immune to the business cycle, which is obviously incorrect. A recession means a drop in tax revenues and a simultaneous increase in demand for welfare transfers (there are more unemployed etc.). Hence, a recession means a weakening of the capacity of the welfare system. That’s exactly the same mechanism that makes charity unreliable.

Fortunately, the welfare state can bridge over recessions by going into debt, something that few private charity donors will do. This means that a welfare state can keep its anti-poverty transfers going in times of increased demand for funds and decreased supply of funds.

More on charity here.

Human Rights Ads (59): See How Easy Feeding the Hungry Can Be?

(source, Advertising Agency: TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, Johannesburg, South Africa Executive Creative Director: Damon Stapleton Creative Directors: Adam Weber, Hennie Stander Art Director: Wihan Meerholz Copywriter: Dan Parmenter Photographer: Seppi Hochfellner Released: May 2008)

More on hunger and charity. More human rights ads.

Human Rights Maps (118): World Giving Index, a Map of Charity

(source, this is the version of 2010, click image to enlarge)

The World Giving Index offers a view of charitable behavior worldwide reflecting the fact that being charitable is about more than simply giving money. (In case you’re wondering about the link between charity and human rights, go here).

The Index is based on three types of charitable behavior – giving money to an organization, volunteering time to an organization and helping a stranger. The map above reflects the way the world looks based upon the charitable behavior of each country’s population and shows their ranking in the Index. The size of the circle reflects the World Giving Index percentage score and the number is its ranking on the World Giving Index.

The top 21 most generous countries, in order, are:

1. Australia
1. New Zealand
3. Ireland
3. Canada
5. Switzerland
5. United States
7. Netherlands
8. Britain
8. Sri Lanka
10 Austria
11. Lao People’s Democratic Republic
11. Sierra Leone
13. Malta
14. Iceland
14. Turkmenistan
16. Guyana
16. Qatar
18. Hong Kong
18. Germany
18. Denmark
18. Guinea

The incidence of giving money to charity ranges from as low as 4% in Lithuania to as high as 83% in Malta. Incidence of volunteering lies in a range from 2% in Cambodia to 61% in Turkmenistan. Each country has its own way to give. In Liberia, less than one tenth (8%) of the population give money to charity every month. Yet over three-quarters (76%) of Liberians help a stranger every month, more than any other country in the world. Overall, 20% of the world’s population had volunteered time in the month prior to interview, 30% of the world’s population had given money to charity, and 45% of the world’s population had helped a stranger.

Giving money to charity increases with age, largely explained by changes in disposable income. Women are generally more likely to give than men, but only just barely – 30 percent versus 29 percent. Religious affiliation is correlated with higher levels of giving. And within countries, those with higher wealth tend to give relatively less than those with lower wealth, paradoxically.

More on charity and poverty. More human rights maps.

Related Articles

• Canada ranked second most charitable in the world (theglobeandmail.com)
• Ireland comes third in World Giving Index (politics.ie)
• The Most Generous Countries on Earth (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Australia, NZ top ‘giving’ index (bbc.co.uk)
• ‘World Giving Index’ measures charity in 153 nations (theglobeandmail.com)
• “US Fifth Most Giving Country in the World, China 147th” and related posts (tonic.com)

Religion and Human Rights (30): Religion, Charity and Cooperation

I go on a lot about charity on this blog, and about how important it is in the fight against poverty (a major human rights issue). (Some recent posts about charity are here, here and here). And although I’m often very critical of the role of religion in politics and of the harm it can do to human rights (see here, here, here, here, here and here for instance), I can see its benefits. One of the benefits is that religious people are more generous and give more to charity. I’ve made that claim myself based on these data. However, the following quote tells another story:

This paper examines the supernatural punishment theory. The theory postulates that religion increases cooperation because religious people fear the retributions that may follow if they do not follow the rules and norms provided by the religion. We report results for a public goods experiment conducted in India, Mexico, and Sweden. By asking participants whether they are religious or not, we study whether religiosity has an effect on voluntary cooperation in the public goods game. We found no significant behavioral differences between religious and nonreligious participants in the experiment. …

In a dictator game, Eckel and Grossman (2004) examined differences in the amount and pattern of giving to secular charities in response to subsidies by self-identified religious and nonreligious participants. The results indicate no significant difference in either the amount or pattern of giving. Tan (2006) used the dictator game and the ultimatum game and similar to Eckel and Grossman (2004) he found that religiosity as a whole yields no significant influence in the experiments. Second, one paper has focused on whether religiosity affects cooperation. Orbell et al. (1992) used the prisoner’s dilemma game to test the hypothesis that religious people are more cooperative. They conducted their experiment in what was considered more religious and less religious towns. They found no general relationship between religious affiliation and cooperation. …

We arrive at the following observations. There are no significant differences between religious and nonreligious participants regardless of what country we are studying. Hence, in line with previous experimental results, we found no supporting evidence for the hypothesis that religiosity enhances cooperation. (source)

Human Rights Facts (56): The Poor Are More Generous Than the Rich

I go on a lot about charity on this blog, and about how important it is in the fight against poverty (a major human rights issue). (Some recent posts about charity are here, here and here).

Now, because charity is a means to fight poverty, we don’t expect the poor to be charitable. Indeed, they can be excused for being selfish and self-interested. The rich, especially the super-rich, on the other hand, are expected to be generous, and many of them are (there’s this recent story about 40 U.S. billionaires pledging half their wealth to charity).

However, as I’ve mentioned before, in relative terms (compared to an individual’s wealth) it’s in general the poor who are most generous. This is now confirmed by a serious of psychological experiments conducted by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (see here). Before the experiments, participants were asked to position themselves on a ladder with ten rungs on it. Each rung represented people of different levels of education, income and occupational status. They were asked to place an “X” on the rung they felt corresponded to where they stood relative to others in their own community. The experiments showed that

generosity increased as participants’ assessment of their own social status fell. … Upper-class participants said 2.1% of incomes should be donated. Lower-class individuals felt that 5.6% was the appropriate slice. (source)

Why is this the case? It seems odd, and possibly fatal for the argument that poverty alleviation should be done through private charity (an argument I espouse). One possible explanation is that people aren’t (relatively) selfish because they are rich but that they are rich because they are selfish. Indeed, selfishness can be seen as a driver of wealth creation. But the experiments were controlled for self-made wealth and inherited wealth, and this distinction didn’t change the outcomes. So selfishness as a driver of wealth is not very strong, if it’s a factor at all.

Hence the causal link probably goes the other way: people are selfish because they are rich. The experimenters hypothesize that a climate of compassion among the poor – as opposed to a climate of competition among the rich – can instill a general spirit of compassion, help and cooperation. And that does seem convincing.

Fortunately, the experiments also showed that the rich can be encouraged to be compassionate. (If poverty alleviation through charity must depend on the poor, we’ll not go very far). Compassion inducing videos had a positive effect on the level of charity among the rich.

More on charity. More on psychology and human rights.

Related Articles

• The Scrooge Effect: Research Shows Poor Are More Compassionate (uspoverty.change.org)
• Wealth, poverty and compassion: The rich are different from you and me (economist.com)
• Study: Poor Are More Charitable Than The Wealthy (npr.org)
• New Study Finds The Rich Horribly Stingy When It Comes To Charity (businessinsider.com)

Economic Human Rights (34): The Cost of Human Rights, and of Economic Rights More Specifically

Human rights cost money. It’s often claimed that economic human rights aren’t really human rights because they are so expensive for many governments in the world that they can’t realistically impose duties: governments of poor countries can’t be expected to respect a duty to provide healthcare, housing, food, work etc. Ought implies can. You can’t be under an obligation if there’s no way you can honor that obligation. It’s claimed, therefore, that economic rights are mere aspirations rather than rights.

Yet, the same argument can be made about the supposedly more distinguished and respectable freedom rights. It’s strange, many countries in the world can’t manage to create the institutions and the governance to enforce freedom rights, simply because they don’t have the means (and sometimes the willingness), and yet this fact doesn’t make people think twice about the reality of freedom rights.

Providing effective and non-corrupt police forces and judiciaries is expensive. Probably just as expensive as providing a good public healthcare system. True, rights have to be enforceable, and duties shouldn’t be farcically unrealistic. But I fail to see the ontological difference here between freedom rights and economic rights.

We also shouldn’t overestimate the cost of economic rights. The purpose of these rights is not to have a government that gives healthcare, food, work etc. to every single citizen. That would destroy the economy. A system of economic rights will require that most people provide these goods for themselves through work and economic activity. It will also require that citizens show generosity and help each other. Economic rights also create duties for fellow-citizens. The government supplies the goods in the remaining cases, when self-help and mutual help are not enough.

As a result, the cost of economic rights isn’t as high as a cursory reading of these rights would imply. Conversely, the cost of freedom rights is often higher than one would conclude at first sight: true, these rights often require abstinence and forbearance (“don’t invade my privacy or inhibit my speech”) and that’s something cheap. But the enforcement and equal protection of those rights and the enforcement of forbearance requires an efficient government, which is expensive.

Read more on economic rights here, here and here. And something about another cost issue related to human rights, namely the relative cost of freedom and dictatorship, is here.

Human Rights Facts (53): Charitable Giving Down Because of the Recession

Contrary to what I claimed in a previous post – which, I have to say in my own defense, was written in the middle of the recession – it now seems that the recession did have a negative effect on charitable giving:

individual charitable giving was down 4.9% percent in 2009. … On the positive side, people may give more because they empathize with those with increased need in a bad economy. On the negative side, people may give less because they are anxious about their own, their families’ and perhaps their workers’ financial well-being. (source)

If you’re wondering about the link between charity and human rights: poverty is a human rights issue (see here and a lot of other places on this blog), and I believe charity is the best way to help the poor (see here and here).

More on human rights and the recession is here. More on charity here.

Political Graffiti (110): Donate Your Old Clothes, Shoes and BMW’s

(by Rene Gagnon, source)

More political graffiti. More on charity. More on the recession.

Annals of Heartlessness (2): Tax Evasion What For?

According to [a] Bloomberg story, Mr Lampert is worth $3 billion. If he earns just 1% per year on that fortune—and he certainly earns much more—then he takes home $30 million in income. Per year. That’s 600 times the median household income in America. It’s more money than a person can reasonably spend. With that much money you can binge every day, and yet the money will just keep accumulating.

And yet Mr Lampert feels he needs to take special steps to avoid paying the regular income tax rate for individuals in the highest tax bracket, which begins at around $373,000… Obviously, most of the people bringing home that level of income are generating it in wages and salary, and they have no choice but to pay the income tax rate. I’m sure if you approached Mr Lampert and told him he didn’t work for his money, he’d bristle at the suggestion. And yet he wants to continue to take advantage of the silly rule by which the money hedge fund managers make from doing their job is taxed as capital gains rather than income.

As far as I can tell, this is entirely within the law. But I don’t think it’s improper to declare it obscene. Shameful, even. With a fortune of that size, additional wealth is about little more than score-keeping. You can afford to be a grown-up and pay the same taxes as everyone else. (source)

In case you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with human rights, (re)read this and this in which I argue that taxation is merely the enforcement by the government of private philanthropy, which in turn is a moral duty based on certain human rights (the right not to suffer poverty etc.). More on the role of taxation in social justice is here. More on taxation in general is here. Read other installments in the annals of heartlessness here. More on greed in particular is here.

The Causes of Poverty (34): Desert

Those who agree that the government should help the poor usually don’t make qualitative distinctions between different kinds of poor people. They only separate the mildly poor from the horribly poor and modify the assistance policies accordingly.

My personal views are similar to these, albeit that I want to promote private charity before and above government assistance. The recent debates about healthcare reform in the U.S. were in essence about one type of assistance to the “poor”, namely those not poor enough to be eligible to existing government programs yet not wealthy enough to be able to buy adequate private insurance. During these debates, Bryan Caplan – a libertarian – proposed to make a distinction between deserving poor and non-deserving poor:

All [the government] needs to do is provide a means-tested subsidy to make private health insurance more affordable for those who need it most. The subsidy should be based on income, wealth, chronic health status … on past and current behavior. People who engage in voluntary risky behaviors – smoking, drinking, over-eating, mountain-climbing, violence, etc. – should receive a smaller subsidy, or no subsidy at all. The same goes for people who failed to buy long-term insurance when they were healthy and employed, then ran into health or financial troubles. (source)

We can broaden this to poverty assistance generally. And we can also expand the argument to a moral one rather than one that is simply about the need, appropriateness or scope of government intervention in poverty reduction, since I believe government intervention in poverty reduction is simply a fallback option in the case of deficient private charity (see here for my argument). The government should step in when individuals and groups fail to honor their private duties towards fellow human beings. The proper question is then: do we, as individuals, have a moral duty to help the poor, directly and through the taxes we pay to the government? I think that’s the case, and if I’m right we should ask if this duty is limited to the deserving poor. In other words, can we ignore the predicament of those who are themselves the cause of this predicament through overly risky behavior, self-destructive behavior, or stupid and irrational behavior?

The affirmative answer to that question has some intuitive appeal. And it’s also coherent with a long tradition in moral philosophy that argues against paternalism as an attitude that protects people against their freedom to damn themselves. However, things aren’t quite as intuitive as this. A duty to assist only the deserving poor requires a clear and unambiguous distinction between desert and lack of desert. I don’t think it’s really possible to decide in all cases, or even most cases, that someone has or hasn’t been deserving. Take the case of a person engaging in systematic over-eating and thereby destroying his or her health and ending up in poverty. At first sight, that person deserves poverty. People are agents with a free will and have a choice to engage in self-destructive behavior. However, we know that education and culture influence eating habits, so the causes of this person’s poverty are far more diverse than simply his or her lifestyle decisions. Even if there is an element of voluntariness in this person’s decisions, at what level of voluntariness do we put the threshold and say that this person does indeed deserve his or her predicament, notwithstanding the effect of outside causes?

There is also a problem of information deficit. People can act in a bona fide way, believing that they don’t act in a self-destructive way, based on the information that they have gathered using the skills that they have been taught. How on earth can you go and judge whether people were sufficiently bona fide? You’d need the KGB to do that, and still…

In addition, there may be a chain of desert: if, through some miracle of understanding and close monitoring, you can determine that a person isn’t to blame for his or her own predicament, maybe you can decide to assist that person but reclaim the money from his or her parents because those parents were undeserving while educating the person. In that case, the least of your problems would be an infinite regress.

Also, given the fact that poverty reduction, because of the regular failure of private charity, isn’t simply an interpersonal matter and that therefore the government will have to step in at some point, do we really want the government to start separating the deserving from the undeserving? Look at the answer of another libertarian, Tyler Cowen:

First, I am worried about a governmental process which first judges the “deservingness” of each poor person before setting the proper subsidy. Do they videotape your life as you go along, or do they convene a Job-like trial when you submit receipts for reimbursement? (source)

So we have a fundamental tension between on the one hand the value of individual responsibility and the need to have people make their own choices and suffer the consequences (if no one has to suffer the consequences of choices it’s hard to call them real choices), and, on the other hand, the need to help the wretched of the earth, even those who may be (partly) responsible for their own wretchedness (I say “may be” because I don’t believe there’s a way to know, not even with a KGB).

The useful thing about this dilemma is that it makes clear that people are indeed in some cases the cause of their own poverty, at least in part. It’s very important to determine the real causes of poverty if you want to do something about it. Helping poor people after they have become poor is just part of the solution. It’s better to prevent poverty altogether, and this dilemma helps doing that because it forces people to see that behavior is a cause. Hence they should be able to adapt their behavior.

More on the causes of poverty. More on desert.

The Ethics of Human Rights (28): Private Charity vs the Welfare State

In previous posts (here and here), I wrote about my personal views regarding the best ways to help the poor. In a nutshell, I favor private philanthropy or charity over the welfare state. Some of the reasons are:

• The welfare state imposes certain costs on the economy, thereby damaging the prospects of the future poor.
• Closeness and affinity imply a greater ability to help. And he or she who can do more, should do more (can implies ought). Citizens are better placed than the government to help poor people in their community/family because they better understand the needs.
• Spontaneous mutual assistance fosters community spirit. Allowing poverty reduction to take place at the level of citizens’ relationships will strengthen feelings of belonging.

When all this fails – as it often will – and only when this fails, can a state intervene and can the welfare mechanisms and redistribution systems based on taxation begin to operate (these merely enforce deficient private philanthropy).

However, some claim that the welfare state crowds out private charity. If you don’t care about private charity and want a government monopoly on care for the poor, you won’t mind if there is crowding out. And if you don’t care about private charity or about government assistance to the poor, you won’t mind either. But I guess most people agree with me that both charity and the government have a part to play (although they may not agree with my chosen priorities). So it’s good to see that

government welfare programs [do not] appear to displace an equivalent amount of private charity. Private giving does not vary inversely with the size of government programs and there is little evidence for a “crowding out” effect. Many private charities, in fact, rely on government funding to some extent. Private charitable giving to the poor, defined in narrow terms, runs in the range of $10 to $15 billion a year [in the U.S.], and few observers believe that this sum is capable of significant augmentation in the short run, regardless of government policy. Tyler Cowen (source)

More posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (27): The Human Rights of Future Generations and Poverty

I’ve argued many times before that poverty is a human rights issue, so I won’t do that again (you can read this or this for example). For those who are not convinced, just assume arguendo that I am right, otherwise the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense. I’ve also presented my views on the types of duties produced by the human right not to suffer poverty, and on the moral agents that carry those duties: is it a face-to-face thing, or does the government have a role to play by way of redistribution and the welfare state? Etc. You can read about this here and here for instance, so that’s something else I won’t repeat.

I do believe the welfare state is an important institution because it can fill the gap left by deficient private charity. But my view is that private charity should come first and should be promoted. The welfare state should be a fallback option rather than the starting point. So I guess I don’t think it’s as important as people from the left usually think it is. In order to bolster my view, I can point to some problems with the welfare state. In fact, it can be argued that the welfare state is another case of a self-defeating human rights policy, in the sense that it reduces poverty but at the same time produces poverty. Tyler Cowen, in a very interesting paper, has argued that while the welfare state does indeed reduce the levels of poverty of those people currently living (at least if we focus on the level of the state and forget the global impact of the operation of a welfare state in a particular country), it also has a negative impact on the poverty of future generations.

The argument goes as follows. It’s reasonable to accept that economic growth lifts people out of poverty (see also here) and that the welfare state lowers the rate of economic growth, perhaps not by much annually but small reductions of economic growth over several years may amount to a large cumulative reduction. Now, how does the welfare state lower the rates of economic growth? There are at least four effects:

[1] A welfare state will cause some people to substitute welfare dependency for private work, thus lowering the number of individuals in the active work force or causing them to work less hard. … The poor could be engaging in more productive exchange with other individuals in the economy, but to some extent they desist, for fear of losing welfare benefits. …

[2] The taxes used to support the welfare state discourage taxpayers from working or otherwise creating economic value. …

[3] The extensive welfare states of Western Europe typically are bundled with labor market protections and interventions. It is not politically or economically feasible to give the non-working significantly more risk protection than the working. Western European welfare states therefore tend to create a privileged class of working “insiders,” with high real wages, high benefits, and near-guaranteed positions of employment. This practice, of course, lowers the number of new jobs that are created, limits labor market mobility, and raises unemployment.

[4] [The welfare state] causes the economy to develop new technologies and new ideas at a slower rate. … A welfare state will plausibly have a negative effect on innovation. By withdrawing individual labor from the productive sector of the economy, the rate of discovery is likely to fall. Both the poor and the taxpaying non-poor will work less when a welfare state is in place [see 1 and 2 above]. If we think of research and development, broadly construed, as one kind of work, we can expect the rate of growth to decline. Even if the poor do not participate in ideas production directly, they do so indirectly. To provide a simple example, to the extent it is harder or more costly to hire good janitors, and other forms of cheap labor, fewer research laboratories will be opened. … The welfare state permanently discourages various individuals from contributing to technological development and thus lowers the rate of economic growth in lasting fashion. (source)

One can argue about the importance or even the existence of these four effects, and there may even be counter-effects (welfare recipients may move in the underground economy, unemployment may lead to better parenting and hence better education etc.). But even if the effects are small, it’s sufficient to spread them towards the very long term future in order to produce a lowering of the economic growth rate and an increase in future poverty. Given that the future contains an infinitely large population, the welfare state will always produce more poverty than it eliminates (given that the current population and hence also the current poor are a limited number). That would mean that the concept of the welfare state is doomed. And if that’s the case, it would seem I have proven too much (I merely wanted to buttress my argument that the welfare state should come second, after private philanthropy).

However, I don’t think it’s obvious that we should value the rights of future people the same way as the rights of existing people. After all, these future people may never come into existence. If we try to protect their welfare by giving up the welfare state, we will harm real people for the rights of people who may never exist. Furthermore, the future may bring a novel solution to the poverty problem.

More about the rights of future generations. More about the related topic of population metrics. More posts in this series are here.

Religion and Human Rights (22): The Proper Role of Religion in a Democracy

For me, as an agnostic, the question of the place of religion in a democracy is an important one, although I believe the question would be just as important if I held a religious belief or if I were an atheist. There’s no doubt in my mind that the full protection of human rights and civil liberties for all citizens can be jeopardized by misconceptions about the proper role of religion. Take, for example, the rights of homosexuals, the rights of non-believers or adherents of other religions, women’s rights etc.

At the most basic level, this is a problem of tolerance. We should not impose our beliefs, moral values and practices on others if these others don’t inflict harm, even if we think other people act immorally from the point of view of our religion. And neither should we discriminate people when they act or speak or think in ways that are incompatible with our own beliefs. These two prescriptions are based on the need for respect. We would show disrespect for other people if we were to force them to act according to our own beliefs. And the need for respect is, in turn, based, on the importance of freedom. Other people value their freedom to act according to their own beliefs. Let’s take two examples:

• A Muslim father may, as long as his daughter is underage, impose certain religiously inspired rules of behavior on this daughter, and he can even hope that the girl internalizes these rules and respects them for the rest of her life. But when the girl reaches adulthood and chooses to live according to her own rules, she will be protected to do so by her human rights and civil liberties, even against the wishes of her father. The proper role of the religious beliefs of the father has reached its limit. The father should tolerate and respect (which doesn’t mean agree with) the choices of his adult daughter, and the laws of the democracy in which they live will enforce this tolerance and the girl’s freedom of choice if necessary.
• A Catholic human resources manager in the recruitment department of the army of a democratic country, refuses to hire a perfectly qualified candidate because of her homosexuality. Again, this would be a sign of disrespect on the part of the HR manager and the law should intervene.

(source)

But the problem goes beyond the level of relations between citizens. The question about the proper place and role of religion in a democracy isn’t limited to the problem of how we treat each other in our daily lives, how we treat our wives and children, our gay or “infidel” neighbors or employees etc. In a democracy, the people translate their beliefs in legislation and government policy. Hence we should ask to what extent people can use their religious beliefs as the basis or reason for legislation.

Here I take a nuanced position between the two extremes: between a complete lack of restrictions on the role of religion in democratic legislation, and a complete exclusion of religion from democratic legislation. So the question becomes one of degree: to what extent can religion be the basis of law? When is it allowed, and when is it no longer allowed for religious reasons to be the reasons for government coercion?

I think that the problem arises when the legal coercion resulting from religious reasons violates the human rights and civil liberties of individuals, and that any religiously inspired legislation that stops short of such violations is acceptable. Some would say that even legal coercion based on religious reasons that doesn’t violate the rights of individuals is reprehensible, but I don’t agree. An argument in favor of this more restrictive approach could go as follows. Legislation based on religion automatically implies disrespect for people of other religions and for non-believers, since the religious reasons used as a basis for this legislation are likely to be exclusive to a particular religion. Only religious reasons which are sufficiently vague so as not to be exclusive to one religion can then be acceptable religious reasons for legislation. An example: charity can be an acceptable religious reason for legislation, because it’s not a reason that is exclusive to one religion, perhaps not even to religion as such. Laws regarding the sabbath, on the contrary, would not be an acceptable reason for legislation, even if it produces legislation that doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. Or the argument could be that only a law that is supported at the same time by religious reasons and non-religious reasons is acceptable, and that laws that are supported only by religious reasons are unacceptable, even if they don’t violate anyone’s rights.

I think that goes too far. Disrespect should be avoided, but I don’t see why the avoidance of disrespect should automatically override legitimate religious concerns. It’s not even clear to me that there’s necessarily disrespect involved in the use of exclusive religious reasons as a basis for legislation. It’s certainly not the case that such legislation necessarily means forcing one religion on people of other faiths or of no faith. If that would be the case, we would have legislation that violates the rights of individuals (namely the freedom of religion). And that would violate my own rule stated above.

However, legislation that is based on exclusive religious reasons does involve coercing people on the basis of a doctrine that they don’t accept. But, again, if this coercion doesn’t result in rights violations I can’t see what would be wrong with it. Laws by definition force people to do things they don’t accept or to abstain from doing things that are essential to them. I don’t see why there should be laws in any other case.

same-sex marriage cartoon by Riber Hansson

(source)

To summarize, religious people can advocate and – if they are in the majority - implement laws on the basis of their own, exclusive religious reasons, as long as the human rights and civil liberties of all are respected. A religiously inspired law banning same-sex marriage would therefore not be acceptable; a law instituting a religious holiday on the contrary would be acceptable. In the words of Habermas:

The liberal state must not transform the requisite institutional separation of religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith. (source)

Jurgen Habermas

More here. On the other hand, religious people should also refrain from imposing a burden on the rights of their fellow citizens.

Some would say that even my rule is too restrictive on religion. For religious people, religion is not only a personal and private conviction but also the law of humanity. Forcing them to forsake the legal implementation of their religious views means taking away their identity, forcing them to be what they don’t want to be. Their religious beliefs are political beliefs and always trump opposing political beliefs. It’s intolerable for them to be forced not to implement their beliefs by way of legislation, or to submit to political decisions that are not based on their religious reasons. It’s indeed a good question: can religious people really accept democracy, given that God cannot be in the minority and God’s commands are absolute and trump opposing majority decisions? Democracy seems to be unacceptable from a religious point of view. However, catering to this view would mean forfeiting democracy, majority rule, the free choice of others, respect for others, freedom of religion, and human rights, and replacing all this by absolute theocracy. I don’t think that’s a price many are willing to pay, and not even many religious people as I argued here.

Other, older posts on the proper role and place of religion in a democracy:

• Should religious symbols such as headscarves be banned in public places?
• The space for religious monuments and symbols in public spaces.
• The space for illiberal religious practices in a liberal society.
• The possibility of religious exemptions to generally applicable laws.
• The space for proselytizing.
• The space for religious education in public schools.
• The conflict between religious liberty and freedom of speech.
• A more general post on religious liberty and the separation of state and church.

Economic Human Rights (31b): Certain Objections and Counter-Objections

M.C. Escher, hands drawing each other, symbolizing cooperation and mutual assistance

(source, and here is more M.C. Escher)

Economic rights are a subset of human rights. Put very briefly and simplistically, they are what could be called anti-poverty rights: for example, there’s a right to a certain standard of living, to social security, to work, to fair wages, to healthcare, housing etc.

It’s an understatement to say that there’s no universal consensus on these rights. Some say that these aren’t “real” human rights, even some who believe that poverty is a real problem (like Bill Easterly for example). Others say that these rights are useless or even harmful. Here are a few of the most common objections raised against economic rights, and my counter-objections.

The big state criticism

Economic rights are believed to require invasion of privacy and hence violations of an important freedom right (freedom rights such as free speech, privacy, habeas corpus etc. are usually distinguished from economic rights, political rights etc.). In order to verify whether people have a right to social security benefits or healthcare benefits, the state has to check people’s income (legal and illegal), their family composition, their health, their medical consumption, their lifestyle etc.

The assumption behind this criticism is that the state is the only or the main party responsible for the realization of economic rights. This is not the case. People in need can call on other people to help. And these other people have a moral responsibility to help. The duties of mutual assistance, charity and philanthropy point to a horizontal aspect of economic rights. People in need do not only have a vertical right to assistance, or a right directed at the state. Their economic rights can be addressed at their fellow citizens, and these have a duty to respect and protect these rights. It’s only when horizontal duties fail that the state should intervene. If we think of economic rights in this way, the dangers of an overbearing state don’t look that ominous anymore.

The rule that economic rights should – in part – be realized by citizens has another advantage as well: economic rights tend to foster community spirit and feelings of solidarity and belonging.

But this insistence on solidarity shouldn’t obscure the rule that people have a responsibility to help themselves and support themselves. This kind of independence is a part of freedom and an important good. Solidarity comes into play only when self-help is unsuccessful or impossible, and the state comes into play only when solidarity is unsuccessful or absent.

Different kinds of duties

Another objection: some say that economic rights, if they are rights at all, are radically different from “normal” human rights – also called freedom rights – and can therefore be given a lower priority (and maybe aren’t even real rights at all). Freedom rights imply duties of abstention or forbearance, whereas economic rights require duties of active help, involvement and intervention. In the case of violations of freedom rights, the remedy is easy: stop doing what you’re doing. In the case of violations of economic “rights”, the remedy is often very difficult if not impossible. If there is no work, no one can give it to me. If a country is poor, no one can raise the standard of living.

When freedom rights are violated, the victim can go to a court and a judge can force the violator to stop his or her actions. When economic rights are violated, it’s useless to go to a court. Not only isn’t there an obvious violator who can be stopped, there is often no one who can stop the violation from happening. Hence it looks like these rights are unenforceable and often have no remedy. Rather than rights, it seems that they are aspirations or policy goals, often long term policy goals.

However, there’s again an erroneous assumption underlying all of this. The distinction between the two types of duties – forbearance and active assistance – isn’t clean-cut. Freedom rights require active intervention by the state in order to enforce forbearance. They require an efficient judiciary and police force. For some states, this may be as unattainable as prosperity. In fact, it’s precisely because of a lack of prosperity that many states are unable to guarantee protection for freedom rights. Of course, the fact that economic rights are a prerequisite for freedom rights isn’t a sufficient reason to call them rights. But neither is it a reason not to call them rights.

Conversely, economic rights often require more forbearance than active intervention. Economic rights in China during the Great Leap Forward would have been better served by state forbearance. All types of human rights require forbearance and intervention. Perhaps economic rights generally need more intervention, but that is a difference in degree and not in essence, and it isn’t a sufficient reason to reject the label of “rights” for the aspirations inherent in economic rights.

Ought implies can

There’s another criticism of economic rights, related to the previous one. Economic rights are said to violate a general rule for rights: ought implies can; there can be no obligation to do something if there is no capability to do it. You cannot have a duty to help someone who’s drowning if you can’t swim yourself. Hence the person drowning doesn’t have a right to be assisted by you. The same is said to be true of economic rights which therefore aren’t real rights. If a poor country doesn’t have the resources to help its poor citizens, then these citizens don’t have a right to be helped.

However, we don’t follow the same logic in the case of freedom rights. Freedom rights also require resources, as we have seen. When a state doesn’t have the resources necessary to protect its citizens’ freedom rights, we usually don’t say that the citizens of such a state have lost their freedom rights. People have rights irrespective of the probability that they can be protected. Or better: the less people’s rights are protected, the more important it is that they have rights (see here). And anyway, violations of economic rights don’t occur because there are insufficient resources but because of an unequal distribution of resource, nationally or internationally. So the “can” part of “ought implies can” isn’t as fanciful as the critics of economic rights believe.

Economic rights are superfluous and useless

This is supposed to be the case because free markets should automatically produce a certain standard of living for everyone that is high enough to realize the goals inherent in economic rights. Free trade, deregulated markets and low taxes cause profits to rise, which in turn means more investments, which in turn means more and better jobs and higher incomes. All boats rise on a rising tide.

Now, it’s my belief that history – and especially recent history – has shown that this isn’t enough. Free markets are beneficial, but they don’t automatically provide high standards of living for everyone.

Economic rights are harmful and counterproductive

This is a stronger version of the “useless” argument. Economic rights are believed to require a big state (see above), high taxes and intrusive regulation. All of this hinders the economy and the creation of wealth. As a result of economic rights, there is less wealth to redistribute, and economic rights therefore undo what they want to achieve.

They are also harmful in another way: they violate freedom rights, especially the right to privacy and the right to property (because of redistribution). We’ve already seen that we can mitigate this risk when we include horizontal duties. But even if this risk is real, why should property and privacy automatically rank higher than the absence of poverty? If we assume that economic rights are real rights, then it’s not surprising to see that they can contradict other rights. Contradictions between human rights are very common. The right to privacy is often in conflict with free speech for example. Sometimes one right has to be limited for the sake of another. So why should this be a problem when dealing with economic rights?

Of course, one shouldn’t dramatize. Economic rights and freedom rights are generally not incompatible. On the contrary, they are interdependent. Freedom for the poor often doesn’t mean a whole lot. But, on the other hand, the squeaky hinge gets the oil: poverty has to have a voice if it is to be eliminated.

Human Rights Facts (41): The Effect of the Recession on Charitable Giving

As I’ve mentioned several times before, the current economic recession has several and almost entirely negative consequences for human rights. One of the human rights that is affected most severely is the right not to suffer poverty (or, positively, the right to a certain standard of living). The causal link between the recession and poverty passes through several “channels”. The most obvious one is rising unemployment; a dampening of charitable giving is potentially another one.

However, data from The Economist show that there is (as yet) no such dampening, despite the recession:

Among the 500 British and American individuals with at least $1m of investable assets, … 28% of Americans say they are giving less money compared with 18 months ago, though 26% are giving more.

More on charity here, here and here.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (45): Need, Greed and Compassion

“Need” now means wanting someone else’s money. “Greed” means wanting to keep your own. “Compassion” is when a politician arranges the transfer. Joseph Sobran

That would be what we call “redistribution” or, in the words of Obama, ”spreading the wealth around“. Regular readers know that I’m a proponent of social justice, but I also believe that this is a priori a citizen responsibility. The state should intervene and forcefully redistribute only when citizens fail to act responsibly towards their fellow-citizens. Charity is proof that people don’t always need to be forced by the government to help the needy, who, by the way, don’t want other people’s money, just a decent life.

Here is a post giving some more detail on the role of citizens and the government with regard to poverty reduction.

Human Rights Facts (37): Charitable Giving by Income Group

"Charity" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

(source)

I’ve written about charity or caritas many times before. In fact, I see charitable giving to the poor as a way to honor one’s duties arising from the social and economic rights of the poor (more here). In my view, government redistribution on the basis of taxation is only necessary when individuals fail in their duty of charity. (I also believe that this kind of understanding of economic rights can debunk the big state criticism which is often leveled against these rights).

One of the rules governing charity is “ought implies can“: only those who can give have a moral duty to give. Another rule is  that “can implies ought“: those who can do more, should do more. Which means that wealthy people are expected to give more, not just “more” in absolute terms, but also in terms of a higher percentage of their wealth. Giving more in absolute and relative terms may still leave them better off than those who engage in charity starting on a lower level of wealth.

Now, it turns out that in real life, the opposite is true: the less wealthy you are, the more you give in relative terms:

(source)

This is quite shocking in a sense. And it means that the current recession, which doesn’t only affect Wall Street types but the poor as well, will probably reduce charitable giving substantially.

More on charity here and here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (16): The Extent of Our Duties Towards the Poor

(source)

Not only the state has a duty to help the poor and to protect their economic rights. The individual should also intervene in order to realize the economic rights of his or her fellow citizens and fellow human beings. He or she can intervene in different ways: through caritas or altruism, through trade and exchange etc. (Simply giving the example and inspiring others by way of your own success, as in this cartoon, is not enough).

It is only when these interventions fail or never take place and individuals neglect their duties, that the state must act by way of redistribution. After all, redistribution is a limit on freedom and on property rights (which are very important, see here) and should therefore be kept to a minimum.

I mentioned our fellow human beings. The extent of our duties towards the poor is an interesting discussion in contemporary philosophy. Some say that we have only duties towards our fellow citizens; others that we have a duty towards everyone. Whereas in principle, everyone regardless of borders has the same right to our assistance, there has to be some differentiation in practice. Our duties arising from economic rights are not the same towards everyone. In general, we have more duties towards certain persons than towards other persons. This is because of the principle “ought implies can” (if you cannot swim, then you do not have a duty to rescue persons from drowning), which is a general principle of law and morality. None of us can give material assistance to everybody in need of assistance. We all have a limited amount of resources, and even if we have more than we require for our basic needs, we will not be able to assist everybody.

That is why we have to be selective. Our own children, for example, take precedence. We have more duties towards our children than towards other people. Closeness means that you can do more, and if you can do more, you ought to do more. Can also implies ought. Closeness, therefore, plays a part in the degree of duty, although not in the existence of duty. If we can help everybody, then we have to help everybody. This is especially the case when we transcend the level of individuals. Wealthy groups – for example a wealthy country or a group of wealthy countries – can help many people and maybe even everybody, and hence have a duty to do so.

More on the problem of the extent of our duties towards the poor here. More posts in this series are here.

Religion and Human Rights (12): Religion, Charity and Poverty

Throughout this blog, I’ve always been very critical of the role of religion in politics and of the harm it can do (see here, here and here for example), and I will continue to be critical.

However, while advocating the separation of state and church as a means to guarantee liberty, human rights, tolerance and democracy, I also admit that religion is very important to a large number of people, and that a rigid exclusion from politics is not feasible or even necessary.

On top of this, I’ve always stressed the importance of the fight against poverty, and our individual responsibility in this respect (contrary to an exclusive reliance on the state). The following graphs show that religious people are more likely to take this responsibility serious, another reason to show religion some respect:

(source)

Human Rights Quote (32): Charity

Confucius

A man without charity in his heart—what has he to do with ceremonies? A man without charity in his heart—what has he to do with music? It is the spirit of charity which makes a locality good to dwell in. He who selects a neighbourhood without regard to this quality cannot be considered wise. Confucius