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Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Mathias Risse
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Extract

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.

Type
Response To World Poverty and Human Rights
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 9 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar).

2 I argue this in my forthcoming paper “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” The empirical thesis mentioned is the view that economic progress turns primarily on the quality of institutions. The view that the global order harms the poor in ways delineated by the institutional thesis is consistent with the view that that order must also plausibly be credited with massive improvements, which is the view defended here.

3 Unless otherwise noted, data are from World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000Google Scholar); available at web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/o,,contentMDK:20195989~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:336992,00.html; United Nations, “Report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development” (“Zedillo Report”); available at http://www.un.org/reports/financing/full_report.pdf; “World Development Indicators 2002”; available at http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2002/cdrom; and Maddison, Angus, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD Development Center, 2001), table B 22, p. 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lomborg, Bjorn, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar), esp. Part II for the different approaches to measuring inequality.

4 Alesina, Alberto and Dollar, David, ‘Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?” Journal of Economic Growth 5 (2000), pp. 33 – 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to the Zedillo Report, official development aid in 2000 was $53.1 billion, down from $60.9 billion in 1992; in 1998, $12.1 billion went to the least developed countries; official development aid in 1992 averaged 0.33% of donors’ GNP, down to 0.22% in 2000, contrasted with the 0.7% of GNP that is widely agreed upon.

5 de Walle, Nicolas Van and Johnston, Timothy, Improving Aid to Africa (Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press for the Overseas Development Council, 1996), p. 20Google Scholar.

6 Giersch, Herbert, Paqué, Karl-Heinz, and Schmieding, Holger, The Fading Miracle: Four Decades of Market Economy in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 This, I think, is true even though the absolute (as opposed to the relative) number of people living in poverty is now higher than it was 200 years ago; while I find it hard to muster a conclusive argument for that claim, I find it intuitive that what matters here are relative, rather than absolute, numbers.

8 Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000Google Scholar); and Lewis, Bernard, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002Google Scholar).

9 Landes, David S., The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 381Google Scholar, see also p. 429; Bairoch, Paul, in Economics and World History (New York: Harvester, 1993Google Scholar), argues that it was not because of exploitation of developing countries that developed countries did well. The classic of dependency theory is Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979Google Scholar). See Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 51off., for some comments on Cardoso's rise from leftist scholar to president of Brazil.

10 Braudel, Fernand, A History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 134Google Scholar.

11 Pogge, Thomas W., “‘Assisting’ the Global Poor,” in Chatterjee, Deen K., ed. The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 260 – 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 I have adopted this view in Mathias Risse, “What We Owe to the Global Poor,”Journal of Ethics, forthcoming; as well as in Mathias Risse, “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” forthcoming.

13 North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001), pp. 1369–1401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and Francesco Trebbi, “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development,” forthcoming.

15 Pogge, “Assisting the Global Poor,” p. 263.

16 Alan Patten, “Should We Stop Thinking about Poverty in Terms of Helping the Poor?” p. 23, this journal.

17 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 24Google Scholar.

18 This sketch must be extended to a full-fledged argument in support of the existence of states; I do some work toward that end in “What We Owe to the Global Poor.” The distinction between “morally arbitrary” and “morally relevant,” which I think is very important in this context, is due to Blake, Michael, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 3 (2001), pp. 257–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Both points are addressed in “What We Owe to the Global Poor,” but the concern about the original ownership of the earth is discussed most carefully in “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” (where, however, the concern is not with the legitimacy of states).