United States the Scrooge of the Western world
Friday, December 28, 2001
By PAUL KRUGMAN
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
"Bah, humbug!" cried the U.S. treasury secretary. OK, Paul
O'Neill didn't actually say "Bah."
But last week he contemptuously dismissed proposals for
increased aid to poor nations. And his justification -- that
he "would like to see evidence of what works before making
new commitments" -- was pure humbug.
For the truth is that we already know what works. Nobody
expects foreign aid to perform miracles, to turn
Mozambique into Sweden overnight. But more modest
goals, such as saving millions of people a year from such
diseases as malaria and tuberculosis, are quite reachable,
for quite modest sums of money.
That is the message of a commission report just released by
the World Health Organization, which calls on advanced
countries to provide resources for a plan to "scale up the
access of the world's poor to essential health services." The
program would provide very basic items that many poor
nations simply cannot afford: antibiotics to treat
tuberculosis, insecticide-treated nets to control malaria,
and so on. The price tag would be about 0.1 percent of
advanced countries' income. The payoff would be at least 8
million lives each year.
This is not starry-eyed idealism. The report quotes Jeffrey
Sachs, the Harvard professor who headed the commission:
"I can be 'realistic' and 'cynical' with the best of them --
giving all the reasons why things are too hard to change."
Sachs knows that it will be hard to persuade advanced
countries to come up with the money -- and that the United
States, in particular, is likely to be highly unreceptive. But
this is one of those cases in which leadership could make a
tremendous difference.
Right now, the United States is the Scrooge of the Western
world -- the least generous rich nation on the planet. One
of the tables in that WHO report shows the share of gross
national product given in foreign aid by advanced
countries; the United States ranks dead last, well behind
far poorer countries such as Portugal and Greece. The
sums proposed by the WHO would double our foreign aid
budget, not because those sums are large, but because we
start from so low a base -- about a dime a day for each U.S.
citizen.
Still, doubling our foreign aid budget sounds like an
impossible dream. But is it? We may be a Scrooge nation,
but we are not a nation of Scrooges. Not only are Americans
often generous as individuals, they are -- without knowing
it -- apparently willing to give substantially more foreign aid
than the nation actually does. When asked how much of
the federal budget should be devoted to foreign aid,
Americans typically come up with a number around 10
percent -- about 20 times what we currently spend.
Voters are, however, misinformed: They think that the
share of foreign aid in federal spending should be cut to 10
percent. And they wonder why foreigners don't show more
gratitude for all the money we give them. Americans are, in
other words, living in the past: The Marshall Plan ended
more than 50 years ago, but they haven't noticed.
The point is that we like to think of ourselves as generous.
This suggests that a U.S. administration that really wanted
to follow the WHO report's recommendations would not find
it hard to build political support. All it would have to do is
use the bully pulpit to inform the public of the difference
between America's generous self-image and the less
attractive reality.
Why bother? You might say that the United States has a
selfish interest in helping the world's poor. The Sachs
commission argues that there would be large collateral
benefits from improved health care in the world's poorest
nations. Disease, it argues, is a major barrier to economic
growth, and economic growth in developing countries
would make the world as a whole a richer and safer place.
You might also say that reducing the disconnect between
America's words and its deeds would give us a better claim
to the moral leadership we think we deserve.
But the key argument here is surely a moral one. A sum of
money that Americans would hardly notice, a dime a day
for the average citizen, would quite literally save the lives of
millions. Can we really say to ourselves that this gift is not
worth giving?
seattlepi.nwsource.com
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times.
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