Open up the black box
Posted by Richard on July 6, 2005
Mark at Cutting Edge of Ecstasy has an excellent post about aid to Africa:
I want to end the needless misery in Africa as much as Bob Geldof, but his solution is to keep using a hammer to turn a screw. …
…
We’ve tried the easy ways of ending the suffering in Africa and they haven’t worked. Sending money and cell phones hasn’t worked. Singing about it falls below the threshold of deserving consideration as a solution. The problem isn’t with the donors, and that leaves only one place to look for the answer – the recipients.I’m not suggesting that a starving infant is to blame, but what happens to the money we send? Who gets it and what are they doing with it? It’s as if there’s this black box labeled ‘African Aid’. We keep putting money in, but better living conditions never seem to come out. How long do we have to keep doing this until someone wants to look inside of the box? We have to ask tough questions and propose tough solutions, for the donors as well as the recipients.
Nice metaphor. Of course, anyone who isn’t delusional knows that inside the black box are a bunch of cynical, heartless, control-freak thieves with Swiss bank accounts and insatiable greed, clinging desperately to the discredited socialist paradigm that they use to justify their parasitic existence, even though it condemns their populations to abject poverty in the midst of one of the most resource-rich parts of the earth.
Why do people like Geldoff and Bono, apparently intelligent, informed, and caring people, seem to just shrug and accept this state of affairs as an unchangeable fact of life? Why do they think the solution is shoving money into the box faster than the kleptocrats can steal it?
Yogimus said
Because it is not about the results as much as the effort.