Not For Sale, Free2Work, and just spending

Not For Sale author David Bastone will be giving a talk at Point Loma University on Wednesday April 1 at 7 PM. Check out the Not For Sale Campaign website; there's a bunch of news items on the left on human trafficking and sex slavery.

It looks like the Not for Sale Campaign has also started a complementary organization, Free2Work. And here's where things get interesting for you chocolate lovers. During the first part of the LATG study, we committed to do four things with our money: be thankful for it, spend less, spend justly, and give more. We learned that, much to our chagrin, some of our favorite foods have a less than savory history. In our effort to spend more justly, we found it was relatively easy to find Fair Trade coffee. But Fair Trade chocolate is a good bit harder to find, and usually much more expensive. Earlier this month, however, Cadbury, one of the world's largest confection companies, pledged to certify all their milk chocolate as Fair Trade by the end of this year.

Through this single decision Cadbury has increased the amount of Certified Fair Trade Chocolate sold by three fold.

Neat!

It's World TB Day

I swear I didn't plan it this way. Just in case you thought Paul Farmer was some loony idealist like that TB doctor from that one episode of House, reports from all over the world on World TB Day remind us that that Gregory House is the crazy one, not the TB doctor. (But you already knew that.) TB is a serious global issue. What's more, we're learning that TB itself is symptomatic of deeper social diseases, which you don't have to be a doctor to diagnose.

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

At yesterday's meeting, I read a small quote from an interview with Tracy Kidder at the Random House website, and I think it's worth quoting at length:

One of my favorite characters in this book is a woman named Ophelia Dahl. She met Paul Farmer when she was 18 and he was 23. She told me that she remembered, from many years ago, deciding that Farmer was an important person to believe in. Not as a figure to watch from a distance, thinking, Oh, look, there is good in the world. Not as a comforting example, but the opposite. As proof that it was possible to put up a fight. As a goad to make others realize that if people could be kept from dying unnecessarily — from what Haitians call “stupid deaths” — then one had to act. I don’t plan to give away all my worldly goods and go to work with Farmer in Haiti. For one thing, I’d just get in the way. But I can’t tell myself anymore that the great problems of the world, such as the AIDS and TB epidemics, are beyond all hope of amelioration, or of repair. In other words, I don’t think I can feel comfortable anymore in this world, by resigning myself to despair on behalf of billions of other people. There’s always something one can do. It’s not my place to make a fund-raising pitch for Farmer and his organization, Partners In Health. Well, actually, I don’t know why it isn’t my place. I happened onto something remarkable and I sat down to try to describe it to others. I hope what I’ve written is artful. I believe it is at least accurate and truthful. And one true fact is that Farmer’s organization, Partners In Health, represents a real antidote to despair. [...] A donation to Partners In Health of, say, $200 will save an impoverished Haitian from dying a horrible death from tuberculosis.

I think reading this book is, in some sense, being in Ophelia Dahl's shoes (and Tracy Kidder's). It seems easy to be overwhelmed by Paul Farmer's person, but I think the more important part of this book and Paul Farmer's life isn't Paul Farmer, but the truth outside him. As it happens, writing a biography of Paul Farmer is a good way of illuminating some oft-ignored truths that exist independent of him: about what it means to be poor in this world, about Haiti and stark historical injustices, about sickness and 'the great epi divide'. I should hope that at some point, anyone talking about me could not do it without talking about some vital truth.

I was pleased with out discussion on Sunday and I hope you all felt the same way. Feel free to email me or post any suggestions or other info you find interesting. Those of you reading other Farmer-related material, earmark especially tasty bits.

Guns, germs, or steel?

An economist finds that malaria is much more statistically significant in predicting underdevelopment in Africa than colonialism or the intensity of the slave trade. As the author says at the end of the paper, it doesn't mean those other things aren't important, but findings like these should remind us why infectious disease and public health are such a big deal.

(via Marginal Revolution)

You > The Government

It seems like citizens of the world are incessantly demanding that rich countries budget more for foreign development aid. Indeed, countries like the United States give miserly percentages of their income as foreign aid. Plus, it's hard to feel like one small gift can make a difference. But remember that most of the world's aid comes from private sources, and money from private sources allows NGOs more flexibility in emergencies.

Peter Singer

You remember Peter Singer, the utilitarian ninja who seemed poised to sink our listing hearts before we'd even really started? I don't remember a great deal of affection at our first meeting for Singer's pitch, but I think we agreed with him that we have to do something. Singer has recently extended his ideas on giving into a book, but Bill Easterly is unimpressed. He writes:

Unfortunately, there are several differences between these two situations. The most important is that you know exactly what to do to save the child, whereas it is not at all clear that you (or anyone else) knows exactly what to do to save the lives of poor children or how to get them out of extreme poverty. Another difference is that you are the one acting directly to save the drowning child, whereas there are multiple intermediaries between you and the poor child — an international charity, an official aid agency, a government, a local aid worker.

I think that using the excuse that institutions are not 100% efficient is a major dodge. Certainly, there are some massive inefficiencies at some of the world's largest charities. But if giving money is like paying, say, $10 for an 85% of chance of saving someone's life (or giving them some food, or medicine, or shelter), that's still a bet we should take every time!

At the same time, it is certainly true that some of the world's most prominent aid organizations often do not act in the interest of their constituents, or betray some destructive institutional conceit. Although I don't think it was Tracy Kidder's explicit intent in writing the book, I think one of its great strengths is the numerous places where we learn what makes a highly effective service provider. I think many of these traits are common sense that are difficult to institutionalize, and maybe even harder to identify for those of us on the outside, the potential donors. But things like a patient/client/constituent/others-first ethic ("You can't sympathize with the staff too much or you risk not sympathizing with the patients," p.20) are the things that make an aid organization effective.

What are the things you look for in an organization when you give money? Can we compare churches to international or domestic NGOs?

Blog?

Hello LATGers!

It is my sincere desire that this book club not flop, and I thought a blog might encourage some of us to keep reading and give us a place to air thoughts about the book, or share information with the rest of the group. If anyone wants to post anything, let me know.