Peter Singer Transcript

TRANSCRIPT Peter Singer Interviewed by Len Morris July 2007 LEN MORRIS: First question would be to ask you to define “poverty” - what are we talking about here?

PETER SINGER: When I talk about poverty on a global level, I’m talking about people who don’t have the resources to meet their basic needs. The basic needs of themselves and their families. And to do it in a secure way. Obviously, you know, they may be able to meet their basic needs today or tomorrow but they don’t know when something is going to happen, that might mean next week or next month they either can’t provide enough food for their family or one of their children falls ill and they can get no basic – not even the most basic medical care for them. That’s what I mean by poverty.

According to the World Bank, there’s about one billion people who are in that category that I just described. The category of what they call “extreme poverty.” There’s another two billion who are also poor by a slightly more generous definition, which still means that they are living on the equivalent of about two US dollars per day, or what two US dollars per day can purchase in their countries. So they are still, by our standards, incredibly poor. But they do have enough to just meet their minimally basic needs.

The standard – the extreme poverty standard is the purchasing power equivalent of one dollar per day. That’s not to say that they actually have the equivalent in their own country of a dollar. They have what one dollar can purchase in the United States, so in exchange rate terms, that might be actually much less than a dollar. It might be twenty or thirty cents. It’s really hard for us to imagine, I think, people getting by on so little.

Many years ago I published an article in a journal in which I asked people to imagine that they are walking past a shallow pond, and they see a small child who’s fallen into that pond, and is in danger of drowning. And they look around to see where the parents or someone who is looking after the child is; there’s no one else around. So they can see that the child is quite likely to drown unless they wade into the pond and pull out the child. And if they do that, they know that the pond is not deep or dangerous, but they’re going to ruin their shoes, they’ve got good shoes on that they like, and they’ll get wet and muddy, so they’ll probably be ruined. Maybe their other clothing will need to go to the cleaners. So there’ll be some small cost to them. And I asked my students, ‘Well, do you think it would be wrong for a person in those circumstances to say, ‘No, I don’t want to spoil my shoes, so I’m not going to wade into the pond,’ and let the child drown?” And almost everybody says, “Of course that would be wrong. That would be a terrible thing to do. You’d be a kind of monster to consider your shoes weighing against the life of the child.” Then having got people to accept that view, I asked them, “Is there really such a difference between that and the situation of comfortably-off people as most people in the United States, say, are, as against the one billion who are living in extreme poverty, when we know that every day some 27,000 children die from poverty-related

causes. Those are figures that come from UNICEF. And that those deaths could be prevented if only we would share a little bit more of our wealth to provide them with basic health care, or assist them in producing enough food, give them better varieties of grain, or fertilizer or something like that, so that they can start to produce enough food for themselves. So we could prevent many if not all of these deaths. At a cost to ourselves probably that per life saved, would be no greater than a pair of shoes, or sending your clothes to the cleaners.

I think, you know, once we realize that when we choose to spend let’s say two hundred dollars on the kinds of things that we might – might be a vacation trip, might be just a night out at a good restaurant and going to the theatre – that that kind of amount can quite possibly save the life of a child or anyway make a huge difference to people living in extreme poverty, if given to an effective organization that uses the money carefully to make sure that it gets the best results. And so I think that ought to affect our actions in the sense that we should realize that we have these choices, and that if we want to live ethically, ethical lives, if we want to just even live a minimally decent standard, we should be sharing at least some of what we have. I’ve suggested perhaps 10 percent, a traditional tithe, that we should be contributing to the relief of extreme poverty.

I think that we certainly say, and I think generally we believe, that human life is of equal value, independently of whether that’s the life of an American or of a Kenyan.

It’s of equal value independently of the race or ethnicity of the person. And I don’t think just mere distance should really make a moral difference. It would seem very strange that just the fact that one child is 100 yards away from you and the other child is several thousand miles away from you, should make a difference, if in fact there is a way of helping that child on the streets of Nairobi. So then I think, yes, there’s really no significant moral difference between those decisions.

Clearly if there are 50 children drowning, the demands on you are greater, if you’re the only person who can help. You have to, you know, wade into the pond again and again. I still think that if the added cost each time is slight, really you ought to do that. Now perhaps at some point there’s a limit – you might say you’re collapsing from exhaustion, or you have no life apart from helping children who are drowning in the pond. You might feel at some point there’s a limit. Some people might say, once you’ve done your fair share, if there are other people who could help, maybe that’s enough. I certainly think, you know, that we should still be going on and doing as much as we can.

And if other people are not doing their fair share, well, unfortunately, we, you know, have to keep on helping. But maybe, maybe at some point, you might say, “Okay, I’ve done so much that I have no other life left, and that’s a point at which I can reasonably stop.” But I think there’s a long way to go for most of us before we get to that point.

Right, right. I do think that there’s something seriously morally questionable about the lifestyle that we maintain in the industrialized nations of the world, given that we’re aware, or we should be aware, that there are so many people who are starving or who can’t get even the most minimal health care for their children. I think that we have to put a big moral question mark against that kind of lavish lifestyle and lavish spending.

Now, it’s difficult, you know, when everybody else is doing it. Of course it’s difficult not to do it yourself. I think that’s part of the problem. That we have a culture that makes this acceptable, and so it’s difficult for us to say, “Well, you know, I’m going to stop all of that.” But I do think we should – you know, we can at least all cut back. We can at least be aware of how ostentatious this is, and how indulgent this is really, and I would say that at some limits, when you look at some of the extravagance that’s around – people having their own private yachts or whatever it might be – I think it verges on the obscene, really, I have to say. That people would be so indulgent themselves while there is so much need elsewhere in the world.

And if you have an open wound that’s bleeding, then a Band-Aid might be the best thing for it, right? If you – obviously if you can stop the cause of the bleeding, you will do so. But until you can do so, then I think you need to do what you can to patch the wound. And in that sense, to say that providing food and shelter is a Band-Aid solution, is not to say that it’s a bad thing to do. Of course, if you can deal with the causes as to why there are these street children, deal with them, too. And in the meantime, do what you can to help those who are already there.

Well, you can certainly say that if we’re failing to provide assistance, we are responsible for the deaths of those children. And whether you want to say it’s the same as actually going there and shooting them, that’s a debatable point. A lot of people draw distinctions between what you do by an act and what you do by your omissions, but personally I think that there’s a clear degree of responsibility for deaths that you bring about by your omissions and yes, if we are failing to provide help when we can – perhaps even more clearly when we’ve made commitments as we did at the Millennium Development Summit, and we don’t live up to those commitments, we are responsible for the deaths that result.

The disparity was completely ridiculous. I mean, I know that so much money was given to victims of 9/11 that tables were set up in the lobbies of apartment buildings in Lower Manhattan, asking people to make claims if they were in some way, had to evacuate or whatever. This is not a poor part of the world, Lower Manhattan. And in contrast, as you say, UNICEF’s report received very little attention. Part of the problem, of course, is that 9/11 was such a dramatic event. It was captured on television, it was shown again and again and again. Everybody saw it, everybody saw some emotional response to it. Plus, of course, people do help Americans more than they help people in other countries. The 10 million children who are dying every year are not significant news events. It’s just always happening. It’s not captured on television. And it happens far away. So people don’t respond to it. I think it’s kind of different emotional systems going on here that lead to action, and different ways in which news is presented and reaches us. That’s a tragedy, because of course really what happens every day to the world’s children is on a much larger scale and really worse than what happened on September 11th.

I think if those 10 million deaths were occurring in the United States, we would get a different reaction. But it’s possible that if they were well-dispersed throughout the

United States, they were occurring in poor areas, in the ghettos of cities and so on, that it still would not get a very big reaction. But if even, say, ten thousand of those 10 million children were actually brought together and were to die on the lawn in front of the Capitol in Washington, then there would be an enormous reaction. I mean, I don’t think the public could stand that. I don’t think the American public could stand thousands of children dying in front of their eyes amidst the affluence of Washington. That wouldn’t happen.

It’s no less grave to die from a gunshot wound. But it’s more difficult to prevent children in Washington dying from gunshot wounds, then it is to prevent children dying of hunger or disease in Africa. That’s partly because it’s politically difficult to change the situation regarding gun laws in the United States, and also because even if you do change the laws, it’s going to be another question to enforce those laws. And I would say – and I haven’t actually tried to cost this, but I imagine the cost per child’s life saved, if we’re trying to save children from gunshot wounds in the United States, would be many thousands of dollars per life saved, maybe tens of thousands of dollars per life saved. Just in the increased enforcement that you would need to keep those guns out of those communities. Compared to that, I think we can save the lives of children in Africa for really peanuts, as compared to what it would take to save the lives of gun violence in the United States.

Americans are generous in terms of philanthropy. That is, Americans give a lot away, compared to other countries. But most of it, overwhelmingly, is given domestically, and it’s not given to fight poverty, necessarily. It’s given to a whole lot of things – to churches, to colleges, to the arts and so on. Many of these are good causes, but as compared to the emergency that we face in terms of global poverty, I don’t believe that they are as urgent. And when we look at what Americans give to fight global poverty, it’s actually very little. And Americans are not generous at all in this respect. The U.S. government is currently giving about 22 cents in every 100 dollars that the nation earns, as what it calls “official development assistance.” Now that figure is among the lowest in the developed world. It’s comparable, I think, to Greece or Portugal, right down at the bottom of the industrialized nations. It’s less than a quarter, for example, of what Norway gives per – in relation to the size of its gross domestic product per year. And even if you add to that private philanthropy, you don’t get very much more – you get a little bit more.

But also you have to consider that of that official aid, a lot of it is not going to the poorest nations in the world. By far the biggest recipient at the moment is Iraq, followed by Afghanistan, followed by Egypt. These are nations where we think giving is going to be in our political interests. They’re our friends; we want to support. It’s not going to the poorer African nations, for example. So if you really want to ask, “What is the United States doing to fight poverty?” it’s less than 22 cents in every 100 dollars that we earn, even when you add in the private philanthropy. And the European nations, generally, most nations in the world are more generous than we are in fighting global poverty.

There’ve been a lot of survey which show that Americans vastly overestimate the amount of foreign aid this country gives. In four separate surveys Americans typically said that they thought that 15 to 20 percent of the federal budget goes for foreign aid. And

they thought that was too much. But they said, “Well, maybe something like 10 percent would be the right amount.” In fact only one percent, or less than one percent of the federal budget, is going for foreign aid. So Americans believe that we’re giving perhaps 20 times as much foreign aid as we are, and they’d like us to give maybe 10 times as much foreign aid as we are. So they’re really woefully misinformed. And perhaps they’d like the United States to be more generous than it is, if they were accurately informed about what we’re doing.

I don’t really know where the false impression comes from. I mean it may come from some of the news commentators that they hear. The critics of foreign aid that sort of talk about “billions of dollars” going – well, yes, it is billions of dollars, but remembering that the United States spends 116 billion dollars each year on alcohol. The fact that it might give 15 or 20 billion dollars for foreign aid is not really such a large amount. So it may be that just throwing around these big figures which don’t really mean much to people – they can’t put them in proportion to the size of the federal budget – that that misleads people. I don’t know. But what is clear is that there’s a failure of political leadership in this country. Because you never hear a national political leader, or even a candidate for political office, say, “It’s a disgrace how little this country’s giving for foreign aid; we should raise the amount of foreign aid we’re giving.”

Yes, I think you could probably say that maybe a nickel in every 100 dollars we earn actually goes to the poorest people. Whether it ends up helping Emmanuel or some other project, it’s hard to say, but that’s probably the net amount that actually we are giving, really that’s directly aiding the poorest of the poor in the world.

Aid can be tied when a government says we’re giving such-and-such, so many billion dollars of aid, but it then tells the countries that you have to use this money to buy products from the United States, that are made in the United States. So it’s an attempt to support US producers and manufacturers. That often dramatically reduces the value of the aid. Let me give you one example of this. The United States announced that it was making a donation to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. And it announced this sort of cash sum of – can’t remember, say five billion dollars or whatever it was. It was a reasonable size sum. But then it said that a substantial part of this aid was tied and that condoms provided to fight AIDS had to be manufactured in the United States. Now, you can get identically good condoms manufactured in Asia for less than half the price of the cost of purchasing them in the United States. So in order to support a few hundred jobs in the United States, we’re reducing the value of the money that we’re committing to fight HIV/AIDS by at least 50 percent.

It’s not. If you say, well, naturally most people when they go to the market, they buy the cheapest product that they can, if the quality is the same. So by that sense it’s as if saying, you know, okay, here’s 50 dollars you can spend when you go to the market.

But you can’t buy the cheapest goods, even if they are two identical goods. You have to spend that fifty dollars on the one that costs two dollars a pound, rather than the same product that you could get for one dollar a pound. So you’d really say, well, you might as well just give me 25 dollars and let me buy what I choose.

Yes, I think the situation with drugs is often even worse than the situation I described with condoms. It’s clearly because of the political influence of the big pharmaceuticals who give, of course, millions of dollars to campaigns of political candidates. And they have enormous influence. And so they’ve been able to get this clause about FDA approval being required which is clearly just a way of making sure that the cheaper generics are not used and therefore that they can sell more of the identical drugs at five times the cost.

I think there’s no question about that. The pharmaceutical lobby has been very successful in maintaining profits for big pharmaceutical corporations and the result of that is millions more deaths that are occurring of people who become victims of HIV/AIDS. It’s obviously completely immoral.

Well, there are a couple of problems with food aid. One is that certainly it’s expensive for the American taxpayers because it is buying from American corporations and being shipped on American ships, and so on, as you say. And clearly it serves the interests of the American farm lobby and buys up surplus grains that are produced. But apart from that, while there is a place for food aid in some circumstances where there is a local food emergency, there’s a drought, a famine, there’s no food in the region available at all, then maybe shipping in food is the only thing you can do. But in general, shipping in food from the United States to Africa actually destroys the local market for food. And very often food is available in the region, but people simply don’t have the means to purchase it. It’s much better, then, to supply them with assistance purchasing the food locally. Because that puts money back into the local economy. And provides an incentive for local farmers to continue to grow food. If you just take thousands of tons of US grain and dump it in a local market, you destroy that market, and maybe you feed some people with some cheap food, but the farmers who are relying on being able to sell their harvest in order to get a little bit of money to be able to send their children to school or afford some basic health care for their children, they don’t have any cash income now. And that can be incredibly destructive for the local community.

I think for anyone who believes in democracy there is a problem about some people, a small number of people having vast wealth, if they can use that for political influence. If the political system allows them to use that, either to buy influence by donating to the campaigns of candidates for office, or by buying a lot of media advertising, TV ads, and so on, to support the causes they believe in. That seems to me to be fundamentally contrary to the idea that everybody’s voice should in some way count roughly equally. So I think there is a real problem with combining democracy and very unequal distribution of wealth, where there are no serious limits or restrictions on the use of that wealth to gain political influence. But beyond that, I see the problem, really, as being the fact that there are so many people still living in a really what’s such a minimal level that it’s not a proper human existence. That it lacks the basic prerequisites for what we might consider a minimally decent human life. And that’s what troubles me about great wealth. That people are really indulging themselves in this without thinking how can I use it to actually help reduce some of these problems in the world.

And it’s been very good to see that some of the extremely wealthy – Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the most recent examples – have been thinking about this. And have been using very substantial parts of their great wealth to actually think about making a difference in the world. I just wish that everybody who had such abundance would really be taking that path.

People sometimes say to me when I suggest, you know, that they have an obligation to give away a lot of their money – they say, “Well, you know, I earned it, why should I give it away?” But what they don’t realize is that it’s only possible for them to get rich because they have been born into, or perhaps emigrated into a society that provides them with the social economic conditions for getting rich. For example, in the United States, we have come into a society which has a tradition of providing reasonably good government, law and order fairly well maintained, maintenance of property rights, education for all of us and our children, infrastructure like roads, telecommunications, all of those things. A kind of economic system that to a degree relies on trust that people will fulfill their obligations, and in which they do so. And those are the circumstances in which some people have the ability to become very wealthy. But most of that wealth really presupposes those conditions. Warren Buffet has said it quite openly, that he said, look, if he, instead of being born in America at the time he was, had been picked up and dumped down in Peru or somewhere like that, maybe in an agricultural region, the particular skills that he has in analyzing corporations and buying stocks that he believes will appreciate, would have been useless. And he would not have become a particularly wealthy man at all, very likely. So that’s true, really, for anyone who becomes wealthy, that they are relying on the capital that has been built up by the society. It’s been accumulated over generations before they began to accumulate their wealth, that provided the conditions for them to become wealthy. And Herbert Simon, who’s a Nobel prizewinning economist estimated that about 90 percent of the wealth in developed nations comes from social capital. Only 10 percent is created by the individual efforts of entrepreneurs and people who actually gain that wealth for themselves.

What Simon said, actually, was that just in terms of fairness, it would be perfectly fair to have a 90 percent income tax on people who were extremely wealthy. Now he wasn’t suggesting that that would be a good thing to do, because he thought that would destroy too much of the incentives for creation of wealth. But what it does mean, I think, is that those who have great wealth could recognize that perhaps 90 percent of that wealth is something that they are holding, really, because of what the community has contributed to them, and that they might think about giving back, not just to our own community either, I would say, but to the world as a whole.

I think that that is an excellent view: that we should expect a great deal from those who have abundance. I don’t think we do expect enough. We’re pleased when people like Gates or Buffet give away most of their fortune, but we’re not outraged when other extremely wealthy people on the Fortune 500 list give two or three or five percent of what they have to charity. Or when they buy 400-foot yachts and cruise the Caribbean with them. I think we should expect more of people who are extremely wealthy.

Okay. Well, I started thinking about what I should be doing when I was a graduate student at Oxford. I didn’t have very much money at the time. My wife and I decided to give away of 10 percent of what we earned, of our gross income, largely to Oxfam. And gradually as we’ve become more comfortable, we’ve built that up. It’s probably now about a quarter of what we’re earning. But I wouldn’t say that’s an equilibrium. I think we should be doing more than that. We still are living very comfortably and no doubt we should be getting up to a higher figure than that, too. We are gradually moving upwards.

I think that in practice individuals are going to have different kinds of boundaries that will relate to their own feeling of what they’re prepared to do for others, and what they want to keep for themselves. And of course a lot will depend on their own individual circumstances. I think that you can go different ways. I know some people who’ve said I’m just going to take a fixed sum that I need to live on, whatever that might be. I know someone living in England who said, for example, that 10,000 pounds, about $20,000 US dollars is enough to support himself, and that he’s going to give the rest away. I think that’s a wonderful thing to do, which probably not everybody is prepared to do. But other people will do it in terms of percentage. I think that for people who are not really doing anything significant at the moment, think of that 10 percent, that tithing figure, is a good figure to aim at, and if sort of the majority of people were to do that, we would probably have enough to deal with the problem. But of course people who are well above the kind of comfortable middle class, who are really affluent, can easily do a lot more than that and there’s – I would urge them to work up – start with 10 percent and work up beyond that, because I think it’s totally doable. And I’d also, again, like to say something that Warren Buffet said, that if what you’re thinking about is – well, I want to retain some money because I want to leave it to my children – are you really doing your children a favor if you’re going to leave them with so much money that they don’t have to work?

That they can live lives of idleness. Because I think there’s lots of evidence that the second generation of people who are wealthy often do not actually lead good lives, because they lack the purpose of needing to do something to earn their own living. And Buffet’s view is that you should not leave your children so much that they don’t need to do anything. You should leave them something so they can do what they want to do – maybe they have some opportunities, but not so that they’ve got enough that they can just sit back and say, “I don’t really need to do anything for the rest of my life.”

I think there’s no doubt at all that if the people in the affluent world generally were to contribute, there would be plenty of money to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and even to go further not only by Jeffrey Sachs’s estimate, but even if you double or triple the amount that he thinks is needed. The calculations that I did really only took a certain percentage from people who were earning I think the equivalent of around $90 thousand US dollars, so that’s still the upper 10 percent of the US population. And was suggesting that they give 10 percent. That when you get up to the next bracket, they give a little bit more than 10 percent; when you get up to the super rich, and they might give 25 percent. But it was never a level that you would call confiscatory or taking half of what people have. And it was never actually reaching down to people who were not already very comfortable. And what I calculated is, that if you work out what that

amounts to, and you take it not only from the US but from all the people in the world living at that level of comfort, you can have four or five times the amount that Jeffrey Sachs calculates needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. So it’s not as if extreme poverty is a kind of bottomless pit in which we would pour all the wealth of the wealthy people in the world and still not deal with it. On the contrary, it would be a rather modest contribution from affluent people, probably affecting enough – if we include the middle class – probably five percent from people in the middle class and a little more from people who are in the upper reaches of the economic ladder. And we would do that – of course, we would have to make sure it was given effectively. And we need to do more work on making sure that we can do it in the right way that actually creates longterm solutions to problems. But there’s no question in my mind that we have the resources to do it and to do it comfortably.

Absolutely. I think the United States must take a leadership role. The United States economy is about a third of the global economy. It’s of course very disproportionate to our population which is less than five percent of the global population. So we must take a leadership role. We don’t have to do it alone. But we are lagging behind European nations at the moment. The European Union is the other largest part of the economy and then Japan following that. And China, of course, which has also now got a significant number of wealthy people in it. So if the US takes a leadership role, I’m sure everyone else will follow that. But at the moment we are really dragging back on what the Europeans are doing, and we need to change that. We need to match or go ahead of what they’re doing, and instead of that 22 cents in every 100 dollars that we’re giving – in fact, barely that, as we were saying, given what goes to countries of political significance to us – but if we could get that up to maybe two dollars in every hundred, I’m sure that would be enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals, as long as that money was given effectively.

I do see that, yes, the statements and announcements are not matched by the reality. And of course the Millennium Development Goals will be a real test. We sign on the line here, is to say we’ve reaffirmed them. If we do not do what our commitments were, then I think it’s going to be clear to everyone that these are just words, that basically we’re liars. That we don’t even really mean what we say at the time we say it.

Because you can make excuses – you can say, well, it was difficult to get the system in place for a time. That’s why we haven’t spent all of these funds on HIV/AIDS yet that we’ve promised. But we’re going to do so. But eventually, of course, that runs out.

Eventually you run out of excuses. And we have to make this a priority. If we’re making it a priority, we’ll find ways to do it. And so we will see very soon, as we’re now sort of half-way through that Millennium Development commitment, whether we’re really going to deliver on that or not.

For me, it’s sufficient that we have the ability to help, and that there are people who need to be helped. But there are some people who hold a different sort of philosophy which basically says, “Look, if I don’t violate their rights, then I don’t owe them anything.” Kind of libertarian view. And for those people, I think it should be a very powerful reason for doing something. That actually we have and are continuing to harm

these people. Because, particularly through our emission of greenhouse gases. We are hanging their climate. We are making the rainfall on which they rely to grow their food less reliable. We’re raising sea levels which will flood some of their low-lying fertile delta farm lands in some countries. So certainly we owe them something for the harm that we’ve done. And there are a lot of other issues that we could go into, including the ridiculous subsidies that we give to our cotton growers that prevent more efficient cotton producers in West Africa from selling their cotton on the global market. Because our subsidized cotton is cheaper than the cotton they can produce.

Or we can talk about the way in which our corporations take the oil or minerals from countries that are run by dictators and give the royalties to the dictators, when they know it’s not going to the people of the companies. And surely those resources belong to the people of the country, not to some corrupt gang of thugs that have managed to get power over the government. We shouldn’t be dealing with these people at all. It’s really like receiving stolen goods. So I think there’s a lot of ways in which we are harming these countries. The climate change is probably the clearest and the most dramatic concern.

If you look at the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population, it’s very hard to see how our affluence is benefiting them at all. They’ve not been benefiting by the era of globalization and more open trade. I mean, some of the moderately poor people in the world have. Some of those people in China and India who were not the poorest, but perhaps still fairly poor, have benefited through globalization and trade. But all the evidence suggests that the bottom 10 percent is just as poor as they were, and are not really able to participate in the trade with more affluent nations. So I just don’t think it’s true that our efforts are benefiting them at all.

I think that we have to try and help people to get to a sustainable state. I think that should always be the aim. I think we should not be locked in to permanently helping people. It’s possible that that will happen, as Sachs says, in some areas. But I think we should try and use all of our ingenuities to find ways in which we can assist them to be sustainable. And of course I would emphasize, if they can’t sustain their numbers in a certain area, to help them to control their fertility, so that those numbers don’t grow. I think we do have to face up to this question of global population. It’s an issue that is there. And in terms of a sustainable world of people living at a reasonable lifestyle I do know some people who have gone there themselves, if you like. They want to not just write a check, but they want to see what’s happening, they want to have some contact with the people they’re helping. I have one Australian friend who inherited some money from his father, a bit more than he expected. I mean, he’s certainly not super-rich, but he’d been living quite comfortably and now had this extra money. So he set up a foundation with it, and he went to Ethiopia. He found a part of the country where people did not have safe drinking water. The women had to walk three hours a day to bring water to their homes, and then they still had to boil it, using scarce wood to boil it. And yet there was underground water there. The villagers just didn’t have the technology to drill down and bring up that water. So for about $10,000 he was able to put in a well, a

simple hand-operated mechanism, no motor or fuel needed, or anything like that, where they can now pump safe, clean water out of the ground right near their village and that should last a lifetime and provide about a thousand people with clean, safe drinking water, for a total of $10 per person. I mean you think about the sort of things that we would trivially would spend ten dollars on, and this immense difference that this can make. Not only saving people of the village hours of work daily, but also preventing some of their children dying from drinking impure water. So you can make a huge difference. And obviously he found it tremendously satisfying, to be able to actually go there and have contact with the people who he was helping. He’s subsequently been looking around for other projects like that. So yes, people can do that and I think it’s great if they actually have that personal connection with the people they’re helping.

I’m not sure that there is a connection between terrorism and poverty. It’s tenuous I think. Obviously young people living in circumstances where they have no prospects and no future I guess are more likely to volunteer to be suicide bombers, that’s possible.

But we’ve also seen some quite affluent people doing that. It seems like the people involved in the recent British bombing, or attempted bombing in London and the ____ Airport were affluent doctors. So you can’t actually say what fanatical religious belief will lead people to do, even if they’re quite comfortably off. So I wouldn’t really play the link between terror and poverty too strongly. There may be some connection. It certainly won’t hurt, I think, to show that we’re genuine about relieving poverty, will certainly help to establish our country’s reputation in places where at the moment it’s very low.

But I couldn’t say that we won’t win the war on terror without doing, solving the problem of poverty, and I also can’t say that if we do solve the problem of poverty, we will win the war on terror. They are separate things.

Well, I think the United Nations can play a very useful coordinating role in getting nations to work together. I don’t think that means that all of the money should be channeled through the United Nations. The United Nations is a global bureaucracy. It’s actually not a very big one. People are often surprised how small the United Nations is, in terms of the number of people it employs. I read somewhere it has fewer employees than the New York City Fire Department. And yet it’s in one way responsible for the entire world. But it plays that role in coordinating. And I would like to see a lot of the money going directly through non-government organizations that work at the grassroots level, rather than going through either the United Nations, or the World Bank, or bodies like that. I don’t think that’s the most efficient way of doing it.

I like the idea of the Millennium Villages, because they are in a way a kind of social experiment. They’re a test of the theory that if we go to a village, if we deal with a lot of different issues, if we deal with malaria by giving them bed nets, we deal with health by providing some basic health clinics, we give them better varieties of grain, so they get better yields, we give them some fertilizer for the first year or two so they can produce more and then get a bit of cash surplus to put back – is that going to work? Is that going to help them to become self-sustaining, to get out of the poverty trap? I like this sort of empirical approach that says, “Let’s try this; let’s see what it does.” And, you know, we try it with 80 villages. If it looks like it’s working, maybe we can expand to 80

thousand villages before too long. So I think it’s a good approach to try. The results are not really in yet but let’s keep watching and let’s see whether this is the way to go.

Well, I don’t think we can justify the minimal amounts that we’ve spent on assistance to the poor. And perhaps if we spent more on the poor, we wouldn’t have to spend quite so much on defense. But certainly I think those aspects of the budget are out of proportion. And if we do need to spend this much on defense, well, we certainly should be spending a lot more, a similar sort of amount, I would say, on dealing with global poverty.