Brian Micklethwait on why this crisis is different

Brian Micklethwait writes about why so much private aid is flowing to help the victims of the tsunami:

This catastrophe is, it seems to me, an exception to a rule which is now widely accepted among the donation-giving (as opposed to donation soliciting) classes. This rule is: that most of what passes for Foreign Aid these days is pointless, or worse. Personally I believe this, and I now believe that a lot of other people believe it too, and have believed it for some time.

Take the Sudan. Suppose you throw money into that mess. Who gets their hands on it? Starving people? Maybe. But a lot of it surely goes instead to the people who are inflicting rather than suffering from the starvation. The starvation-inflicters control the country like prison guards, and they demand tribute from Aid Agencies as a price for the Aid Agencies bringing their Aid to a few of the starvation-sufferers.

This is exactly my own feeling as well: far too much of what passes for charity is (at best) fractionally beneficial to the intended recipients, and far too much of it ends up in exactly the wrong hands: either the criminals who steal the donations or the "armies" and bureaucrats who are often the primary cause of the crises.

[Aid workers in this case], it seems to me, have one huge advantage compared to the circumstances that pertain in other disasters. They have a definition of cleaning up. They have an objective. Basically, very approximately, very roughly, as best they can, as imperfectly as they must, they are trying to restore the state of affairs that existed before the Tsunami struck. And, they can be confident that if they do manage an approximation of this Herculean labour, the local people whom they are seeking to help will then know just what to do. They will get back to getting on with their lives. Their lives worked okay before. They can work okay again. Meanwhile, they need a helping hand. A big one. But only for a while.

Other 'disasters', of the sort that are said to have 'root causes' (i.e. complicated and controversial and intractable causes), but upon which we are nevertheless nagged to shower Aid, have no such simple and shared objective to get everyone who is trying to help to actually help.

Aid of the second sort, is really just guilt payments: there is little or no hope of the donations actually making the situation better for anyone (except the criminals and oppressors), and a strong likelihood of making it worse. Perpetuating oppression and misery is a terrible way to assuage a general sense of guilt! And yet that's exactly what seems to happen in many cases.

To summarise, this disaster is (a) exceptional in being one that good people have been allowed, by circumstances and by local politicians, to deal with; and (b) it is exceptional in that it is actually reasonably correctable. Money will, in short, not do that much harm, and could do a hell of a lot of good.

Note that I am not just saying that this is how I think it is. Maybe I am totally wrong. Maybe the politicians are screwing up everything, and maybe the idea that there is a status quo ante which can in any imaginable way be returned to is utter nonsense.

I don't think Brian is wrong here, and he makes some excellent points that I haven't scraped off and reposted here. Do read his whole article!