Singer vs. Horatio Alger
Probably my favorite part of Ban van der Vossen and Jason Brennan’s new In Defense of Openness (Oxford University Press) is their critique of Peter Singer’s “drowning child” argument. Background: Philosopher Peter Singer famously argues that failing to donate your surplus income to help the global poor is morally equivalent to allowing a child to drown in a pond. Van der Vossen and Brennan, in contrast, argue that the global poor are perfectly able to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps… if the world’s governments will only let them.
If we’re going to have an analogy, perhaps the following would be better: the world’s poor are not like children in a pond, and they do not need to be pulled out by nobly motivated Westerners. They are people, perfectly capable of swimming and rescuing themselves, who are trapped in a pond surrounded by fences keeping them from escaping on their own initiative. What they need, what they really need, is for those fences to be taken down. They need the removal of the barriers that keep them in a position where they need help. Such an analogy would recommend protecting people’s productive rights, improving their access to markets around the world, and freeing their ability to migrate.
Alternately, instead of seeing the global poor as drowning children, we should see them as characters in a Horatio Alger novel. What they need is not charity but opportunity. And that’s great news, because charity has always been very scarce. Opportunity, in contrast, is like love – the more you offer, the more you have.
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I used to love Horatio Alger stories. It took me a long time to realize that their lessons are less applicable in a world of credentials, byzantine bureaucracy, and equity-informed hiring. The stories are still good guides to life, of course... but the old idea of hard work & initiative yielding success, and sloth & laziness yielding failure, has been badly blurred. Sloth and poor decisions can earn a person tens of thousands of dollars in transfer payments. Academic conformity can win opportunities to luxurious, lifetime sinecures, where no valuable work need be performed.
I agree with the point of this post, but I think we need to introduce a little more Alger into OUR society. Opportunity, fairness (meaning you earn what you produce), and flexibility. That will require those who do not produce to suffer the wages of failure, of course, which is intolerable to many modern people.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/job-search-part-2
I get that someone from 3rd world moving to US or Europe can increase wealth more than if they stayed home and poor, but what about the why? The 1st world wealth is built on infrastructure, historical wealth open trade etc, which all contribute to wealth... But all of those things stem ultimately from certain cultural norms such as equality under the law, personal responsibility, understanding conflict of interest....
Single immigrants who integrate are great. Large groups of immigrants who transplant their whole culture and way of life to the west will simply result in those parts of the world where they form a majority to immiserate.
Removing the fence would be disastrous. What is needed is installing a gate in the fence and allowing through only those willing to play by our rules