The Professor
		7.11.05
	The Tragedy of Live8 Whatever the eventual impact of Live 8, the chain of megaconcerts held throughout the world to promote debt relief and increased aid to Africa, one thing is fairly clear: The power of art will continue to be wholly misunderstood, misused, and mistaken by the millions (perhaps billions, if promoter Bob Geldof is correct) of people who took in the shows. By confusing the power of art to shape the world anew with the power of money to enrich Africa, the Believers will continue to press for the right result through the wrong means, and they will seek assistance from the wrong people. Let’s be clear: The issue of poverty in the developing world is complicated. Lenders deserve to be paid back, but they might also clear credit if it would serve their interests to do so. Debtors will benefit from one less debit to their account balance, but corrupt political leaders are not clear candidates to use the extra income wisely. Additional aid would provide resources for food, health, and shelter, but every additional handout makes the need for further largesse in the future more likely. Benign neglect is often an effective strategy to spark an entrepreneurial spirit, but such a strategy can only succeed under conditions that allow for amicable market conditions (stable currencies, credible contract laws, basic infrastructure, and so on). So there are no easy answers to the question of how to address the problem of international poverty. The organizers and artists associated with Live 8 would prefer to ignore this complexity. For the benefit of humankind, they would like to simplify the issue by framing debt relief and humanitarian aid as a moral imperative. Geldof associated the event with human rights movements led by Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Bono encouraged his cheering throngs to get their hands out of their pockets and their fists in the air. And Bjork, according to accounts from Tokyo, can’t seem to keep from crying: “I’m a total mess.” If the moral outrage expressed in the Live 8 concerts were convertible to cash, let it suffice to say that there would be a lot of shopping going on for the next few months. Taking a moral stance against poverty is attractive. It is sometimes difficult to consider that I am writing this article on a sweet computer in a great house in a safe neighborhood in a thriving city in the wealthiest country in the world, and that I could have been dealt with death from typhus and been forgotten in a landfill on the outskirts of Managua, Nicaragua. It is heartening to think that a simple transfer of wealth from the gifted to the needy could make such arbitrary strokes of luck and tragedy less possible, or at least less severe. It is uplifting to know that I’ve tried to make a difference. But Live 8 goes about realizing this equation in exactly the wrong way. There’s a difference between buying a meal for a homeless individual and implementing a welfare program that prioritizes the nutritional needs of a population. Letting a down-and-out friend crash at your place is not identical to putting a public housing program into place. And there is only a loose conceptual connection between offering someone a cough drop and instituting a community health care system. But suffused as they are in their righteous offense at the approach taken by the G8 countries towards the plight of the world’s impoverished, the Live 8 Believers refuse to understand that feeding an African individual through a morally determined donation is nothing like feeding an African country through a morally guided policy. The international market – which includes financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – is built on the philosophical belief that individuals should be left alone to pursue their own interests according to their own hierarchy of values in a system that grants no a priori preference to any given interest or value. As such, it is exactly the wrong venue in which to introduce anything approaching a moral position with regard to how resources should be distributed. The political leaders and the economic experts who will be represent their countries at the upcoming G8 summit know this, and their action with regard to third-world debt will likely reflect a strong allegiance to this knowledge. Any action otherwise will be stunning and likely disruptive to financial markets – especially in the long term. They will probably continue to ask for their money back. And Live 8 and Company will continue to damn them for it. They will keep browbeating others to give up their money, but it is unclear that any of them (aside from Bill Gates and a select few others) will be willing to make the attempt to see whether there’s anything damnable (even if unintentionally so) about their own solution to the problem. And that’s a shame. Brad Pitt might overstate his and others’ abilities to end world poverty in this generation, but he and others would have a better shot at it if they didn’t misapprehend their own powers to change the world.
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