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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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How can people who care really help the billions mired in deep poverty?

By David McElroy · June 17, 2012

In the early 19th century, the United States was an economic backwater with relatively little influence on the rest of the world. There were certainly plenty of natural resources and there were agricultural crops such as cotton and tobacco that were valuable, but the economic centers of the world were in Europe. What happened over the next 150 years that transformed this country and created the highest standard of living in the world?

Things didn’t change because kindly Europeans sent poverty aid to help poor Americans. It changed because Americans took advantage of the opportunity to build businesses and produce valuable goods in ways that were unheard of until the Industrial Revolution. Americans harnessed the market — which was free to a great extent — in order to start up an economic engine that would become the envy of the world.

When we look at places in the world where poverty is crushing and the economy is crippled, why aren’t those people taking the same path that Americans took starting in the 19th century? And for those of us who have serious concerns about global poverty — both the human cost and the violence it brings — what can we do to change things?

Zachary Caceres is a researcher at the Free Cities Institute who’s traveled to poverty-stricken countries to study what factors are holding poor people back. I asked him what he sees and why the help that many westerners are trying to provide isn’t making a long term difference.

“The big issue is symptoms versus diseases,” Caceres said. “Widespread unemployment, informal trading, poverty, extortion by authorities, violence in the streets — these are all symptoms of a dysfunctional social system. It is essentially impossible for the average person in many developing countries to start a business. Should we be surprised then that people have to eke out a tiny living in the streets?”

The problem is that we’re not in the position to change the social and political systems in these countries. So what can we do? For the most part, we end up trying to provide basic services such as relief aid and building wells for safer water and similar things that treat the worst of the symptoms we see. Caceres says those things are good, but they’ll never be enough.

“Charity, emergency aid and other interventions can do plenty of good in moments of sudden tragedy — and they certainly ameliorate some hardship from people’s lives,” he said. “Treating symptoms makes living hard lives easier. But if we are serious about ending poverty, violence and unemployment then we have to cure the disease. This means helping people to make major structural change in their societies.”

I told Caceres that my church is active in sending short- and medium-term missions teams to work among poor groups, but that I’ve felt uneasy about the process — feeling that we had to go deeper than the symptoms in order to offer a long-term solution. He agreed.

“People can certainly make a difference in people’s lives by ‘symptom treating,'” Caceres said. “Has your church ever considered starting a business in these areas? Starting a business means bringing expertise from the congregation into the developing world. Profits from the enterprise could go towards wells or feeding people. The beauty of doing it this way is that you are employing, bringing commerce, teaching skills and providing a sustainable fund for ‘food and wells’ that doesn’t rely just on the generosity of your congregants.”

Caceres said that those who want to make a difference need to apply what he called “radical social entrepreneurship” to the problems of the world. He said it’s a way of using entrepreneurial thinking to fix social problems. He gave an example of an idea that came from his time in Kenya studying the informal market there.

“One big and innovative way to help people if you can find a way to buy land is to pool your resources and buy a plot for use as an informal market,” Caceres said. “Land can be very cheap. People in the slums of the world try to do this now but have great difficulty. It can be easier for westerners to get land — often by pairing with a trustworthy local, say someone in your religious congregation from the developing nation. Please note that although this proposal ‘thinks big,’ a small group of people with limited resources can make a big difference in people’s lives with smaller markets.”

You can download a PDF of the proposal for this market here. It’s an excerpt from Caceres’ forthcoming book, “Business, Casual: The Spontaneous Order of the Kenyan Street Trade.”

There was a day when those who went to other countries — such as missionaries — were only interested in saving souls and feeding the people. For many of us, those are still worthy goals, but I think we need to be looking more toward the long-term — how we can join forces to make changes that will restructure societies in ways that can make them prosperous over the next century or more.

Feeding and clothing people is important. Loving them and caring about them is even more important. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be equipping the people of the places we want to help with tools that are going to let them — and the generations that come after them — have a greater chance of taking care of themselves.

My church is very active in sending people to help in other countries, but I don’t know of a specific effort to tap the knowledge and skills of business people to find ways that the local people could better help themselves. My church is filled with successful businesspeople. It seems to me that a group of entrepreneurial businesspeople could have a great impact on the future of the people where we send workers. It’s important to feed, teach and build, but what could we do if we helped those people start and run businesses?

I have big and crazy ideas about what could be done, and it’s something I’d love to be part of under the right circumstances. Can we find places where governments will either co-operate or leave us alone to build businesses with the locals? Can we build new social systems in those countries — formal or informal — that would allow the people to learn entrepreneurial skills (instead of just subsistence skills)? I’ve been thinking about that a lot for much of the past year. It seems like something worth pursuing.

We will never change the poverty of the world as long as we’re just benevolent Americans who show up with some aid money and then leave. We have to partner with local people for the long-term. We have to have people with skills move there to live and work among them. Some missionaries and workers with non-profit agencies are already doing some of this, but I think we can do much more if we’ll apply entrepreneurial thinking — and if we’ll dream really big dreams. Some people will be motivated by faith. Others will be motivated by compassion. Either way, a tremendous amount of hurting can be alleviated.

We can’t fix every problem the world faces, but we can make a huge difference in the lives of people around the world for generations to come if we’ll expand the ways in which we look at aid and ministry.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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