Once upon a benefit concert

Just last week I read, and was intrigued by, The Rock Star's Burden, an NYT op-ed. (Subject to login and possible future archiving, sorry.)

The gist of it is that the West in general, and rock stars in particular, have got it all wrong where aid to developing nations is concerned. A specific way in which this is proposed to be so is the bottomless pit of corruption in so many of the world's poorest countries. The article raises an excellent question: when we send monetary aid, or promote debt relief, how carefully are we examining where that money will go and how it will be used?

I was a pre-teen Band-Aid/Live Aid junkie. Only after college did I start to learn things: that the Ethiopian famine (like many) was not a natural disaster, as it was presented to us, but largely was inflicted intentionally in the course of a civil war. That donations often don't reach their destinations due to theft, lack of transport vehicles, insecurity of roads, lack of roads. That aid can be seized and used as a tool to manipulate and repress people. That local farms fail when they can't compete with free food aid; that agriculture is abandoned when people have to move to centralized aid distribution camps. The list goes on.

It had not previously occurred to me that foreign aid, administered naïvely, could potentially cause harm.

Are these high-profile projects really about helping the needy, or are they about convincing ourselves that we've Done Something? That we've Done Enough?

Earlier this fall, there were articles reporting that for all the buzz generated by Live 8, not many actual accomplishments have materialized. I don't know for sure whether that's true, or fair.

Live Aid in 1985 asked for donations, which people sent in. I wonder what it means that Live 8 in 2005 focused so much attention on debt forgiveness. We're not even pretending to give of ourselves any more... we exhort somebody else to give and that feels like we've Done Enough?

But the op-ed writer's solutions didn't seem like a big improvement. He criticized Bill and Melinda Gates for proposing to send computers to schools in the developing world that currently don't have paper and pencils, which admittedly does seem at best premature, but he didn't give them any credit for their work on AIDS, malaria, and global health research in general. He talked about the brain-drain of doctors and professionals from their own countries and proposed "Northern Exposure" style educational contracts to keep them working locally for a few years. Do those work? It's easy to poke holes in someone else's work; much harder to come up with poke-resistant alternatives.

With all that fresh on my mind, Bono and the Gateses are Time magazine's Persons of the Year. I'm not sure what to make of that now.