My wife called my attention to this Nicholas Kristof column the other day. In describing it, she said Kristof had gotten fed up with an unpleasant truth about why aid efforts in poor areas of the world fail to save children: Their fathers blow what little money they earn on booze and prostitutes.
I just got around to reading it a few minutes ago. I expected a rant, an angry diatribe using the kind of slashing language that, well, that I tend to use when I’m fed up about something.
But no, Mr. Kristof was as carefully rational as ever. If anything, I think he undersold his point by being so mild about it. An excerpt:
… Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.
Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that…
This tracks with what folks who give microloans to the poor in backwards parts of the world have learned: That if they want the loans to go to better the family’s plight, they need to lend the money to the mothers.
Nicholas Kristof, who uses his own bully pulpit to keep us mindful of the plight of the world’s least fortunate — and in doing so shows no respect for the orthodoxies of left or right — has now blown the whistle on guys everywhere. The man is a traitor to his gender. And God bless him for it.
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Why complain about a problem halfway across the world when the same problem is right in our backyard? How is this different than what happens in housing projects across the country?
I think we already do talk about this happening in our country. In fact, we have a candidate for governor right now that’s running a campaign based on it.
Why complain about it somewhere else? Because sooner or later, poverty “over there” affects us. Of course it isn’t an either/or, but a both/and. Too much of the world’s population lives in squalor. Thank God for journalists like Kristof.
Michael, Susan…
Nicholas Kristof was talking about targeting aid to the women in poor countries. But Bauer stigmatizes poor women as well as men, especially given how many families on welfare are headed by women with NO husbands around. If you read the entire column, the debate is not WHETHER to give aid, but how best to achieve the goals of the aid.
In Bauer’s world, if you are poor and cannot find work to sustain yourself and your family, that’s just too bad for you. You’re essentially not a part of society as he sees it. He speaks on this issue not to propose real solutions for the working poor (for whom he seems to care little, not being a part of his voting coalition or fundraising base) but to engage in demagoguery to fire up his own political base, to exploit class/racial resentments. It’s nothing more than the usual Southern Strategy of the GOP for the last 40 years.
@ Phillip–He also often uses a statistical sample of one–his experience decades ago and long before welfare reform.
One thing lost in Andre’s and others’ diatribes against the shiftless poor, is that “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” thing–there is a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle information passed on by our parents. For example, my dad said things like, “The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss.” The message a kid draws from that can help him keep a job, while other kids don’t get it. When I went to law school with children of lawyers, they were considerably better equipped for the ins-and-outs of practicing law than I was. If you are the child of divorce, you may be poor, but you still probably pick up a lot of the coding of middle class life. If you are the child of poverty, you get a whole different code.