There is something deeply flawed in the current international model. The UN/development assistant/world bank/NGO model can’t hack it.

Well, first off, the everyday, prevailing mindset of the majority of the organization’s workers/members is going to have a LOT to do with the outcomes that organization produces.

Public education in the United States has become a jobs scheme for bureaucrats, not a system for actually educating children. The bureaucrats have detached themselves from accountability. Although our L3 (who would know) once remarked something to the effect that a good education is expensive, a lot of public school districts demonstrate that a terrible education can be really expensive, too … and not just on the front end, but in the expenses that that failure to educate produces in the life of the child who drops out or may, perchance, still graduate, but only with a joke of a diploma. For $100K+ each, we have produced an army of barbarians, for at least two generations and counting.

This is because the prevailing mindset of the public education bureaucracy is the welfare of the bureaucrats, not the welfare of children or the welfare of society at large.

Reading the writings of Claudia Rosett and others on the UN does not give me the impression that the everyday, prevailing mindset of the majority of that organization’s workers is the welfare and improvement of the poor countries of the world. That being the case, you are NEVER going to get sustainable postive outcomes from the UN development model. An organization infested with thieves and drones is going to thieve and drone; it cannot do otherwise.

As far as what the money does when it hits the ground in these poor countries (the small percentage that remains after the thieves and drones have eaten away at it, at any rate), it seems to me that bureaucrats, esp. those from developed nations, operate in a kind of default money-bomb mode: Mo money, mo money, mo money. Instead of cutting a program that doesn’t work, just increase the funding to that program.

Are liberals *ever* going to acknowledge that money-bombing people can be as spiritually, morally, and psychologically destructive to the bombees as a bomb-bomb is physically destructive? Phat chance. The moral self-satisfaction of today’s liberal is inextricably tied to the habit of money-bombing … i.e., “the more money I can show being spent, the more I care, the better I am as a person.”

IOW we are back to the driving motivation of the development model: It turns out to be what’s good for the bureaucrat (or the pol, but I repeat myself somewhat), not necessarily what’s good for the recipient of the largesse.

On Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint program, they just yesterday ran a story about an American church that was sending regular shipments of medical supplies, food, clothing, and money to a sister church in the Ukraine. After a while, the Ukranian pastor told them that all that charity was having a *negative* long-term effect:

Instead of Ukranian Christians giving sacrificially to their neighbors as needs arose, they came to expect another shipment from the Americans. Even worse, the pastor feared his church growing increasingly dependent on outside resources and losing its own motivation for ingenuity and industry.

Human nature. People tend not to appreciate that which they don’t work for themselves. In the long term, dependency, a sense of entitlement, and resentment set in.

The Breakpoint commentary gets this anecdote from a book, “The Poor Will Be Glad,” by Peter Greer and Phil Smith. The authors propose a different approach to aiding poor communities and countries:

The authors particularly focus on microloans and creating opportunities for savings. In the United States we have grown accustomed to the availability of credit and to the fact that there are safe places to save our money.

Authors Greer and Smith explain basic concepts such as creating local savings and credit associations, which can help communities to begin digging themselves out of poverty. Additionally, the authors explain how MFI’s, or microfinance institutions, can make small loans available to the needy.

The microloan approach has at least a couple things going for it: (1) It appears to be consistent with human nature, attracting and rewarding the motivated and industrious, (2) It does not money-bomb the poor but works with them incrementally, starting out with small loans of say $50 or $100 and, when that is paid back, gradually increasing the amounts that the person can take out, and (3) It factors in outcomes as the primary driver of sustainment, i.e., if someone doesn’t pay back a loan, they don’t get another one, thus winnowing out the scammers and the inept.

Of course the very existence of savings & loan institutions for the poor in a poor country must get around the huge obstacle of political corruption and crime. Prosperity for the masses can’t exist without private property rights, and private property rights can’t exist without rule of law. And so we are back to the problem of a culture of corruption.

I guess that the “indispensable man” in a nation’s history is the incorruptible man. America was very, very blessed to have such a man at the helm right at our nation’s founding. Corrupt leadership, when it’s not just an anomaly but institutionalized, is terribly demoralizing to the average folks. I worked in a department at a well-known large private corporation (not to be named, but its mascot is a mouse) where lack of good leadership pretty much killed the healthy functioning of the department and turned the place into a virtual war of all against all. Honest people flee that kind of environment, or are ground under pretty early, until only the thieves and drones remain. There is NO incentive, other than a hero/martyr complex, to stick around as a little guy in those circumstances. And if you are going to put on a tin star, you damn well better be carrying a gun.