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Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification

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1 Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification?* Mathias Risse A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge’s path-breaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them, but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted.1 However, in this essay, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor, but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false. Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by “the global political and economic order” (“the global order”). For the first time in history, there is one continuous global society based on territorial sovereignty. This system has emerged from the spread of European control since the fifteenth century and the formation of new states through wars of independence and decolonization. Even systems that escaped Western Imperialism had to follow legal and diplomatic practices imposed by Europeans. This state system is governed by a set of rules, the most important of which are embodied in * This paper was originally presented at an author-meets-critic session held during the Eastern APA on December 30, 2003. I am grateful to the audience for helpful discussion, as well as to Christian Barry for helpful comments. 1 I argue this in my forthcoming paper “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” The empirical thesis mentioned is the view that economic progress turns primarily on the quality of institutions. The view that the global order harms the poor in ways delineated by the institutional thesis is consistent with the view that that order must also plausibly be credited with massive improvements, which is the view defended here.2 the UN Charter. The Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank, IMF, and later the GATT/WTO) were founded as a framework for economic cooperation that would prevent disasters like the Great Depression of the 1930s. These institutions, together with economically powerful states acting alone or in concert, shape the economic order. Although this order is neither monolithic nor harmonious, it makes sense to talk about a global order that includes but is not reducible to the actions of states. In what follows, then, I argue that this global order does not harm the poor according to the benchmarks of comparison used by Pogge, but that on the contrary, according to those benchmarks, this order has caused amazing improvements over the state of misery that has characterized human life throughout the ages. The global order is not fundamentally unjust, but instead, but rather incompletely just, and it should be credited with the great advances it has brought. Benchmarks for Harm: Historical References One might think the present extents of poverty and inequality by themselves reveal the injustice of the global order.2 But they do not. While indeed 1.2 billion people in 1998 lived below the poverty line of $1.08 PPP 1993 per day, it is also true that there is now less misery than ever before, at least as measured in terms of any standard development indicator. The progress made over the last 200 years is miraculous. In 1820, 75 percent of 2 Unless otherwise noted, data are from World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000); available at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/0,,contentMDK:20195989~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:336992,00.html; United Nations, “Report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development” (“Zedillo report”); available at www.un.org/reports/financing/full_report.pdf; and from World Bank, “World Development Indicators 2002,” CD ROM; available at http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2002/cdrom/;Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD Development Center, 2001), table B 22, p. 265. See also Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Part II, esp. for the different approaches to measuring inequality.3 the world population lived on less than $1 a day (appropriately adjusted). Today, in Europe, almost nobody does; in China, less than 20 percent do; in South Asia, around 40 percent; and globally, slightly more than 20 percent do. The share of people living on less than $1 a day fell from 42 percent in 1950 to 17 percent in 1992. Historically almost everybody was poor, but that is no longer true. It is true that the high-income economies include 15 percent of the population but receive 80 percent of the income. Around 1820, per capita incomes were similar worldwide, and low, ranging from around $500 in China and South Asia to $1000–$1500 in some European countries. So the gap between rich and poor was 3 to 1, whereas, according to UNDP statistics, in 1960 it was 60 to 1, and in 1997 74 to 1. But it is also true that, between 1960 and 2000, real per-capita income in developing countries grew on average 2.3 percent (doubling living standards within thirty years). Britain’s GDP grew an average of 1.3 percent during its nineteenth century economic supremacy. For developing countries, things have been better recently than they were for countries at the height of their power during any other period in history. The average income per capita in 1950 worldwide was $2,114, while in 1999 it was $5,709 (in 1990 dollars PPP); for developing countries income per capita increased from $1,093 to $3,100 (in 1990 dollars PPP)during this period. Similar improvements were achieved in life expectancy, which rose from 49 years to 66 years worldwide, and from 44 years to 64 years in developing countries and thus has increased more in the last fifty years than in the preceding 5000 years. Literacy rose from 54 percent in 1950 to 79 percent in 1999. Infant mortality fell from 156 to 54 in 1000 live births worldwide. Furthermore, while the UNDP inequality statistics quoted above used international exchange rates, things look different if one uses4 the Purchasing-Power-Parity standard. According to such calculations, which account


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