Bob Geldof can't answer state spending questions for us

The demographic case against foreign aid

In the Summer of 1985, at the age of twenty, I took my first trip to what, back then, we unapologetically used to call ‘the third world’. At the end of our second year, an Indian friend from university invited me to visit her family. They lived in army quarters in Delhi, and in the course of six weeks, sometimes travelling alone and sometimes with her family, I spanned the country from Srinagar in the Kashmiri Himalayas to the Mahabalipuram temples south of Chennai (then Madras) and from the exotic and erotic carvings of Khajuraho to the Nepali, Bengali and Tibetan confluence of Darjeeling. On occasion the family’s senior military status lent me certain privileges. In the company of a brigadier (soon to be a general), there were no questions about my entry into Chandigarh, then a closed zone as tensions with separatist Sikhs simmered. Prime Minister Mrs Gandhi had been assassinated the previous autumn, and Delhi and Punjab had flowed with blood as thousands had been massacred. In Calcutta, I stayed in the citadel of Fort William and had been assigned a car and two soldiers to show me around.

For someone who at that stage had not been farther than the shores of the Mediterranean, all of this was of course mind-boggling. The sheer difference of India was indeed, to use a cliché, an assault on the senses. The heat, the cows wandering down the street, the extravagance of the architecture both Hindu and Muslim, and the chaotic traffic could not have been more different from the London and Oxford of my daily existence back home. But, without a doubt, it was the poverty which was most striking. Whilst my hosts were modestly comfortable, every town was thronged with underfed children begging at the traffic lights. A trip to a village a few hours out of Delhi opened my eyes to the even worse depredations and despair of rural poverty.

Decades later, my daughter won a scholarship at her college to be hosted by an Indian foundation and tour the sub-continent for a month. I joined her for a week and found a very different India. For sure, standards of living were still way below those of Britain, but the narrowing of the gap was astonishing. At the top end there was a whole new class of the affluent, the very affluent and the super affluent, all evident from the cars, the hotels and the shopping malls. But even at the bottom end, at least in the towns, the misery was noticeably attenuated. It is a line I often use against Malthusians: that when I went to India most recently, its population had doubled since my first visit while conditions everywhere, from the evident level of nutrition among the people to the state of the railways, had been genuinely improved almost beyond recognition.

The data backs up my impressions: since 1985 India’s infant mortality rate has plunged by 75% and is now quite close to where it was in the UK when I was born in the mid-1960s. At the time of my first visit to India, the average Indian could expect a life almost two decades shorter than the average Briton. Today that gap has almost halved, to not much more than a decade. And in the period of the current century, barely a generation, undernourishment in India relative to population size has halved. None of this is to say that India is a paradise on earth or that its people have reached material nirvana. But it would be foolish to ignore the enormous progress achieved since I first touched down in the country more than four decades ago. In raw size, the Indian economy will soon surpass that of its onetime colonial master. In price-adjusted terms (at ‘purchasing power parity’) it is already vastly larger. Income per capita and living standards will remain lower than the UK, but that gap will continue to diminish.

The year before my first visit to India, we had been exposed on the television to the horrors of the famine unfolding in Ethiopia. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, died of hunger. Like the other famines of the late twentieth century — in China in the late 1950s / early 1960s and in North Korea in the late 1990s — the Ethiopian calamity had more to do with the machinations and incompetence of a Marxist administration than it had to do with any food shortages which could not have been dealt with. Nevertheless, the compassion of people across the developed world was roused. Bob Geldof’s 1984 hit ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ awakened the world’s conscience and raised millions. About the same time, an acquaintance of mine passed the civil service exams and chose to join the Overseas Development Agency (later DFID). As well as being prestigious and exciting, it seemed like the most noble of callings.

All of this has significance for the policy debate as newly-crowned Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces calls to increase international aid from its current 0.3% back to the 0.7% it reached under the Cameron administration, in line with the 2005 Gleneagles Summit pledge. This comes at a time when the UK’s public finances are under exceptional pressure. The welfare spend has ballooned while an ageing population has ensured an ever-rising bill for pensions and healthcare. There are calls for a significant rise in military spending. Tax levels are crushingly high, arguably close to a ‘Laffer’ point where further rises will reduce the overall take. And all the while, borrowing continues apace and the national debt is at its highest since the immediate post-war period. And yet, if reports are to be believed, Burnham is trying to map out a path to the restoration of aid to its previous highs.

There are many arguments for and against aid. Some readers of Pimlico Journal likely object to a narrowly utilitarian determination of the case for foreign aid. But these decisions continue to be made on such logic by Western states and should be contended with on their own terms. On the one hand, a pound spent in the poorest communities in the world tends to have a more powerful impact on people’s lives than it has back home. On the other, every marginal pound the government spends is one borrowed. Should we be financing help for others from the debt markets — like a deeply indebted near-bankrupt generously helping others to funds he has just managed to wheedle out of the bank manager?

This debate becomes a dialogue of the deaf. We have some kind of ‘responsibility to all of humanity’; ‘with so many of our public services neglected at home, should we be prioritising those responsibilities over local requirements?’ At a now oft-cited dinner at Nuffield College, Oxford, my friend David Goodhart was astonished to hear the head of the Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, state that his objective was global rather than national welfare, the logic of which would suggest an indifference between a British citizen and anyone across the globe. The implication of such an approach, given that Britain remains a relatively wealthy country, would be to redistribute our national wealth until the average citizen has the living standard of, say, Turkey.

The advocates for aid might point out that the progress made in a country like India has in part been achieved precisely because of the generosity of a giver like the UK. Its regular detractors probably counter that in fact India’s economic reforms since the early 1990s, removing many of the Nehruvian Fabian-inspired restrictions, have acted as a vastly greater force for change than any paltry crumbs from the table of the West. Similarly, they would argue, China has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty without depending on Western aid but through turning its back, at least in part, on Communism and embracing the market. The most impactful thing the rich world did, by far, was not to scatter its charity but to open its markets and allow the toiling masses of the South and East to meet its needs. ‘Trade, not aid’, the slogan goes.

And then, although aid often has done much good, it is equally open to corruption. Witnessing some government officials swanning around Geneva or Zurich, one wonders how much aid money has simply gone to support the Swiss banking industry (which, in fairness, has tightened up on money laundering in recent years). The reasons for there being no Palestinian state are varied and contentious. But it can be explained by considering the $13m presidential palace Abu Mazen was preparing for himself in Ramallah while he was supposed to be creating such a state. For the aid-addled Palestinian Authority, financial assistance has been corrupting and debilitating, as it has been for many others. Meanwhile, giving aid to nuclear India, which manages to finance a space programme and spends more on its military than we do, might be argued as subsidising a superpower.

The circularity of this debate cannot fully be explained without the critical aspect of the ‘white guilt/saviour’ complexes amongst those who argue for it — aid has not been so much about the welfare of the recipients but the self-regard of the donor. The arguments for and against aid are all too often outdated; they ignore the basic change in the demographic facts, and a reasonable conversation about the issue, regardless of one’s ethical framework, cannot take place without first bringing them to the fore.

We have already seen how Indian infant mortality, life expectancy and nutrition have been revolutionised in the past few decades. For most of human history, progress depended on a good harvest or a fortuitous but all-too-rare technological breakthrough. Since the dawn of, at least, agriculture thousands of years ago, most of humanity has lived more or less close to the edge of penury and hunger, if not starvation. The harsh conditions the Reverend Malthus described in the first edition of his essay on population, published in 1798, held for more people most of the time. The last two centuries have been a story of human escape from those conditions. The first to emerge were the British and Americans. Europe followed and then eventually the rest of the world — parts of Africa are still in the process. I told this story and charted its political and economic implications in my second book, ‘The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World’. The world of 1984, when Bob Geldof sang for Ethiopia and 1985 when I first went to India, was a moment in time when a large chunk of the globe was still extricating itself from the Malthusian nightmare and those who already had could do more than look on with pity at the condition but could actively engage in its amelioration.

It is not just India which is now in a very different place, and indeed, not even particularly India. However impressive India’s advance has been in terms of the welfare of its people, and however important this is given the sheer scale of India, now the world’s most populous country, others have moved even faster. China, until recently the world’s population number one, has seen its infant mortality rate drop from more than forty per thousand in the mid-1980s to less than eight, not much above what prevails in the United States. And the life expectancy of the average American and Chinese is now more or less equivalent. Bangladesh has brought down the share of infants who die within their first year from more than 10% to less than 2% over the same period, while literacy rates have grown from less than one third to around 80%. Similar stories can be told of most countries in the traditionally poor parts of the world such as Latin America. Today the average Ethiopian is relatively well fed. The moral question of aid or no aid today is simply different to the one asked to the public, whose understanding of the terms is still largely shaped by Geldof’s hit song.

Overall, the world has undergone over the past four decades or so an extraordinary process, as I explained in my third book ‘Tomorrow’s People’, of demographically ‘getting to Denmark’. The term, originally coined by Francis Fukuyama, suggested that there was a global movement towards the indisputable calm, peace and constitutional good order achieved by the Danes. But while Fukuyama’s hypothesis is widely disputed — though often misunderstood — it is certainly applicable to demography if not to politics. Reasonably long life expectancy (and modest to low fertility) are the hallmarks of increasingly large numbers of people across the globe. The fertility side of the equation is complex and multi-faceted, but undoubtedly does have an element which testifies to global progress. (It must be better, surely, than Kenyan women are having today around three children each, not the seven they were bearing in the 1980s.) The mortality side must undoubtedly be seen as unmitigated good news, as children who once would have died in infancy make it through to adulthood and those in middle age have a reasonable expectation of experiencing some kind of old age.

All of this cannot but have implications for the question of aid. In the UK we no longer lead lives of towering material prosperity when compared to the rest of the world. It is not just that people like the Irish and Poles — relatively close-by and traditionally impoverished — no longer need to come to Britain in search of better living standards. (The Irish are unquestionably better-off and the Poles, if not already, are on the path to being so.) It is that the very poorest on the globe, those once called ‘the wretched of the earth’, are no longer quite so wretched or — in many cases — anything like so wretched. If we are to take the cosmopolitan welfarism which David Goodhart suggests Gus O’Donnell espoused, then we still have a long way to go before the average Briton is no better off than the average human. But if our motive is to relieve the very worst and most extreme need, then we have to acknowledge that that need has to a very large extent already been alleviated through our pursuing our commercial interests rather than through our opening our charitable hearts. We could even be completely cold-hearted and care for nought but ourselves; this fact would remain true.

If the multi-faceted debates about the size and scale of the aid budget do not take account of the increase in global welfare which can be seen in the demographic data, and we remain within the paradigm of the mid-eighties as if nothing had changed since then, then we will be failing to allow for the most dramatic transformation in raw material conditions the species has ever experienced. As so often, demography does not provide all of the answers, but to fail to take account of it when the facts and figures are so readily available and so utterly incontrovertible would be inexcusable.

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This article was written by guest contributor Paul Morland. Paul is a demographer, author and broadcaster. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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