A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 8). A continuation of the review of The Nature of Mass Poverty by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Placing the resources of the United States at the service of the less fortunate
At the beginning of his new term in 1949, President Harry S. Truman committed the United States to his now famous Point IV, a promise of a bold program to place the technical resources and achievements of the United States at the service of the less fortunate people of the world. It was a step in direct decent from the Marshall Plan, which by then was showing great promise in the restoration of European economic life. There was one improvement; technical assistance, as distinct from capital, that seemed to promise progress at a much lower price.
Rarely can deliberations have been more unstructured
In the early weeks of 1949, I served on a State Department committee which sought to give content to the President’s promise, for, as often before and since, the rhetoric of intention had run ahead of the design for action. Rarely can deliberations have been more unstructured. It was a vivid lesson on the emptiness of the economic box. There was also ample evidence to the same effect in the universities.
Sophisticated models applicable only to advanced industrial countries
I had previously given thought to the considerable number of students coming to Harvard from the poor countries under scholarship, who were now studying the sophisticated models applicable, if at all, only to the United States and other advanced industrial countries. Aid to the poor countries by the United States, negligible in 1950, was in excess of $5.5 billion in 1965. No economic subject more quickly captured the attention of so many as the rescue of the people of the poor countries from their poverty.
Economic success in the industrial countries
The years from 1950 to 1965 were also ones of major economic success and self-approval in the United States and the other industrial countries. There was a belief/instinct that if the poor countries remained in wretched and painful deprivation, the rich countries would not be safe in their comfortable affluence. The rich countries were not strongly attracted by the idea of giving up their wealth. Therefore the poor must be made less poor. More compelling than this dialectic was the fear of Communism and that if poor countries were not rescued from their poverty, the Communists would take over.
The greatest disaster in American foreign policy
Failure to understand the nature of mass poverty and, more precisely, a misunderstanding of its relation to Communist opportunity or the limits thereof were central in the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. The explosion of concern over the condition of the poor nations called for agreement on the causes of poverty. If there was to be a remedy, there had to be a cause. If it couldn’t be identified, it would have to be invented or assumed. The imperatives of action specified the causes that were not acceptable, and they selected the causes that were.
The most obvious causes of poverty had to be excluded
The most obvious of the possible causes of poverty that had to be excluded was the economic system. The exigencies of policy also excluded climate and ethnic character. The pressure of population on land resources and food supply could not be a cause of poverty, because the remedy was birth control and this risked alienation of the Catholics of the developed world. In contrast, the circular causes of poverty – those where cause and result are interchangeable – and the related actions were often agreeable to those urging them.