The Reproach of Hunger by David Rieff

Author:David Rieff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

12

Philanthrocapitalism: A [Self-]Love Story

There is an old Hawaiian joke about the first American missionary families to arrive on the islands in the 1820s: “They came to do good and they did very well indeed.” Neither Rajiv Shah nor Justine Greening were alone in thinking that the United States and the United Kingdom could profit materially from the good they believed their new vision of business-focused development was already doing, not to mention the far greater good they were confident it would do in the decades to come. Historically, both in peace and war, development aid, however much good the donors hoped it would do, was understood as simultaneously serving these donors’ geostrategic and geoeconomic interests. The Marshall Plan and the Green Revolution were classic successful examples of this; a classic unsuccessful one was USAID’s effort throughout the Vietnam War to win the “hearts and minds” of ordinary South Vietnamese. So a skeptic listening to Shah or to Greening would have been within his or her rights to inquire why anyone should have imagined that these officials would frame development issues in any other way than free-market capitalist terms.

Earlier versions of the arguments from (national) interest that Western development officials had presented had been as informed by geostrategic imperatives as by charitable ones, even if, as Nick Cullather has shown in his work on the Green Revolution and the Cold War, “the terminology of alliances, iron curtains, and armaments [often] gave way to a language of takeoffs, five-year plans, and [economic] growth rates.”1 Western aid was an integral part of the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union. In contrast, the development project Shah and Greening evoked was presented as being devoid of any competitive spirit except, that is, the healthy competition for recognition that Gates described in his Davos speech on creative capitalism as being the reward corporations would get for “good behavior” in situations where profits are not to be had. What was being described was frictionless development, “a hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others,”2 as Gates put it, that was completely of a piece with the world of “frictionless capitalism” he had so often spoken of. And if politics in the normal sense of the word had gone by the wayside, this was all to the good. As Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was the chief executive of the Gates Foundation before she went on to become secretary of health and human services in the Obama administration, described to me when I met with her in Seattle some years ago, the foundation’s “focus [was] on the individual rather than on the macro [economic and political].” This was by far the best approach, she said. As if by way of illustration, she then pointed to a photo on the wall of her office of a small African child holding a blue plastic pail. “We refer to this person as ‘the boss,’” she said, “and I give a copy of this picture to every new person who comes to work here at the foundation.

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