I found this article in Wired very intriguing which explains from a scientific standpoint how humans tick when they are confronted with people who need their help. Especially, as I fully correlates with my own experience since I have been living in India. Quoting from the work of Paul Slovic who runs the social-science think tank Decision Research, it points to a remarkable trait in human behavior when confronted with poverty:
In one recent experiment, Slovic presented subjects with a picture of "Rokia," a starving child in Mali, and asked them how much they'd be willing to give to help feed her. Then he showed a different group photos of two Malinese children — "Rokia and Moussa." The group presented with two kids gave 15 percent less than those shown just one child. In a related experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a dying child. When a second set of subjects was asked to donate to a group of eight children dying of the same cause, the average donation was 50 percent lower.
India is obviously full of poverty, although it it a commonly accepted fact that in spite of all hardships people do no longer starve. On the other hand, 80 % of the population living on less that US-$ 2 per day is a strong indicator of not really a wealthy country overall. Where do I want to go with that? Yes, there is poverty, and it emerges most prominently in the big metros like Bombay or Bangalore when you drive past slums. Or with immediate impact when beggars, usually very aggressive ones, assault you for giving money to them. How to react? What is a morally acceptable way of treating the situation? Do I have an obligation, because I am "rich" (relatively) and they are poor? And there, the experiment kicks in and the same type of shift as well: I remember when I was a small boy and my Mum walked me through Munich and a beggar would sit somewhere in front of a church. My mother would explain to me that this was a "armer Mann" (=poor man) who needed our help and would put some coins into his hat. This kind of mindset has been very much formative for my framework of social behavior. Certainly, out of the fact that these beggars were relatively rare, quite in line with the the picture of "one child" above, and seemed truly in despair.
Contrast that to India where the occurrence of beggars is ubiquitous and in their aggressive ways with following you and touching you heavily annoying. Once you also learn that many of them are organized in rackets, driven by market economics where they fight for lucrative "property" (i.e. well frequented crossroads), your pity and helpfulness plummets down to nil. Is that morally objectionable? I don't think so. Although the experiment above is per se descriptional, therefore only able to explain behavior, it leaves a blank when it comes to a normative take on the situation. My own thoughts on this: I still feel as a guest and visitor in India. I try my best to play by the rules of this country, I have invested in this country and I do add value to the economy by my consumption. Yet, my love for India does not go that far that I feel responsible for the social situation, especially when it comes to alleviating it with the wrong means. And these are certainly: giving money to beggars. Till recently, when I used to go through my moral dilemmas, I was happy to read from Mohammes Yunus who won the Nobel Prize for his successful foundation of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank. This institute provided mirco-credits to the poor, an investment which has brought thousands of people out of poverty in a sustainable way and truly restored their human dignity. And the same Mohammed Yunus said in an interview, paraphrazed: "As hard as it may appear, I never give money to beggars in the street."
In that respect, the initial article from Wired is pretty right to demand that more "social cripples" like Bill Gates enter the field of philantrophy. For them 3 starving children analytically is 3 times the suffering, and 100.000 poor people a 100.000 magnification of a problem they can tackle not just with their money, but with smart and "getting-things-done"-concepts which allow for a lasting change. Overall, if one really wants to help, it's more about giving money (to the right organizations), giving time (for fruitful initatives) and giving contact (from your network of people who can enable something). So far the latter as a rough quotation from Bill Clinton's new book "Giving " which I held in my hands a few days ago in a bookstore in Bangalore.
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