Hijacked by Altruism

PlayPumps is the modern story of good intentions creating bad outcomes. They raised tens of millions to install children's merry-go-rounds as infrastructure in Africa. Turns out the kids got tired fast. This left poor mothers struggling to push toys for water, wishing they had normal pumps instead, which are more efficient and 4x cheaper.

This was not the first time humans did something obviously foolish.

In the late 1800s, the rich British rulers tried to do their Indian subjects a favor. They claimed, over tea, that they could help the colonized people by teaching self-reliance and reducing idleness. Turns out their mass infrastructure "work education" programs became slave labor camps. Exploitation and exportation led to famines, which were not ended until 100 years later by independence and free markets. At least tea time was pleasant, full of back-patting and polite applause.

Grain shortages in Russia occurred from the 1920's through the 1980's. For over half a century, Stalin's "helpful" seizure of privately owned farms in the name of shared prosperity killed incentives for productivity. People stopped dying only after market reforms in the 90's finally allowed private farming to feed the population efficiently. They managed to manufacture a bunch of missiles though.

While the U.S. began eyeing outer space in the late 1950's, Mao Zedong mobilized a poor China to melt all their pots, pans, and farm tools in homemade backyard furnaces. Instead of producing steel to industrialize the nation, this effort contributed to the Great Famine which killed tens of millions who had lost the means to feed themselves. Thus the CCP learned the necessity of market-driven factories, and modern China was built on genocidal stupidity.

It turns out altruism is almost always a trick. Asking people to exhaust their resources and families on behalf of nice-sounding programs to help others actively goes against the concept of sustainability, unless those programs can legitimately last for centuries.

This ubiquitous foolishness is a slippery slope and a midwit trap. It has happened over and over throughout history. It continues today.

Educated, well-meaning people defer hard implementation questions to others. They vote for "helpful programs" on the road to centralized national management in the name of altruism. But this inevitably leads to lower productivity spirals and civilization's ruin. Poverty for all.

But wait—what's the alternative exactly? What program can last for centuries? Who's to say and decide such things? How did we go from millions to billions of people on this planet over the last couple thousand years?

Excellent questions. Let's find out in tomorrow's blog post on altruism's alternative.