One common complaint about foreign aid is that some of it gets wasted on corruption and of course, some of it does. But the horror stories you hear - where aid just helps a dictator build new palaces - mostly come from a time when aid was designed to win allies for the Cold War rather than to improve people's lives.
The problem today is much smaller. Small-scale corruption, like a government official who puts in for phony travel expenses, is an inefficiency that amounts to a tax on aid. We should try to reduce it, but we can't eliminate it, any more than we can eliminate waste from every government program - or from every business, for that matter. Suppose small-scale corruption amounts to a 2 per cent tax on the cost of saving a life. We should try to cut that. But if we can't, should we stop trying to save those lives?
We also hear critics complain that aid keeps countries dependent on outsiders' generosity. But this argument focuses only on the most difficult remaining cases still struggling to be self-sufficient. Here is a quick list of former major aid recipients that have grown so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius, Botswana, Morocco, Singapore and Malaysia.
Aid also drives improvements in health, agriculture and infrastructure that correlate strongly with long-run growth. A baby born in 1960 had an 18 per cent chance of dying before her fifth birthday. For a child born today, it is less than 5 per cent. In 2035, it will be 1.6 per cent. We can't think of any other 75-year improvement in human welfare that would even come close. A waste? Hardly.
MYTH THREE: Saving lives leads to overpopulation.
Going back at least to Thomas Malthus in 1798, people have worried about doomsday scenarios in which food supply can't keep up with population growth. This kind of thinking has gotten the world in a lot of trouble. Letting children die now so they don't starve later isn't just heartless. It also doesn't work, thank goodness.
It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too.
When more children survive, parents decide to have smaller families. Consider Thailand. About 1960, child mortality started going down. Then about 1970, after the government invested in a strong family planning program, birthrates started to drop. In the course of just two decades, Thai women went from having six children on average to having just two. Today, child mortality in Thailand is almost as low as it is in the US, and Thai women have an average of 1.6 children. This pattern of falling death rates followed by falling birthrates applies for the vast majority of the world.
Saving lives doesn't lead to overpopulation. Just the opposite. Creating societies where people enjoy basic health, relative prosperity, fundamental equality and access to contraceptives is the only way to a sustainable world.
More people, especially political leaders, need to know about the misconceptions behind these myths. The fact is, whether you look at the issue as an individual or as a government, contributions to promote international health and development offer an astonishing return.
