There has been a lot of research in recent years suggesting that the most effective form of charity in many poor countries is to simply give people cash, but there has always been a negative reaction from this from some sections of the establishment who fear that giving cash to poor people will just cause it to be wasted. I think this stems from a residual Calvinist assumption that poor people are the architects of their own misfortune and therefore can't be relied on to use money appropriately.
Buffett is so vague that people are seeing in it whatever they want to see.
This is true. And anyway, here's a couple of things I see.
The first is a failed (or at least truncated) attempt at articulating the concept of Structural Violence[1]. I'm surprised he got so far as publishing this op-ed, without having been told to read anything by Paul Farmer. At least it appears he hasn't, even though Farmer is quite well-known. I know George Soros counts himself as a member of the Farmer school.
The second thing I see is Buffet slipping into the trap of armchair "big-picture" philosophizing. This is what Esther Duflo warned against in the very beginning of her poverty course on edx.org (she has also given a TED talk). Trying to make grand, blanket statements or generic judgements about aid as a whole, is a flawed exercise. Duflo holds up two books as the prime examples of this fallacy: The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, and White Man's Burden by Will Easterly.
Fixating on big-questions and big-answers clouds thinking and hampers action. Instead, Duflo teaches a clinical approach as infinitely more productive. Ask specific questions, conduct trials and collect data. Doing experiments and making observations is a much better way to discover truth than thinking your way through an extremely tangled web of armchair philosophizing.
But we can turn the article's logic on us too. What if we US citizens bear some responsibility for Haiti's suffering, because our elites/government attack and overthrow every attempt they make to solve their own problems?
Fortunately, all we need is to accept the simplest moral "innovation". Get off their backs; and if we're particularly noble, pay reparations. (Just as we'd hope a future China did if they successfully dominated us and turned us into a basketcase.)
If anyone's understandably skeptical, simply look to opposition/dissident media. Because it's rational to seriously consider the possibility that an attacking country's media may be a component in those attacks. In the US, Democracy Now and Noam Chomsky are reasonable sources, which you can then fact-check to your heart's content.
We do, I think. Write the history book of today that someone might read (probably through a brain interface) in a thousand years.
The story of the US isn't one to cast a positive light on. The 500 year legacy of imperialism is that empires conquered the world and intentionally kept vast swathes of it in perpetual turmoil for selfish goals.
Every time the US conquered a country, be it by proxy in Iran in the 70s or directly like in Iraq, the legacy will be the US getting in the way of the people of foreign countries dictating their own destinies. And that is something we need to hold ourselves accountable for.
This sounds dangerously close to colonialism. Or nation building to use the more modern term, although the modern version of it is rarely ambitious enough to actually succeed.
(As an example of the distinction, compare the colonial British efforts to end widow burning, compared to contemporary American efforts to end honor killings.)
He's vague and impressionistic, and his most concrete suggestions (which aren't very concrete at all) are in the 2nd-to-last paragraph:
"Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine."
call me out if I'm wrong here, but he just had a bazillion news stories saying he was going to do philanthropy. how is that not back patting? finally, he concludes that we will have a perpetual poverty machine by people patting themselves on the back with charitable acts, so his solution is to try and get all 13 year old girls to no longer be sold for sex.
that makes zero sense! I'm gonna try and follow his logic here: he says the market is too vast. ok. we should shatter those structures and vast markets. ok. we gatta be absolutely sure that 13 year-old girls are no longer sold for sex any more.
so, could he be implying that he really wants to return to traditional markets without wifi on every street corner and just the regular old 18+ year-olds sold for sex?
(sorry for the crude comment. it is not meant in harm. after thinking about it more than 10 seconds, I have no idea what kind of world he wants to create!!)
EDIT: I would imagine that what he really want's to do, is invest all that cash into google, install wifi on their street corners along with a chromebook so they can get them some form of education, and then track all their communications, to be 100% sure that they're not being sold for sex.