November
30th, 2011
Well, I figured that it was about
time to explain to my audience a little bit about international development and
the role that the U.S.A. plays in all of that since that is basically what I am
doing right now. Alright so the whole idea of international development is to
get everyone in the world to a basic living standard, believe it or not the
goal is not to get a McDonald’s on every corner in every country. This basic
standard of living is outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man 1
that was published by the U.N. in 1948. I’ll save you some reading unless you
have a lot of time on your hands and want to read it, but it basically as
stated above outlines the rights that each and every person has. So, this is
the document that is the idea behind international development as a whole.
Since we feel that every man is entitled to this basic living standard we also
feel that those above this standard (both monetarily and with knowledge) have
the right and the obligation to help those who have not met this standard.
Alright so enough with the old
stuff, besides we the people of the United States of America have long believed
this truth to be self-evident. So over 50 years after it was written the world
realized that what this declaration says was not being fulfilled so they all
got together in the millennium spirit and wrote a new plan which is called the Millennium Development Goals 2 (MDGs). The
MDGs are a set of eight goals that the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015,
the eight goals are as follows: (1)
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger (2) Achieve universal primary education
(3) Promote gender equality and empower women (4) Reduce child mortality rates
(5) Improve maternal health (6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
(7) Ensure environmental sustainability (8) Develop a global partnership for
development. These are some broad and optimistic goals, however as stated a few
posts ago I believe in reaching for the stars. So that is currently what the
international development community is working towards at this point.
The U.N. has a lot of fancy
mathematics and statistics that they are using to measure all of these goals, of
course there is some controversy over these fancy formulas because well you can
basically say whatever you want to with numbers (*insert funny statistics joke
that illustrates this point that I was not clever enough to think of here*).
One of this fancy mathematical formulas that is used in the world of
international development is called the Human Development Index (HDI)3
It takes into account a lot of different variables and then puts them together
to give each country a ranking of just how developed they are. For a little bit
of fun, see if you can put the following countries in order from highest (most
developed) to lowest (least developed): Chile, Colombia, Egypt, France,
Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, New Zealand, Romania, and United States. I’ll give
you some time to make your guesses; do not look ahead here…
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
Don’t Cheat
And the
answers are, drumroll please…. Highest to lowest with rankings in parenthesis.
New Zealand (3), United States (4), France (14), Chile (45), Romania (50),
Colombia (79), Egypt (101), Honduras (104), Guatemala (116), and Kenya (128).
So how did you do? No worries I did not do good when I did this for the first
time either, I got the first four countries right and then crashed and burned
after that. Another interesting formula that is used in the world of
international development, maybe not by many people besides me, is called the
Happy Planet Index (HPI) 4 This index measures who is happiest in
the world, the rankings that this spits out are extremely different when
compared to the HDI. This index completely proves the notion that you have to
have money to be happy wrong, most of the countries that are at the top of this
index are located in Central America, South America, and the Pacific Islands.
These are places that are relatively poor and rank fairly low on the HDI, for
example Honduras which is ranked 104 according to the HDI is ranked 7th
happiest place in the world by the HPI; on the other hand the U.S. which is
ranked 4th according to the HDI is ranked a dismal 150th.
One of the big names in
international development and kinda sorta (in my opinion) brought all of these
statistics and mathematics to the forefront is a guy by the name of Hans Rosling
(check out his talks on Ted.com, fantastic just like everything on Ted.com). He
developed a software program called Gapminder that put together all of the
available world statistics and organized them in a way that one can set up
graphs using all of these different variables. The program is called Gapminder
Desktop and is available at gapminder.org, really a fun tool to play around
with and provides some amazing information at the same time. Now Hans Rosling’s
big thing is that in order for a country to develop economically they first
have to be healthy medically, I believe his quote is, “before you can be
wealthy, you have to be healthy.” This idea backups the MDGs, as we work to
improve the health and basic human developmental needs of others worldwide
which in a twisted way is going to help us out in the long run economically. In
other words, it is worth the investment.
Now for the U.S.’s role in all of
this, basically we have three ways that we help out with international
development. Those three fronts are the Peace Corps, USAID, and Beccas Semillas.
Peace Corps is obviously an organization that provides developing countries
with support in the form of people with certain knowledge or skill sets that the
country wants. USAID is an organization that provides funds to these countries
in a very simple sense, they are the best funded of the three fronts of
international development. The last front is Beccas Semillas which are
scholarships that are provided to the people of developing countries to come to
the States and study with the idea that they have to then return to their
native country and use the skills that they have acquired to help their country
to develop. While I feel that all three of these fronts are important to
international development, as a PCV I obviously feel that the Peace Corps is
the best way to help these countries develop and the reason is simple; give a
man a fish you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a
lifetime.
So with these three fronts the U.S.
does a lot of good in international development, and to think that all of that
good is done with the extremely large (*read small, minimal, minuscule, tiny,
minute, microscopic) budget that is allotted to international development. The
budget that the Peace Corps had for 2011 was 374.25 million 5, now
to put that in perspective, the budget for defense in 2011 was 549.1 billion 6
without the black budget for intelligence. Now I hope I am not the
only one who finds those numbers absolutely appalling, we are spending around 500 (feel free to check my math…) times the amount of money on spreading war
in the name of “peace” than on actually
spreading peace. Just imagine what could happen if more money was allocated towards
the Peace Corps and other programs that aim at helping humanity. Now do not get
me wrong here, I fully 100% back the troops and I do not want the terrorists to
win but can’t we do without just one more F-16? With that, I am going to leave
you all with one more thought that I really like and this quote really rings
true, enjoy! “The purpose of live is to plant trees whose shade you do not
expect to enjoy.”
Here are
my footnotes like a good little researcher:
3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
(wikipedia is a legit source; I don’t care what my teachers told me. I mean how
can all those Americans be wrong?)
Jim, the defense department budget was 549.1 BILLION dollars, not trillion. But yes, we still should eliminate lots of waste and duplication in the department.
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