Many churches during the season of Lent hold a “hunger banquet” to illustrate the problem of poverty in the developing world. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but does guilt manipulation really solve the problem or does it cause people to grasp for straws or actually favor dangerous policies?
Here is the way the banquet works. Everyone pays one price, but the food is unevenly distributed. Some people eat well: steaks on tablecloth with wine etc. Others eat nearby on the floor with bowls of rice. Everyone then watches a film on the horrible plight of the poor nations as compared with the filthy rich nations. So on it goes. The idea is to drive home the idea that whether you are rich or poor really comes down to the luck of the draw, and clearly those who come out with a winning hand should share their winnings.
What? This doesn’t sound like your idea of a charming evening out? Well, you can go to HungerBanquet.org and have a similar experience online. Here we find touching stories of the plight of the poor. My favorite is the case of a Guatamalan coffee grower who has been devastated by low coffee prices. His family is sick he is in debt, and sees no way out. So he joins a “cooperative” that deals with a US firm that buys coffee at high prices. American consumers fork over, and the man’s life is saved. The strong implication of this story is that high prices can save the world!
This is only a small look into the economic confusions that beset this large community of people who constantly draw our attention to human suffering. That is all well and good but not so great if they have no good theories as to how the poor can be made better off. One might think that they would see economic development--not high prices--as a possible fix. And a sure means of that is capital investment in poor countries, capital used to make good for export. But no: this same crowd is livid that places like Wal-Mart dare sell such wares to US consumers. They tell us that we should not buy from Wal-Mart; that would only be exploiting the poor. It’s as if they cannot conceive that there are voluntary, mutually beneficial ways of getting richer, namely through trade. The very first lesson of economics hasn’t been learned.
Back to the hunger banquet. Some years ago I took note of a local one which attracted way too few people. The organizers had overplanned for diners. They cook vast qualities of great food for those who would be assigned to be rich and barrels of rice for the artificially poor. Hardly anyone came. So guess what happened to the food? It had to be thrown away. What a waste! What about the poor of the world?
A far better approach would be an economic banquet at which people watch Friedman’s Free to Choose Vol. 1.
