Effective Compassion

Each semester in my Economics of Compassion class I teach students about Adam Smith and his two prominent books: Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith was primarily a moral philosopher in case you were unaware. To illustrate Smith's ideas of sympathy and how each of us would react differently I ask the following questions:

1. Do you know someone in need?

2. What do they need? Can you design a plan that would help them?

Then I ask students to contact someone else familiar with the situation and ask them how they would approach helping the person in need. Do they come up with the same plan? Sometimes the plans contain similar ingredients, but, sometimes they are quite different. This is with intimate knowledge of the situation! Now, imagine you had to design a plan to help many many many people, each with unique needs that you don't know very well, and you had to design the plan in a committee. Could you do it?

This is the question: What information and attitude is necessary for effective compassion? Can compassion be produced on a large scale through big plans? Or, does compassion need to be searched out by people with local knowledge?

Movie Musing

Sue and I recently watched The Bicycle Thief. What a powerful movie. What is instructive about it is that it demonstrates the poverty that Europe (in this case Italy) suffered in the couple of years immediately after World War II. This can be immediately contrasted with another picture of post-war Italy, only about a dozen years later, La Dolce Vita, where Italy is portrayed as a land of sports cars, glamour, and partying.

There are two things that I take away from this comparison. First, it is truly remarkable how quickly Europe was able to recover economically. The downside of this miracle is that we in the West believed that something like the same model of external aid and intensive capital re-development was also the way to bring the rest of the world out of poverty. As William Easterly points out, this was a false analogy, one that has proven to have tragic consequences. Economic "recovery" for a developed country from a war is not the same thing as economic "development."

Secondly, in comparing the two movies we see that the return of material prosperity, if anything, has led to a society that is less spiritually mature. Which of these people do you believe are closer to the Kingdom of God?

Good Intentions v. Outcomes: What do you think?

We frequently separate good intentions from outcomes in our personal lives. For example, if the house is dirty and one person picks up the trash, but, unknown to them is the important document they threw away we could say their intentions were a clean living space but the outcome also included tossing an important document (not a true story . . . but I couldn't think of another example off the top of my head).

Should we also evaluate good intentions when it comes to policy? Or, should we say, "Regardless of the intentions I only want to evaluate outcomes."?