Transparency is a wonderful thing. I agree with you on that. For China and India to gain our levels of waste, they will need to provide their customers extreme value or have relatively high levels of natural resources. It’s hard for 2.5 billion people to do that when they make up almost half the world’s population.

But, you say that the more powerful someone is, the more damaging the ulterior motives… ok.. but what about philanthropists like Bill Gates? What’s his damaging ulterior motive? Give him a better name – instead of just the Microsoft tycoon? So what?

The ulterior motives come in when gov’t to gov’t donations aren’t transparent and there’s corruption at the top.

but… the point is – what happens after that?

Say my kiva donations really start helping a country lift itself out of poverty. they follow the same path of economic growth because their people start having more disposable income and hence, they can start buying more disposable ’stuff’. Then what?

How do we stop the chinas and the indias from becoming mass consumers of destruction like us?

People helping out with poverty relief always have an alterior motive. The problem is that the more powerful they are, the more damaging the alterior motives. For example, a lot of rich governments try to help by donating millions of dollars to the poor to the poor governments of the poor countries. In the process, the various levels of government take their cut and use it to buy arms from the rich countries. This is damaging because the presence of arms reduces the poor people’s ability to have their most basic physiological and safety needs met. If it is not arms, most of these rich government officials in poor countries use their “cut” to buy goods and services from rich western countries. At the end of the day, not only does the poor person not get anything, what little he has is threatened by the extra weaponry held by the country’s ruling class. Individual donors’ alterior motives are usually to “give back” because they feel fortunate. These kinds of donations are manageable alterior motives for the poor.

A different way exists, which is to provide resources directly to the poor. The Grameen bank (www.grameen.com) provides micro-loans to poor business folks in poor countries with no assets except their social networks. These businesses end up being profitable and pay back the loans. Because the governments and their officials don’t get a cut, both the resources and the ability to self-generate new resources is left in the hands of the poor. That is a long-term solution to poverty.

Kiva (www.kiva.org) is a charity that operates in a similar way. It uses individual donors from rich countries to make cheap loans to poor business folks and they have a 97% payback rate. Again, both the donated resources and the means to self-generate new resources are left in the hands of the poor.

With Kiva or Grameen, individual donors can give or loan money to individual recipients without rich or poor governments transferring the money and taking unfair cuts.

If my definition of poverty is acceptable, then poverty reduction is a worthy goal. For the folks in the hot economies of the developed world, or from the ones in India and China making money off their hot economies, many have levels 1 & 2 of Mazlov’s hierarchy covered off. They are looking for self-actualization. That is what drives consumption. (However, if they sacrifice love and esteem for self-actualization they will lose happiness and feel as poor as their brethren in poverty). For these folks, claims of poverty are often really unhappiness due to their inability to self-actualize. Lowering the inability to self-actualize should not be the goal of poverty reduction.