KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segments: Peter Singer

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matters and k x p seattle ninety point three of them an online k e x p dad or at our guest this morning is peter singer ira debited camp professor of bioethics at princeton university peter singer is the author co author or editor of more than thirty books including animal liberation practical ethics and one world ethics and globalization in two thousand and five time magazine named him one of the most hunted influential people in the world peter singer is here today to tell us about his most recent book the life you can save acting now to end world poverty welcome thank you through what led you to write your book the life you can save it's an issue that i've been working on since really i was pretty much fresh out of graduates grow so since the nineteen seventies i've written several articles about it and it's featured as a chapter in a couple of my earlier books but i thought that i would come to really do a bad book length partly because that first article i write has given

rise to a lot of discussion and i want to comment on something gets is that have been made and also to really address the question of is this idea that somehow can get out there in the world that people could act on on a large scale so that we can really good as the subtitle boxes and world poverty are glazed and large scale massive stream poverty how do you define it is the world bank's definition which is not having enough resources to provide for your basic needs of those are your dependents or at least not to provide reliably for them so maine's not earn enough income to be sure that you can have enough food on the table to have safe drinking water to have shelter of course also designate includes being able to provide at least some education for children and wraps them in a health care now the world bank kindly says

that to be able to revive you need you need an encounter that is the equivalent in purchasing power in your country of what you can get for one dollar and twenty five cents in the united states there's a very minimal amount of money it's not even a dollar twenty five in cash in your country it's the purchasing power of crippled and the world bank says there are currently one point four billion people living boy on and what parts of the world are mostly those in extreme poverty located the largest number of still on the indian some common in india pakistan bangladesh in sri lanka but as a proportion of the population the largest proportion as in subsaharan africa and those two places per account for the bulk of the world's recently pulled a small alarm was in southeast asia and east asia or in central asia iran and even some and some other former soviet satellites would anyone in the us qualify as being in extreme poverty by your definition

well not unless they had particular personal problems because really people in the us have access to things like food stamps to get enough calories goes by or have access to education for their children and if you opt for the new eligible for medicaid say if you can get some medical attention you would be turned away by a hospital emergency room so the people who really would be extremely poor people have for some reason can access the system and that may be their mental health problems for instance or alcohol abuse from an ethical point of view how would you characterize humanities current response to world poverty i think that it's woefully inadequate when you consider that we have more than a billion people living in affluence and and even tell you know can the present economic downturn most of those billion really have laws where they think nothing of spending money on all sorts of things that are just not necessary by any

stretch of the imagination we just sort of never think about expenditures like by more water or dying for a coffee shop for a coffee or buy a tennis when we do that we're spending as much as some of these people have to live on and even to feed their families und fr in tie dye and yet we give very very little to help these people i think a lot of americans and realize how little our country actually does is it wrong to help i believe it is i believe that we ought to be doing at least a decent minimum to help all those to get the basic necessities if if we have so much that we spend more than i have to live on quite fearlessly then it's not going to be difficult for us to make a significant difference in their lives and so i think we do have an obligation to do them in your book you argued that to be good people we mice given tell if we gave more we would be sacrificing something nearly as important as the bad things are donating

can prevent which you know every rock when he decided that that's a very demanding standard would you just read there and it's blocked the idea and at the beginning of the book comes to your right about that but by the time he had to the end of the book i start to think about what would be a publicly released extended and so in the sensible close to centers has a very demanding standard the game i'd say the logic of the initial argument leads us to that that the monies that is essentially say look if it's a choice between spending something on yourself will be done really made and citing the life of a child who might die from barrio malaria easily preventable curable conditions then surely charles life must out why the pretty trivial things we spend money on and repeated until you have nothing left to spend all of those trivia aren't bogged i recognize that

that's two top for people really to live up to her and so by the end of the book i propose a minimum standard issue i which i think we could make it into a public standard that we expect people to made up to him i'm not suggesting compulsion a collision but when summer we say look if you wanna lose benefits a lot you have to at least meet this minimum standard and i discuss the loss of the war but knows that it might be coming up on the more rigorous standard amount to do you choose to give to your own children versus children of others who are in dire poverty i think that we are obviously danny gives some preference to earn show them where you know my show that their basic needs are met william i show also for instance that they can get a decent education doesn't necessarily have to be absolutely top ranked indication that was decent education and a good start in life but i don't think we should go beyond that i think the needs of ours is such that they need they must come into it somewhere and

sort of indulging every desire every every wanted our children at the cost of not helping others would be wrong and probably wouldn't even be good for our children anyway because i do believe that there's a point which it you have to my nine when the world and the idea that they didn't get everything from their parents says is not a good thing for them would you also discuss the tendency towards getting close to home rather than in countries that are far away a lot of people tsai yeah well look we have poor here we have homeless people who should we help them this paramilitary on this is that he lives on equally important were living lives where living lived in seattle or in bangladesh or mozambique they're equally important so if i have a certain amount that i'm prepared to give a less i mean if you're a fifty thousand the average american salary on this dialogue reform and the minimum probably sell you should be giving at least one percent of your income so you have five hundred dollars if you ask yourself oh why should i give that

man you might say look for five hundred dollars given to someone now given to idolize asians working against diarrhea no summer that putting in sanitation aside drinking water in villages in africa you could really make a big difference to the family that maybe even save a child's life franny goes helping the homeless in seattle probably is nearly every friday it's not enough to really make a difference so that's what i would choose plenty of where it goes further and plays for the moment that's going to be putting it in and diane warren and we're speaking with peter singer ira debit account professor of bioethics at princeton university and author of the book the life you can save acting out to end world poverty in your turn to the sustainability segment of mind over matters and katie xv and he pointed out an ad on the web we don't know it to what extent does the us currently

contribute to alleviating rural poverty if you take into account both governmental and private contributions we're really not very good and a lot of americans believe that this is a very generous motion some believe that it's bearing the larger share of helping the poor but even when you add in government and private contributions the best estimates are yet suggest that maybe we giving a bad thirty cents every hundred dollars that we earn in aid to the poor and probably lots of below were astonishing because the official either we give doesn't all go to the poorest people but let's say that it's thirty cents every hundred dollars well the united nations many years ago set a target of seventy cents on every hundred dollars so we're not really even at half of that tiger the world average just for government aid without even the private army and is forty five cents every hundred dollars so even adding in a private eye we're way below the world average just for official and the best nation's noises like sweden and norway

and denmark and the netherlands give pretty close to one dollar for every hundred author and so i have about a third of what they're getting so they were doing pretty poorly by world standards most of our main focus geographically it tends to be focused on countries where we have some political interests and that's one of the reasons why the cinema it's not all going to the porous nation so so the top recipient of us paid for the last few years has been erratic iraqi is not one of the poor as much of the world cause with my device and that was a military intervention that i have is the world's third largest oil reserves so they're not really a poor nation the next is afghanistan which is a porn audition but obviously the reason it's up there on the list is again because of the war against terror so it is egypt not one of the poor is nice and either really about an important partner in the middle east peace process if you look at all the regions the latin american nation that gets the most us aid is colombia it's not the poorest

of those nice entire but it's very important to us in terms of fight against the drug trade against mccain so that's why we give a lot of aid to colombia so you know it has very mixed motives and i really would be better if we can get our aid at helping the world's poorest and if the us wants to give other's arms to other nations to help them saas on politically that's a different matter and should be classified as i when to comment in your book on why you have chosen to focus on individual rather than governmental aid i've heard as an individual because it's individuals who i hope will read this book and i want them to realize that they can do something that doesn't have to just say oh i think the government should do more but i just have to say well right to my congressional representatives of course that's a good thing and it's good that i can reassure senators should hear from us and say that we support fine i was bored more fried but we want

to be targeted more to the poorest people in the world but i think we should feel that just doing that is enough years off the hook i think we really how have a moral responsibility to do silly ass else to it that's a book so to go online without credit towns and give people into this scale i suggest which as i said starts off for most middleclass americans at one percent and then goes up as we go up the income scale depending on how much yearning how much money is needed to raise every one above the poverty line about poverty jeffrey sachs is a psychologist at columbia university and did a united nations report on this he wasn't asked how much would rise every one above the poverty line he was looking at the millennium development goals which were girls sit and signed onto by all the world leaders in the year two thousand at the millennium development summit and buying food hounding the proportion of the world's population living in poverty as sexist it cost about a hundred ninety nine billion dollars a year to achieve

that lego set a twenty fifteen says never a faraway anymore now that i'm rene i mean dollars in my sound like you're a lot of money but it's not really such usama united states fifteen billion on alcohol so just that little mustard and it goes on and on billion would come from the world the hall just from us so we could very easily meet our share of that commitment that would really make a big dent in what we spending which is a more about who should pay to alleviate poverty i think everybody who's affluent enough to be able to spend on luxuries even moses assign for my arteries like buying bottled water or genocide or beer or gas wind were luxuries by world standards and ailing can afford that should i think we're prepared to give something so the slice girl i had started at one percent and then if you're in the top ten percent of us

taxpayers which means if you're earning one hundred and five thousand above it just a five percent and if you're in the top five percent of us taxpayers that's people earning a hundred and forty eight thousand and above he gets a ten percent and so on until you know she get to the super wealthy regular goes to a thirty three and a third set a third of what you're doing and i think that that's a scallops really reasonable to ask aaron to give no one will be sacrificing a decent set of living or anything like that he would rise from or when you and there will rise far more money than that on may nine billion web sites mentioned what do you see as the obligation of the us compared to the world as a whole well i think our obligation should be in proportion to the size of our economy our economy is just a little under a third of the world's economy so where we should be having something like thirty percent of what's needed in the world as a whole we could easily do that

time in the style i mentioned would yield more than that so it's not a duty only force there's not some it would require a lot of sacrifice for us to sell it enough to meet the millennium development goals that would be so total of sixty billion something like that which would be roughly audio little more than doubling not quite a tripling of the total aid including private wells official i do and i do think that's something we could really easily do there's an individual's obligation and contributing their fair share according to your sightings scale i think individually contribute their fair share on that scale have made a good start and can feel really satisfied that they are contributing and incidentally if it just mentioned i've set up a website which has the scales notes the life you can save come on i want it will actually gotten pledged to meet that scale because i think that the more people see that i was doing this the easy it will become what i wanna really create a different standard different norm for people to do that but i will say that as their obligations for one thing i think that some

form of civic engagement is important so i'd like them to ride to their representatives and talk about making us aid more effective i like them to talk about what they're doing with others so that other people can see what they're doing and mit graduate i'll work up to a higher level at minimum scale that's good that there was a side i think once people doing that we shouldn't be cowed with a mission the blinding them we should be perhaps encouraging them but congratulating him on having taken an important step you're listening to the sustainability segment of mind over matters on k e x t seattle ninety point the fm and on the web add ptsd got or it and diane warren and my guest is peter singer cairo debbie had to camp professor of bioethics at princeton university and author of the book the life you can save acting now to end world poverty what most stands in the way of people donating to end world poverty there a psychological barrier is that we have two

dating which i think like a high the forest of the night to ending low quality land grabs too helping out a child and we might see a my blues in trouble and i imagined them in the book i talk about the charges fall into a shallow pond or needs rescuing and i think if you could do that without any danger we will do it but rescuing the world in fact millions of them worry i was like an album because we don't see them if we don't identify with them as individuals we don't give them a feist and that's one of the barris another gotten there is that we focus on the size of the problem and i just feel powerless because we think about the fight or whatever we do there will still be millions of children in maine who have died from poverty every year but we should fight us eyes and ears on the good that we do rather than the good that we can get an even if we just held one family cheer helped them to have a decent life a

life that at least the basic minimal compatible with a reasonable human existence thats a terrifically important thing to do and if we can do that for five hundred dollars so that we should be proud that we've done that and we shouldn't just you know feel guilty about the fact that there are so many other people that we can't help what is the best way to use the money given to alleviate world poverty what do you think would be most effective there's a big debate going on about what's the most effective way to reopen and that's as it should be because we need to try a lot of things we need to experiment i think that there are some agencies that are highly effective way to be sure that your money will we will use i've been a supporter of oxfam america for a long time and i continue to support them they both do some development grassroots work in the villages and they also help to empower people to be advocates for themselves so for instance if they're mining companies that go into an area and basically ignored the interests and needs of the local people own stammer helped local people to get

organized to have a kind of campaign for justice and respect for their audience so that arab that's more politically dale does asian and some of them and that's one of the reasons that i support the aisles as a boil that as asian called give world frontline get well but matt is trying to improve the efficacy of it is trying to encourage ireland as agent to be more transparent and to demonstrate that what they do is affective and i think that's an important mission to raise the level of effectiveness of it well you've been a living good as that how can we go about creating a culture of getting what other things is giving us all men talking about it because more people would do that the more it will make it easy for others and will get turned into a virtuous spiral going where it becomes more normal becomes easier more people give so i think being public about it encouraging others to think about the issue of

world poverty and doing something about it is an important part i'd also like to see big corporations buying their pot of like to see them and charging employees to give <unk> matching what their employees give an otherwise of encouraging employees to give and i think will be quite public criticism of people live a lavish lifestyles without doing anything significant for the world's poor thats just wrong and we should say that's real which you mentioned a couple of the specific examples of people that you talk about in your book who have gone out of their way to get of sharp i talk about members of something called the fifty percent lead let's leave that to be a member of your have forgiven oh why are the fifty percent of your wealth or fifty percent of your income for the last three years and the number of people who remember that lage who i talk about in the book some of them are people who are wealthy and have given away means some of the people really

doesn't average incomes and it's amazing how they can give away half of what they're earning and still have a good life in effect but i often feel but the lives of the new rich time i'd better by giving so he only given a very substantial level is not a sacrifice to them i also talk about tomatoes okra pinsky who might've fortune we'll start adding about forty million and they were eventually over the loser modestly with his family and then when that wasn't enough it you know that there are people dying in his near philadelphia and so the va hospitals while on the waiting list to get an organ transplant a kidney transplant so he did it one of his kidneys to have to a stranger so that's a remarkable degree of altruism i don't know it all a spot about it but it is inspiring to have those kinds of examples would you think inspires these special out to us well it's hard to know i mean i think so kaminski well i quite well is really just struck by the idea that

he could save many lives with the money have been undone you know he couldn't see a good value his own life at so many times more than that of other people so that's what inspired him just a spicy sense of the equal importance of every human being's life to him or herself other people and some of them have a religious inspiration but some of them are quite secular some of them feel that they were just lucky to have the wealth that they have and the others were not so lucky and therefore i don't really deserve that so they should share with others and for others it's just a matter of making our lives more fulfilling there are people who say that committee is they would have been a lot of money but they never really feel satisfied are fulfilled in a while i didn't know what they were doing and for adjusting to be the thing to do you could make money so he did like money and you tried to make more money that was as i giving them together my purpose in their life with my them feel fulfilled and

they had richer happy lives as a result how can our listeners find out more and become involved well obviously they're buying the book the life you can save this is one way of doing that and going to the website buzzfeed so dot com is another because that has some of this information and also as links to some of the old as asians that i would recommend that people might consider getting too and i'm encouraging people to online enjoying their women to wear a discussion group set up and create for where people can discuss this and share with others what it is but they think about this and in particular people are giving can talk about beginning and encourage others to do this just to deny give for why they find a good thing i believe building up that kind of community of givers will be an important step towards making this a culture of giving will what's the message you'd like to leave our listeners the basic message is that it's quite easy for you tonight it life or death difference

to at least one family in a developing country and if that something that's easy for us to do then surely everyone to think of ourselves as ethical and decent people that is what we should do what thanks so much for being here that if they were talking with you and with your listeners we have just been speaking with peter singer that i read that did the camp professor of bioethics at princeton university and author of the book the life you can save acting out and rural poverty published in two thousand and nine by random house for more information check on the web at dubie debbie debbie about the life you can save dot com again that's the life you can save dot com the sustainability segment of mind over matters program you've just heard will be on the streaming archives section of k e x these website at atx feet out or achieve for the next fourteen days in addition selected sustainability segment interviews are available as podcasts good at atx the dot org she couldn't podcasting and scroll down to mind over matter sustainability

segment i'm diane warren thanks for listening and be sure to tune into the sustainability segment again next week on any point three of them and katie x p that archie