When I was a kid, I played “Balance of the Planet,” a 1990 simulation / strategy computer game by Chris Crawford. The game lets you play as the imaginary UN “High Commissioner of the Environment,” given near-universal control over taxation and spending for the world, with a mission to improve the planet’s ecosystem and improve human quality of life. It’s neither easy nor particularly fun; it requires you to balance a complex web of competing goals and priorities, with punishing and at times no-win tradeoffs. The game works by tracking various scores and parameters (quality of life, consumer goods, biodiversity, pollution, etc.) and how they change and affect each other in response to your policies. For example, the “quality of life” parameter is influenced by “Northern lifestyle” and “Southern lifestyle.” Northern lifestyle (“usually associated with rich countries in the northern temperate latitudes”), in turn, is influenced by beef production, consumer goods, medicines, and net energy. Southern lifestyle (“usually associated with poor countries in the southern hemisphere”), by contrast, is influenced by drinking water, food supply, and housing. An optional alternative game mode, “Third World Bias,” “asserts that all human life is equally valuable, and adjusts the point system accordingly,” making the game even harder.
As a statement of moral values, all of this is abhorrent. Of course all human life is equally valuable. And how can anyone act like cheap beef and consumer goods are on the same tier as drinking water and food? As a matter of cold pragmatism, though, it’s probably correct. We naturally pay the most attention to those closest to us - whether due to practical limits on our empathy and awareness, appeals to culture or tribe, ordo amoris or similar religious ideas, or the harsh realities of political constituents and finances. After all, any American politician’s fortunes and effectiveness are far more affected by the price of gasoline and beef (or eggs) than starvation from Sudan’s civil war. And even a hypothetical UN High Commissioner of the Environment must know that the US, as one of the 193 sovereign states in the UN, pays roughly one-third of the UN’s budget.
It’s easy to forget just how rich the US is. For example, the United Kingdom falls firmly in the computer game’s “Northern lifestyle” bucket; however, if it were a US state, its GDP per capita would put it on par with Mississippi, our poorest state. Or, to flip that around, if California were a separate country (as some Americans might wish!), its GDP would make it the sixth largest economy in the world. For all our concern over the rise of China, our next closest competitor, the US’s is roughly 50% higher despite having one-fourth the population. Twenty-two of the 25 largest companies in the world are American. There are countries with larger GDPs per capita, but most are outliers and oddities - Ireland with its corporate tax havens, the high-tech city-state of Singapore with a population smaller than New York City’s, etc. By contrast, the US is simply huge – over 340 million people, the third biggest country in the world by both population and land mass.
This wealth has odd effects. For one, it gets easier to put that “Southern lifestyle” out of mind when I can drive for days and still be in the same country, same language and mass-produced culture, same economy, same general standard of living. And all that money makes things more expensive: the US has one of the highest costs of living in the world. This can cause real hardship for Americans, because that sky-high GDP isn’t evenly distributed. Still, even many lower-income people in the US have advantages unimaginable in other times and places: cell phones, air conditioning, (often processed and unhealthy) meat, etc. A hotel-room-style residence (one room, furnished, climate-controlled, with indoor plumbing and carpeted rather than dirt floor) doesn’t meet housing codes in many US municipalities; it would be luxury in many parts of the world.
And this wealth has odd effects for international affairs. The US is regularly criticized for not giving enough foreign aid: it ranks “near the bottom of all developed countries” in terms of foreign aid as a percentage of GDP or GNI (gross national income). In 2019, it was a mere 0.22% – less than 1/3 of the UN’s target. Foreign aid is around 1% of our own government’s budget. Yet, because we’re so obscenely wealthy, that 1% comes out to over 40% of the global humanitarian aid tracked by the UN.
US foreign aid is currently a matter of heated debate as Donald Trump and Elon Musk promise an “America First” agenda and, in the words of Musk, took USAID (the government agency responsible for much of the US’s foreign aid) and threw it “into the wood chipper.” Certainly, there’s room to criticize and express concerns: the federal government rarely has a reputation for efficiency and wise use of resources, and tax burdens and federal deficits place real limits on what we can do. And, as inevitably happens when things become political, USAID’s actions and agendas have no doubt at times served partisan goals rather than the best interests of the US and the world as a whole. But any criticism and complaint must be weighed against the millions of lives helped, food and drugs distributed, disease treated, knowledge shared.
I don’t really have the time or the expertise to get into the weeds of the debate here, and it’s not really the focus of this blog. I’m more frustrated by the mood I see among some Americans and some professing American Christians: “America First” (as if we should put ourselves before others), outright declaring that we don’t care about others (as if our Northern-lifestyle challenges trump their Southern-lifestyle ordeals), worrying about our beef production and egg prices and gasoline while leaving others wondering if they’ll get their rice and antibiotics and HIV meds, begrudging the world of 40% its aid for the sake of 0.22% of our income, laying claim to all our stomach-turning wealth in the face of gut-wrenching poverty.
And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. – Luke 16:9 (ESV)
From everyone who has been given much, much will be required, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, even more will be asked. – Luke 12:48b