What's Your World View?

I had coffee yesterday with a friend and business colleague. We worked together at my former company and both left about the same time to go out on our own. He is doing consulting now as well on sales stuff and is a very smart guy. We got to talking about travel and how we were enjoying the opportunity to travel more. Chrystal's friend Sarah is going to be in South Africa for a couple of years so I was telling him that we are planning on visiting her at least once, and while we are there visiting at least one bank with Opportunity International.

My friend had never heard of Opportunity International so we got on the subject of micro finance lending. Inevitably it turned into a political conversation and he expressed an opinion that most African countries (and other 3rd world nations) are in the position they are in because of their own fault (political corruption and such), and most of them were better off in every economic way when under the rule of a colonial power. This is not the first time I've heard this comment, and each time I do it saddens me. It saddens me not because someone does not agree with my opinion, but that someone who is very smart with a college degree and has traveled extensively throughout the world can look at the situation of extreme poverty and respond with, "They created this problem for themselves and need to fix it. If we give them our money their corrupt government is just going to steal it from them anyway." I may be overstating his position but it was clear that he did not find it realistic to try and end world poverty. (I define poverty in this case as the 50% of people in the world living on less than $2 per day.)

I recommended that he should read "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs (I've posted about it before here). I also asked him, "If they did create the problem are we not in some way, as the wealthiest nation on Earth, responsible to help them?"

I know that there are at least a couple of readers of this blog out there and I'd like to know your thoughts. Can we as Westerners (or a least Americans) actually make a financial difference in economic support of 3rd world countries, or are we really just giving our hard earned money to a problem that will always exist?

Further more, if you are the in the top 10% of income earners in the US do you have a responsibility to help?

What Matters Most to You?

What is more important to you, wealth or dignity?

I'm enamoured and shocked with the statistics of world poverty and have recently become interested and in strong support of microfinance lending in poverty stricken areas of the world (how I was not intersted in it before I will chalk up to laziness and a narrow world view). If you read my blog (and there are few that do), you'll know this by my other posts.

I just finished watching a great TEDBlog by Jacqueline Novogratz entitled Tackling Poverty with Patient Capital (the talk is at the bottom of this post). She made a really amazing statement based on her experience in Africa working in areas of microfinance.

"Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth"

I love this statement because it's a great balance to the get rich, be rich, act rich, all thing rich culture. There is a battle here because part of my initiative in starting my own company is to create financial freedom and personal freedom. But it's quotes like this that bring reality to the goal of "freedom". Life is not about wealth nor should it be about financial freedom. If it is a product of life, then what blessing.

My college budies and I had a quote that we all swore we wanted to live life by.

"Be men of God speaking well."

I hope and pray when people look a me, my life, and my business they see dignity being more important than wealth and they see a man of God speaking well.

Why We Call Them Third World Countries

Two weeks ago I did a post about having a realistic world view. Yesterday I was talking with my wife about the book (The End of Poverty) and how eye opening it was to learn that 2.5 billion people in third world countries live on under $2 per day. My thoughts drifted to how easy Americans will spend someone’s entire yearly income on a new flat screen television, laptop, or even a watch. To us these are necessities for living in the world, where to others it would be enough money to feed and clothe their entire family for literally years.

In the midst of the conversation my wife asked why they were called third world countries. This was a question I had asked before reading the book, and before reading it probably would have made up some answer about the national GDP of the country or some decent sounding answer regarding economics. But the real answer was quite eye opening as was not grounded in economics but rather politics.

In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs outlines for us exactly why we call them 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries. Below is a summary of his description, but I recommend reading the entire book to get a full understanding of these descriptions.

First World
The rich world, called the first world, succeeded in reconstructing a market-based trading system between the end of WWII in 1945 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Countries established currency conversion factors and reduce trade barriers. With it came a burst of rapid economic growth, a powerful recovery after decades of war, blocked trade, and financial instability. First world countries generally adopted a capitalist economic structure.

Second World
The second world is the socialist world, the world first forged by Lenin and Stalin in the wake of WWI. This world remained cutoff from the first world until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The characteristics of the second world were state ownership of production, one party rule under communism, and economic integration through barter trade.

Third World
We generally define this as a poor country, but the third world included the rapidly rising number of postcolonial counties after WWII that chose neither to be part of the capitalist first world or socialist second world. They were the “third-way” countries with the philosophy that they would develop on their own without the assistance of international trade.

Jeffrey Sachs goes into great deal on the reasoning why second and third world counties did not achieve the economic success of first world countries, which I will let you discover by reading the book.

A Realistic World View

I recently finished a book that changed my "world view" perspective more than any other book. By world view I mean viewing the world as the world, versus from our completely isolated view in the Western world. In Santa Barbara I am surrounded by some of the most obscene wealth in the world and it's easy to get caught up in it.

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs is a must read for everyone in the Western world, especially Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Sachs is a altruistic economist that has advised just about every major political figure on the third world economics, and is currently a special advisor to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General. The big thought of the book is our generation is the first in history that has the financial capability to end "extreme poverty". The book highlights the UN Millennium Project, which is a plan to end "extreme poverty" by the year 2025.

The book defines extreme poverty as the 2.5 billion people in the world that live on less than $2.00 per day, and that we have the ability to provide the necessary money and supplies to end that. Read the book and get involved.

You don't have to agree with everything that Jeffrey proposes in the book, but it's hard not to be affected by reality of information that he provides.