Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Gloria Steinem, defining symbol of women’s movement and eloquent advocate for equality, dies at 92 (September 4)

2. Flock cameras draw opposition from across the political spectrum (September 5) "Every month, Flock cameras capture billions of license plates, along with other vehicle data. Police say this tool helps them find stolen vehicles and missing people. But the technology has been abused. Officers have used it to stalk ex-partners, for instance."

3. If you weren't on Cohost, you don't have to miss it (September 5, via) "This post is a response to those whose impression of Cohost has been based off the glowing retrospectives by its biggest fans."

4. The U.N. backs a new world map showing Africa in its true relative size (September 4) I don't get why the UN is doing this, seems like not really the best use of their time, but you should definitely go take a look at this map.

5. Wales Gender Clinic In The UK Pauses Surgeries Over Accusations That They Help Too Many Trans Patients (September 2) "However, the impacts on patients have been devastating. Existing gender-affirming surgeries on the books were cancelled for the foreseeable future. Some patients were informed of this mere hours before they, themselves, were scheduled to go under the knife. Some had already been admitted to the hospital when news broke. People who had waited years for this care, rearranged their lives, took time off work, and traveled to the clinic from all over the country are now stuck in a medical purgatory."

Also from Erin in the Morning: 21 States Sue Federal Government To Block Anti-Trans Under-19 Medicaid Ban (September 4) "The lawsuit targets a rule published on Aug. 13 that bars federal reimbursement for puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for anyone under 18 on Medicaid or under 19 on CHIP, and which could do significant harm to transgender youth in these states, who currently have that care covered."

And: The Guide To Anti-Trans Democrats In The 2026 Elections, By State (September 8)

6. Seth Moulton lost. Good. (September 3) 

7. The widow of Zarephath and the extra mile (September 9) "But what would it mean for us to have told him that this is what he was obliged to do? What would it mean for us to have insisted to him that this self-sacrifice was compulsory and something commanded of him? That would seem to put us in the same category as the corrupt white cops and klansmen who were also telling Lewis that his duty — his role in life — was to take a beating, turn the other cheek, and then be beaten again. Instead of the world being changed by his radical heroism, we would be locking that world into place, with all of its grievous injustice protected and enshrined."

The question of how much self-sacrifice we are morally obligated to do is something I've been thinking about for my entire life. Maybe the approach in this blog post is reasonable.

8. Dolly Parton Was Political, But Not Partisan (August 31) "Parton’s achievement, then, wasn’t in pursuing nonpartisan politics over partisan politics; simply refusing to be partisan is not a virtue in itself. Rather, the reason she did so much good is that she identified areas where her resources and her carefully cultivated position as a nonpartisan figure would allow her to advance particular causes—LGBT acceptance, children’s literacy, vaccine development, vaccine uptake—in a way few others could. That took decades of unwavering commitment, careful strategy, and moral commitment. Everyone can’t be Dolly, and I don’t think everyone should be Dolly. But everyone can be inspired by a public figure who figured out her path and used it to do so much good."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. climate.us (via) Site where US climate data is now being hosted without political interference, after what happened with climate.gov.

2. MapQuest app reaches No 1 on US Apple list after defying Trump’s Lake Ontario order (September 1)

3. CBS Just Putting It Out There That Maybe Abdul El-Sayed Secretly Loves Terrorism And 9/11 (September 2) "What kind of questions? What kind of duck? A communist duck? A terrorism-loving duck? A Muslim duck? What sort of quacking and in what direction? This seems like a very weird thing to say if you have a concrete criticism of someone that isn’t 'Well, I don’t like his religion.'"

4. Supreme Court allows Trump to continue building White House ballroom (September 1)

5. Speaking (and singing) of the dead (August 31) "Yes, poor Sisera’s Mama — waiting for her son to return in his fancy chariot and dreaming of all the loot and new slaves he’ll be bringing back for her. Except oops — sorry Mom! — your son isn’t coming home because he’s dead! One of those women he planned to enslave put a tent peg through his skull! [shrug emoji, cry-laughing emoji]"

6. Trump’s 9/11 Lies Are A Moral Failure, Not A Cognitive One (September 9) "In a telephone interview just after the attack, Trump boasted that his property at 40 Wall Street was the tallest building still standing in Manhattan. That was a lie; it was the second tallest. And it was an incredibly fucked up thing to say while the bodies were still being counted."

"The Case for Open Borders": Racism

People holding a sign that says "Welcome asylum seekers and refugees." Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 214-215:

17. Closed Borders Are Racist

The nationality granted to you at birth determines whether you are free to move across international borders or are blocked by them. Not only border walls, but a web of multilateral visa agreements privilege certain passport holders and allow their free movement, while denying and immobilizing others. Such discrimination, while based in nationality, overlaps with both class and race. Citizens of Global North nations, made up of predominantly white citizens, are generally able to cross borders with ease. Citizens of the Global South, predominantly Black or Brown, are denied that same freedom.

The logic of apartheid and Jim Crow lives on when applied to migrants. "Looking at the data, it becomes apparent," writes sociologist Steffen Mau, that "most countries with either black or Islamic majorities are exempted from visa-free travel on a large scale." Even within Third World countries, whiter citizens have the wealth and connections to obtain passports and authorization for international travel. The pattern holds for nonauthorized migration as well: Black and Brown people are more readily denied, suspected, detained, and deported.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Classic Star Trek Actually Missed the Point About Racism (June 25, 43-minute video) "Captain Kirk never felt it was necessary to pull McCoy aside and say, 'Hey, man, next time you disagree with Spock, maybe try not to mention what color his blood is.'"

2. Israel kills over 300 Palestinians in 48 hours as Gaza runs out of graves (July 3, via)

Also from Gaza: Knives, bullets and thieves: the quest for food in Gaza (July 6) "At the distribution site, I pushed people aside and grabbed whatever food I found tossed on the ground under torn cardboard boxes: cooking oil, biscuits, a bag of rice that had been torn open and was mixed with sand from the ground. I didn't care. It's food. I can wash it."

The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world (July 6, via) "This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel."

3. AI chatbots oversimplify scientific studies and gloss over critical details — the newest models are especially guilty (July 5, via) 

I've started using Deepseek at work, asking it for help with programming tasks. There are some things it's good at, but also, sometimes it just has no idea what it's talking about, and it's not immediately obvious when those times are. Its output reads as equally authoritative and confident regardless. One trick I've figured out is, if I read Deepseek's output and I feel like "I didn't quite understand this, let me read it again more carefully"- that's a red flag, it's likely that reading more carefully is just going to be a waste of time.

See, normally when you encounter text that sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but you can't quite understand it, it DOES help to spend more time reading it carefully. Because a person wrote it, and they had an idea of what they wanted to say, and they made decisions about what details to include. If it turns out their answer is not useful for you, that might be because they were working on a different thing than what you are doing, or they were wrong about it, or they made typos when writing. But for an AI-generated text, the concepts of having an idea it's trying to communicate, and being right or wrong about it- these concepts don't have any meaning when we're talking about AI-generated text. The LLM simply generates something that comes across as the sort of thing that would be an answer to your question. That's it. 

I've found that it's especially misleading when you're trying to write code to do something, which could be done in several different ways, with different groups of functions applying to each way (and some of them are deprecated, and some of them only work with certain versions of certain software packages, etc)- the LLM will sort of combine these seamlessly so you don't *at all* get the understanding that, if you use *this* function, you need to also be using *this other* function, but not *that other* one.

Like this one time Deepseek gave me some code to use that had 2 different functions in it, and then later as I continued to debug, Deepseek brought up the point that if I'm using this one approach, I shouldn't use this other approach, and I'm like "you literally gave me code that said to do it that way" and Deepseek is all like "you're right to point that out!" and then I got mad at it, but there's nothing to be gained from arguing with Deepseek, so don't do that. It's never going to actually understand what it did wrong and do better.

Anyway, sometimes it's really helpful. But when it's not helpful, it's very deceptive, because the output text is so friendly and easy to read and makes you feel like you're just 1 step away from solving your problem. This is the sort of thing that I think we as a society need to spend more time really thinking through what the use-case is, and what strategies we should use so it's actually effective and useful. Education about best practices.

Because right now, people are treating LLMs like the output they give you is the answer to your question, and oh yikes, no, that's not what it is. The output is the sort of thing that we might imagine someone might say in response to your question, but that has an tenuous connection to what's actually true and/or makes sense.

4. The ultra-selfish gene (2024) Really interesting article about how gene editing can be used to wipe out the subspecies of mosquito which carries malaria- which could potentially save hundreds of thousands of people's lives every year. But, releasing an edited gene into the wild, to wipe out a whole subspecies- uh, better think carefully about if you really want to do that. A lot of unexpected things could go wrong. This article takes those risks seriously and talks about strategies to reduce the risk. There is a lot of potential for this technology to be used for good.

5. A Rough Ride: ‘Dirty’ Workers Stand Up to Subway Stares (July 4) "This leaves manual workers who need to commute in dusty clothes in a bind: they can either take a seat and potentially face the ire of fellow passengers, sit on the floor and risk injury, or stay on their weary feet throughout the journey."

6. I released my game (July 5) This is a cool game if you like math~

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. 4 things to know about the vaccine ingredient thimerosal (July 6) "Fiscus, from the Association of Immunization Managers, says the committee's decision to only recommend single-dose flu shots without thimerosal shows that it is willing to make a decision without following protocol and considering the scientific evidence. 'Is this now going to be the standard?' she says. 'That's very concerning if that's where this is heading.'"

2. Arlington woman detained by ICE after her honeymoon speaks publicly for the first time (July 3) "'I did lose five months of my life because I was criminalized for being stateless,' she said. 'Something that I absolutely have no control over. I didn't choose to be stateless, I didn't do a crime that made me stateless. I had no choice.'"

3. Abrego Garcia says he was severely beaten in Salvadoran prison (July 3)

4. UPenn updates swimming records to settle with feds on transgender athletes case (July 2) "The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday modified a trio of school records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and said it would apologize to female athletes "disadvantaged" by her participation on the women's swimming team, part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case." They're really going to a lot of effort just to be mean to Lia Thomas specifically. 

5. All the children of the world (July 7) "That committee also organized our annual Missions Conference, which began each year with young people from our church parading through the sanctuary carrying the flags of every nation our missionaries served. “World Missions” was an integral part of that church’s identity and the faith taught, learned, and lived there."

6. Projected Mortality Impacts of the Budget Reconciliation Bill (June 3, via) "Including that impact, the researchers project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths."

7. Bombshell report alleges El Salvador disclaimed responsibility for those U.S. sent to CECOT (July 8) "El Salvador, per the U.N. working group’s report attached to the filing, acknowledged that it had 'facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure' by the U.S. — but also stated that, '[i]n this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the' U.S."

"Portfolios of the Poor" (book review)

Book cover for "Portfolios of the Poor"

I read the book Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. I enjoyed this book! Here's my review of it.

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Overview of the book

This book is about research into the financial lives of people whose income is somewhere around $2/day. The researchers tracked several hundred households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, asking them very detailed questions, in order to get a clear picture of every single inflow and outflow of money in their household. This even includes really informal stuff like if you owe a shopkeeper $3 because you bought groceries on credit. The kind of stuff that people wouldn't really think to mention normally, and/or that researchers usually wouldn't think to ask about. (The authors reported that they needed several conversations with the participating households in order to really get all the details, because at the beginning they didn't have a good enough understanding of all the things they should ask about.) The book refers to the data collected as "financial diaries" because the goal is to track all the small day-to-day transactions.

(This research took place around 1999-2005 and the book was published in 2009.)

Usually, when you see statistics on global poverty, it's about people's annual income or average income per day. But if you only measure those things, you're missing a lot of what's actually happening. These researchers found that the turnover that these poor households had was very big, compared to their total income. They were constantly lending or borrowing money, in various types of formal or informal arrangements, they had all kinds of different strategies for saving, etc. 

The actual reality of what it means to live on $2/day is much more sophisticated than you'd expect.

The book says that for the households that participated in these studies, the problem isn't just that their income is low. There are actually 3 problems that make their financial lives difficult:

1. Low incomes
2. Irregular, unpredictable incomes. Most of the people in the study didn't have regular, salaried jobs. (Some of them did, and that was definitely a huge benefit to them.) Their income often came in irregular amounts, at unpredictable frequencies. Also, farmers often get most of their income during certain seasons of the year, and hardly anything during other seasons.
3. Lack of financial tools. Poor people don't have access to the same financial tools (savings accounts, credit cards, etc) that I am familiar with. The fact is, though, that poor households need these tools even more than rich households do. One of the big messages of this book is that it would make a big difference if a wider variety of financial services was available to poor people.

So it's not just about "they live on less than 2 dollars a day." It's actually worse than that.

The book says that there are 3 main areas that should be considered when we look at how people manage their money. 

1. Normal, day-to-day expenses
2. Saving up for big expenses. For example, capital for a business, weddings, paying for children's education.
3. Emergencies. When you suddenly need to borrow money because of medical expenses, a funeral, replacing an asset that was damaged or stolen, etc.

For each of these, there is a chapter in the book that talks about the strategies that the diary households used.

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Making it relatable and human

There's something that has bothered me for a long time about the way that people talk about global poverty. It's like... when I hear statistics about how many millions of people don't have access to clean water, or how many millions of people are living on less than $2 a day, etc, I feel like, I can't even imagine what that's like. It sounds so terrible, I can't even picture how a person can live under those circumstances. It's the sort of thing that makes one want to just throw money at a charity so then one can stop thinking about it. 

Hearing statistics about millions or billions of people living on $2 a day- it doesn't feel like they're real people, like me or anybody I know. It comes across like they are caricatures who don't really do anything or have any thoughts besides just sitting around being sad and desperate (and they need YOU to swoop in and donate money so they can get out of that state).

I once saw an article about a photographer in Africa who would take 2 different photos of each person- one photo that portrayed that kind of one-dimensional, people-in-Africa-are-just-sad-and-poor message, and another photo that showed some personality, showed the person in a setting that communicates something about who they are as a unique person. (I can't find a link to this- but if you have also heard of this and you happen to have a link, please leave it in the comment section.) I'm really interested in the way this photographer explored the stereotypes that western people have about Africa, and how that feeds into the sorts of images that are shared, and the way we talk about people.

And the ads that a lot of global poverty charities use- like, they find the saddest picture of a poor child they can find. It comes across like the child is not a whole person- that the only thing that matters about them is they don't have food/water/etc, and they don't really have a personality or feelings or dreams beyond that.

So I like this book because it takes these big scary statistics about "$2 a day" and shows you what that really looks like, how humans whose lives are just as complex as mine or yours or anybody else's keep their lives moving forward in those circumstances. 

The authors point out that none of the households in the study lived "hand to mouth", ie, spending all of their money immediately after getting it. All of them had some kind of savings strategy.

And also, you can see in all the examples throughout the book, which described the circumstances of specific households in the study, that there's a whole range of personality types here. Some people talked about how they didn't like to ask others for money, and preferred to be independent as much as they could, while other people were constantly getting into financial arrangements with everybody. Some people chose not to take microfinance loans because it felt like too much of a risk, others were happy to have access to such loans. Some people were very skeptical the first time they heard about microfinance institutions offering savings accounts, and weren't willing to open one until their friends tried it and told them how it went. All of this feels very real and human to me. It feels very different from just hearing a statistic about global poverty and thinking it's so terrible that I can't even imagine it.

The thing is, though, for some reason learning about the practical human details makes it feel like... less urgent that we take action to help? Charity appeals are like "oh noooo this is so bad, these people are so desperate, if you don't donate money then what are they going to do?????" (The book isn't about charity at all, but this is something I think about.) But the reality is more like, they have ways to scrape by. They are able to plan ahead, and ask family members or neighbors for loans, and so on. Does that make global poverty seem less bad? 

It *is* bad; we shouldn't lose sight of that. The world has enough resources that nobody should live in poverty like that, where they don't know if they'll be able to get their basic needs met. The people described in this book... yeah, the book is about how they're able to manage, and take care of themselves even on such low incomes, but the reality is that it just doesn't work as well when you're living on so little money. People die from medical issues which are no big deal to those of us who have access to good medical care. They have to deal with constant annoyances- unreliable housing, low-quality food, chronic health issues, physically demanding jobs- which could be avoided if only they had more money.

They get by, but not as well as people who aren't impoverished. They get by, but with a much lower life expectancy than people in "developed" countries.

When a potential donor hears "oh nooo these people are so desperate, they need you to send money, or what are they going to do????" that comes across differently than "these people are really in need and you should help by donating money. If they can't raise enough money, their back-up plan is xyz." Like, realistically, usually there is a back-up plan. But you don't *mention* the back-up plan, or else that will make the donors suddenly decide "oh, never mind then."

Or, I guess you can mention the back-up plan if it sounds really terrible, like maybe on a gofundme someone might write "if they're not able to raise enough money, they will be forced to sell their home!"

Has anyone studied the psychology of this- the way potential donors feel like they're off the hook if the potential recipients are portrayed in a realistic human way, taking charge of their lives and making choices about how to move forward even in a bad situation? 

People living on $2/day truly are impoverished and it would make a big difference if we donated money to help them. *But* they're not just sitting around hoping that will happen. They manage their own lives. They make plans related to their finances. Why does that make me *feel* like I don't have an obligation to help them? It's something about being unable to realistically weigh other people's needs and my own needs, I think.

But anyway, the book isn't about charity at all. It wasn't anything about "we should donate money to help them." Its message about how to help them was more like "their government and/or private businesses should invest in infrastructure that can provide them with savings accounts and loans." People manage their own financial lives- but it really helps a lot if they have access to tools that enable them to do that, just like rich people have access to such tools.

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Some financial tools that poor people use

The book described some financial tools that the diary participants used, which I wasn't familiar with. For example:

Savings clubs. This is an informal arrangement where a group of people get together at regular intervals, and each time, they all contribute a certain amount of money, and they take turns taking home the whole pot. For example, you get together with 4 friends (5 people total) once a week, you each put in 6 dollars, and then once every 5 weeks you get to take home the whole $30.

What's the point of this? Well, for some people, depending on their situation, they find it doable to put in small amounts of money at frequent intervals, as a way to save up a usefully large amount of money. Yeah, but why do they need the savings club? Why not just save up the money on their own? Well, they may find it helpful having the social pressure to stick to their plan. And they might not have a good way to keep money safe in their home- there is a risk that it could be stolen, or spent by family members, or just spent by themself when they're not really paying attention to whatever their savings target is supposed to be for that week.

A similar example: Some poor households in South Africa received grants from the government every month. But, receiving the money at a frequency of 1 time per month did not work well for managing their day-to-day cash flow. So some people would pair up and make an arrangement where 1 person receives their money at the beginning of the month, and gives part of it to the other. And when the other person receives their money in the middle of the month, they give part of it to the first person. In this way, the government grant money is split up so they receive it twice a month instead of once a month- which was much more convenient.

Funeral insurance. In South Africa, funerals are expensive, and people have come up with various ways to insure themselves in case a family member dies and they need to pay for a funeral. There are formal arrangements with insurance companies, and there are informal arrangements with "burial societies." For example, there are burial societies where, if a member dies, all the other members need to contribute a certain amount for the funeral. Or, there are also burial societies where everyone contributes money on a regular basis, and it is kept in some kind of savings account, and then if someone dies, their family receives a payout.

Many of the South African diary households had multiple forms of funeral insurance, because none of them paid out enough to cover the full cost.

Moneyguards. Sometimes people deposit money with the moneyguard, for safekeeping. This is helpful if you are concerned about money being stolen or being spent by your family members. But there's a risk- what if you want your money back, but the moneyguard doesn't have it at that moment?

Also, sometimes the researchers had trouble understanding what exactly was going on when the diary participants said they put some money with the neighbor. Does this mean you gave the neighbor a loan? Does it mean you deposited money with them for safekeeping? The tools that poor people use to manage their money don't always easily match up with the categories of financial tools we are familiar with.

The financial tools varied a lot in terms of how convenient they were, and how reliable they were. There were examples in the book of people who joined a savings club, and the savings club fell apart and they ended up losing money. You always have to consider the risk that comes with any of these options.

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It's about how to add up small sums to make big sums

The book emphasized that for the people in this study, they don't have big sums of money laying around to pay for big expenses, but they *do* have small incomes which can be used to save small sums on a regular basis- so they need financial tools which can help them turn these small amounts saved up over time into big amounts.

For example, various kinds of savings accounts or savings clubs, where people are required to frequently pay in small amounts of money, and then at some point they can withdraw a big amount. Or loans- they get a big lump sum of money and then pay it back in small frequent payments. From the perspective of the poor people in this study, savings accounts and loans were pretty much the same thing. Both of them allow you to make small, regular payments, and then withdraw a big amount of money when you need it. This was surprising to me because I always heard that saving money is good and taking out loans is bad- in my mind, savings accounts and loans are complete opposites.

This concept of "these people *can't* pay for big things, but they *can* put aside small amounts of money frequently, and pay for big things that way, so they need access to financial tools that do that" is hard for me to get my head around. If you can't pay $30 one time, but you can pay $3 every week for 10 weeks, well, what? Isn't that the exact same thing? Why can they do one but not the other? Why do they need tools to help them?

I feel like I'm missing something about how to understand the psychology of this. Or rather, I feel like the way the people's budgets actually work in the real world (not just the poor people in this book, but basically everyone) is like this: It's not about "we planned out the correct amount for each category in our budget, which is more or less the minimum we feel we need to have a good life, and all the rest goes to savings." It's more like, you have a vague sense of how much money is available to you, and your lifestyle sort of naturally expands to match.

I think that "personal responsibility" Republicans might frame it as being "self-disciplined" and view it as a moral failure if you can't manage to save up money because you lack good financial tools. But the truth is, it really does take work. Let's say you want to save up $3 a week for 10 weeks. So, every week, you need to have an awareness of what your savings amount is supposed to be, and you need to make sure that you don't accidentally spend it as you pay for your normal life expenses. Remembering what the number is supposed to be, remembering to update the number in your head every week, communicating this number and its importance to your family members so they don't spend it (and/or just hiding the cash from them, maybe that's easier), always knowing how much you have left every time you make a purchase- this is work. And what if you're saving up for multiple things, with different timelines... 

If it was me, I would make a Excel sheet to keep track of this. (Actually, many of the study participants were illiterate, and were just mentally keeping track of their informal loans with their neighbors. Interesting.)

It truly is work to continually make sure you're saving the right amount of money for future expenses. So of course it's helpful for poor people to have access to financial tools which will do that work for them. Even though sometimes those financial tools will charge fees. Here's a quote from pages 148-149:

An example from India shows us just how important these elements [reliability, flexibility, structure that works with a household's cash-flow timing] are to the poor saver. Jyothi works in the southern city of Vijaywada and was described in an earlier book by one of our authors. Jyothi is a middle-aged woman living in the slums she served, and her service consisted simply of walking round the slum each day collecting small deposits from her customers, most of them housewives. She gave them a crude passbook, just a card divided into 220 cells made up of 20 columns and 11 rows, so that savers could keep track of their progress. When all 220 cells were ticked off, Jyothi returned the savings to the value of 200 of the 220 cells, holding back the remaining 20 cells' worth as her fee for her service. Thus someone depositing a total of $44 with her, as 20 cents a day, would get back $40. If we consider this 20-cell fee as interest, and we assume a growing balance as 220 deposits are made over 220 days, then Jyothi is effectively paying her customers a negative rate on the savings-- minus 30 percent a year. Put this fact to the savers and they will tell you to forget your fancy calculations: the fact is that they needed their $40 to ensure that they could pay school fees to keep their children in class for another year. With husbands earning irregularly, the only sure way to build up this sum was to take pennies from the housekeeping money each day and hand it over to Jyothi. It costs them only $4 to form the $40, and Jyothi did all the work. Taken within this context, this is a reasonable price to pay to build badly needed savings.

I don't think we should view this as "poor people are not self-disciplined enough." I think there are plenty of examples in our lives where people choose to put pressure or restrictions on themselves, to force themselves to follow through with good habits they are trying to maintain. You might know someone who paid money to join a gym, even though they could just exercise at home by following workout videos on youtube for free. Why pay the money for the gym? Because they know that if their plan is just to exercise with youtube videos at home, in reality they're not going to do it. But if they're paying money for the gym, they will feel obligated to actually go and exercise. There really is value in these strategies to make yourself do something you know you should do.

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Microloans

The diary households in this book used a wide range of loans, from informal, semiformal, and formal sources. Some examples:

• Buying groceries on credit
• Getting an advance on one's salary
• Interest-free loan from a neighbor
• Loan from a local moneylender
• Loan from a microfinance organization

Let's talk about the microfinance organizations.

When I was in college, sometime around 2010, I heard a lot about Kiva, a charity that provided microloans to people in developing countries. The story that was presented went like this: These people have such low incomes, and they can't get loans from normal financial institutions because those institutions don't think it's worth the trouble of doing business with such small amounts of money. If they need a loan, they have to go to a shady moneylender- and the moneylenders charge something like 300% annual interest, oh my goodness, that's terrible. But if they had access to loans with reasonable interest rates, wow, that could really turn their lives around. That could lift them out of poverty. The microloan recipients will be able to start their own businesses- whereas, without the microloan, they never would have been able to save up enough money for the initial capital investment to start their business. And having a business would totally change their life.

"Portfolios of the Poor" shows us that the reality is not really like that.

The reality is more like: 

Okay, so those predatory moneylenders you've heard about? It doesn't really make sense to talk about their annual interest rate, since the loans are often paid back very quickly. It makes sense to think of this cost as more of a fee, rather than interest. Also, people often renegotiate with the moneylenders about their interest payments and the term of the loan. It's very common for part or all of the interest to be forgiven. So if you see a moneylender loan presented as "it's x dollars, for y period of time" and then you use those numbers and calculate the annual interest rate, and your jaw hits the floor, well, no, that's not really an accurate way to look at it. When all is said and done, the total interest might be much lower, and the repayment schedule might be much longer. And there may be benefits in using a moneylender- like convenience, and how the moneylender may be someone who's been a member of your community for a long time, so you know they are reliable, and will probably be understanding if you need extra time to pay back the loan.

And the formal microloan organizations: Yes, it is good that those exist. It is an extremely useful resource to have. But the loans are not all used for entrepreneurial purposes. There was one example in the book of a household that used part of the money from a microloan to buy a cabinet to store their rice in. Something like that, which I would never think of as something one would need a loan for. I would take it for granted that you already have that. Something that doesn't really make for a good story about how these microloans are so amazing and they're rescuing people from poverty. No, it's not really like that.

There weren't any examples in the book where having microloans allowed someone to get to a standard of living that *in my opinion* can be described as "rising out of poverty." These people all had very hard lives- but having financial tools like microloans allowed them to get by, more or less, rather than having a financial emergency cascade into a disaster that affects every part of their life.

The book emphasized how extremely important it is that options such as microloans from formal providers are available to poor people. This is something that helps them a lot. But it doesn't look like the glamorous stories that charities tell, about how everyone is going to be an entrepreneur and escape from poverty. (The book emphasized that it would be most helpful if the loans could be used for any purpose at all- rather than requiring them to only be used for entrepreneurial reasons.)

The microloan organizations are a good thing. Don't misunderstand me. It is a very helpful resource to have. It's good that such organizations exist. But the reality doesn't match the romanticized story that we in the US have heard about microloans.

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The point is that poor people need a variety of financial tools

The book is all about how, when people's incomes are so low and irregular, it's even more important that they have access to financial tools to help them manage their money. The financial lives of these diary households were very complex. They had various methods of saving money, and chose to take different kinds of loans in different circumstances.

They use so many different financial tools, and it would benefit them even more if they had better ones. If they had reliable savings accounts. If they had access to loans with flexible repayment schedules. And so forth.

(And this was published in 2009, based on research from 1999-2005. So probably the situation has changed since then.)

I found this book extremely interesting and I'm glad I read it, because it paints a picture of what life is like for people in extreme poverty, in a way that actually feels *real* to me. I've always felt that, when I read statistics about global poverty, or see ads for charities, it doesn't make them look like real people. It makes them look like, their lives are so terrible I can't even imagine, so I should feel bad, until I give money to a charity, then I can stop feeling bad. Not so with this book. This actually shows poverty in human terms. People making plans, making choices based on their own preferences related to risk and so on. 

"Portfolios of the Poor" was not about charity at all (it was about how governments and private businesses should invest in building the kind of financial infrastructure that would help poor people), but I have some thoughts. It makes me think, maybe charity should actually be really boring. It shouldn't be about me swooping in and making a big payment that feels like a very dramatic, emotional sacrifice. It shouldn't be about how I'm gonna make a big difference and save people so easily. Instead, maybe we should think of it like, people who have high enough incomes should have a habit of regularly giving money to charities. Like, just really really boring stuff, just regular automatic donations that you don't really think much about, but you'll notice them if you look at your bank statements. It's not okay that poor people don't have good options for savings accounts, but at the same time, it doesn't make for an exciting story that people will rally around. (Though the issue about access to bank accounts should really be addressed by governments and businesses, rather than charities, so maybe this is not a good example for talking about charity.) So I think, it shouldn't be a big emotional thing, like it's super meaningful and you're saving people's lives and you have all kinds of feelings about it. It should be that, when you think about it morally, rich people *should* have the habit of giving money to charity. And those boring regular payments do make a difference- but it's sort of in terms of what's going on in the background, rather than being a really dramatic "wow I saved a child's life just now."

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Follow-up post: On Skipping My Daily $5 Starbucks

Related:

My Weird Hangups About Charity

"Winners Take All": Businesspeople Only Want To "Change The World" If It Makes Money

On Living Far Away From One's Family For Financial Reasons

Cruise ship. Image source.

I have a couple anecdotes to share about families where one or both parents live in a different city from their children, in order to make more money, because there aren't good enough job opportunities in their hometown.

This is a well-known phenomenon in China. They are called "migrant workers" and "left behind children." It sounds awful, being away from your kids, only able to see them once a year- but it's inevitable that this happens, because of the economic disparity between the big cities and the countryside in China. In big cities like Shanghai (where I live), the salaries are higher and the cost of living is higher. In small cities or rural areas, salaries are lower and the cost of living is lower. So, mathematically, the way to earn the most money for one's family is for a parent to live in a big city and earn a higher salary, while the child stays in their hometown where the cost of living is lower. This kind of situation is always going to exist when there is such a big economic gap between different places.

I have several anecdotes about what I've seen in Asia:

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When I was in college in the US, I had a friend who was an international student from China, let's call her Anna. She helped me a lot with studying Chinese. At one point, she told me about a movie called "Last Train Home," which is about Chinese migrant workers traveling home for Chinese New Year. They only get to see their children 1 time out of the whole year. Anna organized a film screening in one of the classrooms on campus, and a bunch of us got together and watched this movie.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have any empathy about it, back then. My feelings were "why are we supposed to feel bad for these people who are only able to see their children once a year? They chose to move to a different city. Nobody was forcing them. They shouldn't have done that." I had a sort of "family values" mindset where we imagine what a "family" is supposed to look like, and if anyone can't live up to that, we naively blame them and say it's because they didn't value their family enough.

And also, I had sort of a "just world fallacy" thing going on. I didn't want to believe that we really live in a world where, for some parents in some places, there is actually a convincing argument to be made that "maybe the best thing I can do for my children is move far away, and leave them behind, and earn more money and send it back so they can have a better life." That's really awful to think about. It's really awful to face the reality that some people truly are in that situation. That, in some places in China, it's extremely normal for the parents to be gone, and the children are raised by other relatives and only get to see their parents once a year.

I didn't want to believe that that was real, so I just thought to myself "I would never do that" and decided that the parents in "Last Train Home" should just simply have not moved away from their children. Like it was that easy.

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Sometimes I see "heartwarming" short videos on Chinese social media about parents who make such long and difficult journeys home to see their kids for Chinese New Year. I feel these are in the same genre as American news articles about "these kids got together and had a bake sale to pay off their classmates' school lunch debt" or "these employees all donated their vacation time so that their pregnant colleague could have maternity leave, how heartwarming." It's not heartwarming- it's messed-up that this situation even exists in the first place.

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Years ago, at a previous job, working as a software engineer in Shanghai, I had a coworker whose wife and child lived in a different city near Shanghai. This coworker would live in Shanghai from Monday to Friday, and go home on the weekends to be with his wife and child. This is a thing that people do, because you can get a better salary and better job opportunities in Shanghai than in other nearby cities.

That was before covid. Now that covid has made it more normal to work from home, I think someone in that situation should try to make an arrangement with their employer where they always work from home on Mondays or Fridays, so they only have to be in Shanghai 4 days out of the week, instead of 5. (I know that in the US, many jobs are fully remote now, because of the societal changes that came with covid, but I haven't heard of fully-remote jobs in China.)

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I have an American friend in Shanghai, let's call her Chelsea. Her husband is Chinese, and his parents live in a different city.

When Chelsea was pregnant, she told me, "my mother-in-law says we can send the baby to live with her?????"

And I said, "Make sure you make it very clear that your answer is NO. Because she's not joking about that."

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Since both me and my husband have full time jobs and don't really want to do housework, we hire an ayi. "Ayi" is what female nannies/ maids/ domestic workers are called in China. It's common for people at our income level to hire an ayi to do housework/cooking/childcare.

We had always hired Chinese ayis before, but at one point, around the time our second child was born, we decided to hire a Filipino ayi. The situation with Filipino ayis is, it's not legal for them to work in this job in China. But, there is demand for them, because they speak English. International people, like me, want to hire Filipino ayis because they speak English so it's easier for me to communicate with them. Chinese people want to hire Filipino ayis who will talk to their kids in English, to help the kids learn. Filipino ayis are generally believed to be better trained and more hard-working, compared to Chinese ayis.

Anyway, we found a Filipino ayi, let's call her Brenda. When we first had her come for a job interview, she told us about her legal situation- she entered China on a tourist visa, and overstayed it, and that was years ago. She has no valid Chinese visa. It's illegal for her to still be in China. She hasn't traveled back to the Philippines, because then she wouldn't be able to enter China again. Within China, she doesn't travel on trains or planes because there's a possibility that they might discover she doesn't have a valid visa. If she has to travel somewhere, she has to ride in somebody's car.

She said that at one of her previous jobs, the family that employed her heard that police were in the area looking for Filipinos working illegally, so they warned her about it and she had to move elsewhere and find a different job.

I felt bad for her, but also I believe that feeling bad for someone is not a good reason to hire them, because then you'll have weird emotions about how you're doing such a noble thing for them, and you expect them to perform gratefulness, etc. Weird strings attached.

Also, I wasn't sure about it, because I felt I didn't clearly understand the legal situation enough to know whether I was putting myself at risk. I'm an immigrant in China too. I don't want to get in trouble. 

But, I also wanted to find out more about Filipino ayis who work in China. 

But also, Brenda didn't have any experience caring for newborn babies, and I knew in the long term I would need an ayi to take care of the baby full-time when my maternity leave ended. Brenda wouldn't be the right person for that. (In China, daycares typically start at around age 2. Before that, usually people get a grandparent to come and take care of the baby while the parents are at work, or hire an ayi.)

Anyway, we decided to hire Brenda temporarily- and I told her this pretty early on- I said she would probably work for us just a few months, and then we would need to find someone else who had experience with newborn babies.

Brenda was great. She had a good attitude, worked hard, always asked me questions to make sure she was doing things the way I wanted. She was really good to work with. It was easy to communicate with her because she could speak English. I speak Chinese, so that's how I've communicated with Chinese ayis in the past, but it's just easier in English. And my son (who was preschool-age) loved her. (He loves everyone though.)

We paid her more than we would have paid a Chinese ayi. In my experience, Chinese ayis get a salary around 40-50 RMB/hr (this is about 6-7 USD), but we paid Brenda around 60-70 RMB/hr (about 9-10 USD). Actually I have no idea what the normal hourly rate is for Filipino ayis in Shanghai. We just asked her what her previous salary was, and believed whatever she said, and based it on that. I was okay with that because I knew it would just be a short-term thing. If she was going to work for us longer, I would have put more effort into figuring out what a reasonable salary would be. 

But, yeah, I felt it didn't make sense to have her work for us long-term, because what I really needed was someone to take care of the baby, and why would I pay so much extra money when she hasn't even worked with newborn babies before? (And she was also looking for more hours than what I wanted to give her- so it just wasn't going to work out long-term. But we really liked her and I'm glad to have met her and found out something about what life is like for Filipinos working illegally in China.)

There were several instances where I felt like, I'm so privileged and out-of-touch with what her life is like. For example, right when she started working for us, I tried to get a key card for her so she could get into our building. You have to go to the apartment management office with your ID and register in order to get a key card. Brenda was very much NOT willing to do that. I felt like... I'm asking her to do something that might put her at risk. Like I'm so out-of-touch, I don't even understand what I'm asking her to do. Fortunately (???) our apartment complex doesn't actually care about security, and the building door is always left open, so she was able to enter the building even without a key card. 

Also, sometimes she came with me to pick up my son from school. When we were waiting outside the gate with all the other parents, she would kind of nervously side-eye the school security guards. And I felt like she was being paranoid- but what do I know? It's easy for me to say "she's being paranoid" and judge her, when I'm not the one at risk of being deported. It's not right for me to judge what level of "paranoid" she should be.

She told me she has friends who never even take the subway, because there are police there. She took the subway herself though.

She didn't have a bank account in China. I used WeChat to pay her. (WeChat is a Chinese app for texting and social media, and it also has a payment function- you can easily send people money, and stores in China all accept WeChat Pay, so there's no problem using your WeChat wallet to buy stuff.) She couldn't open an actual bank account because banks require international customers to have a valid visa.

And here's another weird thing- one time, we were cleaning out our kitchen and found an old rice cooker, and we were gonna get rid of it, and Brenda asked if she could have it. To mail to somebody in the Philippines. I found it hard to believe that somebody in the Philippines would want our old rice cooker (do they even have the same kind of outlets there? The US has different outlets than China, I have no idea what they have in the Philippines) but she really wanted it, so we gave it to her. Another time we found a box of cables from old electronics, and we were going to throw them away because we didn't even know what they were from, and Brenda wanted those. I think maybe she could get money from recycling them. In the places we've lived in China, there have always been people looking through the trash bins, looking for things they can get money for. Mostly cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. If we hadn't given those old cables to Brenda, I'm sure somebody else would have taken them out of our trash. 

She said that she's heard from other Filipinos that one strategy would be to marry a Chinese man, in order to get legal immigrant status. But, she said, she doesn't really want to. I said, yeah you shouldn't marry someone if you don't want to.

And, yeah, I believe it's a bad idea to marry someone if you don't want to. But I also think it's a bad idea to live in China as an illegal immigrant, but I can't judge because obviously I don't know what her situation was in the Philippines, and why she decided to come to China, and how long she initially planned to stay, and if her life is better in China than it would have been in the Philippines, and if she is earning money for the purpose of supporting family in the Philippines, etc. (Her situation is different from the other anecdotes in this post because she doesn't have kids.) I didn't ask her any of that because it's none of my business. (Also there is a power difference, because I was her boss- she has to act like she cares about my problems, regardless of whether she does or not. So, try not to exploit that.)

There are people in this world who chose to get married for those kinds of reasons, not because of a romantic "I want to spend my life with this person." There are people who are in a situation where that is actually, somehow, a good idea.

From my point of view, it doesn't make sense- she can't even have a bank account, she can't go home and see her family, she can't really travel in China, she always has to be worried about police, she always told me about problems she was having with her landlord, probably it's easy for a landlord to exploit Filipinos who are in China illegally, especially since she couldn't speak very much Chinese, and so on and so on- why would someone choose to live as an illegal immigrant in China? But she knows her own situation, and I don't, so I can't judge. There's a lot of information I just don't have.

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We went on a cruise from Shanghai to Japan. In the ship's main dining room, we were assigned to a certain table, so we had the same waiter every night. Towards the end of the cruise, we were friendly enough with him to chat about what life is really like for him on the cruise ship. He was also from the Philippines. Let's call him Daniel.

We chatted about a LOT of things with him! He said he was happy to talk to us because a lot of the passengers only speak Chinese, which makes it hard for him because he doesn't speak Chinese at all. I started out asking him if the ship only travels between Shanghai and Japan, or if it also goes to other places. And I asked if they have cruises all the time, or if there are some days in between cruises where they don't have any passengers. Turns out, they have cruises ALL the time. Daniel said that after we all leave, the crew has to work hard cleaning all the rooms to get ready for new passengers to arrive that same day. They even bring the waiters in to help with cleaning the rooms.

I asked him if the rooms for the crew were smaller than our rooms (yes).

We had seen the waitstaff all having a meeting in the afternoon, when the dining room was empty, so we asked him what that was about. He got talking about the expectations for their work performance, and how if some customer gives them an 8 out of 10 review, they get called in to the manager's office, like "What did you do???!!!!" (I said, "wait, 8 is bad???") Daniel says, "What can I do, some people just never give anything higher than a 7."

(A week later, when I got the email about filling out the survey, I gave the staff all 10 out of 10. And there was one question on there, "Was there any crew member that told you to give them a good review?" and I put "no" because probably they get in trouble for that. Later there was a question "Was there any crew member that did a really good job?" and I put his name in there, and also the assistant waiter and the woman who cleaned our rooms.)

My husband and I had been wondering about the people who work on the ship- we felt like maybe it would be a good job to have when you're young and want to see the world and you don't have any family commitments. So we asked Daniel about that. He said, his wife also works on the ship. Yeah, it's common for the crew to get married to each other, because you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, where else are you going to meet anyone?

He said, they have a son. The son is in the Philippines- the grandparents are raising him. And Daniel misses his son a lot, but working on the cruise ship he's able to earn more money than he would in the Philippines, to give his son a good education. And last time he visited home, his son was crying at the airport telling him not to leave... And how he hopes that soon his wife will stop working on the cruise ship and go back home, and hopefully in a few years he will too.

The cruise ship had an activity where you could pay 100 dollars per person to take the "behind-the-scenes tour." No need to do that- you can just talk to the waiter. (I also talked to the Chinese woman who cleaned our room every day.) The people who work on the ship, they know a lot of things. Many of those things they probably aren't supposed to tell you- their job is to give you whatever you ask for, and be extremely polite, and pretend to be happy even if the customers are really annoying and unreasonable, and give you a perfect vacation experience, and make you feel like the world revolves around you...

If you want to ask them things, for your own curiosity, obviously don't do it at a time when they're busy. That's annoying. You should thank them for the work they are doing, show them you appreciate it, be friendly, maybe from there you'll have a chance to ask them about their life, or the practical logistics of the cruise ship, or whatever, if they're willing to talk about it.

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This is a real thing in this world- people who are in a situation where their best option is to live far away from their children. And this will inevitably be true, when some places have much better job opportunities and a higher cost of living, compared to other places. Mathematically, the way to earn the most money and to have that money be used most effectively, is to have the income-earners of the family live in the places with higher salaries, and the children to live in places with a lower cost of living. I feel sad about it, but it's not something that can be easily changed- it's entirely based on the very big economic differences between different places in this world.

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Related:

That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)

"The Case For Open Borders" (book review) 

"The Case for Open Borders": Remittances

On "Unjust Marriage" 

Dog Hotels and Poverty Existing at the Same Time

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. SCOTUS Allows For Trans Discrimination In Medical Care: A Full Analysis Of Today's Ruling (June 18) "The ruling effectively greenlights medical care bans across the country and may pave the way for broader restrictions, including for adults, while leaving lower court rulings on bathrooms, schools, sports, and employment remain intact—for now."

Really not good for trans kids. We have to keep doing what we can to support them.

And from Law Dork: Where is the outrage over Skrmetti? (June 20) "In its U.S. v. Skrmetti ruling, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees shaved off the edges — if not more central parts — of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in order to uphold laws that bar an exceptionally small number of teens from receiving a type of medical care that only one group of teens need."

The reasoning in this Supreme Court decision is about how the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment applies (or doesn't apply) to trans people. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor draws comparisons with the Loving vs Virginia case, where the Supreme Court ruled that states could not ban interracial marriage. I guess in the Skrmetti case, the majority opinion said that both trans and cis children cannot get treatment for gender dysphoria, so it's not discrimination. And this is like how the argument to ban interracial marriage was that people of every race are equally not allowed to marry outside of their race, so it's not discrimination. And the Skrmetti decision is really opening the door to a skewed interpretation of the equal protection clause, which could lead to rights being eroded in so many other areas.

I'm literally in an interracial marriage, but I never thought about "hey my marriage is about the 14th amendment" or anything along those lines. Learning about Loving vs Virginia in high school, it felt like ancient history, like of course people can marry a partner of a different race, why would that be an issue, aren't we glad we don't have those racist laws like they did back then. When I got married, I didn't think about "some of my ancestors thought this shouldn't be legal" or anything like that- it never occurred to me that anyone would think there would be a legal issue. 

BUT ALSO I grew up evangelical and so back then I totally bought into all the anti-queer stuff, like we can't let gay people get married, we can't let trans people have rights, etc. We usually didn't talk about the details about how you turn that into an actual legal argument, but apparently one argument that was being used in court was "both straight and gay people aren't allowed to marry a same-sex partner, so it's not discrimination."

ANYWAY my point is, I should read more about the equal protection clause. It turns out to be related to a lot of things.

Also related to Skrmetti: After Getting The Ruling It Wanted, New York Times Publishes 6 Anti-Trans Articles (June 20) "In all, at least half a dozen articles have been published by the Times in the 24 hours following the ruling—ink still drying—spreading misinformation, shaming transgender people, and giving prominent space to voices that seek to strip us of our rights."

2. Baby of brain-dead Georgia woman on life support delivered via C-section (June 17) Not sure what to say about this- if I died and was pregnant, I would want them to continue the life support to save the baby. But the key thing is, it should be the family's choice. This case is horrific because it was forced on this family by faraway politicians and heartless laws.

3. The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it (2016, via) "The result of a media — and education system — that fails to present quantitative information on long-run developments is that most people are very ignorant about global development and have little hope that progress against serious problems is even possible."

4. HIV prevention drug hailed as a 'breakthrough' gets FDA approval (June 18) 

5. The Meta AI App Lets You ‘Discover’ People’s Bizarrely Personal Chats (June 12, via) "It’s unclear whether the users of the app are aware that their conversations with Meta’s AI are public or which users are trolling the platform after news outlets began reporting on it. The conversations are not public by default; users have to choose to share them."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Federal Judge Grants Class Status To Trans People In Passport Case In Massive Win (June 18) "According to preliminary conversations with expert attorneys, whether transgender people should submit a passport update request immediately depends on their risk tolerance and individual circumstances. A motion to stay the ruling could come within days. Those most likely to benefit from applying immediately are individuals with incorrect gender markers, those seeking their first passport, or those with expired documents who need to travel soon. Expedited processing may increase the likelihood of receiving a passport before any potential appellate or Supreme Court intervention."

2. FULL SPEECH: Sen. Padilla speaks on Senate floor after removal from DHS press conference (June 18) 14-minute video. "If that is what the administration is willing to do to a United States senator for having the authority to simply ask a question, imagine what they'll do to any American who dares to speak up."

3. Trump administration cuts specialized suicide prevention service for LGBTQ+ youth (June 18) "'This is devastating, to say the least,' Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, said in a statement. The Trevor Project is one of several nonprofits administering the services. 'The administration's decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible.'"

So, now would be a good time to donate to The Trevor Project.

4. Trump administration actions contradict MAHA rhetoric on toxic chemicals (June 18) Oh, so it turns out, when RFK said we have to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in the environment that are harmful to children, he didn't mean it like 'let's actually fund the scientists who are doing good work studying which chemicals are harmful.' He meant it like 'here are some words that we will use as an excuse to be mean to autistic children.'

5. The ABA Declares War (June 18, via) "The American Bar Association (ABA) just dropped a massive federal lawsuit against the White House. And it’s not messing around. The lead counsel filing suit on behalf of the ABA is Susman Godfrey, one of the firms Trump targeted. The complaint names the Office of the President, but for good measure, it also names each and every high level government department along with every cabinet official."

6. Federal immigration agents asked to leave Dodger Stadium parking lot, team says (June 20) "Dozens of federal agents with their faces covered arrived in SUVs and cargo vans to a lot near the stadium’s Gate E entrance. A group of protesters carrying signs against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started amassing shortly after, local media reported."

7. ‘Code Adam’ (June 19) "That video shows Villareal, wearing his blue Walmart vest, approaching the agents and asking them questions. That video shows the agents mobbing him, throwing him to the ground, and hauling him away."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. China’s Only Solution Yet for Climate-Ravaged Villages: ‘Move Out’ (February 26) "While many families have already agreed to relocate, these are predominantly households whose homes were completely destroyed, leaving them with no real choice. The government’s larger goal is to move everyone from high-risk zones, but the relocation effort is complicated by the uncertainty and risk for those still living in these areas." Part 2 of the article I linked to last week about climate change and rural China.

2. Hercules | I can Go The Distance HD 720p - Posting it because I like the song.

And hey while we're on the subject of Disney songs, I also like this one: Idina Menzel, Evan Rachel Wood - Show Yourself (From "Frozen 2"/ Sing-Along) 

Also: Disney Pixar's Cars - Real Gone

You are welcome to post your favorite Disney songs in the comments~

3. Residents of Bangor’s Cedar Falls officially own their mobile home park (February 20, via) "Prior to the purchase, residents may have owned their homes but not the land the homes sat on."

4. Fabric giant Joann is closing down. What happens to those who relied on the retailer? (March 3) 

5. Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create 'woolly mice' (March 4, via) This is really cool, but personally I don't think it's worthwhile to bring back the big flashy species like woolly mammoths- instead, we should focus on taking care of the environment and endangered species that exist right now.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Ken Paxton Wants Genetic Testing For 220,000 Women Athletes A Year (February 26) "Paxton is proposing 220,000 genetic tests per year so that women’s sports can exist at all." What on earth.

Also at that link, here's something you can do to help trans people: The US State Department is allowing public comments on recent changes to a policy about passports- specifically, because of the executive order, they are only issuing passports with a gender marker that matches the assigned sex at birth. You can leave a comment about it on the Federal Registrar website.

Comments are open on it until March 17.

2. WTF Is This Trump Gaza AI Video?! (February 27) 

And here's the Slacktivist's take on it: An ethnic-cleansing fever-dream (February 27) "The report barely scratches the surface of how full-gonzo batshit loony this video is"

3. No, Trump's Trans Military Ban Does Not Have A "Waiver" For Openly Trans People Serving (February 28) "It applies only to individuals who have never transitioned, do not experience dysphoria, and who are willing to remain closeted while serving—a regressive return to a worse version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Senate Dems Show Spine, And National Sports Ban Bill Dies (March 4) 

4. Foreign students say the threat of Trump's executive orders is getting real (March 3) "Abed Ayoub, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the threat is getting real. He says the ADC has heard from at least a dozen students who left the U.S. for winter break and were unable to return because their visas were canceled — with no explanation given."

5. These U.S. Companies Are Not Ditching DEI Amid Trump’s Crackdown (February 26, via) Posting this because of this quote from Ben & Jerry's: "'We believe that companies that timidly bow to the current political climate by attempting to turn back the clock will become increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace and will ultimately be judged as having been on the wrong side of history,' the company said in a statement."

Wow, Ben & Jerry's knows what's what.

6. Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency (March 3, via) "One million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 people will die from malaria and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade, the memos estimated. The programs were cut anyway." 

7. Euphoria's Hunter Schafer says her passport now lists her as male due to new laws (February 25) "Reacting to the passport in the video, Hunter said: 'I was shocked. I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.'"

8. Republicans move to repeal lead limits imposed by Biden-era rules (February 3, via) "If the GOP is successful in repealing the lead rule, tens of millions of people would continue to have drinking water contaminated with the heavy metal, a neurotoxin that the EPA has found lowers IQ scores in children, stunts their development and increases blood pressure in adults."

"When Helping Hurts" (I wanted to like this book but it didn't work out)

Book cover for "When Helping Hurts", 2014 edition. (This is not the one I have- the one I have is the 2012 edition.)

So I started reading the book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself [affiliate link], by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. (I have the 2012 edition.) And... I read about one third of it, and decided I'm going to stop there. And I want to just blog about my reaction to this book real quick.

What I was expecting

So, I first heard about this book back when I was in college- and I was very evangelical. I knew this was an evangelical book.

Since the title is "When Helping Hurts" and it's about charity, I assumed it would be anecdotes about how rich Americans sent a bunch of stuff to some overseas tsunami victims, and it was stuff the recipients didn't need, so it was all a waste and the recipients had to deal with the problem of how to dispose of it. Or about how rich Americans make genuine sacrifices to do these things, and therefore there's an emotional component to it, which makes us unwilling to objectively evaluate if the results were actually beneficial or not. Things like that. 

I feel like... I don't really have a good perspective on what my approach should be for giving to charity- from an ethical standpoint, and as a Christian. I mean, John the Baptist said that anyone who has 2 coats should give 1 away. Does anybody do that? Can anybody do that? I really want to have a better framework for thinking about this- but also, maybe that's just impossible because no matter what I do (even moving to China), I'm complicit in the massive economic inequality in this world. But anyway, I shouldn't just be paralyzed by lack of certainty and do nothing- and so, a few years ago I picked some charities and set up automatic monthly donations to them. That's my current approach, and that's what I recommend to people who have a high enough income that they have a responsibility to give some of it away.

Anyway, yeah I knew this book is coming from an evangelical perspective, so there would be parts I wouldn't agree with, but I thought it would be good to see what it has to say. Especially since it's a book I had heard mentioned many times in evangelical spaces.

Okay let's get into what the book says, and my reactions to it.

The preface

The preface of the book is good. Basically it says this book is about how to help without hurting. ie, it's not just "here's all the ways that charity can go wrong" but it's about how to actually do it right. Great! The authors recommend that churches use this book for small group discussions, and every chapter has discussion questions.

In the preface, there are discussion questions about how your church would go about planning a trip to Indonesia to help tsunami victims. You can discuss it in groups and write down your plans, and in a later chapter you'll revisit the plans. I mean, personally, my take on this is, maybe don't plan a trip to Indonesia? Probably not worth it to spend so much money on plane tickets to get your untrained volunteers to go there and, uh, do what exactly? Before you make any plans, you should talk to people who are actually there about what they actually need and what would actually be helpful.

I'm guessing that's the direction the book's going to go with it. But I gave up on this book 1/3 of the way through, so I guess I'll never know. But anyway, I felt like the book was off to a good start here.

The introduction- a story about a "witch doctor"

In the "Introduction" section of the book, there's a story from one of the authors, about when he was in Uganda teaching classes for refugees about small businesses, at a church. The curriculum he used was "biblically based," ie, I guess this is about telling people they have to be Christians, and also giving them training about running a small business.

One person in the class, Grace, says that she is a witch doctor, but she decided to quit that and follow Jesus instead. The local church leader, Elizabeth, tells Grace to bring all her witch-doctoring herbs and burn them right there in the church, and Grace does this. Later, as Grace continues attending the classes, she seems to have changed for the better since becoming a Christian (and this is a big sacrifice for her, because she was making a lot of money as a witch doctor selling questionable products to women to get their husbands to not cheat on them). But then Grace gets sick- and the author of the book talks about how he went to her home to find her, and the appalling conditions she lived in- and he saved her life by buying her penicillin. So, overall it felt like a happy ending, but later the author had some feelings about whether he had actually done more harm than good toward the refugees he was teaching in that class.

As I was reading this, I had 2 main thoughts:

1. Is "witch doctor" the right term here? I'm thinking it's probably not. "Witch doctor" sounds like the kind of incredibly skewed and biased term that an evangelical would use, to make this sound very negative and bad. Perhaps there's a whole religious system, with meaningful culture around it, and perhaps it serves some beneficial function in their society. I personally don't know, but using the term "witch doctor" just reduces it to a one-dimensional "this is obviously bad" sort of thing.
2. This story assumes that it's self-evidently a good thing that Grace decides to not be a "witch doctor" anymore and be a Christian instead. (Also, very manipulative of Elizabeth to tell Grace to burn up all her herbs immediately. Not cool!) Okay, well, I understand this book is coming from an evangelical perspective, I understand that evangelicals think everyone should convert to Christianity, I understand that evangelicals see that as so self-evidently true that they wouldn't even think to question it. So I'm reading this, and thinking, "well, maybe the authors just never even thought about how they have this unquestioned assumption that everyone should convert to Christianity. But as long as that's not something the book focuses on and consciously tries to argue for, I'll let it slide."

(Unfortunately, later the book focused on and argued for that...)

Chapter 1 has some very good things to say about Jesus (but also some red flags)

Chapter 1 starts out with these discussion questions:

1. Why did Jesus come to earth?
2. For what specific sin(s) was Old Testament Israel sent into captivity? Do not just say "disobedience." Be specific. For example: "The Israelites were constantly robbing banks."
3. What is the primary task of the church?

Yes! Love this! These are questions that ABSOLUTELY need to be addressed when trying to talk to evangelicals about poverty. I'm really happy with how the book handles this section. 

See, evangelicals would answer the question "Why did Jesus come to earth?" with something like "to die for our sins so we can go to heaven." Like all the things Jesus did during his life don't matter, it's all about the crucifixion. (Also, in this ideology, the Resurrection may or may not matter- which is BONKERS.) 

This is a big deal to me, because my answer to these questions has changed SO MUCH, now that I'm not evangelical. I now believe Jesus came to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth- and that means we need to work on bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. We need to fight for justice, for equality, for a world where everyone is able to live a flourishing life, each as a unique and amazing person created in the image of God.

And yes, the book agrees with me on that. It cites chapter and verse, about how Jesus came to "preach good news to the poor" and "proclaim freedom for the prisoners", and how "in him all things hold together." It's not about the abstract far-away idea of going to heaven when you die; it's about renewing this world we live in right now.

Love that!

And yeah, I know a lot of evangelicals would be very resistant to this idea, because it sounds like "watering down the gospel" or it sounds "liberal" or it sounds like "putting too much emphasis on social justice instead of the gospel." That's why it's SO IMPORTANT that the book makes a case for this, right here in chapter 1. This part is very well done. It's absolutely necessary to challenge this evangelical idea, that all that matters is getting people into heaven. This is definitely a very major obstacle in getting evangelicals to care about people in poverty.

Next, there's an anecdote about a pastor named Reverend Marsh, who lived in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. He believed the KKK was bad, and racism was bad, but he never talked about it in his sermons. (I conclude that he must be white...) Those were political questions, and he thought the church should only preach on the personal, spiritual aspects of people's lives. (The book portrays this as being very wrong.)

Instead of speaking out against actual lynchings that were happening, Reverend Marsh preached a sermon called "The Sorrow of Selma," which was about "the lack of personal piety and unbelief of some of the civil rights workers."

The book says this:

In one sense, Reverend Marsh was right. Many of the civil rights protestors longed for the peace, justice, and righteousness of the kingdom, but they did not want to bend the knee to the King Himself, which is a prerequisite for enjoying the full benefits of the kingdom. In contrast, Reverend Marsh embraced King Jesus, but he did not understand the fullness of Christ's kingdom and its implications for the injustices in his community. Both Reverend Marsh and the civil rights workers were wrong, but in different ways. Reverend Marsh sought the King without the kingdom. The civil rights workers sought the kingdom without the King. The church needs a Christ-centered, fully orbed, kingdom perspective to correctly answer the question, "What would Jesus do?"

Umm.

Uh.

Umm.

Really not comfortable with how this is framing it like both Reverend Marsh and the civil rights workers were equally wrong. See, Reverend Marsh had the correct religious beliefs, but he didn't actually do anything about racism, and the civil rights protestors didn't have the correct religious beliefs, but they fought for justice, so, see, both had it partly right and partly wrong. Uh. Umm. (Just gonna drop the parable of the sheep and the goats here- Jesus pretty clearly takes a side on the question of whether it's more important to have the correct religious beliefs or to do actual things that help people, and it's NOT the side that "When Helping Hurts" takes!)

But, as I was reading this, I thought, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt... maybe they didn't really mean both of these things were equally bad. Maybe they meant like... like if someone has different religious beliefs than I do, then of course I am of the opinion that they are wrong about those religious beliefs. It's just objectively true that I disagree with them. Maybe the authors just meant that they disagree with people who have different religious beliefs than they do, but they weren't necessarily saying those differences in religious beliefs are important.

(But, unfortunately, later the book makes it clear that those religious beliefs are dealbreakers...)

The next weird bit is when the book is talking about how the early church cared for the poor. This is in contrast with the pagan culture of the Roman Empire:

[Sociologist Rodney] Stark explains that the Christian concept of self-sacrificial love of others, emanating from God's love for them, was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind, which viewed the extension of mercy as an emotional act to be avoided by rational people. Hence, paganism provided no ethical foundation to justify caring for the sick and destitute who were being trampled by the teeming urban masses.

WHAT.

What. What the what.

Christians were the first ones to come up with the idea of helping poor people? Really? They expect their readers to buy that? "Paganism" just couldn't comprehend the idea of caring about poor people?

Seriously?

This is a very one-dimensional, oversimplified view of the pagan worldview in the Roman Empire. (Like, I don't even know anything about paganism in the Roman Empire, but I know it must be more nuanced than that.) Really these authors should stop trying to make statements about other religions- they're just embarrassing themselves.

(Unfortunately, they did *not* stop making statements about other religions...)

Continuing on. This chapter has a lot of really good stuff to say about how evangelicals wrongly believe they don't have a responsibility to care about the world. Yes, lots of very good stuff, which evangelicals really need to hear. Makes me want to say "I definitely recommend this book to evangelicals" but ... well... the Christian-supremacist stuff gets so much worse, so, I don't.

Chapter 2 is about what poverty really is

I like how chapter 2 starts. The discussion question is "What is poverty? Make a list of words that come to your mind when you think of poverty." Next, it has some quotes from "Voices of the Poor," a project in the 1990s where actual poor people around the world were asked for their views on what poverty is. A lot of these quotes are about feeling helpless, feeling shame, feeling inferior, being dependent on other people. It's not just about not having material things; it's about being trapped in a situation where you can't control your own life, you can't make your own choices, you can't live the life you want to live.

I think this is an important exercise- contrasting the reality of poverty with what well-off Americans *think* poverty is.

The book says that, when you want to help poor people, it's very important that you understand what their real needs are, rather than acting on what you *think* their needs are. Otherwise, the "help" you give them won't help. Yes! Very much agree with this.

But I don't feel good about this example:

Similarly, consider the familiar case of the person who comes to your church asking for help with paying an electric bill. On the surface, it appears that this person's problem is the last row of table 2.1, a lack of material resources, and many churches respond by giving this person enough money to pay the electric bill. But what if this person's fundamental problem is not having the self-discipline to keep a stable job? Simply giving this person money is treating the symptoms rather than the underlying disease and will enable him to continue with his lack of self-discipline. In this case, the gift of money does more harm than good, and it would be better not to do anything at all than to give this handout. Really! Instead, a better-- and far more costly-- solution would be for your church to develop a relationship with this person, a relationship that says, "We are here to walk with you and to help you use your gifts and abilities to avoid being in this situation in the future. Let us into your life and let us work with you to determine the reason you are in this predicament."

I'm reading this, feeling really uneasy about how it veers extremely close to conservative Republican talking points about how those lazy people need to just take responsibility and get a job, and therefore we shouldn't do anything to help them.

But, I thought, maybe the authors don't realize that it's going to read that way to their Republican readers. Just taking this section at face value, it may indeed be true that there are some situations where a person is capable of getting a job, but they don't want to, and they need a little push to get them to actually do it. (Republican folklore says that's the situation for *most* people on welfare, and that's just NOT true- but okay, maybe it is true occasionally, so, okay, this example from the book isn't necessarily bad...)

I'm just... really really suspicious of people (evangelicals, Republicans, etc) saying "oh these people are asking for money, but actually that's not the right way to help them, the right way to help them is [some other thing that we're also not going to lift a finger to do]." It's just a way to sit around feeling superior for having the "correct" opinion about what poor people really need, without doing anything that actually helps.

But I thought, maybe the authors don't realize this is coming across that way. I'll just let it slide.

Then the authors lay out their "biblical framework" of what poverty is. They say that when God created the world, humans were made to have good relationships in the following 4 areas:

1. Relationship with God
2. Relationship with self
3. Relationship with others
4. Relationship with the rest of creation

But, because of the Fall (Adam and Eve's sin), all 4 of these relationships are broken. All of us have "poverty" in these 4 areas of life. (For example, "poverty" in one's relationship with God would be something like, not believing God exists. "Poverty" in the area of relationship with self would be low self-esteem, or, alternatively, having a God-complex and feeling like you're superior to the poor people you're trying to help. And so on.)

The authors use the word "poverty" here, to describe the situation that all people are in- but they also say that material poverty is a whole different thing. Like, we all experience "poverty", so you shouldn't act like you're better than anyone else- but also, if you haven't experienced material poverty, then you don't know what it's like, it's so much worse.

I don't really think it's useful to define "poverty" in this way. It muddies up the definition. But okay, whatever, let's keep reading.

Then there's this equation:

Material Definition of Poverty

+

God-complexes of Materially Non-Poor

+

Feelings of Inferiority of Materially Poor

=

Harm to Both Materially Poor and Non-Poor

And also a few anecdotes to show how "poverty" in the 4 different relationship types can all come together to make it more difficult for the "materially poor" to improve their lives.

Yeah, this "equation" makes sense, and I think it's useful that the book presents it like this. If rich people think the problem is simply "they don't have [thing], so let's give them [thing]" then it's quite possible that the rich people don't realize how they're coming across (ie, treating poor people like they don't know anything, can't do anything for themselves, etc)- and this can do more harm than good.

Chapter 3 is where I noped out of this book

Chapter 3 starts out with this anecdote:

During the 1990s, Alisa Collins and her children lived in one of America's most dangerous public housing projects in inner-city Chicago. Alisa had become pregnant at the age of sixteen, had dropped out of high school, and had started collecting welfare checks. She had five children from three different fathers, none of whom helped with child rearing. With few skills, no husband, and limited social networks, Alisa struggled to raise her family in an environment characterized by widespread substance abuse, failing schools, high rates of unemployment, rampant violence, teenage pregnancy, and an absence of role models. 

From time to time, Alisa tried to get a job, but a number of obstacles prevented her from finding and keeping regular work. First, there were simply not a lot of decent-paying jobs for high school dropouts living in ghettos. Second, the welfare system penalized Alisa for earning money, taking away benefits for every dollar she earned and for every asset she acquired. Third, Alisa found government vocational training and jobs assistance programs to be confusing and staffed by condescending bureaucrats. Fourth, Alisa had child-care issues that made it difficult to keep a job. Finally, Alisa felt inferior and inadequate. When she tried to get vocational training or a job and faced some obstacle, she quickly lost confidence and rapidly retreated into her comfort zone of public housing and welfare checks. Alisa felt trapped, and she and her family often talked about how they couldn't "get out" of the ghetto.

So, in the first paragraph, the "started collecting welfare checks" was a bit suspect to me because, again, it veers uncomfortably close to Republican mythology about how "those lazy inner-city [black] people are freeloaders living easy lives on welfare." I quoted two whole paragraphs here to show you that overall, this anecdote is not like that- I think the second paragraph is very fair, showing that getting out of poverty is much more difficult than the simplistic Republican mythology of "they need to just get a job." The authors clearly show that there are a LOT of factors trapping Alisa in a system of poverty, and that churches have a responsibility to help people like her.

This chapter of the book also makes it clear that poverty is partly about individual choices, and partly about systems that are stacked against people. It's very good that the book is talking about this! Evangelicals are likely to buy into the idea that if people just worked harder and stopped being lazy, they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps, etc. Evangelicals are likely to not believe in any kind of systemic injustice, taking away people's opportunities and setting them up to fail. It's very good that the book is explicitly pointing out the ways that systems trap people in poverty.

Then the authors start talking again about healing the 4 key relationships, and how, to put it bluntly, you have to be a Christian or else it doesn't work:

Ultimately, the profound reconciliation of the key relationships that comprise poverty alleviation cannot be done without people accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Yes, people can experience some degree of healing in their relationships without becoming Christians. For example, although it is typically more difficult, unbelievers can often stop drinking, become more loving spouses, and improve as employees without becoming Christians. And as these things happen for unbelievers, they are more likely to earn sufficient material things. However, none of the foundational relationships can experience fundamental and lasting change without a person becoming a new creature in Christ Jesus. Furthermore, simply having sufficient material things is not the same as "poverty alleviation" as we defined it above. We want people to fulfill their calling "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever" in their work and in all that they do. Again, this requires that people accept and experience Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

What the actual ****.

"although it is typically more difficult"- what on earth?

And then saying that if people improve their lives so they are no longer poor, but they don't become Christians, it doesn't really count as "poverty alleviation"- WHAT?

This right here, this is called Christian supremacy. The idea that only Christians can live life the correct way, and everyone else is automatically living inferior lives because they don't know Jesus or whatever. This idea is EVERYWHERE in evangelicalism- you can't have a good marriage if it's not centered on Jesus, you can't live a meaningful life without Jesus, everyone has a God-shaped hole in their heart, etc. (And full disclosure, I definitely believed it when I was evangelical. I had no idea how offensive it was, because evangelicals view it as a completely normal thing to believe.) This idea is EVERYWHERE, and it's WRONG. It's WRONG. I want to be very clear here, this is WRONG.

Let me be very clear about what I believe: I am a Christian. I believe that all people are made in the image of God- our creativity, ambition, compassion, conscience, all of that comes from God. And God made this world- all of the potential this world has for good things, for growth, for enjoying your life, for finding meaning and joy, all of that is from God. All of it is from God, and is accessible to people regardless of whether they agree with me about it being from God. Regardless of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

I believe those things are from God, but if other people don't believe that, I won't argue with them about it. It's fine if people don't believe the same religious things as I do. Whatever. Okay, so we disagree about it, but so what? What actually matters is how you live, how you treat other people.

(And also, my husband is not a Christian, so this is personal. When Christians say non-Christians just can't be as good as Christians- this is personal to me.)

Okay... so... moving along with the book. Basically, I want to share 3 anecdotes from chapter 3 which show how incredibly Christian-supremacist this book is, and made me decide to just quit reading it. Each of these anecdotes is about how, when you help poor people, if you're not also getting them to convert to Christianity, you're "hurting" rather than helping.

Anecdote 1: Pachamama and the llama fetuses

A Christian relief and development agency attempted to improve crop yields for poor farmers in Bolivia's Alto Plano. Although successful in increasing output, the impact on the farmers' incomes was far less than hoped because of the farmers' deep reverence for Pachamama, the mother earth goddess who presides over planting and harvesting. Seeking Pachamama's favor, farmers purchased llama fetuses, a symbol of life and abundance, to bury in their fields before planting. At the time of the harvest, the farmers held a festival to thank Pachamama. The larger the harvest, the larger the celebration was. In fact, a large percentage of the farmers' income was being spent on the fetuses and on the harvest festival, thereby contributing to the farmers' material poverty. Furthermore, by increasing agricultural output without worldview transformation, the development agency realized it was actually adding to these farmers' idolatry, as the farmers were giving increasing levels of praise to Pachamama for her benevolence.

Okay, this sounds to me like a case where the relief agency didn't get the results they expected because there were some key things they didn't know about the culture and society of the people they were trying to help. They didn't know that even if the "science" part succeeds- ie, even if the agricultural output is increased- it doesn't necessarily cause an increase in the farmers' incomes in a straightforward way, because of these societal/religious factors about what the farmers would then spend the money on. 

This sounds like the relief agency failed to do their research. They should have talked to someone familiar with the culture, who could address questions like "What would success look like for this program? What kind of outcome would have the most meaningful impact on people's lives?" and so on.

The book is framing it like the problem is the Bolivian farmers' religious beliefs, and the relief agency should have, I don't know, manipulated them into converting to Christianity??? 

Wait, wasn't there a whole section earlier in the book about how sometimes your perspective on people's needs and problems is actually wrong, and it will cause you to act in ways that don't really help them? And now the authors are saying what these farmers actually need is to become Christians- where are they getting that from? Just because that's what evangelicals believe about EVERYONE, not because there's any practical evidence for it. Kind of sounds like a case of COMPLETELY MISJUDGING OTHER PEOPLE'S NEEDS and then DOING MORE HARM THAN GOOD.

When I read that part earlier about having misconceptions about poor people's needs, I really thought what they meant was "this is why you need to actually listen to them, before trying to help." But maybe they meant it like... "as Christians, we KNOW what everyone's needs are- they need to have the correct beliefs about Jesus, that's the most important thing."

Ugh.

Also, the thing about the llama fetuses... Perhaps this is a case where the local religious leaders are manipulating the farmers for their own financial gain. Maybe they're jacking up the price of llama fetuses, and pressuring people to buy them. This sounds like it could be an unhealthy power dynamic- and you can find this kind of unhealthy power dynamic everywhere. It doesn't necessarily have to have any connection to religion.

But also, I can very easily imagine an alternative anecdote that would go something like this:

We tried to help these poor Americans, but it turns out that they are Christians, and they watch televangelists on TV, and these televangelists say "you have to give money to me, so God will bless you- the more money you give me, the more God will give you!" So even though we were able to increase people's incomes, it didn't actually help them, because they just gave the extra money to televangelists. See, this is why it's so important to get people to stop being Christians. Otherwise there's just no way you can help them.

Is this not the EXACT SAME THING that the book is saying about the Bolivian farmers' religion?

Yeah, I know at this point, evangelicals would take issue with me equating "Christianity" with "donating to televangelists." Someone will argue, "Hey, I'm a Christian, and I disagree with televangelists. I DON'T think people should give money to them. The people in your anecdote don't need to stop being Christians, they just need to learn that being a Christian doesn't mean you have to give money to predatory leaders."

Oh, so you're saying Christianity is a whole diverse religion, that has some predatory leaders but also has a lot of good in it? Don't you think the same thing could be true of the Pachamama religion?

Ugh. Anyway. On to anecdote 2.

Anecdote 2: Non-Christians don't know how to not let rats eat their food

For example, the Pokomchi Indians are some of the poorest people in Guatemala. Through the efforts of missionaries, many of the Pokomchi converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, the missionaries failed to communicate a biblical worldview concerning human stewardship over the rest of creation; hence, the Pokomchi continued in their fatalism, literally just waiting to die in order to be delivered from the horrors of this life. Over the years, a number of development organizations tried to help the Pokomchi by building schools and latrines for them, but these largely went unused.

Arturo Cuba, a pastor and community development worker, decided to confront the worldview that lay at the foundation of the Pokomchi culture. Arturo noticed that the Pokomchi failed to use adequate crop storage facilities, allowing rats to eat the harvest and contributing to widespread malnutrition. Artuo [sic] asked the Pokomchi farmers, "Who is smarter, you or the rats? Do you have dominion over the rats, or do the rats have dominion over your lives?" The farmers admitted that they were allowing the rats to get the best of them. Arturo then explained the biblical worldview that humans are created to have dominion over the rest of creation. As the Pokomchi began to embrace the biblical worldview, dramatic changes took place: better food storage facilities were created, children went to school, women learned to read, and the men adopted improved agricultural techniques.

Uh. Yeah I don't buy this.

The part about "schools and latrines" that "largely went unused" makes me think this is a problem where people building these things to "help" the Pokomchi Indians didn't talk to them first to find out what would actually be helpful. Very not cool how the book is blaming it on the Pokomchi "worldview" rather than outsiders' ignorance about what their actual needs were.

Also, yeah it is possible that there is a really pessimistic idea that's widespread in a certain culture, which stops people from trying to do anything to improve their lives. Sure, that can happen. (I could give a lot of examples from evangelicalism! Like, let's not do anything about climate change, because the bible says Jesus is coming back soon anyway so it doesn't matter.) I very much do NOT think the answer is "they need the bible." You need to talk to someone who knows that culture, to find out what can be done about it. Probably there's some reason behind this "fatalistic" worldview- maybe the Pokomchi have tried to change things before, but it never did any good. You need to do your research and find out what kind of thing would actually be able to create change, to inspire people to believe that they can improve their lives.

(Hey readers: If any of you are non-Christians, and also you don't let rats eat your food, you are welcome to leave a comment and explain how you figured that out without using the bible. Apparently it's a real tough one!)

The book presents it like, "oh the rats are eating our food" and then some Christian comes along and says "well the bible says you can stop the rats from eating your food" and then they're like "oh my goodness we never thought of that."

Come on.

Anecdote 3: Jobs training needs Jesus

For example, I once served on the board of an inner-city ministry that serves an African-American population. We applied for federal funds to pay for part of our jobs preparedness training program for unemployed people. As part of this program, our ministry was very committed to using a curriculum that communicated a biblical worldview concerning work, including the need for Jesus Christ to restore us to being productive workers. 

The government's grant administrator, who happened to be a Christian, informed us that the law prohibited us from using the government's money to cover the costs of such an explicitly gospel-focused curriculum. He was doing his job in informing us of this law. No problem with that. However, he then said, "Brian, just remove the explicitly Christian material from the lessons. You can teach the same values that you want to teach-- responsibility, punctuality, respect, hard work, discipline, etc-- without articulating their biblical basis. These values work whether people see them as coming from God or not." [Note from Perfect Number: hey I agree with this guy!] In essence, the grant administrator was encouraging us to apply evangelical gnosticism, separating Christ from His world, encouraging us to use Christ's techniques without recognizing Him as the Creator of the techniques and without calling on Him to give people the power to employ those techniques.

We decided not to use the federal funds to pay for the curriculum. Teaching the values of a "Protestant work ethic" without teaching about the Creator of those values and about the transforming power of Jesus Christ is like giving out penicillin without ever explaining the source of the penicillin's power. [There was an earlier anecdote about how it's bad if people benefit from penicillin without being told that penicillin is from Jesus.] Yes, like penicillin, these values work. But how sad it would have been if we had ended up communicating to the program participants: "You can pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps. Become more disciplined, hardworking, and responsible, and you too can achieve the American dream of material prosperity." 

Wow, I have newfound sympathy for all the atheists who just want to improve their lives by going to a job training program/ addiction recovery program/ therapy, without having Jesus pushed on them all the time.

The book is like, oh wouldn't that just be terrible if we improved people's lives but they didn't become Christians. 

NOT COOL.

Conclusion: I quit reading there

This book is called "When Helping Hurts," and I thought it was going to be about when well-meaning donors have completely wrong ideas about what poor people need, so they end up butting in with their big well-meaning charity projects which do more harm than good. But after seeing how extremely Christian-supremacist chapter 3 is, I'm becoming very concerned that these authors actually think "doing more harm than good" would be if you help people but don't pressure them into changing their religious beliefs.

Where's the part about how you need to actually listen to people to find out what they need, instead of assuming you know what they need? That's what I thought this was going to be about. Really, that's the whole reason that charity efforts can do more harm than good. Has the book even mentioned listening to people at all, up to this point? Listening to them, and believing them? I thought it was so obvious, and I was so sure that would be what the book said, that I've been reading it through that lens, and now I'm like, wait, maybe they actually never said that at all???

Anyway. So that's my review of "When Helping Hurts." Hey maybe I'm wrong and it gets better from here, who knows. I decided it's not worth my time to read the rest of it and find out. The Christian supremacist stuff is so bad.

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Related:

Recurring Donations

Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts

"My Evangelism Isn't Working" is a Very Creepy Thing to Say 

This is so normal. We just don't usually say it in front of other people. 

God of Bad Snaps