But as regards the long-term disparities in aid, it really is a huge problem. I’ve been particularly conscious of the short straw the Congo has drawn over the last 130 years, and still almost complete absence of real help — though there are now a few UN peacekeepers from France, South Africa and some other countries. But it is often about what is in the news — as they say:

“We feel for the cry of the bird, but not for the blood of the fish;
Blessed are those that have voices.”

(And yes, I am proud of that one).

Also, good points on some other moral and political problems with inequality. It certainly is very hard, in my opinion, to justify large differences in wealth — though no doubt there are people who’d be willing to try!

Both of these problems above are, of course, not being helped by the increasing ability to customised and sensationalise news, as wealthy people are increasingly able to ignore and/or selectively choose the poverty they hear about.

Also, as we have seen in the last century, disparity tends to engender a drive to greater disparity. Besides pushing for decisions that will propagate and expand the inequity of the system (which from an economic standpoint can be regarded as morally neutral changes), as disparity builds the wealthy class will increasingly push for decisions that have a direct and unarguably negative impact on the rest of society, because they themselves feel less and less reliant on public services at the heart of a functioning society, and therefore feel less and less responsible for taking part in supporting those services. Of course there will always be some segments of the wealthy class that will continue to support a higher tax rate, and programs which they know they will never benefit from directly, but in general the existence of wealth tends to drive a society toward division (as much as it can feel unifying for a particular wealthy person who uses their resources for generous purposes) and sets-up conditions to perpetuate poverty and suffering.

(And here, the more we get into group dynamics, the argument becomes harder to make to a society that is oriented to wanting it’s policies justified from the perspective of social contracts with an individual).

But to un-digress and reiterate: inequity is not just an economic phenomenon, and it seems disingenuous to think that a defense of a system that allows and encourages inequity could be made adequately on solely economic grounds.

I think, though, it is also worth addressing the issue of what gaps might (inevitably?) result from this kind of laissez-faire division between gov’t aid and private charity. As this past week’s Economist pointed out, the recent outpouring of aid for tsunami relief efforts has ironically highlighted the disparities that exist between different categories of aid. While it was a heartening turnabout from the usual state of affairs to hear organizations such as Doctors Without Borders saying they were so *well*-funded for their tsunami efforts that they found it better to stop accepting donations for that purpose entirely, their accompanying plea that contributions be redirected instead to “humanitarian needs in war-torn Darfur, Sudan, and elsewhere in the over 70 countries where MSF is working around the world” was something of a wake-up call as to the skewed nature of the world’s aid-distribution habits. Disasters, with their (seeming) moral simplicity and immediate emotional impact, are more “popular” options for international aid-giving than development or humanitarian causes, which tend to require a greater investment in terms of understanding the human-made context, and often imply an appeal for a longer-term commitment on the part of the donor.

Thus it is with aid-giving decisions within a society as well. Some categories of aid will be inherently more popular than others. Sometimes, hopefully most of the time, because they are guided by different motivations, governments and individuals will make aid-giving choices that are complementary, with the gaps left by one source being made up for by the preferences of the other. But not always. As the Tsunami relief situation puts into, er, relief, there are situations
in which the differing motivations of governments and individuals converge on the same disproportionate result [And you did not mention whether or not aid-giving is regarded as a zero-sum game, but there is certainly some concern now about the possibility of "aid-fatigue"; that some areas of giving might directly suffer from people deciding to redirect their gifts to this cause. Personally my guess is that within a certain range, aid-giving is not a zero-sum game (ie, giving this year is likely to be much greater than it would have been overall, despite specific areas that have been set up for a fall by redirection), though common sense would seem to say there is probably some practical limit to what people are able/willing to give]. While some “gap areas” underserved by both governments and individuals can be written off as isolated oversights of the system, I think it very likely that there are situations where a neglected gap (categories of aid regularly receiving short shrift from both individuals and the government) is an endemic consequence of how the system is set up. Of course, *any* system will be imperfect in some way, and will err in a way that is inevitable because of how it’s set up. My point is that any consideration of a system or comparison between systems would do well to include a projection of the ways it is likely to fall short, and an analysis of what systemic error actually exists (inherently, by nature of set-up, and not just because we haven’t managed to put the ideas into practice well enough yet).

…And at this point the reader, will be *absolutely startled* by the revelation that part of this writer’s daily routine involves walking past a poster put up by my systems-engineer roommate, that is entitled “Introduction to Error Analysis”.