“We would
like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving
but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves
that we are good in order to survive.”
Dorothy Rowe
“But goodness
alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too,
for good-ness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom
invariably accomplishes evil.”
Robert Heinlein
“Never let your sense of
morals get in the way of doing what's right.”
Isaac Asimov
In my
experience, doing well by doing good is a whole lot easier
than doing good well. If you are providing good and useful
goods and services to society, you are highly likely to do
well, simply because the need and demand for your goods or
services is high. One of my favorite examples is the
founders of --and contributors to-- Google, who all deserve
to be millionaires for providing such an incredibly useful
service to humankind, and making it free too. Everybody who
ever contributed significantly to the development of the
Internet also deserves that, even if they did it for evil,
military purposes. There are of course millions of more
modest examples of incredibly useful goods and services.
Condom and tampon manufacturers, for example, never really
get any do-good credit, but they make life so much better
for billions of women, and deserve whatever money they make
on it.
It is much
more difficult to do good well. There are so many
institutions constructed for the specific purpose of doing
good and saving the planet – usually with other people’s
money. But they are often shockingly ineffective and
sometimes even do more harm than good. This is mainly
because they are based on a distorted view of the world, an
exaggerated impression of imminent environmental collapse,
and/or a lack of understanding of indirect and dynamic
effects of their actions (i.e. what Heinlein sums up as
“lack of wisdom”). I don’t really want to point fingers
here, but the hugely expensive and completely inefficient
institutions set up in a futile attempt to prevent the ever
changing climate from changing does stand out as a sore
thumb.
Fortunately, there are exceptions to the
dismal picture of aid effectiveness. I personally adore Hans
Rosling and his
Gapminder Foundation,
which unveils “the beauty of statistics for a fact based
world view.” Knowing the facts is a necessary condition
for developing the wisdom needed to do good well, and
Gapminder presents huge amounts of data in a very simple and
appealing way, and has helped convince institutions like the
World Bank that access to data needs to be free (1).
By simply
presenting the evolution of a few simple indicators (like
birth rates and child mortality), Rosling helps tear down
the very damaging, imaginary wall between so-called
developed and developing countries (see for example his
short
Lego video on population growth
or his slightly longer talk “Debunking
myths about the Third World”,
or the famous talk “The
Seemingly Impossible is Possible”
where he shows how developing countries are catching up with
developed countries, and he even swallows a sword during the
presentation!).
Perhaps Rosling
is doing good so well because he didn’t set out to do good
-- just to do the right thing.
