Costs of Inequality
posted by Frank Pasquale
As tax day approaches, Sheryl Sandberg of the Google Foundation has some sobering insights on the “charity gap”–how small a percentage of donations actually help the disadvantaged. “[O]nly 8% of donations provide food, shelter or other basic necessities. At most, an additional 23% is directed to the poor.” International deprivation is not a major concern of most donors; “The most generous estimate shows that only 8% of U.S. individual donations supports international causes of any kind.”
Another article, on the prevalence of organ markets, shows how this persistent inequality affects the global supply of and demand for body parts. It pleads for another type of giving:
Fewer than 40 percent of Americans have signed organ-donor cards, and only about half of their families consent to the donation of a loved one’s organs. . . . Many assume that if they don’t supply the organs, somebody else will. But [even if that is the case,] that somebody won’t be a corpse. It’ll be a fisherman or an out-of-work laborer who needs cash and can’t find another way to get it. The surest way to stop him from selling his kidney is to make it worthless, by flooding the market with free organs. If you haven’t filled out a donor card, do it now.
Both quotes bring to mind a recent quote I’d read, reportedly from an upcoming book by Pope Benedict XVI:
Confronted with the abuse of economic power, with the cruelty of capitalism that degrades man into merchandise, we have begun to see more clearly the dangers of wealth and we understand in a new way what Jesus intended in warning us about wealth.
As Thomas Berg has blogged, “great disparity seems likely to make it harder for people to practice the value of solidarity, that is, ’see[ing] the “other”. . . not just as some kind of instrument, . . . but as our “neighbor,” . . . to be made a sharer on a par with ourselves in the banquet of life to which all are equally invited by God.’” (citing Solicitudo Rei Socialis, para. 39).
I look forward to seeing what the distinguished legal scholars attending the upcoming Class Crits Workshop (hat tip: Feminist Law Profs) at the SUNY Buffalo Law School have to say on these and related topics. (Note–they are still accepting proposals until April 23).
April 15, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Health Law, Tax, Wills, Trusts, and Estates
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