Chapter 1: Saving a Child

1. Reid McWilliams Kevin Bandel Chapter 1:Saving a Child

2. Summary • Part 1 – The Moral Obligation • Opening with 2 ethical dilemmas • Statistics of unnecessary deaths compared to our standard of living • Accounts of the poor today • Part 2 – Our Standard of Living vs. The Poor • Psychological Toll • World Bank and Poverty Line • Unnecessary Spending

3. Major Arguments • Affluent Nations make too much money not to help the poor. • We waste our money on unnecessary things instead of giving it away. • Children in developing nations are dying not because of measles or other diseases, they are dying because their parents have no money.

4. Arguments Refuted • You do not have the money to give. • Poor people are poor. Relative poverty. • $1.25 a day is not a problem because in other countries it is less expensive than the U.S.

6. Powerful Facts • 10 million children under five years old die each year from causes related to poverty (p.4). • 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty vs. 1981 1.9 people living in extreme poverty (p.7). • In the USA, one can get eight glasses of water out of the tap for less than a penny, while a bottle of water will set you back at least $1.50 (p.11). • You can make coffee at home for pennies rather than spending three dollars or more on a latte (p.11). • 14% of house hold garbage is perfectly good food in its original packaging [that is thrown away] (p.11). • $100 billion dollars of food is wasted in the USA every year (p.11).

7. Powerful Quotes • “Your poverty traps you, and you lose hope of ever escaping from a life of hard work for which, at the end, you will have nothing to show beyond bare survival” (p.6). • “You are short of food for all or part of the year, often eating one meal per day, sometimes having to choose between stilling your child’s hunger or your own, and sometimes being able to do neither” (p.7). • Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American telecommunications entrepreneur who paid a reported $20 million for eleven days in space. Ansari did it because it was “the only way she could achieve her life’s goal of flying over every single starving person on earth and yelling ‘Hey look what I’m spending my money on!’” (p.10). -Lewis Black, The Daily Show

8. Yes, but…… • The First Ethical Dilemma • Idea vs. Acting • You vs. Everyone else • Immediate gratification vs. Intangible Relief • “If the relief organizations had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved” (5). • What is hard work to these impoverished nations? • Support for Infrastructure • Nation to Nation – my discussion question… • Is there a point where we are “helping” these people too much? Are we going to, as we have done in the past, force America’s capitalist (and other) attitudes onto impoverished countries like Africa or Asia, effectively destroying their culture? Is that a bad thing if we are still saving lives?

9. Discussion Questions • What does it mean to you to be poor? How does that compare to how poor people are actually living? • Is it a life worth living if you are so far in debt that you will never be able to get out of it, will work until you die, and rely on support organizations to provide you with food to keep you alive until the next day? • Every day we spend money on completely unnecessary things, while thousands of kids die at the same time. Is it wrong that we do that, or are those material things actually necessary?