Some mighty appetite

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Well, who knows?
Humans are not exactly famous for being able to deal appropriately with complex scenarios and therefore they tend to oversimplify things.
History has shown that just throwing money at problems is usually not enough to solve them.

One of my favorite examples is when the British decided to do something about the cobra problem in British-India by paying rewards for each dead cobra the Indians brought, with the result that they had more cobras than ever, because them Indians began breeding them cobras to collect more of them rewards. 😁

So we like to think that it´s a no brainer, spend less on weapons and more on development, make love not war, and all will be rainbows and unicorns.

The hard truth is that it doesn´t cost much money to kill people.
A couple of years ago I read a study that the majority of people killed in armed conflicts is not being killed by some expensive hightech gear but by your trusty, cheap AK 47 and similar firearms. The majority of American casualties in Iraq did not die during the actual hightech war, but later on during the occupation, killed by cheap IEDs, in guerilla warfare.

So I guesstimate you could reduce the defence budget of those 10 nations by 50 % and it wouldn´t change a thing, because the slaughtering by Boko Haram or in the Congo or in Sudan or wherever the shit hit the fan would just keep going on. Those guys are not relying on nuclear subs and star wars shit, they kill with machetes if they have to.
Just look at them Tutsis massacred in Ruanda in 1994, 800 000 to one million people killed in three months and not a single fancy weapons system involved.

Genocide Memorial in Ruanda

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Also what exactly are philantropic causes?

For years foreign aid has been pumped into Africa, but what has really changed?
People became dependend on the World Food Programme while neglecting their own agriculture, respectively African markets have been flooded with cheap garbage from Europe (parts from chicken the Europeans don´t want for example) thereby driving African farmers out of business, or the clothes we throw away or donate destroy the African clothing manufacturers.
Infant mortality rates may have gone down, but that doesn´t mean that people suddenly see a future for themselves in Africa, instead there are a few hundred millions who would like to come to Europe in search of a better future.

So some experts are now demanding to stop all aid, to let Africa figure it out for itself, because obviously the foreign aid system is not working.
What appears to be working is giving microcredits, to women especially, because they are the ones taking care of their families. So help to self-help.
But the millions spent on ambitious development projects are usually only good for the ego and the wallet of the African elites trained in Western thinking at Western universties to drink the Kool-Aid of Western progress and growth philosophy.

I forgot who said it, but the saying goes something like, you get more of that which you pay for, like the cobras in British-India. If that logic holds true then you get more poor if you give more money to the poor, something the do-gooders don´t understand.

In the UK they wanted to be very social and support single teenage moms by giving them moms and their babies their own flat. Suddenly they had lots of single teenage moms because those girls where not really thinking about what it meant to have a child, but they saw giving birth as a way to get away from home, to live independently without nagging parents in their own flat and get support from the government.

I think agression, violence, war is even older than money, just ask Abel, and money, while being a strong incentive for human behaviour, is neither the root cause nor the solution of those problems.

You might find some answers shadow boxing with C. G. Jung instead. 😉

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@ecotrain

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