Tax-avoider tours refugee camps in a Gulfstream G650…

“Bono: Time to Think Bigger About the Refugee Crisis” is one reason that I love the New York Times. Here was my comment on the article (not sure if they will approve it):

The world is awash in capital. Interest rates have never been lower. Nearly every bad idea can find funding (check the app store from your smartphone!). Thus to the extent it is possible for capital to be productively deployed in the countries that Bono visited it is already happening (some of those places have better mobile network coverage than we do here in the Boston suburbs).

As others have noted, the analog to the Marshall Plan is inapt. Funding for a country such as France, which pioneered modern aviation, to re-industrialize is a different project than funding for a country that has never been industrialized. Educated labor was scarce post-WWII due to a smaller and less connected world. Combining Europe’s educated labor with some American capital was a fairly sure bet.

[Separately, I am grateful to have been exposed to the spectacle of a guy who has stashed all of his assets in a nearly tax-free offshore trust, as previously covered by the NYT, flying from refugee camp to refugee camp in a Gulfstream G650 filled up with 44,200 lbs. of dinosaur blood. This is modern “slumming”?]

What do readers think? Bono is presumably correct that it would be better if everyone could get a good job and build an American- or European-grade middle-class lifestyle regardless of location. But 70+ years of do-gooding by developed countries doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything, unless we want to take credit for the success of the Asian Tigers under the “success has many fathers” theory. Nor has cash helped that much, even when governments have been stable. As Malthus predicted, at least in most parts of the Earth human population has expanded so that the high-level picture from a resource infusion is “more people at the same standard of living” (for example see the population chart on this page about Saudi Arabia for what happens under a best-case scenario). Perhaps the flood of migrants into Europe doesn’t represent the failure of non-European countries but rather the success of Malthus?

Related:

• NYT reader comment on the article: “The reason that no one wants to hear the opinion of people worth tens of millions and even billions of dollars is that we all know without any doubt that nothing about their lives will change if they have to pay higher taxes and nothing about their lives will change if we import another few million low skilled workers and nothing about their children’s lives will change if we import another few million non-English speaking students. They and their loved ones are completely immune to the consequences of their opinions and decisions, so they go with whatever makes them seem the most ‘generous’ and ‘enlightened’.”