The Joy of Economics:  Making Sense out of Life
 Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop University
 

Good Intentions Gone Awry

            Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.

                                                                                    ....George Bernard Shaw

            I am a picky eater.  Plain meat and potatoes.  No sauces.  Nothing that would appear on a menu written in French, nothing that needs "presentation," and nothing with bright colors (except m&m's).  My mother repeatedly tried to broaden my culinary range, but to no avail.  My father more sympathetically claims it is a genetic flaw, inherited from paternal lineage.

            At a recent church potluck dinner an elderly woman across the table, Mrs. Bittlemyer, urged my wife and me to try her rhubarb pie.  Since I understood that rhubarb pie was merely a vegetable in disguise, I quickly declined.  But my considerate and kind wife took a piece.  Although she does not particularly care for rhubarb pie, she devoured it eagerly and, to the delight of the cook, with effusive praise. 

Knowing my wife's culinary proclivities I was surprised, but held my tongue.  Later that evening I asked if she had truly enjoyed the pie.  She replied, "No, but I could not disappoint Mrs. Bittlemyer.  I nodded in cautious concurrence and admiration.  For a while.  However, a few weeks later we heard a knock at our front door.  It was Mrs. Bittlemyer carrying a rhubarb pie.  She explained that my wife had enjoyed the first piece so much that she baked a new pie, just for her.  Now what?  Do we fess up?  No, it was too late.  We accepted the pie with smiles and thank you's -- just as we have done for each of the rhubarb pies that have steadily been arriving on our porch ever since.¹ Good intentions gone awry.

            I should not have been surprised.  After all, I know economics.  I know that when people get a good price for their efforts -- either in terms of cold cash or warm fuzzies -- their eagerness to supply goes up. When potential buyers appear, sellers queue up quickly.  It is like mail-order purchases.  We cannot expect to buy one mail-order item without being flooded with catalogues from others.  Or charitable gifts.  A $50 check to one deserving group prompts a deluge of calls and mailings from others. 

As a ten-year-old I sold raffle tickets to help support my cub-scout troop.  When word leaked out that Mrs. Hartbuckle² down the street had bought an entire book of tickets from our friend Steve, every boy in our troop began lining up, raffle tickets in hand, at the Hartbuckle's front door.  A firm "yuch" from my wife would have stopped Mrs. Bittlemyer dead in her tracks.  A firm "no" to my friend Steve from Mrs. Hartbuckle could have saved her many dollars.  They chose to be kind.  Good intentions gone awry?

Sudanese slaves

            Let's get serious.  Rhubarb pies and cub scout raffle tickets are small potatoes.  Slavery is not.  And slavery persists in several pockets of the world, including Sudan.  A poor country to the south of Egypt, Sudan has been ravaged by a brutal civil war between the Muslim-led Khartoum government in the north and rebellious, largely Christian and animist tribes in the south.  The war and attendant famines have claimed more than two million Sudanese lives since 1983.³

            Beginning in the early 1990s, government-backed militias began raiding southern villages to burn homes, steal food and animals, and slay the men.  With husbands and fathers dead, the women and children are captured, shipped north and sold as slaves.  Ugly stuff.

            As word of Sudanese slavery leaked out into the international community, a predictable moral outrage began mounting.  What could be done?  The war was an internal struggle caused by ethnic and religious tensions that had been burning for many generations.  Military intervention by the United States or the United Nations was not likely to be either effective or welcomed.  As long as the war raged, there was little that could be done to stop the slave raids. 

Could the effects at least be muted?  Perhaps the slaves could be freed.  Sudan is a woefully poor country and the going price for a slave was a mere $15 in most northern markets. To a comparatively well-to-do American, $15 is nothing, not even the price of a single meal at a reasonably fashionable eatery.  Perhaps the freedom of Sudanese slaves could be bought.

Humanitarian and Christian groups in the United States and Europe mobilized quickly to raise monies for slave redemption.  Christian Solidarity International (SDI), a group based in Switzerland, has freed some 10,000 slaves by itself.  Other groups have freed more.  Church groups, schools, and private individuals from around the country have joined the effort. 

Supply and demand

            While noble in spirit, the redemption effort has split the human rights community and prompted scathing criticism from international agencies such as UNICEF.  Why?  Supply and demand.  The redemption effort has raised the demand for slaves.  As with any other product, increased demands create shortages.  Shortages, in turn, drive up prices. In the below graph, the increased demand drives price from P₁ up to P₂.

 So it is with Sudanese slaves.  The demand from redemption groups has driven the going price for slaves from $15 to anywhere from $50 to $100 per slave. Using the appropriate economic jargon, humanitarian redemption efforts have increased the demand for slaves.  Because of this increased demand, the equilibrium price for slaves jumped from $15 to $100.  Who gets the financial spoils of the increased price?  The slave traders.  And, for what do they use their ill-gotten gains?  According to opposition groups in the field, it is to buy more guns with which to conduct more raids and capture more slaves. 

Can you see what happens to quantity?  Check the graph one more time.  Increased demand drives up the equilibrium quantity as well.  As a result of the increased demand, the quantity of slaves captured and sold rises.  That's right.  The redemption effort has backfired.  When the price goes up, the quantity supplied rises as well. If you praise Mrs. Bittlemyer's pie, she will bake more pies.  If you pay high prices to redeem slaves, the slave traders will eagerly capture more slaves to be sold. 

And capture they do.  Redemption sales have invigorated the market.  Since redemption agencies often prefer to buy slaves in large groups, raiders have responded by capturing larger numbers of slaves at a time.  One observer notes that they have turned slaving technology from a cottage industry into mass production.  Moreover, in past years, slaves who became old or sick lost value to their captors and were released.  Continued provision of food and shelter was not efficient.  Not any more.  It now makes more sense to hold on to such slaves until they can be sold to a redemption group.

 The silver lining is that the number of slaves kept in captivity does eventually go down.  At the new, higher $100 price Sudanese buyers ultimately choose to keep fewer slaves in captivity.  The others are sold to the redeemers and ultimately released.  However, the release process is often slow and, in the meantime, captured slaves are often subject to abuse, torture and mutilation.  Perhaps more importantly, the raids themselves are violent and result in the brutal deaths of adult males in the targeted villages.  Instead of curbing slavery, redemption efforts may merely have fueled additional violence, capture and death. Good intentions gone awry.

________________________

Notes:

1.         Yes, Mrs. Bittlemyer is a fictitious name.  And, the food in question was not rhubarb pie (which for some strange reason my wife actually enjoys).  I changed the example to protect the feelings of the cook.  You know, good intentions…

2.         Yes, Hartbuckle is another fictitious name.

3.         Miniter, Richard, "The False Promise of Slave Redemption," Atlantic Monthly, July 1999, volume 284, issue 1, pp. 63-71.  Much of the following analysis draws on Miniter's account.

________________________________________

Testing Yourself

To test your understanding of the concepts in this reading, try answering the following:

1.         Explain how attempts to buy the freedom of Sudanese slaves have affected the equilibrium price and quantity of slaves captured.

2.         Explain what has happened to the quantity of slaves in captivity as opposed to the quantity of slaves captured.

Return to Contents