The reparations trap: Elite guilt about the past will do nothing to help the world’s poorest.

Affirmative action, racial preferences and other guilt-driven approaches, despite enjoying such wide acceptance in the political class, have had little noteworthy success to date. Billions of dollars in aid have been handed out to Africa over the years, but this has done little to help its economic development. In the coming recession, Africa’s situation is likely to get even worse. Instead, more progress has been made by countries, notably in East Asia, which have relied instead on capital imports, savings, trade and self-reliance to boost their economies.

America’s commitment to wage a ‘war on poverty’ has also been less than effective. In the 50 years since it began in 1964, over $20 trillion has been spent on welfare programmes. Yet, in 2020, the ratio of incomes between blacks and whites is the same as it was in 1968. Nor has the black middle class expanded beyond its stunning postwar gains. Despite decades of affirmative action, the percentage of blacks in elite colleges has fallen, reflecting in part the utter failure of many school systems in large cities. And black poverty, largely concentrated among families without fathers, has not decreased in recent decades. One in five black Americans is now experiencing a third generation in poverty, compared to only one in 100 whites.

Basically, what has ‘improved’ are the optics, with more ‘people of colour’, women and transgender people in public roles. In the climate movement, for instance, leaders from poor countries are placed on the dais next to the corporate and bureaucratic green elites who are overwhelmingly white. While this may suit public-relations consultants, in reality it solves nothing. Poor countries do not need lectures on climate change from the rich world, nor do they need reparations to achieve ‘climate justice’. What they need, above all, is cheap energy.

So COP27’s ambitions will likely fail. As climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr’s ‘iron law of climate policy’ suggests, sensible governments will always opt for electricity, gas and feeding their population over reducing emissions. We are already seeing this play out. Even as comfortable politicians in the West restrict access to fossil fuels, effectively advocating ‘de-growth’ for the world’s poorest nations, such an approach is dismissed by many sceptical African leaders. They know that developing a reliable electricity supply is critical to reducing poverty.

Similarly, America’s embrace of racial preferences provides superficially good optics but few positive effects. Racial preferences may have occasioned the rise of the black political class over the past half a century, but they have made little difference in terms of black people’s overall income and educational attainment, which is either stagnating or getting worse. Similarly, the Obama administration’s eight years in power was wonderful for the ‘talented tenth’ among African-Americans, but it did not improve life for most. In terms of actual results, black Americans actually did better in the first years of the widely and deservedly ridiculed Donald Trump.