On what constitutes selfishness, and to what extent societies must be willing to tolerate that personality trait, I am caught between two cultural mindsets. I have struggled for a long time trying to figure out which way to lean on that question.
I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Ghana. As is typical in Africa, much of Ghanaian society is structured around the extended family system. Individualism is frowned upon in most parts of the country. People of means are expected to use their resources to take care not only of their nuclear families, but also of parents, siblings and their families, aunts and uncles, and in some cases, entire villages.
Although Ghana has modernized considerably over the last few decades, this social organization persists in the country. That is mainly because there is little government presence in many communities. The absence of a social safety net means that people living in poverty in such places, where employment opportunities tend to be scarce, have nowhere to turn but to constantly rely on assistance from extended family members.
The problem with this arrangement is that anyone who is unlucky to have at least one financially successful person in their clan is doomed.
Because I grew up in a Ghanaian village, I am intimately familiar with that social organization and its inherent problems. My extended family is extremely lucky to have someone like me and a couple of my siblings who have also attained financial success in their lives. Over the years, we have helped cover the costs of education and medical care and provided various forms of financial assistance to our other siblings and their families, and to countless members of the extended family. Throughout that time, other families in the village have struggled to obtain the most basic of needs. I have frequently offered a helping hand to some of those unlucky people. Some of them were classmates I grew up with. Given the scale of the problem, it is impossible to help everyone so I have often had to make hard choices.
It will soon be thirty-four years since I immigrated to America. I have spent more than half of my life in this country and naturally, I have become a lot more used to American culture than the one I grew up in. But I have never been able to jettison that habit of spreading my resources thin.
While it is a heavy burden, I am happy to bear it because I know how high the stakes are for the people I assist. Moreover, I was once in their shoes and I did receive a lot of help from that extended family system to get me to where I am today. Most importantly, knowing that I am able to save at least a few people from some utterly desperate situations they would otherwise find themselves in is quite gratifying.
After carefully observing life in Ghana and the U.S. over several decades, I am now convinced that despite the many positives of societies like Ghana’s where personal resources tend to be broadly shared, the costs associated with such social organizations far outweigh the benefits. My view is that the extended family system perpetuates poverty. It is time for Ghana and other countries where this cultural practice is prevalent to begin taking steps to dismantle the parts of those social structures that are overly harmful. While doing so, it should be possible to preserve some of the beneficial aspects.
Many of the multi-billion and trillion-dollar companies that are household names here in America and around the world today were each founded by one or two individuals with just a small amount of seed capital. Bill Gates and Paul Allen reportedly founded Microsoft in 1975 with about $500 (a little over $23,000 today) of personal savings. Currently, the company has a market capitalization of over $3.5 trillion and employs nearly 230,000 people globally. There are similar stories of companies like Amazon, Google, Apple and other corporate behemoths that started from such humble beginnings.
I have a strong feeling that if these founders were from Ghana and had family ties there, most, if not all of them, would today be regular middle-class people like I am. That is because whatever seed capital any of them had to work with would, in all likelihood, have been diverted to take care of some immediate needs within their clans. These entrepreneurs would probably not be the centibillionaires they are today. It is unlikely that they themselves would be struggling financially in their day-to-day lives, but the broader society they inhabit, and indeed the entire world, would be much worse off.
Through taxation, we have some version of the extended family system here in America. The difference is that the people our tax dollars help, through provision of welfare benefits, are not as directly related to us as it is the case in places like Ghana. That is also perhaps why so many of us are allergic to paying taxes. The appetite to give naturally diminishes somewhat when the recipients are “strangers” who, for the most part, are not readily visible to us.
My sense is that when American business leaders complain about excessive corporate taxes, they essentially make the same argument about ensuring proper channeling of current resources to achieve broader levels of future socio-economic benefit. I often wonder whether it will ever be possible for economists, governments and the various stakeholders to agree on what constitutes an optimal level of taxation that will generate the revenues governments need to fund their programs, while making sure that corporations are not so heavily drained of capital that they cannot sustain or expand their operations. That debate will probably never be settled, given its highly ideological nature.
In Ghana, individuals who demonstrate unwillingness to share their resources as freely as they are expected to are labeled as selfish. They are often shunned by their communities. Here in America, that character trait tends to be associated with tax-averse companies that we describe as greedy corporations.
Should the stinginess be looked at a bit differently in both places though?
Those selfish individuals in Ghana might well go on someday to use their hoarded resources to establish prosperous businesses that end up providing jobs for tens of thousands of people in the country, just as the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple have done here in America. Paying a bit more in taxes will probably not kill American corporations as their bosses often warn. But we should be careful about taxing them so much that they start functioning like overburdened middle-class Ghanaians. This writer knows the harm that does.