Revolutionary Aid

In the March issue of the Atlantic, Ken Stern writes about a central puzzle of philanthropy: members of the top quintile in earnings, in the United States, gave, on average, 1.3 percent of their income to charity; those on the bottom gave 3.2 percent. Stern quotes Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” They are, he continued, “more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.” As it is among individuals, so it is among countries.

Robert Huish’s Where No Doctor Has Gone Before: Cuba’s Place in the Global Health Landscape is a powerful broadside against the enormous international inequities in access to health care, not just ignored but furthered by wealthy countries. In this book, the Dalhousie University...