No good deed.

• Author: Friedland, Julian
• Position: Letters

Gregg Easterbrook's is an entirely distorted and misleading review of Peter Singer's book on globalization ("The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number," November). I am currently using the book in a philosophy class I'm teaching, and it will be clear to anyone who has actually read it closely that Easterbrook has not himself done so, nor has he understood much else he has superficially gleaned of Singer. Singer, for example, has never claimed that we should become poor by giving most of our money away, as Easterbrook states; only that if the pleasure we can derive from keeping a given amount of money is entirely insignificant compared to the pleasure it can achieve in someone else's hands, then we must give it over.

Easterbrook's evident neoliberal bias leads him to misrepresent the text at almost every point. Never does Singer even claim that globalization has definitively made the poor better off. Indeed, the quote that Easterbrook gives as Singer's arguing that, without globalization, the income gap between the rich countries and the poor ones would be greater still--from page 88--is actually someone else's view, which Singer is calling into question. Ultimately, Singer explicitly states that the question of whether or not globalization has been good for the poor still cannot be answered without more research; see pages 89 and 90. The serious question that merits reflection, according to Singer, is how to ensure that the straitjacket be truly golden--making it more democratic and eliminating such WTO loopholes as the product/precis distinction.

DR. JULIAN FRIEDLAND University of Colorado at Boulder In 1995, in his book A Moment on the Earth, Gregg Easterbrook proclaimed that corporate capitalism had triumphed over all the Earth's and environmental woes because the corporate PR departments were assuring the world that they were implementing voluntary, market-driven "green" business practices. Right Now comes Pollyanna once again to tell us that corporate globalization is the way and the light in his review of Peter Singer's One World.

Easterbrook is dressing up the widening gap between rich and poor, standing on his head and squinting at it sideways to make it look like the opposite of what it is. There are a billion people living on a dollar a day, but their numbers are not growing quite as fast as the world's total population ... therefore absolute poverty is really, decreasing? Here's a stone-wall stat that can't be leapt over: Since...