Hayward, Tim. "Can Benign Leverage be Relied on to Make The World More Just?". In Global Justice and Finance, by Tim Hayward, 84-95. Awaiting Publication.

Hayward, Tim. "Can Benign Leverage be Relied on to Make The World More Just?". In Global Justice and Finance, by Tim Hayward, 84-95. Awaiting Publication.

• Philosophers like Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge argue in favour of small transfers of money from the wealthy world, or the wealthy, to the global poor. Dr. Pogge justifying this in terms of the wealthy world's role in creating the contemporary deeply unjust global economic order. The author refers to both their positions as 'benign leverage' (84).
• The authors that these positions are generally buttressed on assumptions that the West is wealthy because it is efficient, ignoring the legacies not only of economically exploitive colonialism, but also the fact that current global economic order is shaped by the wealthy countries to further the exploitation of other states (85-86). Okay, but all of these scholars recognize that as true, this 'straw man' has no basis in opposing arguments.
• Even Dr. Pogge's solution to global poverty does not envision a radical restructuring of international institutions, but rather a use of currently existing international institutions to redistribute the funds necessary to end extreme poverty (86).
• Matthias Risse argues that these views require the existence of a global banking system through which such funds could actually be transferred. This does not yet exist, meaning that there is no technical solution to prevent these funds from being appropriated by local strongmen or otherwise prevented from reaching the global poor (87-88).
• These arguments rest on the assumption that small amounts of money from the rich world can have a massive effect on the absolute wealth of the world's poor. The author contends that this sudden influx of wealth raises macroeconomic questions about prices and ultimately limits the applicability of these solutions (87).
• The author contests that Mayard Keynes's concept of the facility of composition in economics applies the case of benign leverage policies. While increasing the spending power of an individual in a market benefits that individual with little change, the sudden increase of spending power for a large group of people results in increased prices which reduce that spending power, negating the initial change in purchasing power and making it more expensive for similar changes to be affected in the future (91-93).

The author argues that the plans introduced by Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge could never work because of inefficient aid networks being unable to reach the global poor (fair point, but one which also undermines his own work) and because increased money to the poorest would raise prices and negate the initial change (this also undermines his own work on 'ecologic debt'). The biggest problem is that he is only extrapolating from Keynesian theory; I don't know if it is true, but it is troubling that he is refuting an argument based on an untested and possibly false economic claim.