As far as I could tell the article was about &quot;The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems&quot; since that was its title i.e. how much easier a problem looks from the outside than from the inside and how it&#x27;s naive and arrogant to think that you, after learning about something for a year can go somewhere and &#x2F;quickly and easily&#x2F; fix problems that have escaped solutions for decades, even hundreds of years with your western civilization&#x2F;education&#x2F;spirituality&#x2F;tech.  It&#x27;s a kind of hubris supported by the implicit assumption that the people in the other countries are wrong, stupid, barbaric, incompetent, etc. It&#x27;s a trivial and simple point to make but not an incorrect one. Have you never heard someone read news about some violence in the third world and say &quot;gee gosh, why don&#x27;t they just stop killing each other&quot;?<p>Its entire thesis is that the kid in the US thinks prison reform is hard because she understands the culture, the problem a little better. She thinks solving FGM in Africa is easy because &quot;they should just stop mutilating each other&quot;. There&#x27;s a tendency to run away from problems in our country because you don&#x27;t realize that the problems in other countries are no easier once you get on the ground.