This interview is compelling in and of itself, but I also want to capture an important element that happens to exhibit "systems thinking," which involves, among other things, understanding the role of feedback in dynamic systems. Systems thinking often reveals to us that our first impulses to "do good" have long-term, counter-intuitive results.

In this interview author Benjamin Skinner is talking about slavery around the world, and in this excerpt slavery in Haiti.

I went back last summer with Dan Harris of ABC Nightline. He was pretty incredulous of my claim. In fact, it ended up taking him 10 hours from ABC's offices in Manhattan, but by the end of those 10 hours, he'd negotiated with not one, but three traffickers who'd offered him three separate girls.

As he put it, the remarkable thing is not that you can get a child for $50, but that you can get a child for free. When you go up into these villages, you see such desperation on the parts of the parents.

I want to make clear, I never paid for human life; I never would pay for human life. I talked to too many individuals who run trafficking shelters and help slaves become survivors. They implored me, "Do not pay for human life. You will be giving rise to a trade in human misery, and as a journalist, you'll be projecting to the world that this is the way that you own the problem." If you were to buy all 300,000 child slaves in Haiti, next year, you'd have 600,000. [Emphasis added.] [Here's the interview.]

Given the condition of the lives of these girls in slavery, one's first impulse would be to buy their freedom. Traffickers recognized the destructive systemic impact that positive impulse could have.