In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good than harm.”
Wenar is right, of course, but he is pointing in the wrong direction.
This planet is suffering from an attack of Homo Sapiens. My very crude assessment is that an acceptable load of HS for our little planet would be around one hundreth of the current count.
Yes. 99 percent of us should, somehow, remove ourselves from The Earth.
This won't happen, of course.
My only personal relief is that, being at the age of 87, I am unlikely to be around for the worst of it - but I have children and grandchildren ...
The best available evidence seems to suggest government aid has a small positive effect on development. This is contested, but there's certainly no clear evidence of a negative impact on average.
Effective Altruism is the scapegoat of the moment solely because the brand has been hijacked by techbros and 1 high-profile swindler, whose implementation scheme is neither Effective or Altruistic. Wenar's invocation of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences is less than convincing, as you point out.
Has there actually been any net development aid? The agencies with that in their title like to inflate the total by counting gross new loans as well as grants, hiding the interest and capital repayments of old loans. At most they should limit the aid label to the concessionary element. For the private sector, charity is offset by monopolistic exploitation. The Gates foundation does exemplary work on health in Africa, but the money comes from Microsoft's excess profits, a good chunk in the same poor countries. Has anybody done a credible accounting of the overall flows of resources?
Wenar is right, of course, but he is pointing in the wrong direction.
This planet is suffering from an attack of Homo Sapiens. My very crude assessment is that an acceptable load of HS for our little planet would be around one hundreth of the current count.
Yes. 99 percent of us should, somehow, remove ourselves from The Earth.
This won't happen, of course.
My only personal relief is that, being at the age of 87, I am unlikely to be around for the worst of it - but I have children and grandchildren ...
Good piece as always John,
For what it's worth, seeing as aid's my thing.
The best available evidence seems to suggest government aid has a small positive effect on development. This is contested, but there's certainly no clear evidence of a negative impact on average.
This is a good paper on the aid growth relationship: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-016-9137-4
Evidence suggests bednets have reduced Malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that PEFAR helped with HIV:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2050847
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1157487
I have a look at the potential negative unintentional consequences of aid in this blog post, and link to lots of studies: https://devpolicy.org/is-it-wrong-to-donate-to-ngos-2-20230215/
Cheers
Terence
Effective Altruism is the scapegoat of the moment solely because the brand has been hijacked by techbros and 1 high-profile swindler, whose implementation scheme is neither Effective or Altruistic. Wenar's invocation of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences is less than convincing, as you point out.
Has there actually been any net development aid? The agencies with that in their title like to inflate the total by counting gross new loans as well as grants, hiding the interest and capital repayments of old loans. At most they should limit the aid label to the concessionary element. For the private sector, charity is offset by monopolistic exploitation. The Gates foundation does exemplary work on health in Africa, but the money comes from Microsoft's excess profits, a good chunk in the same poor countries. Has anybody done a credible accounting of the overall flows of resources?