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 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?
I'm pretty confident that poor people in Africa get more from Gates than they pay for Microsoft software. But on any complete accounting, Sub-Saharan Africa has to be a big net loser from its interactions with the rest of the world, starting with the slave trade.
Data point on Microsoft. I looked up the price of one of their key products, Office Professional 2021 for a single PC, on their sites in Australia and South Africa. Converted to euros, the price came out exactly the same, €513/514. This is clearly a corporate policy, presumably to prevent arbitrage. The marginal cost to Microsoft of a copy of the software is the same in both countries, €0, but the customer support and marketing costs must be much higher in Australia, and customers willing to pay much more. Looks like monopolistic abuse to me.
I agree with John's point about SSA's interactions with the rest of the World, but more generally net aid flows have most definitely been positive. You can see this in OECD data which, until recently used to provide numbers on net and gross aid flows.
The bigger question is what share of total (government) aid has actually been given with the intent of helping, as opposed to advancing geo-strategic or commercial goals.
That number's greater than 0% and less than 100%, but for obvious reasons, hard to work out more precisely. Also, it varies between donors, and overtime within donors. For example, Australia was pretty good until the demise of AusAID, and got worse again still with China Panic. Even so, a reasonable share of Australian government aid is still given with pretty good intentions.
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?
I'm pretty confident that poor people in Africa get more from Gates than they pay for Microsoft software. But on any complete accounting, Sub-Saharan Africa has to be a big net loser from its interactions with the rest of the world, starting with the slave trade.
Data point on Microsoft. I looked up the price of one of their key products, Office Professional 2021 for a single PC, on their sites in Australia and South Africa. Converted to euros, the price came out exactly the same, €513/514. This is clearly a corporate policy, presumably to prevent arbitrage. The marginal cost to Microsoft of a copy of the software is the same in both countries, €0, but the customer support and marketing costs must be much higher in Australia, and customers willing to pay much more. Looks like monopolistic abuse to me.
I agree with John's point about SSA's interactions with the rest of the World, but more generally net aid flows have most definitely been positive. You can see this in OECD data which, until recently used to provide numbers on net and gross aid flows.
The bigger question is what share of total (government) aid has actually been given with the intent of helping, as opposed to advancing geo-strategic or commercial goals.
That number's greater than 0% and less than 100%, but for obvious reasons, hard to work out more precisely. Also, it varies between donors, and overtime within donors. For example, Australia was pretty good until the demise of AusAID, and got worse again still with China Panic. Even so, a reasonable share of Australian government aid is still given with pretty good intentions.