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mattnewport comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong
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If you are interested in understanding the case against aid to Africa, I'd suggest reading Dead Aid.
It's important to distinguish between economic aid and public health aid. Economic aid seems to have failed to have any dramatic effects on per capita GDP, while public health aid has drastically extended lifespans and reduced infant mortality in Africa and elsewhere. Bill Easterly, the leading critic of 'foreign aid' spends hundreds of pages critiquing World Bank type economic aid and very briefly mentions that public health aid (one bright spot) has saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is the latter that groups like GiveWell and the Gates Foundation identify as offering value. Controlling malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc offer very large benefits to the recipients, success is comparatively easy to measure, and are less subject to theft (thieves can only use so many malaria drugs).
Good points. But when are they going to start feeding themselves and making their own medicines?
Africans do mostly feed themselves. Most countries (and regions of the U.S., for that matter) don't make their own medicines, they buy them. When will poor countries or people in poor countries buy all those drugs themselves in adequate quantity (although note that rich country governments paid for mass vaccination and treatment of infectious diseases, as well as eradication of disease vectors, since reducing infectious disease has big externalities and is a public good)? China and India have undergone significant development, but certainly Africa has some additional problems facing it. It looks unlikely that Africa will surge forward (although there has been some growth in the last decade) in a sustained way in the near future, but there remain various possibilities for change, and in the long-term technology should radically change the game.
Quoting from that site's front page about the book's author: "Dambisa is a Patron for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a hedge fund supported children’s charity."
I take it that she does not disapprove of all aid? I can readily imagine that there are indeed harmful forms of aid (e.g. that gets intercepted by corrupt governments).
My preferred form of aid would in fact be in the area of education, because you can only be a self-reliant adult if you're given in childhood the memes required for self-reliance. Aid that does allow people to bootstrap out of aid.
Aid in health care and education would in fact be the best way if the problem was something that can be solved with health care and education.
If I cure one person of TB, who would otherwise die, and the patient goes on to have several decades of happy life, I have solved a problem. That's so even if the patient isn't turned into a rich-country computer programmer whose kids never get sick.
This is like attacking the idea of working at a job to buy food for yourself: since you'll just get hungry again later it's not a solution to the problem of your hunger.
If it makes one happy to go around and cure people of TB, then one should by all means do so. However, I do not perceive this as significantly different, or more valuable, than running a huge animal shelter, if the recipient of aid doesn't pay you back. As with an animal shelter, you are expending external resources to maintain something for the sake of it. Doing so does not contribute towards creating resources. It is a form of indulgence, not investment.
So valuable_denisbider charity is charity that is a profitable investment for denisbider? Or profitable for the giver? Even if the recipients were highly functional and creative thereafter?
If the recipients are highly functional and creative thereafter, they should make money. If they make money, even if you don't want it, they can pay you back.
I do approve of charity which gives to things that do go on to create more than was invested. An example would be investing into basic research that isn't going to pay off until decades later. Investing in that is, I think, one of the most commendable charitable acts.
Most charity, however, is not that. It is more so charitable indulgence; it is spending money on something that is emotionally appealing, but never provides a return; neither to the giver, nor to anyone else.
I despise the travesty of such acts being framed as morally valuable charity, rather than as an indulgent throwing of resources away.
Well, if you want to say that curing a TB patient to have a mostly happy life with low economic productivity in tradables is a despicable "travesty" and an "indulgent" waste of resources (and not because the return on investment could be used to do more good later), you can use words that way.
But in future it would be nice to make it plain when your bold conclusions about "cost-benefit analysis" depend so profoundly on normative choices like not caring about the lives or welfare of the powerless, rather than any interesting empirical considerations or arguments relevant to folk who do care.