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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on So you say you're an altruist... - Less Wrong
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Comments (106)
There's an objection to be made that you can't be sure how useful charity is, but it's not a very strong objection. Last I heard there was pretty good evidence converging around $1000 or so being enough to save a person's life.
I accept this argument as valid and have for some time. I doubt I could donate everything to charity, but ~50% seems like a good compromise between human weakness and inhuman mathematics. We'll see how far I follow through on this when I get an income.
You need to choose a very carefully targeted charity that takes into account knock-on effects like displacing local production, before you should accept any such claim. It is now being suggested that the majority of aid is actually counterproductive and destroys local industry in exchange for giving Westerners a warm fuzzy feeling. Hence Africa staying poor despite (because of?) hundreds of billions spent.
Frankly, if you're going to put in that much work into buying expected utilons at the cheapest available price, you shouldn't be considering any mainstream charity targets like aid to developing countries. Let Bill Gates worry about it, if that's the limit of his creativity.
Also, as I know you are aware because you linked to it once at OB, Eliezer, there is the work of Gregory Clark, which suggests a double reason refuting this essay's line of argument. Not a response directly to your comment then, but as an add on I mention it here.
I suppose this line of reasoning is not new to most here, but since I don't see it explicitly mentioned....
1) Most controversial, and almost an aside to the main argument that Clark makes but of course the claim that gets the most ink: that there is something in the culture or even genes of certain societies that keeps them from effectively industrializing.
2) The core claim: That throughout history, temporarily increasing the food supply (through minor technical innovation, or through some other windfall) in a non-industrialized population just leads to more births, creating more people living at the subsistence level. The next food or money shock around the corner puts all these people at death's door. An increase in their numbers just strains the subsistence system even more, inviting an even more horrible catastrophe. Only large, across-the-board increases in the efficiency of economic agents can provide anything other than temporary respite from this trap.
I do not mean to be glib about the horrible, regrettable, and tragic death of a single victim of starvation, let alone millions. But if poorly aimed altruism leads to MORE starvation in the future, then it is not really altruism but self-important, deadly moralizing. I don't know where the truth of the situation lies, but at the very least I bet I could come up with a cute, leading and misleading thought experiment that would lead the essay-writer to admitting he's killing 10 times as many people as he claims he's saving. And I'd be just as reprehensible in my intellectual laziness as he appears to be.
Added: In response to Yvain's latest post, I can accept that this is one sense a dodge of the question. I suppose I don't have a response to the central question, if indeed the central question is whether to do everything in one's power to alleviate suffering, either through food charity or condom charity or whatever. So to separate out the issues here: (1) I find the argument disingenuous, (2) I do not have an answer. .... yet. I must think more clearly about my morals.
I've done some research into this, and found a few targeted charities that I trust.
However, I'm a bit skeptical of the "aid is naturally counterproductive" claim (which I admit is stronger than what you're saying here, although I have heard some people say it). There are definitely some cases where it's true (you don't just send in random goods for free!), but the claim that you can't help poor people so you might as well keep all your money is just too convenient.
Take the claim from the OB post that it would take $3000 per person to raise per capita income $3. Unless they are referring to some specific, especially stupid kind of aid, this is clearly false. Simply invest the $3000 at 5% interest, and give the $150/year to the Africans and you've raised per capita income 50x as much. Not that this is a good idea, but it does seem to show there's something fishy about the calculation.
Jeffrey Sachs writes some interesting responses to the claim that Africa is too corrupt to be able to handle aid. If anyone has seen a specific counterargument to Sachs' claims, please link me to it.
Before I went back to school and lost my income, my favorite charities were microfinance, iodine supplementation (see Raising the World's IQ ) and yes, the Singularity Institute. Although I will be very disappointed if you guys (or anyone) still need money by the time I'm in my prime donating years.
to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power
Fixed that for you.
As P. J. O'Rourke says, speaking of something like a total of $200,000(?) per poor person spent by the American welfare system, it's a flabbergasting phenomenon that appears to be real: You can't fix poverty by giving people money.
I'd love it if the Singularity Institute had an endowment by the time you get out of school, but I wouldn't count on it if I were me.
Citation so very needed. 200,000 dollars to do what? And how often? And by what agencies?
"The American Welfare system" is an enormous patchwork of state, federal and local organizations with different mandates and populations served. It also does not tend to transfer much money at all. I've lived on Social Security Disability for years and it pays a little over 7k a year (try "bootstrapping" yourself on that budget). I make another 40 dollars monthly in food stamps. I am receiving the maximum amount possible from SSDI; the max for Food Stamps is about 120 dollars monthly.
I am highly suspicious of the claim that for my annual income of ~7600 USD, it takes ~192,400 USD just to get it to me, affecting no other welfare recipients in the country.
Total yearly welfare spending in the usa is $700 billion [1]. This includes federal, state, and local spending. This is being spent on around 50 million people [2] (that's 1/6th of the population). So $14K/person. To get $200K/person you'd need there to be only 3 million poor people in the usa (1%) which is way to low.
This sounds like maybe 50% overhead, not 500% overhead.
"to the Africans' warlords, who steal the money and use it to stay in power"
Note the reference to Jeffrey Sachs in my comment. If you haven't read The End of Poverty, he demolishes the "It's all warlords stealing the money" argument pretty darned thoroughly.
I was thinking of my prime giving years as late middle age, two or three decades down the line, and I was hoping less that you would have an endowment than that, you know, you would control the world and dazzle the few remaining people who hadn't advanced to a Stross-ian Economy 2.0 by transforming small asteroids into giant gold nuggets. But I guess an endowment would be nice too.
Haven't read The End of Poverty, but I'm willing to accept that it's other forms of economic displacement, not just the warlords stealing. However, it really doesn't look like ending African poverty is remotely as simple as giving them a bunch of money. You'd think it would be. I wish it were. But it doesn't appear to be.
It's not particularly surprising that ending poverty isn't that simple. Most developed economies were brought to their current stage through hundreds of years of innovation, investment, protectionism, and use of inexpensive raw materials and labor from the global South (among other things), and the ones that industrialized more quickly (like Singapore) often had unique geographical or political characteristics that aided this. The development of a stable, diverse economy (and correspondingly high standards of living for a population) depends on far more things than a simple infusion of capital.
For that matter, poor African states are usually poor for very different reasons. Congo's poor despite its great natural resource wealth because the Belgians systematically sabotaged its ability to rule itself before independence even arrived, in the early '60s, and then it got stuck with corrupt dictators who robbed it blind for four decades. Rwanda's poor because the genocide destroyed everything it had built, and even the stable, non-corrupt government that's in power today can't overcome such odds in a generation (and has virtually no natural resources to help it along). Botswana's actually not that poor, because it has a competent government that's used its diamond wealth well. Rather like different aid organizations are differently competent, different African governments are better- and worse-positioned to benefit from A) aid or B) participation in the global economy in general.
I don't usually expect comments that have plus five votes and no negative reception to be retracted! Interesting.
Even weirder: It's from 2009 (before the retraction feature was added).
Edit: Maybe the strikethrough is just because the account was deleted.
Aha. Good theory.
Re [i]The End of Poverty[/i]:
Can't say I recommend it. I picked it up about a year back. I made it about a third of the way through, and he was still discussing 1st year microeconomics and political theory. I really meant to finish it, and I might at some point, but there is a lot of unnecessary filler. The book's written to be popular and easily accessible.
You, sir, have better things to do with your time.
Edit: I fail at the magic of javascripting...
What is your p that I can't find a charity that (1) gives money to people in Africa and (2) the majority of the donated funds doesn't go to warlords? How about this one: http://givedirectly.org/?
The p that is more relevant is that of a charity that (1) will be giving money to people in Africa in the counterfactual in which the 10% donations are done by all the wealthy people and (2) the majority of the donated funds doesn't go to warlords. The more money that is floating around the harder it is to avoid corruption. Incentives.
I'd be curious about how much of that is going for administrative costs to people who haven't taken a vow of near-poverty themselves, assuming that the number is accurate. Is it per year?
Eliezer implies it's pretty much all administrative costs. But it's not clear that this is a fair measure "giving people money." European welfare systems are less resentful of their recipients and more focused on direct transfers. I'm sure that they are more efficient than the US system, though I don't have any numbers. A stipend that was not means-tested could be more efficient still. A negative income tax might not need to be more complicated than the income tax system itself. The US version is not terribly complicated by income tax standards, but I think a lot of people fail to exploit it out of ignorance. That's a type of inefficiency that doesn't show up in this kind of number.
Per year? If so, that is evidence mostly that your system is ridiculous. When I worked for the Department of Social Security in Australia (who do most welfare payments) in 1991, our running costs were 2% of benefits disbursed (so we were told by our managers).
In this case, I really think a cite for precisely what he was claiming, and his source for it, would be needed.
That almost sounds like some sort of a subtle hint, EY...
Are the charities reccommended by Givewell, specifically VillageReach, good or counterproductive?
Also, what exactly does the Singularity Institute spend its money on? If I knew, I'd be more willing to direct my money there.
I've answered this before directly, so I'll try a different tack. What action could you take to find this out? What information is already available?
Since no one bit my Socratic lure, my sequence of answers would have been to point out that SIAI is a charity, charities are nonprofit corporations, corporations keep records of spending, and often make them public; as an IRS-recognized charity, SIAI is obligated to make reports public, and some googling then turns up GuideStar as a source, at which point it's easy to download their PDFs from SIAI and finally answer the question - what does SIAI spend its money own?
I did this earlier for salary information: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/2ywt There are a lot of interesting things in the filings; I once wrote an essay on what I found in the filings for Girl Scouts: http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance (See also Discussion post.)
EDIT: for an analysis of SIAI, see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5fo/siai_fundraising/