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NancyLebovitz comments on Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity - Less Wrong
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"Are you making a serious case that the net effects are that harmful?"
Yes. Although development isn't my specialty, I'm a professional economist who has read a lot about development. The full argument I would make is similar to the one that supports the "Resource Curse" which holds "The resource curse (also known as the paradox of plenty) refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons, including a decline in the competitiveness of other economic sectors (caused by appreciation of the real exchange rate as resource revenues enter an economy), volatility of revenues from the natural resource sector due to exposure to global commodity market swings, government mismanagement of resources, or weak, ineffectual, unstable or corrupt institutions (possibly due to the easily diverted actual or anticipated revenue stream from extractive activities)." (From Wikipedia)
"What are your betting odds?" Development data is often horrible in part because of deliberate fraud on the part of poor countries and NGOs so it would be very hard to determine criteria for who wins.
"Why not donate to things that don't generate rents to steal, e.g. developing cheaper crops and treatments for tropical diseases?"
Cheaper crops harm farmers.
Treatments for tropical diseases cause Malthusian problems, must be administered by medical staff dictators approve of in buildings dictators allow to be built. One theory holds that AIDS spread so rapidly through Africa because of dirty Needles used by medical personal.
The best justification for what I wrote comes from a quote from Robert Lucas that is one of the three quotations on my Facebook homepage. "But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."
The idea that the rich "should" distribute resources to the poor has done massive damage to both the world's rich and poor.
Do gambling and tourism count as resource curses? They're renewable resources, but they don't seem to do localities much good.
No because an incompetent or evil government can lose them as a source of revenue. Zimbabwe, for example, has no doubt lost many tourist dollars because of state violence. This loss might be deterring some other African governments from engaging in too much state violence.
In contrast, governments often get more economic aid if they engage in destructive economic policies.
Theoretically, a particularly beautiful landscape or cultural affinity for some profession might lead to Dutch Disease effects. The renewability of the resource isn't really the relevant factor; it just happens to be that most supply shocks of the required magnitude consist of natural resource endowments.
Service industries like gambling and tourism don't generally have these effects, though. What they do have is typically lower wages, greater seasonality, and less technology spillover effects than manufacturing.