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taw comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong
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Let's see how rationalist people are here...
Without anything coming remotely close, the single most amazing success story in sustainable reduction of abject poverty for largest number of people, most rapidly in history of humanity is - without any doubt - People's Republic of China. They're as effective now as they've been over the last four decades, and they still have plenty of work to do - coastal provinces are pretty well off, but Western parts of China are still spectacularly poor.
Is anybody convinced by this that one of the best kinds of charity would be donating dollars directly to the Communist Party of China which is responsible for this spectacular dead, or falling that to poorest provincial governments, or is anyone at least convinced enough to change their purchasing habits to buy more goods from China (and other rapidly developing countries like India), even if they are of inferior quality (price is usually not a problem)?
I understand that it's possible to rationalize it all away, but if you do, do you really care about people in abject poverty?
You'd still have the question of whether the Chinese Communist party would do more good if it had more money.
Average vs marginal distinction affects every charity, but I'd argue CPC passes this amazingly well. They have really good track record of scaling their operations from a handful of special economic zones to provinces covering larger and larger portions of Chinese population, and even better track record leveraging their previous successes into support for their continuing operations.
They're not infinitely scalable, but they're not even halfway through China. I'd expect them to be near the top of the list of most marginally effective charities for at least another decade or two.
Even the best single problem charities like Village Reach have nothing close to this kind of scalability.
However, this doesn't address whether the CPC would benefit from being given more money. Perhaps the special genius of the Party includes not making changes faster than they can be made.
What do you think the CPC sould be doing differently if it had more money? Does it make a difference if the money comes in as charity rather than as trade?
I'm no expert in poverty reduction by economic development, they are.
My guess is that changing one's purchasing preferences towards buying larger amounts of cheaper lower-quality lower-social-status goods and services from developing countries like China and India might be a very effective form of charity.
The next time your crappy Chinese phone breaks, or you have trouble understanding accent of Indian tech support person you're talking to - treat it as your charitable contribution towards solving the problem of world poverty.
You don't address Nancy's questions :-).
By design or by contingent circumstantial factors which they may not understand very well?
I could imagine this being so.
Their track record is so much more amazing than anybody else's that it seems like a good idea to support them even if nobody in the world knows why.
I doubt we'll know why CPC is so good at it. We still haven't figured out why Industrial Revolution happened by more or less sudden take-off, or why demographic transition happened, or why Flynn Effect happened, or why Neolithic transition happened nearly simultaneously in so many places after such a long time of not happening, or why language and intelligence took so long to evolve. Yes, there's plenty of theories for all of these, but as far as I can tell they're all total garbage with no predictive power. Our knowledge of causes of such processes that happened only once or a few times is nearly non-existent.
My idea is - why not just follow the track record, wherever it takes us? And right now, there's a very clear winner. Does it matter that we don't know why?
I like and upvoted this comment, and agree with most of the points that you make therein but feel that it does not support your (implicit) suggestion that donating to the CPC is one of the best uses of charitable funds.
Again, you have not address NancyLebovitz's questions. If we don't have a model for how the CPC is promoting poverty reduction by economic development then we can't conclude that donating to the CPC is likely to promote economic development.
Now, it could be that according to a reasonable Bayesian prior the expected value of donating to the CPC is sufficiently high so that it would be a good charitable investment, but my knowledge of the situation is too poor for me to be convinced; I'd need to hear more about your implicit reasoning (your thinking about unintended negative consequences, unintended positive consequences, counterfactuals) to understand where you're coming from.
Yes. "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past." Presumably we are not discussing the CPC in a charity context solely out of a historical interest, but to guide our future actions.
Paul Krugman writes:
He is speaking of Russia, of course. Krugman then goes on to say that the growth was perfectly explicable by normal industrialization and not by any special governing factors (no 'your legal kung fu is best'):
So. I think no one here would suggest that donating to the CCCP (rather than CPC) would have been very effective, nor did the CCCP government offer much worth imitating.
If the CCCP didn't, the Outside View asks, what makes the CPC different?
I have extremely low opinion of Krugman's writings so I won't address his vague claims. If he has some numbers or some actual predictions, I might take a second look.
"Communist" countries on average did about as well as world average, so Soviet Union is no counterargument to anything. The big failures were definitely non-Communist countries of Latin America, Africa, India, Indonesia etc. The paper uses 1937 baseline, which is about the most unfriendly baseline towards "Communist" countries possible.
Outside view says country being "Communist" or not is pretty much irrelevant.
OK, in that case - why are we assuming the CPC has anything to do with the success and so donating to it could have any effect to begin with?
It's possible that the best thing for the world would be praising the current Chinese Communist party, especially if there are other countries which would benefit from a similar change.
Upvoted. I think a well-written article called "In praise of the Chinese Communist Party" would do well as a Less Wrong article. I am hesitant to write it because it would come off as an enormous troll action, because I would expect such an article to generate a lot of controversial comments and quickly lead to mind-killing.
Such an article would take a lot of specific knowledge I haven't got, and some which I suspect was never even written down. I would love to know how the leaders who made Communist governments more pragmatic and less destructive, who presumably waited quietly thinking about what to do while managing to retain power, thought about what they were doing.
Me too!
Your prescriptions don't follow from your descriptions, for donations to improve a governments development plans, it would have to be shown that they are pursuing wealth in order to promote development, rather than the other way around. And that their policies are constrained by wealth. Similarly, that a society has an effective economic system does not support donating money to that societies upper classes (ie: the Communist Party) unless that economic system's effectiveness stems from the dominance of the upper classes.
The full chain is:
For CPC the first link's evidence is weak just as you say, but second's is extremely robust. For everyone else, both links' evidence are weak.
Due to fungibility of money, most donations end up being donations to people in power. If you make someone poor richer, they might be forced to pay higher taxes, rents, prices for goods, or receive less support from their government and local charities than they'd otherwise. This effect totally destroys chain of evidence for pretty much every charity.
Do you literally mean everyone else?? There's something to the points that you're making in this comment but your framing seems too strong to the point of being distortionary.
Yes, literally everyone else. There's good evidence that net effect of charity is about zero. If you have good evidence that some charities have high positive effect, it is automatically about as good evidence that some other charities have high negative effect, and that people cannot tell them apart.
Refer to my response to your other comment. You seem to be assuming that the efficient market hypothesis holds in the philanthropic world; an assumption which is very far from holding for intelligible reasons (pervasive lack of vigilance on the part of donors)!
Diminishing returns; they already have billions of dollars.
Conditional on how much support they receive from the national government, this sounds like a good idea. Is there a process for donating to these governments?
This is good, but I am not convinced I should spend my charity dollars on buying goods and products of Chinese or Indian make. That feels too much like a rationalisation. It is a charitable move to alter your spending habits, though, which I will do. That said, I live in Australia, where nearly everything is sourced from China already, so I can easily commit to this because it won't significantly alter my habits.
Donating money to the CCP wouldn't improve the lives of Chinese rural denizens. The CCP spends exactly the amount of money needed to sustain their power. Any donated money would go to rich Chinese, not poor Chinese.
Why not "Village Reach spends exactly the amount of money needed to keep donations flowing". It's exactly the same logic, and equally wrong.
The facts are - CPC has amazing track record of lifting rural poor of China out of poverty, mostly by providing them with jobs in rapidly developing cities.
I don't see the connection. If Village Reach had millions of extra dollars, they would spend it on developing world poverty. If CCP had millions of extra dollars, it would benefit wealthy Chinese.
You made the comparison by saying it would be like if Village Reach did that, but that is not what counterfactual Village Reach would do the extra money where it is what counterfactual CCP would do with the money. Do you dispute the ability of Village Reach to not spend extra money corruptedly?
Giving dollars to China is precisely what we are already doing. China has bazillions of $ lying in their soveriegn wealth funds and foriegn currency reserves.
But some people have argued that the most important thing we give to china is not dollar notes, but a market for their goods.
So maybe the answer is to just go out and spend money on consumer goods.
Or, to put it another way, that the global economy is a self-organizing system which solves these problems automatically as long as the rule of law and enforcement of contracts is upheld.
Perhaps western countries should consider re-colonizing Africa in order to get those institutions working stably and then let the economy do the rest?
Unlike between botched decolonization and about 1995, Africa has been doing really well for the last 15 years (except for AIDS epidemics), precisely once the West and Soviets stopped their attempts at recolonizing by proxy.
Not China levels of well, but really well.
I think this is much less important than the other thing we give them: manufacturing specifications for all the goods we want them to make for us. If it was a market they wanted, the Chinese government could just allocate more money to the lower classes, and they'd have one.
I initially took your questions to be rhetorical/trolling in nature but your subsequent comments point toward sincerity. I'd suggest writing up your thoughts more systematically in a top level post. I'd be interested in seeing a more detailed argument.
No. I don't have good reason to believe that donating money to the communist party would provide a net benefit.