FormallyknownasRoko comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong

31 Post author: multifoliaterose 04 December 2010 10:27AM

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Comment author: taw 04 December 2010 09:09:15PM 4 points [-]

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?

Comment author: FormallyknownasRoko 04 December 2010 11:31:50PM *  1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: taw 05 December 2010 11:48:07AM *  5 points [-]

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.

The  conventional  wisdom  that  Africa  is  not  reducing  poverty  is  wrong.  Using  the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐iMartin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates,  and  inequality  and  welfare  indices  for  African  countries  for  the  period  1970‐2006. We show that:

  • (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly.
  • (2) If present trends continue, the poverty  Millennium  Development  Goal  of  halving  the  proportion  of  people  with  incomes  less than  one  dollar  a  day  will  be  achieved  on  time.
  • (3)  The  growth  spurt  that  began  in  1995 decreased  African  income  inequality  instead  of  increasing  it.
  • (4)  African  poverty  reduction  is remarkably  general:  it  cannot  be  explained  by  a  large  country,  or  even  by  a  single  set  of countries  possessing  some  beneficial  geographical  or  historical  characteristic.  All  classes  of countries,  including  those  with  disadvantageous  geography  and  history,  experience  reductions in  poverty. In  particular,  poverty  fell  for  both  landlocked  as  well  as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture;  for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade 
Comment author: jimrandomh 05 December 2010 01:27:13AM 1 point [-]

But some people have argued that the most important thing we give to china is not dollar notes, but a market for their goods.

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.

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