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Mass_Driver comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong
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Comments (182)
What do you mean?
It is fairly well established that there's no meaningful correlation between aid and economic growth.
The best you can claim is that aid alleviated some suffering. I'm willing to accept that, but to be honest I don't really care much about this.
I'll leave it to you to explore all theories on why aid doesn't work, there's plenty and it would be irresponsible to donate without learning a bit about this.
I couldn't get anywhere from this latest link -- it's a dead Wikipedia page for me.
Part of why I asked what you mean is that "aid" sometimes encompasses great power military aid and aid from the IMF, World Bank, etc. -- institutions whose primary motivation is often not so much to reduce poverty as it is to promote loyalty to the great power or to the neoliberal economic ideology du jour. I'm not just saying this out of generic leftish peevishness; the tribal part of my brain is quite glad, e.g. that America is donating billions of dollars to the Israeli military, but I wouldn't expect that to have more than a trivial effect on, e.g., increasing the job opportunities for Ethiopian Jews. Likewise, as a holder of Argentinian bonds, I'm pretty happy that the IMF is offering "aid" to support the Argentinian budget, but I can't pretend that this aid will ever reach los gauchos. On the contrary, it'll probably cut their government health benefits.
It's cool if you don't care about suffering per se and you do care about economic growth, but honestly I find it hard to even articulate a hypothesis on which, e.g., de-worming initiatives don't foster economic growth. I wouldn't be starting many local businesses if my brain couldn't get calories out of my gruel because they went to a tapeworm first.
Let me help you with some hypotheses, all of them take place in the real world to some extent, but I have little idea which are important, and which aren't:
Thanks, that's helpful. Feel free to poke me in 2-3 weeks when I've had time to digest this.
Agree that the first two hypotheses are possibilities (but still think that the expected value is positive). The last two hypotheses don't seem relevant to the interventions under discussion.
The third had some decent support at least for mineral income. Countries with a lot of money from export of oil and similar goods tend to have low taxes and be most corrupt and least democratic, while countries with broad tax base tend to have less corruption and more democracy.
I'd expect similar effect for foreign aid if it became large enough. I don't have these studies bookmarked, in any case this was just a request for hypotheses.
Sure, but Mass_Driver was discussing deworming initiatives specifically rather than aid in general!
Well, let's go back to efficient market hypothesis. If (deworming / your other favourite cause) is indeed such a great investment, why aren't affected people or their governments already buying it?
I can think of a few plausible hypotheses - the most obvious one would be coordination problems with various kinds of vaccinations, and other public or semi-public goods.
However, most analyses don't do that, they just implicitly assume that everyone in the affected country is a total idiot, while the enlightened donors will show them the light.
I'd expect people over there have much better idea of what they need, while donors acting mostly like total idiots in this context, who do things for warm fuzzy feeling, not guided by the kind of analysis they'd use if it affected them directly. Zero net effect of aid seems to confirms that all too well.
I'm sympathetic with your skeptical prior as to the value of outside interventions and with your frustration with the widespread naivete on these points.
In the case of the health interventions under discussion I think that the point is that the people who live in the affected areas are living on a dollar or less a day and can't afford the cost of procuring the relevant vaccinations, medications, etc.
In a libertarian spirit one can ask "Why not just give money to the poorest people and let them spend it in the way they deem most useful?" To this end you might be interested in Holden's posts:
Why not just give out cash?
Philanthropy Vouchers
Should I give out cash in Mumbai?
We are quickly running out of people that poor:
Of course we just readjust our definition of poverty line higher - $1.25/day is the minimum used these days, and $2/day and $3/day lines are becoming increasingly common.
If some people stay extremely poor in the middle of global convergence, we should probably focus on whatever is stopping them from participation in it - and these are highly location specific factors.
One common cause are wars and military occupation. For example which charity works best to end Israeli blockade of Gaza, or American occupation of Afghanistan? IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation? Hamas itself? (good luck donating to them)? Wikileaks? Of course in all such conflicts money is very likely not to reach intended recipients.
That's very different from traditional charities. My best bet here is Wikileaks, they have quite some track record on both third world corruption and military atrocities, and money donated to Wikileaks is unlikely to end up funding more weaponry fueling the conflict.
I'm quite sympathetic towards give-out-cash and even more in microfinance. I'm not sympathetic towards how these programs often end up serving ideological agenda. Like microfinance world's ideological obsession about lending to women, while men universally do most of economic activity:
I'd be surprised by the opposite result.
Anyway my rankings are:
You seem to be Missing The Trees For the Forest. The statement that on average aid has not contributed to economic growth does not imply that the best foreign aid charities do not contribute to economic growth.
See, e.g. a comment by Unnamed. I agree that there's not an ironclad case that donating to such charities having positive impact on countries' economic growth, but would you bet against it? If so, with what odds and why? At present I judge the expected impact on economic growth to be positive.
If on average aid has not contributed to economic growth, and the best foreign aid charities positively contribute a lot to economic growth, then as many other foreign aid charities negatively contribute a lot to economic growth, and people cannot tell them apart (if they could, they would definitely shift their contributions).
The result that macro effects are about zero is pretty solid, what terms of the bet are you proposing as I'd take it if it wasn't for difficulty of measurement.
My impression is that the situation is closer to a very large majority having small negative impact and a very small minority having a large positive impact.
The reason that people cannot tell them apart is that they're putting essentially no effort into doing so. According to the recent Money for Good study only $4.1 billion of the $300 billion donated mentioned in the above was donated by donors who do research comparing multiple charities when deciding where to give. It's plausible that donors who make an active effort to maximize the positive effects and minimize the negative effects of their donations can do far better than the average donor.
I'm not literally proposing a bet; I'm just saying that while it could be that donating to charities like Deworm the World and VillageReach doesn't have a positive impact on economic growth, I judge the expected value to be moderately positive and I don't see any reason to think otherwise.This is in line with MassDriver's comment
There are plausible explanations for why the net effect of aid has been trivial that don't preclude the hypothesis that the interventions under discussion are effective.
This implies that GiveWell is much better charitable cause than Village Reach.
In any case, all of my charitable budget goes towards provision of public goods - this has clear large net positive effect, while alleviating suffering would only have positive effect under some rather strong assumption about how well informed I am.
I haven't donated anything to CPC yet (other than a few throwaway comments about how remarkable their performance has been, I tend to do that for things I like and it's hardly much of "charity"). I consider this a very interesting idea, but I'd like someone else to verify that it makes sense.
Upvoted.
Actually, the situation is probably quite a bit worse than the $4.1 billion figure that I cited suggests: "doing research comparing multiple charities" probably entails visiting several charities websites and/or referring to charity watchdog organizations which rate charities on financials rather than impact.
If one ignores signaling/incentive effects then I agree.
Up until this point, GiveWell has been focusing on attracting donations for its recommended charities rather than soliciting money for itself. The more money GiveWell moves the more influence it will have subsequently. Whether or not donating to GiveWell's recommended charities is genuinely a good way to support GiveWell is unclear to me; but what I've done so far on their recommendation.
I think that their thinking has been that they want to prove that they're doing something tangibly useful by directing more money to their recommended charities before fundraising for themselves. Presumably this comes from their emphasis on proven programs.
I personally would like to see them shift toward evaluating charities like Wikipedia, etc. for which it's more difficult to assess the impact but which have potentially very high expected value.
Sure, makes sense. If you're interested I'd encourage you to fill out GiveWell's survey - this could influence what causes they look into next and help you optimize your public goods donations. They've been going where the interest is, presumably in an effort to gain broader traction (e.g. they started looking into disaster relief as a cause in response to receiving a number of queries from prospective donors).
Interesting :-). Is the CPC accepting donations?
Maybe better still would be to fund a (hypothetical) advocacy group that offers the CPC money in exchange for greater openness / freedom of speech in China (potentially leading to simultaneous progress on two fronts at once)? (This idea presupposes that straightforwardly increased civil rights in China would not indirectly reduce its economic growth; an assumption which admittedly may not be valid.)
It is clear to me that the real efficient charitable cause is rationality itself. Givewell is giving money to VillageReach as a way of proving to stupid, irrational people that efficient charity is better than random charity. (Duh).
But if you could find a way to make rationality more widely accepted, even by a tiny amount, then you would incrementally solve the "efficient charity" problem along with a host of others, including existential risk, lack of life-extension advocacy, etc etc.
Agree, but easier said than done :-).
Beware the fallacy of the drunkard who looks for his keys under the streetlight rather than in the alley where he dropped them, because "the light is better here"
Also, we know much of the aid has been done with knowledge that it would cause harm, and designed to be stolen/abused, because it was being used as bribes for nasty regimes in geopolitical contests. That can provide a sizable chunk of the "negative" effect to balance out positives.