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Mercy 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?
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)!