Cost-benefit calculations are about contingent facts, which may be different in different cases; they do not indict the very nature of activities such as charity. I too value that which is functional and creative, and I agree that simply giving people money creates harmful incentive problems, but that just means that specific charitable programs must be carefully evaluated for their actual effectiveness. Money is indeed a useful mechanism, but this doesn't mean that the default market outcome is the best possible; it would be awfully strange if deliberate altruism had no power whatsoever.

I think cost-benefit calculations usually take this kind of form. You know, "X is net bad under specific conditions A and B which usually obtain, unless C; however, ancillary considerations D, E, and F; therefore recommend Y until we get better evidence." Not: "X is bad and you're stupid for supporting it." Policy debates should not &c.

Quoting from that site's front page about the book's author: "Dambisa is a Patron for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a hedge fund supported children’s charity."

I take it that she does not disapprove of all aid? I can readily imagine that there are indeed harmful forms of aid (e.g. that gets intercepted by corrupt governments).

My preferred form of aid would in fact be in the area of education, because you can only be a self-reliant adult if you're given in childhood the memes required for self-reliance. Aid that does allow people to bootstrap out of aid.

It's important to distinguish between economic aid and public health aid. Economic aid seems to have failed to have any dramatic effects on per capita GDP, while public health aid has drastically extended lifespans and reduced infant mortality in Africa and elsewhere. Bill Easterly, the leading critic of 'foreign aid' spends hundreds of pages critiquing World Bank type economic aid and very briefly mentions that public health aid (one bright spot) has saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is the latter that groups like GiveWell and the Gates Foundation identify as offering value. Controlling malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc offer very large benefits to the recipients, success is comparatively easy to measure, and are less subject to theft (thieves can only use so many malaria drugs).

It seems like a drastic overgeneralization to say that the cost-benefit calculation will always come out negative when charity is used outside of that context.

For instance, I'm sympathetic to your argument when applied to giving money to a homeless person in my neighborhood who looks like they might buy liquor with it, far less so when you denounce efforts to aid starving people in countries that remain poor after having been essentially pillaged by my ancestors and yours. How are these people "dysfunctional and destructive"?

Communities where the latter is an option are not prime targets for the project I was referring to. If you're in a poor community, scattered over a large swath of rural Africa, and the first thing you need to do to get a clinic is to build a few thousand klicks of road to someplace where you can get vaccines, what potential do you think that you can leverage to get that done?

Communities where the latter is an option are not prime targets for the project I was referring to. If you're in a poor community, scattered over a large swath of rural Africa, and the first thing you need to do to get a clinic is to build a few thousand klicks of road to someplace where you can get vaccines, what potential do you think that you can leverage to get that done?

I.e. if one is a Randian Objectivist who redraws the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way so that libertarian policies are always morally best no matter what. This is exactly the sort of antics discussed in the article I linked. These are not broadly shared normative assumptions here and, as Robin Hanson says the resulting statements are boring. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand Objectivists and axiomatic libertarians can predict the forthcoming normative exclamations and the bottom-line reasoning in favor of certain pre-ordained conclusions, regardless of the empirical evidence.

Which is more functional and creative: A child who gets vaccinated at the nearby clinic, or the same child getting polio and losing the use of their legs because there was no nearby clinic.

Your portrayal of charity is accurate if you look at what you get if you try to vote for charity, but it is not an accurate description of the best charities that have been discussed in this thread.

I don't read these as equivalent:

[C]harity is harmful because the cost-benefit calculation comes out negative when charity is used outside of the context in which it works (a small, closely knit social group).

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Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities. [...] A person who does this willingly is, I am sad to say, stupid.