Thanks for the thoughtful response. There’s a difference between demand and need. Need is the number of people that could use nets but do not. Demand is the number of people that actually want nets. The problem is that the need for nets is significantly higher than the demand. Oversupply decreases the demand for nets, no one will pay for something that is being given out for free. If you want people to actually use a net, you need to create demand, not just fill a need. Most people here literally put up their nets when they see the people that are coming to survey a village on the road. They lie about whether they sleep under a net, and spend most of peak mosquito biting time outside talking, not sleeping, so nets are left ineffective. Imagine that instead of buying many nets and shipping them in, AMF invested in local companies that produce nets to employ more people, expand their business, while simultaneously going to communities and sensitizing them about the importance of bednet use. This would increase demand as well as fill need. And, importantly it would be sustainable, AMF would eventually work themselves out of a job instead of killing off all of the local competition, and making the society completely dependent on their bed nets.
If I understand your point, you are claiming that, since bed net distributions are targeted to the poorest, the factories, which cater to the richer populations, would not have a problem. I have three concerns with this claim. First it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the sheer level of corruption that perpetrates many of these societies. In order to get resources to the poorest, (at least where I live, which is admittedly pretty high on the corruption index) you must give them to the wealthy who control the distribution centers, the ports, and the laws, and simply to be culturally appropriate and respectful. Second, this still does not address the problem that there is not actually a demand for these nets in the poorest communities, they don’t want it, so of course they are going to sell it at a cheaper price than the factory can produce to the people that actually want it. Third, organizations which come into these countries rarely are able to distinguish the extreme poor from the moderately well off. Most people will pretend to be poor here in order to get handouts. I have seen families hide their television in the hopes of getting an organization to donate to them. Organizations frequently fail to actually give to the people that need it the most.
As for searchers and planners, the problem is, once again the difference between need and demand. AMF goes into areas that need nets, they don’t go into areas that want nets. They go into areas that want jobs, electricity, or clean water. They don’t sit down with the community and say, what do you need the most? A new market? Okay we will get that for you. They sit down with a community and say, you need bed nets, we are going to give you bed nets. If you say that you don’t need them, we will go to the next village and give them bed nets instead. I have seen it. They do assessments of how many people get malaria in an area, not what people want if given the choice. The only comparable thing for someone that has not lived here is the flu. Have you gotten a flu shot every single year? Why not? People die of the flu at about the same rate as they die of malaria every year. Maybe because you think that other things are more important. These communities do too. Governments and organizations may request funding and nets, but I have spoken to many communities up and down this country, and never have they said that the thing that they need is bed nets, or malaria reduction. This is top down because AMF is not talking to the actual recipients of the aid, they are talking to intermediary organizations or governments, who ignore the needs of the people, just as much as AMF.
As for Give Directly, here’s what I’m talking about. Imagine that you are a village tailor. You don’t make enough as a tailor to support your three wives and 20 children (no that’s not an exaggeration) so you are also a subsistence farmer. Give Directly comes in and provides you with money. You use these funds to supply your immediate needs. Give Directy proudly claims “This year we plan to provide entire communities of people with a basic income: regular cash payments that are enough for them to live on, for more than 10 years.” Imagine you are one of the recipients, for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes. Your equipment breaks, villagers go to other tailors and you loose market share. Other people that need it more use your farms, and you let them, because culturally, those that have more must give to those that have less. Now ten years later, you were able to “eat your money” as they say, but now you have no business, no farm, and no more free income. You are worse off than you were before.
The video goes into these individual points in greater depth. What I fail to see is why effective altruists should not focus on programs that build capacity, provide jobs, actually listen to what the people want, not what international organizations determine that they need, and increase independence, instead of making recipients more and more dependent on foreign aid. I would be surprised if others who have actually lived in these communities for any substantial amount of time would disagree. The problem is that those that evaluate these charities are so far removed from the actual needs of the people, and the consequences of their actions, that they don’t realize the harm that they do.
“for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes”
I don’t believe that these cash payments, the equivalent of less than $1 a day, are sufficient to cause people to stop working. And the evidence is fairly clear from GiveDirectly’s research that they do not have that effect. In fact by allowing people to invest in their education/health/business where previously they were credit constrained, they could fairly easily raise their work effort and productivity.
I personally do not live in a country where give directly operates, but I can speak to what people here with money they receive from similar programs, and what they tell the people who have them the money what they did with it. I have seen literally over a hundred families receive donations tell the organization that they spent it on everything from healthy vegetables to school fees when in fact they spent it on sugar, tea, larger celebrations, new sound systems and more. It is completely culturally acceptable to lie to strangers, especially if those strangers are giving you money. So I am skeptical of their statistics to say the least.
As for people refusing to do work when they have enough to get by, I live in a place where most people are subsistence farmers. Due to the lack of jobs, when there is no work to do on the farm, most people sit around and do nothing. If there are no jobs and people have enough to get by, they won’t do anything. Why are there no jobs, because of organizations like AMF.
“I have seen literally over a hundred families receive donations tell the organization that they spent it on everything from healthy vegetables to school fees when in fact they spent it on sugar, tea, larger celebrations, new sound systems and more.”
Even if that turns out to be true, this kind of spending could still help the country’s economy and support local businesses. It seems like cash transfers to people in developing countries don’t do enough harm to outweigh the positives associated with them. Your argument might still work for AMF, but I’m not so sure about GiveDirectly.
If you doubt the claim, I would encourage you to come live here for years and see what you think. But as for the claim about the economy, I would agree that GiveDirectly, would probably fall more in the “not doing as much good as it says” category in terms of jobs and economic development than the “actively doing harm” category. However, in terms of dependence I would argue that the harm outweighs the good. GiveDirectly clearly creates dependence of foreign aid by supplying communities with money for basic necessities for years and then cutting them off. These communities loose the ability to be productive after years of dependence, and will in fact end more dependent on aid than they started, since those people in the community who were working, did not need to, and so their tools and equipment will need to be replaced, or if they passed on, their expertise could be lost for good. The harm that GiveDirectly does is that it deepens the need for aid in these communities instead of lessening it. This is great for aid organizations, because it keeps them in business, but it is bad for communities because if the aid ever stops, they will be much worse off than before. An ethical aid organization should work itself out of a job, not increase the need for more organizations like itself.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. There’s a difference between demand and need. Need is the number of people that could use nets but do not. Demand is the number of people that actually want nets. The problem is that the need for nets is significantly higher than the demand. Oversupply decreases the demand for nets, no one will pay for something that is being given out for free. If you want people to actually use a net, you need to create demand, not just fill a need. Most people here literally put up their nets when they see the people that are coming to survey a village on the road. They lie about whether they sleep under a net, and spend most of peak mosquito biting time outside talking, not sleeping, so nets are left ineffective. Imagine that instead of buying many nets and shipping them in, AMF invested in local companies that produce nets to employ more people, expand their business, while simultaneously going to communities and sensitizing them about the importance of bednet use. This would increase demand as well as fill need. And, importantly it would be sustainable, AMF would eventually work themselves out of a job instead of killing off all of the local competition, and making the society completely dependent on their bed nets.
If I understand your point, you are claiming that, since bed net distributions are targeted to the poorest, the factories, which cater to the richer populations, would not have a problem. I have three concerns with this claim. First it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the sheer level of corruption that perpetrates many of these societies. In order to get resources to the poorest, (at least where I live, which is admittedly pretty high on the corruption index) you must give them to the wealthy who control the distribution centers, the ports, and the laws, and simply to be culturally appropriate and respectful. Second, this still does not address the problem that there is not actually a demand for these nets in the poorest communities, they don’t want it, so of course they are going to sell it at a cheaper price than the factory can produce to the people that actually want it. Third, organizations which come into these countries rarely are able to distinguish the extreme poor from the moderately well off. Most people will pretend to be poor here in order to get handouts. I have seen families hide their television in the hopes of getting an organization to donate to them. Organizations frequently fail to actually give to the people that need it the most.
As for searchers and planners, the problem is, once again the difference between need and demand. AMF goes into areas that need nets, they don’t go into areas that want nets. They go into areas that want jobs, electricity, or clean water. They don’t sit down with the community and say, what do you need the most? A new market? Okay we will get that for you. They sit down with a community and say, you need bed nets, we are going to give you bed nets. If you say that you don’t need them, we will go to the next village and give them bed nets instead. I have seen it. They do assessments of how many people get malaria in an area, not what people want if given the choice. The only comparable thing for someone that has not lived here is the flu. Have you gotten a flu shot every single year? Why not? People die of the flu at about the same rate as they die of malaria every year. Maybe because you think that other things are more important. These communities do too. Governments and organizations may request funding and nets, but I have spoken to many communities up and down this country, and never have they said that the thing that they need is bed nets, or malaria reduction. This is top down because AMF is not talking to the actual recipients of the aid, they are talking to intermediary organizations or governments, who ignore the needs of the people, just as much as AMF.
As for Give Directly, here’s what I’m talking about. Imagine that you are a village tailor. You don’t make enough as a tailor to support your three wives and 20 children (no that’s not an exaggeration) so you are also a subsistence farmer. Give Directly comes in and provides you with money. You use these funds to supply your immediate needs. Give Directy proudly claims “This year we plan to provide entire communities of people with a basic income: regular cash payments that are enough for them to live on, for more than 10 years.” Imagine you are one of the recipients, for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes. Your equipment breaks, villagers go to other tailors and you loose market share. Other people that need it more use your farms, and you let them, because culturally, those that have more must give to those that have less. Now ten years later, you were able to “eat your money” as they say, but now you have no business, no farm, and no more free income. You are worse off than you were before.
The video goes into these individual points in greater depth. What I fail to see is why effective altruists should not focus on programs that build capacity, provide jobs, actually listen to what the people want, not what international organizations determine that they need, and increase independence, instead of making recipients more and more dependent on foreign aid. I would be surprised if others who have actually lived in these communities for any substantial amount of time would disagree. The problem is that those that evaluate these charities are so far removed from the actual needs of the people, and the consequences of their actions, that they don’t realize the harm that they do.
“for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes”
I don’t believe that these cash payments, the equivalent of less than $1 a day, are sufficient to cause people to stop working. And the evidence is fairly clear from GiveDirectly’s research that they do not have that effect. In fact by allowing people to invest in their education/health/business where previously they were credit constrained, they could fairly easily raise their work effort and productivity.
I personally do not live in a country where give directly operates, but I can speak to what people here with money they receive from similar programs, and what they tell the people who have them the money what they did with it. I have seen literally over a hundred families receive donations tell the organization that they spent it on everything from healthy vegetables to school fees when in fact they spent it on sugar, tea, larger celebrations, new sound systems and more. It is completely culturally acceptable to lie to strangers, especially if those strangers are giving you money. So I am skeptical of their statistics to say the least.
As for people refusing to do work when they have enough to get by, I live in a place where most people are subsistence farmers. Due to the lack of jobs, when there is no work to do on the farm, most people sit around and do nothing. If there are no jobs and people have enough to get by, they won’t do anything. Why are there no jobs, because of organizations like AMF.
“I have seen literally over a hundred families receive donations tell the organization that they spent it on everything from healthy vegetables to school fees when in fact they spent it on sugar, tea, larger celebrations, new sound systems and more.”
Even if that turns out to be true, this kind of spending could still help the country’s economy and support local businesses. It seems like cash transfers to people in developing countries don’t do enough harm to outweigh the positives associated with them. Your argument might still work for AMF, but I’m not so sure about GiveDirectly.
If you doubt the claim, I would encourage you to come live here for years and see what you think. But as for the claim about the economy, I would agree that GiveDirectly, would probably fall more in the “not doing as much good as it says” category in terms of jobs and economic development than the “actively doing harm” category. However, in terms of dependence I would argue that the harm outweighs the good. GiveDirectly clearly creates dependence of foreign aid by supplying communities with money for basic necessities for years and then cutting them off. These communities loose the ability to be productive after years of dependence, and will in fact end more dependent on aid than they started, since those people in the community who were working, did not need to, and so their tools and equipment will need to be replaced, or if they passed on, their expertise could be lost for good. The harm that GiveDirectly does is that it deepens the need for aid in these communities instead of lessening it. This is great for aid organizations, because it keeps them in business, but it is bad for communities because if the aid ever stops, they will be much worse off than before. An ethical aid organization should work itself out of a job, not increase the need for more organizations like itself.