Thanks for posting! I’d be excited to see more shallow investigations and other content on global health and wellbeing on the Forum because I feel like the public conversation about these topics within EA has become a bit stale, which seems unfortunate.
I found it particularly striking that such a significant share of people who suffer from extreme poverty live in fragile states, and that the trend for these looks so different. (More surprised about the former than the latter.)
A few quick comments (I read very quickly, sorry if they’re addressed somewhere):
I was surprised to not see more discussion of variance between civil wars. I would guess that they are fairly heavy-tailed with respect to total amount of harm done, which might make it hard to use average numbers for decision-making. (And such average numbers might be very sensitive to the sample that is being considered.)
More generally, external validity concerns seem to loom much larger than for health interventions.
I was also slightly surprised to not see more discussion of backfire risks when discussing interventions. I would naively guess that risks of unintended negative effects are particularly large when outside actors are trying to intervene in a civil-conflict context, e.g., because any transfer of resources can be perceived as siding with one actor in a conflict or because extractable resources can increase the gains from operating armed groups that have the capacity to violently seize resources.
Indeed, my impression is that some development funders explicitly adopt a ‘Do No Harm’ framework in this context, and my understanding is that the historical roots of this framework date to concerns that UN aid to Rwandan refugees displaced to the Eastern DRC after the 1994 genocide had the unintended effect of transferring resources to génocidaires and contributed to them being able to set up armed groups operating in the Eastern DRC. (I haven’t vetted these claims, and don’t have a considered view on how much it makes sense to use Do No Harm/conflict sensitivity frameworks in this area.)
You seem to focus on the relatively direct and measurable harms from civil war, but I’m wondering what share of the total effect they amount to. For instance, my loose impression of the DRC is that it has suffered from poor governance and low state capacity for multiple decades, and I would guess that the counterfactual well-being loss from that (even just from foregone growth) is significantly larger than the battle deaths and other relatively immediate effects from the civil war which you date as ending in 2002. (If we include deaths from conflict-caused starvation and look a couple of hears out, I’ve seen numbers as high as 5.4 million deaths from the war. But this stacks up against a population of 90 million foregoing a quintupling of income.)
I guess this is loosely related to Hauke and John’s more general criticism that EA global health and development interventions have undervalued growth. (Though I don’t have a considered view on that criticism.)
One caveat here is that it’s likely hard to identify the causal contribution of civil war to continued bad governance or poor growth. E.g., growth in Western and Central Africa has been poor on average despite only some countries being affected by civil wars (and arguably none as much as the DRC).
Speaking of the DRC, I think it raises a question of whether ‘civil war’ is the right category to consider here. You seem to implicitly consider it relevant since it features in the table of war deaths (that otherwise, apart from Iraq 1991 and maybe a few other conflicts I’m not that familiar with, seems to include more central examples of civil war), and it is very relevant to some of the interventions you consider (I believe there have been major DDR-like programs in the country and I think MONUC/MONUSCO has been among the top 3 largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping missions in history). But while the country has been marred by several more typical civil conflicts since, the war from the table was arguably a major interstate war (indeed, it is sometimes called the African World War):
Thanks for posting! I’d be excited to see more shallow investigations and other content on global health and wellbeing on the Forum because I feel like the public conversation about these topics within EA has become a bit stale, which seems unfortunate.
I found it particularly striking that such a significant share of people who suffer from extreme poverty live in fragile states, and that the trend for these looks so different. (More surprised about the former than the latter.)
A few quick comments (I read very quickly, sorry if they’re addressed somewhere):
I was surprised to not see more discussion of variance between civil wars. I would guess that they are fairly heavy-tailed with respect to total amount of harm done, which might make it hard to use average numbers for decision-making. (And such average numbers might be very sensitive to the sample that is being considered.)
More generally, external validity concerns seem to loom much larger than for health interventions.
I was also slightly surprised to not see more discussion of backfire risks when discussing interventions. I would naively guess that risks of unintended negative effects are particularly large when outside actors are trying to intervene in a civil-conflict context, e.g., because any transfer of resources can be perceived as siding with one actor in a conflict or because extractable resources can increase the gains from operating armed groups that have the capacity to violently seize resources.
Indeed, my impression is that some development funders explicitly adopt a ‘Do No Harm’ framework in this context, and my understanding is that the historical roots of this framework date to concerns that UN aid to Rwandan refugees displaced to the Eastern DRC after the 1994 genocide had the unintended effect of transferring resources to génocidaires and contributed to them being able to set up armed groups operating in the Eastern DRC. (I haven’t vetted these claims, and don’t have a considered view on how much it makes sense to use Do No Harm/conflict sensitivity frameworks in this area.)
You seem to focus on the relatively direct and measurable harms from civil war, but I’m wondering what share of the total effect they amount to. For instance, my loose impression of the DRC is that it has suffered from poor governance and low state capacity for multiple decades, and I would guess that the counterfactual well-being loss from that (even just from foregone growth) is significantly larger than the battle deaths and other relatively immediate effects from the civil war which you date as ending in 2002. (If we include deaths from conflict-caused starvation and look a couple of hears out, I’ve seen numbers as high as 5.4 million deaths from the war. But this stacks up against a population of 90 million foregoing a quintupling of income.)
I guess this is loosely related to Hauke and John’s more general criticism that EA global health and development interventions have undervalued growth. (Though I don’t have a considered view on that criticism.)
One caveat here is that it’s likely hard to identify the causal contribution of civil war to continued bad governance or poor growth. E.g., growth in Western and Central Africa has been poor on average despite only some countries being affected by civil wars (and arguably none as much as the DRC).
Speaking of the DRC, I think it raises a question of whether ‘civil war’ is the right category to consider here. You seem to implicitly consider it relevant since it features in the table of war deaths (that otherwise, apart from Iraq 1991 and maybe a few other conflicts I’m not that familiar with, seems to include more central examples of civil war), and it is very relevant to some of the interventions you consider (I believe there have been major DDR-like programs in the country and I think MONUC/MONUSCO has been among the top 3 largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping missions in history). But while the country has been marred by several more typical civil conflicts since, the war from the table was arguably a major interstate war (indeed, it is sometimes called the African World War):