Your article concludes with an anecdote about your surfer friend Aaron who befriended a village and helped upgrade their water supply. Is this meant to be an alternative model of philanthropy? Would you really encourage people to do this on a large scale? How would you avoid this turning this into voluntourism, where poor people in the third world have to pretend to befriend wannabe white saviours in exchange for money?
And on a slightly more snarky note, for all the limitations of EA analysis, is it really worse at quantifying the positives and negatives than his pronouncements about projects’ potential based on conversations with white Westerners in Bali? (that means both his well-intentioned surfer friend and the jaded twentysomethings enjoying drunken post-voluntourism R&R whose cynicism apparently transformed his entire view of the value of aid to people he never spent a moment talking to!)
Your article concludes with an anecdote about your surfer friend Aaron who befriended a village and helped upgrade their water supply. Is this meant to be an alternative model of philanthropy? Would you really encourage people to do this on a large scale? How would you avoid this turning this into voluntourism, where poor people in the third world have to pretend to befriend wannabe white saviours in exchange for money?
And on a slightly more snarky note, for all the limitations of EA analysis, is it really worse at quantifying the positives and negatives than his pronouncements about projects’ potential based on conversations with white Westerners in Bali? (that means both his well-intentioned surfer friend and the jaded twentysomethings enjoying drunken post-voluntourism R&R whose cynicism apparently transformed his entire view of the value of aid to people he never spent a moment talking to!)