ryancbriggs
My claiming it’s uncontentious is based on working in this research area and talking to lots of researchers about it. When asked, most say they’re less worried about charity than ODA causing these sort of governance issues. Now I get that your question is “why?” and my answer here is more tentative, because I don’t know what is going on in their heads.
I do think “size of flow” is a big part of it. I’d guess “large flow” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for governance issues, and absent something like a big GiveDirectly UBI-type thing the size of charity flows is often not that large compared to e.g. recipient government budgets.
In terms of the theory, I honestly just think our theory is pretty weak. We’ve often expected flows to cause harm when it looks like they didn’t. I don’t want to say theory isn’t important here, but I think we should be at least as cautious about theory as we are about empirics (very). Maybe it’s worth pointing out that my title was that we don’t have good evidence for harm, which I strongly stand by, not that we have good evidence that these flows are benign (we don’t). This is just a very hard area to study.
Fair. I struggle with how to incorporate animals into the capabilities approach, and while I appreciate Martha Nussbaum turning her attention here I was also wary of list-based approaches so it doesn’t help me too much.
I think this is one of those posts where the question is ultimately more valuable than the answer. And to be clear that isn’t a criticism and I upvoted the post. I appreciate posts that push people to think about important questions, even if our best guess answers are not currently very compelling.
I strongly agree with your main point on uncertainty, and I’ll defer to you on the (lack of) consensus among happiness researchers on the question of whether or not life is getting better for humans given their paradigm.
However, I think one can easily ground out the statement “There’s compelling evidence that life has gotten better for humans recently” in ways that do not involve subjective wellbeing and if one does so then the statement is quite defensible.
Totally agree that it’s a fascinating case. Thanks for this!
Happy to recommend her work highly.
Good question. It’s worth recalling that Sam and Finn’s JDE actually finds small positive (significant) effects of aid on many governance outcomes. I’m not sure I actually believe that those positive effects exist, but it’s important to see that my claims above don’t hinge on over interpreting (imprecise) nulls. Also I realize you know this, but for others it’s good to remember that classical measurement error in the DV will increase noise but will not introduce bias.
The article in footnote 3 is also an example of other work I (in the interest of brevity) didn’t summarize but have read that lends support to my claims re: aid and governance by testing one mechanism thought to link aid and governance in proper experiments (this is another related one based on qualitative work: https://rdcu.be/b4aTu), so my claims don’t rest purely on country-year panels. If some people DM me and say that they want a longer summary covering this stuff, I might try to find the time to do it.
That is correct. I think it is pretty uncontentious to say that the people who study this in general worry less about these private charity-type interventions than they do about ODA.
Fair.
I used the term to mean ODA, as did all of the authors that I cited. Basically, this would capture grants and concessional (below market rate) loans that are aimed at promoting economic development or welfare (so not military aid). From a donor’s POV, it includes money that it gives to multilateral organizations like the WB that then pass the grant on as well as classic bilateral money. From the recipient’s POV, it includes money from bilateral donors and from multilaterals. It does not include non-concessional loans or private charity. Money can be ODA even if the government doesn’t administer the aid. This is sometimes called “bypass aid.” ODA would also include things like project aid (money for a specific project, e.g. to build a road) or programme aid aimed at sectors or general budget support.
I hope that helps!
Thanks for the comments!
Off the top: I’m not an expert on Afghanistan and it wouldn’t be overly surprising to me if we could find specific times in specific countries when aid did affect politics. Maybe post-invasion Afghanistan is one. All that said, my personal bet would be that aid just isn’t doing much in Afghanistan.
Now if the question is “does aid work well in Afghanistan?” then I’d guess the answer is “no.” I fully believe that politics can interact with aid to make aid more or less effective, especially in the sense that aid to very badly governed places might do very little. However, that isn’t the question. The question here is “would Afghanistan be better off without aid?” and while I’m open to the answer being “yes” I imagine that most of the problems are larger and more serious, and that aid offers only a very minor push in any direction. And of course this goes quadruple for Cameroon or Nigeria, where aid is a sideshow compared to the other money in the system.
I really appreciate you putting in the work and being so diligent Gregory. I did very little here, though I appreciate your kind words. Without you seriously digging in, we’d have a very distorted picture of this important area.
Brilliant! Thank you!
That makes some sense to me. She should have an easier time of this (than Sen-ish people like me) because she’s willing to just write a list of the eg 10 most important capabilities for humans. If you’re willing to do that, then it almost seems easier to do it for animals. I’ll listen to the podcast and should read the book. Thanks for the pointer.
I liked this post. It was thought provoking.
I just wanted to note that you are correct in highlighting the “human” part in my post on the capability approach. To me, capabilities are the best way to think about human welfare but some variant of utilitarianism is the best way to think about the welfare of (most?) animals, but I’ve no good way to exchange between those and I find that unsatisfying.
I like this idea in the abstract.
One implementation detail that I worry about is how much friction would exist in the micro-transaction. For example, if I do this on my iPhone would it just go <ching> and then make the donation, or would it then pop up a little screen saying “pick your method of payment, then I double press the side button for apple pay, then it scans my face and I wait a beat”. I think it has to be the latter given iOS platform constraints (to stop scammers from just taking people’s money), but I think that might greatly reduce the “fun, friction-free” thing that I see as the draw here.
Yeah, good points. You may well be right.
I think point 2 is highly questionable though. Just from an information aggregation POV, it seems like we should want key public goods providers to be open to all ideas and to do rather little to filter or privilege some ideas. For example, the forum should not elevate posts on animals or poverty or AI or whatever (and they don’t). I’ve been upset with 80k for this.
I think HLI provides a good example of how this should be done. If you want to push EA in a direction, do that as a spoke and try to sway people to your spoke. “Capturing” a central hub is not how this should be done. I think having a norm against this would be helpful.
That said, I also unfortunately do not think the market metaphor is going to be convincing to people. I think concerns around monocultures and group-think might be more persuasive, but again I don’t have very well-formed thoughts here. But I do think that if the goal of EA is to do the most good and we think there might be a cause x out there or we aren’t confident that we have the right mix of resources across cause areas, then there is real value in having a norm where central public goods providers do not strongly advocate for specific causes.
Re: what goes wrong with the market metaphor: I mostly just think it raises all sorts of questions about whether or not the relevant assumptions hold to model this like an efficient market. Even if the answer is yes (and I’m skeptical), I think the fact that it pushes my (and seemingly other people’s) thoughts there isn’t idea. It feels like a distraction from the core issue you’re pointing to.
I think this is probably better framed as a governance problem. I think you’re asking institutions that provide public goods to the “spokes” or EA to not pick favourites and to be responsive to the community. I think that point can be made well without reference to an EA market or perfect competition. I prefer the phrasing in 1-2-3 in your reply.
If people care maybe I can look I to this more seriously and write up something longer, but I find it quite unlikely that their claim is correct. I think many of your numbered points are likely correct, but I bet 3 is significant. CEA is tough to do well, and easy to shape.
That said, wasting really is a serious concern and might be quite cheap to treat so if UNICEF was going to be highly cost-effective it might be here.
Thank you for this Michael. I don’t think I agree with the market metaphor, but I do think that EA is “letting this crisis go to waste” and that that is unfortunate. I’m glad you’re drawing attention to it.
My thoughts are not well-formed, but I agree that the current setup—while it makes sense historically—is not well suited for the present. Like you, I think that it would be beneficial to have more of a separation between object-level organizations focusing on specific cause areas and central organizations that are basically public goods providers for object-level organizations. This will inevitably get complicated on the margins (e.g. central orgs would likely also focus on movement building and that will inevitably involve some opinionated choices re: cause areas), but I think that’s less of an issue and still an improvement on the present.
This was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing it. This reflects a lot of my own views, especially the parts about RCT evidence in Development being weaker than is deserved (given the medicine halo) and the challenges in estimating costs (and how much that matters). Whenever I dig in for teaching or research I nearly always leave with more uncertainty, which is a bit of a scary feeling.