Comments
I'm not sure this is a good idea.
- It seems possible that the individual interventions you're linking to research on are not representative of every possible intervention about skill development.
- Also, it seems possible that future interventions may integrate both building human and economic capital to enable recipients to make changes in their lives. Ie. Skill-building + direct cash transfers.
- Also, it's generally uncertain whether GiveDirectly will continue to be the most effective or endorsed donation recommendation. I say this given changes in how we measure wellbeing (admittedly, a topic with frequent updates to opinions and mistake corrections being made).
Why potentially reduce the effectiveness of those future interventions by launching this campaign?
As inspiration, here's a quote by Scottish stand-up comedian Frankie Boyle on how patronizing the teaching-to-fish idea is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X5KmQxvO5U&t=1537s
Strong disagree downvoted because:
This blame-the-west narrative may alienate people (and I don’t think it’s a great explanation for poverty, but that’s debatable but also not the main point)
This suggests the solution is simply ‘not doing harm/not getting involved’
Yeah, I mainly posted it because it's good comedy. That doesn't mean I think Give Directly should adopt it.
It's comedy, but it's also pretty spot on. My only nitpick is it should be 200 years, not 400 years. Not doing harm would be a big step forward in addressing poverty in developing countries.
Many developing countries are under crippling debt that forces them to forgo basic services for their citizens. Around half of this debt is taken out by dictators and never used to help the citizens of the countries responsible for the debts. . There are many instances where IMF and World Bank insist on collecting debts in full knowledge that the funds weren't used for the benefit of the citizens, and that doing so will kill many people through famine or lack of basic services.
As recently as last decade, governments were still paying money to former slave owning families as compensation for their financial loss when slavery was banned. Haiti is an iconic example. I can't think of an instance of large national government paying reparations for the harm it caused through slavery.
Sure the West isn't to blame for everything, but it is far from innocent in the perpetuation of poverty.
When the UK outlawed slavery they compensated the slaveowners. It was a distasteful compromise, but [edit: contributed to] slavery being outlawed much sooner than in other countries (ex: in the US it took another 32y and a war). To fund these payments the UK government borrowed money, and paid it back slowly over time. Describing paying back the loans as "paying money to former slave owning families as compensation for their financial loss when slavery was banned" is very misleading.
Slave owners were also compensated in the USA. There were other reasons (cultural, political, economic) that legalized slavery lasted longer in the USA than it did in Britain.
Additionally, the UK didn't borrow from random people - they allowed slave owners to convert the payments into annuities. The UK could have decided to stop paying these annuities at any point.
Almost none of them, no? It looks like this was DC-only and very late (1862).
The annuities had become regular UK debt, though, no? And could be owned by anyone, not just descendents of slaveholders?
I absolutely misread that same Wikipedia article. My bad.
As for the annuities, while they could have been sold, some may have still been held by the decedents of the slave holders.
That seems almost aggressively misleading. "Some of this category of debt may have been held by these descendants, therefore it should have been invalidated", as you seem to be implying, proves far too much.
I think that disengaging from developing countries would be a negative, at least if we include trade, services, tourism and immigration/remittances (not sure if that should count under 'not doing harm')
But OK:
ODA is about $180 billion per year; about $50 billion to Africa link
Plus about 8 billion in private philanthropy per year
Africa's debt service payments are about $70 billion per year
If that debt was all forgiven it might do as much good as the ODA. So if 'not doing harm' means 'forgiving debt' you might be right. (But that is not what GiveDirectly is involved in.)