NickLaing
Bio
Participation1
I'm a doctor working towards the dream that every human will have access to high quality healthcare. I'm a medic and director of OneDay Health, which has launched 35 simple but comprehensive nurse-led health centers in remote rural Ugandan Villages. A huge thanks to the EA Cambridge student community in 2018 for helping me realise that I could do more good by focusing on providing healthcare in remote places.
How I can help others
Understanding the NGO industrial complex, and how aid really works (or doesn't) in Northern Uganda
Global health knowledge
Posts 12
Comments730
The "non-tweet" feels vague and unsubsantiated (at this point anyway). I hope we'll get a full article and explanation as to what he means exactly because obviously he's making HUGE calls.
As a quick reply, I'm wondering what evidence you have that education in democratic liberal countries increases support for liberal democracy accross the globe? There's arguments for and against this thesis, but I don't think there's good evidence that it helps.
Many dictators in Africa for example were educated in top universities, which gave them better connections and influence which might have helped them oppress their people. Also during the 20ths centure a growing intelligent and motivated middle class seems correlated with higher chance of democracy. - its unclear whether highly skilled migration helps grow this middle class through increasing remittances and a growing economy, or removes the most capable people who could be starting businesses and making their home country a better place. Its worth noting that programs like this don't just take high school graduates, they usually take the cream of the crop who were likely to do very well in their home conutry as well.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that its complicated and far from a slamdunk that this will increase support for liberal democracies.
Love this thanks for the insights, this definitely helps answer some of my questions about people like Weinar. When a couple of people I knew mentioned that article, I pointed them to what I think are better criticisms here in philosophy tube (also more fun)
https://youtu.be/Lm0vHQYKI-Y?si=sw_3u-9tQSvRZRut
I am encouraged though that a few people have written responses to Thorstad over the last couple of weeks. Not exactly blowing up on Twitter but some good engagement at least ;)
It is pretty clear that the longer the shrimp, the higher the moral weight. Long live the long shrimp orgs
Except they should maximize confusion by calling it the "Macrostrategy Interim Research Initiative" ;)
First, focus and drive to scale is very important. The "dream" as a small charity is to figure out how do your one thing well (give mosquito nets, give money, incentives for vaccines ets.) then iterate, replicate and scale up. Bigger charities don't think that way and are comfortable just to "add" and "maintain" programs rather than drive hard for impact and scale. I doubt bigger charities would have the focus and drive to scale new initiatives compared to founders of small charities which have more energy and where the sky is the limit.
Second, new small charities can be lean (bit of a cliche). On the other hand many big charities actually become more inefficient as they get bigger (I'm sure there are many exceptions) and already ogten have "locked in" many inefficiencies. My evidence for this is that the classic big charities which do lots of things (oxfam, save the children, world vision etc.) are some of the least efficvient charities around.
Unfortunately as charities scale up, its often the opposite of business. You don't gain much from economies of scale, instead you add lots of middle management and each "unit-of-good" can become more expensive than it was when you were a smaller charity. I'm even struggling with this situation a bit with our charity at the moment.
I actually think the opposite should often be the case, bigger charities could split up or downsize, in order to focus on the one thing they are best at.
I'm talking mainly about the GHD space here by the way, don't know anything about animal charities.
I've written about this kind of thing a bit more here.
https://ugandapanda.com/2021/02/04/ngos-should-only-do-one-thing/
After reading a bit more, one potential issue here is that most of the white sorghum and cassava processed by this project (Anthony can correct me if I'm wrong) will be used for making alcohol, which could cause negative externalities through increasing alcohol production or reducing price, although this is hard to measure.
There could also be more local brewing as well using these crops.
Anthony what do you think about this potential negative to selling sorghum to the alcohol companies?
@Thomas Kwa in my eyes this is a hugely insightful (perhaps even spectacular) response, thanks for taking the time to think about it and write it. Perhaps consder writing a full post with these kinds of insights about benefits of CEAs.
That is If you can stomach spending more time away from your real job making sure that we still exist in 50 years to even talk about GHD ;).
"Most charities seem much less effective than the most effective for-profit organizations"
This is a big discussion but I would be interested to see you justify this. I would say many of the biggest GHD achievements and much important work is driven by not for profit organizations like charities and government (global vaccine alliance, university research institutions etc) but obviously it's a complicated discussion.
Obviously a market economy drives much of it, but I consider this more the water we swim in rather than the capitalist system doing the good itself.
I would be interested to hear the for profit businesses which you think are counterfactually doing the most good on the margins