Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities.
Charity doesn’t change the nature of the dysfunctional and destructive. It only restructures the reward system so that the dysfunctional and the destructive is rewarded, and the functional and constructive is penalized.
A person who does this willingly is, I am sad to say, stupid. You are only supposed to do this if people force you at gunpoint (taxes), and even then it’s more patriotic to flee.
You should reward people for doing the right thing—providing a quality product or service—not for when they fail miserably.
Please clarify. The article you link to is sensible, yet I do not see what part of it is at odds with what I wrote.
I am essentially saying that charity is harmful because the cost-benefit calculation comes out negative when charity is used outside of the context in which it works (a small, closely knit social group).
It seems like a drastic overgeneralization to say that the cost-benefit calculation will always come out negative when charity is used outside of that context.
For instance, I’m sympathetic to your argument when applied to giving money to a homeless person in my neighborhood who looks like they might buy liquor with it, far less so when you denounce efforts to aid starving people in countries that remain poor after having been essentially pillaged by my ancestors and yours. How are these people “dysfunctional and destructive”?
It’s important to distinguish between economic aid and public health aid. Economic aid seems to have failed to have any dramatic effects on per capita GDP, while public health aid has drastically extended lifespans and reduced infant mortality in Africa and elsewhere. Bill Easterly, the leading critic of ‘foreign aid’ spends hundreds of pages critiquing World Bank type economic aid and very briefly mentions that public health aid (one bright spot) has saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is the latter that groups like GiveWell and the Gates Foundation identify as offering value. Controlling malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc offer very large benefits to the recipients, success is comparatively easy to measure, and are less subject to theft (thieves can only use so many malaria drugs).
Africans do mostly feed themselves. Most countries (and regions of the U.S., for that matter) don’t make their own medicines, they buy them. When will poor countries or people in poor countries buy all those drugs themselves in adequate quantity (although note that rich country governments paid for mass vaccination and treatment of infectious diseases, as well as eradication of disease vectors, since reducing infectious disease has big externalities and is a public good)? China and India have undergone significant development, but certainly Africa has some additional problems facing it. It looks unlikely that Africa will surge forward (although there has been some growth in the last decade) in a sustained way in the near future, but there remain various possibilities for change, and in the long-term technology should radically change the game.
Quoting from that site’s front page about the book’s author: “Dambisa is a Patron for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a hedge fund supported children’s charity.”
I take it that she does not disapprove of all aid? I can readily imagine that there are indeed harmful forms of aid (e.g. that gets intercepted by corrupt governments).
My preferred form of aid would in fact be in the area of education, because you can only be a self-reliant adult if you’re given in childhood the memes required for self-reliance. Aid that does allow people to bootstrap out of aid.
If I cure one person of TB, who would otherwise die, and the patient goes on to have several decades of happy life, I have solved a problem. That’s so even if the patient isn’t turned into a rich-country computer programmer whose kids never get sick.
This is like attacking the idea of working at a job to buy food for yourself: since you’ll just get hungry again later it’s not a solution to the problem of your hunger.
If it makes one happy to go around and cure people of TB, then one should by all means do so. However, I do not perceive this as significantly different, or more valuable, than running a huge animal shelter, if the recipient of aid doesn’t pay you back. As with an animal shelter, you are expending external resources to maintain something for the sake of it. Doing so does not contribute towards creating resources. It is a form of indulgence, not investment.
So valuable_denisbider charity is charity that is a profitable investment for denisbider? Or profitable for the giver? Even if the recipients were highly functional and creative thereafter?
If the recipients are highly functional and creative thereafter, they should make money. If they make money, even if you don’t want it, they can pay you back.
I do approve of charity which gives to things that do go on to create more than was invested. An example would be investing into basic research that isn’t going to pay off until decades later. Investing in that is, I think, one of the most commendable charitable acts.
Most charity, however, is not that. It is more so charitable indulgence; it is spending money on something that is emotionally appealing, but never provides a return; neither to the giver, nor to anyone else.
I despise the travesty of such acts being framed as morally valuable charity, rather than as an indulgent throwing of resources away.
Well, if you want to say that curing a TB patient to have a mostly happy life with low economic productivity in tradables is a despicable “travesty” and an “indulgent” waste of resources (and not because the return on investment could be used to do more good later), you can use words that way.
But in future it would be nice to make it plain when your bold conclusions about “cost-benefit analysis” depend so profoundly on normative choices like not caring about the lives or welfare of the powerless, rather than any interesting empirical considerations or arguments relevant to folk who do care.
No one is powerless unless they are physically or mentally incapacitated.
To give an example of someone who is physically incapacitated. A pig. He’s smart, but he doesn’t have thumbs and can’t speak. Are you out to help him?
For another example of someone who is mentally incapacitated. A chimpanzee. He has thumbs, but he’s not so bright. Are you out to help him?
If you believe that Africans are somehow physically or mentally incapacitated, then you should treat them much the same as you treat chimpanzees.
On the other hand, if you believe that they are not incapacitated, then they aren’t powerless. If they aren’t powerless, they can organize their community any way they like.
They haven’t yet created any highly functional societies over the past few decades, whereas many others have. So apparently, they’re either incapacitated (so proper treatment = same as chimps), or they’ve decided that their current situation is what they want.
Either way, foreign aid is inconsistent. Either we should be helping animals as much as we help Africans, or else, they are people who have the power to better themselves, and do not need aid.
Edited to add: Again, people downvoting, but nary a peep about why this logic is wrong. Focus on the essence, rather than the blasphemy? Anyone?
Sigh...
I think I’m just going to give up on this community. Good luck with your goals, everyone. ;)
Your analogy is flawed. We cannot spend a few dollars to ensure that a chimpanzee gains cognitive ability. We can spend a few dollars to ensure that someone with nutritional deficiencies or easily curable diseases has a vaccine or proper vitamins to substantially increase their IQ and ability to function. In which case, the “incapacitation” you refer to is actually a vicious cycle, a structural problem, that’s aid-solvable.
Also, there’s an enormous leap from “they’re not incapacitated… ” to “they can do whatever they want!”
Also, there’s an enormous leap from “they’re not incapacitated… ” to “they can do whatever they want!”
Yes.
In which case, the “incapacitation” you refer to is actually a vicious cycle, a structural problem, that’s aid-solvable.
Surely some part of it reflects such positive feedbacks, but not obviously all. E.g. public health aid is not very well-suited to overthrowing kleptocrats and replacing them with efficient institutions, or changing cultural norms.
Also, note that there has been a Flynn Effect in Africa too, and it’s one of the only regions of the world that still lacks broad iodization of salt, and thus suffers from the associated IQ deficiencies and retardation. Likewise for iron..
Edited to add: Again, people downvoting, but nary a peep about why this logic is wrong. Focus on the essence, rather than the blasphemy? Anyone?
Sigh...
I think I’m just going to give up on this community. Good luck with your goals, everyone. ;)
Firstly, I am not obligated to tell you why I downvote.
Secondly, it is hard to justify responding to a comment like this. The amount of clarifying questions I need to ask to fully understand how your examples relate to the point requires more effort than I want to expend.
As best as I can tell, this is the crux of your point:
If you believe that Africans are somehow physically or mentally incapacitated, then you should treat them much the same as you treat chimpanzees.
On the other hand, if you believe that they are not incapacitated, then they aren’t powerless. If they aren’t powerless, they can organize their community any way they like.
If we narrow the field from Africa to someone unjustly imprisoned, should we help them? The point of this question is to clarify whether there is a difference between someone who is powerless and someone who has the potential for power. It makes no implicit claim on whether we should help Africa.
This is similar to Rain’s comment about spending a few dollars on chimp cognition.
Haiti and Africa are not the way they are because anyone pillaged them. You need to read types of books you do not want to read, or try to live among them for a while, to get a glimpse of the nature of their dysfunction.
Or ask yourself this question. Many Asian countries are poor, but among them, some are marvelously prosperous. How come, though, there is no Singapore of African descent?
I’m not claiming great knowledge of either region, but I did read Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, for instance, which seems to broadly answer your question about an African Singapore. If you have an alternate theory, I’m interested in seeing specifics.
We seem to have strayed a fair bit from your general assertion about charity being always negative outside of a narrow context.
I didn’t read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. My impression is that Diamond discusses the reasons why civilization developed in Europe (rather than elsewhere) in the past. The synopsis on Wikipedia does not, however, discuss anything relevant to why Africa has been unable to pick up civilization after it has already been developed. Are you aware of a synopsis of Diamond’s argument that addresses specifically that?
I gave the example of Singapore specifically because it is a country that grew from virtually nothing to prosperity in a matter of decades. Japan and Taiwan could also be used as examples, and China is not faring too bad either. There are still a large number of countries in Asia that are dysfunctional, but many countries, some of them very large, have picked up the lessons of what works, and have applied them, or are now applying them, to create a functional civilization.
This, however, is not happening in Africa, nor in Caribbean (where independent), nor in the Philippines, nor in the Bronx—nor anywhere with a majority of largely African descent.
In all these places, the reverse process took place. The locals took control away from colonizing foreigners, and then instead of a proliferation of prosperity, it all broke down and fell apart. Why is that?
If you want to be shocked some more, follow an international news source such as BBC for a few years, and pay attention to news from Africa and the Caribbean. The pieces will fall in place in time.
You are definitely shifting the goal posts. Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
Comparing the above post to your original comment, one has to wonder why you didn’t start there.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I don’t believe that I’m shifting the goal posts; I stand behind both my original comment and the one above. They are different aspects of a greater concept.
Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
That’s part of what I’m saying. It should also not be directed towards the homeless and other failures.
I am in favor of a social net for those who are legitimately out of luck and soon regain gainful employment.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Some of that “data” is hard to take seriously when you come across quotes such as the following:
Upon reading the original reference, we found that the “data point” that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was actually the mean IQ of a group of Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain.
There’s a similar issue with the next lowest IQ on the list, and when you learn that the greater portion of the “country IQ” figures were obtained by averaging IQ data from nearby countries, you see how this kind of data quality issue could have contaminated the entire data set. But say I am inclined to take the data seriously and dismiss a few mistakes. This is from Wikipedia’s page on “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” by Lynn and Vanhanen:
The authors believe that average IQ differences between nations are due to both genetic and economic factors. They also believe that low GDP can cause low IQ, just as low IQ can cause low GDP. [...] The authors write that it is the ethical responsibility of rich, high-IQ nations to financially assist poor, low-IQ nations, as it is the responsibility of rich citizens to assist the poor.
IOW, the authors whose work justifies your conclusions arrive at more or less opposite conclusions from yours. You’re seeing a correlation, and assuming a causation in one direction, without (so far as I can see) a proper argument for that direction. Since this is one of the classic mistakes people are warned against in the sciences, I’ll maintain my skeptical attitude until you adress my actual arguments.
When you do, please take into account how cognitive abilities actually develop (i.e. if you’re fed, healthy and go to school you’ll end up smarter than if you’re starving, sick and nobody ever talks to you, and the former is more likely in a rich country).
I disagree, my current best estimate is the low 80s. The main reasons for this is various factors like parasites lowering IQ and lingering iodine and micro nutrient deficiencies have been empirically demonstrated to have measurable impacts on cognition and these factors are a bigger problem in Africa than elsewhere. Another reason is the analysis of other authors who tried to disprove his claims by using other tricks to try to infer g and the equivalent IQ (but could only rig the IQs up to the high 80s).
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
Why stop at Africa then? Shouldn’t we invest billions in animal shelters, so that dogs and cats can live long lives until we find a way to bypass their genetic disadvantage? Wouldn’t those be just as “massive benefits”?
And there’s no need to be smug.
Perhaps it came across as smugness, but I do find that every piece of news I see, either from South Africa, or from Haiti, or from Nigeria, or from Zimbabwe, or from Turks and Caicos, just adds to the pile of evidence.
Also, I myself live in a place like that. Which is why I suggest (in all seriousness!) that people should consider visiting a country like South Africa for a while.
There’s no better cure for academic distance than direct contact with the hard facts on the ground.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment. The Dickens-Flynn model explains how to reconcile the Flynn effect and heritability increasing with age: gene-environment interactions, suggesting that any genetic difference would be amplified by feedback environmental effects. Even Jensen gives a chunk of the gaps to environment.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment.
I wouldn’t say so. I think it shows that genes for higher IQ are inherited dominantly.
This has also been proposed as an explanation for the Flynn effect—whole countries getting “smarter” over time—being due to the gene pool mixing more in cities, and thus with dominant pro-IQ genes gaining ground.
The same mechanism has been proposed for the increasing height.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
See, that’s fine with me. You want to indulge in X because you like it, not because of rationalization Y or Z. Just like I want to indulge in chocolate. That’s fine with me.
I just don’t like the claim that it is morally superior. Or that it’s something everyone should do. Or that it’s how resources “should” be spent. If it is an indulgence, though, then indulgences are fine with me.
Btw, I’m just going to interject and say that this conversation has been done at Hacker News many times and it never really goes anywhere. I’m going to wait five years until more genome wide association studies are done before I try to enter this argument again. It seems obvious to me that there are some genetic differences in intelligence, but it’s a touchy enough subject that I don’t feel it’s worth entering an argument based on individual interpretations of incomplete evidence.
Regardless, I advise not talking about the idea now. If it’s true large genomics studies will conclusively indicate that in the next few years without harming anyone’s reputations today. If it’s false, one will have avoided reputational costs as well as stoking racism.
That depends on what you mean by proven nonexistent. There are differences between the populations of black and white Americans in terms of what results you get if you measure their intelligence. There are also explanations for those differences that don’t involve any inherent differences in intelligence.
Also worthy of note: whatever IQ measures, second and third-generation immigrants to First World nations from Third World ones have more and more of it.
Yet at least in the case of those of African ancestry don’t seem to ever catch up. Those of East Asian ancestry don’t seem to ever drop to European levels either. It makes perfect sense that lower exposure to parasites and better nutrition will boost IQs for quite some time. Since stupid people generally earn less, this means their children get to enjoy fewer of the benefits of a good envrionment.
Remember even Lynn, Jensen, ect., the scientists favouring the hereditarian hypothesis consider a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors to best match their data. Their opponents claim it is nearly all envrionment.
I’m pretty much certain Askenazi Jews are smarter than gentile Europeans because of genetics. I’m also very certain that East Asians are smarter than Europeans because of genetics. The IQs of these groups have been measured in environments that appear to be as optimal as we can make them.
I’m not so sure where South Asian and Middle Eastern IQs would lie under 1st world conditions but if I had to make a guess I’d say the difference in intelligence is probably comparable to the difference between Europeans and Asians, putting their average somewhere in the mid 90s.
I’m also unsure how much of this low IQ is just the result of inbreeding, which is something “easily” fixed. It seems very plausible that the European vs. Middle Eastern gap can entirely be explained by different levels of inbreeding.
African IQs until quite recently seemed very firmly and robustly one standard deviation (15 points) below the European average, but there’s recently been some strange educational achievement data from the UK, which suggests the difference may be as low as half a standard deviation. Low 90s quite honestly seems a stretch considering all the other data though, so my best estimate is in the 80s. Which also happens to be about right considering educational attainment of second generation immigrants elsewhere in Europe and African Americans.
Do you have any reason to believe Lynn is a racist, or is that just a knee-jerk reaction? Lynn is too contrarian and I am too unqualified to agree or disagree with him, but I believe his work is done in good faith. At the very least, it’s unreasonable to label any research into race and intelligence ‘racist’ just because you don’t like the conclusions.
Claims about race and intelligence are racist. They suppose that race is a relevant factor to consider. I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
I will also give a dismissive “boo phrenology” to anyone posting a link to a book that talks about the relationship between intelligence and lumps on one’s skull. It deserves no further comment.
It is impossible to draw a clear line between races, but it is also impossible to draw a clear line between colors of the visual spectrum, and yet “red” and “blue” exist. For a non-IQ related example, people of Ashkenazim heritage are known to be at risk for certain genetic issues, while people of African heritage are known to be exposed to heart-related risks.
The concept of race (or any other word that symbolizes this concept) is statistically significant and useful—more so in countries that are much more homogeneous than the USA.
I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you. If you don’t think there are genetic differences between, say, Northern Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, you are literally blind. They obviously belong to groups that evolved in different directions. That does not have to include intelligence, but it’s not reasonable to refuse to consider a hypothesis just because you find it repugnant.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you.
That isn’t what it means. It’s a useful shorthand for nothing, or at least nothing of worth. If you’re referring to a particular clade, for instance, don’t use the word “race” to differentiate that clade. That’s just using the word wrong.
You know the history here right? These bogus definitions were crafted by humanities scholars to have empty extensions so that the scholars could claim that the biologists and ordinary folk were using the words (with their ordinary meanings) illegitimately. It’s like if I suddenly redefined ‘atheism’ to mean ‘the worship of 4-sided triangles’ and started browbeating atheists for their confusion.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently, namely that phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc). Are they misusing words?
I find Flynn and Nisbett’s position unconvincing. Asians are obviously different and were heavily discriminated against, yet have integrated in America regardless, and now have comparable or better outcomes. There must be a more substantial reason why Africans haven’t done the same, and the most plausible reason so far for me is genetics.
Pretty much the one major argument against genetics is that people just don’t want this to be the case, because it’s one of the least hopeful explanations. But this is bias. Once you eliminate it, it becomes strikingly evident what the most likely explanation is.
Flynn and Nisbett think that Asians have better cultures in this respect (cultures are passed down from parent to child, and note that the transracial adoption studies, the most powerful evidence have had mixed results) and Africans worse. Note that Asian-American kids lag in IQ before they enter school (when their parents talk less to them than white Americans) but then surge ahead after entering school, as their parents put intense pressure on them to learn and succeed. Also Asian-Americans are much more successful educationally and professionally than their IQs would predict.
Good points. But then why don’t African Americans perform much better when adopted and raised by non-African parents? If it’s about parent pressure, then an African American kid adopted by Asian parents should perform at about Asian level. Why do they not?
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
Agreed. More data would be nice.
I am open to a different explanation, it’s just that the genetic one seems most compatible with what I do know at this time.
Seeing a prosperous and competent country arising out of Africa would surely be nice. I would prefer living in a universe like that. It’s just that I don’t see it happening—regardless of the aid—at this time.
phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc).
This in itself does not use the mal-formed concept of “race”. I have no problem with assessing genetic influences on intelligence.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently … Are they misusing words?
I’m not aware of a simple, accessible guide to the history of science regarding race. The AAA Statement on “Race” seems to disagree with me, claiming that the concept of “race” was based on bad philosophy and political motivations instead of bad science.
The AAA is at odds with biologists, esp. geneticists, and that statement is the result of heavy politicization. The philosophers and anthropologists (among others) have used a silly strategy to attack research on group differences, by assigning bogus meaning to the word race and pretending that there is no such thing. Neven Sesardic is a philosopher with some good (in the journal Philosophy of Science, etc) articles on the subject, and reveals the blatant dishonesty of some of the philosophical misrepresentations on the subject:
I disagree with him on the proper stance to take on the word “race”, but I doubt our disagreement goes any deeper than that. At the end of the day, my feeling on the matter probably does have more to do with politics than linguistics.
Seems like a funny link, I’ve watched a bit of it and will continue to watch it.
But comparing the per capita GDP of $7,000 in Mauritius, vs $39,000 in Singapore...? Granted, $7,000 in Mauritius is more than $270 in Zimbabwe, but still.
The difference remains similar in PPP terms.
Also, about 2⁄3 of the Mauritius population appear to be Asian.
[C]harity is harmful because the cost-benefit calculation comes out negative when charity is used outside of the context in which it works (a small, closely knit social group).
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Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities. [...] A person who does this willingly is, I am sad to say, stupid.
Which is more functional and creative: A child who gets vaccinated at the nearby clinic, or the same child getting polio and losing the use of their legs because there was no nearby clinic.
Your portrayal of charity is accurate if you look at what you get if you try to vote for charity, but it is not an accurate description of the best charities that have been discussed in this thread.
Which is more functional and creative: a community that leverages its own potential and builds its own clinic, or a community that relies on outsiders to provide that clinic?
Which is more functional: An investment that leverages its own potential and uses its own resources, or an investment that leverages the resources of outsiders?
A good investment is a good investment, regardless of where the resources are coming from. Bickering about which investments are better than others is fine and should be done, but I am not willing to write off all investments in others simply because they are unable to come up with the resources on their own.
Communities where the latter is an option are not prime targets for the project I was referring to. If you’re in a poor community, scattered over a large swath of rural Africa, and the first thing you need to do to get a clinic is to build a few thousand klicks of road to someplace where you can get vaccines, what potential do you think that you can leverage to get that done?
Looks like you’re just going to have to build that road then.
You are focusing on the immediate needs of people now, whereas I am focusing on the dysfunctionality that’s going to continue into the future.
Freebies from the Western world aren’t going to improve the lot of Africa. The only way their lot can be sustainably improved is by them reorganizing the way their communities work. No outsider can do that, and if they don’t, no amount of external aid will help.
How about a community that, thanks to charity-delivered polio vaccines 20 years ago, has the potential to build its own infrastructure (and the motivation, since, at the time under discussion, charity efforts have been redirected towards communities with higher incidence of polio)?
Cost-benefit calculations are about contingent facts, which may be different in different cases; they do not indict the very nature of activities such as charity. I too value that which is functional and creative, and I agree that simply giving people money creates harmful incentive problems, but that just means that specific charitable programs must be carefully evaluated for their actual effectiveness. Money is indeed a useful mechanism, but this doesn’t mean that the default market outcome is the best possible; it would be awfully strange if deliberate altruism had no power whatsoever.
I think cost-benefit calculations usually take this kind of form. You know, “X is net bad under specific conditions A and B which usually obtain, unless C; however, ancillary considerations D, E, and F; therefore recommend Y until we get better evidence.” Not: “X is bad and you’re stupid for supporting it.” Policy debates should not &c.
That is generally true. In extreme cases, however, things can get near black and white. The case I was responding to does seem such an extreme case to me.
I.e. if one is a Randian Objectivist who redraws the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way so that libertarian policies are always morally best no matter what. This is exactly the sort of antics discussed in the article I linked. These are not broadly shared normative assumptions here and, as Robin Hanson says the resulting statements are boring. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand Objectivists and axiomatic libertarians can predict the forthcoming normative exclamations and the bottom-line reasoning in favor of certain pre-ordained conclusions, regardless of the empirical evidence.
I hardly think that linking to Robin Hanson is a good way to backup a criticism that someone is ‘redrawing the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way’. Robin Hanson’s ethics/moral concerns are among the most unusual I’ve encountered.
I also think it is worth noting that although utilitarianism remains a bafflingly (to me) popular ethical position around here it is very unusual in the broader population. Broadly libertarian ethics are probably less unusual in the general population than strict utilitarian ethics.
I’m pretty sure the prevailing view here is actually some sort of consequentialist egoism, not utilitarianism in a sense recognizable to an ethicist. Planning a top-level post about that.
I’d rather see a definition than a label. Calling it ‘consequentialist egoism rather than utilitarianism’ is perhaps useful to professional or enthusiast ethical philosophers, but it doesn’t convey much information to me. A list of properties used in the ethical system would be far more useful.
I’m not a Randian Objectivist, nor do I insist on everything leading to libertarian policies.
You seem to have misinterpreted me based on a preconceived notion of what other things are usually said by people who say this sort of thing. But I’m not one of those people.
Charity doesn’t change the nature of the dysfunctional and destructive.
I think this is where your argument goes off the rails. Sometimes, possibly even most of the time, it’s true, but I doubt it’s always true. For example, I have a hard time seeing how it is true of GiveWell’s four top-rated charities. The implication is that before giving to charity, one should assess whether the money will be put to good use; I doubt that sentiment is controversial around here.
If I derive joy from helping people in need then you could view that process as part of a very specialised industry.
In this view I am not really paying to alleviate suffering, I am paying to make myself feel better but may in fact help others as a by-product.
This suggests that a large proportion of efforts devoted to charity would be fairly inefficient as “makes me feel better” doesn’t necessarily equate with “helps people”, nevertheless it is still “productive” as it is producing a sense of well being among the givers.
Yes, but charity is not without external consequence.
The continuous rewarding of the dysfunctional does have long term effects, which I believe are negative on balance.
The reason we evolved empathy is for cohesion with our immediate social group, where our empathy is balanced with everyone keeping track of everyone else, and an effective sense of group fairness.
But this only works within our immediate social group. Charity towards complete strangers is harmful because it is not balanced with fairness.
To balance our economic interactions outside the immediate social group that we can monitor, we already have a functioning system that’s fair and encourages constructive behavior.
You should reward people for doing the right thing—providing a quality product or service—not for when they fail miserably.
That’s not the only valuable thing, or rule for action. You should also help people when they are suffering and you are able. This definition:
Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities.
You should also help people when they are suffering and you are able.
Quite the opposite. Most suffering is self-inflicted, and as such is a reminder that you need to learn a lesson. External help removes the suffering and makes it seem as though no lesson needs to be learned. This perpetuates the cycle and leads to more suffering.
Leaving aside my usual objection to schools, one should help one’s kids do their homework.
That said, it seems like your example is chosen specifically to sound paternalistic, which seems at odds with the free-market view you’re espousing.
Most suffering is self-inflicted
I dispute that, but don’t have relevant numbers. If your friend falls and breaks his leg, is that “self-inflicted”? Is it best to bring him to the hospital, or to leave him crying on the ground so he can learn something?
If your friend falls and breaks his leg, is that “self-inflicted”? Is it best to bring him to the hospital, or to leave him crying on the ground so he can learn something?
It seems that for some countries, falling accidentally is pandemic, while other countries rationally attempt to avoid it? Isn’t this comment willfully ignoring the analogy denisbider was using?
Charity is the process of taking purchasing power away from functional, creative individuals and communities, and giving it to dysfunctional, destructive individuals and communities.
Charity doesn’t change the nature of the dysfunctional and destructive. It only restructures the reward system so that the dysfunctional and the destructive is rewarded, and the functional and constructive is penalized.
A person who does this willingly is, I am sad to say, stupid. You are only supposed to do this if people force you at gunpoint (taxes), and even then it’s more patriotic to flee.
You should reward people for doing the right thing—providing a quality product or service—not for when they fail miserably.
Obligatory Less Wrong link.
Please clarify. The article you link to is sensible, yet I do not see what part of it is at odds with what I wrote.
I am essentially saying that charity is harmful because the cost-benefit calculation comes out negative when charity is used outside of the context in which it works (a small, closely knit social group).
It seems like a drastic overgeneralization to say that the cost-benefit calculation will always come out negative when charity is used outside of that context.
For instance, I’m sympathetic to your argument when applied to giving money to a homeless person in my neighborhood who looks like they might buy liquor with it, far less so when you denounce efforts to aid starving people in countries that remain poor after having been essentially pillaged by my ancestors and yours. How are these people “dysfunctional and destructive”?
If you are interested in understanding the case against aid to Africa, I’d suggest reading Dead Aid.
It’s important to distinguish between economic aid and public health aid. Economic aid seems to have failed to have any dramatic effects on per capita GDP, while public health aid has drastically extended lifespans and reduced infant mortality in Africa and elsewhere. Bill Easterly, the leading critic of ‘foreign aid’ spends hundreds of pages critiquing World Bank type economic aid and very briefly mentions that public health aid (one bright spot) has saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is the latter that groups like GiveWell and the Gates Foundation identify as offering value. Controlling malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc offer very large benefits to the recipients, success is comparatively easy to measure, and are less subject to theft (thieves can only use so many malaria drugs).
Good points. But when are they going to start feeding themselves and making their own medicines?
Africans do mostly feed themselves. Most countries (and regions of the U.S., for that matter) don’t make their own medicines, they buy them. When will poor countries or people in poor countries buy all those drugs themselves in adequate quantity (although note that rich country governments paid for mass vaccination and treatment of infectious diseases, as well as eradication of disease vectors, since reducing infectious disease has big externalities and is a public good)? China and India have undergone significant development, but certainly Africa has some additional problems facing it. It looks unlikely that Africa will surge forward (although there has been some growth in the last decade) in a sustained way in the near future, but there remain various possibilities for change, and in the long-term technology should radically change the game.
Quoting from that site’s front page about the book’s author: “Dambisa is a Patron for Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), a hedge fund supported children’s charity.”
I take it that she does not disapprove of all aid? I can readily imagine that there are indeed harmful forms of aid (e.g. that gets intercepted by corrupt governments).
My preferred form of aid would in fact be in the area of education, because you can only be a self-reliant adult if you’re given in childhood the memes required for self-reliance. Aid that does allow people to bootstrap out of aid.
Aid in health care and education would in fact be the best way if the problem was something that can be solved with health care and education.
If I cure one person of TB, who would otherwise die, and the patient goes on to have several decades of happy life, I have solved a problem. That’s so even if the patient isn’t turned into a rich-country computer programmer whose kids never get sick.
This is like attacking the idea of working at a job to buy food for yourself: since you’ll just get hungry again later it’s not a solution to the problem of your hunger.
If it makes one happy to go around and cure people of TB, then one should by all means do so. However, I do not perceive this as significantly different, or more valuable, than running a huge animal shelter, if the recipient of aid doesn’t pay you back. As with an animal shelter, you are expending external resources to maintain something for the sake of it. Doing so does not contribute towards creating resources. It is a form of indulgence, not investment.
So valuable_denisbider charity is charity that is a profitable investment for denisbider? Or profitable for the giver? Even if the recipients were highly functional and creative thereafter?
If the recipients are highly functional and creative thereafter, they should make money. If they make money, even if you don’t want it, they can pay you back.
I do approve of charity which gives to things that do go on to create more than was invested. An example would be investing into basic research that isn’t going to pay off until decades later. Investing in that is, I think, one of the most commendable charitable acts.
Most charity, however, is not that. It is more so charitable indulgence; it is spending money on something that is emotionally appealing, but never provides a return; neither to the giver, nor to anyone else.
I despise the travesty of such acts being framed as morally valuable charity, rather than as an indulgent throwing of resources away.
Well, if you want to say that curing a TB patient to have a mostly happy life with low economic productivity in tradables is a despicable “travesty” and an “indulgent” waste of resources (and not because the return on investment could be used to do more good later), you can use words that way.
But in future it would be nice to make it plain when your bold conclusions about “cost-benefit analysis” depend so profoundly on normative choices like not caring about the lives or welfare of the powerless, rather than any interesting empirical considerations or arguments relevant to folk who do care.
No one is powerless unless they are physically or mentally incapacitated.
To give an example of someone who is physically incapacitated. A pig. He’s smart, but he doesn’t have thumbs and can’t speak. Are you out to help him?
For another example of someone who is mentally incapacitated. A chimpanzee. He has thumbs, but he’s not so bright. Are you out to help him?
If you believe that Africans are somehow physically or mentally incapacitated, then you should treat them much the same as you treat chimpanzees.
On the other hand, if you believe that they are not incapacitated, then they aren’t powerless. If they aren’t powerless, they can organize their community any way they like.
They haven’t yet created any highly functional societies over the past few decades, whereas many others have. So apparently, they’re either incapacitated (so proper treatment = same as chimps), or they’ve decided that their current situation is what they want.
Either way, foreign aid is inconsistent. Either we should be helping animals as much as we help Africans, or else, they are people who have the power to better themselves, and do not need aid.
Edited to add: Again, people downvoting, but nary a peep about why this logic is wrong. Focus on the essence, rather than the blasphemy? Anyone?
Sigh...
I think I’m just going to give up on this community. Good luck with your goals, everyone. ;)
Your analogy is flawed. We cannot spend a few dollars to ensure that a chimpanzee gains cognitive ability. We can spend a few dollars to ensure that someone with nutritional deficiencies or easily curable diseases has a vaccine or proper vitamins to substantially increase their IQ and ability to function. In which case, the “incapacitation” you refer to is actually a vicious cycle, a structural problem, that’s aid-solvable.
Also, there’s an enormous leap from “they’re not incapacitated… ” to “they can do whatever they want!”
Yes.
Surely some part of it reflects such positive feedbacks, but not obviously all. E.g. public health aid is not very well-suited to overthrowing kleptocrats and replacing them with efficient institutions, or changing cultural norms.
Also, note that there has been a Flynn Effect in Africa too, and it’s one of the only regions of the world that still lacks broad iodization of salt, and thus suffers from the associated IQ deficiencies and retardation. Likewise for iron..
Firstly, I am not obligated to tell you why I downvote.
Secondly, it is hard to justify responding to a comment like this. The amount of clarifying questions I need to ask to fully understand how your examples relate to the point requires more effort than I want to expend.
As best as I can tell, this is the crux of your point:
If we narrow the field from Africa to someone unjustly imprisoned, should we help them? The point of this question is to clarify whether there is a difference between someone who is powerless and someone who has the potential for power. It makes no implicit claim on whether we should help Africa.
This is similar to Rain’s comment about spending a few dollars on chimp cognition.
Haiti and Africa are not the way they are because anyone pillaged them. You need to read types of books you do not want to read, or try to live among them for a while, to get a glimpse of the nature of their dysfunction.
Or ask yourself this question. Many Asian countries are poor, but among them, some are marvelously prosperous. How come, though, there is no Singapore of African descent?
Book pointers welcome.
I’m not claiming great knowledge of either region, but I did read Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, for instance, which seems to broadly answer your question about an African Singapore. If you have an alternate theory, I’m interested in seeing specifics.
We seem to have strayed a fair bit from your general assertion about charity being always negative outside of a narrow context.
I didn’t read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. My impression is that Diamond discusses the reasons why civilization developed in Europe (rather than elsewhere) in the past. The synopsis on Wikipedia does not, however, discuss anything relevant to why Africa has been unable to pick up civilization after it has already been developed. Are you aware of a synopsis of Diamond’s argument that addresses specifically that?
I gave the example of Singapore specifically because it is a country that grew from virtually nothing to prosperity in a matter of decades. Japan and Taiwan could also be used as examples, and China is not faring too bad either. There are still a large number of countries in Asia that are dysfunctional, but many countries, some of them very large, have picked up the lessons of what works, and have applied them, or are now applying them, to create a functional civilization.
This, however, is not happening in Africa, nor in Caribbean (where independent), nor in the Philippines, nor in the Bronx—nor anywhere with a majority of largely African descent.
In all these places, the reverse process took place. The locals took control away from colonizing foreigners, and then instead of a proliferation of prosperity, it all broke down and fell apart. Why is that?
The short answer is: their average IQ is 70.
The long answer is:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/159368021X
If you want to be shocked some more, follow an international news source such as BBC for a few years, and pay attention to news from Africa and the Caribbean. The pieces will fall in place in time.
You are definitely shifting the goal posts. Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
Comparing the above post to your original comment, one has to wonder why you didn’t start there.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I don’t believe that I’m shifting the goal posts; I stand behind both my original comment and the one above. They are different aspects of a greater concept.
That’s part of what I’m saying. It should also not be directed towards the homeless and other failures.
I am in favor of a social net for those who are legitimately out of luck and soon regain gainful employment.
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Some of that “data” is hard to take seriously when you come across quotes such as the following:
There’s a similar issue with the next lowest IQ on the list, and when you learn that the greater portion of the “country IQ” figures were obtained by averaging IQ data from nearby countries, you see how this kind of data quality issue could have contaminated the entire data set. But say I am inclined to take the data seriously and dismiss a few mistakes. This is from Wikipedia’s page on “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” by Lynn and Vanhanen:
IOW, the authors whose work justifies your conclusions arrive at more or less opposite conclusions from yours. You’re seeing a correlation, and assuming a causation in one direction, without (so far as I can see) a proper argument for that direction. Since this is one of the classic mistakes people are warned against in the sciences, I’ll maintain my skeptical attitude until you adress my actual arguments.
When you do, please take into account how cognitive abilities actually develop (i.e. if you’re fed, healthy and go to school you’ll end up smarter than if you’re starving, sick and nobody ever talks to you, and the former is more likely in a rich country).
I disagree, my current best estimate is the low 80s. The main reasons for this is various factors like parasites lowering IQ and lingering iodine and micro nutrient deficiencies have been empirically demonstrated to have measurable impacts on cognition and these factors are a bigger problem in Africa than elsewhere. Another reason is the analysis of other authors who tried to disprove his claims by using other tricks to try to infer g and the equivalent IQ (but could only rig the IQs up to the high 80s).
Why is this answer down voted?
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
And there’s no need to be smug.
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Why stop at Africa then? Shouldn’t we invest billions in animal shelters, so that dogs and cats can live long lives until we find a way to bypass their genetic disadvantage? Wouldn’t those be just as “massive benefits”?
Perhaps it came across as smugness, but I do find that every piece of news I see, either from South Africa, or from Haiti, or from Nigeria, or from Zimbabwe, or from Turks and Caicos, just adds to the pile of evidence.
Also, I myself live in a place like that. Which is why I suggest (in all seriousness!) that people should consider visiting a country like South Africa for a while.
There’s no better cure for academic distance than direct contact with the hard facts on the ground.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment. The Dickens-Flynn model explains how to reconcile the Flynn effect and heritability increasing with age: gene-environment interactions, suggesting that any genetic difference would be amplified by feedback environmental effects. Even Jensen gives a chunk of the gaps to environment.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
I wouldn’t say so. I think it shows that genes for higher IQ are inherited dominantly.
This has also been proposed as an explanation for the Flynn effect—whole countries getting “smarter” over time—being due to the gene pool mixing more in cities, and thus with dominant pro-IQ genes gaining ground.
The same mechanism has been proposed for the increasing height.
See, that’s fine with me. You want to indulge in X because you like it, not because of rationalization Y or Z. Just like I want to indulge in chocolate. That’s fine with me.
I just don’t like the claim that it is morally superior. Or that it’s something everyone should do. Or that it’s how resources “should” be spent. If it is an indulgence, though, then indulgences are fine with me.
Btw, I’m just going to interject and say that this conversation has been done at Hacker News many times and it never really goes anywhere. I’m going to wait five years until more genome wide association studies are done before I try to enter this argument again. It seems obvious to me that there are some genetic differences in intelligence, but it’s a touchy enough subject that I don’t feel it’s worth entering an argument based on individual interpretations of incomplete evidence.
I thought racial disparity in IQ was proven to be minimal or nonexistent?
Cases so thoroughly closed tend not to have Wikipedia pages that look like this.
Regardless, I advise not talking about the idea now. If it’s true large genomics studies will conclusively indicate that in the next few years without harming anyone’s reputations today. If it’s false, one will have avoided reputational costs as well as stoking racism.
That depends on what you mean by proven nonexistent. There are differences between the populations of black and white Americans in terms of what results you get if you measure their intelligence. There are also explanations for those differences that don’t involve any inherent differences in intelligence.
Also worthy of note: whatever IQ measures, second and third-generation immigrants to First World nations from Third World ones have more and more of it.
Yet at least in the case of those of African ancestry don’t seem to ever catch up. Those of East Asian ancestry don’t seem to ever drop to European levels either. It makes perfect sense that lower exposure to parasites and better nutrition will boost IQs for quite some time. Since stupid people generally earn less, this means their children get to enjoy fewer of the benefits of a good envrionment.
Remember even Lynn, Jensen, ect., the scientists favouring the hereditarian hypothesis consider a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors to best match their data. Their opponents claim it is nearly all envrionment.
I’m pretty much certain Askenazi Jews are smarter than gentile Europeans because of genetics. I’m also very certain that East Asians are smarter than Europeans because of genetics. The IQs of these groups have been measured in environments that appear to be as optimal as we can make them.
I’m not so sure where South Asian and Middle Eastern IQs would lie under 1st world conditions but if I had to make a guess I’d say the difference in intelligence is probably comparable to the difference between Europeans and Asians, putting their average somewhere in the mid 90s.
I’m also unsure how much of this low IQ is just the result of inbreeding, which is something “easily” fixed. It seems very plausible that the European vs. Middle Eastern gap can entirely be explained by different levels of inbreeding.
African IQs until quite recently seemed very firmly and robustly one standard deviation (15 points) below the European average, but there’s recently been some strange educational achievement data from the UK, which suggests the difference may be as low as half a standard deviation. Low 90s quite honestly seems a stretch considering all the other data though, so my best estimate is in the 80s. Which also happens to be about right considering educational attainment of second generation immigrants elsewhere in Europe and African Americans.
boo racism
(hooray beer)
Do you have any reason to believe Lynn is a racist, or is that just a knee-jerk reaction? Lynn is too contrarian and I am too unqualified to agree or disagree with him, but I believe his work is done in good faith. At the very least, it’s unreasonable to label any research into race and intelligence ‘racist’ just because you don’t like the conclusions.
Claims about race and intelligence are racist. They suppose that race is a relevant factor to consider. I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
I will also give a dismissive “boo phrenology” to anyone posting a link to a book that talks about the relationship between intelligence and lumps on one’s skull. It deserves no further comment.
It is impossible to draw a clear line between races, but it is also impossible to draw a clear line between colors of the visual spectrum, and yet “red” and “blue” exist. For a non-IQ related example, people of Ashkenazim heritage are known to be at risk for certain genetic issues, while people of African heritage are known to be exposed to heart-related risks.
The concept of race (or any other word that symbolizes this concept) is statistically significant and useful—more so in countries that are much more homogeneous than the USA.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you. If you don’t think there are genetic differences between, say, Northern Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, you are literally blind. They obviously belong to groups that evolved in different directions. That does not have to include intelligence, but it’s not reasonable to refuse to consider a hypothesis just because you find it repugnant.
That isn’t what it means. It’s a useful shorthand for nothing, or at least nothing of worth. If you’re referring to a particular clade, for instance, don’t use the word “race” to differentiate that clade. That’s just using the word wrong.
In the 19th century, such phrases as “the English race” or “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” were popular.
You know the history here right? These bogus definitions were crafted by humanities scholars to have empty extensions so that the scholars could claim that the biologists and ordinary folk were using the words (with their ordinary meanings) illegitimately. It’s like if I suddenly redefined ‘atheism’ to mean ‘the worship of 4-sided triangles’ and started browbeating atheists for their confusion.
I don’t take your characterization of the history as fact. I don’t have the resources to dispute it.
The articles and referrences thereof that I linked to cover include most sides of this debate.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently, namely that phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc). Are they misusing words?
I find Flynn and Nisbett’s position unconvincing. Asians are obviously different and were heavily discriminated against, yet have integrated in America regardless, and now have comparable or better outcomes. There must be a more substantial reason why Africans haven’t done the same, and the most plausible reason so far for me is genetics.
Pretty much the one major argument against genetics is that people just don’t want this to be the case, because it’s one of the least hopeful explanations. But this is bias. Once you eliminate it, it becomes strikingly evident what the most likely explanation is.
Flynn and Nisbett think that Asians have better cultures in this respect (cultures are passed down from parent to child, and note that the transracial adoption studies, the most powerful evidence have had mixed results) and Africans worse. Note that Asian-American kids lag in IQ before they enter school (when their parents talk less to them than white Americans) but then surge ahead after entering school, as their parents put intense pressure on them to learn and succeed. Also Asian-Americans are much more successful educationally and professionally than their IQs would predict.
Good points. But then why don’t African Americans perform much better when adopted and raised by non-African parents? If it’s about parent pressure, then an African American kid adopted by Asian parents should perform at about Asian level. Why do they not?
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
Agreed. More data would be nice.
I am open to a different explanation, it’s just that the genetic one seems most compatible with what I do know at this time.
Seeing a prosperous and competent country arising out of Africa would surely be nice. I would prefer living in a universe like that. It’s just that I don’t see it happening—regardless of the aid—at this time.
This in itself does not use the mal-formed concept of “race”. I have no problem with assessing genetic influences on intelligence.
No, they’re privileging the hypothesis
Source?
I’m not aware of a simple, accessible guide to the history of science regarding race. The AAA Statement on “Race” seems to disagree with me, claiming that the concept of “race” was based on bad philosophy and political motivations instead of bad science.
The AAA is at odds with biologists, esp. geneticists, and that statement is the result of heavy politicization. The philosophers and anthropologists (among others) have used a silly strategy to attack research on group differences, by assigning bogus meaning to the word race and pretending that there is no such thing. Neven Sesardic is a philosopher with some good (in the journal Philosophy of Science, etc) articles on the subject, and reveals the blatant dishonesty of some of the philosophical misrepresentations on the subject:
http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=Race.pdf http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=POS-2000.pdf
I disagree with him on the proper stance to take on the word “race”, but I doubt our disagreement goes any deeper than that. At the end of the day, my feeling on the matter probably does have more to do with politics than linguistics.
Mauritius?
Seems like a funny link, I’ve watched a bit of it and will continue to watch it.
But comparing the per capita GDP of $7,000 in Mauritius, vs $39,000 in Singapore...? Granted, $7,000 in Mauritius is more than $270 in Zimbabwe, but still.
The difference remains similar in PPP terms.
Also, about 2⁄3 of the Mauritius population appear to be Asian.
Hans Rosling has a ton of good presentations.
I don’t read these as equivalent:
.
I see it as equivalent if your cost-benefit calculation values that which is functional and creative.
Which is more functional and creative: A child who gets vaccinated at the nearby clinic, or the same child getting polio and losing the use of their legs because there was no nearby clinic.
Your portrayal of charity is accurate if you look at what you get if you try to vote for charity, but it is not an accurate description of the best charities that have been discussed in this thread.
I would say it depends on the child.
Which is more functional and creative: a community that leverages its own potential and builds its own clinic, or a community that relies on outsiders to provide that clinic?
Which is more functional: An investment that leverages its own potential and uses its own resources, or an investment that leverages the resources of outsiders?
A good investment is a good investment, regardless of where the resources are coming from. Bickering about which investments are better than others is fine and should be done, but I am not willing to write off all investments in others simply because they are unable to come up with the resources on their own.
Communities where the latter is an option are not prime targets for the project I was referring to. If you’re in a poor community, scattered over a large swath of rural Africa, and the first thing you need to do to get a clinic is to build a few thousand klicks of road to someplace where you can get vaccines, what potential do you think that you can leverage to get that done?
Also, have you actually been to Africa? I recommend visiting for a prolonged period several times. You might see it in a different perspective then.
Looks like you’re just going to have to build that road then.
You are focusing on the immediate needs of people now, whereas I am focusing on the dysfunctionality that’s going to continue into the future.
Freebies from the Western world aren’t going to improve the lot of Africa. The only way their lot can be sustainably improved is by them reorganizing the way their communities work. No outsider can do that, and if they don’t, no amount of external aid will help.
How about a community that, thanks to charity-delivered polio vaccines 20 years ago, has the potential to build its own infrastructure (and the motivation, since, at the time under discussion, charity efforts have been redirected towards communities with higher incidence of polio)?
Cost-benefit calculations are about contingent facts, which may be different in different cases; they do not indict the very nature of activities such as charity. I too value that which is functional and creative, and I agree that simply giving people money creates harmful incentive problems, but that just means that specific charitable programs must be carefully evaluated for their actual effectiveness. Money is indeed a useful mechanism, but this doesn’t mean that the default market outcome is the best possible; it would be awfully strange if deliberate altruism had no power whatsoever.
I think cost-benefit calculations usually take this kind of form. You know, “X is net bad under specific conditions A and B which usually obtain, unless C; however, ancillary considerations D, E, and F; therefore recommend Y until we get better evidence.” Not: “X is bad and you’re stupid for supporting it.” Policy debates should not &c.
That is generally true. In extreme cases, however, things can get near black and white. The case I was responding to does seem such an extreme case to me.
I.e. if one is a Randian Objectivist who redraws the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way so that libertarian policies are always morally best no matter what. This is exactly the sort of antics discussed in the article I linked. These are not broadly shared normative assumptions here and, as Robin Hanson says the resulting statements are boring. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand Objectivists and axiomatic libertarians can predict the forthcoming normative exclamations and the bottom-line reasoning in favor of certain pre-ordained conclusions, regardless of the empirical evidence.
I hardly think that linking to Robin Hanson is a good way to backup a criticism that someone is ‘redrawing the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way’. Robin Hanson’s ethics/moral concerns are among the most unusual I’ve encountered.
True.
I also think it is worth noting that although utilitarianism remains a bafflingly (to me) popular ethical position around here it is very unusual in the broader population. Broadly libertarian ethics are probably less unusual in the general population than strict utilitarian ethics.
I’m pretty sure the prevailing view here is actually some sort of consequentialist egoism, not utilitarianism in a sense recognizable to an ethicist. Planning a top-level post about that.
I’d rather see a definition than a label. Calling it ‘consequentialist egoism rather than utilitarianism’ is perhaps useful to professional or enthusiast ethical philosophers, but it doesn’t convey much information to me. A list of properties used in the ethical system would be far more useful.
Agreed. Thus the planned top-level post.
I’m not a Randian Objectivist, nor do I insist on everything leading to libertarian policies.
You seem to have misinterpreted me based on a preconceived notion of what other things are usually said by people who say this sort of thing. But I’m not one of those people.
And this unoriginal bashing of a view not represented here is also boring.
See here.
I think this is where your argument goes off the rails. Sometimes, possibly even most of the time, it’s true, but I doubt it’s always true. For example, I have a hard time seeing how it is true of GiveWell’s four top-rated charities. The implication is that before giving to charity, one should assess whether the money will be put to good use; I doubt that sentiment is controversial around here.
If I derive joy from helping people in need then you could view that process as part of a very specialised industry. In this view I am not really paying to alleviate suffering, I am paying to make myself feel better but may in fact help others as a by-product. This suggests that a large proportion of efforts devoted to charity would be fairly inefficient as “makes me feel better” doesn’t necessarily equate with “helps people”, nevertheless it is still “productive” as it is producing a sense of well being among the givers.
Yes, but charity is not without external consequence.
The continuous rewarding of the dysfunctional does have long term effects, which I believe are negative on balance.
The reason we evolved empathy is for cohesion with our immediate social group, where our empathy is balanced with everyone keeping track of everyone else, and an effective sense of group fairness.
But this only works within our immediate social group. Charity towards complete strangers is harmful because it is not balanced with fairness.
To balance our economic interactions outside the immediate social group that we can monitor, we already have a functioning system that’s fair and encourages constructive behavior.
That system is money. Use it for what it’s for.
That’s not the only valuable thing, or rule for action. You should also help people when they are suffering and you are able. This definition:
willfully ignores the entire point of charity.
Quite the opposite. Most suffering is self-inflicted, and as such is a reminder that you need to learn a lesson. External help removes the suffering and makes it seem as though no lesson needs to be learned. This perpetuates the cycle and leads to more suffering.
One shouldn’t do one’s kids’ homework.
Leaving aside my usual objection to schools, one should help one’s kids do their homework.
That said, it seems like your example is chosen specifically to sound paternalistic, which seems at odds with the free-market view you’re espousing.
I dispute that, but don’t have relevant numbers. If your friend falls and breaks his leg, is that “self-inflicted”? Is it best to bring him to the hospital, or to leave him crying on the ground so he can learn something?
It seems that for some countries, falling accidentally is pandemic, while other countries rationally attempt to avoid it? Isn’t this comment willfully ignoring the analogy denisbider was using?
Okay, but what if some “kids” don’t have the necessary tools to do their “homework”?
See reply here.