Basically, your model is: “UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them.”
and my model for the (typical) UN interns
UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.
I guess when you say
My model is: “Some ambitious people use the association with UN to achieve their own political goal. They are quite happy to do it for free.”
and your following text, this invalidates my first point. Though somehow, if I assume on the long run p(working at UN or other organisation|internship at UN) > p(working at UN or other organisation|no internship at UN), then perhaps I should have noticed that my premise of UN was probably false :)
I am sure these people are ambitious. My main point was that the sample selection of UN interns is not a good idea if you want to solve the problems UN says wants to solve, as you have already written. But I guess all of this is already acknowledged in EA-like spaces.
Your comment was quite detailed and clear, a part of this point...
deliver some extraordinary results.
Understanding this might perhaps help towards finding solutions (that are not of the kind lets break up the UN).
I have no idea whether organizations like UN can be made more effective or not. I don’t want to claim dogmatically that they can’t be, but I can’t imagine a way they could.
So if I wanted to achieve X, I would try to achieve it some way outside of UN, as if UN does not exist at all.
Maybe someone who studies history of large organizations could tell us whether and how large organizations can be fixed. I don’t have that kind of expertise.
My assumption is that once organization is what it is, it gets filled mostly with people who are happy about the fact that it is what it is. Those people would resist a change. They could be overcome by a much stronger force from outside, but who exactly is this force compared to UN?
Seems to me that the greatest threat to UN is that another organization will appear, doing the things that UN originally wanted to do, and as it becomes generally known, the resources will gradually be diverted from UN to the new organization. But that is a process that would take decades, so the people who are happy with UN being what it is can still assume to get decent salaries until they retire, no need to panic.
My model for the UN is
and my model for the (typical) UN interns
I guess when you say
and your following text, this invalidates my first point. Though somehow, if I assume on the long run p(working at UN or other organisation|internship at UN) > p(working at UN or other organisation|no internship at UN), then perhaps I should have noticed that my premise of UN was probably false :)
I am sure these people are ambitious. My main point was that the sample selection of UN interns is not a good idea if you want to solve the problems UN says wants to solve, as you have already written. But I guess all of this is already acknowledged in EA-like spaces.
Your comment was quite detailed and clear, a part of this point...
Understanding this might perhaps help towards finding solutions (that are not of the kind lets break up the UN).
I have no idea whether organizations like UN can be made more effective or not. I don’t want to claim dogmatically that they can’t be, but I can’t imagine a way they could.
So if I wanted to achieve X, I would try to achieve it some way outside of UN, as if UN does not exist at all.
Maybe someone who studies history of large organizations could tell us whether and how large organizations can be fixed. I don’t have that kind of expertise.
My assumption is that once organization is what it is, it gets filled mostly with people who are happy about the fact that it is what it is. Those people would resist a change. They could be overcome by a much stronger force from outside, but who exactly is this force compared to UN?
Seems to me that the greatest threat to UN is that another organization will appear, doing the things that UN originally wanted to do, and as it becomes generally known, the resources will gradually be diverted from UN to the new organization. But that is a process that would take decades, so the people who are happy with UN being what it is can still assume to get decent salaries until they retire, no need to panic.