I am not an expert, so the following is based more on cynicism than empirical data, please take it with a grain of salt. My current best guess is that:
UN is a huge, mostly dysfunctional bureaucracy. It probably does some good, but to achieve that good it probably spends 100x more resources than would be necessary.
(I suspect it mostly takes credit for what less known organizations do. If one day Effective Altruists succeed to cure malaria in Africa, UN will probably announce it as their own success. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that today UN already has a department dedicated to cure malaria, which spends millions of dollars on having its employees fly around the world in airplanes, give speeches on the necessity of fighting malaria, and produce some paperwork. When malaria is gone, UN will declare that it was these people’s heroic effort that has achieved it, and to the average person this will sound completely credible.)
People do internships at UN either because they are preparing for their future jobs as bureaucrats in some huge dysfunctional bureaucracy, or as a form of advertising—being associated with UN looks cool on your CV, ask Greta Thunberg or Sri Chinmoy.
Basically, your model is: “UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them.”
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.”
People working in UN are not selected for their passion to end war and hunger. They are selected for their political connections and skills. If they seem to you like a modern aristocracy, that’s because indeed they are.
The guy was not one of the brightest people, neither he was kind. He came from privilege, and nevertheless he was there trying to solve world hunger.
There are millions of people in the world who have a wish to end world hunger. The plebeians among them will never see this wish translated into an actual paying job—not unless they deliver some extraordinary results.
The guy you describe is trained to have one of these jobs, regardless of his abilities or results. If he wants it, he will probably get it. The fact that he actually cares is… nice, but optional.
Ben Todd at 80K published an old (2014) exploratory career profile on being a program manager in international orgs “like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations”, and notes that
We recommend this career if it is a better fit for you than our other recommended careers.
These positions may offer the opportunity to influence substantial budgets, since these organisations govern huge pools of aid money and international regulation. Typically in these organisations the average budget spent on programs per employee is on the order of US$1-10 million.1 Since it’s difficult to give workers the right incentives and the work is difficult, we think it’s likely that additional intelligent, rational and altruistic people can have a substantial impact through improving the efficiency of how these funds are spent. However, we’re highly uncertain about the expected size of the influence.
These organisations are highly influential over important global challenges, so you’ll be working with highly influential people, which increases our assessment of advocacy potential and career capital. The high prestige of these positions also contributes to our higher rating of their career capital.
On the other hand, reading Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan a few years back, detailing his experience as program coordinator for the Oil-for-Food programme, greatly soured my then cautiously net-positive view of the UN.
My friend once participated in a disaster relief in some country that was hit by tsunami. If I remember it correctly, he described the relief process as many less-known organizations actually doing something in the territory (building shelters for people who lost their homes, organizing food distribution), and a few expensive UN “coordinators” who took numbers from them and put them into their Excel sheets.
But I have no idea how much should I trust this, and how typical this is for disaster relief programs.
(One detail I remember is how important is to distribute all the foreign aid across the country, because most organizations that bring it, will simply drop the entire cargo in one port in the capital city, and consider their work done.)
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.
I am not an expert, so the following is based more on cynicism than empirical data, please take it with a grain of salt. My current best guess is that:
UN is a huge, mostly dysfunctional bureaucracy. It probably does some good, but to achieve that good it probably spends 100x more resources than would be necessary.
(I suspect it mostly takes credit for what less known organizations do. If one day Effective Altruists succeed to cure malaria in Africa, UN will probably announce it as their own success. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that today UN already has a department dedicated to cure malaria, which spends millions of dollars on having its employees fly around the world in airplanes, give speeches on the necessity of fighting malaria, and produce some paperwork. When malaria is gone, UN will declare that it was these people’s heroic effort that has achieved it, and to the average person this will sound completely credible.)
People do internships at UN either because they are preparing for their future jobs as bureaucrats in some huge dysfunctional bureaucracy, or as a form of advertising—being associated with UN looks cool on your CV, ask Greta Thunberg or Sri Chinmoy.
Basically, your model is: “UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them.”
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.”
People working in UN are not selected for their passion to end war and hunger. They are selected for their political connections and skills. If they seem to you like a modern aristocracy, that’s because indeed they are.
There are millions of people in the world who have a wish to end world hunger. The plebeians among them will never see this wish translated into an actual paying job—not unless they deliver some extraordinary results.
The guy you describe is trained to have one of these jobs, regardless of his abilities or results. If he wants it, he will probably get it. The fact that he actually cares is… nice, but optional.
Ben Todd at 80K published an old (2014) exploratory career profile on being a program manager in international orgs “like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations”, and notes that
On the other hand, reading Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan a few years back, detailing his experience as program coordinator for the Oil-for-Food programme, greatly soured my then cautiously net-positive view of the UN.
My friend once participated in a disaster relief in some country that was hit by tsunami. If I remember it correctly, he described the relief process as many less-known organizations actually doing something in the territory (building shelters for people who lost their homes, organizing food distribution), and a few expensive UN “coordinators” who took numbers from them and put them into their Excel sheets.
But I have no idea how much should I trust this, and how typical this is for disaster relief programs.
(One detail I remember is how important is to distribute all the foreign aid across the country, because most organizations that bring it, will simply drop the entire cargo in one port in the capital city, and consider their work done.)
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.