As far as I know, there’s no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don’t see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?
It seems like the main point of our disagreement is that you believe that the effects of interventions in remote parts of the world can be assessed in a straightforward way using some basic common-sense criteria, while I am much more skeptical and wary of the real-world complexity and the law of unintended consequences. As a general principle, absent some extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe that even the most resourceful and well-intentioned people really know what they’re doing when they try to influence things in extremely distant and alien parts of the world, even if their intervention seems so purely benevolent that you can’t even think of what might possibly go wrong.
So, to answer your question, yes, I do see a multitude of possibilities for how even the most benevolent-seeming interventions can go wrong, including these ones, and I distrust any simple analysis that purports to account for their effects fully. To answer whether these possibilities correspond exactly to the specific things mentioned by Shikwati, I would need to know much more about the specific details of how these organizations work than it’s possible to find out from the public information about them. In particular, when it comes to the issues of Malthusian problems and abetting bad government, I don’t find your replies satisfactory. The mechanisms of these problems are clear and straightforward, and they’ve been observed many times historically up to the present day. To be convinced that some intervention is worth supporting, I need to see strong evidence to the contrary, for these issues as well as numerous others. They are the ones asking for my money, after all.
If someone claims to have an airtight case that a certain intervention in a distant part of the world really is worth supporting, the burden of proof is on them. And yes, they have an awfully high bar to clear, but given the sordid history of well-intentioned interventions among distant strangers throughout the last century or so, it’s impossible not to be either naive or strongly skeptical.
multifoliaterose:
It seems like the main point of our disagreement is that you believe that the effects of interventions in remote parts of the world can be assessed in a straightforward way using some basic common-sense criteria, while I am much more skeptical and wary of the real-world complexity and the law of unintended consequences. As a general principle, absent some extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe that even the most resourceful and well-intentioned people really know what they’re doing when they try to influence things in extremely distant and alien parts of the world, even if their intervention seems so purely benevolent that you can’t even think of what might possibly go wrong.
So, to answer your question, yes, I do see a multitude of possibilities for how even the most benevolent-seeming interventions can go wrong, including these ones, and I distrust any simple analysis that purports to account for their effects fully. To answer whether these possibilities correspond exactly to the specific things mentioned by Shikwati, I would need to know much more about the specific details of how these organizations work than it’s possible to find out from the public information about them. In particular, when it comes to the issues of Malthusian problems and abetting bad government, I don’t find your replies satisfactory. The mechanisms of these problems are clear and straightforward, and they’ve been observed many times historically up to the present day. To be convinced that some intervention is worth supporting, I need to see strong evidence to the contrary, for these issues as well as numerous others. They are the ones asking for my money, after all.
If someone claims to have an airtight case that a certain intervention in a distant part of the world really is worth supporting, the burden of proof is on them. And yes, they have an awfully high bar to clear, but given the sordid history of well-intentioned interventions among distant strangers throughout the last century or so, it’s impossible not to be either naive or strongly skeptical.