Lots of money spent helping poor people in poor countries has done more harm than good. You wrote: “GiveWell estimates that VillageReach and StopTB save lives at a cost of $1,000 each.” I bet at least $100 of each $1000 goes indirectly to dictators, and because the dictators can count on getting this money they don’t have to do quite as good a job managing their nation’s economy. Also, you need to factor in Malthusian concerns.
Poor people in poor countries might be better off today if rich countries had never given them any charity.
If lots of people signup for cryonics the world would become more concerned about the future and devote more resources to existential risks.
I often find this sort of argument frustrating. Are you making a serious case that the net effects are that harmful? What are your betting odds? Why not donate to things that don’t generate rents to steal, e.g. developing cheaper crops and treatments for tropical diseases? Or pay for transparency/civil society/economic liberalization work in poor countries?
Many people just like to throw up possible counter-considerations to blunt the moral condemnation, and then go on with what they were doing, without considering any other alternatives or actually trying to estimate expected values in an unbiased way. One should either engage on the details of the altruism, or focus on the continuum of selfish expenditures, and note the double-standards being applied to cryonics.
I agree that widespread cryonics would have beneficial effects in encouraging long-term thinking. Edit: and even small changes in numbers could significantly increase the portion of people paying attention to existential risk and the like, given how small that pool is to start with.
“Are you making a serious case that the net effects are that harmful?”
Yes. Although development isn’t my specialty, I’m a professional economist who has read a lot about development. The full argument I would make is similar to the one that supports the “Resource Curse” which holds “The resource curse (also known as the paradox of plenty) refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons, including a decline in the competitiveness of other economic sectors (caused by appreciation of the real exchange rate as resource revenues enter an economy), volatility of revenues from the natural resource sector due to exposure to global commodity market swings, government mismanagement of resources, or weak, ineffectual, unstable or corrupt institutions (possibly due to the easily diverted actual or anticipated revenue stream from extractive activities).” (From Wikipedia)
“What are your betting odds?” Development data is often horrible in part because of deliberate fraud on the part of poor countries and NGOs so it would be very hard to determine criteria for who wins.
“Why not donate to things that don’t generate rents to steal, e.g. developing cheaper crops and treatments for tropical diseases?”
Cheaper crops harm farmers.
Treatments for tropical diseases cause Malthusian problems, must be administered by medical staff dictators approve of in buildings dictators allow to be built. One theory holds that AIDS spread so rapidly through Africa because of dirty Needles used by medical personal.
The best justification for what I wrote comes from a quote from Robert Lucas that is one of the three quotations on my Facebook homepage. “But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.”
The idea that the rich “should” distribute resources to the poor has done massive damage to both the world’s rich and poor.
I agree that the resource curse elements of aid exist (and think it plausible that ‘development aid’ has had minimal or negative effects), but they have to be quite large to negate the direct lifesaving effects of the best medical aid, e.g. vaccines or malarial bed nets.
Cheaper crops harm farmers.
The Green Revolution did not harm poor Indians, by a very wide margin. I’m talking about developing new strains, not providing food aid purchased from rich-country farmers.
Treatments for tropical diseases cause Malthusian problems, must be administered by medical staff dictators approve of in buildings dictators allow to be built.
There is some bribery and theft bound up with medical aid too, aye. But the Malthusian argument is basically saying better that they die now to expedite growth later? Really?
“But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor.”
The Green Revolution, smallpox eradication, financial support for vaccination and malaria control all involved rich country denizens spending on benefits for the poor. Hundreds of millions of lives involved. The benefits of economic growth dwarf the benefits of aid, but the latter are not negligible.
Rich countries used aid dollars to pressure African countries to stop using DDT. Aid has probably increased the number of poor people who have died from Malaria.
Most of the agricultural improving techs were developed for profit not charity reasons, although dwarf wheat is an important exception that supports your viewpoint.
Eliminating smallpox wasn’t really done for chartable reasons, meaning that rich countries had an incentive to be efficient about it. It also caused the USSR to develop smallpox bio-weapons.
Africa’s main problem is low economic growth caused mostly by its many “vampire” governments. Aid feeds these vampires and so does create negative effects large enough “to negate the direct lifesaving effects of the best medical aid, e.g. vaccines or malarial bed nets.”
I’m not claiming Malthusian factors should dominate moral considerations, just that they need to be taken into account.
Although I can’t prove this, I believe that the vast sums of money spent on foreign aid to poor nations have done much to convinced the elite of poor nations that their nations’ poverty is caused by unjust distribution of the world’s resources not the elites’ corruption and stupid economic policies.
James, the discussion was about things that one can donate to as a private individual looking to have a maximal positive impact, using resources like GiveWell and so on. So arguments that governments doing foreign aid are often not trying to help or serving crazy side-concerns (e.g. with DDT, although that’s often greatly exaggerated for ideological reasons) aren’t very relevant.
I gave smallpox as an example of a benefit conferred to poor people by transferring resources (medical resources) to their countries. I agree about sloppiness on the part of governments and most donors, but that doesn’t mean that those rare birds putting effort into efficacy can’t attain some.
I agree that Africa’s main problem is low economic growth, and that vampire states play a key role there (along with disease, human capital, etc). You never answered my earlier question, “why not fund anti-corruption/transparency/watchdog groups?” Would you guess that the World Bank Doing Business Report saves one net life per $1000 of expenditure?
“why not fund anti-corruption/transparency/watchdog groups?” I don’t think it would do any good, although I don’t know enough about these groups to be certain of this.
I believe that on average charity given to poor people in poor countries does more harm than good, and I don’t think most people (myself included) are smart enough (even with the help of GiveWell) to identify situations in which giving aid helps these people in large part because of the negative unintended indirect effects of foreign charity.
In contrast, I think that technological spillovers hugely benefit humanity and so while spending money on cryonics isn’t the first best way of helping humanity it is better than spending the money on most types of charities including those designed to help poor people living in corrupt dictatorships.
I agree. It seems likely to me that for-profit investment in developing new technologies (and commercializing existing technologies on a large scale) has had a greater positive impact on human welfare than charitable spending over the last few hundred years. Given that it has also made a lot of early investors wealthy in the process (while no doubt also destroying the wealth of many more) and likely has a net positive expected return on investment I personally like it as a way to allocate some of my resources.
I haven’t yet looked at your last three links, but the first is a tendentious polemic. Taking a look...
After more than 30 years and tens of millions dead—mostly children—the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT.
This claim is true only in the limited sense that the WHO has tried to stop indiscriminate DDT spraying. But as far as I know, the WHO has never handed down a blanket ban on DDT.
There isn’t a date on Stossel’s editorial, but going by the URL it was published in October 2006. Official WHO documents predating that condone the use of DDT under limited circumstances. For example, this archived copy of a WHO FAQ on DDT from August 2004 says, “WHO recommends indoor residual spraying of DDT for malaria vector control”, citing this 2000 report from the WHO Expert Committee on Malaria. On page 38 (p. 50 in the PDF), the 2000 report “endorsed” the conclusion of a still earlier 1995 study group that “DDT may be used
for vector control, provided that it is only used for indoor spraying, it
is effective, the WHO product specifications are met, and the necessary
safety precautions are applied for its use and disposal”.
DDT is the most effective anti-mosquito, anti-malaria pesticide known. But thanks to the worldwide environmental movement and politically correct bureaucrats in the United States and at the United Nations, the use of this benign chemical has been discouraged in Africa and elsewhere, permitting killer mosquitoes to spread death.
I don’t see how anyone can honestly call DDT “benign” unless they’re ignorant of the evidence for its negative ecological effects. At any rate, Stossel’s decision to solely blame environmentalists & government busybodies for DDT’s unpopularity is disingenuous. Increasing resistance to DDT is another (I would have thought obvious) reason.
DDT was banned by President Richard Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s, after Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring,” claimed to show that DDT threatened human health as well as bird populations. But some scientists found no evidence for her claims.
Which is basically meaningless without quantitative evidence. There are always a couple of scientists somewhere who fail to replicate findings that some chemical is dangerous. Also, the EPA ban does not appear to have been a complete ban; this pro-DDT article points out that “the public health provisions of the 1972 US delisting of DDT have been used several times after 1972 in the US to combat plague-carrying fleas, in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada”.
Even if there was danger to bird eggs, the problem was the amount of DDT used, not the chemical itself.
Presumably Stossel’s implying that the EPA should therefore have just regulated the amount of DDT used, instead of just banning it. But the EPA did allow some uses of DDT after its ban, and the trivially true fact that the dose makes the poison isn’t sufficient for Stossel’s implied argument to go through; he also has to show that regulation would suffice to make DDT exposure less than some critical numerical threshold. Which he doesn’t.
Huge amounts of the chemical were sprayed in America. I’ve watched old videos of people at picnics who just kept eating while trucks sprayed thick white clouds of DDT on top of them. Some people even ran toward the truck—as if it was an ice-cream truck—they were so happy to have mosquitoes repelled. Tons of DDT were sprayed on food and people. Despite this overuse, there was no surge in cancer or any other human injury.
This statement is off in two ways. Firstly, just looking for a “surge” in aggregated levels of injury in the US is a poor way to assess DDT’s level of dangerousness. Secondly, how does Stossel know there was “no surge” in not only cancer, but also “any other human injury”?
Even sticking to cancer, which is relatively well-reported, The National Cancer Institute’s SEER program only has cancer incidence data from 1973 onwards, and I’ve not found earlier reliable data for US cancer incidence. The SEER data isn’t much use for evaluating Stossel’s claim because, of course, it starts the year after the EPA banned DDT in the US. There are earlier estimates of the cancer rate based on death certificates, but I don’t know how well those track incidence. (I’d guess neither does Stossel.)
Nevertheless, the environmental hysteria led to DDT’s suppression in Africa, where its use had been dramatically reducing deaths.
American foreign aid could be used to finance ineffective alternative anti-malaria methods, but not DDT.
I’m not even sure how to test the claim that American foreign aid couldn’t be used to finance DDT use — “American foreign aid” is pretty vague. And what about effective alternative anti-malaria methods like bed nets? Is Stossel implying that there are no effective alternative anti-malaria methods?
Within a short time, the mosquitoes and malaria reappeared, and deaths skyrocketed. Tens of millions of people have died in that time.
But specifically what proportion of those deaths were caused by reductions in DDT use? [Edit: and what sub-proportion of that proportion of deaths could be attributed to foreign aid, rather than other motivations for using less DDT?]
And so on and so forth. It’s also discouraging that the column’s penultimate 4 paragraphs are based on hyperbolic soundbites from Steven Milloy, who has past form in pseudoscience.
Not only is the column misleading, but the claim that
Rich countries used aid dollars to pressure African countries to stop using DDT. Aid has probably increased the number of poor people who have died from Malaria.
is not really meaningful without putting numbers on it. I expect there must be at least one African out there who’s died of malaria because of aid’s political pressure. But it’s not really a compelling argument against aid unless the actual malaria death count due to pressure exerted via foreign aid is much higher.
The first article opens with “the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT” which is simply a lie. The third article makes the less verifiable:
Meanwhile, vast swathes of the anti-malaria community, including the malaria teams within national donor agencies, are quietly opposed to DDT. Agencies include insecticide spraying in their literature, but then run No-Spray programs.
but I have never seen evidence of this claim. In fact, I have seen it confabulated on the spot by people caught in the first lie.
But the Malthusian argument is basically saying better that they die now to expedite growth later?
If one believes that it is better, for the individual or the group, to die in war or acute famine than to live malnourished, then peace and a stable food supply may be bad (but then one should apply the reversal test and ask such people whether they support war and high variance food supply).
But disease is not like war or acute famine. The survivors are often permanently affected, in many ways like the malnourished. So many arguments that consider malthusian conditions should support medical aid.
No because an incompetent or evil government can lose them as a source of revenue. Zimbabwe, for example, has no doubt lost many tourist dollars because of state violence. This loss might be deterring some other African governments from engaging in too much state violence.
In contrast, governments often get more economic aid if they engage in destructive economic policies.
Theoretically, a particularly beautiful landscape or cultural affinity for some profession might lead to Dutch Disease effects. The renewability of the resource isn’t really the relevant factor; it just happens to be that most supply shocks of the required magnitude consist of natural resource endowments.
Service industries like gambling and tourism don’t generally have these effects, though. What they do have is typically lower wages, greater seasonality, and less technology spillover effects than manufacturing.
Lots of money spent helping poor people in poor countries has done more harm than good. You wrote: “GiveWell estimates that VillageReach and StopTB save lives at a cost of $1,000 each.” I bet at least $100 of each $1000 goes indirectly to dictators, and because the dictators can count on getting this money they don’t have to do quite as good a job managing their nation’s economy. Also, you need to factor in Malthusian concerns.
If lots of people signup for cryonics the world would become more concerned about the future and devote more resources to existential risks.
I think (but am not sure) that you’re right about this, but even if you are there’s still the question of whether at the margin advocating for cryonics is a worthwhile endeavor. My intuition is that we’re so far away from having a population interested in signing up for cryonics (because of the multitude of irrational biases that people have against cryonics) that advocating for cryonics is a very inefficient way to work against existential risk.
I’d be interested in any evidence that you have that
•Signing up for cryonics motivates people to devote resources to assuaging existential risk.
•It’s feasible to convince a sufficiently large portion of the population to sign up for cryonics so that cryonics is no longer a fringe thing which makes people in the general population uncomfortable around cryonics sign-ups.
A vastly disproportionate percentage of the people who have signup for cryonics are interested in the singularity and have helped the SIAI through paying for some of their conferences. This, I admit, might be due to correlation rather than causation.
Your point is valid, but you seem to have dodged the thrust of my main post. Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk? If not, you should not conceptualize cryonics advocacy as philanthropic.
“Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk?”
No, but I do think spending money on cryonics probably increases expenditures on existential risk. Cryonics and existential risk spending are complements not substitutes.
Also, your not first best argument against cryonics also applies to over 99.999% of human expenditures and labors.
Lots of money spent helping poor people in poor countries has done more harm than good. You wrote: “GiveWell estimates that VillageReach and StopTB save lives at a cost of $1,000 each.” I bet at least $100 of each $1000 goes indirectly to dictators, and because the dictators can count on getting this money they don’t have to do quite as good a job managing their nation’s economy. Also, you need to factor in Malthusian concerns.
Poor people in poor countries might be better off today if rich countries had never given them any charity.
If lots of people signup for cryonics the world would become more concerned about the future and devote more resources to existential risks.
I often find this sort of argument frustrating. Are you making a serious case that the net effects are that harmful? What are your betting odds? Why not donate to things that don’t generate rents to steal, e.g. developing cheaper crops and treatments for tropical diseases? Or pay for transparency/civil society/economic liberalization work in poor countries?
Many people just like to throw up possible counter-considerations to blunt the moral condemnation, and then go on with what they were doing, without considering any other alternatives or actually trying to estimate expected values in an unbiased way. One should either engage on the details of the altruism, or focus on the continuum of selfish expenditures, and note the double-standards being applied to cryonics.
I agree that widespread cryonics would have beneficial effects in encouraging long-term thinking. Edit: and even small changes in numbers could significantly increase the portion of people paying attention to existential risk and the like, given how small that pool is to start with.
“Are you making a serious case that the net effects are that harmful?”
Yes. Although development isn’t my specialty, I’m a professional economist who has read a lot about development. The full argument I would make is similar to the one that supports the “Resource Curse” which holds “The resource curse (also known as the paradox of plenty) refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This is hypothesized to happen for many different reasons, including a decline in the competitiveness of other economic sectors (caused by appreciation of the real exchange rate as resource revenues enter an economy), volatility of revenues from the natural resource sector due to exposure to global commodity market swings, government mismanagement of resources, or weak, ineffectual, unstable or corrupt institutions (possibly due to the easily diverted actual or anticipated revenue stream from extractive activities).” (From Wikipedia)
“What are your betting odds?” Development data is often horrible in part because of deliberate fraud on the part of poor countries and NGOs so it would be very hard to determine criteria for who wins.
“Why not donate to things that don’t generate rents to steal, e.g. developing cheaper crops and treatments for tropical diseases?”
Cheaper crops harm farmers.
Treatments for tropical diseases cause Malthusian problems, must be administered by medical staff dictators approve of in buildings dictators allow to be built. One theory holds that AIDS spread so rapidly through Africa because of dirty Needles used by medical personal.
The best justification for what I wrote comes from a quote from Robert Lucas that is one of the three quotations on my Facebook homepage. “But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.”
The idea that the rich “should” distribute resources to the poor has done massive damage to both the world’s rich and poor.
I agree that the resource curse elements of aid exist (and think it plausible that ‘development aid’ has had minimal or negative effects), but they have to be quite large to negate the direct lifesaving effects of the best medical aid, e.g. vaccines or malarial bed nets.
The Green Revolution did not harm poor Indians, by a very wide margin. I’m talking about developing new strains, not providing food aid purchased from rich-country farmers.
There is some bribery and theft bound up with medical aid too, aye. But the Malthusian argument is basically saying better that they die now to expedite growth later? Really?
The Green Revolution, smallpox eradication, financial support for vaccination and malaria control all involved rich country denizens spending on benefits for the poor. Hundreds of millions of lives involved. The benefits of economic growth dwarf the benefits of aid, but the latter are not negligible.
Rich countries used aid dollars to pressure African countries to stop using DDT. Aid has probably increased the number of poor people who have died from Malaria.
Most of the agricultural improving techs were developed for profit not charity reasons, although dwarf wheat is an important exception that supports your viewpoint.
Eliminating smallpox wasn’t really done for chartable reasons, meaning that rich countries had an incentive to be efficient about it. It also caused the USSR to develop smallpox bio-weapons.
Africa’s main problem is low economic growth caused mostly by its many “vampire” governments. Aid feeds these vampires and so does create negative effects large enough “to negate the direct lifesaving effects of the best medical aid, e.g. vaccines or malarial bed nets.”
I’m not claiming Malthusian factors should dominate moral considerations, just that they need to be taken into account.
Although I can’t prove this, I believe that the vast sums of money spent on foreign aid to poor nations have done much to convinced the elite of poor nations that their nations’ poverty is caused by unjust distribution of the world’s resources not the elites’ corruption and stupid economic policies.
James, the discussion was about things that one can donate to as a private individual looking to have a maximal positive impact, using resources like GiveWell and so on. So arguments that governments doing foreign aid are often not trying to help or serving crazy side-concerns (e.g. with DDT, although that’s often greatly exaggerated for ideological reasons) aren’t very relevant.
I gave smallpox as an example of a benefit conferred to poor people by transferring resources (medical resources) to their countries. I agree about sloppiness on the part of governments and most donors, but that doesn’t mean that those rare birds putting effort into efficacy can’t attain some.
I agree that Africa’s main problem is low economic growth, and that vampire states play a key role there (along with disease, human capital, etc). You never answered my earlier question, “why not fund anti-corruption/transparency/watchdog groups?” Would you guess that the World Bank Doing Business Report saves one net life per $1000 of expenditure?
“why not fund anti-corruption/transparency/watchdog groups?” I don’t think it would do any good, although I don’t know enough about these groups to be certain of this.
I believe that on average charity given to poor people in poor countries does more harm than good, and I don’t think most people (myself included) are smart enough (even with the help of GiveWell) to identify situations in which giving aid helps these people in large part because of the negative unintended indirect effects of foreign charity.
In contrast, I think that technological spillovers hugely benefit humanity and so while spending money on cryonics isn’t the first best way of helping humanity it is better than spending the money on most types of charities including those designed to help poor people living in corrupt dictatorships.
I agree. It seems likely to me that for-profit investment in developing new technologies (and commercializing existing technologies on a large scale) has had a greater positive impact on human welfare than charitable spending over the last few hundred years. Given that it has also made a lot of early investors wealthy in the process (while no doubt also destroying the wealth of many more) and likely has a net positive expected return on investment I personally like it as a way to allocate some of my resources.
As far as I have been able to determine, this is false.
See Deltoid’s DDT category for more on this.
See
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2006/10/04/hooray_for_ddts_life-saving_comeback
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/EXTAFRHEANUTPOP/0,,contentMDK:20905156~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:717020,00.html
http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=936
http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=137
I haven’t yet looked at your last three links, but the first is a tendentious polemic. Taking a look...
This claim is true only in the limited sense that the WHO has tried to stop indiscriminate DDT spraying. But as far as I know, the WHO has never handed down a blanket ban on DDT.
There isn’t a date on Stossel’s editorial, but going by the URL it was published in October 2006. Official WHO documents predating that condone the use of DDT under limited circumstances. For example, this archived copy of a WHO FAQ on DDT from August 2004 says, “WHO recommends indoor residual spraying of DDT for malaria vector control”, citing this 2000 report from the WHO Expert Committee on Malaria. On page 38 (p. 50 in the PDF), the 2000 report “endorsed” the conclusion of a still earlier 1995 study group that “DDT may be used for vector control, provided that it is only used for indoor spraying, it is effective, the WHO product specifications are met, and the necessary safety precautions are applied for its use and disposal”.
I don’t see how anyone can honestly call DDT “benign” unless they’re ignorant of the evidence for its negative ecological effects. At any rate, Stossel’s decision to solely blame environmentalists & government busybodies for DDT’s unpopularity is disingenuous. Increasing resistance to DDT is another (I would have thought obvious) reason.
Which is basically meaningless without quantitative evidence. There are always a couple of scientists somewhere who fail to replicate findings that some chemical is dangerous. Also, the EPA ban does not appear to have been a complete ban; this pro-DDT article points out that “the public health provisions of the 1972 US delisting of DDT have been used several times after 1972 in the US to combat plague-carrying fleas, in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada”.
Presumably Stossel’s implying that the EPA should therefore have just regulated the amount of DDT used, instead of just banning it. But the EPA did allow some uses of DDT after its ban, and the trivially true fact that the dose makes the poison isn’t sufficient for Stossel’s implied argument to go through; he also has to show that regulation would suffice to make DDT exposure less than some critical numerical threshold. Which he doesn’t.
This statement is off in two ways. Firstly, just looking for a “surge” in aggregated levels of injury in the US is a poor way to assess DDT’s level of dangerousness. Secondly, how does Stossel know there was “no surge” in not only cancer, but also “any other human injury”?
Even sticking to cancer, which is relatively well-reported, The National Cancer Institute’s SEER program only has cancer incidence data from 1973 onwards, and I’ve not found earlier reliable data for US cancer incidence. The SEER data isn’t much use for evaluating Stossel’s claim because, of course, it starts the year after the EPA banned DDT in the US. There are earlier estimates of the cancer rate based on death certificates, but I don’t know how well those track incidence. (I’d guess neither does Stossel.)
Again Stossel ignores insecticide resistance.
I’m not even sure how to test the claim that American foreign aid couldn’t be used to finance DDT use — “American foreign aid” is pretty vague. And what about effective alternative anti-malaria methods like bed nets? Is Stossel implying that there are no effective alternative anti-malaria methods?
But specifically what proportion of those deaths were caused by reductions in DDT use? [Edit: and what sub-proportion of that proportion of deaths could be attributed to foreign aid, rather than other motivations for using less DDT?]
And so on and so forth. It’s also discouraging that the column’s penultimate 4 paragraphs are based on hyperbolic soundbites from Steven Milloy, who has past form in pseudoscience.
Not only is the column misleading, but the claim that
is not really meaningful without putting numbers on it. I expect there must be at least one African out there who’s died of malaria because of aid’s political pressure. But it’s not really a compelling argument against aid unless the actual malaria death count due to pressure exerted via foreign aid is much higher.
You make some good points.
Of course I’ve seen lots of articles like that.
The first article opens with “the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT” which is simply a lie. The third article makes the less verifiable:
but I have never seen evidence of this claim. In fact, I have seen it confabulated on the spot by people caught in the first lie.
If one believes that it is better, for the individual or the group, to die in war or acute famine than to live malnourished, then peace and a stable food supply may be bad (but then one should apply the reversal test and ask such people whether they support war and high variance food supply).
But disease is not like war or acute famine. The survivors are often permanently affected, in many ways like the malnourished. So many arguments that consider malthusian conditions should support medical aid.
Do gambling and tourism count as resource curses? They’re renewable resources, but they don’t seem to do localities much good.
No because an incompetent or evil government can lose them as a source of revenue. Zimbabwe, for example, has no doubt lost many tourist dollars because of state violence. This loss might be deterring some other African governments from engaging in too much state violence.
In contrast, governments often get more economic aid if they engage in destructive economic policies.
Theoretically, a particularly beautiful landscape or cultural affinity for some profession might lead to Dutch Disease effects. The renewability of the resource isn’t really the relevant factor; it just happens to be that most supply shocks of the required magnitude consist of natural resource endowments.
Service industries like gambling and tourism don’t generally have these effects, though. What they do have is typically lower wages, greater seasonality, and less technology spillover effects than manufacturing.
See my responses to Vladimir_M’s comments here
I think (but am not sure) that you’re right about this, but even if you are there’s still the question of whether at the margin advocating for cryonics is a worthwhile endeavor. My intuition is that we’re so far away from having a population interested in signing up for cryonics (because of the multitude of irrational biases that people have against cryonics) that advocating for cryonics is a very inefficient way to work against existential risk.
I’d be interested in any evidence that you have that
•Signing up for cryonics motivates people to devote resources to assuaging existential risk.
•It’s feasible to convince a sufficiently large portion of the population to sign up for cryonics so that cryonics is no longer a fringe thing which makes people in the general population uncomfortable around cryonics sign-ups.
“I’d be interested in any evidence that you have”
A vastly disproportionate percentage of the people who have signup for cryonics are interested in the singularity and have helped the SIAI through paying for some of their conferences. This, I admit, might be due to correlation rather than causation.
Your point is valid, but you seem to have dodged the thrust of my main post. Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk? If not, you should not conceptualize cryonics advocacy as philanthropic.
“Do you really think that cryonics advocacy is comparable in efficacy to the most efficient ways of working against existential risk?”
No, but I do think spending money on cryonics probably increases expenditures on existential risk. Cryonics and existential risk spending are complements not substitutes.
Also, your not first best argument against cryonics also applies to over 99.999% of human expenditures and labors.