Poverty: Nonprofits
The first set of institutions I want to examine is the nonprofit sector. I will make a few points about how ours works, but mostly my conclusion is that nonprofits are insufficient for the task at hand.
The relevant parties, it seems to me, are the religious, educational, and explicitly poverty-oriented nonprofits. I won't deal with environmental and health groups separately for now, but they function along the same lines as the poverty-oriented nonprofits.
Starting with religious spending, the basic problem is that it's not clear that it is beneficial on net. Such charity often comes along with a religious message. I suppose that's not objectionable in the abstract, but in reality people die when, for instance, they forego condoms because Catholics tell them that condoms cause HIV. I shouldn't just pick on Catholics: Muslim and Hindu charities have been known to fund schools that teach hate and intolerance. Charity like that we can live without.
Educational nonprofits come in two varieties. One kind is well-funded, mostly secular, and highly effective. This is higher education in the United States. The other kind is poorly funded, often religious in nature, and wholly inadequate to its task. These charities strive to improve primary and secondary education in the US.
Thanks to generous alums and government money, American higher education is the best in the world, and it's increasingly accessible to bright students of all backgrounds. The problem is that by the time students are old enough for college, most of the effects of poverty have taken their toll. It's a meritocracy in the sense that smart kids from stable, supportive families with enough resources to make it through high school are all treated basically alike. For everyone else, the system is horribly unfair.
I don't know the answer here, so I'll just note the disparity and come back to the issue when I consider education in general. My basic point is that primary and secondary education are awful most places in the world, and not nearly as good as they could be in the US.
Finally we have the big boys. Oxfam, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, etc. These guys do excellent work, for the most part. Occasionally they get political and express anti-market sentiments (more on that later), but these charities are unambiguously good for the world (unless you're trying to maximize the number of souls in heaven or something, in which case by all means keep lying to people about HIV).
The main problem is that they simply can't mobilize the resources to complete their jobs. This may change in the future. Asian economies are growing very quickly, so it's conceivable that in a few decades severe poverty will be relegated to Africa and a few other tough areas. For now, though, we can't even provide everyone with the very basics: clean water, adequate nutrition, protection from easily preventable diseases.
I say we can't provide these things, and yet manifestly we can. Our global economy is easily productive enough to give everyone the basics. This brings me to the second problem with the big global nonprofits: they have to function against a background of inept, corrupt, and downright evil governments. Some, like India, turn down foreign aid while their citizens starve. Others oppress their own people, or fail to provide the security necessary for nonprofits to operate.
All of this makes it dangerous and expensive to get the job done. The already insufficient funds available to charities are stretched even further, and here we are. This post is already too long, so I'll address the precise role of global nonprofits in my next post.
The relevant parties, it seems to me, are the religious, educational, and explicitly poverty-oriented nonprofits. I won't deal with environmental and health groups separately for now, but they function along the same lines as the poverty-oriented nonprofits.
Starting with religious spending, the basic problem is that it's not clear that it is beneficial on net. Such charity often comes along with a religious message. I suppose that's not objectionable in the abstract, but in reality people die when, for instance, they forego condoms because Catholics tell them that condoms cause HIV. I shouldn't just pick on Catholics: Muslim and Hindu charities have been known to fund schools that teach hate and intolerance. Charity like that we can live without.
Educational nonprofits come in two varieties. One kind is well-funded, mostly secular, and highly effective. This is higher education in the United States. The other kind is poorly funded, often religious in nature, and wholly inadequate to its task. These charities strive to improve primary and secondary education in the US.
Thanks to generous alums and government money, American higher education is the best in the world, and it's increasingly accessible to bright students of all backgrounds. The problem is that by the time students are old enough for college, most of the effects of poverty have taken their toll. It's a meritocracy in the sense that smart kids from stable, supportive families with enough resources to make it through high school are all treated basically alike. For everyone else, the system is horribly unfair.
I don't know the answer here, so I'll just note the disparity and come back to the issue when I consider education in general. My basic point is that primary and secondary education are awful most places in the world, and not nearly as good as they could be in the US.
Finally we have the big boys. Oxfam, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, etc. These guys do excellent work, for the most part. Occasionally they get political and express anti-market sentiments (more on that later), but these charities are unambiguously good for the world (unless you're trying to maximize the number of souls in heaven or something, in which case by all means keep lying to people about HIV).
The main problem is that they simply can't mobilize the resources to complete their jobs. This may change in the future. Asian economies are growing very quickly, so it's conceivable that in a few decades severe poverty will be relegated to Africa and a few other tough areas. For now, though, we can't even provide everyone with the very basics: clean water, adequate nutrition, protection from easily preventable diseases.
I say we can't provide these things, and yet manifestly we can. Our global economy is easily productive enough to give everyone the basics. This brings me to the second problem with the big global nonprofits: they have to function against a background of inept, corrupt, and downright evil governments. Some, like India, turn down foreign aid while their citizens starve. Others oppress their own people, or fail to provide the security necessary for nonprofits to operate.
All of this makes it dangerous and expensive to get the job done. The already insufficient funds available to charities are stretched even further, and here we are. This post is already too long, so I'll address the precise role of global nonprofits in my next post.
posted by James | 7:45 AM
1 Comments:
Good post. It's all about equality of opportunity. A lot of what dooms people is a poor familial situation. Aside from the tangible stuff, family imparts culture, values (including ones to rebel against), accents (to what extent?), and countless other things during critical periods that can really make or break a person. But how much should the government be able to intervene in child rearing? Presumably, parents are best able and most inclined to promote their children's interests. Arguably, then, it's a matter of providing parents with resources and information. On the other hand, some cultures, or at least "parenting cultures," massively suck. Raising a kid Amish is arguably more akin to raising a daughter according to strict Islamic law than to raising a kid on a steady diet of Marxism. Raising a kid vegan can (as far as I know) permanently fuck their ability to consume animal products. At some point the government basically must declare certain practices as incompatible with equality of opportunity. There's garden variety abuse, but there's also the failure to take certain positive steps, such as education (I'm not sure that this positive/negative distinction, like many others, adds anything). What positive steps should the government mandate? I'm not sure, but it seems that it hasn't gone far enough. Broadly speaking, one of the two greatest tragedies of the human condition, if I may say so, is lack of control: genes plus environment. (The other is me; I mean, death.) Insofar as the government is willing to take its conception of freedom and other values overseas, including by force, how about ensuring it at home by preventing child rearing practices that doom children's futures by curtailing (effectively or physically) choice? The problems, and perhaps insurmountable ones, are the twin evils of discretion: abuse and incompetence. But maybe we need something radical to change the modern conception of the child, to make the child less "determined." Back in the day people as young as 13 were capable of taking on very adult roles. Of course, this was due to brutal necessity, lower life expectancy, and shit like that. My point is just that it might be time to question the presumption of parental despotism - not to replace it with governmental despotism (e.g., a list of acceptable child rearing texts), but just to ban certain parental impositions. The world would be a much better place if blame and praise were always deserved; on a basic level, the solution is more freedom, which requires resources, education, AND an absence of heavy-handed parenting. "Because I said so" is bad enough. "Because I said so, electricity is evil" is fucking shitty.
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