> how many of your friends "don't give fuck all about the poor"?
Almost all of my friends. And I'm from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, generally considered a pretty open-minded, progressive, tolerant and caring place. My friends are educated, middle-class. They're caring and generous to friends and family and have disposable income.
But they're extremely hesitant to something even like Kiva - a charity which allows you to lend money to business projects, and actually get your money back. I've lent thousands and got all of it back and relent it over and over again. Worst case is you miss out on $0.10 a month in interest while putting $100 to work charitably, infinitely, in a way that can't in any way be described a handout, as going to corrupt governors, as creating a relationship of dependence or be used to buy drugs.
But they really don't give a fuck. Trust me. May not be the case for everyone, buy my very generous friends are only generous to the people they know and love. Outside of that, they don't give a shit.
> That's blatantly untrue.
I disagree. The numbers are clear. About 5 thousand people die each day from preventable causes, such as a lack of clean drinking water. That's 9/11 every single day, completely preventable, mostly children.
On that statistic, here's a quote
> It is estimated that it would cost about US$ 23 billion per year to achieve the international development target of halving the percentage of people unserved with improved water sources globally (currently at 18%) and improved sanitation services (currently at 40%) by the year 2015. But governments presently spend US$ 16 billion a year in building new infrastructure. The additional US$ 7 billion a year needed to supply good water and sanitation to some who lack it is less than one tenth of what Europe spends on alcoholic drinks each year, about the same as Europe spends on ice cream and half of what the United States spends each year on pet food. Compared to what governments expend on military weapons, the cost of providing people with the means to improve their health is small.
Yes, one country spends twice as much on our pets than is necessary to spend to worldwide solve one of the biggest tragedies the world knows, that kids die each day from entirely preventable trivial issues like diarrhea. That's why the whole ice bucket challenge rubbed some people the wrong way, because it was one big tragic joke that was hard to criticize because at the end of the day, it did raise money that wouldn't otherwise be raised.
These quick notes are but the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of data and we can do a lot more with very little, but people don't care, and don't seem to care enough to know or consider to change their mind, either.
I donate money to various charities and causes and do use microlending too, but it's not something that I end up talking about with my friends, so they're probably not aware that I do it. Maybe that's the case with your friends too. I probably look like I "don't care about the poor" because I usually don't give money to random people asking me to support causes (like at events or stores) if I'm not familiar with the cause because I prefer to research where my money goes before giving it.
No in my case I've had these conversations and they've always dismissed them. Even my girlfriend who liked the idea hasn't bothered with something like Kiva while she's asked for an invite and I've sent her a few and told her several times, and she's done years of community service and studied international development. Somehow a lot of people dismiss participating outright despite saying it's awesome and saying it's cool I'm doing it and appreciate why Kiva's model, and some willing people seem not to be able to be bothered.
I'm not much different by the way. I've been participating in Kiva for quite a while and donate monthly to doctors without borders since I was a teenager, but despite being interested in the topic of development, I am barely motivated to learn the nitty gritty and get more deeply involved. I'm only barely beyond the point of superficiality to be honest.
Hope you'll talk to your friends about it, too!
As for not giving to random things at events, I don't either. Effective giving is extremely important. Here's some great talks to start with if anyone's interested:
For a quick bit of context, here's a very rough example. A guide dog for a blind person typically costs upwards of $20k for raising, training (both the dog and the blind person) etc. This improves the quality of life of a blind person considerably. Alternatively, we can spend about $30 per person to operate on people's eyes who are effectively blind due to a vitamin deficit and allow them to see again. This literally restores their vision. The latter is almost two orders of magnitude cheaper meaning you can help that many more people with every dollar spent.
That's one of the most extreme examples of why effective giving matters.
Has Kiva gotten better about choosing their lending partner organizations? It was big news a few years ago that Kiva was partnering with in-country lenders charging extortionate interest rates.
Kiva is a great idea in concept. They just need to take a firm stance against corrupt lending practices, especially since they present themselves as a charity and so no middleman should really be profiting incommensurately in the process.
I'm not too up to date, I should do some more reading. Without having researched this thoroughly, I can say this though:
The first link you posted shows some 'portfolio yields' (pretty much interest+fees, which can kind of be summarized as interest rates anyway) of up to say 80% in South Sudan for 2012.
But that's not as crazy as you may think. After all, South Sudan has an 80% inflation rate in 2012, meaning the two are cancelled out.
This may not be true for every year, for every partner, for every country, but inflation rates of 20% are pretty average and typical for a lot of developing countries. Accompanying interest rates of 20% may sound ridiculous to us, but it's not considering all prices and income in nominal terms rise by 20% per year, too, making the ability to pay off your loan similar to if income/prices and interest rates were 0 throughout the year.
The second link you posted is hyperbolic bullshit (like microfinance producing 'zero impact on a good day' or irrelevant facts that are clear ad hominem attacks, like how the founders have 'newly minted MBAs', which we all know has become the international and universal sign of 'inexperienced privileged rich people without a clue' and just a cheap shot. He doesn't for example mention he himself is writing the article with a 'freshly minted MBA', because he indeed has an MBA himself)
David Roodman has written a great book, but any nuance it may have had is completely thrown out the window by the writer of the article. For a more substantial view read the following article for example (which is far from unbiased by the way, as Grameen was the genesis of modern microfinance, but it struck me as fair)
It continues about a crisis in Andra Pradesh, a region my girlfriend just came back from, on suicides related to microfinance. There's no link to Kiva at all, therefore it's thrown out there just to defame Kiva, it merely proves that not all lenders are good lenders, which isn't news. Loansharks have existed for thousands of years.
In India specifically I can recommend the documentary nero's guests. It's been a long-term problem even before microfinance took off and has caused hundreds of thousands of suicides in the past decades. It's tragic, but simply not indicative of Kiva. It's an illustration of globalization's need to compete with factory farms, requiring large investments in land and fertilizers, and a single drought can ruin 10 years of profits, and Indian farmers with no social security, no welfare, no pension, no savings, no insurance, they have zero opportunity to recover from that. That's horrible, but I hope it's clear the solution isn't to not allow any financing of any farmers. The solution is not to stop programmes like Kiva. These problems are unrelated.
It then talks about things like cockfighting loans on Kiva. There was one and promptly pulled, the lenders were refunded. Again, no substance, just an article trying to attack Kiva.
Then it mentions child labor, that's actually not on Kiva as child labor is illegal by international legal standards and Kiva abides by such standards. But it's an interesting discussion. A friend is traveling to Bolivia next month to report on child labor laws there, as it has just legalized the practice. I'd be happy to have a larger discussion on this, but as crazy as it may sound, I'm not of the opinion that child labor should be illegal everywhere. Yes, in a perfect world, child labor should be illegal. It oughtn't be dismissed so easily, here's a quick overview, some comments might be good reading, too, one from a former child laborer himself:
Then it attacks Kiva for keeping $88m in the bank in order to raise money from interests by investing that money. It's just utter bs. You can read about it here:
Anyway I can go on and on, but it's quite clear that Kiva is not the 'scam' that he literally calls it without nuance. I'm not championing Kiva as the perfect solution to all problems. It's just a tiny NGO that does some good work by lending a relatively tiny $50m a year worldwide.
There is - sadly - a hierarchy of insight which privileges self, then family (sometimes), then friends, then associates and coworkers (more or less), then local community, then country, then other countries, then species, then planet and ecosystem.
The basic problem is that economics rewards smart choices for the earlier items on the list and punishes smart choices for the later ones.
So it's 'not efficient' to think about them.
One hypothetical solution is to make distant pain points personal. If you're directly, immediately impacted by someone else's misfortunes you're going to want to do something about them.
It's possible technology could help with this. But it may have to do it in some unexpected and new ways.
Absolutely, there's a joke on journalism that newsworthiness = death / distance. Evolutionarily that makes a lot of sense, for immediate selfish reasons it makes sense to pay attention to that which directly impacts you.
The tragedy here is that we're not really very moral creatures. Somehow when we see a child drowning in a nearby pond, we jump in, despite ruining our smartphone, expensive watch and new jordans in the process worth $1000 together, to save the kid.
And if we ask someone 'would you do it again, knowing it'd cost you $1000 of your stuff', they'd smile 'of course'. We celebrate this, and we call them heroes, and when we tell them they're a hero they smile 'anyone would have done it'. And if it was a boat, and 100 children were in the water, we'd still go in and save as many as possible, even if you're alone and can only save 3 kids.
But when we are presented with data that $60 can save a child from a painful death through the purchase of Malaria nets, we say no. We come up with many reasons. One is cost, people can't afford the $60. (Note in the previous example someone was willing to pay $1k to save nearby child). We might say there's too much suffering, we can't solve the problem. (Note in the previous example, someone would be killing to save even a few, as every life counts).
Technology could play a role. The big internet utopia is that we're all connected, and the world becomes a smaller place, a world in which everyone is a neighbour we care for. To a small extent that can be achieved. It seems we give more to our overseas allies, friends and those with historical ties. France is more prone to give to an Algerian earthquake than one in Tunisia, due to colonial, cultural, political, historical ties, for example. So cultural exchange through technology can help bring us closer, but only on a macro-level.
More specifically, we're seeing blogging slowly take off. You know how CNN etc now have twitter feeds, and a portion of the news is reported by citizens? That'll take off everywhere, as publishing (blogging, vlogging, tweeting etc) becomes easier and cheaper. That may shorten the distance between the needy and those with disposable resources, a role normally suited for NGOs that try to bridge the gap. Storytelling, reporting, data collection etc will become cheaper and easier, and that affects people's willingness to give.
> If you're directly, immediately impacted by someone else's misfortunes you're going to want to do something about them.
Indeed, although I don't really have any clue how technology could achieve it, or if we'd even want to. For now there's the correlary, which is that as countries become richer, natural family planning occurs and the birthrate goes down. The tendency for illicit outlets (like crime and indeed terrorism, e.g. check out the movie Horses of God) decrease. The level of education increases. Look at China, suddenly we get 300m extra middle-classish people whose children go to school. The point here is that rising tides lift all boats. And all ideas (and thereby all knowledge), Chinese ideas or otherwise, are like a candle, you can light someone else's candle without diminishing your own. So while I may not be hurt if a country is poor, I look forward to a country's development, as it benefits me, too. I hope that becomes a slightly bigger element in our rhetoric on things like national security, because we could partially displace military action with more international development.
> But when we are presented with data that $60 can save a child from a painful death through the purchase of Malaria nets, we say no. We come up with many reasons.
One very good reason involved that you didn't mention is that action at a distance like this has significant drawbacks. Since you mention mosquito nets specifically:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/02/opinion/la-oe-shah-2... "In Africa, anti-malaria mosquito nets go unused by recipients".
There are several classes of problem you completely bypass when you're dealing with a drowning child a few tens of meters away. You can anticipate and reason about outcomes in a very tight feedback loop. You don't need to worry about intermediaries, the inscrutability of your impact or about the inherently different risk profiles of immediate interventions versus those that require significant ongoing commitments (to say nothing of corruption or fraud).
To put it in less-human and more-economic terms, the market for immediate interventions better meets the preconditions for efficiency. If you'd like to make remote intervention more common, perhaps you could do something to reduce the costs associated with the transactions involved, including non-financial costs associated with the opacity of the process. Many charities are already researching new structures and applying lessons learned from various trends elsewhere, like crowdfunding.
Governments spending money poorly has to do with poor governance, not necessarily people being uncaring. I don't want to support foreign wars, but lo and behold, my government spends half its budget blowing up civilians!
I also think there's a big difference between "caring" in the abstract and "doing something". It's a shame that more people don't part with more of their money for other people, it's true. But even the stingy likely wish others well, at the very least. Maybe people don't care "enough", or maybe people are too lazy to donate, but it's there.
Your take on that quote is very literally "glass one-third empty". It says we spend as much building new infrastructure as we do feeding our pets! I love little Rosie!! You can't accuse someone of not caring about something if they spend as much on that thing as their pet. Relatedly, it may be a bummer that we don't donate more, but the US at least still donates 2% of its GDP every year. That's not nothing.
The people of the US donate about 2% a year to various charitable causes, that's where his figure comes from, it's separate from what the government does. That includes a lot of internal stuff like people giving to their local church. Such charity is respectable, too, it helps e.g. the homeless Americans living on the streets, but it's separate from international aid.
The US's international development budget is only 0.2% which in my opinion is a disgrace. It's defense spending by comparison is 3.8%, more than an order of magnitude larger. That's for 2013, for 2012 for example it was 4.4%, in the sixties it was nearly 10%, and the 45-year average is about 5.5%. It makes that 0.2% look pretty puny.
As for the recipients, indeed military aid is larger than US Aid aid (the governmental agency of the US that does humanitarian/economic development) by a few billion. And so it's no surprise that foreign aid is very much tied to national security interests, which themselves are tied to US economic interests, making the 0.2% not a very benevolent figure beyond the fact that it's relatively small.
You mentioned Israel/Palestine, interestingly the WB/Gaza are the only group in the list of 25 top recipients that receive no military aid at all, only economic aid. For perspective, Palestine receives 20x more economic aid than Israel from the US. And Israel receives 6x more military assistance than Palestine receives economic aid. It's a bit of a weird situation indeed, as every few years the one army destroys infrastructure of the other territory, the US for part of that army, and then pays for the rebuilding of the infrastructure. Leaving politics outside of this, it's weird indeed, if I were a martian looking down from my spaceship, I'd have taken humans for quite silly creatures!
Also in this top 25 list of aid recipients, not a single country receives more economic aid than military aid. Every single country receives more military aid, often by a large margin. Except Palestine and Sudan (which receives as much military as economic aid).
Interesting factoid: remittance from the US (e.g. relatively poor Mexicans sending money back home to friends and family) surpasses the totality of all American military aid and US Aid, each, and, every, single, year.
I agree from a distance people don't care. What I've learned is we have to actually live it, for some time, for it to register. Short term experiences people count as inconvenient. Long term experiences people realize it's a problem.
Almost all of my friends. And I'm from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, generally considered a pretty open-minded, progressive, tolerant and caring place. My friends are educated, middle-class. They're caring and generous to friends and family and have disposable income.
But they're extremely hesitant to something even like Kiva - a charity which allows you to lend money to business projects, and actually get your money back. I've lent thousands and got all of it back and relent it over and over again. Worst case is you miss out on $0.10 a month in interest while putting $100 to work charitably, infinitely, in a way that can't in any way be described a handout, as going to corrupt governors, as creating a relationship of dependence or be used to buy drugs.
But they really don't give a fuck. Trust me. May not be the case for everyone, buy my very generous friends are only generous to the people they know and love. Outside of that, they don't give a shit.
> That's blatantly untrue.
I disagree. The numbers are clear. About 5 thousand people die each day from preventable causes, such as a lack of clean drinking water. That's 9/11 every single day, completely preventable, mostly children.
On that statistic, here's a quote
> It is estimated that it would cost about US$ 23 billion per year to achieve the international development target of halving the percentage of people unserved with improved water sources globally (currently at 18%) and improved sanitation services (currently at 40%) by the year 2015. But governments presently spend US$ 16 billion a year in building new infrastructure. The additional US$ 7 billion a year needed to supply good water and sanitation to some who lack it is less than one tenth of what Europe spends on alcoholic drinks each year, about the same as Europe spends on ice cream and half of what the United States spends each year on pet food. Compared to what governments expend on military weapons, the cost of providing people with the means to improve their health is small.
Yes, one country spends twice as much on our pets than is necessary to spend to worldwide solve one of the biggest tragedies the world knows, that kids die each day from entirely preventable trivial issues like diarrhea. That's why the whole ice bucket challenge rubbed some people the wrong way, because it was one big tragic joke that was hard to criticize because at the end of the day, it did raise money that wouldn't otherwise be raised.
These quick notes are but the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of data and we can do a lot more with very little, but people don't care, and don't seem to care enough to know or consider to change their mind, either.