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42 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 OP 7 Jul \ parent \ on: Charity - "More Harm Than Good" (from the book Family Fortune - by Bill Bonner) alter_native
Your second point is interesting ("The giver's utility matters too".)
I didn't really think about that very much, EXCEPT in the sense that charity (as in "I'm selflessly doing this to help these people") is explicitly false. Because the donor is mostly giving it to help themselves - either through a better reputation, an interesting experience, or something similar.
Take for instance the situation which happens so frequently, which is that a large youth church group descends on an orphanage in a poor third world village, and paints it. The orphanage doesn't need painting. Painting is a low skill job, you don't need to import teenagers from first world countries in order to get it done. But the group gives a large donation to the orphanage, and the kids are able to claim this experience.
Do the kids get a lot out of the experience? Probably, yes. But it's based on a lie. The kids want to be able to say that they did some necessary work for orphans. But they didn't.
It would be more honest to call it a cultural or language exchange.
A really good book is Toxic Charity, by Robert Lupton. He's had decades of history, running charitable church organizations. Church organized charity is probably vastly more efficient than government run charity, but he believes that most of it is actually harmful.
He says "One-way giving is toxic. Reciprocal relationships build community."
I don't disagree and this is the motivation behind the Effective Altruism movement, although my understanding is that they're struggling to live up to that name.
What I find lacking in the "charity is pointless/harmful" case is that it doesn't really give people with resources and a desire to help others any answers about what to do with their resources. As an economist, it's hard for me to believe that simply transferring purchasing power to poorer people is not going to improve their situation.
Now, I can certainly believe that there are more efficient ways to help them, like investing in profitable local industries. However, there's no reason to think that I, or any other non-specialist, have any talent for identifying those.
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Robert Lupton actually has another book on this very topic - Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results.
His main point is that instead of handouts, people should always be required to actually do something, to receive the charity.
For instance, instead of a food bank, have a food co-op, with subsidized products, but where people were required to actually do some work, in order to receive the benefits.
This whole idea was REALLY common until recently. It was rare for the poor to be given a complete handout. For instance, here's a quote from a book I read recently (context - a horse had just broken a leg, and had to be shot):
When the trench was dug deep enough, Father pushed the carcass into it, feet up, and covered it, tamping in the soil all around.
After that, when he had an indigent or a tramp to feed, he often told him to dig an hour or so on this trench, which finally extended to the full length of the lot.
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That's fine. I don't think there's one correct answer, though. Models like this help solve various incentive and information problems that come from trying to deliver aid at scale. Charity doesn't have to be mass delivered, though.
I'm thinking about Donor See, which Tom Woods talked about a few times. If I learn about some poor kid whose parents can't afford a pair of glasses and I want to buy them as a gift, I really don't need her parents to do chores in return. The important thing is the credibility of the program, because the kid's situation needs to actually be as described.
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