Anbefaler alle som er interessert i bistandspolitikk å lese Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa av Dambisa Moyo. Jeg synes FrP er en gjeng klovner, men ser man tilbake på alle de pengene som har gått med til bistand så er det grunn til å spørre seg hvorfor det ikke har fungert i Afrika.
The article doesn't really seem to answer the question about Senegalese "wanting" Peace Corps Volunteers, most RPCVs/PCVs know that the host country government has to buy into Peace Corps and local communities have to ask for a volunteer. I think that the interesting thing is that a president of Senegal said that pursuing free markets helped pull a lot of countries out of poverty, and Africa didn't pursue that course so that is a problem and that countries that receive foreign aid haven't been able to develop as fast. I ran across a book on Amazon I didn't purchase:
It seems to promulgate the same idea that massive amounts of foreign aid cause problems as there is, obviously, corruption in a lot of countries and the massive influx of money destabilizes things.
HOWEVER, the Peace Corps, IMHO, isn't foreign aid, it is living with communities to promote change and capacity building, and not dumping in a lot of cash.
I'd take the article and the book (which I haven't read yet) with a big grain of salt as Forbes praises both of them, in addition to the Wall Street journal for the book. But I guess it is good to challenge your beliefs about how development should function and being too proud that America pumps billions into foreign aid every year.
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa:
"A national bestseller, Dead Aid unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined―and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries.
Much debated in the United States and the United Kingdom on publication, Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions."
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
Another reason is the aid/charity industries which over the past 50 years have negatively impacted African countries that they have set out to “fix”. Dead Aid is an excellent book by a Zairean economist on the complete failure of aid to help African Countries, and how aid actually created more poverty for Africans while benefiting the donor countries economically.
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
Pretty much. It's a hugely complex issue that no one fully understands. But we do know that a lot of what we're doing is having actual negative impacts. Here's a relevant joke I heard a while ago: A villager fell into a pit latrine (a huge hole in the ground that acts as a toilet) and asks for help.
A missionary walks by, throws him a Bible, and says "read this, pray, and God will fix everything for you." A foreign aid worker walks by, tosses him a bunch of cash, and says "here, you can use this to get out" A Peace Corps Volunteer walks back, and jumps in as well. "What are you doing?" "I don't know, but we're in this shit together now"
Recommend reading this: https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125 Overall summary is throwing money at the problem gives you short term victories at the cost of creating a lot of long term problems and perverse incentives
If your donations stay in the US it's probably ok. However, if these are going to third world countries you are just killing their textile industries. This subject was, and still is considered racist and untouchable. It helps when a knowledgeable black woman writes a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
This book argues pretty strongly against aide . https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1481963244911
FWIW I disagree. Also Bill Gates funds my job and I believe it has the potential to bring about good things so I'm pretty bias.
The Western world led by the World Bank has invested billions upon billions of dollars in African nations to encourage economic growth. In Dead Aid, Zambian born Dambisa Moyo argues that bilateral government aid has largely hurt economic growth in Africa and needs to be eliminated completely. The viz follows a few economic indicators for Africa as well as poverty numbers since 1960 by level of received aid.
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
Source: World Bank Indicators Tool: Tableau
This is a good book that covers most of the current issues regarding foreign aid:
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
The underlying problem is the geography:
"The shape of Africa is relatively simple with a remarkably smooth outline. The rivers plunge off the edges of the plateau into the sea in a series of falls and rapids. The coast is fringed with coral reefs, sand bars, mangrove swamps and lagoons that block passage to the continents interior."
Very few navigable rivers and in general rivers with inconstant flows, means that trade is limited to overland routes. Libya for instance, has no rivers at all! The one exception (Egypt/The Nile) is also an exception in all the other categories, for the same reason.
For more insight, you may also want to check out the documentary "Empire of Dust":
A great read from an African on that very topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
More foreign aid being helpful isn't always the case. Would highly recommend this book if you're interested about the topic. One of the few books regarding sub-saharan Africa by someone who actually grew up and lives there instead of a western Academic.
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
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We do have a responsibility to help them, but even the simplest things can have unintended consequences due to us not understanding local culture and social dynamics. The best example I can think of right now is a group of engineering students who went to a rural village in South America for a service trip in the 1980s. They found that women in the village walked for hours each day to fetch water from a stream, so they went and built a well for them.
The ended up being repeatedly sabotaged by the women themselves. Upon further investigation, it turns out that the trip to the river served an important social function: in a highly patriarchal society, it allowed women of the village to get together and socialize without any men around. So the well in the village was destroyed, and rebuilt in another place where the women wouldn't have to walk as far, but was still far away enough that they would be by themselves.
If something as simple as constructing a well for water accessibility can cause so many complications, imagine what unintended consequences could be for messing around with something more complex by orders of magnitude. Ultimately, no one really knows how to solve this problem because the cultural context and social dynamics are different everywhere. What works in one town may not even work in another town in the same country.
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A relevant joke that contains a depressingly accurate grain of truth:
A villager in a developing country falls into a pit latrine (hole in the ground serving as a toilet) and screams for help.
A missionary walks by, throws him a Bible, and says "read this, pray, and God will get you out".
A foreign aid worker walks by, tosses the villager a huge bag of money, and says "Here, this will help you solve your problem"
A Peace Corps Volunteer walks by and jumps in. "What are you doing?" "I don't know, but we're in this shit together now"
>I would like to live in a better world. In economic terms, there's a good basket we could afford as a society if we were to decide everyone had to contribute but that individually nobody can purchase. It makes sense to give up savings in exchange for that good basket if you prefer it over whatever else you might have bought. This is rational, I'm getting something. But giving up something for nothing, donating without such a collective agreement makes no sense. If it makes sense for you, that's because the act makes you feel good or fulfilled; I would only feel exposed.
Well if you assume that everyone should only maximize their own utility functions, then sure. Legal obligations don't have normative weight under an egoist framework either. But egoism is selfish and wrong.
>Huh? I thought we were talking about real consequences, not pie in the sky. "Ought" and "should" don't concern me. What concerns me is actually solving social problems.
Well then your view doesn't make sense. If there are no oughts and shoulds, then social problems don't matter, or at least we have no obligation to care about them. This leaves you in a pretty poor position to say things like "the rich ought to help the poor" or anything like that. Besides, moral naturalist consequentialism holds that "real consequences" just are what's morally important, so you can have your pie in the sky and eat it too.
>That you cast taxes in light of punishment is revealing, taxes are the price we pay for civilization. On the one hand you believe inequality needs to be addressed but on the other you don't believe anyone "should" compel others to pay taxes to address this problem.
I said that I would like to be a dictator and forcibly tax lots of money to allocate to these problems.
>http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/[1]
>Notice how when charitable donations were lower, inequality was as well.
The statistics there just show that charity was more in certain years and less in other years. I can't find recent data on the Gini coefficient. Even if inequality was higher during the recession (plausible) the answer would just be that the recession caused both inequality and reluctance to donate money - and this matches one of the studies cited by that page, which says that charity rises with the stock market (and therefore can probably be expected to fall likewise). Besides, the cycle of government policy takes months or years, and after some policies take effect they often won't effect inequality for years afterwards. So we can't even expect for there to be a close year-to-year correlation between charity and inequality. Analysis of the issue would have to find a long term effect. And I'm not doubting that there can be some causation at play. That is certainly a possible issue that is worth thinking about. But that $1,000,000 of private donations will cause the government to reduce their social spending by $1,000,000 or more (or anywhere close to that) seems to me to be implausible. Government spending is pretty inelastic.
>My claim was that there's abundant data showing there's always been charity accompanying capitalism and feudalism, and you're seriously contesting that? In other news, water is wet. Do you need a source?
There was charity before capitalism and feudalism. Mutualist hunter-gatherer societies were basically founded upon charity of a certain sort. I'm not saying that charity hasn't followed the development of the modern economy - I'm doubting that charity causes society to grow in more capitalist ways. This causal relation is what needs to be fleshed out.
>... um what evidence? Are you claiming that "some would say" is "pretty good evidence"? Alrighty then! Some would say indeed!
It's been pretty well studied. AFAIK, economists generally don't care much for foreign aid, or at least foreign aid the way it's commonly done. Two of the more influential books on it are:
I'm not sure how much credence to give to these arguments. I'm not saying they're all right. I'm just saying that overall the results of government foreign aid don't seem to be as good, dollar for dollar, as that effective charities, based on the reaction and criticism from economists who argue for different government solutions to international poverty. It's worth pointing out that everyone agrees that bed nets and schistosomiasis tablets are perfectly good ways to help the global poor. But in government policy there is no such clarity. Free trade? Fair trade? Foreign aid? What kind of aid? Just give them money? On what conditions? There is no such clarity, and many economists argue that some of the above can be downright harmful in certain cases, so we should be more modest in our assumptions about what we can expect to accomplish.
>The uptick in charitable giving is a consequence of wealth consolidation.
Well the history of effective altruism says otherwise. It came from certain philosophical and philanthropic ideas which sort of reached critical mass a couple of years ago. Most charitable giving isn't effective altruism anyway.
>The uptick in inequality is likewise a consequence of wealth consolidation. You're eating your own tail.
I'm not sure about these increases in consolidation and inequality which you are referring to, but effective altruists don't "consolidate wealth", so clearly this can't be the case.
>Systemic problems demand systemic answers.
Okay, then people should donate money to political advocacy organizations and thinktanks which deal with global poverty. Oxfam is a big one. Many altruists do this. They also talk about the importance for working in politics etc. It's not just about money either.
>Alright, well I'm almost done with this, because it seems like you've made up your mind without doing much thought or research.
You have to be fucking kidding me. Without much thought or research? I have read several books on the issue including Dead Aid, White Man's Burden, and the Elusive Quest for Growth, read countless journal articles, and written at least two papers on this very subject. I know the truth about this upsets a lot of people, and it causes much consternation with my fellow very liberal students.
>Note that only five of the countries have negative growth rates out of the more than fifty countries on the continent, and two of those have shrunk less than one percent.
OK, once again, take this in context. This is only the last 5 years, but anyway, who has the largest growth on that list? Ethiopia. Why? Not because Ethiopia is now a wealthy country, but it's because when you start with nothing, then ANY improvement will seem spectacular from a % perspective. Zimbabwe's growth was just behind Ethiopia at 42%. But let's look at a different measure. This depressing chart, for example. In 1960, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) had a per-capita income equal to 20% of that of the UK. Now it's closer to 2%, and much of that (like with many African countries) isn't actually due to trade or production, but rather from remittances sent home from immigrants working in Europe!
It's very hard to measure this, but probably the largest recipient of foreign aid, per capita, is Liberia. It's population is very small, under 5 million, but it has received at least 5 billion in aid in the last 10 years. Yet it hasn't improved by almost any measure:
Also: "Over 50 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty on less than $0.50 a day, life expectancy is just 57 years, the population is one of the least skilled anywhere and illiteracy is over 60 percent. The U.N. ranks Liberia 182nd out of 187 countries on its Human Development Index, and Liberia was recently featured toward the bottom of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer." https://www.devex.com/news/a-decade-of-aid-dependence-in-liberia-81634
"The GDP per capita is obtained by dividing the country’s gross domestic product, adjusted by inflation, by the total population. This tells how much each person gets when the wealth of the country is divided equally at any given time. This also means that if the wealth of the country is divided equally, each Liberian would benefit : 1962 ($608.16); 1973 ($785.55); 1984 ($577.91); 1995 ($58.46) and 2013 ($273.44). This means, a typical Liberia was nearly twice as better off in 1962, 1973, and 1984 than in 2013." http://www.theperspective.org/2013/0430201301.html
Now let's compare this to another aid recipient, South Korea. At the end of the Korean War, South Korea had a standard of living and a per capita GDP comparable to many African nations. Yet within a generation they modernized and became a first world society. By contrast, Africa has stood still, and aid is simply not working there. It has been squandered in massive amounts and led to utter dependence on it, like an addiction.
Finally, you have to ask yourself, if Africa has improved so much, why are the numbers of refugees fleeing to Europe increasing rather than decreasing every year?
hvis man er interesseret i problemstillingen: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125
Some would certainly argue aid is responsible for Nigeria being a shithole (if you accept that premise to begin with).
Is it far worse than dumping food. The entire aid mentality is a Machiavellian system of control.
You aren't wrong. Many medical mission trips are a detriment to the community unless they adhere to the guidelines. This is true of anyone who intends to provide healthcare to communities for a brief period and then leave, does nothing to help create a stable system of care. It creates dependency and takes away from the distressed community and their ability to build local healthcare infrastructure. This is a good read by an Oxford/Harvard trained economist who argues against any form of aid to impoverished nations.
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125#
If you volunteer, as a preclinical student, you would be placed in a logistical or education program. These roles are encouraged by the WHO, because you are directed by the host nation. When I worked in Malawi, I did so at the pleasure of the Minister of Health under the direction of Dr. Mwanswambo and went where told. Dont discount all missions. There are ethical ways you can contribute.
can u show me one single children he saved please?
you have absolutely no f* clue about the international aid system. just like athene doesn't. Beside the fact that you dont even KNOW where athene's (or put it another way - the money of thousands of people is now) money now is!