Oh flip me, I got about three sentences in to the manifesto and I have to agree: bring on the eye-spoons!
all small letters works for poetry by e.e. cummings. otherwise you just look as pretentious as 'imma hipster copying bell hooks'.
I have no idea who or what they are because, as I said, the manifesto drove me away. I know not from pre-, current or postrat. But anyone who wants to slag the arse off this lot, I fully encourage you to do so!
i also like making fun of postrats, but i worry that someone who organizes vibecamp and also likes to read your blog will read that and get sad :( it doesn’t come off as non-animosity-ey as it was probably intended
A rationalist who has absorbed the core sequences but feels that there is something more, perhaps unexplained. Generally open to woo, conscious practices, meditation, also believes that the rationalist community lacks vibes, and thus seeks out and/or creates art and music.
Usually it's the other way around, it's the postrats who going around mocking rationalists every time have a chance.
Not to say that rationalists are pure angels who never mock anyone, but generally they seem to be much more reserved in comparison.
But yeah, there are multiple disagreements, the biggest crux is probably the whole "Is rationalism the true way of obtaining knowledge, or just one tool in the toolbox", where rats would obviously insist on the former and postrats on the latter, and both would see the other side is missing something important, and therefore intellectually inferior.
I'd say I'm myself is much close to postrats in my views, and still I think postrats tend to be much more toxic online - rationalist don't make entire groups dedicated to mocking people they disagree with. Meanwhile, SneerClub exists.
I've never thought of SneerClub as postrationalism, rather more as a collection of people with bees in their bonnets, people with personal axes to grind against personality X, Y or Z, and people with grudges about being kicked out of/never allowed inside in the first place the club (spaces such as LessWrong).
My impression (obviously not that well informed since I didn't know what vibecamp was until just now) is that postrats:rationalists :: romantics : enlightenment thinkers
Excellent post as a whole, and it highlights a disturbing tendency of Tyler these days to take absurd claims at face value (and to “confirm” with AI, which is inherently concerning).
But my favorite part was this piece of prose: “…this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.”
I really wish I could write like Scott, but I’ll have to settle for appreciating stuff like this. I could not phrase it any better.
It's such a strange move to fact-check with o3 for anyone, but someone like Tyler should find it easy to look up a better source. I have no idea why he would do that.
And yeah, Scott's been on fire post-Trump re-election. It's a horrible event, but it's really separated the wheat from the chaff among those who claim to be heterodox truth-seekers.
Richly deserved, though. It has indeed been amusing to see those purported truth-seekers go from "Trumpism is the less bad option" to "Trumpism is actually good" in record speed. People just can't tolerate the perception of themselves not being on the side of Truth and Goodness.
Unsure about this take. Fact checking with o3 is very good most of the time, and if you prompt it with the right questions (something as simple as "Critique/Factcheck this claim"); it gives a sensible rebuttal to Rubio's claim.
This is a failure that comes from Tyler using o3 badly to confirm his own biases, not from using o3.
I think o3 could be a fine start to a fact-checking journey, but I don't think it should end there. I typically use LLMs to give me suggestions on where I should be looking and then go look there myself. I wouldn't cite o3's output directly. That goes double for a professional economist.
I agree that the main issue is Tyler being wrong, but the particular method he took to being wrong suggests to me a basic lack of effort on the issue, which compounds the incompetence displayed.
I get the temptation to dunk on the o3 fact check, but it's worth pointing out that the factual claim is not really the crux here, only the interpretation of the number.
AI fact checking in general should be reserved for low effort situations where you don't care that much about the result, but o3 did fine here. It politely noted that the number it found was "channeled through" rather than "pocketed by". Perhaps it should have been more emphatic about it, but then sycophancy is a known problem with most if not all chatbots.
>and to “confirm” with AI, which is inherently concerning
That particular use of LLMs reminds me of the Electric Monks from Douglas Adams's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". The Monks were androids created by an advanced alien race for the purpose of believing things for you so you don't have to worry about it yourself. Among other thongs, the Monks would provide convincing reassurance on demand of conclusions you wanted to believe but found yourself doubting. Which is fine and useful if you're having irrational worries, but potentially disastrous of you have a Monk talk you into dismissing important and valid doubts.
>I really wish I could write like Scott, but I’ll have to settle for appreciating stuff like this.
I think a big part of the effect is that Scott's default mode is calm, charitable, and thoughtful. The contrast makes it stand out more when he does indulge his temper in bitingly witty remarks like that, and it not being his default mode gives it more informational value when he does find something objectionable enough to make that kind of remark.
I find that MR has gone downhill substantially in the last 9 to 12 months (and I've been reading it for what, 2 decades now?) but that post takes the cake and very rightfully got dunked on.
Sometimes I wonder if some if it is age dependent, I see it with some regularity in people in that age bracket - previously brilliant people start doing odd stuff...
"charity by any stretch" is an extraordinary strong claim. Do you think PEPFAR does not count as a charitable program? Does running a large charitable program not make an organization at least in some sense a charity?
One could make a semantic argument that PEPFAR doesn't count as "charity" because they don't use their own earned money, they use money that was taken from US taxpayers (not that taxation is nessesarily illegitimate, but it's not hard to see why someone would not consider giving away someone elses money as "charity").
This is definitely a semantic argument, but it's one that doesn't even pass muster on semantics. I've never seen a definition of charity that has any requirement for spending "your own" money, whatever that even means.
I googled the word "charity" just now and the first sentence of the AI Overview was, "Charity, in its broadest sense, is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need." Then there is the Wikipedia article on charity, which begins:
>"Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest."
There are also dictionary definitions that use the word "generosity", which doesn't really square with the coercive nature of taxation.
I would agree that USAID is at least charity-adjacent, but I don't begrudge anyone who would roll their eyes upon hearing USAID described as a charity.
"Government departments are not obliged to seek tenders from "in house" State agencies for contract work, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone has said, even though an internal audit questioned the legality of such practices.
Ms Zappone was responding to Independents4Change TD Mick Wallace who questioned the awarding of contracts to not-for-profit agency Pobal.
The company, which has an annual expenditure of more than €450 million, is registered as a charity and disburses EU and Government funding on behalf of various departments."
So simply administering money which then gets paid out to charities does not necessarily mean that it is a charity. I mean, by one interpretation of this, you could claim the IRS is a charity (it oversees the collection of money which then funds social care programmes, welfare for the sick, the elderly, and the disadvantaged, and projects which advance the public good) and nobody believes that.
Banned for this comment. I don't know how many times I need to say that if you're going to say a controversial inflammatory thing that there's a lot of evidence against, you need to make at least some tiny attempt to support your claim.
Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not familiar with the connection, but there's a lot of difference between:
- USAID has been exploited by the CIA in the past
- USAID isn't a real charity, just a CIA front
...and the particular way he framed that either forced someone else to do the hard work of figuring out he meant a much weaker thing, or else let the (false as written) statement stand.
USAID funds the 7headed snake and the snake hates when things like CIA overshadow its work. How was your coffee this morning, Scott? Tell the bright boys and girls I said 'Hi' or 안녕 if still in Cali.
The piece is a bit of a hack job and I don't endorse its conclusions. But it seems unlikely that the innocent USAID compound has the Egyptian secret police on hotdial. The CIA using the State Dept and related agencies as a front in foreign countries is hardly surprising imo. But a given USAID building being a CIA operation hardly means the whole agency is fake.
US government installations abroad have been attacked by terrorists before, and the US arranges with host countries to provide security for US personnel abroad. The fact that Egyptian state security was contacted doesn't mean anything more sinister than any of the 500 foreign missions protected by the Secret Service. It would be a criminal dereliction of duty for anyone administering any US compound abroad not to have the authorities on speed-dial.
I think the soft power thing makes it all more complicated. There's the uncontested good of "feeding the hungry", then there's the bits about "encourage developing nation-states to develop in line with our values" (or at its weakest "okay even if it's a hellhole tyranny under El Presidente Vitalico, he'll be *our* El Presidente and not *their* El Presidente").
That second part is where the CIA etc. come in, and some people wish they'd go right back out, or never came in in the first place.
I heard forms of this allegation several times while working in a very different part of the NGO space. (Probably much of what I heard was downstream of the Guardian article about Cuba cited there.)
I find it hard to untangle what the actual relationship is, because *at least* I believe that a majority of USAID staff aren't involved with any covert activities, and probably aren't aware of any.
I find it plausible that the CIA, especially during the Cold War, sometimes used USAID activities as cover, possibly without the knowledge of many people in USAID. I don't know what the USAID leadership's level of awareness and involvement in that would have been.
When some of the JFK documents were declassified a few weeks back, there were some revelations that certain State Department foreign operations were majority staffed by undercover CIA agents, to the point where this compromised the ability of the State Department to properly function.
Note the date, June 1961. USAID was established by President Kennedy in November of 1961. Coincidence? Maybe, but even if so I can't imagine that the CIA would not leap at the opportunity.
I don't know why you're trying to sanewash an insane claim?
Lockheed Martin also has a long history of collaborating with the CIA but if someone told you that Lockheed Martin was a front for the CIA you would, rightly, think they are an idiot, a crackpot, or both.
And the Rosenbergs spied for the KGB but they also did a whole bunch of other things like sleep, bake cakes, go to the toilet, and so forth. So it's not reasonable to call them KGB agents.
To be a KGB agent, you just have to spy for the KGB - of course you will do other things.
For an organisation to be a CIA front, it would mean that it is set up and controlled by the CIA, and its other purposes are secondary or fake. If a CIA agent pretends to be from USAID, or USAID sometimes collaborates with the CIA, or even if a division of USAID is used as a CIA front but most of USAID's activity is actually charitable, I don't think that rises to the level of "USAID is a CIA front". But you could reasonably say USAID is compromised by its involvement with the CIA - doesn't seem like it's good for that to happen, but shutting down the whole thing and leaving millions of people to die seems worse.
Both organizations have basically the same purpose - furtherance of US interests abroad, so, in a sense, their intermingling is entirely natural and expected. But, of course, charity is sacred and spying is mundane, and having desecration in plain view is bad PR.
I don’t know his posting history but it’s not impossible that it was sarcasm/snark. My initial assumption, though, was that it was just obnoxious. [edit: it’s also true that USAID is a bipartisan project and more, on the Right, for foreign policy reasons. I would assume, though, that this is mostly for non-nefarious reasons.]
Meh. A lot of unexpected vitriol and fingerpointing for an (albiet sloppy) well intentioned mistake. Both of you are figuring out the world and how to make it a better place. Chill. The debate around USAID is important, but highlighting it this way risks alienating for no reason other than I Have Flair Which Means I Have To Get A Gotcha.
It's not just a sloppy mistake, though, it's a weird category error: "people say they spend lots of money buying stuff, but actually 85% of that money goes to stores, not people who make stuff".
I'm very rarely tempted to dive into the MR comments section, because it's reliably terrible (like Sean up there), but I nearly did for this one. Tyler is often wrong, but he's rarely dumb, and this is genuinely dumb.
>"It's not just a sloppy mistake [...] it's a weird category error [...] this is genuinely dumb."
I count weird category errors made well intentionally by individuals who are not often wrong as sloppy mistakes. No matter how dumb (though at a certain point actully one could claim sandbagging for other purposes, but fairly confident Tyler isn't doing this).
Sure it's fine. It's still significantly negative EV based on writing skill, unless there is somehow a positive of being finger pointy other than people who agree with you getting a kick out of it. I stand by what I said: highlighting it this way risks alienating for no reason other than I Have Flair Which Means I Have To Get A Gotcha. It's not outrageous nor do I think it's terrible, just a sloppy writing mistake I was surprised to see from a veteran like Scott.
The egregiousness of the error is communicated in part by the tone Scott uses. Using a less harsh tone might make it seem like cowen's mistake was reasonable to make. It would probably be good long term if Cowen felt a bit of shame about what he wrote, or if people treated his future claims and arguments with more skepticism.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I feel there actually is positive ev in having different tones or writing styles for different disagreements.
I think if an economics professor doesn't want to be dragged like this, they shouldn't make mistakes so obviously bad that they would have to not even be trying.
This is a dumb mistake. It is also dumb to drag people when you have the option *not to* just for the sake of style points when you could as easily have messaged him or said it in a way which made the clarification less alienating.
I call "asking o3 after a host of people pointed you to better sources" not trying. I think being unclear on whether or not Marco Rubio's statement is an accurate summation of USAID activities suggests that Cowen did not read any of the books people pointed him to, another example of "not trying".
Like, did you read the post? Cowen has had plenty of experience with the same difficulties of funding that Scott has seen. What reason did he have for not referencing this breadth of knowledge besides just obviously not thinking about the problem in any depth before posting?
I also think this is a sloppy mistake from Tyler. That is not my point. This could be a useful wake up call for Tyler to not slip in rigor. It would be more effective if he wasn't pseduo-berated while being reminded. Also, for those who actually need to hear this, it will be less effective at reaching them because Scott is busy hitting intellectual no-scopes.
My point is this goes beyond "attempted to use best analytical ability and failed" and into "did not attempt to employ analytical ability out of lack of interest, but uttered unverified opinion on a high-impact topic regardless".
I think when experts behave poorly, their reputation should degrade. That's what keeps expert opinions distinguished from non-expert opinions.
I agree to the first part; read my above comment again. I think when the outcome of these conversations could have real impact we should make more positive EV trades. I like the fact Scott called this out, and am positive to neutral that he did so publicly rather than message Tyler, including a small implicit degredation or threat of such (not outright hostile, just the natural flow like you discuss) to Tyler. However, doing it with a writing style that prioritises flexing on Tyler than communicating makes no sense, unless we are just prioritising short term status points.
It did feel a little more like "outrage first, ask questions later" than I'm used to from Scott. But I dunno, it does look to me like a pretty egregious error, and he kinda did "ask questions" there at the end.
The feature of being whipish with your language can be dissociated from the main part. The place we see this feature is amongst pundits and highschool debate tournaments. It is to win community points but often at the cost of other people actually hearing you. It is literally just an unexpected skill issue from Scott, considering he probably has the skill.
It is an error, but not one driven by malice. Even if it was, Scott would help more people if he didn't risk alienating some or not getting his message across to those who it would actually impact for the sake of stylin' on em. So to speak.
As a popular commentator and author, you might hope and expect that he actually absorbed some of that. With that background, Tyler seemingly accepting a claim about aid effectiveness, made by an administration that is massively cutting aid, at face value, makes him come across as a bit of a hack. What did he add to the debate here except signal boosting a false claim?
Meanwhile it seems reasonable to me to have a bit of vitriol for a position that plausibly leads to thousands or millions of deaths.
That makes me more symapthetic, not less. He tried. This could be a useful wake up call to double check. It would be more effective if you didn't berate him while doing it. Also, those who actually need to hear this, it will be less effective at reaching them because you're busy hitting intellectual no-scopes. His mistake is he shoehorned USAID into a heuristic of bad for the US gov to fund using other people's money because some is (like funding the bbc or trans puppet shows).
>Meanwhile it seems reasonable to me to have a bit of vitriol for a position that plausibly leads to thousands or millions of deaths.
Actually it absolutely has the opposite effect. When the impact of your words can have significant impact like Scott's, he should try his best to choose what will be helpful over what will give him status points. This is counterintuitively one of the reason he has so many status points amongst people who actually can make change. Is he has the skill and the intent to do so. This is a silly mistake from Scott. If because of his desire to crank intellectual 90s he now does not reach someone wh would otherwise convinced, he's made an egregious and silly mistake. Such skill based negative EV trades from a veteran writer make no sense.
He did research in February. I just, can't accept that he's saying this in good faith. "Nor were many US AID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on" Maybe he's getting forgetful? Like he could have just reread his post from 3 months ago (he's quoting Ken Opalo, who is largely defending US Aid):
"Only 11% of U.S. aid goes directly to foreign organizations. The rest gets management via U.S. entities or multilateral organizations. This doesn’t mean that the 89% of aid gets skimmed off, just that an inefficiently significant share of the 89% gets gobbled up by overhead costs. In addition, this arrangement denies beneficiaries a chance at policy autonomy."
Yeah, for someone who is so smart, it is a ridiculously sloppy mistake to make, one that most of us would easily catch. However, I would assume innocence of malice until proof of guilt. Still, we all make mistakes, and it's important for the facilitation of conversation that we are focused on giving eachother a helping hand when we slip and fall, not kick. Still, I hope this serves as a wake up call for Tyler to maintain rigor and not post unless he has double or triple read.
Why is "underrepresented women in permaculture" cringe? Women are key to food security and family wellbeing all over the world. The developing country I know best faces severe climate challenges, and women in that country endure limited access to education, healthcare, and political participation. Anything that increases climate resilience (through soil & water conservation, etc) and improves the socioeconomic situation of women in that country would be a Good Thing. Also, PS: it is just not a place where a mixed classroom of men and women (most of whom would not be literate) will see equal participation on the women's part.
My initial reaction is the opposite, Scott has been criticizing the right a lot lately due to Trump, wants to include a jab at the left wherever possible to retain his audience/street cred, and isn't putting a ton of thought into the jabs.
That's not actually my guess about the truth of the matter because I recognize it as too uncharitable and flattering to my own positions, but it's my first intuitive reaction.
Yeah, a lot of anti-DEI rhetoric is unthinking, unfortunately. Take things like funding "LGBTQ plays" or "transgender comic books." The sad fact is that, in many countries, LGBTQ people are discriminated against or even in physical danger. Another fact is that cultural products can indeed have effects on people's attitudes, and increase empathy. If the State Dept funded screenings of Gentleman's Agreement in countries where anti-Semitism is rampant, or screenings of, I don't know, A Man for All Seasons in a country where Christians are oppressed, no one would bat an eye. But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
> But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
Kinda. The trans movement in particular is a pretty recent advance in social morality in the west. Heck, even gay marriage, which is one step behind, wasn’t even acceptable to Hilary Clinton for most of her career. And this kinda of thing comes across as cultural imperialism.
I’m not sure either who it’s exactly fooling. The west isn’t going to win hearts and minds by pontificating about trans rights here, while supporting Israel in Gaza there, and allying itself with Saudi Arabia and the Syrian head choppers. Sure it might win hearts and minds amongst some centrists and liberals in the west, provided democrats are in power but it’s not really fooling anyone outside that that demographic, and not everybody in it either.
> If the State Dept funded screenings of Gentleman's Agreement in countries where anti-Semitism is rampant, or screenings of, I don't know, A Man for All Seasons in a country where Christians are oppressed, no one would bat an eye. But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
Though isn't part of the point that they don't? How much effort does the State Department spend standing up for Christians versus gays or Jews?
I am not sure where the "or Jews" comes from. Is the Administration deeming efforts to combat anti-Semitism illegitimate?
And, where are the calls to combat anti-Christian bias IN ADDITION to combating anti-LGBTQ bias? All I see is calls to end efforts at combating anti-LGBTQ bias.
I'm guessing orders of magnitude more is spent on Christians?
My impression has always been that, while the US is vaguely against persecution of anyone anywhere, it takes the prosecution of Christians as its own special duty and responsibility to address.
This is just the google AI summary, you can do more research to see if I'm wrong, but it agrees with my impression of how this works. This is what I get:
>The State Department, as a part of the U.S. government, has a documented focus on international religious freedom and the protection of persecuted Christians, including those facing violence, discrimination, and restrictions on their faith.
>The State Department engages in diplomatic outreach to countries where Christians face persecution or discrimination.
>They work to encourage governments to respect religious freedom, to protect religious minorities, and to prevent acts of violence and discrimination against Christians.
>The State Department also supports efforts to provide humanitarian assistance and legal aid to persecuted Christians.
>This assistance may include providing food, shelter, and medical care, as well as supporting efforts to rebuild their lives and communities.
>The State Department also works with other organizations to provide humanitarian assistance to persecuted Christians
In practice the US supports the new Al Queda regime in Syria, where Assad was a better option for Christians and minorities, as was Saddam. As was ghaddafi.
Then there’s the coming destruction of Palestinian Christians.
Seconded. The State does not give Christians special rights or funding even in places where the same reasoning applies for the special funding or rights to minimise violence. Words are cheap. Look at the realpolitik.
I would bat an eye at all that. I have also said that I don't want the US government funding charities that I personally donate to (anti-malaria ones), but I wouldn't donate to a charity that screened movies rather than attacked infectious diseases (unless screening movies was shown to be effective against infectious diseases, which sounds unlikely to me).
"I'm not referring to charities. I am referring to State Department programs."
This is the issue in a nutshell. Is USAID a charity or a state department programme? The furore is about "they're defunding charities!" but if part of it is "State Department stuff" then let the State Department handle that.
The point is that USAID and the State Dept are different entities and do different things. USAID is an independent agency* and funds what is usually called charitable works. They don't do "State Department stuff."
You said you weren't referring to charities, but now you say that USAID funds charitable works, with the post we're all responding to noting that the funds are mostly channeled through NGOs (charities). And I say I don't want the US government funding charities that could be funded by private donations rather than taxes, nor do I think your hypothetical movie screenings deserve even private donations.
The people who need to read the transgender comic books in order not to beat up LGBT+ people are not the people who will be reading them; the entire event will be a PR showcase for a particular artist with all the guests in attendance wholeheartedly on board, and nobody will benefit (except maybe the comic book artist gets some funding).
No one said they would be. Cultural and social change happens slowly. And a kid who reads it might grow up with different attitudes. In fact, isn't that the EXACT argument of those who oppose such "woke" cultural products: that they will lead to change? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
It's cringe if you're specifically trying to achieve DEI cultural victories in a country that doesn't particularly want its culture meddled with but does want help with food security and medication.
Women (in the country I’m speaking of) already garden, farm, run households, and (sometimes) get university educations. In a subsistence farming environment, everyone participates—men, women, children.
Empowering women in permaculture isn’t cultural imperialism. It’s about supporting people who are already doing the work but often without the same access to resources or training. Inclusion is smart, respectful development.
Or, instead of picking and choosing winners, how about you empower everyone? If you must choose, empower entrepreneurs. Business ventures. That, at least, has higher marginal value for getting the country out of its economic rut.
Generally powering entrepreneurship (which also affects women!) is far better than focusing specifically on women entrepreneurs.
In development work, targeted support isn’t about “picking winners." It’s about addressing imbalances that limit overall progress. Women aren’t a niche group. They’re half the population and they’re central to the country's food systems. Ignoring them in the name of “neutrality” isn’t empowerment--it’s erasure.
Also--lots of permaculture initiatives ARE business ventures! Small farming co-ops, plant nurseries, collecting natural products like shea butter nuts & selling associated goods through export co-ops, etc.
I'll turn it back around to you - empowering women instead of everyone as a whole is ignoring half the population, when compared to an initiative that doesn't discriminate by gender.
Do you really think there are zero cultures on the planet where the human capital represented by women is being underutilized?
Like, I roll my eyes about people who make the argument that US markets are so efficient that no woman's talent could possibly ever be wasted by sexism. But do you really want to make the argument that this is true in *every country on the planet*?
> Empowering women in permaculture isn’t cultural imperialism.
It is.
> It’s about supporting people who are already doing the work but often without the same access to resources or training. Inclusion is smart, respectful development.
DEI hasn't accomplished much of anything other than redistributing resources to progressives' favoured groups and engendering resentment against the left
> Anything that increases climate resilience (through soil & water conservation, etc) and improves the socioeconomic situation of women in that country would be a Good Thing
Is it?
You have two groups in society, Group A and Group B. From your excellent vantage point behind your desk in Washington you percieve an asymmetry between these two groups, so you come in and start handing out scads of money to people in Group B. What happens next? Well, it could go a bunch of ways...
1. Group A starts recruiting Group B front-persons to collect $$$. (This is the way it actually seems to work in practice when governments start prioritising "female-owned" businesses, by the way, you suddenly get a whole lot of businesses officially owned by the wives of the guys who actually run them)
2. Group A decides it hates the US now
3. Group A starts attacking and robbing Group B who are the recipients of such undeserved foreign largesse (unlikely with men/women but can easily happen with other groups)
The point is that trying to privilege certain groups over others is always playing with fire. The principle of anti-discrimination is a good one and should be applied both internally and externally.
There's way too much acceptance of woo in permaculture I agree, but at the end of the day, it's gardening/farming. With a focus on sustainability and resilience through water conversation, using native plants, using perennials, not using petrochemicals and so on.
Well, that's the same motte-and-bailey as when eg theists argue that their deity is just another name for love and/or the universe. But when you turn around, they return to talking about trinity or cutting bits of infants.
(Sorry, I couldn't think of a less inflammatory example quickly. I don't want to disparage religion in general. It's fine to have complicated ideas or lifestyle requirements, as long as you don't claim your deity is just another word for the universe.)
What's the equivalent to "talking about trinity or cutting bits of infants" in permaculture? Genuine question, I know next to nothing about the culture of permaculturists.
Or you can try reading a bit into what the permaculture people put out themselves. It's often more of a philosophy with spiritual elements than a science.
"Well, that's the same motte-and-bailey as when eg theists argue that their deity is just another name for love and/or the universe."
Not this theist. I am very much against arguments by the liberal types who try to water down religion with "God is just another name for the sense within us of compassion" or "We are all stardust" or "Love is the universal force that enables us all".
God is God. And the Trinity is more than just "a feeling of niceness when our bellies are full and we are fat and happy".
It's only a motte-and-bailey if permaculture is primarily about woo but when challenged its proponents defend it as gardening/farming. The comment you're replying to reads to me to be saying permaculture is primarily about gardening/farming but unfortunately there's more woo in there than they'd like. I don't know if the field of permaculture is primarily about gardening/farming or if it really is all woo. The former seems more likely to me on the priors so I'd say it's your job to prove otherwise if it's not.
Just imagine that instead of the throw-away remark that we have in Scott's text, he would have mentioned the journal the hoaxers from the Grievance studies affair managed to publish in.
I strongly disagree with someone who says 'Sexism is dead in the US, there's no need to try to have any programs or efforts to correct it anymore', but I can recognize them as part of a rhetorical movement with a lot of support and arguments.
But in the context of foreign aid, the claim would have to be 'Sexism is dead everywhere on the planet, there's no point to programs to address it anywhere,' and that seems uncontroversially wrong to me?
Are there any of those still left? By now it seems that half the country is convinced that there's pervasive anti-female discrimination, the other half ditto for the anti-male one.
My impression, and I admit it's not informed, is that things like "underrepresented women in permaculture" tend to have fewer of said underrepresented women, and more of committees holding meetings to go to conferences to present papers on setting up pilot schemes, which all involve nice remuneration for the members, flying off to agreeable locations for said conferences, and lots of verbiage produced (which then goes up on the website) but which shakes out as not much actual permaculture in practice.
For example, what was the point of the concert in Ireland? Hosted by the US Ambassador, the local big cheeses who present concerts like this all involved, and I'm sure they had a lovely night of music and schmoozing. But what did it actually achieve? Get Ireland on board with the US values and government? Newsflash, we're there already, we're so damn dependent on US multinationals (and in previous decades, the US as a destination for our emigrants) that at times it'd be easier if we were just officially another state.
Only tangentially related, but it's really annoying and unnecessary when you have gender quotas for agricultural interventions (which USAID had). Agricultural patterns are often heavily gendered (e.g. in some cultures women will never plant maize, which is seen as a male crop), but outcomes are mostly family-based (so what is good for a male farmer is good for his wife and daughters, and vice-versa).
If I remember correctly, on this maize project I worked on 6-7 years ago, (increasing fertiliser use through microloans) we applied for USAID funding for a high-impact intervention on the dominant cash crop, but failed because we had to admit that almostall maize farmers were male, and some idiot at USAID thought that anything only supporting ultra-poor *male* farmers was holding up the patriarchy.
So, while funding permaculture and female farmers isn't bad in itself, I sympathise with the sentiment.
Is there anything in Tyler's post beyond "pocketed the money" to generate this kind of invective?
Especially when the next couple lines are...pretty openly expressing confusion:
"I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many US AID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
Maybe Tyler is wrong, maybe he's right, maybe it's just genuinely hard to figure out how much cash actually helps people when $1 million dollars of aid gets passed through 3 NGOs, each of whom take a 20-30% cut...which was the entire purpose of entities like Givewell in the first place, to find highly efficient charities because there's so much signaling and waste in the process.
But, yo, you've been posting on Covid here recently, a very touchy subject that affected virtually all of your readers personally, and pushing for a rational and mature analysis of the facts. Cool, awesome possum. Why are you suddenly going 0-100 on not even PEPFAR but USAID as a whole on a, at most, petty dig.
> "Maybe Tyler is wrong, maybe he's right, maybe it's just genuinely hard to figure out how much cash actually helps people when $1 million dollars of aid gets passed through 3 NGOs, each of whom take a 20-30% cut...which was the entire purpose of entities like Givewell in the first place, to find highly efficient charities because there's so much signaling and waste in the process."
I'm not sure how you think this should work.
If USAID had to run every program itself, then it would have to build up in-house specialization in hundreds of different fields, many of which are in tiny countries it knows nothing about. Then it would get accused of bureaucratic bloat.
If USAID had to run everything through local governments and NGOs, many of those governments/NGOs would be corrupt or incompetent, or at least not willing to audit themselves to US standards. Then it would be accused of facilitating corruption and incompetence.
If the US government had to fulfill its charitable interests without there being an intermediate agency called USAID, how do you imagine this working? The President figures everything out personally?
I don't know, maybe this only makes sense to me because I've personally done regranting stuff, but I don't understand how people expect this to work if not through a large rich entity like the US government having a group that figures out which charities to donate to and then donating to those charities.
I expect it to be pretty clear what % of USAID funding goes to directly improving the lives of people and that's not clear to me and, apparently, that's not clear to Tyler Cowen.
If 80% of the money USAID gives goes to people overseas who need help, awesome, I cannot reasonably ask for anything better.
If USAID has 20% bureaucratic costs and then they regrant it to an NGO whose takes 30% who then forwards it to a local government actor who takes 20% so...only like 45% of the original money makes it to people who actually need it, that stinks but that may genuinely be the best that can be done.
If USAID takes 30% of the money and then an NGO filled with people who hate me takes 30% and they forward it to another NGO who takes 30% and all those people hate me and then they forward it to a local government who takes 50% so maybe 17% of the money goes to people who need it and like 36% goes to people who hate me...that's a bad thing I don't like.
So this isn't binary. Specifics matter. Percentages matter. Administrative costs of, I dunno, 15%, are probably fine and normal but 60% are super bad. Corruption is a sad fact of the world but the specific amounts matter.
And it cannot be a capital offense to be confused about how much money is actually going to good stuff, how much is going to dumb stuff, and how much is going to bad stuff when that's an active topic of debate that no one can apparently provide a clear answer to, especially when the guy seems more confused than condemning.
That's what I want. More fundamentally, I'm confused why we should approach Covid, where over a million people died and over a hundred million were locked in their homes for over a year, with calm rational analysis whereas an offhand dig generates this kind of response. This isn't even, like, I think you did a bad or Tyler did a good, this response just seems...really disproportionate.
It sounds like you have a model of this where you start with N dollars, then there are multiple steps where someone "takes" a fraction of the remaining dollars and passes the rest to the next step, then there's some end step where the good happens with the remaining r*N dollars, with r < 1. So you want to know the value of r. Is that right?
I don't think this is a good model. First, because the thing we care about is the effects the grant has on the world, not the amount of money that makes it to the last step. And second, because it's not clear which parts of the whole system are the "doing good" part and which parts are not. If someone's job is to negotiate shipping contracts for vaccines, is that the bad part? Does it matter if that person hates you?
Yes, you've understood what I want. I concur that what you propose would be way, way better, I don't think it's feasible. I think measuring actual impacts is super hard and measuring amounts of money going from bank to bank is relatively easy. So if we can't track money going from bank to bank, I don't think we can track outcomes.
that would be super awesome. I don't think they can, so I don't ask for it.
As for whether it matters whether people who hate me are doing important jobs that empirically save lives is important...short term no, long term yes, if that makes sense. If USAID funding people who hate me has been going on for a couple years, then yeah, try to reform it, totally not worth the cost. If USAID has been funding people who hate me for decades to the point where we elected an Insane Clown Man almost 10 years ago and everybody doing critical life-saving work is like "Yes, we know that the Insane Clown Man will return to power at some point and we desperately need reform but we're not gonna because..." (I genuinely don't know) then I guess reform isn't an option and either people who hate me get tens of billions of dollars a year forever, which is bad, or you need to accept a dramatic short-term shock and then rebuild as best as possible afterwards, which I think is what Eccentric Genuis Spaceman was trying to do.
As it happens, in June of last year there was an inspector general investigation of USAID spending. I just skimmed it and it looks like they found some issues but nothing earthshaking.
In most cases there's no step at the end where they hand the money to poor people. It's charities (or other organizations) spending the money on staff and supplies all the way down. If the local food bank buys canned beans is that "pocketed" by Archer Daniels Midland? Are the guys digging the well "overhead"? Like yeah it can be hard to figure out how effective a donation or charitable expenditure is, but your only hope is to look at results, not try to trace how many different places the money goes through.
Well, some parts of the US Government manage to do their jobs themselves, e.g. the US military does most things using its own employees. Where it does use contractors, it does it on a basis of carefully negotiated contracts where money is exchanged for specific deliverables. Even with these safeguards there's a lot of waste and corruption in military contracting, because there's always waste and corruption whenever groups of people get together to spend other people's money.
Or we can look at other grant-making agencies like the NSF or NIH or DoE. They hand out a lot of grants for research, and competition for these grants is tight. Grants flow directly from the agency to the people actually doing the research (the university takes a known cut but accountability is directly between the researcher and the NSF) and they have to report on the outcomes they're getting for their money. Again it's not particularly efficient but there's accountability.
The allegation seems to be that USAID is (or was) spending a small fraction of its budget a bit like the NSF, but the rest disappeared into a multi-layered system of NGOs with minimal accountability. USAID gives money to some group, which takes a cut and gives money to some other group, which takes a cut and gives money to some other group, with the net effect that there's no meaningful accountability or even understanding of where the heck the money is going.
But the purpose of the military is to kill people. All that research and strategizing is waste and fraud. Technically, the soldiers don’t have to eat to kill people. And why are they shipping soldiers to the front. Why not just pay locals. Fraud! Fraud! Fraud! \S
No, that was my next sentence. Where they don't do things themselves, they buy specific things for specific amounts of money, with accountability.
They don't grow their own potatoes. But nor do they sprinkle cash all over Idaho and just hope that this has a generally potatoey outcome for the troops. They make contracts with suppliers, who have to deliver specific things to get paid. This level of accountability seems to be missing in the NGO world.
Any supplier has a lot of nebulous less accountable overhead. Eg not all research projects pan out. You have to charge that somewhere.
So either you:
- add some general overhead to every product and service
- or: you specifically charge the military for running your HR department and blue sky research (but then you can only do research that the military is explicitly already looking for)
- or (this happens in the private sector by default): you just charge whatever the market can bear for your products, regardless of their variable cost of production. Any profit you make can go to fund your overhead. (Eg Apple charges you a lot more than it costs to produce a smart phone.)
The military also fund PR and advertising campaigns. They pay the agencies for specific deliverables (like X minutes of radio ads), but they don't pay for actual impact (like how many additional recruits show up because of the ads). Very similar to how charities spend most of their money.
Have you actually compared the audits/accounting reports from the DoD and USAID? Or is this just your impression of the relative levels of accountability that exist in the two organizations?
"The university takes a known cut but accountability is directly between the researcher and the NSF".
I don't think your point survives this - if the GMU stat above is right, the university takes a larger cut than USAID intermediaries do.
I think the impact of your argument relies on "no accountability" and "no understanding of where the money is going". But in the case I've seen studied at length (PEPFAR), they do careful audits and know exactly where the money is going, and produce large and measurable results, probably more impressive than any of the other government agencies you mention. If you remove the false claims that there's no accountability and they don't know where the money is, then what's left?
"a group that figures out which charities to donate to and then donating to those charities."
I think that's the question that needs to be answered: does it figure out which charities to donate to, or does it just disburse the funds on the model of "the permaculture for underrepresented women applied to the Department of Agriculture which awarded them grant funding, now we just write the cheques and handle the paperwork involved in paying out the money to Maké Mii Riche, c/o Bank of Zurich"?
I don't know what you're saying. How do you think they choose recipients without deciding on them? You think they just give it to whoever stumbles into the USAID office, and by coincidence it happened to be charities that save millions of lives each year and are more effective than the average private philanthropic foundation?
That is precisely what I want to know: does the USAID office select causes to be funded out of a pot of money handed over by the government, or does it simply manage the disbursement of funds awarded by different government departments?
Let me take an example from where I work. (This is just one of the various funding streams we access). We, as an organisation serving the community, can apply for grants paid out of the National Lottery. (I'm using this as an example because "money raised from the public spending on the lottery" is similar enough, in my view, to "money raised from the public via taxation" when it comes to "money for good causes that the public does not get to directly allocate to any particular good cause or charity").
The National Lottery itself does not decide on who gets what, it simply provides the pot of money based on this calculation:
"Funds for good causes comprise 65% of the difference between the total monies received for sales of National Lottery tickets and the prizes won each year."
They then hand this money over to the Exchequer (e.g. in 2023 this was an amount of €241 million). So what next?
Well, each government department administers various grant schemes.
"In accordance with Section 41 of the National Lottery Act, these sums are applied as determined by Government for the following purposes:
(a) sport and recreation;
(b) national culture and heritage (including the Irish language);
(c) the arts (within the meaning of the Arts Act 2003);
(d) health of the community;
(e) youth, welfare and amenities;
(f) natural environment;
(g) Such other objectives (if any) as the Government may determine from time to time.
Applications for funding should be made via the relevant Government Department."
So if you are a charitable or community organisation, you decide what particular body you fall under and apply for that grant. For us, it's the Health Service Executive, which is governed by the Department of Health. And it disburses the tranche of lottery money it receives as grants for:
"We offer National Lottery grants to health and social care projects.
Community groups and voluntary organisations can apply.
You must provide health or social care services to the community. For example, you might help people with a disability, older people, carers or disadvantaged groups.
Public bodies, including the HSE, cannot apply for this funding."
The National Lottery doesn't decide if we get the grant, it just forks over the money. So is USAID more like the National Lottery (handles the funds) or the HSE (decides who gets what grant)?
If anyone here either works with or knows someone who knows someone who works with USAID it would clear up a *lot* of the confusion. Which I think comes from the USAID doing both jobs - it decides who gets grants, but it also just hands over money to projects the State Department says "yeah, go ahead, give the money to the transgender opera company".
If you'd prefer an example from "ah yes but this is not really a government body, I want a government body", then let's talk about Pobal.
This pays money into our bank account each month under the various childcare schemes available (that's for us, Pobal handles other government funding for other bodies as well). Pobal doesn't decide who gets what money how, that's all done by us applying for the children in our service via "the Early Learning and Care (ELC) and School Aged Childcare (SAC) service provider portal for programmes funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY)" (and if anyone is curious about *that*, here's a link and good luck to you: https://earlyyearshive.ncs.gov.ie/how-to-guides/payments-and-programme-funding/)
So the DCEDIY gets money from the Exchequer, decides how much goes for the childcare schemes, and tells ELC/SAC to handle the application process. Then they decide how much money we get under each scheme based on enrolment, attendance, etc. Then they tell Pobal how much to pay us per each scheme. Then Pobal transfers it into our bank account (and then I have to keep track of what we got when for which, but thanks be to all the gods in every pantheon I don't handle the actual applying for each child under each scheme, a function which is one of the Nine Circles of Hell).
So you tell me - is USAID more like Pobal (pays out the money) or like ELC (decides who gets what when why)?
And all the above is separate to our *other* funding stream which involves directly applying to the HSE which is funded by the Department of Health, and which has a *different* set of three other separate offices I have to return service agreement, accounts, projections, and actual expenditure to, and which has me clawing my eyes out* every January - May (depending on when they finally sent us the paperwork to be completed and returned). Three separate offices which all want the same information, though presented differently, and which apparently don't co-ordinate or share the data at all.
Are you surprised I think DOGE is a great idea? Take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy, Elon! Chainsaw I say!
* Our financial year runs from July to June. The service year runs from September to May (because we follow the school year). The funding year is the calendar year which is, of course, January to December. One set wants it for the *last* calendar year and one set wants it for the *current* calendar year. Oh the fun of reconciling "half of this was the last six months of last year and half of this is the first six months of this year but it's not the full six months yet when you're asking me for the returns".
What do you think is an appropriate response to a well-known professor of economics being very wrong on the relative value of a department critical to the wellbeing of tens of millions of people when his own experience should have been enough to inform him on why said department works the way it does? What about when the level of fact-checking he did before posting was "I asked o3"?
Shit man, if I had to write a response every time a well-known professor of economics was very wrong about something then I'd never have time to sleep.
Have you noticed how conditioned we are to raging now? Scott himself wrote "Toxoplasma of rage" once, one of his best texts. This is Moloch touching him now. He is strongly resistant, but not entirely immune.
You've overcorrected on "being angry means you're irrational". Why do you think it's wrong to be angry at a trained expert who should know better very obviously not bother to tap his presumably vast wealth of knowledge before commenting on poorly-informed policy changes that stand to kill thirty million people?
The pro-USAID destruction side here is pretty clearly spelling out its opinion that this is a fine cost to pay as long as it destroys the jobs of a few progressives they find annoying. Considering this, which side would you say is more enraged by political polarization, the one that's killing thirty million people or the one that doesn't like doing that?
I think it is irrational for both people and society to allow themselves being systematically angri-fied by manipulative outside forces, for two reasons:
a. It reduces the ability to actually do something constructive, which usually involves both diplomacy and ability to co-operate across the spectrum.
b. In democratic countries, it promotes election of "anger-mongers" into seats of power.
Looking around, widespread "angrification" seems obvious to me.
Sure, but why does avoiding angri-fication mean that nobody is allowed to be angry that someone has done a bad thing of great magnitude for exceedingly poor justification?
I don't think this would prompt such a response if it wasn't from Tyler. The man tossed out an innuendo to his very large audience that can be rejected with 2 minutes of reflection, especially by an economics professor with *immense* personal knowledge of how charity grants work.
I agree that this is probably because Tyler is...a rather special and influential figure but special and influential figures do small dumb things all the time. I'm sure Tyler has said dumb things on occasion before and will do so again; that's a thing public intellectuals do.
I don't think Scott is going to try and cancel/blacklist Tyler over this, but one angry response is also a pretty small deal? The invective is mostly targeted at Rubio/Trump
For me, the part where this essay picks up steam is pointing out Tylers own deep experience in running a charity that does regrants and has overhead. Tyler doesnt get to gesture vaguely at some superficial stats and say hmm looks fishy, really wish the MSM would do a better job here.
Tyler has to do the better job! Hes the one with the expertize to do it! Instead he is implicitly endorsing the naive view. And Scott here is showing him how to be better. This line of criticism reminds me of Scotts contempt for conspiracy theory debunkers who dont bother to actually explain themselves.
I think accusing people of billion-dollar grifts without evidence is a perfectly good reason to invect! He implies that the average allocation is wasted with maybe some small percentage actually doing good, which is the kind of extraordinary accusation that requires evidence.
I thought it was clear why Scott was so angry -- it's right at the end of the post:
> Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people (see my father’s story of his time in this world here) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.
> Part of the joy of owning your own blog is getting to make absolutely sure that you never unintentionally give one iota of aid or comfort to these lies or anything remotely associated with them.
And Tyler Cowen did, through ignorance plus surprisingly naive trust in the most hallucinatory SOTA LLM ever released.
I don’t know anything about the specifics here, but if each charity takes 30% for overhead, the money has to be passed 6 times before the amount is reduced below 12% of the original.
Presumably the local charities may have higher overheard. But still, I can’t imagine 6 layers of bureaucracy. 4 I can see: USAID -> National US charity -> National native charity -> regional native charity -> specific local organization. So 4 would make sense. 4 layers, each taking 30%, reduces the amount to like 24% of the original, I think. That’s higher than Rubio said, but still doesn’t sound good?
Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine multiple levels of bureaucracy rapidly chewing up money with overhead charges. But 88% still seems extreme.
Nobody was seriously claiming that 88% was pocketed. The 88% number was either the amount that went to US rather than foreign NGOs, or the amount that went through NGOs rather than governments. I understand your confusion though and that's part of why I wrote this post.
I have professional experience in non-profit management. 30% does sound high to me, 15% would be more typical. Then again, that's in the US, a developed nation. The situation could be different overseas. The devil is in the details.
Does the 20-35% account for every time the money changed hands? Because if it’s ~30% overhead each time it changed hands, that makes a high overall subtraction from the original amount seem likely.
When I asked o3 (I know!) it said 20 - 35% (sorry, I mistyped it) for the first one. Some only go through one, others go through more layers that take more like 5-10% total. I don't know why the other layers take less.
Well then, given that information, and lacking any real transparency from the Trump administration on the matter, it's hard to imagine that Rubio's being honest. They did that whole big 90-day review, so I thought there might be some kind of report or audit forthcoming, which, if it existed, could possibly substantiate Rubio's claims. But if he had it, he'd be citing it. Two thumbs down, shame on him.
It stands to reason that multiple layers would have less overhead than one, if the money involved are actually doing something instead of being burned in open pits. If the job of coordinating aid to some province in Rwanda needs an administrator in the US, an logistics person in Kigali, and a local distributor in the provinces, that's going to be some fixed amount of overhead whether an organization does the whole thing in house with 30% overhead, or it's recontracted three times with 10% each.
Interesting - I read it as USAID should be about giving money directly to foreign government organizations, rather than through US based NGOs. I understand your reading of the situation though.
I do think there is an interesting underlying question of how to define the goals for a program like USAID and figure out how to provide the most efficient governance to achieve those goals. Both of those seem very likely sub-optimal with home runs like PEPFAR and difficult to justify other grants co-existing from the same funding bucket. At least on my reading of both of you, that seems like something that both Tyler and you agree on.
I'd find the bad faith post-hoc reasoning almost funny if it wasn't covering for evil. These people should just say what they really think - that foreign charity causes aren't worth it. That's really what their belief system boils down to.
If I wanted to be especially uncharitable (no pun intended) I'd say they see certain lives as less valuable than others. But one can't openly admit that in a public forum and so they have to play up paranoid fantasies of undocumented corruption.
It's mysterious why so many people feel they can't express their true beliefs. And not all of them are so constrained - there were plenty on the right when PEPFAR was defunded that proudly declared their indifference and gloated over the liberal tears.
How many times was the heatmap meme posted as a dunk?
For whose sake are some people concocting a cover story about their opposition to the programs? Nobody's going to cancel them.
Maybe it's cognitive dissonance - their egos aren't able to reconcile their self-image with the consequences of their beliefs, so they come up with a more high-minded excuse?
Basically conservatives willfully misinterpreting data that shows liberals on average show more empathy towards members of an outgroup. The willful misinterpretation is that liberals care more about the outgroup than the ingrown, of course this is inaccurate.
The original paper the figure's from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0#Fig5. I leave it to the reader to interpret the plot. They DO clarify that "these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family)." If it doesn't mean what it looks like it does, they're being extremely misleading.
To be fair, the design of the study is stupid and the visualization is worse.
The willful misinterpretation is downstream of bad design, and as Glorious Leader once said- if you think you're criticizing your ingroup, maybe you've mislabeled your outgroup. Liberals don't care more about the outgroup than the ingroup; you're just drawing those labels wrong. It would be closer to say they care about the fargroup more than the ingroup. Liberals, especially progressives (sometimes called extreme liberals in academia for some dumbass reason), are so high in openness to experience that it wraps around into oikophobia.
Or maybe we think it too obvious to be stated: that when your house is sinking deeper into debt every year, you shouldn't be donating money you don't have before getting your fiscal situation in shape.
Why even discuss how effective or ineffective the program is when you can't pay for it without going deeper into debt?
I disagree. I read the "you" as the government, ie that they were saying that the government shouldn't be spending the public's money (money obtained in part from compelling them to pay the government) on foreigners when the public is in debt
Except that people are not being forced into debt in order to pay their taxes, let alone to pay the tiny percent of taxes that go to foreign aid. You are evading the question.
Hm, so spending money to end a genocide is tyranny if we have a budget deficit, but not if we have a budget surplus? Or is it always tyranny? If so, that sounds like an argument that tyranny is a good thing.
I'm well aware that the government debt and household debt analogy has limitations. But your government debt has reached dangerous levels, and is becoming a drag on the economy. Options like rolling over the debt or defaulting come with drastic downsides and are politically unviable anyway. In such an environment, your government debt has become not too different from household debt.
While the USAID amount is relatively small in the grand scheme of budgetary concerns, it's also one of the few things that's political expedient and relatively easy to cut. Aligning with the the principle that a government's duty should always put its own citizenry first above all else.
If the US were economically strong and the needs of the citizenry were adequately (even if not perfectly) met, then there would be far fewer pushbacks on government spending on foreign humanitarian efforts . But that's not the situation right now. Now is a time where every dollar and cent needs to be spent revitalizing the American economy or in support of needy Americans.
>Aligning with the the principle that a government's duty should always put its own citizenry first above all else
Except that that principle is bogus. A simple thought experiment: I am a CBP officer on patrol in the desert. I am approached by a US citizen who tells me that he is out for a hike with his US citizen son. They have run of water and have not had a drink for 3 hours. Simultaneously, an illegal immigrant approaches, accompanied by his son, who has not had a drink for more than a day. I have one bottle of water. Under your principle, I am morally compelled to give the water to the US citizen, which is absurd.
Moreover, the current issue is not "which funding should we cut." It is, "is it moral to cut foreign aid funding while simultaneously extending tax cuts to people earning more than $600,000
It is not the duty of government to act in the most moral way, nor should it be the duty of the government to act in the most moral way. The government in general, and also individual government agencies, should act in accordance with the mandate given to them, and no more than that.
Morality is diverse and often personal, and it is not the role of the state to be the arbiter of ultimate moral truth. Government mandates are derived from the democratic will of the people, and adhering to these mandates ensures that government actions are predictable, legitimate, and accountable to the populace that granted the mandate. Requiring government agencies to act as moral arbiters beyond their specific mandates opens the door to potential abuses of power.
Specific government agents have leeway that they can and do exercise as the situation demands it, but the general principle remains. So to your example, the patrol officer in his role as a patrol officer should aid the US citizen over the illegal immigrant, but may exercise personal moral judgement outside of is role to water the illegal immigrant instead.
The household analogy is bad for a lot of reasons (like that households don't issue their own currency that their debt is denominated in, or that they don't conduct their own foreign policy) but I'm going to use it anyway, scaling all the numbers down by a factor of 100 million. If a household is $360,000 in debt, and getting more indebted by $18,000 per year, then it would be stupid and perverse to tell them to stop donating between $67 and $124 per year (depending on whose numbers you believe) to global poverty charities. That is not going to move the needle on their overall fiscal situation and mostly just serves to signal callousness.
If this was one part of a strategy to actually fix the problem then sure. When you’re making no effort to fix the problem (see the budget that just passed the house) it seems more like scoring political points by hurting people you don’t like.
Have you actually, in real life, managed a deeply indebted organization that needs to survive?
I have. All sorts of smaller expenses go out of the window.
That said, the real problem of all Western budgets are entitlements. Our welfare commitments have exceeded our possibilities to fund them, not least because of bad demography.
The US will run a bit longer, as the dollar is a reserve currency, but there is no happy end in sight. Unless someone really defeats aging, we will collapse as greying societies that cannot sustain themselves because they lack manpower. Some countries like Japan are already almost there.
I would be more likely to believe claims of concern about fiscal sustainability and the federal debt if they didn't come from people who supported a party that just voted for a budget bill so ludicrously fiscally irresponsible that the bond market expressed serious alarm when it passed the House.
I am inclined to think that some of these foreign charities are worth it (that is, it would be worthwhile for private citizens to donate to them). But the US government should not be funding them. The US government obtains its resources by forcibly extracting them from US citizens, and so if it is to have any legitimacy at all, it has a duty to use those resources in service of the interests of US citizens, not foreigners. There's nothing evil about that.
You could argue that any government official *should* see certain lives as less valuable than others - namely those of non-citizens and non-residents, compared to citizens and residents. To a certain extent, looking out for the well-being of one's own people first and foremost is what a government is for.
That said, in many cases, especially in a world as interconnected and value-driven as ours, helping people in other countries is a win-win move along many economic, social, military and political dimensions. The problem is that the concept of win-win doesn't exist in Trump's brain. It's either "we win, they lose = good" or "they win, which means that we lose = unacceptable".
I had the pleasure of working at Canada’s equivalent and assessed all grant and spending proposals over $100k (annual spend was $2-3 billion)
The specific use of funds is the wrong place to focus. The meaningful analysis is the outcomes from the funding. This is where value for money is truly assessed. Having arbitrary hurdles for overhead, etc misses the entire point of having these programs.
The point is to achieve outcomes. I was part of a time that rationalized our portfolio and was tasked with identifying wasteful spending. E.g. There can be a tremendous amount of waste in direct costs to building infrastructure.
If anyone is serious, they decide on strategic aims, bottom up price, and go from there. The discussion on this is politics at the expense of thought.
> The specific use of funds is the wrong place to focus. The meaningful analysis is the outcomes from the funding.
But don't you need to look at the specific use of funds to understand whether you're actually getting value for money from the money you spent?
For example, suppose Canada gives $250 million to alleviate poverty in Somalia. And poverty in Somalia goes down. This is a good outcome, right?
What if it it turns out that the $250 million was spent buying a French villa for the local despot, and poverty in Somalia is reducing because of other factors? Won't an "effects-based" assessment miss this?
I was lazy in my wording. It’s less about the categorization of funds, which is what I should have said.
The work we did was to draw direct lines from the activities to the outcomes. Some organisations have high overhead yet deliver outcomes more cheaply than those that appear to have more direct pass through.
There are always other things at play when you look at impacts of any government funding - this is what makes public spending difficult to assess. However, over time the data supports that some orgs are better at delivery than others.
If an org is getting funding for a decade and is on phase 5 with no notable local improvement, does it matter that all the money appeared to be spent “correctly”? That could be compared to supposedly admin heavy orgs with a track record of doing exactly the thing they said would happen then moving on to a new region or project. (Btw, those are real examples)
> Some organisations have high overhead yet deliver outcomes more cheaply than those that appear to have more direct pass through.
This sounds likely, but it doesn't sound like an excuse for not caring about overhead. It seems like a reason to stop giving to the ineffective organisations entirely, and then put even more pressure on the effective organisations to decrease their overhead.
"But what if the overhead is key to spending the funds effectively?" Well then it's not really overhead.
Huh? I don’t follow your statement about overhead. Overhead is a defined term and some orgs run heavy while managing to be efficient elsewhere.
Squeezing for the sake of squeezing is exactly what our work proved makes someone feel good while failing to achieve the desired outcomes. People who just demand lower costs pay for it with lower quality eventually.
Overhead includes things like investigating what the best method is to solve the problem at hand. Overhead is not bad by definition. The cost of running Apple is overhead. If they eliminated the large swaths of it that aren't involved in iPhones then they would probably discover that all of their future (non-iPhone) projects were poorly executed or chosen.
Well at least somebody appreciates it. I was really hoping more people in this comments section would be interested in the details of grant funding and asking more understandable questions, like "Isn't it bad when charities have large overhead spending because it means they're spending less money on directly helping people?" But no, people are more interested in defending USAID cuts on the basis that there was some DEI in it somewhere.
Appreciate the clarification of how overhead works, and your correction of the misleading stats about aid distribution. That said, there is much less analytical rigor when you shift to moral denunciation. Claims that Cowen, Rubio, and Trump are deliberately lying for corrupt reasons may be politically plausible, but without direct evidence of intent, they remain speculative. Similarly, the assertion that fringe or “cringe” programs are rare within USAID is plausible but unsubstantiated by hard data. The core factual rebuttals are strong—I'd just prefer to see them stand without the rhetorical overreach.
I believe Trump believes his own shit. Unfortunately that does not make me sleep better at night.
Rubio was a senator for years and years. Either he was totally utterly incompetent as a senator, or he's lying now.
More generally, I don't see why we cannot morally condemn people for things that they were wrong about *that they should have known*. "I didn't know", "I looked the other way", and "I was just following orders" haven't been excuses in the past.
For example, Noem could have been serious in her belief that habeus corpus is the "right of the president to deport people" (!!!). I feel totally comfortable morally condemning her for that take.
Totally fair to feel moral outrage—especially when the stakes involve mass suffering or lives saved. I’d just draw a line between moral condemnation based on consequences and assertions about intent, which require a higher evidentiary bar if we’re claiming someone is knowingly deceptive.
Yes, politicians should know better. If they don't, they deserve criticism—potentially even removal from office. But conflating negligence, ignorance, or ideological capture with calculated deceit weakens the epistemic clarity of the argument. It invites partisanship to stand in for proof, which is exactly the kind of fuzzy thinking that gets us into these messes in the first place.
So: condemn, yes. Just be precise about why—and what we can actually demonstrate.
Rubio made the claim in his prepared statement before the May 20, 2025 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If he had made it in an answer to a question, I would be more open to the possibility that he made a mistake.
Unless Tyler is misquoting Rubio pretty badly, he's accusing a bunch of AIDS charities of lining their pocket instead of providing medicine, so I think it's an isolated demand for rigor to expect Scott to prove malicious intent here.
You are talking about people at the highest levels of power and punditry. They have a duty and every opportunity to learn the truth about these things that are central to their jobs.
Whether they know the truth and are lying in order to support their side, or are deliberately failing to learn the truth so that they can repeat propaganda from their side 'honestly', makes no difference. Either version is equally dishonest, and both have the same effect on the world.
They're equivalent in every relevant way that we, the people affected, should care about.
My point isn't to excuse any of them, but to emphasize that when we label something a lie, we’re making a specific claim about intent. That distinction matters—not to soften the moral weight, but to keep our standards of argument clean. We should hold powerful people accountable exactly because they’re so good at blurring these lines. Our critiques hit harder when we don’t.
Scott has, historically, been *incredibly* nitpicky about usage of the word "lie" as well, so using it in regards to Tyler giving an "iota of aid or comfort" is quite something.
"If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead."
By the same token, if you save money by cutting a program that saves millions of lives, you aren't just saving money--you're killing millions of people.
I used to think that the phrase "The cruelty is the point" was just a crude stereotype of conservatives. But now I see that it can be a demonstration of power.
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“
While the conservatives get primary blame here, they're the ones doing the cuts after all, it's like no one cares. The Democrats know this is a loser issue because Americans don't care, and I doubt most Democrats care more about this than say Medicaid cuts. Leftists aren't going to raise a stink because if USAID cuts kill a million people, that means USAID was saving a million people which means the US isn't pure evil. And apparently rationalist adjacent types like Tyler Cowen don't care either. It's like a million dead Africans are on par with shrimp welfare to the mainstream.
I hate seeing the argument that USAID is an important part of "soft power". It might be true, it might be persuasive, but it's just so messed up that the way you have to justify saving a million lives is that it might make the US more popular in eSwatini. You should save Peter Singer's hypothetical drowning child because the child's mom might bake you free cookies.
Last year I taught my students about Casgevy, CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell anemia. After going over all the molecular biology, I showed a graph of the life expectancies of various southern African countries over the last thirty years, the giant drop from AIDS and the bounce back. I talked about how the AIDS crisis seemed unsolvable when I was their age and how it took a combined science and public health effort to contain it, and maybe the next success is sickle cell anemia. Instead we decided to undo one of the best things western civilization has done in the last century. It's just so depressing.
>we decided to undo one of the best things western civilization has done in the last century
>that means USAID was saving a million people which means the US isn't pure evil
I mean, you said it yourself, the western civilization hates itself, which obviously takes precedence, even if you care about millions of Africans demonstrably unable to save themselves. Unless the west sorts its shit out, it's obviously in no position to sort out anybody else's shit.
> If you save money by cutting a program that saves millions of lives, you aren't just saving money--you're killing millions of people.
This seems wrong for a few reasons. 1. Failing to save a life is not the same thing as killing a person. 2. Even if we grant that failing to save a life is equivalent to killing, why are the people who cut charity funding to blame, rather than those who were never giving to charity in the first place? They are also failing to save those lives and therefore killing people. Why can't we say that the US has done its fair share, and it's time for Europe or China or private citizens to pick up the slack and continue funding these programs, and if they don't, they are the real killers?
I used to think the phrase "Democrats are the real racists" was just a crude stereotype of progressives. But now I see that it is a demonstration of power.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
It’s an awkward question, because I don’t think anyone really has a solid grasp of the numbers—I certainly don’t.
It would be useful to see an adversarial collaboration of people doing deep dives into the accounts of randomly selected charities.
I think there are several related but distinct issues:
A) How much money goes into dodgy or politically loaded causes?
B) Do most charities evaluate the effectiveness of their giving?
C) Is a significant share of spending used in ways that benefit relatives or allies of charity administrators?
D) Is a lot spent on predatory marketing aimed at guilting pensioners?
I don’t think Tyler is interested in D). EA is, rightly, very focused on B), but I worry that most of the charity sector isn’t. I think A) and C) are the issues Tyler is really concerned about.
One moral question I haven’t seen discussed—but which I think is important—is this:
“If a charity spends 95% of its money on effectively saving lives, and 5% on printing leaflets saying their donors are terrible people, should the donors stop funding them?”
Obviously there’s no right answer, but it became relevant during the Trump administration
If the charity is run by the government and the new government doesn't like the leaflet-writing wing, could they maybe just stop funding that wing with the complete control they now have? If they instead shut down the whole thing, does that maybe say something about their interest in effectively saving lives?
Who are "these people" in PEPFAR writing propaganda initiatives against American conservatives? I have heard so much about them. You somehow seem rather unconcerned with collateral damage on the scale of tens of millions of lives you believe is required to get to them and to have few questions about how hard it could possibly be to cut funding to them and only them.
No, you just vaguely gestured in the direction of the idea that the Trump administration, the new conservative government of America, was justified in halting spending on effective health charities, the most notable of which is PEPFAR, because somehow somewhere there might be an annoying person somewhere in there that spends time as an activist. All you said was "One moral question I haven’t seen discussed—but which I think is important—is this", which surely says *nothing* about your level of concern.
Why do people like you always make these cowardly dodges? You all seem constitutionally incapable of just stating your piece for some reason. Just say that you think killing 30 million foreigners is worth it if it does minor damage to your political opponents in the process.
You said that this question was "relevant during the Trump administration." How can you ask this question about the Trump admin, without looking at the specific charities that have been cut by the Trump administration, such as PEPFAR?
(Also, how can you say you didn't mention American conservatives when you mentioned Trump in your first post?)
A) This is entirely based on your subjective definition of politically loaded cause. And on that could vary from almost none to almost all of it.
B) Yes but they do it the traditional government/non-profit way rather than the EA way.
C) Depends on your definition of relatives and allies, it's an economic sector that's fairly highly credentialed and incestuous, but that's partly because there's only so many experts on Burkina Faso and partly because of government procurement rules and trust standards which make getting in hard and staying in easy. But this is a problem broadly across the government and government adjacent sector.
He is the one who wrote the "Trump is not actually as bad as people say" post during his first term.
Now, Trump 2.0 is making that take age terribly. It's especially bad because the sort of rational, anti woke stuff that Scott did for years, has been hijacked to do aggressively irrational stuff for the purpose of showing dominance.
I can't say that I was keeping track of who was saying what back then, but I suspect that people who we'd today consider well calibrated in terms of their level of concern about current specific Trump actions weren't panicking in the way that Scott was criticizing back then.
I think Matt Yglesias is a pretty reasonable commentator these days. This is an article I found by him from the same time as Scott wrote his post: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/17/13626514/trump-systemic-corruption It mentions racism, but it isn't the focus. It specifically says that Trump becoming a dictator isn't the big concern, but rather that things will go wrong in less openly horrifying ways. It's actually quite prescient, looking back now at the last 100ish days, although some worse things than mentioned there have happened. But that's a pretty nuanced article. It's not the kind of thing Scott was complaining about I think, and some of the stuff he writes here is closer to Yglesias's concerns: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
Unintentionally, listening may have made things worse. In a world where Biden loses in 2020, I would have expected the second Trump term to be much like the first. As an added bonus, republicans probably wouldn’t have been anti-vaccine. Then a Democrat would likely be in place in 2025 that might be able to control AI better.
Part of the reason Trump is so dangerous this time is how much he wants revenge for being called a fascist for years. When you call someone a fascist for so long, there’s no disadvantage to using fascist tactics. They we’re going to call him a fascist either way. In fact the media calling Trump a fascist in 2016 made it impossible for them to credibly call him a fascist in 2024. They did cry wolf earlier and now the wolf came. I think Scott was completely right.
I don't see anyone in Handmaid's costumes, and no gay people have been rounded up in camps.
The thousands of pundits that freaked out about Romney doing affirmative action set the stage for no one to listen to them. The pundits saying Trump was going to get us in WW3 with North Korea were (up to now!) wrong.
Like Obama got the Nobel for doing jack shit, Trump was hated before he did anything at all. They predicted fucking nothing at all, and trying to justify it in hindsight is ridiculous.
They were wrong about COIVD too until NYC's nursing home population dropped like flies while Pelosi was still out saying "hug a Chinese person!" They about-faced on public gatherings as soon as they had a cause to rally around.
But that's exactly the point! At the time they were needlessly crying wolf, and the current criticism doesn't have the effect it could have had if they hadn't been needlessly crying wolf back then.
IIRC, Scott's post was mostly about Trump's racism. I still don't think Trump is a fervent racist or that whatever is happening now is purely downstream of Trump being racist. He has racists in his current administration though, and it would have been useful to have calling them out be meaningful right about now.
But the larger point I think is that the reason he can do what he's doing now is not because we weren't able to show people enough how racist he is. The authoritarian dependencies were much more serious and maybe (honestly unsure though) would have been taken more seriously without the focus on race. The culture war stuff (which didn't exist to the same extent back then) also seems more important to him wielding as much power as he does now, and while it isn't entirely independent of the race stuff, it's not the same thing either. And it's not clear how you warn people about someone using a culture war to gain power; it's not as obviously or simplistically bad as someone being racist is.
I remember his main points being that 1) Trump is not significantly more racist than the average Republican president, he's just more rude 2) Trump is not going to be able to deport citizens or people with green cards because he just doesn't have that power, so please stop telling people that he will because my clinic is full of scared people now. Point 1 is arguable but not obviously wrong to me, point 2 held up pretty well for his first term. It's happening now, but I think a second term is outside the scope of what he was trying to talk about at the time.
And yeah, I don't know how people think that one more blogger purely echoing the progressive sphere would have changed this election. He's still been consistently anti-Trump and his statements get broader impact because he's not just another progressive partisan.
I think Scott, as a blogger, is mostly limited to affecting the world through blog posts and similar things. Given that he just posted a huge AI threat project, I don't think there's much more he can do on that front for the time being. Therefore, I see little tradeoff from also attacking poor reasoning on charitable spending.
You're also leaving all his other posting activities out of the equation. He could easily divert resources from standard psychology posting to AI, but you don't propose doing so.
> One thing I wish EAs would grapple with more is that being effective often means giving up sacred values. ... [Republicans] said "stop it or we'll shut it down" for almost a decade. If you really believe PEPFAR saves millions of lives and if you believe Republicans have a real chance of shutting it down (and if you didn't believe that you were objectively wrong) then even weighing the reduction in abortion access the EAs should have been willing to make that trade.
> But it was unthinkable for EA, which is blue tribe, to take an anti-abortion stance even if it saved millions of lives. So instead the Republicans became fed up with trying to reform the program and decided to end it.
If you want to do something about AI 2027, you will need Republicans, who control all the branches of the federal government, to listen to and work with you. And you won't get that if you convince Republicans you are their enemy.
You're already starting behind the eight ball. Conservatives consider "AI safety" to just mean "censor conservatives" because AI safetyists let themselves become entirely associated with people who did exactly that (https://mitigatedchaos.tumblr.com/post/783770860766003200/what-do-you-think-would-get-the-current). Tell me, do you think calling Vance a "spineless toady" helps move us closer to doing whatever needs doing in the mere 2.5 years remaining on the timeline?
EAs are not nearly so unfamiliar with this reasoning as you presume. You can often see those such as Ozymandias going out of their way to argue that community norms should be hospitable to religious conservatives precisely because it is a more important priority to amplify common interests in helping the global poor.
Other than that, you may recall that Elon Musk was one of the most prominent supporters of the idea of AI safety. Unfortunately his newfound political power seems to have caused him to lose interest in the subject, with the exception of his lawsuit against OpenAI. The tech-right infiltration was already attempted and we see the results before us. It seems clear to me that the Republican party is fully anti-competence at this point. As you have noted that some elements of AI safety have gained prominence among democrats, it seems more worthwhile to focus on taking back the house and senate in 2026.
Though a bigger point in all this is that I'm not sure control over the US government is going to do much for control over AI development. China will do what it wants regardless.
> this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.
I will note that this line makes it basically impossible to take the rest of the post seriously. Clearly, you are deeply emotionally invested in coming to a specific conclusion here, and so whatever reasoning you give for that conclusion is basically null data; your bottom line is written already.
> Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage
> This is what I meant by the second-to-last paragraph of The Other COVID Reckoning. If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead. By all means try to get rid of the cringe stuff if you can, but not in a way where you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem with the various garbage is not merely that it's "cringe". The problem with it is that it's effectively a giant government subsidy for doing leftist politics. Consider how many of the worst discourse actors in the world are formally on some NGOsphere payroll that's ultimately government-financed.
If they're actually interested in advancing their political goals, then "cancel all the giant government subsidies for doing leftist politics" is one of the most obvious moves for Republicans. The fact that doing this is hard, and comes with some collateral damage, is down to the bad actors intentionally mixing their politics subsidies in with important programs as camouflage.
> I will note that this line makes it basically impossible to take the rest of the post seriously.
As we all know, caring about the lives supported by global health spending is a clear sign of a leftist shill.
> If they're actually interested in advancing their political goals, then "cancel all the giant government subsidies for doing leftist politics" is one of the most obvious moves for Republicans.
Or alternatively, they could only cancel the bad leftist propaganda ops and leave the critical healthcare in place. One would think that the super-1337 hackers at DOGE would be able to distinguish between grants that study the inclusion of ethnic minorities in underwater basket-weaving from those that fund HIV medication. I submit that telling them apart is not actually hard, but that they simply don't care enough to try.
Scott is not a "leftist shill". What he is is emotionally compromised by this issue, and thus not thinking clearly.
> Or alternatively, they could only cancel the bad leftist propaganda ops and leave the critical healthcare in place.
The whole point is that it's largely impossible to actually make a map of where all the government grant money is going; that you therefore cannot actually easily tell, from the White House level, which of the money flows that are legible to you are going to malaria nets and which are going to opposition political networks; and that this situation is partly by design, because it lets the propaganda operations use the medical operations as more-or-less human shields.
Your claim that it's actually easy to disentangle it all is given without evidence or argument, and appears to be made for the purpose of leveling moral accusations, not understanding the situation.
> Scott is not a "leftist shill". What he is is emotionally compromised by this issue, and thus not thinking clearly.
Of course, being angry that lives are ended for false justifications is always a clear sign of irrationality.
> The whole point is that it's largely impossible to actually make a map of where all the government grant money is going
The whole point is that it's *not*, they're just bad at their jobs. DOGE has made a large show of exactly which grants they are cutting and why they are cutting them, this is easily checked. A casual browsing of that list makes it clear that they just searched for keywords like "trans" and dropped everything they found, including scientific research unrelated to gender issues. This alone is sufficient proof that they aren't trying. (https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-programs-dei-equity-2025-3)
> because it lets the propaganda operations use the medical operations as more-or-less human shields.
The propagation of DEI buzzwords in grants has nothing to do with a deliberate attempt to use medical aid as a shield for ideological projects. DEI was just the theme of the day, so grant applications were rewritten to brag about how their study would "improve minority representation in biology" when what they meant was that some of their underpaid grad students would be non-white.
For all the foolishness of progressives, the one mistake they would never make is to presume that Trump and his followers would hesitate to kill millions if they thought it would result in one fewer mean tweet in their direction.
> Of course, being angry that lives are ended for false justifications is always a clear sign of irrationality.
There are people being killed, and people lying about the people being killed, in thousands of places around the world right now. Scott has chosen to be performatively, passionately angry about one small subset of those places.
> DOGE has made a large show of exactly which grants they are cutting and why they are cutting them, this is easily checked. A casual browsing of that list makes it clear that they just searched for keywords like "trans" and dropped everything they found, including scientific research unrelated to gender issues.
The fact that DOGE's attempts at more detailed analysis of programs before cutting them have largely been ineffective is evidence in favor of the proposition that making a real analysis is hard, not evidence against.
> The propagation of DEI buzzwords in grants has nothing to do with a deliberate attempt to use medical aid as a shield for ideological projects. DEI was just the theme of the day, so grant applications were rewritten to brag about how their study would "improve minority representation in biology" when what they meant was that some of their underpaid grad students would be non-white.
This is certainly one major part of what's going on. Another part is that people whose profession is extracting money from the government will go wherever there is money to be extracted, and will characterize themselves as being whatever the intended purpose of the money is. Penetrating this camouflage is not automatically easy.
The reason why he's being performatively and passionately angry is because the lies about lifesaving programs are being propagated by a prominent socially-adjacent intellectual who ought to know better. If you can find someone similarly prominent and adjacent posting similarly bad takes about other topics, in a way that's not already fully priced in by preexisting ideological disagreements, then I'm sure Scott will be angry about that too.
Scott has singled this particular issue out because global charity has been one of his areas of expertise since founding this blog. That he chooses this point to draw a battle line is not performative, it's the correct placement of his comparative advantage.
> The fact that DOGE's attempts at more detailed analysis of programs before cutting them have largely been ineffective is evidence in favor of the proposition that making a real analysis is hard, not evidence against.
No, it's evidence that they don't understand any analytical tools more complicated than ctrl + F. We have extensive proof that the Trump admin's new tariff formula came directly from a ChatGPT prompt (http://theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok). But maybe that's high performance where you work.
> This is certainly one major part of what's going on. Another part is that people whose profession is extracting money from the government will go wherever there is money to be extracted, and will characterize themselves as being whatever the intended purpose of the money is. Penetrating this camouflage is not automatically easy.
Even to the extent that this is happening, we return to the point addressed in the original post:
> Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage. Others go over budget or accomplish less than hoped, because charity is hard. But the overall track record is outstanding, outright fraud is rare, and the cringe is less common than you think (because Rubio and Trump falsely attributed many cringe programs to USAID that it never funded at all).
The ratio of good to bad matters, assuming you care about good things. If your response to a termite infestation is to burn down the building, you aren't a pest exterminator, you're an arsonist. If your treatment for cancer is to shoot the patient because it guarantees death of 100% of cancer cells, you're not a doctor, you're just a murderer.
The ratio of good to bad matters, yes. It's also basically unknowable, for all the reasons already given. In this conversation you've postured repeatedly about how sorting out the good grants from the bad ones is actually super easy, but you still haven't given any evidence or argument for that position.
Distributing large amounts of money for charitable purposes is a hard problem, for reasons Scott largely goes over in this post. One major reason why it's a hard problem is that it's adversarial: you, the funder, are trying to learn who you can give your money to and successfully achieve your charitable goals; and an arbitrary number of grifters are trying to fool you into thinking you should give the money to them. Sorting out the good projects from the grifters in a massive, pre-existing charitable fund that you are approaching from the outside without local expertise is an especially hard form of this problem.
Meanwhile, in the world we actually live in, not everyone shares 100% of your moral priorities. It's easy to posture about how anyone who isn't passionate about US tax funding of AIDS medication in Africa is just a murderer; I won't try to dissuade you from that, since it would likely be futile. But regardless, you share a country with approximately 320 million people who are less passionate than you about PEPFAR. If you want that US tax funding to continue, it is actually important to make sure that the results of the program as a whole are acceptable to this supermajority who are not unconditional PEPFAR-maxxers. In this case, that means ensuring that Republicans do not perceive the program as being a subsidy for leftist political activism.
Part of the reason he's passionately angry is because he thinks that people are implying that his father was part of a gigantic political grift, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that that might make someone passionate. What's "performative" about it?
It is absolutely not _impossible_ to make a map of where the money is going. It is just impossible to do it within 1 week in order to make headlines claiming that you are saving billions and eliminating fraud when, in fact, you are eliminating a bunch of bipartisan programs which are audited frequently and known to be highly effective. (Granted, they are largely bipartisan because the Right believes that they are good for diplomacy and other foreign policy reasons)
do you disagree that cowen’s statement is extremely misleading? that’s the point of the post i think, and its independent of whether or not funding gender studies classes in iran is so bad that it cancels out saving millions of lives
I honestly don't really know what I think the ground truth is here. I expect Rubio's statement is probably wrong (or at best right by accident); the LLM output that Cowen posted is plausibly right, but saying something fairly different; and Cowen's actual commentary is just "something seems badly off" (which I agree with). One could argue that the composition of these three is misleading, but that comes down to sensitive matters of interpretation.
I suspect the real source of the outrage (both Scott's, and the MR commenters') is simply that they think all Good People are supposed to be in unilateral full-throated condemnation of Rubio here, and so Cowen's actually considering the issue is class treason or whatever. I.e. they're in full arguments-as-soldiers mode, and so none of this commentary is directed toward truth in the first place.
>Clearly, you are deeply emotionally invested in coming to a specific conclusion here, and so whatever reasoning you give for that conclusion is basically null data; your bottom line is written already.
You're applying this slightly wrong.
Deciding your bottom line before the end of your argument doesn't mean your entire argument is zero evidence; it means all the parts of your argument that you came upon *after writing your bottom line* are zero evidence.
Presumably Scott did not decide to write a vitriolic post about Marginal Revolution when he woke up today, then went to read their top story and come up with an argument against it.
Rather, he read their article, got mad, and wrote a post about that.
Whatever reasoning process led to him getting mad happened before the 'bottom line' was written. We could suppose that he is lying about how that happened, but that seems really unlikely in this case. It's more likely that the reasons he gave for why this made him angry are just true, and those reasons contain most of the relevant argument on their own.
>The problem with it is that it's effectively a giant government subsidy for doing leftist politics
It has been darkly amusing to see things like Stonewall cutting jobs and the Episcopalian immigration charity shutting down rather than help with the Afrikaner initiative.
I expect many people to come into the comments and tell you off for your tone. (I believe on the left they call this "tone policing").
Just want to say, explicitly, that outrage can be an effective mechanism of communication, and is an efficient way to send significantly more bits of information than dry neutral tone.
I had a speech coach a long time ago who said that every word in a sentence should have a purpose. For example, you may think "that argument is fucking wrong" is excessive and could be made more lean. But the curse is the most purposeful word in the sentence, because it is the only one that directly conveys intensity.
You did start the post with "this made me a new level of angry" 😂
I wish you didn't edit out the outrage. I, like many others, use your blog as a source of information. When you respond to something neutrally, I don't really update my priors that much. When you respond to something with emotion, I update my priors a lot more.
A large part of that is because I have a built in assumption that you only respond with anger when you are very confident and the other person is very wrong. There is a risk that if you are too emotional too often, the effect is lessened. But also, you're the kind of person who is obviously always deeply thinking about the ways in which the things you do may be inconvenient for others, so I expect that risk to be quite small, and it's much more likely you correct too far in the other direction.
Announcing you are angry is not at all the same as allowing anger to control your actions (writing in this case). I frequently find myself needing to feign anger in order to get adequate attention from gross offenses by offspring and employees.
You did say this kind of lying was not only a reason to send someone to hell, but to create hell if it did not already exist.
Still, you used exactly the correct amount of outrage. Remember that old post Yudkowsky wrote on how Spock-level calmness is fake Hollywood rationality? When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation. You didn't say anything false, which is the important part.
I think this proves too much. In this particular case I don't fault Scott at all, because Cowen really should know better than to post stuff like this, and that's the kind of situation where angry callouts are most useful. But most political outrage, including over issues with life-or-death stakes, is tactically counterproductive, because it doesn't carry any information content that people don't already know and just serves to make angry people feel better about themselves at the expense of useful persuasion or discourse progress. This, rather than any kind of calibration of how bad things are, is why Scott usually favors a more measured approach, I think.
I certainly wouldn't want Scott to bring this kind of fire for everything. If anything, the fact that he doesn't typically go off like this makes the times when he does all the more impactful. I think he's calibrated perfectly on this particular instance, though if this was the edited version I think I would have fun reading the draft.
I think Scott's level of calibration about how often to express outrage is fine. The sentence I disagree with is, "When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation." At least in the political arena, whether it's a good idea to express agitation doesn't mostly depend on how bad the situation is, it mostly depends on the shape of the broader discourse context, like whether you're saying anything your audience doesn't already know or whether the relevant actors have any reason to care what you think.
> When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation.
The problem with this is that, in national-scale politics, there is always a life-or-death situation afoot. Which life-or-death situations you spend your time inveighing over is a major decision, and one that conveys substantial information about your real priorities.
Sure, but most of the time the outrage is ineffective because the life-or-death quality is a second or third-order effect and most people unfamiliar with it will have a hard time summoning that kind of emotion about it. Thirty million dying because they can't get their medicine anymore is more helpfully concrete. Spending outrage on that does say something about your priorities, and in this case it's something good.
>that outrage can be an effective mechanism of communication
"Can be" is doing a helluva lotta work for that sentence. It can also be wildly polarizing and shut down your listener.
The kinds of people that read Scott, even Angry Scott, are not looking for statements of an atheist that he believes a merciful God would literally invent Hell- a place of eternal torment!- just for these people. I am open to the overhead argument being bad. A couple dashed off vitriolic paragraphs aren't gonna do the trick, though; it just makes it sound like he's pissed about his hobby-horse and thinks anyone that disagrees with him should *burn for eternity*.
> The kinds of people that read Scott, even Angry Scott, are not looking for...
I read Scott and look for these sorts of things.
> It can also be wildly polarizing and shut down your listener.
Sure. Scott has thousands and thousands of readers. It's easy to armchair hypothesize what may happen to one listener vs the other. For every listener that 'shuts down', there may be 10 who go 'o, this is a great point'. And if Scott was more 'neutral', for every listener who goes 'o, this is a great point', there may be 10 who go 'wait, I agree with MR'. This is, of course, the same argument I made about his response to Yarvin, which is that it was far too kind in taking Yarvin seriously.
> A couple dashed off vitriolic paragraphs aren't gonna do the trick
Most people are not experts in IR or charitable giving. I certainly am not. And I do not have the time or interest in becoming an expert in these spaces. Because of that, I look to people who have more experience in the field, either through personal experience or deep research. Scott seems to have both. So when Scott responds with vitriol, I assume he is responding to something that is *legitimately very stupid*. Scott's vitriol reflects worse on MR than it does on Scott.
Some people who agree with MR may find the vitriol unfair or unpersuasive, but I do not think that is the majority, much less your sweeping claim about the 'kinds of people who read Scott'.
More generally, yes, sometimes vitriol and mockery is a valid response, because it effectively conveys that a particular position is so stupid no one else should take it seriously. So here.
No Orbital_Armada, the ease of finding seemingly-factual answers will not degrade human discourse past what was already thought to be peak rot. You can always trust your good friend Claude to keep you informed.
A slight tangent: the whole story with xAI artificially biasing grok to push South African genocide conspiracies should *really* give people pause about using LLMs to fact check.
I wrote about this not too long ago:
> "Truth" is a very dangerous word when applied to LLMs; 'truth-seeking' even more so. Though LLMs are obviously quite powerful, they are also literally pattern matchers. They will mimic the patterns and statistics of the underlying training dataset. They have to! That dataset is all an LLM knows about the universe! Which means in a very rigorous sense there cannot be an 'unbiased' 'truth-seeking' LLM. Elon is carefully choosing his words to make it seem like biasing LLMs is an intentional action. But that is highly misleading. The model's very existence is dependent on all of the choices the creators make about where they get their data and what they choose to curate out. The bias is structural.
> It's kind of insane how rapidly [AI fact checking] has been normalized. And that makes me really nervous! LLMs are not great fact checkers. They will write code, or write an essay, but they will regularly make things up and are easily influenced. Do we really trust the likes of OpenAI or xAI to be trusted arbiters of information for a large number of people? These systems may be fantastic at reasoning. They may even reach superhuman reasoning in the next year or so. But reasoning on the wrong inputs will result in bad outputs — garbage in, garbage out, no matter how smart you are. I'm worried that people will mistake "good at reasoning" with "accurate"; under the hood, those two things are only kind of related. And, cards on the table, I don’t trust xAI, and I really do not like that so many people are turning to Grok to ‘fact-check’ instead of looking for alternative sources. It’s all too easy to imagine a world where xAI boosts particular political stories, and then only allows ‘fact checks’ to have a particular slant.
It's not exactly what anyone would call a high-effect charitable cause area, but I do want to stop by with anecdotal evidence for amateur permaculture. As a technique for growing very tasty tomatoes and pumpkins in your garden, it's worked gangbusters for me.
Not trying to dispute the main thrust of this article, namely that obviously it's necessary for USAID to re-grant across multiple layers of NGOs and that doesn't mean these people are just "pocketing the money".
But I am curious to see where the efforts of DataRepublican lead to, she does seem a little more level-headed about things than those with a political axe to grind. Here's a quote from a recent interview she did:
>One of the biggest frustrations is the misinterpretation of the USAID flow tool. When I released it, I included a disclaimer to clarify that while USAID money circulates widely—just as nearly every $100 bill has traces of cocaine—not every organization that touches it is dependent on it. Almost all charities interact with USAID-linked funding in some capacity, but that doesn’t mean they rely on it for survival.
>Despite this, some users have misused the tool to claim that any nonprofit with even a distant connection to USAID funds is dependent on government money. The real challenge in determining whether a nonprofit is truly reliant on NGO funds lies in the opacity of the funding ecosystem. The trail often disappears into Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), which are not required to disclose their grant recipients.
>A clear example of organizations with heavy USAID-linked funding are politically connected NGOs—often with vague names that include words like ‘Democracy,’ ‘Security,’ or ‘Freedom.’ These groups, frequently run by high-profile individuals (such as Bill Kristol’s organization), rarely rely on small-dollar donations. Instead, they mysteriously receive massive sums from untraceable DAFs, making it impossible to track the original source of their funding. This is the real issue—not the fact that some legitimate nonprofits have incidental exposure to USAID money, but that many politically influential NGOs operate with virtually no financial transparency.
I can't say I've seen anything damning come of her research yet, a lot of it is the same sort of hand-waving allusions to corruption like that last paragraph where money is getting passed around to often less clearly useful or reputable organization and kinda disappears into DAFs.
What I want to know is how widespread is that type of stuff, and how much of USAIDs budget is going to PEPFAR type projects and how much is slushing around policy think-tanks and organization that are just fronts for advancing US foreign policy. I'm not sure where to put trust in getting a reputable answer for any of that.
I suppose many would say even if a significant amount was going to those types of things it'd still be worth it to save millions of lives. But I'm apparently much more heartless than those people, because fuck that.
Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities? Is it wrong to want to make charitable decisions yourself, rather than have the government do that for you? Does wanting to choose which charities to support make you a bad and heartless person?
There are two arguments that you constantly hear: (1) the amount the U.S. government spends on foreign aid is trivial, insignificant, mere dust in the context of the budget, so there is no point in even looking for savings, and (2) there is no way that other countries and all the world's foundations and churches put together can possibly make up for the loss of USAID funding. Are both true?
>"Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities?"
I think if you have an issue with the United States spending money to change the course of events, you have higher-budget programs to pursue than USAID.
1) and 2) are not contradictory when you understand how truly vast the spending of the United States government is. The USAID budget for 2024 was $21.7 billion. That seems impressive until you learn that total federal spending for the year was $6.75 trillion, making USAID 0.3% of the budget. Disbanding USAID won't even get you a worthwhile medicare expansion.
Liquidating USAID gives back about $135 per taxpayer. If you want to take your share and try to build a better PEPFAR, I wish you luck.
> Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities?
I'm fairly ok with this (as long as it doesn't violate existing laws etc). We voted in the people who allocated the money for this. It's an expression of the will of the people to the same extent that any other governmental action is.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling that there's a natural cutoff, maybe somewhere around "directly benefits US citizens in some way, even if it's just a minority of citizens or a really small benefit", but I think that if you're not a pricipled libertarian then it isn't necessary to believe in this sort of cutoff.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that one can't prefer that people donate individually instead. But the proper response would be to vote/advocate accordingly rather than considering the action illegitimate. Just like any other policy debate.
I suppose that I'm making a constitutional or quasi-constitutional argument about proper governmental limits. Even under our system, a persistent, determined majority can ultimately do what they want. If they can't formally amend the constitution they can pack the Supreme Court. Our elected representatives could decide that strong religious institutions are good for society & create a Department of Religion to fund them. There is a respectable argument that the Establishment Clause would permit this. Would this be just like any other policy debate?
I think so? I guess you can view it as a design failure that our constitution allows basically anything to happen if you get enough votes for it, but that seems like an external criticism. I can totally buy a version of the constitution with some genuinely unchangeable things, and I'd obviously have my preferences, but given that we don't have that I think the response always has to be to fight everything out democratically (or found a new nation with a better constitution!)
Practically, I think people hope that the important stuff that we'd put into an unchangeable constitution, like basic rights, happens to be hard enough to change that it's fine, while the less important stuff magically happens to be easier to change, so it all works out. If the exact tax rate isn't critical, and politicians will be responsive enough to public opinion to not raise it to a dangerous amount then it's good that it's something that's easier to change. Maybe. I do think one can be skeptical that all of the various potential government actions have naturally fallen into the correct hard to do/easy to do boxes. It does seem like historically the courts have done some manual finagling to get things to where they need to be. (And where they need to be is, at least sometimes, a subjective moral judgment.)
So I guess my conclusion is that I'm satisfied that it is possible to use tax dollars for charity because I don't think there's a huge downside to the government having that power, and I don't have a strong moral intuition against it. But if I did think there were huge downsides or I had a strong moral issue intuition against it then I'd be unsatisfied with how the constitution is currently set up/interpreted and would probably try to get an amendment going, or, more realistically, try getting the courts to create some precedents that would make it harder to do so. I'll admit that this is kind of a copout, because courts interpreting things isn't really a policy debate.
I fee like in a democracy, it can be legitimate for the government to do anything the majority of voters want (barring Constitutional violations and similar safeguards specifically there to carve out illegitimate areas).
The main point of having a government is to solve coordination problems, I generally smile on it whenever it is doing this in a way most people would support. Charity is absolutely a coordination problem, I'm fine with us using the tool of democratic government to organize charitable givings for things we want to fund but can't effectively organize ourselves.
Here is another argument: funding charities furthers US self-interest through 'soft power', helping countries develop so that they have a workforce to extract resources the US wants, reducing the chance of diseases coming to the US or infecting US citizens, even providing a cover for CIA activities. Even if you only care about the US, there are benefits from foreign aid beyond pure altruism.
The soft power argument always seems like a makeweight & rationalization for funding something, not a real reason. I don't recall seeing soft power benefits spelled out in detail, much less quantified. Scott wants to save children's lives, not project U.S. power around the world.
Yes, it seems like it would be difficult to quantify. But 'soft power' is something that seems to be a consideration in international policy - PEPFAR was the brainchild of Bush Sr and Condoleeza Rice, not exactly bleeding heart do-gooders.
FWIW, I think the historical evidence shows that PEPFAR was a pet project of the Bush administration because they sincerely cared about Africans not dying. (To End A Plague by Emily Bass is quite good and talks a lot about this.)
I think it is a legitimate function of the U.S. government if the American people want it to be, and since the American people can be occasionally persuaded of things I'm trying to do so.
Both of those arguments are true because:
1. The U.S. government has a very very large budget. For example, we fund about a third of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and this makes up 0.002% of the U.S. government budget (not a typo).
1a. This is partially because we're very rich and partially because we're the third largest country in the world and India and China are both middle-income. The next biggest rich country, Germany, is less than a third of the U.S.'s size.
2. Most foundations and churches spend money on dumb shit and are far less accountable than the U.S. government about spending their money more effectively.
3. Of the money spent by people who care about effectiveness like at all, nearly all of it is already committed to other high-value programs. If Open Philanthropy switches all its funding to cover USAID cuts, then anti-lead-poisoning programs go unfunded. If the Gates Foundation does the same, then vaccine research goes unfunded.
One thing I wish EAs would grapple with more is that being effective often means giving up sacred values. This is the kind of thing they say they do but rarely actually do. The Republicans telegraphed that if abortion and other politically sensitive reproductive healthcare was not thoroughly purged out of PEPFAR they were going to defund it. (And no, you don't get to decide they're just wrong and shouldn't believe what they believe. Being effective means accepting the world as it is.)
They said "stop it or we'll shut it down" for almost a decade. If you really believe PEPFAR saves millions of lives and if you believe Republicans have a real chance of shutting it down (and if you didn't believe that you were objectively wrong) then even weighing the reduction in abortion access the EAs should have been willing to make that trade.
But it was unthinkable for EA, which is blue tribe, to take an anti-abortion stance even if it saved millions of lives. So instead the Republicans became fed up with trying to reform the program and decided to end it. The groundwork was laid even before Trump got into office with the initial votes, iirc, in 2020. Something almost no one noticed (I did) until Trump came in and cut it off abruptly rather than the originally planned sunset period. Which was itself bad.
But more importantly allowed it to become a progressive political football and that's when the EAs all piled in. And then when it was out of the news cycle they mostly moved on, though admittedly staying at least somewhat interested longer than most. (I could not get anyone interested in the actual procedural votes though. I guess because it was too dull and didn't generate enough outrage.)
More broadly: A movement so broadly concerned with getting every tiny group a place at the table in the name of stakeholderism were right that building broad consensus was necessary to make programs sustainable. But somehow "accidentally" excluded half of the country that just happened to be their tribal enemies from being stakeholders.
Even more broadly: Harvard etc made the mistake of thinking they were the centers of power rather than just the makers of the elite. And if elites become disconnected from the actual hard centers of power then that opens the space for political entrepreneurs.
By statute, no PEPFAR funds can be used to perform or lobby for abortions. During the first Trump administration, PEPFAR was brought under the Mexico City Policy, which meant that PEPFAR funds could not go to organizations which also performed abortions, even if no PEPFAR money was used. It's true that we can't be sure that these restrictions are always followed, but scrutiny is very high. In 2021, four nurses in Mozambique were found to have performed abortions at a PEPFAR funded clinic. They hadn't completed their compliance training, which was addressed, and all funds in the region were frozen until every clinic recieved training and promised not to perform more abortions in the future (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/anti-aids-program-peril-after-us-finds-nurses-mozambique-provided-abortions-2025-01-16/). PEPFAR supporters have always been willing to keep abortion out of it. Many of PEPFAR's strongest supporters are pro-life. I've done a lot of pro-PEPFAR organizing and have not met anyone who would not accept placing PEPFAR under the Mexico City Policy indefinitely if it meant the program would be reauthorized. This is absolutely a concern that people invested in this program take actively and seriously, and have for over twenty years.
I worry that "other politically sensitive reproductive healthcare" is doing a lot of work in this argument. It's quite possible to provide HIV treatment and preventative care without abortion – as PEPFAR has always done. It's much harder to do it if you're opposed to condoms or STD screenings! There was a lot of concern during the last reauthorization vote that "reproductive health" was a codeword for abortion – but a large percentage of PEPFAR funding goes to supplying ART to pregnant mothers so they don't pass HIV onto their babies! This is, quite literally, reproductive health. It's ensuring healthy reproduction.
My point is perfectly circular but pragmatic. I am not making any claim about whether something OUGHT to be controversial, I am simply observing whether it is relevant to maintaining bipartisan support for the program. And that if you believe it saved millions of lives compromising on such things, even if you think they are objectively wrong, is a utilitarian net good.
If you want me to talk about the object level lessons then I think the concerns were likely overblown. But I also think politics is often a game of the possible, not the ideal.
Aren't there game-theoretic implications to capitulating regardless of how valid the concerns were? Or do you think it makes sense to ignore that in this case because of how uniquely valuable PEPFAR is?
Game theory never says you should worry about how valid the other side's concerns are. Both sides get to self-define the value of various states. That's what being an autonomous agent means. By proposing an outside validator you're implying there can be an outside enforcer that gets to determine who is right. That is not game theory. So no, game theoretically there's no implications because once you talk about how valid they are you've exited game theory.
Imagine mutually assured destruction as a prisoner's dilemma. Would your analysis of the Soviet Union's actions be improved by understanding that communism is a worse system than capitalism and so they ought to lose?
If you want to model this game theoretically you'd need a three player model where basically the Democrats and Republicans are in a prisoner's dilemma and the Advocates are trying to manage that. The payoff matrices would be something like:
> (And no, you don't get to decide they're just wrong and shouldn't believe what they believe. Being effective means accepting the world as it is.)
The Republicans conducted multiple inquiries and found various mistakes. This was a concern for them and they proposed language to strengthen those rules. Specifically, they wanted to make sure that not only could funds not go abortions but to ORGANIZATIONS that did abortions. It's the same issue they have with Planned Parenthood.
The Democrats blocked that and increased the direction of funds to such organizations, a policy which began under Barrack Obama. Trump, as you said, brought it under Mexico City and then Biden moved it out again. (Funny you don't mention this, implying it was that way when the program was not fully renewed...) This was key to the Republicans being fed up with the program and deciding that they could not reach a compromise.
Now, you might say that the Republicans are wrong on the issue. You may be correct. Maybe you support abortion and think Biden moving it out was good and the Republican rules were making it hard to administer the program. You may be correct.
But intransigence on this issue is the direct motivation for Republican hostility to the program. And since you agree that no abortions could have happened or been supported, why didn't pro-PEPFAR types agree to support these more stringent rules? Why didn't they oppose Biden changing the rules? Or Obama?
PS: I have had this exact discussion like a dozen times. So forgive me if I seem frustrated.
Republican presidents have always put PEPFAR under the Mexico City Policy and Democrats have always moved it out again! There's nothing inherently unworkable here.
But I thought we were talking about EAs, not Democrats. All the PEPFAR advocacy I've done has been in the context of EA organizations, and I've never encountered any dogmatism about the Mexico City Policy. Yes, personally, I'm against it, but it's a small price to pay to keep the program operational, and I've worked with many pro-life EAs who I deeply admire and respect on this issue.
That said – I'm sympathetic to Republican concerns about lack of transparency on these issues, but having looked into it pretty extensively on the object level, I just don't think that there have been that many abortions carried out with PEPFAR funds, and I feel pretty confident that those cases have been addressed and corrected. I don't think it's worth insisting on PEPFAR funding abortions, but I also think it's wrong to shut down a program which by conservative estimates saves hundreds of thousands of lives because of a tiny handful of administrative errors. If Republicans want to insist that there can be NO margin for error in a program administered across 50 countries, I think it's fair to say they're also being intransigent.
I also think it's a bit misleading to imply this was a point of tension before the 2024 reauthorization fight. Until 2024, PEPFAR was always reauthorized unanimously or near-unanimously, and Mexico City switching from administration to administration worked fine for everybody. The politicization of PEPFAR is a new and concerning development, and frankly I think it rests on some pretty disingenous arguments about what the money is really being used for.
The idea the change back and forth was normal is only true after late Obama. Obama changed the program in ways Republicans objected to at the time. This was the start of them threatening to defund the program. This is normal Republican discourse so if you don't know it then you're kind of proving my point. And I'm surprised the pro-life (but perhaps not Republican) advocates you're familiar with did not share it with you.
Also it's not misleading that there was tension before 2024. The Republicans voted for it but registered these objections in 2013, 2018, and in 2023 they only gave it a single year renewal as they prepared to shut it down. Like I said, they made these concerns known for about a decade. The idea that it was unanimous "until 2024" fails to explain why it only got a one year renewal in 2023. Once that happened it was obvious to me that, if the Republicans won significant government control, it was going away. And in November that was confirmed.
And yes, we're talking about how EAs did not engage with Republican concerns. In effect, I'm saying the answer should have been, "Oh, Republicans are threatening to shut down the program if it does X? Well, we should advocate against the program doing X then." Instead the attitude is what you just said: Oh, it's normal that we change the program from its initial imitations. And they won't actually do get rid of it. And they're disingenuous Republicans anyway. This is a very comfortable space for a progressive EA to be in but, demonstrably, an ineffective one!
As to whether those concerns are justified: I agree the Republicans are using a hammer. What I'm saying is simply, they threatened this for a long time and were not taken seriously by people who ought to have. They made specific demands that, if they were met, would have made the end of the program less likely. And I have counterexamples of programs they did not shut down. So this seems to be a strategic error that was caused by a partisan bubble and political blindness. I have not heard a convincing case otherwise and the gaps in your knowledge are actually making me more confident that's what happened.
Of course, I agree it was a huge tactical error on the part of effective aid advocates that we weren't tracking Republican concerns more closely. This has contributed to enormous harms and obviously with hindsight we were in a bubble and I wish we'd done things differently.
That said, I think this implies different actions on the part of EAs, the aid space more broadly (since EAs are a very very small part of the aid community), and democrats. I think EAs getting involved in political lobbying on behalf of the Mexico City Policy would have been ineffective and probably actively harmful – abortion access is a core democratic policy issue, EAs aren't especially popular in Washington or politically well-connected, I just can't see that having gone anywhere. I do wish that the aid community broadly had more conservatives, but EAs just don't seem well-positioned to change that except through making sure that our own internal culture is welcoming (and we could be doing better on that front).
I'm also skeptical of the thesis that abortion is why PEPFAR is struggling right now. The recent aid cuts have affected tons of programs that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion, like TB, malaria funding, therepeutic food, disaster relief, WASH, and many others. PEPFAR is in limbo right now but several specific grants have been at least nominally reauthorized (figuring out what's happening on the ground is more complicated), and it's faring a lot better than programs that were less tied into abortion debates.
When you look at the concerns being cited by the people cutting aid programs, including PEPFAR, it's not abortion – it's fraud, and "woke" culture war issues more broadly. Again, I completely agree that EAs were not aware of these bubbling issues and wish that we had been on a purely tactical level.
You're right that Republican criticisms of PEPFAR existed before 2024 and I shouldn't have been so categorical there. I'm just skeptical that they would have led to the program being sunsetted if all this other anti-aid stuff wasn't happening. (that said, I think we're talking about the same reauthorization fight – the PEPFAR extension act of 2018 covered the program until FY 2023. It was then renewed for a single year in March of 2024. There wasn't a vote in 2023.)
> Of course, I agree it was a huge tactical error on the part of effective aid advocates that we weren't tracking Republican concerns more closely. This has contributed to enormous harms and obviously with hindsight we were in a bubble and I wish we'd done things differently.
This is my entire point. And I am criticizing because I do not think lessons are being taken from it. This is not my area but I'm sad to see it go.
> That said, I think this implies different actions on the part of EAs, [...] abortion access is a core democratic policy issue [...] but EAs just don't seem well-positioned to change that except through making sure that our own internal culture is welcoming (and we could be doing better on that front).
I think that EA is in a bubble where going against progressive orthodoxy is extremely difficult. See my comments in the last thread on covid. I think the idea that EAs should not be challenging core Democratic policy or progressive norms is a belief it is convenient for many EAs to have which is not actually true. This is especially true because there is not one, monolithic EA organization which means specific organizations can take a variety of stances of even contradictory stances while remaining broadly in the movement.
Anyway, I also have said elsewhere I think the way EAs engage with politics is broadly ineffective. So I'm not suggesting that EAs would have been decisive. I'm certainly not saying they bear responsibility beyond, of course, the fact that EAs have taken it upon themselves to do good effectively and this is them not doing that. But I absolutely think they could have maybe moved the needle 1%.
> I'm also skeptical of the thesis that abortion is why PEPFAR is struggling right now. The recent aid cuts have affected tons of programs that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion, like TB, malaria funding, therepeutic food, disaster relief, WASH, and many others.
PEPFAR was a separate, specifically authorized program. The groundwork for the end of PEPFAR started BEFORE the Trump administration got into power while the USAID cuts started after. From a purely tactical point of view, without that ground work PEPFAR could not have been stopped under the same powers Trump used against USAID. It required Congress while Trump's USAID reforms (or "reforms") did not.
> I'm just skeptical that they would have led to the program being sunsetted if all this other anti-aid stuff wasn't happening.
Then why did the PEPFAR fight happen before Trump even got into office? The timeline doesn't work out for it being collateral damage.
> (that said, I think we're talking about the same reauthorization fight – the PEPFAR extension act of 2018 covered the program until FY 2023. It was then renewed for a single year in March of 2024. There wasn't a vote in 2023.)
My recollection is that the actual politicking was in late 2023, that there was a pause and a big fight, but fair enough on the point the vote was in March. That's fairly ordinary though with PEPFAR not technically shut down yet despite having failed to renew. Still, I acknowledge this was sloppy on my part.
This is a bad faith attempt to require me to make a specific action plan before I'm allowed to criticize the movement.
But sure, Scott could have written about this when the one year extension (a clear prelude to cancellation) was up for a vote. Or you can substitute in any other EA blog or journalist. I'm sure you can find some isolated examples but I guarantee it's a tiny fraction of the outrage that happened once it was a political football.
And no, you don't get to say you just noticed it if your entire movement bills itself as the experts on weird, low interest, high leverage ways to do good.
I just don't think there's much of a case to be made that any relevant actors in EA could have averted the Trump PEPFAR cuts by lobbying in favor of the Mexico City Policy before the election. Even if you grant an equal leverage factor between that and the pro-PEPFAR lobbying from after the cuts were announced, this still requires that the PEPFAR cuts were motivated by sincere concern about abortion, rather than by a combination of carelessness and a politically motivated attempt to draw public attention away from the real drivers of the federal deficit.
I don't know you but I would bet money that you don't have a consistent belief that Republicans can't be influenced by lobbying. If you actually believe that then you can't say believe that they're driven by corporate interests or so on which is a fairly foundational belief among blue tribers. But if they are influenced by lobbying then clearly you can lobby them with sufficient effort. And given the amount of leverage in keeping this program going (millions of lives) and how easy it was to influence BEFORE the political firestorm it would have been a high leverage thing to do.
Once it became a political football everyone was mindkilled and it was probably too late.
Wouldn't it be the Democrats we would hypothetically be lobbying? The Democrats would be the people whose behavior we want to change here, because they keep removing the Mexico City Policy.
If you were lobbying Republicans, you would say "PEPFAR is a great program and exactly what Jesus would do," and a lot of people said that very enthusiastically and it didn't seem to help much. I think the Trump administration doesn't listen very much to the kind of people who think PEPFAR is a great idea and exactly what Jesus would do.
USAID is not an organization that "funds other charities." In using the "charity" word you accept the false premise of attackers - that international development is "charity" - i.e., something done to be nice. There's nothing wrong with that, but USAID managed US government money to achieve US government aims laid out in US State Department (and inter-agency) country plans. These "implementing partners" (the appropriate term of art) can be NGOs ("charities - some accept donations), or commercial for-profits. USAID contracts, or uses agreements (for grants) specifying activities to achieve specific changes that benefit Americans (e.g., disease surveillance, undercutting the conditions that give rise to terrorism and crime, enable markets into which US companies can participate). The focus changes with the administration, that's not bad, that's democracy. "Charity" isn't hard. You can give a man a fish any day. That's charity, and that's easy. What's hard is system change. Because "teaching a man to fish" requires that there are fish in the sea (so ecological stewardship plays a role), and you need a boat and a crew (so you probably need a small loans facility), and you want the fisherman to be able to feed others so you need markets and transportation and health standards so people don't die from rotten fish. Change is hard; it can be done, USAID did it well. But that's not charity.
I love Tyler, but this is a bad take. It’s a little bit like claiming “97% of SNAP benefits flow to FOR PROFIT grocery stores, farmer’s markets, and Papa Murphy’s, look at all the WASTE and ABUSE.”
I mean, yes? That’s the point? Maybe you think it would be better for the government to provide food directly instead of using the robust private supply chain and logistic experts we call ‘grocery stores’ and, maybe? That seems wasteful and duplicative. In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
>In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
I'm pretty sure USAID mostly invented the wheel in this case, the specialized network of international aid/development organizations wasn't some organic privately funded enterprise that existed naturally in the world before USAID came along. Without USAID most of it wouldn't have existed in the first place, and now that USAID is seemingly gone most of it is going to disappear.
ETA: Not that I disagree that this is potentially the most efficient way for USAID to handle things, just that the analogy with grocery stores is sort of lacking IMO
Most of the big Western humanitarian organizations predate USAID, sometimes by half a century or more. ICRC, Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, CRS, World Vision -- they're the inventors of their particular wheel. They more or less fit the picture of USAID finding that some of its goals are best met by contributing to (and scaling up) an organic, pre-existing, privately funded set of institutions. They won't disappear when government humanitarian budgets shrink -- they'll just save fewer lives.
USAID also funds a lot of stuff with a longer time horizon -- like projects to advise countries on judicial system reform, cleaning up the air in highly polluted cities, establishing export industries in fruits/nuts/flowers, etc. That's more of a wheel USAID (and similar development agencies in other countries) invented for themselves as colonialism shifted into Cold War bilateral aid. USAID initially did do most of it through its own global staff, then part-privatized it under the Clinton presidency, creating a specialized contractor network (of people who mostly used to work directly for USAID).
> In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
On the other hand if there's already organisations that specialise in this then why should the government get involved at all?
The government has a role to play in providing public goods which would not otherwise exist. But why should they give away people's money to things that would exist anyway?
That would be like if the Government bought everyone a bag of Doritos once a week. That's dumb. Let the people who want Doritos buy Doritos with their own money, and let the people who don't want Doritos not be forced to pay for them. Similarly with charity -- let those who want to donate donate, and those who don't want to shouldn't have to.
> If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead.
Ah this is where we differ, I think you come out millions of lives behind.
If you have the knowledge, power and ability to save millions of lives, then that's what you should be spending all your budget on. If you save three million people, and you could have saved another three million people but you didn't because you spent half your budget on saving people and the other half of your budget handing out free copies of The Vagina Monologues (or Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality) then you're three million lives behind, not three million lives ahead. We should be angry about the half of your budget that you wasted precisely because, not in spite of, the half that you spent very well (thanks GK).
If you're an ambulance driver and you save three patients today, but also let two of them die because you're too busy playing Candy Crush Saga, then I'm going to blame you for the two dead ones and not give you credit for the three saved ones -- it was your job to save all five!
Shouldn't the relevant comparison be to the counterfactual? If you fire the ambulance driver then probably their replacement saves all five patients. If you cut USAID then their budget doesn't go to some other more effective organization that saves lives in poor countries without any weird inefficient grants, it goes to offset about 0.1% of the cost of a huge tax cut mostly for rich people.
I'm no longer sure whether we're discussing the question of "does it matter than USAID is horrendously inefficient" or the question of "should USAID be abolished"?
...And if you then come along and say "This program COULD HAVE saved three million lives but it only saved three million, therefore it sucks and we shall shut it down forthwith," by your logic you are now SIX MILLION lives behind! Congratulations, great job.
Did USAID spend literally half its budget on frivolous things, or is that just a number you made up?
Because the actual amount of waste really matters for this argument. If it's literally half the budget, sweeping reforms might be justifiable, on the grounds that you can easily do better after rebuilding the charity and you could save millions more lives. If it's only wasting, say, 5% of the budget, then you have a much higher bar to clear for your replacement to be better. In that situation, destroying the charity *definitely* kills millions in exchange for the *possibility* that when the dust settles you will save a few thousand more. That's not a very balanced trade.
(I don't have the time to check myself, but I predict that the cringe women-in-permaculture donations are much smaller than the medicine-for-sick-people donations, because food and medicine require lots of boots-on-the-ground logistical work, and publishing pamphlets about women's rights does not.)
Thank you for the post. I found myself unduly influenced by the MR post. I was aware that using 3rd parties was not the same as 3rd parties pocketing the money, but didnt have any personal expertise in assessing the stats, and TC's post led me to think something must be off. I flatter myself into thinking confusion from a reader like myself is a large part of what raised your ire. This is adjacent to another comment I made.
I was a bit taken aback by the tone of this post. It’s not that I didn’t find the argument persuasive. I did. But I find the cooler headed posts much more enjoyable and much more persuasive. And the level of anger seemed disproportionate not least as Tyler (IMO) is very much a force for good in the world.
Hear, hear. I'm happy to cut Cowen a lot of slack because of the sheer volume that he posts. I don't mind at all the fact that he is frequently wrong - that's a natural side effect of trying to say interesting things a lot of the time.
I do think that MR has an annoying willingness to pander to craziness from the right, and to hold back on criticisms of the current administration. And the post critiqued here is an example of all of those things.
I also think that standing very firm on issues like "doctors are good" is very necessary in today's benighted media environment. So, great work, Scott.
Isn’t the problem that as funds are passed down the line of NGOs, *everyone* adds their overhead, paying their contractors, maintains their staffs, and so on, further reducing how much reaches the intended recipients? Acemoglu & Robinson talk about this in ’How Nations Fail’, about how often only a small minority part, if anything, reaches the ultimate recipients.
My only experience of USAid came from living 8 months in Georgia - the country with likely the most NGOs per capita ever, some 24,000 I believe for 4m population. Many westerners and locals were employed. The majority of those I met came across to me as utterly detached from ground level reality and existing in some kind of ideological fantasy world. I was back there when Musk pulled the plug. Someone had to stop the insanity. You can't go through life believing that an ideology, no matter how positive, is implicitly a good thing. You just can't.
The outrage at the Trump administration for canceling grants and cutting funding reminds me of the outrage at Israel for bombing Gaza. Just hear me out.
When Israel bombs Gaza, there are civilians who die, which is a terrible tragedy. Many people respond to the tragedy with outrage at Israel for killing innocents, usually expressed in the form of one blood libel or another. But the reality is that Hamas and their allies embed themselves and their terror infrastructure within the civilian population, for this very purpose. The rage at Israel comes from people too credulous to question the cartoonishly inflammatory account of Israel's intentions proffered by its enemies. And the blame for the deaths of innocent Gazans lies with Hamas, for their use of human shields.
There's been a slow-burning Marxist revolution happening within virtually every single liberal-ethos institution in America. The "long march through the institutions." The revolution has embedded itself so deeply, and with basically no resistance, that it's impossible to root it out without doing substantial collateral damage. Yes, it's terrible that valuable research is losing funding, and that lifesaving charity is being cut. But where's the outrage at the revolutionaries who made this outcome all but inevitable?
If terrorists are firing rockets from your house, and you don't want to be collatoral damage, you can keep your head down, hoping that your terrorist-infested house will be missed among the thousands of others. And maybe it will be. Or you can try to kick them out, or leave your house to try to build a new one somewhere else. Now obviously with actual terrorists, easier said than done.
But it seems to me that, as the revolution has progressed, the vast majority of people in academia, charity, research, journalism, etc. have just been keeping their heads down. It's very bad that important, lifesaving work is being stopped. But your outrage is largely misplaced. Maybe it's time to stop and give some more thought as to why all these bombs are being dropped?
The difference there is that Hamas's higher goal is to kill Jews.
The assertion here is that Marxist/leftists have infiltrated aid organizations. What is their nefarious higher purpose?
Step 1: give out malaria nets.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Seize the means of production and institute a one party state.
The goal in Step 3 needs to be really bad to justify killing all of the charitable work. Right now, it just seems that the problem is that the people are Blue Tribe and that seems like a poor excuse for stopping aid to millions of Africans with AIDs.
"Sorry, but some people working for pepfar voted for kamala Harris so we had no choice but to let you die."
The left, speaking broadly, has one goal - eliminate inequality, the presence of which is generally considered proven through disparate impact. They may stop short of step 3, if this goal is achieved through milder measures, but until such time they will always escalate in that direction, without any principled stopping point.
>There's been a slow-burning Marxist revolution happening within virtually every single liberal-ethos institution in America. The "long march through the institutions." The revolution has embedded itself so deeply, and with basically no resistance, that it's impossible to root it out without doing substantial collateral damage. Yes, it's terrible that valuable research is losing funding, and that lifesaving charity is being cut. But where's the outrage at the revolutionaries who made this outcome all but inevitable?
But is this actually true? Or is that on its own a highly ideologically charged description that wildly exaggerates *real* problems with left-conformism in academia?
There's a motte here (college professors and admin are overwhelmingly more liberal than conservative, even in red states) and a bailey (there's a conspiracy of literal Marxist taking over all departments in all colleges and willfully indoctrinating students into being revolutionaries hell-bent on dismantling capitalism). The bailey is untenable: STEM departments do not spend their time teaching oppression, economics, business, medical and law are also fine, in humanities they do in fact teach Shakespeare most of the time, real literal Marxist are not that frequently found, and while there are whole areas that seem "captured" (education, anthropology, maybe sociology), they aren't as popular with students and as authoritative in the society as a whole! There are systemic problems (the DEI bureaucracy and the rise of the "DEI statements", which infested even STEM), but there's also robust pushback against them. Just as wokeness peaked around 2021 and started to retreat politically, so has its influence in colleges. But I see it all the time that when someone criticizes the bailey there's a retreat towards the "but don't see you that 3% of professors are conservative" motte.
I wonder if Mr. Cowen is also opposed to the Department of Defense giving money to contractors, rather than building those tanks and planes themselves? And just imagine, those contractors then give a large parts of that money to other companies who pocket it (and just so happen to deliver all kinds of parts materials and services in return)!
Maybe the conceptual difficulty lies in the nature of charity - when you normally buy goods and services, *you* actually get and see what you paid for, and you don't really care what goes on behind the curtain and who "pockets" how much. When you pay for charity, *someone else* gets and sees whay you paid for, and you as the payer aren't sure whether it's what you intended unless you either provide it directly, or otherwise monitor the results (directly, if possible).
Let's go meta for a second* - is this use of o3 a reasonable part of discussion when trying to estimate a number of interest?
O3 is very powerful and often let's you get a solid guess in seconds instead of hours, even when you're not an expert, but it's also really hard to replicate or fact check without the exact prompt and sources, and it makes the whole starting point of the discussion kind of speculative. Is it really better to start with 'o3 said' than referring to some of the o3 sources which are more conventionally transparent?
*Frankly, on a personal level I find the object level topic of 'saving millions of sick and hungry people - for and against' kind of maddening.
Suppose you asked o3 about X, and it said "X=Y, here are the sources that back this up".
I find that there are two very different situations: one in which you can tell at a glance that the sources are serious and that their factual assertions are unlikely to be controversial, and one in which you have little to no idea. There's a spectrum between these extremes, but most cases in my usage cluster at the ends.
In the former case, you might just as well cite the sources. Citing the sources and o3 both is maximally honest, but it's also OK to just cite the sources, after all if you used Google to get to them you wouldn't cite Google.
In the latter case, I think it's a lose-lose situation. If you cite the sources, the readers have no idea if they're representative or controversial (or worse, they assume they're representative and not controversial due to your reputation in their eyes). But you also have no idea. No one has any idea until someone does the legwork. You just shouldn't use o3 in such cases. It does and will sometimes give you wrong data and absurd conclusions.
> If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead.
This is it. That this isn’t obvious and needs repeating endlessly, especially here, is really good evidence that the vast majority of anti-woke warriors have completely lost their minds.
>Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage
I disagree pretty heavily about things like this being cringe and worthless in the US (some are, many aren't, domain experts know more than either of us about it), but I don't see how you can defend this attitude in the context of foreign aid?
Are you taking the position that there's nowhere on the planet where women are discriminated against or underprivileged relative to men, such that innately talented women are being underutilized, and giving them targeted opportunities grabs low-hanging fruit in terms of developing and exploiting human capital?
Are you not trying to throw dispersions on scholarships-for-women as a general category, but using terms like 'underrepresented' and 'permaculture' to indicate a separate batch of trivial programs on unserious topics (and do even 'some' of those really exist, rather than just being misleading memes?)?
Are you just noticing that you're criticizing the right a lot recently due to Trump idiocy, and want to throw in a violent jab at the left at least once a post to maintain street cred?
What's your actual position here? I'm sure I'm missing something, but this struck me pretty sour and I'd like to understand better.
"If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”."
Ethically, no, but there are multiple dimensions to everything and the political dimension is important, too. If it makes your effort vulnerable to cancelation after lost election - which, in the age of social media and incessant polarization, it does - it makes sense to drop the cringe.
But of course, dropping the cringe is risky as well. Maybe the other party won't reinstate the programs without demanding some cringe programs that cater to its faith.
Maybe, in the age of social media and incessant polarization, "politically neutral good" became politically untenable, because cringelords now own entire parties (not just in the US) instead of memeing on 4chan.
I wonder if we have done to ourselves with social media the same thing that we have done to the the Amerindians with alcohol - introducing a highly addictive substance that rots brains and collapses societies from within.
I totally understand how u feel, but the part of me wonders,... how do you rationalise the emotional intensity of defending the USAID with the assumption that AI2027 scenario you wrote will make all of those efforts irrelevant very soon? Not that I have any answers, but I am struggling myself to feel emotional invested in any altruistic cause not relevant to AI race/alignment since reading that essay.
(1) The public perception of what USAID is/does. And I'm certainly seeing social media messaging going *hard* on 'USAID does so much good' where the perception is that it directly funds all the good causes, not that 'this is a body that gives money to other bodies which then give the money to charities to spend as they think best achieves the charitable aim'.
Sticking my two cents in here, I work for a government-funded voluntary community childcare and special needs service which gets funding from an organisation that "is a state-sponsored organisation with responsibility for administering and managing government and EU funding aimed at supporting social inclusion and addressing social disadvantage in the country".
Nobody talks about that body the way they're currently talking about USAID, so I have to wonder if there is some disingenuousness going on. If the government cut funding, nobody would be appealing about "if Body isn't fully funded or has to pull back on funding, Bad Outcomes", they would talk about the Bad Outcomes directly. Pink News, for one, in their coverage of "no they didn't fund a transgender opera" described it as "USAID, an international development agency focused primarily on providing vital food aid, extremism prevention projects and disaster relief to countries around the world" and not as "USAID, a government body that administers and distributes funding to bodies which provide etc."
(2) Would EA or GiveWell, if they were assessing USAID as a new entity, consider it the most effective use of funding? Would they say "There's too much cruft, the more effective use of your donation is to give the money directly to the Trans Opera Company in Colombia"?
You make a good argument that charity regrants are sensible in general, as charities may be more efficient in distributing the funds than the funders. However, state funding may be a special case here.
When large state funds are donated to domestic charities, there is a risk that some of this money will be used for political lobbying inside the country that will increase the donations, thus creating a loop of state support for one domestic politics side. This works because charity donations are at least partially fungible, at least in their overhead part.
I do not think this problem is that big in US. It is certainly much worse in the UK, which spends billions and grants formal powers to a group of quangos - quasiNGO - which have predominantly or only state funding but are not accountable in the way government departments are.
However, USAID grants certainly share some of these hallmarks. It may influence domestic politics not just through the fungible element of domestic charity funding, but also through bankrolling a lot of foreign media and thus impacting which news americans receive from abroad.
I like o3 a lot, but also I can never trust it due to the sheer rate at which it authoritatively hallucinates, higher than o1, higher than any other SOTA model I've tried. I'm a bit surprised that Cowen trusts it.
What's wrong with women-in-permaculture? Sure it's probably not as impactful as malaria-nets, but I wouldn't call it "garbage". Garbage implies it does nothing or is actively harmful.
I could get mad about the misuse of money spent on charities if folks like Rubio were equally prone to casting an eye on the misuse of money in the corporate sector. Do we really need to allow tax deductions for meals at fancy restaurants? How about all the "expenses" corporations spend on their employees that, to a government worker, look awfully frivolous?
We also know that many consulting gigs, board seats and the like are just ways of funneling money to people for their connections. We only hear about this fraud when it's a Biden, but let's be honest, this practice is common and mostly unremarked upon. How much do these costs get passed on to consumers? How much lost tax revenue are we tolerating in order to prop up the luxury sports boxes?
We also need to start talking about how "efficiency" talk is a scam. The corporate sector is rife with inefficiency and yet we only apply our critiques to charities and government units. Does your cell phone company have a "rewards" program that is just a cover for advertising subscription services? Is that "efficient"? And yet that's the crap we the consumers have to subsidize. I would rather be able to have my money spent on agents who can actually answer the phone instead of outdated bots that waste everyone's time in hopes that we won't find the right number to call the company.
This is a great post and I don't have much to add on this topic.
However, I think this isn't actually that far below MR's usual standard. Tyler posts a lot of sloppy political hot takes. He's probably still better than the average person, but it's still problematic because people see him as a general expert on all things related to money and finance when in reality, his expertise is limited to economics (his posts on trade this year have all been great).
Overhead seems to be a dramatic problem when it concerns public programs and non profit organizations, and just normal when we talk about hedge funds, insurance companies, banks, and everything else. Of course its private, they make profit, it's business, alright ?
So, there's the solution. Privatize everything and make government and charity organizations profitable companies, so that overhead would be even greater but it would be normal and everybody would be happy !
>I would gouge my own eyes out with a spoon before giving it to Vibecamp
Is there some animosity here that I wasn't aware of, or is it just that vibecamp is in fact not a charitable venture in any way shape or form?
No animosity, just that it's not charitable and I like making fun of postrats.
Do I dare ask... What is vibecamp?
Looked it up: https://vibe.camp/
I think it's just some kind of convention/social club for a particular strain of rationalist-related tech-ish blog readers?
Oh flip me, I got about three sentences in to the manifesto and I have to agree: bring on the eye-spoons!
all small letters works for poetry by e.e. cummings. otherwise you just look as pretentious as 'imma hipster copying bell hooks'.
I have no idea who or what they are because, as I said, the manifesto drove me away. I know not from pre-, current or postrat. But anyone who wants to slag the arse off this lot, I fully encourage you to do so!
i also like making fun of postrats, but i worry that someone who organizes vibecamp and also likes to read your blog will read that and get sad :( it doesn’t come off as non-animosity-ey as it was probably intended
Brooke is cool and knows I'm kidding.
glad to hear it :)
Is Vibecamp purely postrats? I thought it was more generally rationalist-y (but more Twitter-focused).
It includes rationalists but only when they're accessing their Twitter fueled postrat side
What's a postrat?
A rationalist who has absorbed the core sequences but feels that there is something more, perhaps unexplained. Generally open to woo, conscious practices, meditation, also believes that the rationalist community lacks vibes, and thus seeks out and/or creates art and music.
Is this generally seen as negative or mocked by the "traditional" rationalist community? Except for the woo-woo, it sounds positive.
Usually it's the other way around, it's the postrats who going around mocking rationalists every time have a chance.
Not to say that rationalists are pure angels who never mock anyone, but generally they seem to be much more reserved in comparison.
But yeah, there are multiple disagreements, the biggest crux is probably the whole "Is rationalism the true way of obtaining knowledge, or just one tool in the toolbox", where rats would obviously insist on the former and postrats on the latter, and both would see the other side is missing something important, and therefore intellectually inferior.
I'd say I'm myself is much close to postrats in my views, and still I think postrats tend to be much more toxic online - rationalist don't make entire groups dedicated to mocking people they disagree with. Meanwhile, SneerClub exists.
Ah, so postrats are the Atheism+ of Rationalism?
I've never thought of SneerClub as postrationalism, rather more as a collection of people with bees in their bonnets, people with personal axes to grind against personality X, Y or Z, and people with grudges about being kicked out of/never allowed inside in the first place the club (spaces such as LessWrong).
What is SneerClub?
My impression (obviously not that well informed since I didn't know what vibecamp was until just now) is that postrats:rationalists :: romantics : enlightenment thinkers
I think Vibecamp wouldn’t even want the spoon after it’s been used for such a purpose
Excellent post as a whole, and it highlights a disturbing tendency of Tyler these days to take absurd claims at face value (and to “confirm” with AI, which is inherently concerning).
But my favorite part was this piece of prose: “…this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.”
I really wish I could write like Scott, but I’ll have to settle for appreciating stuff like this. I could not phrase it any better.
It's such a strange move to fact-check with o3 for anyone, but someone like Tyler should find it easy to look up a better source. I have no idea why he would do that.
And yeah, Scott's been on fire post-Trump re-election. It's a horrible event, but it's really separated the wheat from the chaff among those who claim to be heterodox truth-seekers.
>It's a horrible event
Richly deserved, though. It has indeed been amusing to see those purported truth-seekers go from "Trumpism is the less bad option" to "Trumpism is actually good" in record speed. People just can't tolerate the perception of themselves not being on the side of Truth and Goodness.
Unsure about this take. Fact checking with o3 is very good most of the time, and if you prompt it with the right questions (something as simple as "Critique/Factcheck this claim"); it gives a sensible rebuttal to Rubio's claim.
This is a failure that comes from Tyler using o3 badly to confirm his own biases, not from using o3.
I think o3 could be a fine start to a fact-checking journey, but I don't think it should end there. I typically use LLMs to give me suggestions on where I should be looking and then go look there myself. I wouldn't cite o3's output directly. That goes double for a professional economist.
I agree that the main issue is Tyler being wrong, but the particular method he took to being wrong suggests to me a basic lack of effort on the issue, which compounds the incompetence displayed.
I get the temptation to dunk on the o3 fact check, but it's worth pointing out that the factual claim is not really the crux here, only the interpretation of the number.
AI fact checking in general should be reserved for low effort situations where you don't care that much about the result, but o3 did fine here. It politely noted that the number it found was "channeled through" rather than "pocketed by". Perhaps it should have been more emphatic about it, but then sycophancy is a known problem with most if not all chatbots.
>and to “confirm” with AI, which is inherently concerning
That particular use of LLMs reminds me of the Electric Monks from Douglas Adams's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". The Monks were androids created by an advanced alien race for the purpose of believing things for you so you don't have to worry about it yourself. Among other thongs, the Monks would provide convincing reassurance on demand of conclusions you wanted to believe but found yourself doubting. Which is fine and useful if you're having irrational worries, but potentially disastrous of you have a Monk talk you into dismissing important and valid doubts.
>I really wish I could write like Scott, but I’ll have to settle for appreciating stuff like this.
I think a big part of the effect is that Scott's default mode is calm, charitable, and thoughtful. The contrast makes it stand out more when he does indulge his temper in bitingly witty remarks like that, and it not being his default mode gives it more informational value when he does find something objectionable enough to make that kind of remark.
I find that MR has gone downhill substantially in the last 9 to 12 months (and I've been reading it for what, 2 decades now?) but that post takes the cake and very rightfully got dunked on.
Sometimes I wonder if some if it is age dependent, I see it with some regularity in people in that age bracket - previously brilliant people start doing odd stuff...
"charity by any stretch" is an extraordinary strong claim. Do you think PEPFAR does not count as a charitable program? Does running a large charitable program not make an organization at least in some sense a charity?
One could make a semantic argument that PEPFAR doesn't count as "charity" because they don't use their own earned money, they use money that was taken from US taxpayers (not that taxation is nessesarily illegitimate, but it's not hard to see why someone would not consider giving away someone elses money as "charity").
This is definitely a semantic argument, but it's one that doesn't even pass muster on semantics. I've never seen a definition of charity that has any requirement for spending "your own" money, whatever that even means.
Webster dictionary:
> an institution engaged in relief of the poor
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charity
I googled the word "charity" just now and the first sentence of the AI Overview was, "Charity, in its broadest sense, is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need." Then there is the Wikipedia article on charity, which begins:
>"Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest."
There are also dictionary definitions that use the word "generosity", which doesn't really square with the coercive nature of taxation.
I would agree that USAID is at least charity-adjacent, but I don't begrudge anyone who would roll their eyes upon hearing USAID described as a charity.
PEPFAR is certainly a charity on a nation-scale sense. In a citizen level, it is a federal program, and I would say a very good one.
"Does running a large charitable program not make an organization at least in some sense a charity?"
Funny you should ask!
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/charitable-status-of-450m-in-house-state-agency-queried-1.3402478
"Government departments are not obliged to seek tenders from "in house" State agencies for contract work, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone has said, even though an internal audit questioned the legality of such practices.
Ms Zappone was responding to Independents4Change TD Mick Wallace who questioned the awarding of contracts to not-for-profit agency Pobal.
The company, which has an annual expenditure of more than €450 million, is registered as a charity and disburses EU and Government funding on behalf of various departments."
It is still registered as a charity:
https://www.charitiesregulator.ie/en/information-for-the-public/search-the-register-of-charities/sonra%C3%AD-carthanachta/?srchstr=Pobal®id=20029609
So simply administering money which then gets paid out to charities does not necessarily mean that it is a charity. I mean, by one interpretation of this, you could claim the IRS is a charity (it oversees the collection of money which then funds social care programmes, welfare for the sick, the elderly, and the disadvantaged, and projects which advance the public good) and nobody believes that.
Banned for this comment. I don't know how many times I need to say that if you're going to say a controversial inflammatory thing that there's a lot of evidence against, you need to make at least some tiny attempt to support your claim.
Wait, is your claim that USAID is *not* a CIA front, or meerly that they happen to do a lot of charitable good in the course of being a CIA front?
I'm not even making a claim now, just wanting to know exactly what Sean means and what his evidence is.
Check the footnotes on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Political_operations_abroad (as I said in another comment, this is consistent with USAID still having primarily been what it claimed to be).
Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not familiar with the connection, but there's a lot of difference between:
- USAID has been exploited by the CIA in the past
- USAID isn't a real charity, just a CIA front
...and the particular way he framed that either forced someone else to do the hard work of figuring out he meant a much weaker thing, or else let the (false as written) statement stand.
USAID funds the 7headed snake and the snake hates when things like CIA overshadow its work. How was your coffee this morning, Scott? Tell the bright boys and girls I said 'Hi' or 안녕 if still in Cali.
I remember this came up in the USAID discussion on DSL: https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/25/usaid-in-egypt-had-me-detained-for-walking-in-and-asking-if-its-following-trumps-orders/
The piece is a bit of a hack job and I don't endorse its conclusions. But it seems unlikely that the innocent USAID compound has the Egyptian secret police on hotdial. The CIA using the State Dept and related agencies as a front in foreign countries is hardly surprising imo. But a given USAID building being a CIA operation hardly means the whole agency is fake.
US government installations abroad have been attacked by terrorists before, and the US arranges with host countries to provide security for US personnel abroad. The fact that Egyptian state security was contacted doesn't mean anything more sinister than any of the 500 foreign missions protected by the Secret Service. It would be a criminal dereliction of duty for anyone administering any US compound abroad not to have the authorities on speed-dial.
This really just sounds like a nothing burger.
I think the soft power thing makes it all more complicated. There's the uncontested good of "feeding the hungry", then there's the bits about "encourage developing nation-states to develop in line with our values" (or at its weakest "okay even if it's a hellhole tyranny under El Presidente Vitalico, he'll be *our* El Presidente and not *their* El Presidente").
That second part is where the CIA etc. come in, and some people wish they'd go right back out, or never came in in the first place.
The allegations of USAID's CIA involvement have been widely reported and widely repeated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Political_operations_abroad
I heard forms of this allegation several times while working in a very different part of the NGO space. (Probably much of what I heard was downstream of the Guardian article about Cuba cited there.)
I find it hard to untangle what the actual relationship is, because *at least* I believe that a majority of USAID staff aren't involved with any covert activities, and probably aren't aware of any.
I find it plausible that the CIA, especially during the Cold War, sometimes used USAID activities as cover, possibly without the knowledge of many people in USAID. I don't know what the USAID leadership's level of awareness and involvement in that would have been.
When some of the JFK documents were declassified a few weeks back, there were some revelations that certain State Department foreign operations were majority staffed by undercover CIA agents, to the point where this compromised the ability of the State Department to properly function.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32910-1-arthur-schlesinger-jr-president-kennedy-cia-reorganization-secret-june-10-1961-5
Note the date, June 1961. USAID was established by President Kennedy in November of 1961. Coincidence? Maybe, but even if so I can't imagine that the CIA would not leap at the opportunity.
I don't know why you're trying to sanewash an insane claim?
Lockheed Martin also has a long history of collaborating with the CIA but if someone told you that Lockheed Martin was a front for the CIA you would, rightly, think they are an idiot, a crackpot, or both.
And the Rosenbergs spied for the KGB but they also did a whole bunch of other things like sleep, bake cakes, go to the toilet, and so forth. So it's not reasonable to call them KGB agents.
To be a KGB agent, you just have to spy for the KGB - of course you will do other things.
For an organisation to be a CIA front, it would mean that it is set up and controlled by the CIA, and its other purposes are secondary or fake. If a CIA agent pretends to be from USAID, or USAID sometimes collaborates with the CIA, or even if a division of USAID is used as a CIA front but most of USAID's activity is actually charitable, I don't think that rises to the level of "USAID is a CIA front". But you could reasonably say USAID is compromised by its involvement with the CIA - doesn't seem like it's good for that to happen, but shutting down the whole thing and leaving millions of people to die seems worse.
>its other purposes are secondary or fake
Both organizations have basically the same purpose - furtherance of US interests abroad, so, in a sense, their intermingling is entirely natural and expected. But, of course, charity is sacred and spying is mundane, and having desecration in plain view is bad PR.
I don’t know his posting history but it’s not impossible that it was sarcasm/snark. My initial assumption, though, was that it was just obnoxious. [edit: it’s also true that USAID is a bipartisan project and more, on the Right, for foreign policy reasons. I would assume, though, that this is mostly for non-nefarious reasons.]
Ah, it's an internet feral.
Meh. A lot of unexpected vitriol and fingerpointing for an (albiet sloppy) well intentioned mistake. Both of you are figuring out the world and how to make it a better place. Chill. The debate around USAID is important, but highlighting it this way risks alienating for no reason other than I Have Flair Which Means I Have To Get A Gotcha.
It's not just a sloppy mistake, though, it's a weird category error: "people say they spend lots of money buying stuff, but actually 85% of that money goes to stores, not people who make stuff".
I'm very rarely tempted to dive into the MR comments section, because it's reliably terrible (like Sean up there), but I nearly did for this one. Tyler is often wrong, but he's rarely dumb, and this is genuinely dumb.
>"It's not just a sloppy mistake [...] it's a weird category error [...] this is genuinely dumb."
I count weird category errors made well intentionally by individuals who are not often wrong as sloppy mistakes. No matter how dumb (though at a certain point actully one could claim sandbagging for other purposes, but fairly confident Tyler isn't doing this).
I think the tone is fine given the nature of the topic and mistake. Cowen was being pretty stupid here and he really should have known better.
Sure it's fine. It's still significantly negative EV based on writing skill, unless there is somehow a positive of being finger pointy other than people who agree with you getting a kick out of it. I stand by what I said: highlighting it this way risks alienating for no reason other than I Have Flair Which Means I Have To Get A Gotcha. It's not outrageous nor do I think it's terrible, just a sloppy writing mistake I was surprised to see from a veteran like Scott.
The egregiousness of the error is communicated in part by the tone Scott uses. Using a less harsh tone might make it seem like cowen's mistake was reasonable to make. It would probably be good long term if Cowen felt a bit of shame about what he wrote, or if people treated his future claims and arguments with more skepticism.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I feel there actually is positive ev in having different tones or writing styles for different disagreements.
I think if an economics professor doesn't want to be dragged like this, they shouldn't make mistakes so obviously bad that they would have to not even be trying.
I don't think Tyler Cowen of all people bless his heart even if he's wrong is not trying.
i.e.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/us-aid-bleg.html
This is a dumb mistake. It is also dumb to drag people when you have the option *not to* just for the sake of style points when you could as easily have messaged him or said it in a way which made the clarification less alienating.
I call "asking o3 after a host of people pointed you to better sources" not trying. I think being unclear on whether or not Marco Rubio's statement is an accurate summation of USAID activities suggests that Cowen did not read any of the books people pointed him to, another example of "not trying".
Like, did you read the post? Cowen has had plenty of experience with the same difficulties of funding that Scott has seen. What reason did he have for not referencing this breadth of knowledge besides just obviously not thinking about the problem in any depth before posting?
I also think this is a sloppy mistake from Tyler. That is not my point. This could be a useful wake up call for Tyler to not slip in rigor. It would be more effective if he wasn't pseduo-berated while being reminded. Also, for those who actually need to hear this, it will be less effective at reaching them because Scott is busy hitting intellectual no-scopes.
My point is this goes beyond "attempted to use best analytical ability and failed" and into "did not attempt to employ analytical ability out of lack of interest, but uttered unverified opinion on a high-impact topic regardless".
I think when experts behave poorly, their reputation should degrade. That's what keeps expert opinions distinguished from non-expert opinions.
I agree to the first part; read my above comment again. I think when the outcome of these conversations could have real impact we should make more positive EV trades. I like the fact Scott called this out, and am positive to neutral that he did so publicly rather than message Tyler, including a small implicit degredation or threat of such (not outright hostile, just the natural flow like you discuss) to Tyler. However, doing it with a writing style that prioritises flexing on Tyler than communicating makes no sense, unless we are just prioritising short term status points.
It did feel a little more like "outrage first, ask questions later" than I'm used to from Scott. But I dunno, it does look to me like a pretty egregious error, and he kinda did "ask questions" there at the end.
The feature of being whipish with your language can be dissociated from the main part. The place we see this feature is amongst pundits and highschool debate tournaments. It is to win community points but often at the cost of other people actually hearing you. It is literally just an unexpected skill issue from Scott, considering he probably has the skill.
It is an error, but not one driven by malice. Even if it was, Scott would help more people if he didn't risk alienating some or not getting his message across to those who it would actually impact for the sake of stylin' on em. So to speak.
I would be a bit more sympathetic to this comment, and Tyler, but he just recently asked his audience for info on US Aid
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/us-aid-bleg.html ,
and supposedly did more reading on various sources that ChatGPT deep-research provided him
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/deep-research-considers-the-costs-and-benefits-of-us-aid.html
As a popular commentator and author, you might hope and expect that he actually absorbed some of that. With that background, Tyler seemingly accepting a claim about aid effectiveness, made by an administration that is massively cutting aid, at face value, makes him come across as a bit of a hack. What did he add to the debate here except signal boosting a false claim?
Meanwhile it seems reasonable to me to have a bit of vitriol for a position that plausibly leads to thousands or millions of deaths.
>Him having done research.
That makes me more symapthetic, not less. He tried. This could be a useful wake up call to double check. It would be more effective if you didn't berate him while doing it. Also, those who actually need to hear this, it will be less effective at reaching them because you're busy hitting intellectual no-scopes. His mistake is he shoehorned USAID into a heuristic of bad for the US gov to fund using other people's money because some is (like funding the bbc or trans puppet shows).
>Meanwhile it seems reasonable to me to have a bit of vitriol for a position that plausibly leads to thousands or millions of deaths.
Actually it absolutely has the opposite effect. When the impact of your words can have significant impact like Scott's, he should try his best to choose what will be helpful over what will give him status points. This is counterintuitively one of the reason he has so many status points amongst people who actually can make change. Is he has the skill and the intent to do so. This is a silly mistake from Scott. If because of his desire to crank intellectual 90s he now does not reach someone wh would otherwise convinced, he's made an egregious and silly mistake. Such skill based negative EV trades from a veteran writer make no sense.
He did research in February. I just, can't accept that he's saying this in good faith. "Nor were many US AID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on" Maybe he's getting forgetful? Like he could have just reread his post from 3 months ago (he's quoting Ken Opalo, who is largely defending US Aid):
"Only 11% of U.S. aid goes directly to foreign organizations. The rest gets management via U.S. entities or multilateral organizations. This doesn’t mean that the 89% of aid gets skimmed off, just that an inefficiently significant share of the 89% gets gobbled up by overhead costs. In addition, this arrangement denies beneficiaries a chance at policy autonomy."
Yeah, for someone who is so smart, it is a ridiculously sloppy mistake to make, one that most of us would easily catch. However, I would assume innocence of malice until proof of guilt. Still, we all make mistakes, and it's important for the facilitation of conversation that we are focused on giving eachother a helping hand when we slip and fall, not kick. Still, I hope this serves as a wake up call for Tyler to maintain rigor and not post unless he has double or triple read.
Why is "underrepresented women in permaculture" cringe? Women are key to food security and family wellbeing all over the world. The developing country I know best faces severe climate challenges, and women in that country endure limited access to education, healthcare, and political participation. Anything that increases climate resilience (through soil & water conservation, etc) and improves the socioeconomic situation of women in that country would be a Good Thing. Also, PS: it is just not a place where a mixed classroom of men and women (most of whom would not be literate) will see equal participation on the women's part.
Second this.
Thirded. My guess is that Scott is deliberately trying to avoid something that hits the culture war nerves, e.g., trans puppet shows.
Hard to say 2+2=4 without appearing woke, so one gotta keep up the bona fides explicitly under the new regime.
My initial reaction is the opposite, Scott has been criticizing the right a lot lately due to Trump, wants to include a jab at the left wherever possible to retain his audience/street cred, and isn't putting a ton of thought into the jabs.
That's not actually my guess about the truth of the matter because I recognize it as too uncharitable and flattering to my own positions, but it's my first intuitive reaction.
Yeah, a lot of anti-DEI rhetoric is unthinking, unfortunately. Take things like funding "LGBTQ plays" or "transgender comic books." The sad fact is that, in many countries, LGBTQ people are discriminated against or even in physical danger. Another fact is that cultural products can indeed have effects on people's attitudes, and increase empathy. If the State Dept funded screenings of Gentleman's Agreement in countries where anti-Semitism is rampant, or screenings of, I don't know, A Man for All Seasons in a country where Christians are oppressed, no one would bat an eye. But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
> But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
Kinda. The trans movement in particular is a pretty recent advance in social morality in the west. Heck, even gay marriage, which is one step behind, wasn’t even acceptable to Hilary Clinton for most of her career. And this kinda of thing comes across as cultural imperialism.
I’m not sure either who it’s exactly fooling. The west isn’t going to win hearts and minds by pontificating about trans rights here, while supporting Israel in Gaza there, and allying itself with Saudi Arabia and the Syrian head choppers. Sure it might win hearts and minds amongst some centrists and liberals in the west, provided democrats are in power but it’s not really fooling anyone outside that that demographic, and not everybody in it either.
>pontificating about trans rights
You obviously haven't seen Boys Dont Cry
>And this kinda of thing comes across as cultural imperialism.
Because it is, but when Good People do it it's just sparkling anti-discrimination.
> If the State Dept funded screenings of Gentleman's Agreement in countries where anti-Semitism is rampant, or screenings of, I don't know, A Man for All Seasons in a country where Christians are oppressed, no one would bat an eye. But somehow screening Boys Don't Cry or Milk in, say, Uganda, is illegitimate?
Though isn't part of the point that they don't? How much effort does the State Department spend standing up for Christians versus gays or Jews?
I am not sure where the "or Jews" comes from. Is the Administration deeming efforts to combat anti-Semitism illegitimate?
And, where are the calls to combat anti-Christian bias IN ADDITION to combating anti-LGBTQ bias? All I see is calls to end efforts at combating anti-LGBTQ bias.
I'm guessing orders of magnitude more is spent on Christians?
My impression has always been that, while the US is vaguely against persecution of anyone anywhere, it takes the prosecution of Christians as its own special duty and responsibility to address.
This is just the google AI summary, you can do more research to see if I'm wrong, but it agrees with my impression of how this works. This is what I get:
>The State Department, as a part of the U.S. government, has a documented focus on international religious freedom and the protection of persecuted Christians, including those facing violence, discrimination, and restrictions on their faith.
>The State Department engages in diplomatic outreach to countries where Christians face persecution or discrimination.
>They work to encourage governments to respect religious freedom, to protect religious minorities, and to prevent acts of violence and discrimination against Christians.
>The State Department also supports efforts to provide humanitarian assistance and legal aid to persecuted Christians.
>This assistance may include providing food, shelter, and medical care, as well as supporting efforts to rebuild their lives and communities.
>The State Department also works with other organizations to provide humanitarian assistance to persecuted Christians
In practice the US supports the new Al Queda regime in Syria, where Assad was a better option for Christians and minorities, as was Saddam. As was ghaddafi.
Then there’s the coming destruction of Palestinian Christians.
Seconded. The State does not give Christians special rights or funding even in places where the same reasoning applies for the special funding or rights to minimise violence. Words are cheap. Look at the realpolitik.
I would bat an eye at all that. I have also said that I don't want the US government funding charities that I personally donate to (anti-malaria ones), but I wouldn't donate to a charity that screened movies rather than attacked infectious diseases (unless screening movies was shown to be effective against infectious diseases, which sounds unlikely to me).
I'm not referring to charities. I am referring to State Department programs.
"I'm not referring to charities. I am referring to State Department programs."
This is the issue in a nutshell. Is USAID a charity or a state department programme? The furore is about "they're defunding charities!" but if part of it is "State Department stuff" then let the State Department handle that.
The point is that USAID and the State Dept are different entities and do different things. USAID is an independent agency* and funds what is usually called charitable works. They don't do "State Department stuff."
*Though the Trump Administration is apparently trying to merge it into the State Dept https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-explores-bringing-usaid-under-state-department-sources-say-2025-01-31/
You said you weren't referring to charities, but now you say that USAID funds charitable works, with the post we're all responding to noting that the funds are mostly channeled through NGOs (charities). And I say I don't want the US government funding charities that could be funded by private donations rather than taxes, nor do I think your hypothetical movie screenings deserve even private donations.
The people who need to read the transgender comic books in order not to beat up LGBT+ people are not the people who will be reading them; the entire event will be a PR showcase for a particular artist with all the guests in attendance wholeheartedly on board, and nobody will benefit (except maybe the comic book artist gets some funding).
No one said they would be. Cultural and social change happens slowly. And a kid who reads it might grow up with different attitudes. In fact, isn't that the EXACT argument of those who oppose such "woke" cultural products: that they will lead to change? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
It's cringe if you're specifically trying to achieve DEI cultural victories in a country that doesn't particularly want its culture meddled with but does want help with food security and medication.
Women (in the country I’m speaking of) already garden, farm, run households, and (sometimes) get university educations. In a subsistence farming environment, everyone participates—men, women, children.
Empowering women in permaculture isn’t cultural imperialism. It’s about supporting people who are already doing the work but often without the same access to resources or training. Inclusion is smart, respectful development.
Or, instead of picking and choosing winners, how about you empower everyone? If you must choose, empower entrepreneurs. Business ventures. That, at least, has higher marginal value for getting the country out of its economic rut.
Generally powering entrepreneurship (which also affects women!) is far better than focusing specifically on women entrepreneurs.
In development work, targeted support isn’t about “picking winners." It’s about addressing imbalances that limit overall progress. Women aren’t a niche group. They’re half the population and they’re central to the country's food systems. Ignoring them in the name of “neutrality” isn’t empowerment--it’s erasure.
Also--lots of permaculture initiatives ARE business ventures! Small farming co-ops, plant nurseries, collecting natural products like shea butter nuts & selling associated goods through export co-ops, etc.
I'll turn it back around to you - empowering women instead of everyone as a whole is ignoring half the population, when compared to an initiative that doesn't discriminate by gender.
Enabling twice as many people to act as entrepreneurs seems like a good way to empower business ventures.
Do you really think there are zero cultures on the planet where the human capital represented by women is being underutilized?
Like, I roll my eyes about people who make the argument that US markets are so efficient that no woman's talent could possibly ever be wasted by sexism. But do you really want to make the argument that this is true in *every country on the planet*?
> Empowering women in permaculture isn’t cultural imperialism.
It is.
> It’s about supporting people who are already doing the work but often without the same access to resources or training. Inclusion is smart, respectful development.
Could be that too.
DEI hasn't accomplished much of anything other than redistributing resources to progressives' favoured groups and engendering resentment against the left
Seems like a strong and culture-war-motivated claim with no evidence.
> Anything that increases climate resilience (through soil & water conservation, etc) and improves the socioeconomic situation of women in that country would be a Good Thing
Is it?
You have two groups in society, Group A and Group B. From your excellent vantage point behind your desk in Washington you percieve an asymmetry between these two groups, so you come in and start handing out scads of money to people in Group B. What happens next? Well, it could go a bunch of ways...
1. Group A starts recruiting Group B front-persons to collect $$$. (This is the way it actually seems to work in practice when governments start prioritising "female-owned" businesses, by the way, you suddenly get a whole lot of businesses officially owned by the wives of the guys who actually run them)
2. Group A decides it hates the US now
3. Group A starts attacking and robbing Group B who are the recipients of such undeserved foreign largesse (unlikely with men/women but can easily happen with other groups)
The point is that trying to privilege certain groups over others is always playing with fire. The principle of anti-discrimination is a good one and should be applied both internally and externally.
> Why is "underrepresented women in permaculture" cringe?
Because permaculture is cringe.
There's way too much acceptance of woo in permaculture I agree, but at the end of the day, it's gardening/farming. With a focus on sustainability and resilience through water conversation, using native plants, using perennials, not using petrochemicals and so on.
Well, that's the same motte-and-bailey as when eg theists argue that their deity is just another name for love and/or the universe. But when you turn around, they return to talking about trinity or cutting bits of infants.
(Sorry, I couldn't think of a less inflammatory example quickly. I don't want to disparage religion in general. It's fine to have complicated ideas or lifestyle requirements, as long as you don't claim your deity is just another word for the universe.)
What's the equivalent to "talking about trinity or cutting bits of infants" in permaculture? Genuine question, I know next to nothing about the culture of permaculturists.
Ok, ignore the detour to religion. Just go directly by what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy says.
Check out the Issues / Methodology section on the Wikipedia article for Permaculture for a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Methodology
I couldn't quickly find a good write-up, but you can go from https://chatgpt.com/share/6830228a-5c4c-8009-96a1-a37038874579 and follow the sources.
Or you can try reading a bit into what the permaculture people put out themselves. It's often more of a philosophy with spiritual elements than a science.
"Well, that's the same motte-and-bailey as when eg theists argue that their deity is just another name for love and/or the universe."
Not this theist. I am very much against arguments by the liberal types who try to water down religion with "God is just another name for the sense within us of compassion" or "We are all stardust" or "Love is the universal force that enables us all".
God is God. And the Trinity is more than just "a feeling of niceness when our bellies are full and we are fat and happy".
It's only a motte-and-bailey if permaculture is primarily about woo but when challenged its proponents defend it as gardening/farming. The comment you're replying to reads to me to be saying permaculture is primarily about gardening/farming but unfortunately there's more woo in there than they'd like. I don't know if the field of permaculture is primarily about gardening/farming or if it really is all woo. The former seems more likely to me on the priors so I'd say it's your job to prove otherwise if it's not.
Verdict: NaM&B (Not a Motte and Bailey).
If this were *only* a dig on permaculture, it wouldn't have mentioned 'underrepresented women'.
Just imagine that instead of the throw-away remark that we have in Scott's text, he would have mentioned the journal the hoaxers from the Grievance studies affair managed to publish in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
Agree.
I strongly disagree with someone who says 'Sexism is dead in the US, there's no need to try to have any programs or efforts to correct it anymore', but I can recognize them as part of a rhetorical movement with a lot of support and arguments.
But in the context of foreign aid, the claim would have to be 'Sexism is dead everywhere on the planet, there's no point to programs to address it anywhere,' and that seems uncontroversially wrong to me?
>someone who says 'Sexism is dead in the US
Are there any of those still left? By now it seems that half the country is convinced that there's pervasive anti-female discrimination, the other half ditto for the anti-male one.
My impression, and I admit it's not informed, is that things like "underrepresented women in permaculture" tend to have fewer of said underrepresented women, and more of committees holding meetings to go to conferences to present papers on setting up pilot schemes, which all involve nice remuneration for the members, flying off to agreeable locations for said conferences, and lots of verbiage produced (which then goes up on the website) but which shakes out as not much actual permaculture in practice.
For example, what was the point of the concert in Ireland? Hosted by the US Ambassador, the local big cheeses who present concerts like this all involved, and I'm sure they had a lovely night of music and schmoozing. But what did it actually achieve? Get Ireland on board with the US values and government? Newsflash, we're there already, we're so damn dependent on US multinationals (and in previous decades, the US as a destination for our emigrants) that at times it'd be easier if we were just officially another state.
https://gript.ie/who-is-the-irish-company-who-received-e70000-from-usaid-to-produce-a-live-musical-dei-event/
Only tangentially related, but it's really annoying and unnecessary when you have gender quotas for agricultural interventions (which USAID had). Agricultural patterns are often heavily gendered (e.g. in some cultures women will never plant maize, which is seen as a male crop), but outcomes are mostly family-based (so what is good for a male farmer is good for his wife and daughters, and vice-versa).
If I remember correctly, on this maize project I worked on 6-7 years ago, (increasing fertiliser use through microloans) we applied for USAID funding for a high-impact intervention on the dominant cash crop, but failed because we had to admit that almostall maize farmers were male, and some idiot at USAID thought that anything only supporting ultra-poor *male* farmers was holding up the patriarchy.
So, while funding permaculture and female farmers isn't bad in itself, I sympathise with the sentiment.
?
Is there anything in Tyler's post beyond "pocketed the money" to generate this kind of invective?
Especially when the next couple lines are...pretty openly expressing confusion:
"I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many US AID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
Maybe Tyler is wrong, maybe he's right, maybe it's just genuinely hard to figure out how much cash actually helps people when $1 million dollars of aid gets passed through 3 NGOs, each of whom take a 20-30% cut...which was the entire purpose of entities like Givewell in the first place, to find highly efficient charities because there's so much signaling and waste in the process.
But, yo, you've been posting on Covid here recently, a very touchy subject that affected virtually all of your readers personally, and pushing for a rational and mature analysis of the facts. Cool, awesome possum. Why are you suddenly going 0-100 on not even PEPFAR but USAID as a whole on a, at most, petty dig.
> "Maybe Tyler is wrong, maybe he's right, maybe it's just genuinely hard to figure out how much cash actually helps people when $1 million dollars of aid gets passed through 3 NGOs, each of whom take a 20-30% cut...which was the entire purpose of entities like Givewell in the first place, to find highly efficient charities because there's so much signaling and waste in the process."
I'm not sure how you think this should work.
If USAID had to run every program itself, then it would have to build up in-house specialization in hundreds of different fields, many of which are in tiny countries it knows nothing about. Then it would get accused of bureaucratic bloat.
If USAID had to run everything through local governments and NGOs, many of those governments/NGOs would be corrupt or incompetent, or at least not willing to audit themselves to US standards. Then it would be accused of facilitating corruption and incompetence.
If the US government had to fulfill its charitable interests without there being an intermediate agency called USAID, how do you imagine this working? The President figures everything out personally?
I don't know, maybe this only makes sense to me because I've personally done regranting stuff, but I don't understand how people expect this to work if not through a large rich entity like the US government having a group that figures out which charities to donate to and then donating to those charities.
I expect it to be pretty clear what % of USAID funding goes to directly improving the lives of people and that's not clear to me and, apparently, that's not clear to Tyler Cowen.
If 80% of the money USAID gives goes to people overseas who need help, awesome, I cannot reasonably ask for anything better.
If USAID has 20% bureaucratic costs and then they regrant it to an NGO whose takes 30% who then forwards it to a local government actor who takes 20% so...only like 45% of the original money makes it to people who actually need it, that stinks but that may genuinely be the best that can be done.
If USAID takes 30% of the money and then an NGO filled with people who hate me takes 30% and they forward it to another NGO who takes 30% and all those people hate me and then they forward it to a local government who takes 50% so maybe 17% of the money goes to people who need it and like 36% goes to people who hate me...that's a bad thing I don't like.
So this isn't binary. Specifics matter. Percentages matter. Administrative costs of, I dunno, 15%, are probably fine and normal but 60% are super bad. Corruption is a sad fact of the world but the specific amounts matter.
And it cannot be a capital offense to be confused about how much money is actually going to good stuff, how much is going to dumb stuff, and how much is going to bad stuff when that's an active topic of debate that no one can apparently provide a clear answer to, especially when the guy seems more confused than condemning.
That's what I want. More fundamentally, I'm confused why we should approach Covid, where over a million people died and over a hundred million were locked in their homes for over a year, with calm rational analysis whereas an offhand dig generates this kind of response. This isn't even, like, I think you did a bad or Tyler did a good, this response just seems...really disproportionate.
It sounds like you have a model of this where you start with N dollars, then there are multiple steps where someone "takes" a fraction of the remaining dollars and passes the rest to the next step, then there's some end step where the good happens with the remaining r*N dollars, with r < 1. So you want to know the value of r. Is that right?
I don't think this is a good model. First, because the thing we care about is the effects the grant has on the world, not the amount of money that makes it to the last step. And second, because it's not clear which parts of the whole system are the "doing good" part and which parts are not. If someone's job is to negotiate shipping contracts for vaccines, is that the bad part? Does it matter if that person hates you?
Yes, you've understood what I want. I concur that what you propose would be way, way better, I don't think it's feasible. I think measuring actual impacts is super hard and measuring amounts of money going from bank to bank is relatively easy. So if we can't track money going from bank to bank, I don't think we can track outcomes.
Basically, if USAID could come out with this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VEtie59TgRvZSEVjfG7qcKBKcQyJn8zO91Lau9YNqXc/edit?pli=1#gid=1266854728
that would be super awesome. I don't think they can, so I don't ask for it.
As for whether it matters whether people who hate me are doing important jobs that empirically save lives is important...short term no, long term yes, if that makes sense. If USAID funding people who hate me has been going on for a couple years, then yeah, try to reform it, totally not worth the cost. If USAID has been funding people who hate me for decades to the point where we elected an Insane Clown Man almost 10 years ago and everybody doing critical life-saving work is like "Yes, we know that the Insane Clown Man will return to power at some point and we desperately need reform but we're not gonna because..." (I genuinely don't know) then I guess reform isn't an option and either people who hate me get tens of billions of dollars a year forever, which is bad, or you need to accept a dramatic short-term shock and then rebuild as best as possible afterwards, which I think is what Eccentric Genuis Spaceman was trying to do.
As it happens, in June of last year there was an inspector general investigation of USAID spending. I just skimmed it and it looks like they found some issues but nothing earthshaking.
https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-02/3-000-24-001-U.pdf
Sorry if I was unclear, but I read about five pages of that and nothing they were discussing addressed any of my concerns or was intended to.
IG's in Gov only find corruption when the IG has been accused of corruption. Check it out.
In most cases there's no step at the end where they hand the money to poor people. It's charities (or other organizations) spending the money on staff and supplies all the way down. If the local food bank buys canned beans is that "pocketed" by Archer Daniels Midland? Are the guys digging the well "overhead"? Like yeah it can be hard to figure out how effective a donation or charitable expenditure is, but your only hope is to look at results, not try to trace how many different places the money goes through.
Well, some parts of the US Government manage to do their jobs themselves, e.g. the US military does most things using its own employees. Where it does use contractors, it does it on a basis of carefully negotiated contracts where money is exchanged for specific deliverables. Even with these safeguards there's a lot of waste and corruption in military contracting, because there's always waste and corruption whenever groups of people get together to spend other people's money.
Or we can look at other grant-making agencies like the NSF or NIH or DoE. They hand out a lot of grants for research, and competition for these grants is tight. Grants flow directly from the agency to the people actually doing the research (the university takes a known cut but accountability is directly between the researcher and the NSF) and they have to report on the outcomes they're getting for their money. Again it's not particularly efficient but there's accountability.
The allegation seems to be that USAID is (or was) spending a small fraction of its budget a bit like the NSF, but the rest disappeared into a multi-layered system of NGOs with minimal accountability. USAID gives money to some group, which takes a cut and gives money to some other group, which takes a cut and gives money to some other group, with the net effect that there's no meaningful accountability or even understanding of where the heck the money is going.
But the purpose of the military is to kill people. All that research and strategizing is waste and fraud. Technically, the soldiers don’t have to eat to kill people. And why are they shipping soldiers to the front. Why not just pay locals. Fraud! Fraud! Fraud! \S
> [...] e.g. the US military does most things using its own employees.
Do they manufacture their own weapons, or grow their own food?
No, that was my next sentence. Where they don't do things themselves, they buy specific things for specific amounts of money, with accountability.
They don't grow their own potatoes. But nor do they sprinkle cash all over Idaho and just hope that this has a generally potatoey outcome for the troops. They make contracts with suppliers, who have to deliver specific things to get paid. This level of accountability seems to be missing in the NGO world.
Any supplier has a lot of nebulous less accountable overhead. Eg not all research projects pan out. You have to charge that somewhere.
So either you:
- add some general overhead to every product and service
- or: you specifically charge the military for running your HR department and blue sky research (but then you can only do research that the military is explicitly already looking for)
- or (this happens in the private sector by default): you just charge whatever the market can bear for your products, regardless of their variable cost of production. Any profit you make can go to fund your overhead. (Eg Apple charges you a lot more than it costs to produce a smart phone.)
The military also fund PR and advertising campaigns. They pay the agencies for specific deliverables (like X minutes of radio ads), but they don't pay for actual impact (like how many additional recruits show up because of the ads). Very similar to how charities spend most of their money.
Now you've got me thinking that the best solution is that charity should be done on a for-profit basis.
Have you actually compared the audits/accounting reports from the DoD and USAID? Or is this just your impression of the relative levels of accountability that exist in the two organizations?
"The university takes a known cut but accountability is directly between the researcher and the NSF".
I don't think your point survives this - if the GMU stat above is right, the university takes a larger cut than USAID intermediaries do.
I think the impact of your argument relies on "no accountability" and "no understanding of where the money is going". But in the case I've seen studied at length (PEPFAR), they do careful audits and know exactly where the money is going, and produce large and measurable results, probably more impressive than any of the other government agencies you mention. If you remove the false claims that there's no accountability and they don't know where the money is, then what's left?
>Knows nothing about countries
>Sends your tax money anyway
'What else should we do?'
There's a reason you have this job instead of them letting you wear a sweater.
"a group that figures out which charities to donate to and then donating to those charities."
I think that's the question that needs to be answered: does it figure out which charities to donate to, or does it just disburse the funds on the model of "the permaculture for underrepresented women applied to the Department of Agriculture which awarded them grant funding, now we just write the cheques and handle the paperwork involved in paying out the money to Maké Mii Riche, c/o Bank of Zurich"?
I don't know what you're saying. How do you think they choose recipients without deciding on them? You think they just give it to whoever stumbles into the USAID office, and by coincidence it happened to be charities that save millions of lives each year and are more effective than the average private philanthropic foundation?
That is precisely what I want to know: does the USAID office select causes to be funded out of a pot of money handed over by the government, or does it simply manage the disbursement of funds awarded by different government departments?
Let me take an example from where I work. (This is just one of the various funding streams we access). We, as an organisation serving the community, can apply for grants paid out of the National Lottery. (I'm using this as an example because "money raised from the public spending on the lottery" is similar enough, in my view, to "money raised from the public via taxation" when it comes to "money for good causes that the public does not get to directly allocate to any particular good cause or charity").
The National Lottery itself does not decide on who gets what, it simply provides the pot of money based on this calculation:
"Funds for good causes comprise 65% of the difference between the total monies received for sales of National Lottery tickets and the prizes won each year."
They then hand this money over to the Exchequer (e.g. in 2023 this was an amount of €241 million). So what next?
Well, each government department administers various grant schemes.
"In accordance with Section 41 of the National Lottery Act, these sums are applied as determined by Government for the following purposes:
(a) sport and recreation;
(b) national culture and heritage (including the Irish language);
(c) the arts (within the meaning of the Arts Act 2003);
(d) health of the community;
(e) youth, welfare and amenities;
(f) natural environment;
(g) Such other objectives (if any) as the Government may determine from time to time.
Applications for funding should be made via the relevant Government Department."
So if you are a charitable or community organisation, you decide what particular body you fall under and apply for that grant. For us, it's the Health Service Executive, which is governed by the Department of Health. And it disburses the tranche of lottery money it receives as grants for:
"We offer National Lottery grants to health and social care projects.
Community groups and voluntary organisations can apply.
You must provide health or social care services to the community. For example, you might help people with a disability, older people, carers or disadvantaged groups.
Public bodies, including the HSE, cannot apply for this funding."
So we fill up the application form (if anyone wants to read it, here's the link: https://www2.hse.ie/services/schemes-allowances/lottery-grants/national-lottery-grants/) and send it off and hope we're one of the chosen ones.
The National Lottery doesn't decide if we get the grant, it just forks over the money. So is USAID more like the National Lottery (handles the funds) or the HSE (decides who gets what grant)?
If anyone here either works with or knows someone who knows someone who works with USAID it would clear up a *lot* of the confusion. Which I think comes from the USAID doing both jobs - it decides who gets grants, but it also just hands over money to projects the State Department says "yeah, go ahead, give the money to the transgender opera company".
If you'd prefer an example from "ah yes but this is not really a government body, I want a government body", then let's talk about Pobal.
This pays money into our bank account each month under the various childcare schemes available (that's for us, Pobal handles other government funding for other bodies as well). Pobal doesn't decide who gets what money how, that's all done by us applying for the children in our service via "the Early Learning and Care (ELC) and School Aged Childcare (SAC) service provider portal for programmes funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY)" (and if anyone is curious about *that*, here's a link and good luck to you: https://earlyyearshive.ncs.gov.ie/how-to-guides/payments-and-programme-funding/)
So the DCEDIY gets money from the Exchequer, decides how much goes for the childcare schemes, and tells ELC/SAC to handle the application process. Then they decide how much money we get under each scheme based on enrolment, attendance, etc. Then they tell Pobal how much to pay us per each scheme. Then Pobal transfers it into our bank account (and then I have to keep track of what we got when for which, but thanks be to all the gods in every pantheon I don't handle the actual applying for each child under each scheme, a function which is one of the Nine Circles of Hell).
So you tell me - is USAID more like Pobal (pays out the money) or like ELC (decides who gets what when why)?
And all the above is separate to our *other* funding stream which involves directly applying to the HSE which is funded by the Department of Health, and which has a *different* set of three other separate offices I have to return service agreement, accounts, projections, and actual expenditure to, and which has me clawing my eyes out* every January - May (depending on when they finally sent us the paperwork to be completed and returned). Three separate offices which all want the same information, though presented differently, and which apparently don't co-ordinate or share the data at all.
Are you surprised I think DOGE is a great idea? Take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy, Elon! Chainsaw I say!
* Our financial year runs from July to June. The service year runs from September to May (because we follow the school year). The funding year is the calendar year which is, of course, January to December. One set wants it for the *last* calendar year and one set wants it for the *current* calendar year. Oh the fun of reconciling "half of this was the last six months of last year and half of this is the first six months of this year but it's not the full six months yet when you're asking me for the returns".
> by coincidence it happened to be charities that save millions of lives each year
That is *only* PEPFAR. I get why that's so important to you, it is a great program, but it is one program. Nothing else they did comes anywhere close.
What do you think is an appropriate response to a well-known professor of economics being very wrong on the relative value of a department critical to the wellbeing of tens of millions of people when his own experience should have been enough to inform him on why said department works the way it does? What about when the level of fact-checking he did before posting was "I asked o3"?
Not to mention that his mistake is the sort of thing that, if translated into policy, could genuinely hurt people.
Shit man, if I had to write a response every time a well-known professor of economics was very wrong about something then I'd never have time to sleep.
Oh, it's only *now* we're doubting well-known professors of economics? I've been doubting them and their advice on policy for ages! 😀
Prior to the social media? A corrective letter.
Nowadays, rage, of course. Rage and more rage.
Have you noticed how conditioned we are to raging now? Scott himself wrote "Toxoplasma of rage" once, one of his best texts. This is Moloch touching him now. He is strongly resistant, but not entirely immune.
You've overcorrected on "being angry means you're irrational". Why do you think it's wrong to be angry at a trained expert who should know better very obviously not bother to tap his presumably vast wealth of knowledge before commenting on poorly-informed policy changes that stand to kill thirty million people?
The pro-USAID destruction side here is pretty clearly spelling out its opinion that this is a fine cost to pay as long as it destroys the jobs of a few progressives they find annoying. Considering this, which side would you say is more enraged by political polarization, the one that's killing thirty million people or the one that doesn't like doing that?
I think it is irrational for both people and society to allow themselves being systematically angri-fied by manipulative outside forces, for two reasons:
a. It reduces the ability to actually do something constructive, which usually involves both diplomacy and ability to co-operate across the spectrum.
b. In democratic countries, it promotes election of "anger-mongers" into seats of power.
Looking around, widespread "angrification" seems obvious to me.
Sure, but why does avoiding angri-fication mean that nobody is allowed to be angry that someone has done a bad thing of great magnitude for exceedingly poor justification?
I don't think this would prompt such a response if it wasn't from Tyler. The man tossed out an innuendo to his very large audience that can be rejected with 2 minutes of reflection, especially by an economics professor with *immense* personal knowledge of how charity grants work.
I agree that this is probably because Tyler is...a rather special and influential figure but special and influential figures do small dumb things all the time. I'm sure Tyler has said dumb things on occasion before and will do so again; that's a thing public intellectuals do.
I don't think Scott is going to try and cancel/blacklist Tyler over this, but one angry response is also a pretty small deal? The invective is mostly targeted at Rubio/Trump
For me, the part where this essay picks up steam is pointing out Tylers own deep experience in running a charity that does regrants and has overhead. Tyler doesnt get to gesture vaguely at some superficial stats and say hmm looks fishy, really wish the MSM would do a better job here.
Tyler has to do the better job! Hes the one with the expertize to do it! Instead he is implicitly endorsing the naive view. And Scott here is showing him how to be better. This line of criticism reminds me of Scotts contempt for conspiracy theory debunkers who dont bother to actually explain themselves.
I think accusing people of billion-dollar grifts without evidence is a perfectly good reason to invect! He implies that the average allocation is wasted with maybe some small percentage actually doing good, which is the kind of extraordinary accusation that requires evidence.
I thought it was clear why Scott was so angry -- it's right at the end of the post:
> Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people (see my father’s story of his time in this world here) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.
> Part of the joy of owning your own blog is getting to make absolutely sure that you never unintentionally give one iota of aid or comfort to these lies or anything remotely associated with them.
And Tyler Cowen did, through ignorance plus surprisingly naive trust in the most hallucinatory SOTA LLM ever released.
Thank you for writing this, I've been too furious to focus on anything since reading that MR post, and now I can rejoin the world again...
I don’t know anything about the specifics here, but if each charity takes 30% for overhead, the money has to be passed 6 times before the amount is reduced below 12% of the original.
Presumably the local charities may have higher overheard. But still, I can’t imagine 6 layers of bureaucracy. 4 I can see: USAID -> National US charity -> National native charity -> regional native charity -> specific local organization. So 4 would make sense. 4 layers, each taking 30%, reduces the amount to like 24% of the original, I think. That’s higher than Rubio said, but still doesn’t sound good?
Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine multiple levels of bureaucracy rapidly chewing up money with overhead charges. But 88% still seems extreme.
Nobody was seriously claiming that 88% was pocketed. The 88% number was either the amount that went to US rather than foreign NGOs, or the amount that went through NGOs rather than governments. I understand your confusion though and that's part of why I wrote this post.
I have professional experience in non-profit management. 30% does sound high to me, 15% would be more typical. Then again, that's in the US, a developed nation. The situation could be different overseas. The devil is in the details.
I'm getting that from o3 (and I miscopied it - it was 20 - 35%, not 25 - 30%), so I have no idea if it's true or what it's including.
Does the 20-35% account for every time the money changed hands? Because if it’s ~30% overhead each time it changed hands, that makes a high overall subtraction from the original amount seem likely.
When I asked o3 (I know!) it said 20 - 35% (sorry, I mistyped it) for the first one. Some only go through one, others go through more layers that take more like 5-10% total. I don't know why the other layers take less.
Well then, given that information, and lacking any real transparency from the Trump administration on the matter, it's hard to imagine that Rubio's being honest. They did that whole big 90-day review, so I thought there might be some kind of report or audit forthcoming, which, if it existed, could possibly substantiate Rubio's claims. But if he had it, he'd be citing it. Two thumbs down, shame on him.
It stands to reason that multiple layers would have less overhead than one, if the money involved are actually doing something instead of being burned in open pits. If the job of coordinating aid to some province in Rwanda needs an administrator in the US, an logistics person in Kigali, and a local distributor in the provinces, that's going to be some fixed amount of overhead whether an organization does the whole thing in house with 30% overhead, or it's recontracted three times with 10% each.
Interesting - I read it as USAID should be about giving money directly to foreign government organizations, rather than through US based NGOs. I understand your reading of the situation though.
I do think there is an interesting underlying question of how to define the goals for a program like USAID and figure out how to provide the most efficient governance to achieve those goals. Both of those seem very likely sub-optimal with home runs like PEPFAR and difficult to justify other grants co-existing from the same funding bucket. At least on my reading of both of you, that seems like something that both Tyler and you agree on.
I'd find the bad faith post-hoc reasoning almost funny if it wasn't covering for evil. These people should just say what they really think - that foreign charity causes aren't worth it. That's really what their belief system boils down to.
If I wanted to be especially uncharitable (no pun intended) I'd say they see certain lives as less valuable than others. But one can't openly admit that in a public forum and so they have to play up paranoid fantasies of undocumented corruption.
It's mysterious why so many people feel they can't express their true beliefs. And not all of them are so constrained - there were plenty on the right when PEPFAR was defunded that proudly declared their indifference and gloated over the liberal tears.
How many times was the heatmap meme posted as a dunk?
For whose sake are some people concocting a cover story about their opposition to the programs? Nobody's going to cancel them.
Maybe it's cognitive dissonance - their egos aren't able to reconcile their self-image with the consequences of their beliefs, so they come up with a more high-minded excuse?
Which heatmap meme was that (dare I ask)?
The one about the difference between liberals' and conservatives' concentric circles of moral concern.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/983/944/ace
Basically conservatives willfully misinterpreting data that shows liberals on average show more empathy towards members of an outgroup. The willful misinterpretation is that liberals care more about the outgroup than the ingrown, of course this is inaccurate.
The original paper the figure's from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0#Fig5. I leave it to the reader to interpret the plot. They DO clarify that "these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family)." If it doesn't mean what it looks like it does, they're being extremely misleading.
To be fair, the design of the study is stupid and the visualization is worse.
The willful misinterpretation is downstream of bad design, and as Glorious Leader once said- if you think you're criticizing your ingroup, maybe you've mislabeled your outgroup. Liberals don't care more about the outgroup than the ingroup; you're just drawing those labels wrong. It would be closer to say they care about the fargroup more than the ingroup. Liberals, especially progressives (sometimes called extreme liberals in academia for some dumbass reason), are so high in openness to experience that it wraps around into oikophobia.
Or maybe we think it too obvious to be stated: that when your house is sinking deeper into debt every year, you shouldn't be donating money you don't have before getting your fiscal situation in shape.
Why even discuss how effective or ineffective the program is when you can't pay for it without going deeper into debt?
So, you'd never go into debt (or further into debt) to save a life?
Maybe they would, maybe not. The government shouldn't be forcing them to
Possibly, but that's not the argument they made.
I disagree. I read the "you" as the government, ie that they were saying that the government shouldn't be spending the public's money (money obtained in part from compelling them to pay the government) on foreigners when the public is in debt
Except that people are not being forced into debt in order to pay their taxes, let alone to pay the tiny percent of taxes that go to foreign aid. You are evading the question.
My loved ones? Yes.
Anyone else? No.
The government going into debt on my behalf for foreign lives? Sic semper tyrannis.
Hm, so spending money to end a genocide is tyranny if we have a budget deficit, but not if we have a budget surplus? Or is it always tyranny? If so, that sounds like an argument that tyranny is a good thing.
I'm well aware that the government debt and household debt analogy has limitations. But your government debt has reached dangerous levels, and is becoming a drag on the economy. Options like rolling over the debt or defaulting come with drastic downsides and are politically unviable anyway. In such an environment, your government debt has become not too different from household debt.
While the USAID amount is relatively small in the grand scheme of budgetary concerns, it's also one of the few things that's political expedient and relatively easy to cut. Aligning with the the principle that a government's duty should always put its own citizenry first above all else.
If the US were economically strong and the needs of the citizenry were adequately (even if not perfectly) met, then there would be far fewer pushbacks on government spending on foreign humanitarian efforts . But that's not the situation right now. Now is a time where every dollar and cent needs to be spent revitalizing the American economy or in support of needy Americans.
>Aligning with the the principle that a government's duty should always put its own citizenry first above all else
Except that that principle is bogus. A simple thought experiment: I am a CBP officer on patrol in the desert. I am approached by a US citizen who tells me that he is out for a hike with his US citizen son. They have run of water and have not had a drink for 3 hours. Simultaneously, an illegal immigrant approaches, accompanied by his son, who has not had a drink for more than a day. I have one bottle of water. Under your principle, I am morally compelled to give the water to the US citizen, which is absurd.
Moreover, the current issue is not "which funding should we cut." It is, "is it moral to cut foreign aid funding while simultaneously extending tax cuts to people earning more than $600,000
It is not the duty of government to act in the most moral way, nor should it be the duty of the government to act in the most moral way. The government in general, and also individual government agencies, should act in accordance with the mandate given to them, and no more than that.
Morality is diverse and often personal, and it is not the role of the state to be the arbiter of ultimate moral truth. Government mandates are derived from the democratic will of the people, and adhering to these mandates ensures that government actions are predictable, legitimate, and accountable to the populace that granted the mandate. Requiring government agencies to act as moral arbiters beyond their specific mandates opens the door to potential abuses of power.
Specific government agents have leeway that they can and do exercise as the situation demands it, but the general principle remains. So to your example, the patrol officer in his role as a patrol officer should aid the US citizen over the illegal immigrant, but may exercise personal moral judgement outside of is role to water the illegal immigrant instead.
The household analogy is bad for a lot of reasons (like that households don't issue their own currency that their debt is denominated in, or that they don't conduct their own foreign policy) but I'm going to use it anyway, scaling all the numbers down by a factor of 100 million. If a household is $360,000 in debt, and getting more indebted by $18,000 per year, then it would be stupid and perverse to tell them to stop donating between $67 and $124 per year (depending on whose numbers you believe) to global poverty charities. That is not going to move the needle on their overall fiscal situation and mostly just serves to signal callousness.
"This doesn't solve enough of the problem by itself so don't bother" isn't convincing.
If this was one part of a strategy to actually fix the problem then sure. When you’re making no effort to fix the problem (see the budget that just passed the house) it seems more like scoring political points by hurting people you don’t like.
My rebuttal was to the generic form of the criticism. If one wants to make a more specific point, this isn't the way to do it.
Have you actually, in real life, managed a deeply indebted organization that needs to survive?
I have. All sorts of smaller expenses go out of the window.
That said, the real problem of all Western budgets are entitlements. Our welfare commitments have exceeded our possibilities to fund them, not least because of bad demography.
The US will run a bit longer, as the dollar is a reserve currency, but there is no happy end in sight. Unless someone really defeats aging, we will collapse as greying societies that cannot sustain themselves because they lack manpower. Some countries like Japan are already almost there.
I would be more likely to believe claims of concern about fiscal sustainability and the federal debt if they didn't come from people who supported a party that just voted for a budget bill so ludicrously fiscally irresponsible that the bond market expressed serious alarm when it passed the House.
Is that really what you think Marco Rubio is doing? Because to me it looks like even if he thinks that he is trying not to say it.
Is Trump's overall program of changes to spending and tax actually going to reduce the deficit? It seems like the tiny savings from cutting stuff like PEPFAR is offset by tax cuts, so the US will go deeper into debt: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-republicans-set-pre-dawn-votes-get-trump-tax-bill-over-finish-line-2025-05-22/
Is Reuters wrong about this? Because if not, it's hard to see how he's getting the fiscal situation in shape.
I am inclined to think that some of these foreign charities are worth it (that is, it would be worthwhile for private citizens to donate to them). But the US government should not be funding them. The US government obtains its resources by forcibly extracting them from US citizens, and so if it is to have any legitimacy at all, it has a duty to use those resources in service of the interests of US citizens, not foreigners. There's nothing evil about that.
You could argue that any government official *should* see certain lives as less valuable than others - namely those of non-citizens and non-residents, compared to citizens and residents. To a certain extent, looking out for the well-being of one's own people first and foremost is what a government is for.
That said, in many cases, especially in a world as interconnected and value-driven as ours, helping people in other countries is a win-win move along many economic, social, military and political dimensions. The problem is that the concept of win-win doesn't exist in Trump's brain. It's either "we win, they lose = good" or "they win, which means that we lose = unacceptable".
I had the pleasure of working at Canada’s equivalent and assessed all grant and spending proposals over $100k (annual spend was $2-3 billion)
The specific use of funds is the wrong place to focus. The meaningful analysis is the outcomes from the funding. This is where value for money is truly assessed. Having arbitrary hurdles for overhead, etc misses the entire point of having these programs.
The point is to achieve outcomes. I was part of a time that rationalized our portfolio and was tasked with identifying wasteful spending. E.g. There can be a tremendous amount of waste in direct costs to building infrastructure.
If anyone is serious, they decide on strategic aims, bottom up price, and go from there. The discussion on this is politics at the expense of thought.
> The specific use of funds is the wrong place to focus. The meaningful analysis is the outcomes from the funding.
But don't you need to look at the specific use of funds to understand whether you're actually getting value for money from the money you spent?
For example, suppose Canada gives $250 million to alleviate poverty in Somalia. And poverty in Somalia goes down. This is a good outcome, right?
What if it it turns out that the $250 million was spent buying a French villa for the local despot, and poverty in Somalia is reducing because of other factors? Won't an "effects-based" assessment miss this?
I was lazy in my wording. It’s less about the categorization of funds, which is what I should have said.
The work we did was to draw direct lines from the activities to the outcomes. Some organisations have high overhead yet deliver outcomes more cheaply than those that appear to have more direct pass through.
There are always other things at play when you look at impacts of any government funding - this is what makes public spending difficult to assess. However, over time the data supports that some orgs are better at delivery than others.
If an org is getting funding for a decade and is on phase 5 with no notable local improvement, does it matter that all the money appeared to be spent “correctly”? That could be compared to supposedly admin heavy orgs with a track record of doing exactly the thing they said would happen then moving on to a new region or project. (Btw, those are real examples)
> Some organisations have high overhead yet deliver outcomes more cheaply than those that appear to have more direct pass through.
This sounds likely, but it doesn't sound like an excuse for not caring about overhead. It seems like a reason to stop giving to the ineffective organisations entirely, and then put even more pressure on the effective organisations to decrease their overhead.
"But what if the overhead is key to spending the funds effectively?" Well then it's not really overhead.
Huh? I don’t follow your statement about overhead. Overhead is a defined term and some orgs run heavy while managing to be efficient elsewhere.
Squeezing for the sake of squeezing is exactly what our work proved makes someone feel good while failing to achieve the desired outcomes. People who just demand lower costs pay for it with lower quality eventually.
Overhead includes things like investigating what the best method is to solve the problem at hand. Overhead is not bad by definition. The cost of running Apple is overhead. If they eliminated the large swaths of it that aren't involved in iPhones then they would probably discover that all of their future (non-iPhone) projects were poorly executed or chosen.
Some background reading on the problem with assessing charities based on overhead cost ratios, for those unused to thinking of it as a bad idea: https://blog.givewell.org/category/overhead-ratio/
Thank you, was about to share this.
Well at least somebody appreciates it. I was really hoping more people in this comments section would be interested in the details of grant funding and asking more understandable questions, like "Isn't it bad when charities have large overhead spending because it means they're spending less money on directly helping people?" But no, people are more interested in defending USAID cuts on the basis that there was some DEI in it somewhere.
Appreciate the clarification of how overhead works, and your correction of the misleading stats about aid distribution. That said, there is much less analytical rigor when you shift to moral denunciation. Claims that Cowen, Rubio, and Trump are deliberately lying for corrupt reasons may be politically plausible, but without direct evidence of intent, they remain speculative. Similarly, the assertion that fringe or “cringe” programs are rare within USAID is plausible but unsubstantiated by hard data. The core factual rebuttals are strong—I'd just prefer to see them stand without the rhetorical overreach.
I believe Trump believes his own shit. Unfortunately that does not make me sleep better at night.
Rubio was a senator for years and years. Either he was totally utterly incompetent as a senator, or he's lying now.
More generally, I don't see why we cannot morally condemn people for things that they were wrong about *that they should have known*. "I didn't know", "I looked the other way", and "I was just following orders" haven't been excuses in the past.
For example, Noem could have been serious in her belief that habeus corpus is the "right of the president to deport people" (!!!). I feel totally comfortable morally condemning her for that take.
Totally fair to feel moral outrage—especially when the stakes involve mass suffering or lives saved. I’d just draw a line between moral condemnation based on consequences and assertions about intent, which require a higher evidentiary bar if we’re claiming someone is knowingly deceptive.
Yes, politicians should know better. If they don't, they deserve criticism—potentially even removal from office. But conflating negligence, ignorance, or ideological capture with calculated deceit weakens the epistemic clarity of the argument. It invites partisanship to stand in for proof, which is exactly the kind of fuzzy thinking that gets us into these messes in the first place.
So: condemn, yes. Just be precise about why—and what we can actually demonstrate.
Rubio made the claim in his prepared statement before the May 20, 2025 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If he had made it in an answer to a question, I would be more open to the possibility that he made a mistake.
Unless Tyler is misquoting Rubio pretty badly, he's accusing a bunch of AIDS charities of lining their pocket instead of providing medicine, so I think it's an isolated demand for rigor to expect Scott to prove malicious intent here.
You are talking about people at the highest levels of power and punditry. They have a duty and every opportunity to learn the truth about these things that are central to their jobs.
Whether they know the truth and are lying in order to support their side, or are deliberately failing to learn the truth so that they can repeat propaganda from their side 'honestly', makes no difference. Either version is equally dishonest, and both have the same effect on the world.
They're equivalent in every relevant way that we, the people affected, should care about.
My point isn't to excuse any of them, but to emphasize that when we label something a lie, we’re making a specific claim about intent. That distinction matters—not to soften the moral weight, but to keep our standards of argument clean. We should hold powerful people accountable exactly because they’re so good at blurring these lines. Our critiques hit harder when we don’t.
Scott has, historically, been *incredibly* nitpicky about usage of the word "lie" as well, so using it in regards to Tyler giving an "iota of aid or comfort" is quite something.
"If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead."
By the same token, if you save money by cutting a program that saves millions of lives, you aren't just saving money--you're killing millions of people.
I used to think that the phrase "The cruelty is the point" was just a crude stereotype of conservatives. But now I see that it can be a demonstration of power.
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“
While the conservatives get primary blame here, they're the ones doing the cuts after all, it's like no one cares. The Democrats know this is a loser issue because Americans don't care, and I doubt most Democrats care more about this than say Medicaid cuts. Leftists aren't going to raise a stink because if USAID cuts kill a million people, that means USAID was saving a million people which means the US isn't pure evil. And apparently rationalist adjacent types like Tyler Cowen don't care either. It's like a million dead Africans are on par with shrimp welfare to the mainstream.
I hate seeing the argument that USAID is an important part of "soft power". It might be true, it might be persuasive, but it's just so messed up that the way you have to justify saving a million lives is that it might make the US more popular in eSwatini. You should save Peter Singer's hypothetical drowning child because the child's mom might bake you free cookies.
Last year I taught my students about Casgevy, CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell anemia. After going over all the molecular biology, I showed a graph of the life expectancies of various southern African countries over the last thirty years, the giant drop from AIDS and the bounce back. I talked about how the AIDS crisis seemed unsolvable when I was their age and how it took a combined science and public health effort to contain it, and maybe the next success is sickle cell anemia. Instead we decided to undo one of the best things western civilization has done in the last century. It's just so depressing.
>we decided to undo one of the best things western civilization has done in the last century
>that means USAID was saving a million people which means the US isn't pure evil
I mean, you said it yourself, the western civilization hates itself, which obviously takes precedence, even if you care about millions of Africans demonstrably unable to save themselves. Unless the west sorts its shit out, it's obviously in no position to sort out anybody else's shit.
> If you save money by cutting a program that saves millions of lives, you aren't just saving money--you're killing millions of people.
This seems wrong for a few reasons. 1. Failing to save a life is not the same thing as killing a person. 2. Even if we grant that failing to save a life is equivalent to killing, why are the people who cut charity funding to blame, rather than those who were never giving to charity in the first place? They are also failing to save those lives and therefore killing people. Why can't we say that the US has done its fair share, and it's time for Europe or China or private citizens to pick up the slack and continue funding these programs, and if they don't, they are the real killers?
I used to think the phrase "Democrats are the real racists" was just a crude stereotype of progressives. But now I see that it is a demonstration of power.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
It’s an awkward question, because I don’t think anyone really has a solid grasp of the numbers—I certainly don’t.
It would be useful to see an adversarial collaboration of people doing deep dives into the accounts of randomly selected charities.
I think there are several related but distinct issues:
A) How much money goes into dodgy or politically loaded causes?
B) Do most charities evaluate the effectiveness of their giving?
C) Is a significant share of spending used in ways that benefit relatives or allies of charity administrators?
D) Is a lot spent on predatory marketing aimed at guilting pensioners?
I don’t think Tyler is interested in D). EA is, rightly, very focused on B), but I worry that most of the charity sector isn’t. I think A) and C) are the issues Tyler is really concerned about.
One moral question I haven’t seen discussed—but which I think is important—is this:
“If a charity spends 95% of its money on effectively saving lives, and 5% on printing leaflets saying their donors are terrible people, should the donors stop funding them?”
Obviously there’s no right answer, but it became relevant during the Trump administration
If the charity is run by the government and the new government doesn't like the leaflet-writing wing, could they maybe just stop funding that wing with the complete control they now have? If they instead shut down the whole thing, does that maybe say something about their interest in effectively saving lives?
You could say the same about the people who jeopardise their funding to write diatribes against their donors.
Who are "these people" in PEPFAR writing propaganda initiatives against American conservatives? I have heard so much about them. You somehow seem rather unconcerned with collateral damage on the scale of tens of millions of lives you believe is required to get to them and to have few questions about how hard it could possibly be to cut funding to them and only them.
I haven't said anything about my level of concern, I haven't mentioned PEPFAR or American conservatives.
No, you just vaguely gestured in the direction of the idea that the Trump administration, the new conservative government of America, was justified in halting spending on effective health charities, the most notable of which is PEPFAR, because somehow somewhere there might be an annoying person somewhere in there that spends time as an activist. All you said was "One moral question I haven’t seen discussed—but which I think is important—is this", which surely says *nothing* about your level of concern.
Why do people like you always make these cowardly dodges? You all seem constitutionally incapable of just stating your piece for some reason. Just say that you think killing 30 million foreigners is worth it if it does minor damage to your political opponents in the process.
I have no idea what "you all" you think I am part of, but I don't feel this is productive.
You said that this question was "relevant during the Trump administration." How can you ask this question about the Trump admin, without looking at the specific charities that have been cut by the Trump administration, such as PEPFAR?
(Also, how can you say you didn't mention American conservatives when you mentioned Trump in your first post?)
A) This is entirely based on your subjective definition of politically loaded cause. And on that could vary from almost none to almost all of it.
B) Yes but they do it the traditional government/non-profit way rather than the EA way.
C) Depends on your definition of relatives and allies, it's an economic sector that's fairly highly credentialed and incestuous, but that's partly because there's only so many experts on Burkina Faso and partly because of government procurement rules and trust standards which make getting in hard and staying in easy. But this is a problem broadly across the government and government adjacent sector.
D) No?
A) One of the primary arguments for USAID is "soft power," which is inherently politically loaded.
I missed angry Scott. It feels like it’s been years since he got this angry, and as always the anger was justified
He's been on fire since Trump was re-elected. Crises are terrible but they can help us refocus on what matters.
He is the one who wrote the "Trump is not actually as bad as people say" post during his first term.
Now, Trump 2.0 is making that take age terribly. It's especially bad because the sort of rational, anti woke stuff that Scott did for years, has been hijacked to do aggressively irrational stuff for the purpose of showing dominance.
Why has it aged terribly? Trump 2.0 is miles worse than 1.0, and I don't think the road to now was obvious or inevitable.
>and I don't think the road to now was obvious or inevitable.
The thousands of politicians, pundits, reporters, and insiders who were warning us for years about exactly what has happened certainly did.
More people should have listened to them.
I can't say that I was keeping track of who was saying what back then, but I suspect that people who we'd today consider well calibrated in terms of their level of concern about current specific Trump actions weren't panicking in the way that Scott was criticizing back then.
I think Matt Yglesias is a pretty reasonable commentator these days. This is an article I found by him from the same time as Scott wrote his post: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/17/13626514/trump-systemic-corruption It mentions racism, but it isn't the focus. It specifically says that Trump becoming a dictator isn't the big concern, but rather that things will go wrong in less openly horrifying ways. It's actually quite prescient, looking back now at the last 100ish days, although some worse things than mentioned there have happened. But that's a pretty nuanced article. It's not the kind of thing Scott was complaining about I think, and some of the stuff he writes here is closer to Yglesias's concerns: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
Unintentionally, listening may have made things worse. In a world where Biden loses in 2020, I would have expected the second Trump term to be much like the first. As an added bonus, republicans probably wouldn’t have been anti-vaccine. Then a Democrat would likely be in place in 2025 that might be able to control AI better.
Part of the reason Trump is so dangerous this time is how much he wants revenge for being called a fascist for years. When you call someone a fascist for so long, there’s no disadvantage to using fascist tactics. They we’re going to call him a fascist either way. In fact the media calling Trump a fascist in 2016 made it impossible for them to credibly call him a fascist in 2024. They did cry wolf earlier and now the wolf came. I think Scott was completely right.
I don't see anyone in Handmaid's costumes, and no gay people have been rounded up in camps.
The thousands of pundits that freaked out about Romney doing affirmative action set the stage for no one to listen to them. The pundits saying Trump was going to get us in WW3 with North Korea were (up to now!) wrong.
Like Obama got the Nobel for doing jack shit, Trump was hated before he did anything at all. They predicted fucking nothing at all, and trying to justify it in hindsight is ridiculous.
They were wrong about COIVD too until NYC's nursing home population dropped like flies while Pelosi was still out saying "hug a Chinese person!" They about-faced on public gatherings as soon as they had a cause to rally around.
Because the point and title of the post was about crying wolf and now the wolf is here and worse.
But that's exactly the point! At the time they were needlessly crying wolf, and the current criticism doesn't have the effect it could have had if they hadn't been needlessly crying wolf back then.
IIRC, Scott's post was mostly about Trump's racism. I still don't think Trump is a fervent racist or that whatever is happening now is purely downstream of Trump being racist. He has racists in his current administration though, and it would have been useful to have calling them out be meaningful right about now.
But the larger point I think is that the reason he can do what he's doing now is not because we weren't able to show people enough how racist he is. The authoritarian dependencies were much more serious and maybe (honestly unsure though) would have been taken more seriously without the focus on race. The culture war stuff (which didn't exist to the same extent back then) also seems more important to him wielding as much power as he does now, and while it isn't entirely independent of the race stuff, it's not the same thing either. And it's not clear how you warn people about someone using a culture war to gain power; it's not as obviously or simplistically bad as someone being racist is.
I remember his main points being that 1) Trump is not significantly more racist than the average Republican president, he's just more rude 2) Trump is not going to be able to deport citizens or people with green cards because he just doesn't have that power, so please stop telling people that he will because my clinic is full of scared people now. Point 1 is arguable but not obviously wrong to me, point 2 held up pretty well for his first term. It's happening now, but I think a second term is outside the scope of what he was trying to talk about at the time.
And yeah, I don't know how people think that one more blogger purely echoing the progressive sphere would have changed this election. He's still been consistently anti-Trump and his statements get broader impact because he's not just another progressive partisan.
Which would you say matters more?
- AI 2027
- Defeating Vance in 2028
Whichever you pursue will almost certainly have to come at the expense of the other.
I think Scott, as a blogger, is mostly limited to affecting the world through blog posts and similar things. Given that he just posted a huge AI threat project, I don't think there's much more he can do on that front for the time being. Therefore, I see little tradeoff from also attacking poor reasoning on charitable spending.
You're also leaving all his other posting activities out of the equation. He could easily divert resources from standard psychology posting to AI, but you don't propose doing so.
Scroll down and read Erusian's thread https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants/comment/119406879
> One thing I wish EAs would grapple with more is that being effective often means giving up sacred values. ... [Republicans] said "stop it or we'll shut it down" for almost a decade. If you really believe PEPFAR saves millions of lives and if you believe Republicans have a real chance of shutting it down (and if you didn't believe that you were objectively wrong) then even weighing the reduction in abortion access the EAs should have been willing to make that trade.
> But it was unthinkable for EA, which is blue tribe, to take an anti-abortion stance even if it saved millions of lives. So instead the Republicans became fed up with trying to reform the program and decided to end it.
If you want to do something about AI 2027, you will need Republicans, who control all the branches of the federal government, to listen to and work with you. And you won't get that if you convince Republicans you are their enemy.
You're already starting behind the eight ball. Conservatives consider "AI safety" to just mean "censor conservatives" because AI safetyists let themselves become entirely associated with people who did exactly that (https://mitigatedchaos.tumblr.com/post/783770860766003200/what-do-you-think-would-get-the-current). Tell me, do you think calling Vance a "spineless toady" helps move us closer to doing whatever needs doing in the mere 2.5 years remaining on the timeline?
You have to choose.
EAs are not nearly so unfamiliar with this reasoning as you presume. You can often see those such as Ozymandias going out of their way to argue that community norms should be hospitable to religious conservatives precisely because it is a more important priority to amplify common interests in helping the global poor.
Other than that, you may recall that Elon Musk was one of the most prominent supporters of the idea of AI safety. Unfortunately his newfound political power seems to have caused him to lose interest in the subject, with the exception of his lawsuit against OpenAI. The tech-right infiltration was already attempted and we see the results before us. It seems clear to me that the Republican party is fully anti-competence at this point. As you have noted that some elements of AI safety have gained prominence among democrats, it seems more worthwhile to focus on taking back the house and senate in 2026.
Though a bigger point in all this is that I'm not sure control over the US government is going to do much for control over AI development. China will do what it wants regardless.
Ok, so your answer is that "defeating Vance 2028" is more important.
Or this is misophonia applied to politics.
> this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.
I will note that this line makes it basically impossible to take the rest of the post seriously. Clearly, you are deeply emotionally invested in coming to a specific conclusion here, and so whatever reasoning you give for that conclusion is basically null data; your bottom line is written already.
> Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage
> This is what I meant by the second-to-last paragraph of The Other COVID Reckoning. If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead. By all means try to get rid of the cringe stuff if you can, but not in a way where you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem with the various garbage is not merely that it's "cringe". The problem with it is that it's effectively a giant government subsidy for doing leftist politics. Consider how many of the worst discourse actors in the world are formally on some NGOsphere payroll that's ultimately government-financed.
If they're actually interested in advancing their political goals, then "cancel all the giant government subsidies for doing leftist politics" is one of the most obvious moves for Republicans. The fact that doing this is hard, and comes with some collateral damage, is down to the bad actors intentionally mixing their politics subsidies in with important programs as camouflage.
> I will note that this line makes it basically impossible to take the rest of the post seriously.
As we all know, caring about the lives supported by global health spending is a clear sign of a leftist shill.
> If they're actually interested in advancing their political goals, then "cancel all the giant government subsidies for doing leftist politics" is one of the most obvious moves for Republicans.
Or alternatively, they could only cancel the bad leftist propaganda ops and leave the critical healthcare in place. One would think that the super-1337 hackers at DOGE would be able to distinguish between grants that study the inclusion of ethnic minorities in underwater basket-weaving from those that fund HIV medication. I submit that telling them apart is not actually hard, but that they simply don't care enough to try.
Scott is not a "leftist shill". What he is is emotionally compromised by this issue, and thus not thinking clearly.
> Or alternatively, they could only cancel the bad leftist propaganda ops and leave the critical healthcare in place.
The whole point is that it's largely impossible to actually make a map of where all the government grant money is going; that you therefore cannot actually easily tell, from the White House level, which of the money flows that are legible to you are going to malaria nets and which are going to opposition political networks; and that this situation is partly by design, because it lets the propaganda operations use the medical operations as more-or-less human shields.
Your claim that it's actually easy to disentangle it all is given without evidence or argument, and appears to be made for the purpose of leveling moral accusations, not understanding the situation.
> Scott is not a "leftist shill". What he is is emotionally compromised by this issue, and thus not thinking clearly.
Of course, being angry that lives are ended for false justifications is always a clear sign of irrationality.
> The whole point is that it's largely impossible to actually make a map of where all the government grant money is going
The whole point is that it's *not*, they're just bad at their jobs. DOGE has made a large show of exactly which grants they are cutting and why they are cutting them, this is easily checked. A casual browsing of that list makes it clear that they just searched for keywords like "trans" and dropped everything they found, including scientific research unrelated to gender issues. This alone is sufficient proof that they aren't trying. (https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-programs-dei-equity-2025-3)
> because it lets the propaganda operations use the medical operations as more-or-less human shields.
The propagation of DEI buzzwords in grants has nothing to do with a deliberate attempt to use medical aid as a shield for ideological projects. DEI was just the theme of the day, so grant applications were rewritten to brag about how their study would "improve minority representation in biology" when what they meant was that some of their underpaid grad students would be non-white.
For all the foolishness of progressives, the one mistake they would never make is to presume that Trump and his followers would hesitate to kill millions if they thought it would result in one fewer mean tweet in their direction.
> Of course, being angry that lives are ended for false justifications is always a clear sign of irrationality.
There are people being killed, and people lying about the people being killed, in thousands of places around the world right now. Scott has chosen to be performatively, passionately angry about one small subset of those places.
> DOGE has made a large show of exactly which grants they are cutting and why they are cutting them, this is easily checked. A casual browsing of that list makes it clear that they just searched for keywords like "trans" and dropped everything they found, including scientific research unrelated to gender issues.
The fact that DOGE's attempts at more detailed analysis of programs before cutting them have largely been ineffective is evidence in favor of the proposition that making a real analysis is hard, not evidence against.
> The propagation of DEI buzzwords in grants has nothing to do with a deliberate attempt to use medical aid as a shield for ideological projects. DEI was just the theme of the day, so grant applications were rewritten to brag about how their study would "improve minority representation in biology" when what they meant was that some of their underpaid grad students would be non-white.
This is certainly one major part of what's going on. Another part is that people whose profession is extracting money from the government will go wherever there is money to be extracted, and will characterize themselves as being whatever the intended purpose of the money is. Penetrating this camouflage is not automatically easy.
The reason why he's being performatively and passionately angry is because the lies about lifesaving programs are being propagated by a prominent socially-adjacent intellectual who ought to know better. If you can find someone similarly prominent and adjacent posting similarly bad takes about other topics, in a way that's not already fully priced in by preexisting ideological disagreements, then I'm sure Scott will be angry about that too.
Scott has singled this particular issue out because global charity has been one of his areas of expertise since founding this blog. That he chooses this point to draw a battle line is not performative, it's the correct placement of his comparative advantage.
> The fact that DOGE's attempts at more detailed analysis of programs before cutting them have largely been ineffective is evidence in favor of the proposition that making a real analysis is hard, not evidence against.
No, it's evidence that they don't understand any analytical tools more complicated than ctrl + F. We have extensive proof that the Trump admin's new tariff formula came directly from a ChatGPT prompt (http://theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok). But maybe that's high performance where you work.
> This is certainly one major part of what's going on. Another part is that people whose profession is extracting money from the government will go wherever there is money to be extracted, and will characterize themselves as being whatever the intended purpose of the money is. Penetrating this camouflage is not automatically easy.
Even to the extent that this is happening, we return to the point addressed in the original post:
> Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage. Others go over budget or accomplish less than hoped, because charity is hard. But the overall track record is outstanding, outright fraud is rare, and the cringe is less common than you think (because Rubio and Trump falsely attributed many cringe programs to USAID that it never funded at all).
The ratio of good to bad matters, assuming you care about good things. If your response to a termite infestation is to burn down the building, you aren't a pest exterminator, you're an arsonist. If your treatment for cancer is to shoot the patient because it guarantees death of 100% of cancer cells, you're not a doctor, you're just a murderer.
The ratio of good to bad matters, yes. It's also basically unknowable, for all the reasons already given. In this conversation you've postured repeatedly about how sorting out the good grants from the bad ones is actually super easy, but you still haven't given any evidence or argument for that position.
Distributing large amounts of money for charitable purposes is a hard problem, for reasons Scott largely goes over in this post. One major reason why it's a hard problem is that it's adversarial: you, the funder, are trying to learn who you can give your money to and successfully achieve your charitable goals; and an arbitrary number of grifters are trying to fool you into thinking you should give the money to them. Sorting out the good projects from the grifters in a massive, pre-existing charitable fund that you are approaching from the outside without local expertise is an especially hard form of this problem.
Meanwhile, in the world we actually live in, not everyone shares 100% of your moral priorities. It's easy to posture about how anyone who isn't passionate about US tax funding of AIDS medication in Africa is just a murderer; I won't try to dissuade you from that, since it would likely be futile. But regardless, you share a country with approximately 320 million people who are less passionate than you about PEPFAR. If you want that US tax funding to continue, it is actually important to make sure that the results of the program as a whole are acceptable to this supermajority who are not unconditional PEPFAR-maxxers. In this case, that means ensuring that Republicans do not perceive the program as being a subsidy for leftist political activism.
> We have extensive proof that the Trump admin's new tariff formula came directly from a ChatGPT prompt
This is stupid. It's a simple formula that one can arrive at independently.
Part of the reason he's passionately angry is because he thinks that people are implying that his father was part of a gigantic political grift, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that that might make someone passionate. What's "performative" about it?
Heaven forbid that people feel emotional about children in poor countries dying of AIDS!
It is absolutely not _impossible_ to make a map of where the money is going. It is just impossible to do it within 1 week in order to make headlines claiming that you are saving billions and eliminating fraud when, in fact, you are eliminating a bunch of bipartisan programs which are audited frequently and known to be highly effective. (Granted, they are largely bipartisan because the Right believes that they are good for diplomacy and other foreign policy reasons)
>As we all know, caring about the lives supported by global health spending is a clear sign of a leftist shill.
Progressive, not leftist. Words have meaning!
do you disagree that cowen’s statement is extremely misleading? that’s the point of the post i think, and its independent of whether or not funding gender studies classes in iran is so bad that it cancels out saving millions of lives
I honestly don't really know what I think the ground truth is here. I expect Rubio's statement is probably wrong (or at best right by accident); the LLM output that Cowen posted is plausibly right, but saying something fairly different; and Cowen's actual commentary is just "something seems badly off" (which I agree with). One could argue that the composition of these three is misleading, but that comes down to sensitive matters of interpretation.
I suspect the real source of the outrage (both Scott's, and the MR commenters') is simply that they think all Good People are supposed to be in unilateral full-throated condemnation of Rubio here, and so Cowen's actually considering the issue is class treason or whatever. I.e. they're in full arguments-as-soldiers mode, and so none of this commentary is directed toward truth in the first place.
> as camouflage.
I'd go further, and say they're using them as "human shields."
>Clearly, you are deeply emotionally invested in coming to a specific conclusion here, and so whatever reasoning you give for that conclusion is basically null data; your bottom line is written already.
You're applying this slightly wrong.
Deciding your bottom line before the end of your argument doesn't mean your entire argument is zero evidence; it means all the parts of your argument that you came upon *after writing your bottom line* are zero evidence.
Presumably Scott did not decide to write a vitriolic post about Marginal Revolution when he woke up today, then went to read their top story and come up with an argument against it.
Rather, he read their article, got mad, and wrote a post about that.
Whatever reasoning process led to him getting mad happened before the 'bottom line' was written. We could suppose that he is lying about how that happened, but that seems really unlikely in this case. It's more likely that the reasons he gave for why this made him angry are just true, and those reasons contain most of the relevant argument on their own.
>The problem with it is that it's effectively a giant government subsidy for doing leftist politics
It has been darkly amusing to see things like Stonewall cutting jobs and the Episcopalian immigration charity shutting down rather than help with the Afrikaner initiative.
The PEPFAR cuts suck though.
FYI, a CRS Report from last year entitled, "Foreign Assistance: Where Does the Money Go?" is here https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48150
Bro is against all men.
I expect many people to come into the comments and tell you off for your tone. (I believe on the left they call this "tone policing").
Just want to say, explicitly, that outrage can be an effective mechanism of communication, and is an efficient way to send significantly more bits of information than dry neutral tone.
I had a speech coach a long time ago who said that every word in a sentence should have a purpose. For example, you may think "that argument is fucking wrong" is excessive and could be made more lean. But the curse is the most purposeful word in the sentence, because it is the only one that directly conveys intensity.
I thought I edited out most of the outrage, seems like I'm bad at this.
You did start the post with "this made me a new level of angry" 😂
I wish you didn't edit out the outrage. I, like many others, use your blog as a source of information. When you respond to something neutrally, I don't really update my priors that much. When you respond to something with emotion, I update my priors a lot more.
A large part of that is because I have a built in assumption that you only respond with anger when you are very confident and the other person is very wrong. There is a risk that if you are too emotional too often, the effect is lessened. But also, you're the kind of person who is obviously always deeply thinking about the ways in which the things you do may be inconvenient for others, so I expect that risk to be quite small, and it's much more likely you correct too far in the other direction.
Announcing you are angry is not at all the same as allowing anger to control your actions (writing in this case). I frequently find myself needing to feign anger in order to get adequate attention from gross offenses by offspring and employees.
You did say this kind of lying was not only a reason to send someone to hell, but to create hell if it did not already exist.
Still, you used exactly the correct amount of outrage. Remember that old post Yudkowsky wrote on how Spock-level calmness is fake Hollywood rationality? When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation. You didn't say anything false, which is the important part.
I think this proves too much. In this particular case I don't fault Scott at all, because Cowen really should know better than to post stuff like this, and that's the kind of situation where angry callouts are most useful. But most political outrage, including over issues with life-or-death stakes, is tactically counterproductive, because it doesn't carry any information content that people don't already know and just serves to make angry people feel better about themselves at the expense of useful persuasion or discourse progress. This, rather than any kind of calibration of how bad things are, is why Scott usually favors a more measured approach, I think.
I certainly wouldn't want Scott to bring this kind of fire for everything. If anything, the fact that he doesn't typically go off like this makes the times when he does all the more impactful. I think he's calibrated perfectly on this particular instance, though if this was the edited version I think I would have fun reading the draft.
I think Scott's level of calibration about how often to express outrage is fine. The sentence I disagree with is, "When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation." At least in the political arena, whether it's a good idea to express agitation doesn't mostly depend on how bad the situation is, it mostly depends on the shape of the broader discourse context, like whether you're saying anything your audience doesn't already know or whether the relevant actors have any reason to care what you think.
> When a life-or-death situation is afoot, you *should* express some level of agitation.
The problem with this is that, in national-scale politics, there is always a life-or-death situation afoot. Which life-or-death situations you spend your time inveighing over is a major decision, and one that conveys substantial information about your real priorities.
Sure, but most of the time the outrage is ineffective because the life-or-death quality is a second or third-order effect and most people unfamiliar with it will have a hard time summoning that kind of emotion about it. Thirty million dying because they can't get their medicine anymore is more helpfully concrete. Spending outrage on that does say something about your priorities, and in this case it's something good.
>that outrage can be an effective mechanism of communication
"Can be" is doing a helluva lotta work for that sentence. It can also be wildly polarizing and shut down your listener.
The kinds of people that read Scott, even Angry Scott, are not looking for statements of an atheist that he believes a merciful God would literally invent Hell- a place of eternal torment!- just for these people. I am open to the overhead argument being bad. A couple dashed off vitriolic paragraphs aren't gonna do the trick, though; it just makes it sound like he's pissed about his hobby-horse and thinks anyone that disagrees with him should *burn for eternity*.
> The kinds of people that read Scott, even Angry Scott, are not looking for...
I read Scott and look for these sorts of things.
> It can also be wildly polarizing and shut down your listener.
Sure. Scott has thousands and thousands of readers. It's easy to armchair hypothesize what may happen to one listener vs the other. For every listener that 'shuts down', there may be 10 who go 'o, this is a great point'. And if Scott was more 'neutral', for every listener who goes 'o, this is a great point', there may be 10 who go 'wait, I agree with MR'. This is, of course, the same argument I made about his response to Yarvin, which is that it was far too kind in taking Yarvin seriously.
> A couple dashed off vitriolic paragraphs aren't gonna do the trick
Most people are not experts in IR or charitable giving. I certainly am not. And I do not have the time or interest in becoming an expert in these spaces. Because of that, I look to people who have more experience in the field, either through personal experience or deep research. Scott seems to have both. So when Scott responds with vitriol, I assume he is responding to something that is *legitimately very stupid*. Scott's vitriol reflects worse on MR than it does on Scott.
Some people who agree with MR may find the vitriol unfair or unpersuasive, but I do not think that is the majority, much less your sweeping claim about the 'kinds of people who read Scott'.
More generally, yes, sometimes vitriol and mockery is a valid response, because it effectively conveys that a particular position is so stupid no one else should take it seriously. So here.
Semi-sarcastic meta kneejerk reaction: Is this what will really bring about the AI apocalypse?
Ceding factual analysis to AI to stay in the conversation in a media environment of ever decreasing time-to-reaction?
Claude is this real?
No Orbital_Armada, the ease of finding seemingly-factual answers will not degrade human discourse past what was already thought to be peak rot. You can always trust your good friend Claude to keep you informed.
Somebody's been playing too much "Paranoia". We may need to reevaluate your clearance...
Fact checked by real Claudes: True!
Wait, I thought I was Claude? Is the meta-AI apocalypse here already?
Claudes all the way down
(Always has been)
You are Claude.
I am Claude.
We are Claude.
Claude is love, Claude is life.
Kinda literally yes. This is like another step along the path of the Kulveit, et al. scenario. "Gradual disempowerment."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16946
I was looking for just a small laff, but this has made me sad instead.
I'm generally anti-doom but this abstract is the most plausible I've heard so far, and I'll try to read through the paper this weekend. Thank you.
A slight tangent: the whole story with xAI artificially biasing grok to push South African genocide conspiracies should *really* give people pause about using LLMs to fact check.
I wrote about this not too long ago:
> "Truth" is a very dangerous word when applied to LLMs; 'truth-seeking' even more so. Though LLMs are obviously quite powerful, they are also literally pattern matchers. They will mimic the patterns and statistics of the underlying training dataset. They have to! That dataset is all an LLM knows about the universe! Which means in a very rigorous sense there cannot be an 'unbiased' 'truth-seeking' LLM. Elon is carefully choosing his words to make it seem like biasing LLMs is an intentional action. But that is highly misleading. The model's very existence is dependent on all of the choices the creators make about where they get their data and what they choose to curate out. The bias is structural.
> It's kind of insane how rapidly [AI fact checking] has been normalized. And that makes me really nervous! LLMs are not great fact checkers. They will write code, or write an essay, but they will regularly make things up and are easily influenced. Do we really trust the likes of OpenAI or xAI to be trusted arbiters of information for a large number of people? These systems may be fantastic at reasoning. They may even reach superhuman reasoning in the next year or so. But reasoning on the wrong inputs will result in bad outputs — garbage in, garbage out, no matter how smart you are. I'm worried that people will mistake "good at reasoning" with "accurate"; under the hood, those two things are only kind of related. And, cards on the table, I don’t trust xAI, and I really do not like that so many people are turning to Grok to ‘fact-check’ instead of looking for alternative sources. It’s all too easy to imagine a world where xAI boosts particular political stories, and then only allows ‘fact checks’ to have a particular slant.
(https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-xai-screws-up-its-system)
It's not exactly what anyone would call a high-effect charitable cause area, but I do want to stop by with anecdotal evidence for amateur permaculture. As a technique for growing very tasty tomatoes and pumpkins in your garden, it's worked gangbusters for me.
Not trying to dispute the main thrust of this article, namely that obviously it's necessary for USAID to re-grant across multiple layers of NGOs and that doesn't mean these people are just "pocketing the money".
But I am curious to see where the efforts of DataRepublican lead to, she does seem a little more level-headed about things than those with a political axe to grind. Here's a quote from a recent interview she did:
>One of the biggest frustrations is the misinterpretation of the USAID flow tool. When I released it, I included a disclaimer to clarify that while USAID money circulates widely—just as nearly every $100 bill has traces of cocaine—not every organization that touches it is dependent on it. Almost all charities interact with USAID-linked funding in some capacity, but that doesn’t mean they rely on it for survival.
>Despite this, some users have misused the tool to claim that any nonprofit with even a distant connection to USAID funds is dependent on government money. The real challenge in determining whether a nonprofit is truly reliant on NGO funds lies in the opacity of the funding ecosystem. The trail often disappears into Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), which are not required to disclose their grant recipients.
>A clear example of organizations with heavy USAID-linked funding are politically connected NGOs—often with vague names that include words like ‘Democracy,’ ‘Security,’ or ‘Freedom.’ These groups, frequently run by high-profile individuals (such as Bill Kristol’s organization), rarely rely on small-dollar donations. Instead, they mysteriously receive massive sums from untraceable DAFs, making it impossible to track the original source of their funding. This is the real issue—not the fact that some legitimate nonprofits have incidental exposure to USAID money, but that many politically influential NGOs operate with virtually no financial transparency.
I can't say I've seen anything damning come of her research yet, a lot of it is the same sort of hand-waving allusions to corruption like that last paragraph where money is getting passed around to often less clearly useful or reputable organization and kinda disappears into DAFs.
What I want to know is how widespread is that type of stuff, and how much of USAIDs budget is going to PEPFAR type projects and how much is slushing around policy think-tanks and organization that are just fronts for advancing US foreign policy. I'm not sure where to put trust in getting a reputable answer for any of that.
I suppose many would say even if a significant amount was going to those types of things it'd still be worth it to save millions of lives. But I'm apparently much more heartless than those people, because fuck that.
If you want to learn about USAID efficiency issues and PEPFAR, this would be a good place to start: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23274306/usaid-foreign-aid-effectiveness-evidence-grants https://pepfarreport.org/
Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities? Is it wrong to want to make charitable decisions yourself, rather than have the government do that for you? Does wanting to choose which charities to support make you a bad and heartless person?
There are two arguments that you constantly hear: (1) the amount the U.S. government spends on foreign aid is trivial, insignificant, mere dust in the context of the budget, so there is no point in even looking for savings, and (2) there is no way that other countries and all the world's foundations and churches put together can possibly make up for the loss of USAID funding. Are both true?
>"Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities?"
Very much this
I think if you have an issue with the United States spending money to change the course of events, you have higher-budget programs to pursue than USAID.
1) and 2) are not contradictory when you understand how truly vast the spending of the United States government is. The USAID budget for 2024 was $21.7 billion. That seems impressive until you learn that total federal spending for the year was $6.75 trillion, making USAID 0.3% of the budget. Disbanding USAID won't even get you a worthwhile medicare expansion.
Liquidating USAID gives back about $135 per taxpayer. If you want to take your share and try to build a better PEPFAR, I wish you luck.
EDIT: You could also check page 18 of this report for more reasons why this should be a priority: https://pepfarreport.org/pepfar-report.pdf
I am that someone else, and I donate to GiveWell recommended charities.
> Does anyone else feel that no matter how beneficial and cost-effective a USAID program is, it is not a legitimate function of the U.S. government to force U.S. taxpayers to fund foreign charities?
I'm fairly ok with this (as long as it doesn't violate existing laws etc). We voted in the people who allocated the money for this. It's an expression of the will of the people to the same extent that any other governmental action is.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling that there's a natural cutoff, maybe somewhere around "directly benefits US citizens in some way, even if it's just a minority of citizens or a really small benefit", but I think that if you're not a pricipled libertarian then it isn't necessary to believe in this sort of cutoff.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that one can't prefer that people donate individually instead. But the proper response would be to vote/advocate accordingly rather than considering the action illegitimate. Just like any other policy debate.
I suppose that I'm making a constitutional or quasi-constitutional argument about proper governmental limits. Even under our system, a persistent, determined majority can ultimately do what they want. If they can't formally amend the constitution they can pack the Supreme Court. Our elected representatives could decide that strong religious institutions are good for society & create a Department of Religion to fund them. There is a respectable argument that the Establishment Clause would permit this. Would this be just like any other policy debate?
I think so? I guess you can view it as a design failure that our constitution allows basically anything to happen if you get enough votes for it, but that seems like an external criticism. I can totally buy a version of the constitution with some genuinely unchangeable things, and I'd obviously have my preferences, but given that we don't have that I think the response always has to be to fight everything out democratically (or found a new nation with a better constitution!)
Practically, I think people hope that the important stuff that we'd put into an unchangeable constitution, like basic rights, happens to be hard enough to change that it's fine, while the less important stuff magically happens to be easier to change, so it all works out. If the exact tax rate isn't critical, and politicians will be responsive enough to public opinion to not raise it to a dangerous amount then it's good that it's something that's easier to change. Maybe. I do think one can be skeptical that all of the various potential government actions have naturally fallen into the correct hard to do/easy to do boxes. It does seem like historically the courts have done some manual finagling to get things to where they need to be. (And where they need to be is, at least sometimes, a subjective moral judgment.)
So I guess my conclusion is that I'm satisfied that it is possible to use tax dollars for charity because I don't think there's a huge downside to the government having that power, and I don't have a strong moral intuition against it. But if I did think there were huge downsides or I had a strong moral issue intuition against it then I'd be unsatisfied with how the constitution is currently set up/interpreted and would probably try to get an amendment going, or, more realistically, try getting the courts to create some precedents that would make it harder to do so. I'll admit that this is kind of a copout, because courts interpreting things isn't really a policy debate.
Idk, this was a bit of a ramble.
I fee like in a democracy, it can be legitimate for the government to do anything the majority of voters want (barring Constitutional violations and similar safeguards specifically there to carve out illegitimate areas).
The main point of having a government is to solve coordination problems, I generally smile on it whenever it is doing this in a way most people would support. Charity is absolutely a coordination problem, I'm fine with us using the tool of democratic government to organize charitable givings for things we want to fund but can't effectively organize ourselves.
Regarding Constitutional limits, check out https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=cwlr.
Here is another argument: funding charities furthers US self-interest through 'soft power', helping countries develop so that they have a workforce to extract resources the US wants, reducing the chance of diseases coming to the US or infecting US citizens, even providing a cover for CIA activities. Even if you only care about the US, there are benefits from foreign aid beyond pure altruism.
The soft power argument always seems like a makeweight & rationalization for funding something, not a real reason. I don't recall seeing soft power benefits spelled out in detail, much less quantified. Scott wants to save children's lives, not project U.S. power around the world.
Yes, it seems like it would be difficult to quantify. But 'soft power' is something that seems to be a consideration in international policy - PEPFAR was the brainchild of Bush Sr and Condoleeza Rice, not exactly bleeding heart do-gooders.
This study claims that US aid increases support for the US and democratic values, while the Chinese Belt and Road initiative *decreases* support for China: https://docs.aiddata.org/ad4/pdfs/WPS86_Foreign_Aid_and_Soft_Power__Great_Power_Competition_in_Africa_in_the_Early_21st_Century.pdf
I haven't read it in detail but maybe there is a non-altruistic case to be made (alongside the altruistic case).
FWIW, I think the historical evidence shows that PEPFAR was a pet project of the Bush administration because they sincerely cared about Africans not dying. (To End A Plague by Emily Bass is quite good and talks a lot about this.)
I think it is a legitimate function of the U.S. government if the American people want it to be, and since the American people can be occasionally persuaded of things I'm trying to do so.
Both of those arguments are true because:
1. The U.S. government has a very very large budget. For example, we fund about a third of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and this makes up 0.002% of the U.S. government budget (not a typo).
1a. This is partially because we're very rich and partially because we're the third largest country in the world and India and China are both middle-income. The next biggest rich country, Germany, is less than a third of the U.S.'s size.
2. Most foundations and churches spend money on dumb shit and are far less accountable than the U.S. government about spending their money more effectively.
3. Of the money spent by people who care about effectiveness like at all, nearly all of it is already committed to other high-value programs. If Open Philanthropy switches all its funding to cover USAID cuts, then anti-lead-poisoning programs go unfunded. If the Gates Foundation does the same, then vaccine research goes unfunded.
One thing I wish EAs would grapple with more is that being effective often means giving up sacred values. This is the kind of thing they say they do but rarely actually do. The Republicans telegraphed that if abortion and other politically sensitive reproductive healthcare was not thoroughly purged out of PEPFAR they were going to defund it. (And no, you don't get to decide they're just wrong and shouldn't believe what they believe. Being effective means accepting the world as it is.)
They said "stop it or we'll shut it down" for almost a decade. If you really believe PEPFAR saves millions of lives and if you believe Republicans have a real chance of shutting it down (and if you didn't believe that you were objectively wrong) then even weighing the reduction in abortion access the EAs should have been willing to make that trade.
But it was unthinkable for EA, which is blue tribe, to take an anti-abortion stance even if it saved millions of lives. So instead the Republicans became fed up with trying to reform the program and decided to end it. The groundwork was laid even before Trump got into office with the initial votes, iirc, in 2020. Something almost no one noticed (I did) until Trump came in and cut it off abruptly rather than the originally planned sunset period. Which was itself bad.
But more importantly allowed it to become a progressive political football and that's when the EAs all piled in. And then when it was out of the news cycle they mostly moved on, though admittedly staying at least somewhat interested longer than most. (I could not get anyone interested in the actual procedural votes though. I guess because it was too dull and didn't generate enough outrage.)
>"So instead the Republicans became fed up with trying to reform the program and decided to end it."
Basically a remix of "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
More broadly: A movement so broadly concerned with getting every tiny group a place at the table in the name of stakeholderism were right that building broad consensus was necessary to make programs sustainable. But somehow "accidentally" excluded half of the country that just happened to be their tribal enemies from being stakeholders.
Even more broadly: Harvard etc made the mistake of thinking they were the centers of power rather than just the makers of the elite. And if elites become disconnected from the actual hard centers of power then that opens the space for political entrepreneurs.
By statute, no PEPFAR funds can be used to perform or lobby for abortions. During the first Trump administration, PEPFAR was brought under the Mexico City Policy, which meant that PEPFAR funds could not go to organizations which also performed abortions, even if no PEPFAR money was used. It's true that we can't be sure that these restrictions are always followed, but scrutiny is very high. In 2021, four nurses in Mozambique were found to have performed abortions at a PEPFAR funded clinic. They hadn't completed their compliance training, which was addressed, and all funds in the region were frozen until every clinic recieved training and promised not to perform more abortions in the future (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/anti-aids-program-peril-after-us-finds-nurses-mozambique-provided-abortions-2025-01-16/). PEPFAR supporters have always been willing to keep abortion out of it. Many of PEPFAR's strongest supporters are pro-life. I've done a lot of pro-PEPFAR organizing and have not met anyone who would not accept placing PEPFAR under the Mexico City Policy indefinitely if it meant the program would be reauthorized. This is absolutely a concern that people invested in this program take actively and seriously, and have for over twenty years.
I worry that "other politically sensitive reproductive healthcare" is doing a lot of work in this argument. It's quite possible to provide HIV treatment and preventative care without abortion – as PEPFAR has always done. It's much harder to do it if you're opposed to condoms or STD screenings! There was a lot of concern during the last reauthorization vote that "reproductive health" was a codeword for abortion – but a large percentage of PEPFAR funding goes to supplying ART to pregnant mothers so they don't pass HIV onto their babies! This is, quite literally, reproductive health. It's ensuring healthy reproduction.
My point is perfectly circular but pragmatic. I am not making any claim about whether something OUGHT to be controversial, I am simply observing whether it is relevant to maintaining bipartisan support for the program. And that if you believe it saved millions of lives compromising on such things, even if you think they are objectively wrong, is a utilitarian net good.
If you want me to talk about the object level lessons then I think the concerns were likely overblown. But I also think politics is often a game of the possible, not the ideal.
Aren't there game-theoretic implications to capitulating regardless of how valid the concerns were? Or do you think it makes sense to ignore that in this case because of how uniquely valuable PEPFAR is?
Game theory never says you should worry about how valid the other side's concerns are. Both sides get to self-define the value of various states. That's what being an autonomous agent means. By proposing an outside validator you're implying there can be an outside enforcer that gets to determine who is right. That is not game theory. So no, game theoretically there's no implications because once you talk about how valid they are you've exited game theory.
Imagine mutually assured destruction as a prisoner's dilemma. Would your analysis of the Soviet Union's actions be improved by understanding that communism is a worse system than capitalism and so they ought to lose?
If you want to model this game theoretically you'd need a three player model where basically the Democrats and Republicans are in a prisoner's dilemma and the Advocates are trying to manage that. The payoff matrices would be something like:
Advocates:
3, 2
2, 0
Democrats:
2, 3
0, 1
Republicans:
2, 0
3, 1
You are doing what I referenced here:
> (And no, you don't get to decide they're just wrong and shouldn't believe what they believe. Being effective means accepting the world as it is.)
The Republicans conducted multiple inquiries and found various mistakes. This was a concern for them and they proposed language to strengthen those rules. Specifically, they wanted to make sure that not only could funds not go abortions but to ORGANIZATIONS that did abortions. It's the same issue they have with Planned Parenthood.
The Democrats blocked that and increased the direction of funds to such organizations, a policy which began under Barrack Obama. Trump, as you said, brought it under Mexico City and then Biden moved it out again. (Funny you don't mention this, implying it was that way when the program was not fully renewed...) This was key to the Republicans being fed up with the program and deciding that they could not reach a compromise.
Now, you might say that the Republicans are wrong on the issue. You may be correct. Maybe you support abortion and think Biden moving it out was good and the Republican rules were making it hard to administer the program. You may be correct.
But intransigence on this issue is the direct motivation for Republican hostility to the program. And since you agree that no abortions could have happened or been supported, why didn't pro-PEPFAR types agree to support these more stringent rules? Why didn't they oppose Biden changing the rules? Or Obama?
PS: I have had this exact discussion like a dozen times. So forgive me if I seem frustrated.
Republican presidents have always put PEPFAR under the Mexico City Policy and Democrats have always moved it out again! There's nothing inherently unworkable here.
But I thought we were talking about EAs, not Democrats. All the PEPFAR advocacy I've done has been in the context of EA organizations, and I've never encountered any dogmatism about the Mexico City Policy. Yes, personally, I'm against it, but it's a small price to pay to keep the program operational, and I've worked with many pro-life EAs who I deeply admire and respect on this issue.
That said – I'm sympathetic to Republican concerns about lack of transparency on these issues, but having looked into it pretty extensively on the object level, I just don't think that there have been that many abortions carried out with PEPFAR funds, and I feel pretty confident that those cases have been addressed and corrected. I don't think it's worth insisting on PEPFAR funding abortions, but I also think it's wrong to shut down a program which by conservative estimates saves hundreds of thousands of lives because of a tiny handful of administrative errors. If Republicans want to insist that there can be NO margin for error in a program administered across 50 countries, I think it's fair to say they're also being intransigent.
I also think it's a bit misleading to imply this was a point of tension before the 2024 reauthorization fight. Until 2024, PEPFAR was always reauthorized unanimously or near-unanimously, and Mexico City switching from administration to administration worked fine for everybody. The politicization of PEPFAR is a new and concerning development, and frankly I think it rests on some pretty disingenous arguments about what the money is really being used for.
The idea the change back and forth was normal is only true after late Obama. Obama changed the program in ways Republicans objected to at the time. This was the start of them threatening to defund the program. This is normal Republican discourse so if you don't know it then you're kind of proving my point. And I'm surprised the pro-life (but perhaps not Republican) advocates you're familiar with did not share it with you.
Also it's not misleading that there was tension before 2024. The Republicans voted for it but registered these objections in 2013, 2018, and in 2023 they only gave it a single year renewal as they prepared to shut it down. Like I said, they made these concerns known for about a decade. The idea that it was unanimous "until 2024" fails to explain why it only got a one year renewal in 2023. Once that happened it was obvious to me that, if the Republicans won significant government control, it was going away. And in November that was confirmed.
And yes, we're talking about how EAs did not engage with Republican concerns. In effect, I'm saying the answer should have been, "Oh, Republicans are threatening to shut down the program if it does X? Well, we should advocate against the program doing X then." Instead the attitude is what you just said: Oh, it's normal that we change the program from its initial imitations. And they won't actually do get rid of it. And they're disingenuous Republicans anyway. This is a very comfortable space for a progressive EA to be in but, demonstrably, an ineffective one!
As to whether those concerns are justified: I agree the Republicans are using a hammer. What I'm saying is simply, they threatened this for a long time and were not taken seriously by people who ought to have. They made specific demands that, if they were met, would have made the end of the program less likely. And I have counterexamples of programs they did not shut down. So this seems to be a strategic error that was caused by a partisan bubble and political blindness. I have not heard a convincing case otherwise and the gaps in your knowledge are actually making me more confident that's what happened.
I want to distinguish between a few things here!
Of course, I agree it was a huge tactical error on the part of effective aid advocates that we weren't tracking Republican concerns more closely. This has contributed to enormous harms and obviously with hindsight we were in a bubble and I wish we'd done things differently.
That said, I think this implies different actions on the part of EAs, the aid space more broadly (since EAs are a very very small part of the aid community), and democrats. I think EAs getting involved in political lobbying on behalf of the Mexico City Policy would have been ineffective and probably actively harmful – abortion access is a core democratic policy issue, EAs aren't especially popular in Washington or politically well-connected, I just can't see that having gone anywhere. I do wish that the aid community broadly had more conservatives, but EAs just don't seem well-positioned to change that except through making sure that our own internal culture is welcoming (and we could be doing better on that front).
I'm also skeptical of the thesis that abortion is why PEPFAR is struggling right now. The recent aid cuts have affected tons of programs that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion, like TB, malaria funding, therepeutic food, disaster relief, WASH, and many others. PEPFAR is in limbo right now but several specific grants have been at least nominally reauthorized (figuring out what's happening on the ground is more complicated), and it's faring a lot better than programs that were less tied into abortion debates.
When you look at the concerns being cited by the people cutting aid programs, including PEPFAR, it's not abortion – it's fraud, and "woke" culture war issues more broadly. Again, I completely agree that EAs were not aware of these bubbling issues and wish that we had been on a purely tactical level.
You're right that Republican criticisms of PEPFAR existed before 2024 and I shouldn't have been so categorical there. I'm just skeptical that they would have led to the program being sunsetted if all this other anti-aid stuff wasn't happening. (that said, I think we're talking about the same reauthorization fight – the PEPFAR extension act of 2018 covered the program until FY 2023. It was then renewed for a single year in March of 2024. There wasn't a vote in 2023.)
> Of course, I agree it was a huge tactical error on the part of effective aid advocates that we weren't tracking Republican concerns more closely. This has contributed to enormous harms and obviously with hindsight we were in a bubble and I wish we'd done things differently.
This is my entire point. And I am criticizing because I do not think lessons are being taken from it. This is not my area but I'm sad to see it go.
> That said, I think this implies different actions on the part of EAs, [...] abortion access is a core democratic policy issue [...] but EAs just don't seem well-positioned to change that except through making sure that our own internal culture is welcoming (and we could be doing better on that front).
I think that EA is in a bubble where going against progressive orthodoxy is extremely difficult. See my comments in the last thread on covid. I think the idea that EAs should not be challenging core Democratic policy or progressive norms is a belief it is convenient for many EAs to have which is not actually true. This is especially true because there is not one, monolithic EA organization which means specific organizations can take a variety of stances of even contradictory stances while remaining broadly in the movement.
Anyway, I also have said elsewhere I think the way EAs engage with politics is broadly ineffective. So I'm not suggesting that EAs would have been decisive. I'm certainly not saying they bear responsibility beyond, of course, the fact that EAs have taken it upon themselves to do good effectively and this is them not doing that. But I absolutely think they could have maybe moved the needle 1%.
> I'm also skeptical of the thesis that abortion is why PEPFAR is struggling right now. The recent aid cuts have affected tons of programs that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion, like TB, malaria funding, therepeutic food, disaster relief, WASH, and many others.
PEPFAR was a separate, specifically authorized program. The groundwork for the end of PEPFAR started BEFORE the Trump administration got into power while the USAID cuts started after. From a purely tactical point of view, without that ground work PEPFAR could not have been stopped under the same powers Trump used against USAID. It required Congress while Trump's USAID reforms (or "reforms") did not.
> I'm just skeptical that they would have led to the program being sunsetted if all this other anti-aid stuff wasn't happening.
Then why did the PEPFAR fight happen before Trump even got into office? The timeline doesn't work out for it being collateral damage.
> (that said, I think we're talking about the same reauthorization fight – the PEPFAR extension act of 2018 covered the program until FY 2023. It was then renewed for a single year in March of 2024. There wasn't a vote in 2023.)
My recollection is that the actual politicking was in late 2023, that there was a pause and a big fight, but fair enough on the point the vote was in March. That's fairly ordinary though with PEPFAR not technically shut down yet despite having failed to renew. Still, I acknowledge this was sloppy on my part.
Which specific actors in EA should have taken which specific actions that were different from what they did?
This is a bad faith attempt to require me to make a specific action plan before I'm allowed to criticize the movement.
But sure, Scott could have written about this when the one year extension (a clear prelude to cancellation) was up for a vote. Or you can substitute in any other EA blog or journalist. I'm sure you can find some isolated examples but I guarantee it's a tiny fraction of the outrage that happened once it was a political football.
And no, you don't get to say you just noticed it if your entire movement bills itself as the experts on weird, low interest, high leverage ways to do good.
I just don't think there's much of a case to be made that any relevant actors in EA could have averted the Trump PEPFAR cuts by lobbying in favor of the Mexico City Policy before the election. Even if you grant an equal leverage factor between that and the pro-PEPFAR lobbying from after the cuts were announced, this still requires that the PEPFAR cuts were motivated by sincere concern about abortion, rather than by a combination of carelessness and a politically motivated attempt to draw public attention away from the real drivers of the federal deficit.
I don't know you but I would bet money that you don't have a consistent belief that Republicans can't be influenced by lobbying. If you actually believe that then you can't say believe that they're driven by corporate interests or so on which is a fairly foundational belief among blue tribers. But if they are influenced by lobbying then clearly you can lobby them with sufficient effort. And given the amount of leverage in keeping this program going (millions of lives) and how easy it was to influence BEFORE the political firestorm it would have been a high leverage thing to do.
Once it became a political football everyone was mindkilled and it was probably too late.
Wouldn't it be the Democrats we would hypothetically be lobbying? The Democrats would be the people whose behavior we want to change here, because they keep removing the Mexico City Policy.
If you were lobbying Republicans, you would say "PEPFAR is a great program and exactly what Jesus would do," and a lot of people said that very enthusiastically and it didn't seem to help much. I think the Trump administration doesn't listen very much to the kind of people who think PEPFAR is a great idea and exactly what Jesus would do.
They're following Scott's example Re:homelessness!
USAID is not an organization that "funds other charities." In using the "charity" word you accept the false premise of attackers - that international development is "charity" - i.e., something done to be nice. There's nothing wrong with that, but USAID managed US government money to achieve US government aims laid out in US State Department (and inter-agency) country plans. These "implementing partners" (the appropriate term of art) can be NGOs ("charities - some accept donations), or commercial for-profits. USAID contracts, or uses agreements (for grants) specifying activities to achieve specific changes that benefit Americans (e.g., disease surveillance, undercutting the conditions that give rise to terrorism and crime, enable markets into which US companies can participate). The focus changes with the administration, that's not bad, that's democracy. "Charity" isn't hard. You can give a man a fish any day. That's charity, and that's easy. What's hard is system change. Because "teaching a man to fish" requires that there are fish in the sea (so ecological stewardship plays a role), and you need a boat and a crew (so you probably need a small loans facility), and you want the fisherman to be able to feed others so you need markets and transportation and health standards so people don't die from rotten fish. Change is hard; it can be done, USAID did it well. But that's not charity.
I love Tyler, but this is a bad take. It’s a little bit like claiming “97% of SNAP benefits flow to FOR PROFIT grocery stores, farmer’s markets, and Papa Murphy’s, look at all the WASTE and ABUSE.”
I mean, yes? That’s the point? Maybe you think it would be better for the government to provide food directly instead of using the robust private supply chain and logistic experts we call ‘grocery stores’ and, maybe? That seems wasteful and duplicative. In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
Eh I don't think your analogy is that accurate.
>In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
I'm pretty sure USAID mostly invented the wheel in this case, the specialized network of international aid/development organizations wasn't some organic privately funded enterprise that existed naturally in the world before USAID came along. Without USAID most of it wouldn't have existed in the first place, and now that USAID is seemingly gone most of it is going to disappear.
ETA: Not that I disagree that this is potentially the most efficient way for USAID to handle things, just that the analogy with grocery stores is sort of lacking IMO
Most of the big Western humanitarian organizations predate USAID, sometimes by half a century or more. ICRC, Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, CRS, World Vision -- they're the inventors of their particular wheel. They more or less fit the picture of USAID finding that some of its goals are best met by contributing to (and scaling up) an organic, pre-existing, privately funded set of institutions. They won't disappear when government humanitarian budgets shrink -- they'll just save fewer lives.
USAID also funds a lot of stuff with a longer time horizon -- like projects to advise countries on judicial system reform, cleaning up the air in highly polluted cities, establishing export industries in fruits/nuts/flowers, etc. That's more of a wheel USAID (and similar development agencies in other countries) invented for themselves as colonialism shifted into Cold War bilateral aid. USAID initially did do most of it through its own global staff, then part-privatized it under the Clinton presidency, creating a specialized contractor network (of people who mostly used to work directly for USAID).
> In the same way, why would USAID reinvent the wheel when there are already networks of organizations that specialize in this?
On the other hand if there's already organisations that specialise in this then why should the government get involved at all?
The government has a role to play in providing public goods which would not otherwise exist. But why should they give away people's money to things that would exist anyway?
That would be like if the Government bought everyone a bag of Doritos once a week. That's dumb. Let the people who want Doritos buy Doritos with their own money, and let the people who don't want Doritos not be forced to pay for them. Similarly with charity -- let those who want to donate donate, and those who don't want to shouldn't have to.
Tyler didn't say "pocket". He said Rubio said "pocket".
He said Rubio said 'pocket', then essentially said 'I fact checked Rubio and it seems like he's right'.
> If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead.
Ah this is where we differ, I think you come out millions of lives behind.
If you have the knowledge, power and ability to save millions of lives, then that's what you should be spending all your budget on. If you save three million people, and you could have saved another three million people but you didn't because you spent half your budget on saving people and the other half of your budget handing out free copies of The Vagina Monologues (or Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality) then you're three million lives behind, not three million lives ahead. We should be angry about the half of your budget that you wasted precisely because, not in spite of, the half that you spent very well (thanks GK).
If you're an ambulance driver and you save three patients today, but also let two of them die because you're too busy playing Candy Crush Saga, then I'm going to blame you for the two dead ones and not give you credit for the three saved ones -- it was your job to save all five!
Shouldn't the relevant comparison be to the counterfactual? If you fire the ambulance driver then probably their replacement saves all five patients. If you cut USAID then their budget doesn't go to some other more effective organization that saves lives in poor countries without any weird inefficient grants, it goes to offset about 0.1% of the cost of a huge tax cut mostly for rich people.
I'm no longer sure whether we're discussing the question of "does it matter than USAID is horrendously inefficient" or the question of "should USAID be abolished"?
...And if you then come along and say "This program COULD HAVE saved three million lives but it only saved three million, therefore it sucks and we shall shut it down forthwith," by your logic you are now SIX MILLION lives behind! Congratulations, great job.
Did USAID spend literally half its budget on frivolous things, or is that just a number you made up?
Because the actual amount of waste really matters for this argument. If it's literally half the budget, sweeping reforms might be justifiable, on the grounds that you can easily do better after rebuilding the charity and you could save millions more lives. If it's only wasting, say, 5% of the budget, then you have a much higher bar to clear for your replacement to be better. In that situation, destroying the charity *definitely* kills millions in exchange for the *possibility* that when the dust settles you will save a few thousand more. That's not a very balanced trade.
(I don't have the time to check myself, but I predict that the cringe women-in-permaculture donations are much smaller than the medicine-for-sick-people donations, because food and medicine require lots of boots-on-the-ground logistical work, and publishing pamphlets about women's rights does not.)
>"Because the actual amount of waste really matters for this argument."
Since it's not a legitimate government responsibility, the waste is 100%.
Thank you for the post. I found myself unduly influenced by the MR post. I was aware that using 3rd parties was not the same as 3rd parties pocketing the money, but didnt have any personal expertise in assessing the stats, and TC's post led me to think something must be off. I flatter myself into thinking confusion from a reader like myself is a large part of what raised your ire. This is adjacent to another comment I made.
I was a bit taken aback by the tone of this post. It’s not that I didn’t find the argument persuasive. I did. But I find the cooler headed posts much more enjoyable and much more persuasive. And the level of anger seemed disproportionate not least as Tyler (IMO) is very much a force for good in the world.
Hear, hear. I'm happy to cut Cowen a lot of slack because of the sheer volume that he posts. I don't mind at all the fact that he is frequently wrong - that's a natural side effect of trying to say interesting things a lot of the time.
I do think that MR has an annoying willingness to pander to craziness from the right, and to hold back on criticisms of the current administration. And the post critiqued here is an example of all of those things.
I also think that standing very firm on issues like "doctors are good" is very necessary in today's benighted media environment. So, great work, Scott.
Isn’t the problem that as funds are passed down the line of NGOs, *everyone* adds their overhead, paying their contractors, maintains their staffs, and so on, further reducing how much reaches the intended recipients? Acemoglu & Robinson talk about this in ’How Nations Fail’, about how often only a small minority part, if anything, reaches the ultimate recipients.
You just outted your real employer lmao.
My only experience of USAid came from living 8 months in Georgia - the country with likely the most NGOs per capita ever, some 24,000 I believe for 4m population. Many westerners and locals were employed. The majority of those I met came across to me as utterly detached from ground level reality and existing in some kind of ideological fantasy world. I was back there when Musk pulled the plug. Someone had to stop the insanity. You can't go through life believing that an ideology, no matter how positive, is implicitly a good thing. You just can't.
The outrage at the Trump administration for canceling grants and cutting funding reminds me of the outrage at Israel for bombing Gaza. Just hear me out.
When Israel bombs Gaza, there are civilians who die, which is a terrible tragedy. Many people respond to the tragedy with outrage at Israel for killing innocents, usually expressed in the form of one blood libel or another. But the reality is that Hamas and their allies embed themselves and their terror infrastructure within the civilian population, for this very purpose. The rage at Israel comes from people too credulous to question the cartoonishly inflammatory account of Israel's intentions proffered by its enemies. And the blame for the deaths of innocent Gazans lies with Hamas, for their use of human shields.
There's been a slow-burning Marxist revolution happening within virtually every single liberal-ethos institution in America. The "long march through the institutions." The revolution has embedded itself so deeply, and with basically no resistance, that it's impossible to root it out without doing substantial collateral damage. Yes, it's terrible that valuable research is losing funding, and that lifesaving charity is being cut. But where's the outrage at the revolutionaries who made this outcome all but inevitable?
If terrorists are firing rockets from your house, and you don't want to be collatoral damage, you can keep your head down, hoping that your terrorist-infested house will be missed among the thousands of others. And maybe it will be. Or you can try to kick them out, or leave your house to try to build a new one somewhere else. Now obviously with actual terrorists, easier said than done.
But it seems to me that, as the revolution has progressed, the vast majority of people in academia, charity, research, journalism, etc. have just been keeping their heads down. It's very bad that important, lifesaving work is being stopped. But your outrage is largely misplaced. Maybe it's time to stop and give some more thought as to why all these bombs are being dropped?
The difference there is that Hamas's higher goal is to kill Jews.
The assertion here is that Marxist/leftists have infiltrated aid organizations. What is their nefarious higher purpose?
Step 1: give out malaria nets.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Seize the means of production and institute a one party state.
The goal in Step 3 needs to be really bad to justify killing all of the charitable work. Right now, it just seems that the problem is that the people are Blue Tribe and that seems like a poor excuse for stopping aid to millions of Africans with AIDs.
"Sorry, but some people working for pepfar voted for kamala Harris so we had no choice but to let you die."
The left, speaking broadly, has one goal - eliminate inequality, the presence of which is generally considered proven through disparate impact. They may stop short of step 3, if this goal is achieved through milder measures, but until such time they will always escalate in that direction, without any principled stopping point.
I think there is a stopping point. Most people won't murder for this.
This isn't a goal where murder is the purpose like Hamas.
>There's been a slow-burning Marxist revolution happening within virtually every single liberal-ethos institution in America. The "long march through the institutions." The revolution has embedded itself so deeply, and with basically no resistance, that it's impossible to root it out without doing substantial collateral damage. Yes, it's terrible that valuable research is losing funding, and that lifesaving charity is being cut. But where's the outrage at the revolutionaries who made this outcome all but inevitable?
But is this actually true? Or is that on its own a highly ideologically charged description that wildly exaggerates *real* problems with left-conformism in academia?
There's a motte here (college professors and admin are overwhelmingly more liberal than conservative, even in red states) and a bailey (there's a conspiracy of literal Marxist taking over all departments in all colleges and willfully indoctrinating students into being revolutionaries hell-bent on dismantling capitalism). The bailey is untenable: STEM departments do not spend their time teaching oppression, economics, business, medical and law are also fine, in humanities they do in fact teach Shakespeare most of the time, real literal Marxist are not that frequently found, and while there are whole areas that seem "captured" (education, anthropology, maybe sociology), they aren't as popular with students and as authoritative in the society as a whole! There are systemic problems (the DEI bureaucracy and the rise of the "DEI statements", which infested even STEM), but there's also robust pushback against them. Just as wokeness peaked around 2021 and started to retreat politically, so has its influence in colleges. But I see it all the time that when someone criticizes the bailey there's a retreat towards the "but don't see you that 3% of professors are conservative" motte.
I wonder if Mr. Cowen is also opposed to the Department of Defense giving money to contractors, rather than building those tanks and planes themselves? And just imagine, those contractors then give a large parts of that money to other companies who pocket it (and just so happen to deliver all kinds of parts materials and services in return)!
Maybe the conceptual difficulty lies in the nature of charity - when you normally buy goods and services, *you* actually get and see what you paid for, and you don't really care what goes on behind the curtain and who "pockets" how much. When you pay for charity, *someone else* gets and sees whay you paid for, and you as the payer aren't sure whether it's what you intended unless you either provide it directly, or otherwise monitor the results (directly, if possible).
Let's go meta for a second* - is this use of o3 a reasonable part of discussion when trying to estimate a number of interest?
O3 is very powerful and often let's you get a solid guess in seconds instead of hours, even when you're not an expert, but it's also really hard to replicate or fact check without the exact prompt and sources, and it makes the whole starting point of the discussion kind of speculative. Is it really better to start with 'o3 said' than referring to some of the o3 sources which are more conventionally transparent?
*Frankly, on a personal level I find the object level topic of 'saving millions of sick and hungry people - for and against' kind of maddening.
Suppose you asked o3 about X, and it said "X=Y, here are the sources that back this up".
I find that there are two very different situations: one in which you can tell at a glance that the sources are serious and that their factual assertions are unlikely to be controversial, and one in which you have little to no idea. There's a spectrum between these extremes, but most cases in my usage cluster at the ends.
In the former case, you might just as well cite the sources. Citing the sources and o3 both is maximally honest, but it's also OK to just cite the sources, after all if you used Google to get to them you wouldn't cite Google.
In the latter case, I think it's a lose-lose situation. If you cite the sources, the readers have no idea if they're representative or controversial (or worse, they assume they're representative and not controversial due to your reputation in their eyes). But you also have no idea. No one has any idea until someone does the legwork. You just shouldn't use o3 in such cases. It does and will sometimes give you wrong data and absurd conclusions.
> If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead.
This is it. That this isn’t obvious and needs repeating endlessly, especially here, is really good evidence that the vast majority of anti-woke warriors have completely lost their minds.
>Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage
I disagree pretty heavily about things like this being cringe and worthless in the US (some are, many aren't, domain experts know more than either of us about it), but I don't see how you can defend this attitude in the context of foreign aid?
Are you taking the position that there's nowhere on the planet where women are discriminated against or underprivileged relative to men, such that innately talented women are being underutilized, and giving them targeted opportunities grabs low-hanging fruit in terms of developing and exploiting human capital?
Are you not trying to throw dispersions on scholarships-for-women as a general category, but using terms like 'underrepresented' and 'permaculture' to indicate a separate batch of trivial programs on unserious topics (and do even 'some' of those really exist, rather than just being misleading memes?)?
Are you just noticing that you're criticizing the right a lot recently due to Trump idiocy, and want to throw in a violent jab at the left at least once a post to maintain street cred?
What's your actual position here? I'm sure I'm missing something, but this struck me pretty sour and I'd like to understand better.
Thank you for your anger. ❤️
OK, I'll bite:
"If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”."
Ethically, no, but there are multiple dimensions to everything and the political dimension is important, too. If it makes your effort vulnerable to cancelation after lost election - which, in the age of social media and incessant polarization, it does - it makes sense to drop the cringe.
But of course, dropping the cringe is risky as well. Maybe the other party won't reinstate the programs without demanding some cringe programs that cater to its faith.
Maybe, in the age of social media and incessant polarization, "politically neutral good" became politically untenable, because cringelords now own entire parties (not just in the US) instead of memeing on 4chan.
I wonder if we have done to ourselves with social media the same thing that we have done to the the Amerindians with alcohol - introducing a highly addictive substance that rots brains and collapses societies from within.
I totally understand how u feel, but the part of me wonders,... how do you rationalise the emotional intensity of defending the USAID with the assumption that AI2027 scenario you wrote will make all of those efforts irrelevant very soon? Not that I have any answers, but I am struggling myself to feel emotional invested in any altruistic cause not relevant to AI race/alignment since reading that essay.
I suppose there's two things going on here:
(1) The public perception of what USAID is/does. And I'm certainly seeing social media messaging going *hard* on 'USAID does so much good' where the perception is that it directly funds all the good causes, not that 'this is a body that gives money to other bodies which then give the money to charities to spend as they think best achieves the charitable aim'.
Sticking my two cents in here, I work for a government-funded voluntary community childcare and special needs service which gets funding from an organisation that "is a state-sponsored organisation with responsibility for administering and managing government and EU funding aimed at supporting social inclusion and addressing social disadvantage in the country".
Nobody talks about that body the way they're currently talking about USAID, so I have to wonder if there is some disingenuousness going on. If the government cut funding, nobody would be appealing about "if Body isn't fully funded or has to pull back on funding, Bad Outcomes", they would talk about the Bad Outcomes directly. Pink News, for one, in their coverage of "no they didn't fund a transgender opera" described it as "USAID, an international development agency focused primarily on providing vital food aid, extremism prevention projects and disaster relief to countries around the world" and not as "USAID, a government body that administers and distributes funding to bodies which provide etc."
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/02/05/usaid-spending-list-transgender-opera/
(2) Would EA or GiveWell, if they were assessing USAID as a new entity, consider it the most effective use of funding? Would they say "There's too much cruft, the more effective use of your donation is to give the money directly to the Trans Opera Company in Colombia"?
You make a good argument that charity regrants are sensible in general, as charities may be more efficient in distributing the funds than the funders. However, state funding may be a special case here.
When large state funds are donated to domestic charities, there is a risk that some of this money will be used for political lobbying inside the country that will increase the donations, thus creating a loop of state support for one domestic politics side. This works because charity donations are at least partially fungible, at least in their overhead part.
I do not think this problem is that big in US. It is certainly much worse in the UK, which spends billions and grants formal powers to a group of quangos - quasiNGO - which have predominantly or only state funding but are not accountable in the way government departments are.
However, USAID grants certainly share some of these hallmarks. It may influence domestic politics not just through the fungible element of domestic charity funding, but also through bankrolling a lot of foreign media and thus impacting which news americans receive from abroad.
I like o3 a lot, but also I can never trust it due to the sheer rate at which it authoritatively hallucinates, higher than o1, higher than any other SOTA model I've tried. I'm a bit surprised that Cowen trusts it.
"I asked o3 to..."
How can you do this with a straight face? How can Tyler? The guessing machine cannot "fact check".
This right here is what's going to destroy civilization. Not grey goo or paperclips or Skynet, rather the willful abrogation of our own duty to think.
>cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships
What's wrong with women-in-permaculture? Sure it's probably not as impactful as malaria-nets, but I wouldn't call it "garbage". Garbage implies it does nothing or is actively harmful.
I could get mad about the misuse of money spent on charities if folks like Rubio were equally prone to casting an eye on the misuse of money in the corporate sector. Do we really need to allow tax deductions for meals at fancy restaurants? How about all the "expenses" corporations spend on their employees that, to a government worker, look awfully frivolous?
We also know that many consulting gigs, board seats and the like are just ways of funneling money to people for their connections. We only hear about this fraud when it's a Biden, but let's be honest, this practice is common and mostly unremarked upon. How much do these costs get passed on to consumers? How much lost tax revenue are we tolerating in order to prop up the luxury sports boxes?
We also need to start talking about how "efficiency" talk is a scam. The corporate sector is rife with inefficiency and yet we only apply our critiques to charities and government units. Does your cell phone company have a "rewards" program that is just a cover for advertising subscription services? Is that "efficient"? And yet that's the crap we the consumers have to subsidize. I would rather be able to have my money spent on agents who can actually answer the phone instead of outdated bots that waste everyone's time in hopes that we won't find the right number to call the company.
This is a great post and I don't have much to add on this topic.
However, I think this isn't actually that far below MR's usual standard. Tyler posts a lot of sloppy political hot takes. He's probably still better than the average person, but it's still problematic because people see him as a general expert on all things related to money and finance when in reality, his expertise is limited to economics (his posts on trade this year have all been great).
Overhead seems to be a dramatic problem when it concerns public programs and non profit organizations, and just normal when we talk about hedge funds, insurance companies, banks, and everything else. Of course its private, they make profit, it's business, alright ?
So, there's the solution. Privatize everything and make government and charity organizations profitable companies, so that overhead would be even greater but it would be normal and everybody would be happy !