If I put on my "actual beliefs" had, the reason I support foreign aid is that it does very large amounts of good, and I am a utilitarian.
If I try to take in the assumptions of common-sense morality, then I think there's a similar rationale. Promoting the impartial good isn't the only purpose of government. Maybe governments have way more obligation to their citizens than others. But still, it seems like one important purpose. It would have been noble to stop the Rwandan genocide at minimal cost. One feature strongly counting in favor of ww2 intervention was that it stopped the Nazi holocaust.
It seems plausible that the tiny slice of money spent on foreign aid does more good than the rest of the federal budget, barring a few necessities like preventing America from being invaded. For this reason, I think commonsense supports foreign aid.
How independent are these statistics? I think it does a lot of good (and some bad) but most people making statistics on Aid have strong incentives to suggest it is effective.
Are they subtracting out the murdered? I mean, if you're giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood (or Hamas, or...). I'm certain they aren't doing knockoff effects, like "we can't negotiate with Egypt because USAID won't actually support our diplomatic efforts to Stop A War."
Sandefur’s job and identity are dependent on aid being successful and popular. It is hard if you find something saves millions of lives to not want to be involved but it means the research isn't independent.
You may trust this guy, but why should I? I don't know who he is or what his vested interests are, and maybe it's to his benefit (not monetarily, there are a lot of ways we get benefits from something) that the US government pay out a tranche of income tax revenue on LGBT or similar causes that are not "vaccination campaigns, food relief, emergency disaster aid" but get lumped in under the umbrella of "good causes that no decent right-thinking person could object to".
Looking him up, he doesn't seem to have been involved with "crazy shit" so there's that going for him.
On the other hand, I think it would be a good thing for everyone to be Catholic. Can I get some USAID towards teaching primary school children in Tanzania to say the Angelus? I'm sure I could dig up stats from somewhere about the benefits of religious schools in Third World countries!
I would expect a firm "No" to that one, no matter how impeccably sourced my stats, so "independent estimates" is a status in the eye of the beholder at times.
We sent millions of dollars to bribe people to not grow opium in Afghanistan. Opium growth doubled, according to the UN. The Taliban BURNT all the opium fields, which put a stop to the growing of opium.
Increasing the human population and caring for it is a value. But life is not confined to humans. And most people are not interested in the sort of calculations beloved of commenters here, of the - if only each square foot of Earth could hold one person, something something would be maximized.
Perhaps ten percent of prople see things that way, at the outside. And why should we concern ourselves with the views of the ten percent as was explained to me elsewhere?
Most people's values are very, very dumb, and hence "hypocritical." Last I checked, "saving the environment" would require killing a third of the earth's population (and yes, it's gotten worse since then). You won't find many people whose "values" do not include "saving Planet Earth"
In the broader sense, "saving the poor and starving" harms the environment, and yet people tend to be "Pro Both" in a sort of "this is good" way. Expecting humanity to think through consequences is a step too far for many people (listen to the smoke detectors beeping, over and over again, because certain people can't tell there's a pattern. Do you really think these people are going to think through "consequences?")
TEOWAWKI predictions stand as 50% of the world's population dead within 5-10 years, USAID or no. At times like these, USAID is a drop in the bucket.
Hypernormalicy is the only thing keeping people whining about USAID. "This was a good thing two years ago! Therefore I cannot see the changing circumstances and it as a (very minor) bad thing!"
> I’m not sure why some people’s values are held in higher regard than others
This is just what it means to have your own values. When I say "we should fight malaria" there's no implicit "if we feel like it" attached, the way there is for "we should build fewer Brutalist buildings". It is not an indexed statement. I literally just mean that the government should fight malaria. Brutalism is bad *for me*; malaria is *bad*.
It's also a paradox to express the value that all people's values should be held in equal regard. Most people do not share that view and think some values are better than others. To respect everyone's values, you'd have to also respect the value that not all values are equal.
Not all values are equal, though. The person who believes we should "save the environment", really believes it, is saying we should get rid of a third of Earth's population (or more, really). The plans on the books (Road To Zero, charming name, remember Operation Iraqi Liberation?) are optimized for a tenth of the current population, and literally do not work (are BAD investments) at the current population size (see: electric cars).
These are the same people pouring into your ears and mine that "all values are equal" and "diversity is our strength." (And saying that immigrants can't be expected to know not to sexually assault Italian women on Italian beaches, nevermind that maiming is a light punishment for rape in their home countries.)
The only way for them to possibly outcompete oil-based cars is by reducing the world's population dramatically. There are significant economies of scale related to refineries (not to mention the issues with rare earth elements and needing to drive around a HUGE battery that is much heavier than an engine).
Huh? I said most people don't think all values are equal and that trying to regard them as equal is a paradox. Luciaphile is the one who suggested we should hold everyone's values in equal regard.
I am not as concerned about the making of human babies as aid proponents are (noting that once upon a time, not all that long ago, their spiritual and ideological brethren were just as impassioned and convinced if their own rectitude in service of the opposite goal).
But I think it is foolish to imagine that one can jettison, utterly, a regard for life writ large and imagine that somehow, human life in isolation will become more valuable in the exchange.
That seems like a highly uncharitable take on a lot of different things. I will tell you exactly the same thing I tell the "diversity is our strength" people, that people who disagree with you follow different logic supporting their arguments than you do opposing their arguments, which is why you get different answers. The different answers don't imply a values difference on the order of "you support murder while I oppose it", as I have seen claimed in so many unfortunate internet arguments. And also, you may have a happier life overall if you focus more on trying to believe things that are true than things that make your opponents look bad.
The People at Davos are NOT "most people I talk to on the internet" (even the rabidly brainwashed "I have no thoughts but Liberal" -- which I reserve for only one commenter around here, most are thoughtful enough to be worth engaging.) Capiche? My enemies are generally not "reasonable people who have different beliefs."
(Erm. Also my enemies are those who think that different beliefs mean you get to steal people's children. Dumb is dumb, and you may think my beliefs are such, but stealing people's children is a bridge too far).
I am not trying to make my opponents look bad, they do that quite well enough on their own.
Given that America has funded several genocides through "foreign aid" (I'm taking this as military as well as charity) within recent memory, I'd rather we not say that it does unalloyed good.
What are you arguing here? The Holocaust was stopped, as the parent comment said. Survivors were rescued. Would it have been fine to let it continue? Are you saying it wasn't worth stopping?
I think it is worth noting that America did not "intervene" in WW2 until they were attacked at Pearl Harbor. And even then, they waited for Hitler to declare war - if he had never done that, America might never have gone to war with Germany.
Point being, America didn't intervene until it was forced upon them.
You seemingly don't know much about the holocaust. (or you're lying)
Maybe start by reading the wiki page, for example the part about mass shootings and mass deportations in many European countries, and think if that is really something that would have stayed secret.
Or scroll on directly to the International reactions part and notice the sentence about the united nations condemning the systemic murder of Jews in 1942!
I guess I was being imprecise. Obviously the persecution of Jews was known even before the war, but the extent and horror og the concentration camps wasn't really discovered until later in the war, after the US had already joined.
People were really upset and voted a certain way in part due to foreign aid. I think many people's common sense morality places negative value on foreign aid because they really don't think their money should leave the country or believe various conspiracies about foreign aid.
Even if you disagree with their reasoning, I would still call it common sense.
I am not a politics expert, but I really think foreign aid had almost nothing to do with the 2024 election. I definitely heard a lot of isolationist talk from Trump supporters and undecideds, but it was primarily focused on opposition to military interventionism and more involved forms of US participation in foreign affairs. In particular, I heard a lot about the idea that Trump/Vance was the pro-peace ticket while Kamala would be more likely to start foreign wars. I followed the election and discussion thereof pretty closely, and I don't think I had even heard of USAID until DOGE dismantled it.
Four years is a pretty long time to "follow the money." $700 billion dollars in fraud alone, used for buying votes and kickbacks (this isn't the USAID bit, this is the current "refugee" bit).
I'm pretty sure you could have found a lot of Trump supporters willing to say "we must safeguard our elections at all costs." (Okay, of course they don't really mean murdering people, they mean legal remedies -- or taking action on foreign entities that feel like a spoiled election is profitable for them. Nixing USAID was part of that).
Sorry, could you cite sources for $700B in refugee-related fraud? The refugee-related fraud I'm currently aware of has single-digit billions attached to it.
For comparison, USAID had an annual budget of ~$50B in its heyday, which would get you to ~$200B over four years -- so the question of whether we're talking about $700B or <$10B in fraud makes a difference for whether this is "much bigger than USAID" or "much smaller than USAID".
I'm citing a federal financial analyst (personal interview). The single-digit billions are presumably for "mostly Minnesota" -- the full extent of the Somali fraud alone covers Ohio and a few other states as well**. And it's replicatable, and was replicated across other states. Seattle's Mayor explicitly confirms she will NOT investigate claims of somali daycare fraud. Portland (maine) city councilman is calling ICE raids "an agenda of White Nationalism."
We have corrupt judges dismissing flurries of Somali fraud cases. Millions of dollars in actually prosecuted cases (speaking from experience: you have to be pretty damn awful to get taken to court by the Feds, it's a huge pain to substantiate theft).
And what's Walz's response: Dismiss school for the Month (to fill the daycares, one presumes -- or possibly to help protests).
These are easy layups, if you aren't involved. You sit down, keep quiet, and let Trump get rid of the criminals (and some proportion of "workingmen" whose job isn't selling drugs or being a gang), you investigate fraud -- there has NEVER been a Democratic voter who is in favor of letting fraud "just happen" (not since Teapot Dome, etc. at least. It's been a Hundred Years! We prosecuted the sobs in Illinois, in New Jersey, In New York, in Louisiana!)
One does presume that USAID could get more than 100% fraud, through a number of routes, including kickbacks... (Consider this unlikely... but large criminal conspiracies are potentially showing up here, so... your understanding of "likelihood" should be tweaked to represent that).
**Once you come up with a scam, and a way to make money off said scam, you distribute it to as many people as possible. The Somalis are just particularly bad at "not taking too many bites of the apple." Other people have daycares (and other businesses) that they're using to steal money from the government, but it's a little less obvious. They're s***ing bricks right now.
Thank you. I wish you had a more publicly available source than "personal interview" -- but I take your point that it is likely to be larger than MN (or than the Somali refugee community). I still find the $700B figure implausible, because that averages out to $14B per state, whereas you seemed to agree with me that MN was <$10B, and I thought it was believed to be the worst case.
Could you elaborate on "Walz's response is to dismiss school for the month"? I have a child in public school in a Twin Cities suburb. School is out today because it was -21F this morning; it was out on Monday because of MLK day; it will be out this coming Monday because of Grading Day (=end of the quarter). However, my kid was in school yesterday, and if he isn't going there on Tuesday it's news to me.
Wouldn't you think that like whatever department does the most polluting or removes the most forest does more good than the rest of the budget because it causes fewer animals to be born and thus minimizes animal suffering? Like chopping down 100 acres of forest probably prevents so many bugs that your math would say it dwarfs foreign aid.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
Presumably this 10-40% includes you and most EA folks since surely there is some charity we could spend the tax refund on that is better than "average US foreign aid"?
Not necessarily. Not checking the box (i.e. preserving funding for foreign aid) can help maintain a norm of funding these programs with only selfish weirdos opting out. Depending on one's mental model of how many marginal donations would not be replaced with effective private charity, that can increase the overall amount of good done.
maybe, but I have a hard time seeing the marginal signalling value (it's not even necessarily public) of one checkbox outweighing things if, say, the best private charity is >2x more effective. Also, you could commit publicly to take the refund $ and donate it to , say, givewell.
It’d be pretty public what the overall un-opted-out charity budget would be. A lot more people would see that overall budget than would see (say) Scott Alexander’s public commitment.
Sure, total charitable funding is public, but it wouldn’t be obvious how much of the total charitable funding was *due to* Scott’s decision to opt out and commit. It would seem much less salient when other people were deciding whether to opt out. I do find it hard to think about marginal impact - there would be nonlinearities and feedback loops. I think it’s plausible that there are “low” and “high” basins of attraction for the opt-out rate, where if people see the opt-out rate is already high they’re more likely to opt out. And that cut-off will fluctuate randomly from year to year, so really Scott’s decision is pushing the opt-out rate somewhere with different odds of ending up in the high-opt-out basin or the low-opt-out one. There’s a small chance of a big impact, and I don’t know how to compare them.
"help maintain a norm of funding these programs with only selfish weirdos opting out"
Speaking as a selfish weirdo...
Please stop thinking everyone who does not share your views down to the last full stop is a bad person or wrong. This is a hard lesson it took me a long time to learn.
Why? People are allowed to think anyone they want is bad and wrong. You can think of the person is replying to is bad and wrong too. The question is: what are you going to do about it? These people will continue to make your life hell unless they are stopped.
You can think someone is wrong and argue it out. You can even think someone is bad. But "this person is bad because they don't agree with me" doesn't work. It is entirely possible you are the person who's wrong in any particular case, so then you are now declaring "well then I must be a bad awful person because I'm wrong" which is absurd.
Only selfish weirdoes would refuse to sign on! But what if they have good reasons, or what they think are good reasons, to refuse? What if I think *you* are the selfish weirdo?
All that matters in the end is who has the power to enforce their will. Their moralizing means nothing if they lack the agency to do anything with it. That is why you should work to ensure that those who would stand against you are relieved of that agency. Goodness in society will not come naturally. It must be shaped by force.
This presumes that the investment opportunities for an individual are the same as for a government, which is not true at all. Economies of scale are a thing, as is the sovereign power of nations; these both give governments more leverage than individuals, for the same amount of spending.
Which is not to say that government *always* uses those advantages to do better than *any* individual could alone. But those factors exist and affect the calculation.
PEPFAR is maybe the best USAID program, and I've seen a cost effectiveness estimate of around $3,600 per life saved for it. Give well top charities are at around $3,500 per life for seasonal malaria prevention last I checked, so once you note PEPFAR is the best aid program and it's diluted by the other government aid, I'm pretty sure you can do far better at the margin by giving to Givewell.
Ozy Brennan notes that this comparison is incorrect "because GiveWell includes health and consumption effects in its numbers and [the] PEPFAR Report didn’t."
Warren Buffett used to complain about “his secretary paying more taxes than he did” but he did not as far as I know, give the proportional amount of money thus saved to the government. Instead he gave a whole lot to Bill Gates.
I would withdraw my money from US government chosen foreign aid to direct it to what GiveWell recommends. I don't trust the US government nearly as much as I trust GiveWell, precisely because the government can grab my money whether I'm willing to hand it over or not, whereas GiveWell has to convince me to each year.
There's also a cynical view, that foreign aid spending is just defense spending with a softer touch.
This applies firstly in a reputational sense. An America that solves famines and alleviates natural disasters is a "good guy America," and that kind of reputation has positive long-term effects. It also satisfies both prongs of the "why government?" question: a good reputation has free-rider benefits, and the reputation of the government/nation can't be replicated by private donations to private charities.
This also applies in a more literal sense. Government aid programs have from time to time also doubled as intelligence-gathering operations, whether (again) the soft touch of recruiting local sources or a harder touch of using programs as covers for covert operations. Programs that fail occasionally make the news, such as the alleged CIA-run fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan circa 2010 to find bin Laden via blood samples and DNA analysis.
Obviously, it's much easier to run intelligence operations through government-run or government-funded programs than through strictly private ones.
Foreign aid has other benefits as well; for example:
* It makes the aid recipients dependent on America, and thus more likely to offer concessions, such as allowing us to build military bases on their territory.
* It prevents foreign regimes from collapsing due to widespread famine-fueled unrest, thus maintaining our long-term relationships with the leaders.
* It generates goodwill among the populace, making it harder for other major foreign powers to recruit them as terrorists or spies.
True, the "goodwill" part certainly depends on this; but making a ruthless dictator's survival entirely dependent on your nation is a time-honored strategy among world powers. It tends to work really well, until the dictator gets deposed... at which point you can quickly switch support to the new dictator, business as usual.
Discussing Kitty History is hardly "Russian-adjacent topics" ... unless you are considering the Taliban to be Russian adjacent, as well as Sadaam Hussein? (Which, okay, I'm still going to keep talking about cold war stuff that I can cite).
*In that we haven't actually signed a peace treaty, yet, but have a significant probability of doing so. In doing so, we breach Nuland-related agreements and plans (that these plans were STUPID is immaterial to the breach, particularly if the breach results in Zelensky falling from his current position of power).
You are forgetting, or maybe you included it with your second point:
* It enables said regimes to cream off from the top and squirrel money away overseas so that should the house of cards collapse, they can get out and continue to live comfortably in exile. Why kill the golden goose by offending the Americans? As long as the aid cash flows, your bank balance grows!
Oh, absolutely. Basically, foreign aid allows us to buy poor countries instead of invading them. It's much cheaper and more reliable in the long term. It's not about making the world a better place for all people by helping our brothers overseas because of our shared humanity, it's about making America a better place by exploiting foreign leaders (however brutally dictatorial they turn out to be) before our adversaries can do the same.
You might say this is callous and inhumane, and maybe you're right, but then, so is open war...
Open war is bad, but it can have some benefits. We support a lot of child prostitution, which Russia is not very in favor of, for example (they prefer to prostitute their conscripts in the Army).
I feel like this is not merely cynical. Even if you do engage in foreign aid with self-aggrandizing motives, it still matters a lot for people that you're giving them medicine, instead of bullets at a high delivery speed.
A new study published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine (Okoro et al., 2025) reveals a startling trend: COVID-19 deaths increased in regions with higher vaccination coverage.
That's true when you're not giving Pakistani more polio than you're curing.
Perhaps not*, but it's worth looking at -- and worth flagging whether our intuitions are saying "that's funny..." or "of course that's true!" Many discoveries come out of "that's funny..."
*There are semi-obvious confounds here, such as overreporting and underreporting. still, they did do a breakdown of Africa, which had relatively heterogenous reporting and vaccination.
So many people think USAID is United States Aid, when its United States Agency for International Development - and International Development can be things like covering the costs of US charity workers' food and accommodation as they hand out sacks of millet to rural poor, all the way to funding an opposition campaign in a country that is not aligned with US interests.
Or you know funding terrorists over the strenuous objections of the Egyptian Government. When the diplomats came over to USAID to ask them to "not" fund the Muslim Brotherhood, as it was impeding negotiations, USAID told them to piss off.
It Also gave grants to fund investigative journalism, that just so happened to focus on government officials and polititicians the US found inconvenient.
A cynical sort might suppose the name was intentionally chosen to obfuscate such cooincidences.
I would not be NEARLY so down on a USAID that was doing America's Business Overseas. It's when the diplomats, the military tells USAID to "cut that shit out" and they refuse, that I start saying "we're funding terrorists? And USAID won't stop funding terrorists, when the government we're trying to negotiate with, wants us to stop funding their ideological enemies?"
I'm a big fan of realpolitik. At the end of the day, we can have a velvet glove if we choose (see Venezuela. Minimal Regime change for maximal benefit -- removing funding* for Cuban Training Camps for Antifa-types, while causing the least amount of havoc), but we pay money to get results (An intervention in Guyana that is notably "pro-Exxon", say, is within our National Interest, even if it is "against morals". According to the Biden Administration, letting Venezuela invade Guyana might have been worth it for cheap oil -- it was certainly under consideration)
*not exactly "willing" funding, or with Venezuela's interests in mind, I might add. Maduro had Cuban bodyguards, so when Cuba "asked" for some free oil... He found it politik to say yes.
Seems plausible. It also seems that investigative journalism about the abuses of US-opposed* politicians is a good thing too.
*Obviously, I mean the dictatorships and such that the US was historically opposed to, not Canada and Denmark or whoever else Trump has inexplicably started picking fights with
An America (or more broadly the West) that commits warcrimes is... also defense spending with a softer touch. We aren't the ones using bullets in Iran, after all.
It's honestly not that much easier to insert agents into government-run programs. But when one government must talk to another government, "these are our agents, Do Not Shoot", it is good to have a government run program*
This seems obviously correct. Every single dollar spent by Congress is fought over tooth and nail, because everyone has their own pet projects they would prefer to allocate funds to. USAID was funded because it advanced American interests abroad. You couldn't get 2 branches of government to agree to it if they didn't believe that.
Even the seemingly purely charitable spending such as food aid is at least partially a subsidy to American farmers giving them a leg up over other country's farmers.
I agree. To my mind, governments get involved in aid to exercise "soft power". There might be explicit strings attached, but more often it is just influence. Dont like what recipient government does? threaten to cut aid. Need support in international agreements? implicitly or explicitly use aid-generated influence. Whether the money is used wisely or pocketed by officials is irrelevant to the value generated. They might say lots of things about why they do this to get voter support, but the real raison d'être for using tax money is to buy influence.
China really gets this. Right through Pacific, if US, Australia and/or NZ withdraw aid, then in steps China. I guess this is happening worldwide. China is much more explicit about the transactional nature of this aid and is using that power. I dont think the current regime in US understand this use of aid at all and it's costing US influence.
A question: I have heard over the years a nontrivial number of Africans (I realize this is about foreign aid worldwide, but in truth I’ve only heard people from Africa say this) request that the West “leave us alone” full stop. Stop propping up our dictators. Stop sending us clothes. Stop disrupting our ways. Are these just people whose opinion is worthless? Are they prima facie rejected by the rationalist community?
I think probably only a small fraction of Africans (<10%) would say to stop sending them malaria nets. If you think a larger fraction think this, then I guess our crux is empirical. Otherwise, why are we getting blamed for rejecting a small fraction, in some way where we wouldn't reject the larger fraction who continue to want help?
It’s not all malaria nets though. I guess some feel that things are not what they could be, and never will be, as long as aid distorts the situation. There was a fairly prominent economist, nationality I don’t recall, who used to say that, but perhaps he was foolish, as ten-percenters sometimes are …
Dambisa Moyo wrote Dead Aid, that claims amongst other things that malaria net donations are bad actually because they destroy local jobs. Its not a consensus view. some of her ideas about aid corrupting govts are more well regarded.
> I’ve only glanced at the comments at that link, and they don’t seem sympathetic to these two economists.
This comment is technically ad-hominem, but feels relevant (because it addresses the implied reason why we should pay more attention to this specific person's opinions)
> In this particular context it seems a bit strange to describe Moyo as an African economist. She lives in London and so far as I can tell has lived in the West for most of her adult life. In particular, the two most obvious reasons one might have for trusting an African economist more on this issue -- that her self-interest is more closely aligned with what's best for Africa than with what's best for the West, and that she's constantly exposed to the economic realities of life in poor African countries -- are less applicable than they would be to someone who actually lives in Africa.
Another example to whom you might extend more grace is one we’ve recently been reminded of, Mahmood Mamdani. He seems uniformly critical of aid though it seems like he would surely approve cash payments to rulers he admires.
When something like this was debated on Less Wrong, I tried to ask for specific evidence about local malaria net industries, but didn't get a conclusive answer:
Wasn't that what doomed Toms(?) shoes, their free pair of shoes to a developing country put local cobblers out of business and making the target countries poorer?
I also recall an NPR piece how people are much more willing to help build a gravity water system in Africa, often right next to the one that was built twenty years ago but never maintained, maintenance being a much less sexy thing to donate to.
Sigh. this is why it's a better plan to buy your carbon filter from some company that's just going to give their carbon filters to some people in Africa. They'll take credit based on "how many villages saved" (and passing out filters for maintenance is cheaper than getting to a new village).
"You've heard about broken windown fallacy, now get ready for free malaria net fallacy!"
But regardless of how unbelievably dumb that particular argument was (I remember reading the book before knowing any econ and still finding it puzzling), there will always be a market for Counterintuive Big Brain ideas. If those ideas, beyond making you feel smarter than the poor simpletons who try to help their fellow man, also make you feel more *moral*, because good things are actually bad and the poor simpletons are akshually harming while they think they are helping, all the better.
I don't think we have particularly good polling from recipient countries. I have repeatedly heard negative views on aid from Africans in the West often couched in bizarre economic and conspiracy theories, but my sample is incredibly biased.
Aren't mosquito nets the Motte of International Development spending? 'AID' is the Agency for International Development after all - and there's a lot of meddling that accompanies the malaria nets.
Malaria nets aren't covid19 "writeoffs" for vaccinations:
A new study published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine (Okoro et al., 2025) reveals a startling trend: COVID-19 deaths increased in regions with higher vaccination coverage.
Remember when every news media you could find was "Brought to you by Pfizer!"
I think this study is based on "confirmed" data, and that it's consistent with a story where places that don't have access to covid vaccines are places with poor medical coverage. Ie places that are too poor to afford covid vaccines are also too poor to afford covid tests, and so don't get counted in official stats.
> 3 deaths per million in Burundi
Compared to
> or the USA which had 3,300 deaths per million
I think that the 3 per million number isn't credible.
A substantial fraction of the deaths in the USA happened before any of the vaccines were available. So this doesn't really fit a "vaccines are causing all those covid deaths" story.
Now Burundi has a GDP per capita of $489.
I think it's pretty clear what happened here. However many people covid killed in Burundi, they died in isolated villages in the middle of nowhere. Only a very small number of the richest people in Burindi went to an actual hospital that could take covid tests and add their death to the official total.
There are other possibilities. Like covid having R0 of less than 1 when everyone is in small villages and travel is weeks by donkey.
Compare with Rwanda, which does have double the GDP of Burundi, but they're relatively similar otherwise (except for Rwanda shipping out blood diamonds they don't mine) -- I buy coffee from both places, similar climates and all, no major difference in rural population lifestyles.
Leave aside Madagascar, they're a nation of liars -- worse in a different way than China's manipulated data. And Chad's at war, so we can leave them off too, (Although so was Rwanda... i think that was more a border-war than "everyone is always in peril, do not show up to doctor appointments")
Rwanda has 1,344 confirmed deaths (WHO is modeling it as a little larger, but not even double.)
Burundi has 15 confirmed deaths (and WHO is modeling it as ten times that, at 159 -- I'd want to dive into the WHO's explanation for their modeling here, before I'd believe them, but take it as an upper bound? As a "stab at controlling for difficulties in reporting?")
Burundi has a nearly equal population to Rwanda, and they are quite similar in terms of climate and other "basics" (It's africa, so the ethnicity is going to be different).
Rwanda has notable spikes in deaths for Omicron (not as high as delta, but about equivalent for alpha/beta). Burundi does not.
What you're saying seems to be the WHO consensus, that only 10% of the dead Burundians made it to a hospital and were diagnosed with covid19. But that's only 10%, not 1%, and that's where we're sitting.
Again, neither of these countries is looking at being very dead from covid19.
Yes, this is coffee-sperging. No, it isn't covering all of Burundi, as you can see on the map. However, I think from the pictures you'll see this isn't some place where travel is by mule -- we're looking at coffee industry (small time, like old time grain mills).
I'd be very surprised if a majority of people in Africa were opposed to sending things like medicine and bednets- which is ideally what foreign aid should focus on.
To the extent that aid recipients are critical of the aid, we should consider that feedback an extremely valuable source of information, but not the only relevant information. For example, local reports that every shipment of aid is being stolen and sold by a militia group would be a great reason to stop the aid, while a local belief that vaccines cause autism wouldn't. In the latter case, you might be helping a community against that community's will- which I'd say is morally risky, but not morally wrong. Helping someone against their will just requires an enormous amount of caution and honest consideration of their viewpoint.
They might prefer to buy whatever imports they need - medicine and bed nets included - at fair market rates, rather than risk having the local entrepreneurial spirit washed away by flash-floods of capricious charity that make long-term demand forecasting (and accordingly, plans for business profitability) functionally impossible.
Free medicine might suppress local investment specifically into medical import businesses, but so long as the aid isn't suddenly cut off, that's a good thing in the same way that automation and increases in productivity are a good thing- it redirects investment onto industries that would otherwise have been neglected, giving people the benefit of both those new industries and the free medicine. I think it improves growth overall, rather than suppressing it.
Of course, as we've seen recently, aid getting suddenly cut off and leaving people abandoned to die without an alternative is a very serious problem. But I think we can oppose that specific policy without opposing aid altogether.
If given a choice between pushing through a policy banning future aid and one banning the sudden cancellation of aid- maybe requiring that any reduction be tapered off over several years to allow locals to build market alternatives- I think the latter would be much more reasonable and no less realistic.
Any continued distribution of "free medicine" that enhances monopolies is bad for ALL countries' national security (Except China.) Antibiotics are pretty cheap to make, after all, it is entirely Our Fault (as citizens of the world) that 90% of antibiotics are made in China.
>it redirects investment onto industries that would otherwise have been neglected,
That logic only holds if there's a fixed pool of investment capital available, rather than elasticity based on expected yield, and accurate information with which to allocate it. Pervasive uncertainty adds risk premium to everything, uniformly, discouraging investment in general. It's not just the risk of a sudden cutoff, but the risk of new forms of "aid" suddenly coming in. Anything that can be made locally, which is important enough to pay for and has a broad enough addressable market to be worth making capital investments in scaling up, some foreigner might one day decide your people are "suffering for the lack of." and next thing you know your chicken coop is de facto competing against intermodal freight containers full of eggs being given away for free. What could possibly be used to hedge against that?
Personally I think some sorts of medical care, direct cash transfers, and maybe a few other things are beneficial enough to outweigh that effect, but I'm very sympathetic to the position of somebody who looks at aggregate results of the overall bundle of interventions and thinks their part of the world would be better off left alone rather than treated as a charity case.
Isn't a big part of public health interventions in Africa the fact that educated Westerners really do know better than poor Africans what is good for them? Africans are poor, but not so poor that they (or their governments) literally can't afford bednets or water chlorination. The problem is that they don't understand the true value of these things and so choose not to spend money on them.
I suspect that a lot of people in rich countries would also underconsume preventative healthcare (albeit not necessarily to the exact same extent as in poor countries) if their governments weren't there putting a thumb on the scale to get them to do it. Poor-country governments would like to do the same thing—they understand quite well how important it is—but they lack the capacity.
I doubt this. Were this the case, you'd see significant governmental uptake of low-cost solutions, rather than "selling entire branches of the government to your allies."
Preventative health care, in this particular case, seen as "fire safety" (burns are quite expensive to treat, and/or painful and sometimes deadly)
> Africans are poor, but not so poor that they (or their governments) literally can't afford bednets or water chlorination.
Their governments, sure - and in fact most governments *do* have bednet distribution programs, albeit underfunded ones. The challenges there are more political economy than purely fiscal.
Individuals, less so. Most African countries are highly unequal and the poor are *very* poor. Consider Kenya. In rural areas the 20th consumption percentile starts at ~$11 per person per month. Roughly $7 of that goes to food, $1 to fuel (mostly cooking), and $1 to transport, all of which are hard requirements for a farmer - so that's $2 per month for all healthcare, all equipment, all education, all clothing, all anything.
A $5 bed net is in principle attainable on that budget, but it's a massive expense. And this is the 20th percentile; many are much poorer.
See my above comment to Taymon Beal, in terms of $1 for fuel. Were the South African government serious about improving rural people's lives, they'd distribute cookers that let the rural people use waste products for fuel, instead of having to pay.
Like any public policy issue with more than 1 side, you could say that one side is 'right' and the 49.9% supporting other sides are universally worthless fools to be ignored.
Or you could recognize that probably the issue is very complex with very many moving pieces, and there's a useful synthesis of reform and reinvention that uses insights from every 'side' and is better than any one of them. Different blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, sort of deal.
The argument against sending $100 worth of clothes vs. $100 cash is that free clothes suppress the domestic clothing industry, since you can hardly compete with free. Of course, you still send material goods in emergency situations like war or famine when normal industry and logistics break down. Otherwise, it should be cash transfer that goes towards building their own capabilities, or at most means of production like electric generators that can yield economic interest.
Do NOT send bottled water if the roads are gone! (Seriously, send iodine tabs, water purification, anything PORTABLE).
I am quite upset that FEMA was unable to provide anything except bottled water (which is inhumane to transport via mule train, as well as ineffective at actually stopping water-borne illness, because you simply can't bring enough).
Well, even if there was zero aid, the west would never just leave Africa alone. Propping up anti-China and anti-Russia dictators, for example, is an independent consideration, and "disrupting our ways" would happen in a globalized world regardless. So, if meddling is inevitable, it might as well be not maximally cynical.
USAID that funds kill switches seems like it would be maximally cynical. Nothing like "watch us kill your entire population if you don't do this unpopular thing."
Africans are more than happy to accept all the free medications they can get. They are happy to get the all free healthcare they can get. The local government are happy to offload their healthcare and social services unto do-gooders. However Africans are likely to complain when western actions undermine local growing industries.
The most egregious example of this is the used clothes industry. There are youtube videos of trash heaps of imported used clothes in African countries. Literal trash heaps. Local industries can't compete. And when the countries try to ban the imports of used clothes, America actually threatens them for violating "free trade agreements" .
I’m surprised this was explained to me twice lol, as though I didn’t have a clue. But I apologize for my clumsy shorthand. I guess I thought it was the case that some of the folks bemoaning the loss of their local textile industry - extrapolated this to other gifts of the West.
You haven't actually heard Africans say this, you've heard someone else say that this is what Africans said. I know this because I've seen this exact comment on this exact blog before.
Chances are all of them are economists of African *origin* currently living in USA or maybe EU. They probably already forgot what the situation was like at home.
People told me stories about people who emigrated from Czechoslovakia during communism. After a decade of living in USA, they absolutely lost any idea of what was it like before they left. For example, they kept sending their families food help, like packages of dried rice. But lack of food was *not* a problem in 1980s Chechoslovakia. We didn't have political freedoms or recent technology or maybe modern medicine or sometimes toilet paper, but basic raw food, like bread or potatoes or rice, was abundant and cheap. It is hard to believe that people can get confused about what was their everyday problem ten years ago, but apparently human brains work like that.
Perhaps for some Africans, the cost of an anti-malaria net is their weekly food budget that they cannot afford to spend on something else. Other things, like clothes, can be incredibly cheap to buy locally, because they can be simple, hand made, and the local costs of labor are extremely low. The anti-malaria net needs to have very little holes and be infused with some chemicals, that's not trivial technology.
I guess the expectation shared here is that SSA will go through a demographic transition that will make bednets moot. (It sounds wonderful and to be hoped for not to have to sleep under a bed net; I worked in a building that had operable windows - one day they washed the windows for the first time in years, and my boss was ordering the workers to throw away the window screens, and it seemed to me she had forgotten the point of them. Fortunate, but still not a good idea, malaria or no.) Or that the Bill Gates Foundation will end malaria. Before Abundance, people used to use the word “sustainability” (I assume the former will have a good run before suffering the same end.) It would have been less controversial under that watchword to posit that one thing it would be great to manufacture on the continent, is bednets. But I do recall reading here in one of the many posts touching on them, that bednets are much more complicated than one imagines.
Americans were massively propagandized about the "problems" in Soviet Russia (and behind the Iron Curtain) -- it is not forgetting or being confused, but becoming a propaganda vessel, and believing what you are told. We were told there were long lines, and that the food would blow out, and not everyone would get what they wanted. I'm sure someone took this as "please send rice." (and, sadly, not please send a Katz' salami, which probably would have been treasured).
I was a teenager back then, so I can only describe what I experienced, and make a guess about the causes.
My best guess is that many problems were caused by the planned economy having no *slack*. I don't even mean the usual Hayekian argument of "the experts don't have all the necessary local data", but more like "even if they were omniscient about the economical needs, the system would still be very *fragile*".
Like, imagine that you know that the people need exactly 1 million pairs of shoes, so your factories produce exactly 1 million pairs of shoes. And then... one shoe breaks... and now there are only 999 999 pairs of shoes, and 1 million people who need them. So the people, after hearing the news, will rush the shops, because no one wants to be the last one left without the shoes. And because people rush the shops, it is possible that the shoes that were supposed to be sold during the entire year will be out of stock already in April. Even worse, people start buying *extra* pairs of shoes that they don't actually need, "just in case" -- maybe your relatives didn't make it to the shop in time, or maybe you can later trade the shoes for something else that you didn't get. And now you have an actual shortage (despite the economy producing, in theory, enough).
And unlike shoes, the toilet paper is cheap, small, and can be stocked for a year if you have some place in the cellar. So I imagine that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy -- whenever people started suspecting that there may be a toilet paper shortage, they actually caused it by buying a lot more than they needed. But individually it was a rational reaction -- from the past experience you knew that when people start saying "there may be a shortage of toilet paper soon", they were often right.
I remember the very long lines in front of the shops. I do not remember how often they happened; whether they were a rule or an exception; every other day or once in a month. They were often caused by people learning that some rare thing is sold now; for example, oranges were typically sold only before Christmas. So if you heard "they are selling oranges today", you ran to the line, because in the evening it might be too late.
In capitalism, the demand is somewhat unpredictable, too, but the shop owners can respond by making things temporarily more expensive (during a shortage) or give a huge discount (if they have extra food that would spoil). This was illegal during communism: if it spoils, it spoils, but giving someone a discount would be "unfair". Actually, the shop owners do not even need to respond very flexibly, because they typically sell similar things at different price levels; like there is a cheap cheese and an expensive cheese, and when the shop runs out of the cheap cheese, people can still buy the expensive one if they want. In communism, you had one kind of cheese at one price; when you sold it, it was over; the change was abrupt rather than gradual.
Generally, there were big economical differences between various communist countries (but it was a taboo to comment on that). Czechoslovakia was a relatively rich one. We had shortages of specific things (such as the oranges), but we didn't have shortages of food in general. The worst case was that you had to eat something other than you wanted, maybe the same thing for weeks. But you were not hungry, only annoyed.
Between one post about luxury believes and another about ignorant, cloistered elites, RW contrarians always find space to quote some affluent African, oft living in the West, who has strong believes about his much poorer connationals
The internet tells me that James Shikwati lives in Nairobi. But you’re in good company, famous aid expert Jeffrey Sachs, who I don’t believe lives in Africa? … also dislikes him and finds his views distasteful.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
10-40% of voters may account for a majority of the funding if that includes some very rich people! I know you mention that "supporters are on average wealthier than opponents" but top 1% taxpayers pay almost half of US tax revenues and they when facing a checkbox that saves them multiple thousands of dollars they may have a different view than answering an abstract survey.
strongly disagree then, the relevant people are sure to be often propositioned with similar charity offers and rejecting most of them. to the extent they want to be charitable, it is unlikely USG foreign aid is their first choice and they could withdraw the money and spend it on whatever charity they like more.
I would absolutely check the box and then turn around and spend the exact same amount on charity that I can account for.
This, despite having interviewed a number of farmers who directly described relying on benefits from foreign aid (for my Land Reform ACX grant). I would even pay that money directly! My wife makes fun of me because while all these people are doing their 'buy local' thing, I'm at the grocery saying, "Buy the plantains from Honduras! I know farmers who are counting on it to make a living."
I'm far happier patronizing Honduran farmers when they're getting a larger share of the proceeds, and the foods they are shipping are not declining in food quality by the time they arrive Stateside (same criticism about California produce, which I also won't buy if I have any choice).
'Since your taxes will be the same either way, voting yes strictly dominates. This is the virtue signaling model of voting, and it implies that even if no single voter supports raising taxes for foreign aid, the electorate might nevertheless vote to raise taxes for foreign aid!'
I'll admit that 'Moloch makes us vote for charity' was not an argument I was expecting to encounter.
'A stronger counterargument: the Virtue Signaling Argument implies that all “raise taxes slightly to do a nice thing” laws should succeed.'
I think this is only true if the desire to virtue signal is infinitely strong. It seems like instead we should model it as one benefit of voting yes, to be weighed against costs like a small chance (1/num_voters) of causing taxes to be raised.
>"Do you agree that, if all foreign aid were cancelled outright, only a small fraction of people would donate on their own?"
Yes.
>"And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?"
No. I think you would get approximately the same number of people checking the box as you do people who say no to those "would you like to round up your purchase to help [cause X]" questions at the cash register.
Or maybe I'm the only asshole who says no to those.
For all its flaws, I’m much more trusting of the federal government’s international aid efforts than I am of whatever discount charity some corporation has rounded up to put its logo on the cash register.
I feel like the answer might even be simpler than all this, and goes roughly as follows:
1) You are part of this country.
2) You want your country to do good things, and generally want both for you country to be seen as a positive force for good by others, and to feel yourself like your country is a positive force for good in the world.
3) You think foreign aid enables point '2' above.
This, I guess, is a 'kind' of virtue signaling, though it isn't as straightforward (or noxious, in my view) as the kind we see constantly on social media. Most of us want the nations-- or organizations, or institutions, or even families-- with which we're affiliated to be viewed positively, and to feel positive about them. I think we've internalized this to such an extent that we probably don't even notice we feel this way most of the time, but it's still there, and this value informs a whole legion of our behaviors.
As a thought experiment, consider a case where all of us are allowed to vote on whether, say, Slovakia will tax its citizens an extra $100 a year to provide foreign aid to the developing world. Some people in the US would, I imagine, certainly vote for this, but many of us (and I include myself here) would not, simply because I'm not Slovakian, I don't particularly care how the world views Slovakia, and also I don't feel like my opinions should be informing the Slovakian tax code.
I don't think you realize how many people don't ascribe to, are hostile to, or simply don't care about #2 and an even large number might buy it only the context of "taking care of our own people". For the non universal utilitarians, progressives, and humanists, we just don't care how many people in Somalia are dying of starvation when we got people sleeping on the street involuntarily in America and prisons that are overcrowded (for a variety of reasons but one that throwing money to build more of them would help).
To quote Val Kilmer "the average American wouldn't walk across the street to piss on someone even if they were on fire", we could care even less about dead Tamil's from malaria. To Scott's point, this is why people like him prefer it to be taken via the barrel of a gun out of the mouths of American babes and given to endangered spotted elephants in Congo. Because the public overwhelming wouldn't do so voluntarily. Authoritarianism at its best.
Oh and on that last one I would 100% vote yes, let the Slovak taxpayer fund malaria nets in Djibouti, better them than me. Especially if it was paired with "and reduce your own US taxes by $100 and have it rebated". And I'd bet there are more people than you think in my camp. I'm completely indifferent to America's reputation.
I only donate to GiveWell recommended charities that direct their funding to the Third World where it can go the farthest... but I absolutely oppose my government & tax dollars doing what I voluntarily choose to do with my donations.
The number of people who ascribe to the belief isn't relevant. The point is that this is ( believe) the rationale of the people who do ascribe to the belief.
It is possible that you overestimate what fraction of people think the same way as you do. Almost everyone does on almost every issue, and I don't see why sociopaths thinking about international aid should be the exception.
Fair but on this I'm pretty sure I'm not hence to Scott's point in this article, we have to FORCE people to give to foreign aid because charity doesn't work.
Count me as one who believes those three things, and also believes that they are common beliefs. I also vote no on the Slovakia question. I would add two other points.
First, my beliefs are not affected by the source of government funds: I would feel the same way whether the government raised its revenue through taxation or by mining and selling rare earth minerals from Greenland. How the government gets its money is independent of how it should spend its money, except for purpose-directed income such as license fees.
Second, I think there's an additional consideration: whether the nature of the assistance is most appropriately provided by a country or a different entity (corporations, foundations, private individuals). Something that's foreign-policy-adjacent or logistically challenging are in a country's wheelhouse. That's in addition to the foreign policy goal of being seen as a force for good.
I think a lot of people who vaguely support the idea of foreign aid are indeed operating on more or less a model of the US government as a literal Uncle Sam character who struts around the world in a red-white-and-blue outfit, flashing his silver-fox grin as he metes out freedom, justice, prosperity, and goodwill. And honestly this is a pretty good folk justification: the government is basically an imaginary person, and I want that imaginary person to be admirable and virtuous in a number of ways a real person might be virtuous: strong (military spending), prosperous (trade policy), admired (building international alliances), heroic (some military interventions, disaster relief), magnanimous (foreign aid, especially to poor countries).
This model also helps explain the emotional rationale behind why some people oppose all international aid: they want the US government to be "the BASED guy" where we crush others into submission, don't given any money to poors, take whatever we want, etc. Again, government as imagined person / avatar. Just playing a different character.
You're missing a pretty obvious reason for foriegn aid - providing it is good for America, because it builds goodwill - with the people who receive the aid, with our allies who see the signal that if we'll give this much money to some random country in Africa, we'll definitely help them if something happens to them, and even with ourselves - cultivating the idea that we're the "good guys" makes people more likely to join the military, help out in thier school PTA, and pay thier taxes.
I've seen this argument a lot, but my perception is that the US has been disliked for the past two decades as world police and USAID has not moved the needle at all. Democrats in particular who now champion USAID have been the chief creators of that perception. As an example take The Newsroom speech about America not being the greatest country anymore. The group that does think America is great or who want to make it great again are not talking about it with USAID in mind.
On the other hand I think cutting USAID can make us feel more negative about America, but I think the status quo needs to change to capture our attention at all.
Hmm...I loved the Newsroom, but haven't watched it in a while so don't remember that speech. Maybe I'm out of step with the mainstream, but I've always thought of America doing more good for the world (via aid and the Team America World Police) than any other country for my whole lifetime (so since the late 80's). I've had to temper this a bit the more I learn about what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan when I was a kid, but I still think it stands, and I think most people in the US and the world would agree (or would have, say, 15 months ago...)
I think that's true in the PAX Americana sense, but the narrative I usually here is that we benefit massively from it so America doesn't really get to be good guys for guarding the worlds shipping lanes or sending aid. Instead it increases our soft power as the world's hegemon.
To be clear about my own stance I have found this line of thinking frustrating, but always considered myself the contrarian to the more popular belief that America is bad and any good we do is self-interest. I think if you went back and looked at reddit posts over the last decade you would be likely to see what I mean, but that by no means is representative of what the average person thinks so I could be out of touch.
Exactly, and obviously there's a lot of doubt about what we get back and whether it's worth it, but I'd prefer for us to err on the side of improving the world even if it doesn't always generate an obvious "ROI"
I guess my argument is that it isn't necessarily win/win. My personal best feelings for America(ns) is how much they independently donate to the world and charity outside of our government. When the government is providing aid it is viewed as politically advantageous. It's much harder to discredit when it's grass roots donations.
There are still problems with this with regards to the super wealthy creating charitable foundations to pursue research with tax incentives. I think there's also been a lot of souring on charitable organizations which was one of the causes of effective altruism.
I want to get across the main thing I'm arguing against though that charitable government contributions specifically are not a good perception booster to the American public or to Americans abroad (Aside: this does not take into account specific actions taken during natural disasters like sending the air craft carrier to produce fresh water after the Japanese reactor meltdown). I think individual donations are much more effective on this one dimension. This is just my intuition and perception though and it would be interesting to see an actual study.
> It's much harder to discredit when it's grass roots donations.
Do not underestimate the power of social network bots to discredit anything.
> I think individual donations are much more effective on this one dimension.
Kinda yes, but individual donations don't build a powerful brand together. Imagine a foreign hospital with 1000 devices that come with a "USAID" sticker. Now imagine the same hospital with the same devices, one sticker says "John Doe", another sticker says...
But perhaps we could combine both. I imagine an organization that collects individual voluntary contributions, then sends useful stuff to recipients with a logo that contains the name of the organization, the name of the donor, and the country of the donor (the organization could be international). When you donate, you click either the specific cause or a general area, but either way your name ends up on one specific sticker, and the organization will send you a photo of the thing after it was delivered.
It's an argument that makes people feel good but has absolutely no evidence for it, nor would it be particularly easy or worthwhile to collect that evidence.
The goodwill of poor Africans towards America does not matter to Americans in any tangible way. And I don't think third party allies are significantly influenced in their behavior towards America by out African aid. And I really don't think African aid has any effect at all on whether people join the PTA or pay taxes. Basically I think this is just a nice story you are telling yourself.
Africa may not yield a ton of benefits yet (although keep in mind how quickly their wealth and population are growing), but consider the aid we've given out since wwii - to Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, India. These places have much better relationships with us than you would expect (especially the ones we've been to war against), and I think it's pretty reasonable to think some of this is due to our aid programs. I definitely think the signalling benefits are there too. For the third one, I guess I can only speak for myself, but right now I work indirectly for the government, lead a Cub Scout troop (complete with weekly flag ceremonies etc.), and am happy to pay my taxes. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing any of these things if I didn't think America was a force for good in the world, and I can't imagine I'm the only one.
In an alternate history in which America did not give any significant foreign aid, but in which everything else is basically the same, do you think your feeling that America is a force for good in the world would be significantly weaker? Would you still lead a Cub Scout troop in this hypothetical? I bet you would.
You have to zoom out a little to include all the aid we've given since wwii, but yeah, I think so. It's hard for me to disentangle my feelings about America based on the "hard" military part of our foriegn policy from the "soft" aid part, but i really think they go hand in hand. The aid we give makes it much easier to believe the bad things we've done militarily were mistakes with good intentions versus selfish realpolitiks. There's a decent chance I would see America through a much more negative and cynical lens, which would make me less happy, and yeah might have led me to take a different job to avoid associating with the government, or work less hard at it, aggressively look for "tax breaks", and not want to indoctrinate my kids in American patriotism, or maybe not want to help in any programs my kids are part of at all, or maybe not even have kids at all. Think about civil society in Russia and China. Everything is highly multifactorial, but I see transactionalism vs. Altruism as two feedback loops that work in opposite directions, even on a national level, and foriegn aid is part of it.
Jesus. How much do we need to tell you before you remodel your entire life?
Can I get some priors?
1) How many genocides?
2) How many couped/color revolutioned countries?
3) How many dead/crippled children?
4) How many sex slaves?
5) How many '10% chance of ending civilization' problems?
(These, um, should be taken as orthogonal questions. And it's perfectly fair to say "I find these Good Deeds counterbalance them", and that no number of genocides would cause you to stop leading the Cubscout troop).
I feel pretty good that the answers to 1-4 in the last century are lower with America than without. 5 is a bit more uncertain, but someone was gonna invent nukes and AI eventually
Nestle's the answer to 3, and I'm pretty sure their formula disaster wouldn't have happened under other governments (in particular, a more fractured united states).
212,000 excess deaths of children per year? You're going to say that Britain or Russia would have countenanced that?
Well, okay, nestle and the oral polio vaccine (causing more cases of live polio than actual endemic cases of polio) -- but the vaccine had a significantly lower disease rate (212,000 deaths is a lot!).
(and Okay, Fair on 5. Although you're certainly missing some civilization ending interventions (like Deepwater Horizon, but I feel fairly certain someone would have done it -- and probably not the Japanese or Germans, who have better safety records than we do). )
Also, skimming what you sent, it looks like Senate hearings in the US, specifically testimony from an expert at USAID is what finally forced nestle to stop marketing formula in third world countries...
Another angle is that there's just too much stuff for any individual to pay attention to. USAID may be a very worthy organization, but what fraction of the population is going to take the time to decide whether to donate, and instead just default to "no." We all have limited capacity for collecting information and acting rationally. There are what, hundreds if not thousands of government programs that, upon careful analysis, are worthy investments? But there's no way I'm going to navigate all that stuff myself and decide what I want to fund.
We elect representatives to manage that complexity for us. If duly elected representatives think USAID is a good use of US tax dollars, then that's great, they saved me the effort of figuring it out myself and donating to them. In the event that I do form a strong opinion about a government program, I can lobby my representatives and advocate for my positions.
In particular, I don't think one should insist government is only for problems that the private sector can't solve (free riders, externalities, etc.). I think it's also good that governments can solve the problem of "there's too much stuff, much of it important, for individuals to think about."
Problem is, there were public servants who didn't think USAID was a good use of taxdollars, and had some fun finding the "stupidest things ever" in order to get to the root of the corruption. And yes, this was advocating by lobbying representatives, including Trump (as Chief Executive Officer of our Executive Branch)
I have to kinda dodge the question, I don't think there's an easy answer. In fact, I think the ideal role of government is something that will change over time, according to the current Overton window and moral zeitgeist.
I think some principles can be codified, like essential human rights. But beyond that, I personally take the view that's it better to focus on having a good process. Make sure elections are free, fair, and convenient. Have strong enforcement of corruption. Have robust checks and balances. The hope is that a good process will converge on good outcomes.
Some sort of voting system (not getting in the semantic quagmire of what "democracy" is or isn't) coupled with equality under the law and a reasonably free press seem to work pretty well.
Like even hardcore libertarians, who in principle think French dirigisme is as bad as anything ever done by Putin, would rather be born in France than Russia. Ultimately "the government gets to do whatever it thinks will increase their chance of re-election, under the costraint they cannot just fuck over X in particular or outlaw dissent" is not perfect but better than any alternative hitherto tried.
Why are we granting the assertion that foreign aid is charity? Because it looks like a duck and walks like a duck? Because "aid" sounds a lot like "charity" in the common parlance?
To somewhat echo Majromax below, governments have many rational reasons to provide foreign aid in whatever form, setting aside cover for CIA operations. Soft power projection is important. But also, growing the pie is important. Fighting the fight over there before it becomes a problem in your back yard is important.
If your targeted food aid prevents the displacement of whichever chunk of a foreign populace, that's cheaper and far easier than dealing with a million uneducated and malnourished migrants fleeing across your borders. Subsidizing infrastructure development, medicine, education, all of these foster the creation of new markets and potential economic partners.
You can address a fragmenting country with a carrier group, but you still have to send a humanitarian mission unless you're just going to blow everything to rubble and let God identify his own.
Realpolitik is not just about backstabbing when convenient. It's about pragmatism. The US won the post-WW2 world by taking the high road, relative to everyone else on the board (you can add however many caveats and asterisks as you'd like). Building more carrier groups than the rest of the world combined and sustaining the kind of military spend that our closest rival could only dream of was a side effect of running away with the ball, not the cause of our success. Foreign aid was a complement to our investment in human capital domestically, that went hand in hand with a rules-based world and domestic stability brought about by rule of law.
You'll damn well give Uncle Sam that tax dollar because he's got a better use for it than you do (or so it went before Reagan's famous line).
Mind you, there are certainly good and bad ways of doing any of the above, but that's downstream of the argument here.
I don't know why there has to be a special justification for using tax dollars for foreign aid as opposed to anything else. Why is it just to tax people without kids to pay for public schools, or to tax wealthy people for health and welfare services for poor people? (note that those items make up the vast majority of the budget of states like California https://ebudget.ca.gov/publication/e/2025-26/BudgetOverview)
Why, for that matter, is it just to tax me to pay to kill drug dealers in the Caribbean, if I think that is bad policy? Or to tax someone to pay for any government body that that person believes acts contrary to his interests, or acts in pursuit of poor policy?
Isn't the answer that, in a democratic society, that is the deal: The majority, or its representatives, get to decide how tax dollars are spent, subject only to established constitutional limits? Again, why is a special explanation needed?
And, the answer can't be that foreign aid doesn't serve US interests, because it is the majority that gets to decide what those interests are.
If your only justification for how you spend money when your side wins the election is "Vae victis!," then you don't really have a leg to stand on when the other side cuts funding to every cause you remotely like just to spite you after it wins, so if your goal is to argue that gutting USAID is bad, you need something more.
You are completely misunderstanding my point, which is about democratic theory, not "woe to the vanquished." In addition, if your model of democratic politics is simply that each "side" is trying to harm the other, you need a new model.
Moreover, no one said that it is the ONLY justification. For example, voting "just to spite" someone is unjustified for reasons unrelated to democratic legitimacy.
The answer to your "why is it just" questions, actually, is that the taxation is not just in any of those cases. Your answer ("that is the deal") is wrong because there is not in fact any deal (social contract) in place.
As for special justification for foreign aid, I think that even many foreign aid supporters (e.g. Scott in the OP) think of it as a kind of charity, not as something that serves the material interests of US citizens. You might say that since the majority wants to help poor Africans, it is therefore in the US interest to help poor Africans. But that just seems wrong.
>You might say that since the majority wants to help poor Africans, it is therefore in the US interest to help poor Africans. But that just seems wrong.
I actually addressed that: "And, the answer can't be that foreign aid doesn't serve US interests, because it is the majority that gets to decide what those interests are." To clarify, what US interests are is a contested question, so the majority gets to decide what they are (subject to civil liberties limitations). The majority also gets do decide whether sometimes govt can act in a manner contrary to the best interests of the US or its citizens.
Re the latter, suppose a border patrol officer in the desert is simultaneously approached by 1) a US citizen and his young son, who have gotten lost on a hike and ran out of water 3 hours ago; and 2) an illegal immigrant and his young son, who have been abandoned by coyotes and ran out of water two days ago. The officer has one bottle of water. Would a policy (supported by the majority of voters) that requires him to give the water to the illegal immigrants be illegitimate, simply because it did not prioritize the material interests of the US citizens? I don't see why it would be,
First, seconding Majroma above: soft power. Foreign aid is a carrot in foreign relations, often provides intelligence access, impacts local views on geopolitics, and none of that works if it's "US based organizations" rather than "the US government. I think a lot of people vote for US power.
Second: access. Suppose there's a famine in a nation exacerbated by an ongoing civil war. NGOs might be able to get food in, but they're less likely to be able to direct food to starving poor rather than soldiers, and very unlikely to be able to leverage aid to reduce military abuses in the conduct of the war. Direct governmental aid has, to some degree, the leverage I'd the government behind it and can potentially accomplish more.
Third: long term stability. Now, in light of the last year I don't think this has held up, but a year ago I would have said government directed aid was more likely to be able to maintain a given program over years and decades at a consistent level than the average NGO. For programs aiming to build up long term infrastructure, that's essential.
Fourth: coordinated decision making. Reaching agreement on how to use resources at a granular level is difficult (see: infinite EA debates), organizing and assigning decision makers is contentious, etc. Government has existing organisations with defined structures delegated to make these decisions, and the decision makers are far enough from the money source (voters) that individual decisions don't normally face pushback/argumentative delays. Again, last year blew a hole in this, but it had looked true until then.
I'm not interested in defending foreign aid based on soft power, because, although it might be true, I'm not willing to grant that once foreign aid stops giving us soft power, we should stop doing it.
I know you think that, but why? What possible justification could there be for spending resources in ways that won't benefit us even for 250 IQ LDT game theory reasons?
Why did I vote to increase my property taxes to fund a new swimming pool at the local high school, despite neither being a swimmer nor the parent of a child in the local school system? Why do people run into burning buildings to save strangers? Etc, etc.
It's obvious (I think. Maybe it's not obvious?) that there are 250 IQ LDT game theory reasons to run into burning buildings to save strangers. You want to live in the kind of society where people rescue each other from fires. It's less obvious for the high school pool, but you can kind of see how the same logic could apply (i.e. you want to live in the kind of society where recreational activies for teenagers are funded).
A good high school increases your property values, reduces the chances that teenagers will become hoodlums menacing you and your family, and maybe shapes the demographics of your neighborhood in a way you prefer.
It's also very likely that even though you don't have kids in the public high school, people in your local community who you care about do or will, so this also benefits people that you personally like and care about. Maybe you're even networking with local parents to raise money and building your relationship that way.
I mean maybe that's not why every person voted for those things but if none of them were true I don't think schools would get much funding. In the same way that I think the argument for government funded foreign aid is pretty weak if you don't think the government is getting something out of it geopolitically.
I can assure you that I did not vote to improve the swimming pool for that reason, nor do I think that the other voters who did so voted for that reason. The connection between a swimming pool and fewer teenage hoodlums is far, far too attenuated for that to be a plausible, or even rational, decision. And, no, I did not have friends or family with kids in the local schools.
Isn't the rationale the same for foreign aid? I.e., I want to live in the kind of world where children don't die of easily preventable disease, or suffer from malnutrition, etc?
Humans have innate moral sentiments that evolved as adaptive tools for group cooperation. While understandable sociologically, these sentiments are analytically irreducible at the individual level, as evidenced by frequent acts of seemingly inexplicable altruism.
I am not sure whether people who say things like this
(1) genuinely cannot conceive of one person preferring other people's lives to be better other than for "250 IA LDT game theory reasons", or
(2) can conceive of how that _could_ happen but have somehow convinced themselves that _obviously_ all apparent concern for other people is some sort of possibly-self-deceiving virtue-signalling bullshit, or
(3) understand perfectly well that some people actually do prefer other people's lives to be better even when the cost to themselves is non-zero but for some vice-signalling reason think they make themselves look better if they pretend to find that incomprehensible.
All three options seem strange to me. I think most likely it's #2: if one has in oneself only a howling void where others might have a conscience, then it's more comforting to decide that actually everyone else really has a howling void too but the other people are too stupid and self-deluding to admit it. (This is pretty uncharitable toward those people, but I actually can't think of _any_ opinion I could coherently have of people who profess to be baffled that anyone cares about the welfare of others, that wouldn't be uncharitable one way or another.)
It’s number 2. From my perspective, it looks like many people have decided that being FairBot is better than being PrudentBot. Using your terminology, it seems as though these people have a howling void in their brain where the utility maximization is supposed to be.
I think this might be the key difference between people who voluntarily donate to foreign aid, and those who do not but vote for taxation-based aid anyway. The latter may not care about Africans as much as you do, but they would still like to maintain American soft power.
I do think it was a mistake not to spend one sentence in the post saying this, to preempt the obvious objections. (I actually thought you *had* done so, but scrolled back up and couldn't find it—unless it's actually there and I missed it, in which case whoops.)
To be clear, I meant this as explanation not defense. It is a significant reason that people indifferent to charity in general nonetheless vote in favor of foreign aid but went unmentioned in your discussion of reasons people might do so.
I agree that it's a reason orthogonal to charitable goals and not worth defending on that basis.
In what world would foreign aid cease being a useful vehicle for soft power - that is, approximately everyone involved hates it, wishes it would stop, resents and resists the decisionmakers ultimately responsible - but somehow remain ethically desirable?
Scott is less utilitarian and more virtue ethicist and moral realist than he generally comfortably admits, see: kidney. I think this is true of many EAs, who clearly have a highly developed sense of guilt and moral reality but no non-util language for it, so it all gets filtered through the woo-woo math.
Even when unpopular with the very people they're supposedly benefiting? When it comes to moral reality, chanting about "the greater good" while doing something you know everybody's gonna hate tends to be a bad sign.
But that is my problem, Scott. USAID was not set up to be about 'let's be the good guys', it was about 'let's protect our interests and soft power is the way to go'.
I am not disputing that governments have the right to set a portion of the budget for foreign aid. I am disputing that USAID is the shining light its defenders claim. "But PEPFAR!" is the one answer that gets thrown back.
Fine. USAID operated *before* PEPFAR. Supposing there was no PEPFAR, what is the rationale for USAID *if* it is being used primarily as an engine of soft power regime change (hence the mockery about the transgender opera)?
While I think aid is generally good based on its own merits, I'm unconvinced by this near universal assumption that it is a vector for "soft power" Maybe very slightly and in exceptional situations but in the aggregate, US soft power is a result of US cultural hegemony. The refugees and starving villagers that receive those USAid branded sacks of rice have very little overall clout, even in poor third world countries, whether or not they are positive towards the US.
US soft power exists because in these countries, the children of the thin top layer of middle class to wealthy consume American media and absorb American cultural values. That's why even if China took on all of America's aid obligations, it would likely make little difference in soft power unless your point is the cynical idea that it's the corrupt politicians that skim off aid and charity that are intended to be influenced.
Ironically, the critical attitudes towards American hegemony and "imperialism" in US media has probably done more to damage US soft power than anything else because a large chunk of those wealthy to middle class 3rd world kids know and adopt all the anti imperialist and anti American talking points that they learned from Hollywood media. Though this is likely performative as they'll still gladly pick US universities over Chinese and US green cards over Chinese visas.
I get the sense that many people regard the 3rd world as monolithic, but there's a lot of stratification between classes, most people wouldn't even know what aid America sends to their country or whether it's been cut. Those that are aware, are too remote for most people to care, in the same way that people talk about the Appalachians and Rust Belt in America. Basically if you want soft power, fund Hollywood rah rah Murica! type media and spread it far and wide, aid is not the way to do it.
I think maybe the USAID stickers on the rice sacks are a bit misleading, in the sense that their presence makes people think they're the intended mechanism of action, when they're not really. The idea, for the relevant kind of soft power (which is different from the kind that comes from Hollywood), is for poorer-country governments to have a sense that the U.S. will help them with their problems. Starvation in random villages isn't *as* much of a problem for the villagers' national government as it is for the villagers themselves, but it is still a problem for the national government, which would prefer to see it addressed.
It was much more important in the context of the Cold War, when there was a plausible moral challenge to the US hegemony. Of course, these days the challenge comes from within.
American cultural hegemony is certainly another huge source of soft power!
And I agree that foreign aid does not generate most of its soft power via direct good will from individual recipients.
But that doesn't address other factors, such as a carrot (or stick with the threat of stopping) for other nations' governments, opportunities to insert intelligence assets, connections made with government officials in the process of organizing distribution, or the simple global benefit of the optics (belt-and-road never managed to look nearly as "we're good guys here for you!" As simple food delivery to starving people does).
I suspect you underestimate how many people would check it, but I may be overestimating. I know I would check it in a heartbeat; the government is IMO as likely to use my money to make things worse as better. I would roll my eyes at the caveat and not actually believe it; the government is lying through their teeth as usual, yada yada. In defense of this statement, I have a firm belief that the world in which I just reallocate all $X to charities I am confident in (or just whichever I prefer of GiveWell’s top ones!) is much better in terms of lives saved/utilons/however you wish to view it, and I would expect this argument to be widely made and not uncommonly followed.
(I’m not sure I wouldn’t follow it! It would depend on how much $X was, since I don’t actually trust the government to calculate how much I should be giving to charity (and my own calculations end up affected by ‘how much good does an extra dollar do right now’ concerns), but it would also be a convenient anchor point - and really tempting from a virtue signaling/proving the point perspective.)
You might try comparing private/public schools - that has some of the same logic as charity, where if the government is funding it out of everyone’s pockets it’s much harder for individual parents to pay for everyone’s school and also a different one for their own kids out of their own pockets, so you end up with it being very hard for anyone not already rich to access non-government schooling. Private schools can benefit people a whole lot, though (getting out of the wrong school can do so all by itself, but doing so without moving is AIUI hard for public schools) so rich people still do. Can you see any shift for either schooling or charity, in terms of the number of private dollars allocated, when government takes over in a given location or significantly ups the amount they’re contributing? The anecdotes I’ve heard make it sound like small-scale local charity was historically more common, but the plural of anecdote is not, in this context, data.
On the idea of opt-out check boxes on tax forms, I find myself puzzled by things like the Presidential Election Campaign Fund box, or how the state I live in staples a bunch of voluntary donation options to things like renewing a driver's license. In theory, I too enjoy the idea of giving citizens regular opportunities to decide directly how their government operates. In practice, they always feel like some lawmaker's pet amendment from 20 years ago, a handful of random funds that are a tiny fraction of overall spending and don't seem especially high-impact. Where are the boxes to say I want more or less money to go to Medicare, Social Security, or defense spending? (Marginally more or less, mind you, not "give me a full refund", which would run into the free rider problems in the "Insomnia" section.)
I don't believe the Presidential Election Campaign Fund box actually increases YOUR taxes. It just directs more money from the general tax pool to that.
It does. You pay $5 more in tax bill. I always pay it because of a hypothetical future where politicians only can use these funds and don’t have to fundraise/no pacs.
Not true; TGGP is correct. It says right on the form (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf): "Checking a box below will not change your tax or refund." (Also it's $3, not $5??)
edit: I should say explicitly that I'm talking about US federal taxes. I'll be less baffled if it turns out to work the way you describe in another country, or for one of the states.
Yep. I think if we had boxes for things like defense spending, I'd want it to work that way, letting taxpayers slightly shift funding priorities rather than directly getting their money back, again for reasons of free riders/not giving people an incentive to make other people worse off.
Meanwhile, the voluntary donations on the driver's license form do involve choosing to pay more money. To me this makes them more of an advertisement and a way to reduce friction in donating to a (not very EA) charity, rather than offering me any sort of control over government funding.
For a post on some of the nuts and bolts of how USAID in particular made a difference in the world -- with two very cool, short anedocates that made a real difference in how I think about aid -- I highly recommend:
Nice anecdotes, but when people are defending USAID for public consumption, it *is* "that starving kid in Sudan" and not "We helped modernise the Moldovan wine industry".
I think if tax donations were voted on for such concrete examples, people would say "what the hell is the Moldovan wine industry to me, if the Moldovan government can't get off its ass and figure out how to talk to its European neighbours about 'hey how can we make our shitty wine better?' that's not my problem".
Hospital bed story? Yeah, that's much better. And the kind of thing that should be done. But I'm willing to bet that political calculations mean that more of the "Moldovan wine industry so we can kick the Russians in the nuts economically" get funded over "some backwater rundown banana republic".
Private charities can do the hospital beds thing, but that doesn't mean USAID shouldn't do it as well. What I'm saying is, cut out the Moldovan wine and if you need to, stick it under some different umbrella or branch, and make USAID really about "equipment for hospitals where we won't see a dime return". *Then* the supporters of USAID can crow about their superior virtue with their "billionaires are just eeeevil sadists" commentary patting themselves on the back in the comments section there.
Interesting hypotheticals, but if I wanted to donate money to an anti-woke organization (say, one opposing, oh, I don't know, feminism), who would I give it to? Just the RNC?
For immigration there's Steven Miller's America First thing. For anti-antiracism there's Chris Rufo...
There was a time when I was particularly mad at "woke" and almost donated to Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign. The only reason I didn't was that I knew I would be bombarded with infinite solicitation texts and emails for the rest of my life.
So to me, the primary justified purpose of a government is solving coordination problems. The poster frames things in these terms, and I read Scott as spending the first part of the article trying to see if charity can be framed as a coordination problem, and finding it mostly can't. I agree.
To me, the secondary justified purpose of a *democratic* government is economies of scale.
300,000,000 individuals each trying to do the research on which charities to give to and writing individual checks to the best two dozen each month and etc. is an inefficient nightmare that's doomed to flounder on incompetency, distraction, and zero-sum marketing wars, even if every one of those people sincerely wants it to happen and is willing to spend their own money on it.
Having all of that centralized through a single group that can hire the best experts and devote entire careers to getting competent at it, collect all the money through an existing channel with tiny added overhead, distribute funds from a singular hub in large chunks, and use its monopsony power to negotiate and force improvements, simply buys vastly more good for vastly less resources.
This is the practical justification - people can get more of what they want if they contribute to a central fund like this, than if they each try to figure it out on their own.
The moral justification for doing this on issues where less than 100% of taxpayers want something verges into the area of social contract theory. I acknowledge that social contract theory isn't 'real' in that you don't actually get a contract with the right to refuse, and the cost of renouncing citizenship and starting somewhere you like better is not zero. But I still think it's a very useful rhetorical device in clarifying the intuition of 'if you want the benefits of a community that pools its resources to do things that the community as a whole wants, you won't approve of 100% of the things your membership dues are used for, but you will get way more of the things you do want than if you tried living on your own outside any community'.
Governments exist to fill power vacuums. That's how they have been for thousands of years.
The experts on charity are at GiveWell, not the US government.
"Club goods" is part of my explanation for why it's sensible for governments to restrict immigration. But I don't believe that's why government exists.
On the number of taxpayers who would check the opt-out box, the number who currently check the presidential campaign fund box (about 3%), which does not increase tax liability, suggests that more people than you think might opt-out. What percentage of people make the small contributions solicited by the cashiers in Supermarket check-out lines? I expect that some of the folks in the foreign aid NGO community who raise money professionally have analyzed the likely effectiveness of opt-out and opt-in options.
I think the other people’s money force multiplier does work.
From an individual perspective, you’re being given a choice between a world where you pay $100 less in taxes and a world where you pay the $100 and the rest of the country gives a collective $20 billion. That’s an amazing return on $100. Now that’s an amazing tradeoff that probably makes some people who aren’t even that generous feel reasonable about losing $100.
my argument in favor of government spending on USAID and similar programs is that giving a similar amount of money as a direct bribe to foreign dictators would probably be "money well spent" in terms of getting their cooperation on geostrategic goals (and their opposition to rivals' geostrategic goals), but it's money even more well spent if we make the lives of the actual people in that country better so that they have a favorable opinion of us even if the dictator later gets toppled
Let's say that the US government for some reason decided to make US taxpayer funding of ICE completely voluntary. Instead of a flat portion of taxes going to ICE, there is a custom 'fill in the blank' option on everybody's tax forms that would allow them to decide how much money to give to ICE. Pretty much everyone would write '$0' or '$5' and ICE would have a budgeting shortfall.
However, if the immigration issue became severe enough, and Congress refused to revoke this 'voluntary funding of ICE' law, maybe oligarchs and wealthy Silicon Valley people would step in. Maybe investors from Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be recruited. Minor GoFundMes would try to 'chip in', but the bulk of the 'voluntary funding' would come from wealthy investors.
This would create authority issues for ICE. ICE is supposed to be a federal agency that is accountable to the public and the federal government. However, if 25% of its funding comes from an Elon Musk adjacent crowd of investors, and 25% of its funding comes from a Larry Ellison adjacent crowd of investors, then these figures are going to have undeniable say in how ICE gets ran. Even if laws get passed that attempt to limit their formal influence (hiring, staffing, policy directives, etc), the implicit threat of the possibility of the funding getting revoked would give them a lot of implicit influence.
I think this principle applies to most questions of public policy. In theory, market-based approaches could handle most political issues. However, market-based approaches create drastic inequality where the wealthiest people of society are able to run major sectors of society as they see fit with minimal feedback from the public. Therefore, there is an unspoken norm of resolving political questions through the arena of public policy and not markets to preserve the status quo where normal people feel like they have a direct voice in the political process. It's like welfare/redistribution but for political influence instead of money.
We can then quibble over what counts as a 'political question'. There is kind of a bifurcated concern at play here: if you make your definition of 'political' too narrow, then society grows to feel like it is ran by and molded in the image of wealthy successful oligarchs where the discursive voice of normal people is not valued, and if you make your definition of 'political' too broad, then you create societies where the net aggregate trajectory of the society is negative and harmful because the best and smartest and wisest people do not have enough power. But I think the funding and scope of programs like USAID was small enough that if you are passionate about it you can advocate for the government using taxpayer dollars to fund it because you are passionate about it without feeling like a preference molding totalitarian.
As long as it was there, I can see that you could perhaps advocate for continuing it without "feeling like a preference molding totalitarian," but once it's been cut, I think having to argue for reinstituting it forces you to confront what you're doing.
I think using the term 'political' in the narrow sense you likely use it leads to the oligarch society I mentioned above. Markets do handle most ethical and societal concerns better than centralized actors, and they also preserve liberty much better, but a world where markets are expected to handle most issues of serious societal ethical and political concern is a society where the perspectives of normal people will matter much less than they do now. Debating questions of charity and global well-being as questions of governmental policy allows not rich people to have more of a say on these topics than they otherwise would.
To use charity as an example, a world where the government allocates funds to programs like USAID gives common people some say on what charitable causes most resources go to. In comparison, if the government does not, and 90%+ of charitable donations come from Mackenzie Bezos and Elon Musk, the average person gets no say on how they donate their private funds. You can say the latter world preserves liberty, and also might be better than the former world because someone like Elon Musk is likely really good at spending money, but it makes the 'common man's' perspective basically irrelevant. If you do this at scale, you get a society where the voices of most people do not matter in terms of how society progresses in a political and ethical dimension.
I did not say that we should donate to Terrorists. I did not say that a DEI musical was a good idea to perform in Ireland.
In principle, yes, government allocation to USAID means we get to have a say. In practice, we follow at the bootheels of Gates and company, and they get richer.
Bill Gates would actually be one the best possible picks to direct charitable funding. Leftists complain about philanthropy funded & directed by the wealthy rather than tax dollars, but they're wrong. On the other hand, Matt Yglesias is right that "the groups" funded by the wealthy pursue political projects that are unpopular and hurt the Democratic party. Maybe a good thing if you dislike that party :)
I think a society where figures like Bill Gates were unconstrained to shape the future of American society without artificial government interference would lead to paradise, and it would create a paradise 58% of the American population would despise and topple. Even though it has low approval ratings, I think the government is usually pretty good at catering to the 'median voter', and politicians who do not do this get punished. The 'median voter' is just an idiot. But they are an idiot who deserves some say in the discourse.
> although I can’t find straight income data, more educated people are more likely to support [foreign aid programs], so probably supporters are on average wealthier than opponents
r=-0.1422 for correlation between income and support for foreign aid (q44mf2, "Economic assistance to needy people around the world", which was overall pretty evenly split between increasing, decreasing, and maintaining spending). Given, they support an overall smaller government (r=-0.2351), but even if you take foreign aid support minus a domestic spending support composite (average of science, military, unemployment, medicare, environment, and education) that is still negatively correlated with income (r=-0.1). Even just support for foreign aid spending minus support for unemployment spending is negatively correlated with income (r=-0.0526).
Here's the script I used for analysis. It's written by AI, but I reviewed it and also sanity checked the results manually (e.g. people in the highest three tiers of income proportionally supported increasing foreign aid less than those who were in other tiers of income). https://gist.github.com/PlasmaPower/0db1df97bf0eb3237b7b49111a7e42f6
I wouldn't sign the military funding contract because I don't believe there are any plausible invasion scenarios and a standing army is more likely to be used for domestic oppression.
I don't think so, no. The occupation forces in Germany had almost a million men between them, even after the postwar demobilization - the contemporary US has 30 times the land area, 5 times the population, a functioning state, a heavily armed civilian population, huge expanses of rugged terrain, and a porous northern border with an almost indistinguishable population. Occupying the continental United States would mean tens of millions of men, with supply lines measured in thousands of miles, fighting an incredibly bloody guerilla conflict for the foreseeable future. No state on Earth is capable of that, and all of them know it.
Surely there are things besides a full-blown occupation of the entire country that we might not want to let people do, ideally without having to answer the thorny question of first use of nukes?
Obviously, but the question was invasion. "This buys us the physical security of 300 million people" is a very different argument from "this buys us influence over other nations' trade policy" (or whatever other foreign policy aim is under consideration), even if you think it's worth it either way.
Can you give an example? I think if the US did not have a military, and therefore would presumably have stopped throwing its weight around interfering in other countries' affairs, any invasion of the US would be pretty unlikely.
You don't think we should have a military, but also think it's the nukes that protect us from invasion... who do you think designs, builds, maintains, and operates the nukes and their associated logistics chains (warheads, delivery vehicles and their parts and fuel, storage facilities, targeting, intelligence for determining targets and if/how/where to launch, &c).
Do you envision a system where we somehow dismantle all of the military except the parts required to be a nuclear power? Do you think it would contribute to global stability (or even just American well-being) if we had no military options between "surrender" and "thermonuclear war"?
The top comment is somebody who stated they wouldn't sign the military contract, i.e. who wouldn't fund a military. Not sure how to square that with wanting there to be a military.
Your comment follows on by listing all the non-military reasons why an occupation of the continental United States would be impossible. Am I to understand that you nonetheless would sign the contract? Otherwise we're back to having to square those positions.
I think they were answering the question (of whether the US would be invaded if they didn't have a standing army) in isolation and not commenting on any of the broader topics in this thread.
As the owner of a tax preparation company I can assure you that most people would check any box on their return that increases their refund. They would find many rationalizations for it, but they would choose bigger refund almost every time.
Is USAID funding up to a vote? Trivial no if taken literally, (no federal referendum on the matter), but also false in the looser sense that USAID has never been even in the top 5 (10, 20, maybe even 50?) issues in any federal election.
So all this modeling of how voters form preferences seems pointless, if the intensity of preferences are far too low to swing elections.
Looking at it, USAID was a relic of cold-war soft-power strategy, and coasted on inertia for a few decades until someone tried to find savings that don't piss off the voters.
In a broad sense, no. In a narrow sense, every issue is "up for a vote". Campaigns look at exit polls and dig deep into the cross tabs. After the election, they look at who voted, and how, and all down the ballot. If they can pick up a few voters in precinct 43 by enacting policy X, they'll do it and be sure the mailers they send it to precinct 43 mention their stance on X.
If few people care about X among their constituents, they can trade their vote to someone who does, in exchange for electoral aid or help with a policy they do care about or just straight pork funneled to their district.
Ok, but does USAID clear even the low bar of making it onto a flyer? Eisenhower is a long time ago, but maybe the more recent changes that made it into a standalone agency (in 1998) could be looked at. Initial research into it makes it look 100% insider-driven, which is what I'd have expected. No voter ever told a pollster "I think USAID should be directly operating under the secretary of state instead of under IDCA". No voter was ever asked the question, either.
I have no doubt that campaigners are sophisticated, but saying "every issue is up for a vote" is clearly false. Voter preferences are coarse and elections are low-bandwidth. Maybe USAID clears the threshold, but it'd be easy to find policies with even-lower-voter-valence.
I'm not claiming the whole electorate is interested in every issue. I'm claiming that most issues have interested parties. For USAID, in certain zip codes of Maryland and Virginia it was a big deal when DOGE started slashing funding.
And I'm sure decisions like moving operations under the secretary of state aren't driven by electoral concerns. But politicians have multiple groups of people who are driven by narrow interests. Sometimes they pursue those constituents for campaign contributions, and sometimes they do it for votes.
I always wonder how precisely can they trust those exit polls. I guess it's fine when you just want to know how male demographics vote, but I don't think I can't trust its prediction for NB Asian wheelchair-user betel-addicted people. Seems like lizardman constant would drown anything too intersectional groups.
And it was a personal policy push by GWB that AFAICT was the result of the man's own (and his wife's) preferences, not voters'. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means trying to identify the cause of PEPFAR by talking about voters using government as a commitment strategy will explain much less than "GWB visited Gambia in the 1990s and decided the AIDS issue was something he personally cared about".
Yeah, I think discussing the voters' preferences for something like this when it's initially created is sort of pointless. Voters don't really know the plausibility of this sort of thing in advance. You need somebody to get the ball rolling for a while.
You could say something like "voters want the government to do something about HIV/AIDS" but that's about it.
GWB had a mandate based on "compassionate conservatism" and PEPFAR and PMA are obvious outgrowths of this idea. Voters absolutely supported the broader concept of "a president who does good-guy Christian stuff"
Not an economist here, but I think you've missed the revealed preference argument. Let's take a close corollary from other rationalist arguments:
Say you believe candidate X will win the next election. What does that mean? It's easy enough to give an opinion when it costs you nothing to be wrong. But if instead I asked you to bet $100 of your own money on candidate X winning, you might reconsider whether Y has a better chance of winning, or maybe keep your money and not bet at all because you're uncertain.
I think there's something similar happening here. Some politician comes along and says, "X will do good in the world. Not only that, but I'm going to wave my hand vaguely at the magic slush fund while promising you it won't cost you anything, directly, so vote for more of X."
And in a false but still very real way this is how it works. False, because there is no free lunch. But still real because whether we spend that money on foreign aid or the military or toss it down the Money Hole or whatever, it won't change how much Uncle Sam takes in taxes from your paycheck this year or next. Maybe it hurts a smidge more in inflation, but there's no direct way to connect the policy to its true cost - for this or anything else.
So politics is a cheap hack that reverses the betting game, where instead of having skin in the game, you draw from the magic slush fund. This makes it easy to look at a poll and say, "look, I'm just doing what 80% of the population would do anyway, if given the chance." But there's no skin in the game for any of those poll participants either. How does a good rationalist dismiss what people do when it costs them something, in favor of a cost-free opinion? Nobody here, the voter or the poll participant, has skin in this game.
Because of this disconnect - where you use other people's money to remove your rationalist sense of skin in the game - I think an appeal to government programs should be used only when no other option is available, and that sparingly. Foreign aid is far from that threshold for me.
Under futarchy politics would be very different of course. Hopefully for the better, although it might start by "Giving the people what they want... good and hard".
"But there's no skin in the game for any of those poll participants either. How does a good rationalist dismiss what people do when it costs them something, in favor of a cost-free opinion? Nobody here, the voter or the poll participant, has skin in this game."
This is not a standard that people apply to any other political decision. Suppose some politician is saying, "We should give the DoT 10% more funding to build roads." A poll of voters shows that a majority of voters support this idea. But the voters who say there should be more funding for roads have no skin in the game, and their taxes will change minimally if it passes. Therefore, we shouldn't appeal to the poll, and stick with other options, like maintaining the same level of funding.
You can swap out "less" with "more" or "DoT" with any other government agency without affecting the structure of the argument, so this functions as a fully general argument for ignoring polls about how much to spend on various government functions.
This is exactly right. I tried to address this concern in my comment. All of politics is a game of separating the decision from the skin in the game cost for most voters (except for cases of direct costs, e.g. a 5% tax on gas). We're far from the days when Athenians would vote to go to war, and then turn around and prepare their sons for battle. We have a paid standing army and haven't used the draft in decades to insulate the public from exactly that kind of skin in the game.
I'm not saying polls should be entirely disregarded. I'm saying they should be treated differently when considering that the collective decision-making process is designed to separate costs from benefits. Sometimes they'll be useful, but not always.
To take your example, of building roads through collective action, we should use the best tools available to determine allocation of resources. Personally, if I had a poll result of people asking to spend less on roads, but data suggesting that if I don't increase road funding it will result in dramatic increases in driving accidents and car damage, I'll probably increase road funding. Because what does the public know about the minutiae of the transportation budget over 5 years?
I used to be pretty left wing but I've come around to the Musk/Trump position on USAID and similar endeavors. I see a firehose of money (and not just money but attention/effort/thought) going out the door, with plenty of examples of it being spent on absolutely ridiculous things.
Simultaneously I see opportunities everywhere for improving the lives of US citizens that are not acted on. I see resource constraints when responding to natural disasters. I see issues with the funding of our entitlement programs. I see fraud. I see old regulations that no longer serve us. And I wonder why we aren't focusing on those things first. It's not just the money, but attention and will to solve problems, which are in limited supply.
Perhaps if I felt that all the people freaking out about USAID cared equally about those other things I would be more inclined to look deeply into the details and think hard about whether we have made a mistake or whether there are parts that should be brought back. But I don't feel that. Mostly they don't seem to care that much about improving the lives of Americans.
Someone in the comments talked about work USAID did to improve the wine industry in Moldova - cool and not ridiculous. But where's the passion for conducting research that can improve the wine industry in the US? Why shouldn't we have the absolute best wine in the world that no other country can touch with all the resource we have? Apply that idea to literally everything.
Most of the rationalist/EA argument about USAID is about PEPFAR, the incredibly effective global anti-AIDS project, not so much the "we made wine better" thing.
Unfortunately it was not the only thing USAID did, just the most defensible. Also unfortunately, in politics doing big things is often easier than little things.
> Why shouldn't we have the absolute best wine in the world that no other country can touch with all the resource we have?
I don't know much about wine, but I suspect that the answer would start with: "everything in USA is way more expensive and way more regulated than in Moldova".
A more subtle argument could be that when you deal with wine producers in Moldova, you can give them a proposal like "I will give you lots of money if you make better wine", and their options are only to accept or reject. You can threaten to walk away if they don't do what you ask of them.
But when you give a proposal to wine producers in USA, another politician can compete with you by giving them a better proposal, such as "I will give you the same amount of money if you... keep doing what you were doing already, and vote for me". Guess which one of you will be more popular.
I mean, USA already spends zillions of dollars on its farmers, and the purpose is usually not increasing the quality of food, but producing more corn syrup that fuels the obesity epidemic. The thing is, unlike Moldovan producers, American producers can vote on what you subsidize them for. Seems like they don't want to be incentivized to compete on higher quality.
I think the US does spend far, far more attention and money on domestic concerns than on USAID. To clarify your position, which of the following statements would you most disagree with?
1. USAID was about 0.3% of federal spending before the cuts.
2. It saved tens of millions of lives, in addition to other quality of life benefits.
3. The cost is worth that benefit.
Or do you agree with those 3 statements and it's purely other concerns that make you against USAID overall?
Indeed! There is so much rigorous work on this topic that this post missed the mark. A little surprised as this community is pretty familiar with Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan among others...
I think the biggest problem with all debate about foreign aid, including this post, is that foreign aid is assumed to be a problem of morality/altruism.
I'm willing to bet that all foreign aid currently given can be justified on narrowly self-interested grounds. Every dollar that the USA (and every other country) gives to overseas aid is more than recouped in increased trade, security, and other benefits.
In which case, the problem of voter antipathy towards foreign aid is a problem of (1) lack of voter understanding about the benefits (99% of the issue); and (2) voter worries about the use of aid for transfers and corruption (1%, in reality much less).
Which, as always, suggests that the political problem is the poisonous media environment, supported by right wing political parties that are no longer fit for purpose.
I'd like to know what the obvious reasons are, because they're not obvious to me at all!
To settle the bet, there'd be a few possibilities. One simple starter would be to look at how much of the foreign aid budget gets spent on goods from domestic suppliers. My guess is that once those are subtracted, the amount spent on foreign aid would start to look very small indeed.
Then you'd have to make some effort to measure benefits accruing to the home country from international development, increased trade, and international good will.
I think that (a) international aid helps to make the world more peaceful and developed; and (b) we all benefit from that. If I'm wrong about those assumptions, then I might be wrong that international aid is also in what economists call our "rational self interest".
Actually, now I do wonder if I misinterpreted your "every dollar" claim as a claim about every individual dollar whereas you might have meant that the aggregate has a positive return on investment? But I don't think there's much of a reason to believe that money spent domestically is necessarily in the national interest.
Yes, that's right that I was talking about a positive return on investment. Like, if you spend 100 bucks on mosquito nets for Africa, Americans don't directly get the benefit of those nets. But if the nets are purchased from a US company (as they often are), then maybe 50 bucks of that 100 bucks in aid flows back to the USA directly (so I think it doesn't count as a loss); and the other 50 bucks may get made up in other benefits, leading to a total net positive.
On the national interest - in general I think that a healthier, more peaceful world is very much in the national interest; as is a world with lots of positive feelings about Americans.
Subtracting the amount spent on domestic suppliers implies that they all would be unemployed without foreign aid because the internal demand for everything is already satisfied. You can argue for <1 multiplier, but simply zeroing it out is obviously ridiculous.
Wut? It's exports. Exports are a positive component of GDP.
I think you're trying to do economics that is way too clever. Everything I'm saying is at a really basic level. I'm sure there are clever multiplier effects on all components of my argument (I'd suggest the multiplier effect on altruism would be very large). But let's keep it simple for the sake of a BTL blog argument. On this basic level, exports are in our own rational interest; so a dollar spent to gain a dollar of exports is a net neutral.
Exports are good if and only if you're getting paid for them, enough to offset the opportunity cost of doing something else. That's, like, the entire point. In case of aid you're spending one dollar to gain zero dollars.
> First, you could argue that supporters are using the government as a force multiplier. That is, suppose that 51% of people support spending $100 of their own money on foreign aid. If, instead of donating personally, they vote for a law that taxes everyone $100, they can make their “donation” go twice as far by “matching” it with $100 checks from the 49% of unwilling voters
My intuition has always been something much stronger than this. If your vote is decisive, then you’re getting more like 100 million x leverage. I think this intuition is clearer for something like taxes. No one is going to donate to the government, so by proposing a tax increase you go from zero dollars donated to your $100 plus $100 from everyone else. (Probably that’s what the assurance contract section is about, I just skimmed the post tbh.)
> This is the virtue signaling model of voting, and it implies that
This seems to badly misunderstand the concept of "virtue signaling". It assumes that the audience for virtue signaling is... yourself. There is very little reason you'd need to send a signal from yourself to yourself.
The right way to virtue signal on the proposition in question is to vote against it, and then lie to everyone about how you voted. Or, to tell everyone in advance how you plan to vote for it, because you're virtuous. But no part of either plan requires you to vote for it. Your vote is secret, and has no signaling value.
> But you could argue that poll respondents face the same incentive to virtue signal (polls also don’t change your taxes). Answers to poll questions do change based on changing realities (eg people are less likely to support foreign aid if they’re told the budget is tight), but, uh, maybe people are also trying to signal fiscal discipline, and, uh, somehow keep all of these signals straight so that it exactly matches what you would expect if they were voting and responding based on true beliefs.
Boy, this is unworthy of you.
Poll respondents, of course, have a much stronger incentive toward virtue signaling than voters do, because they're making a statement about themselves to whoever is polling them. This problem is so well known that it has its own name and its own wikipedia page:
> In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.
> The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports.
But sure, you can use rhetorical tricks to imply that the very concept of social desirability bias is ridiculous, too. Who's to say what's right and what's wrong?
I think the original argument is also meant to invoke the moral cost of using the police to extract taxes from your fellow citizens. Empathetic people often struggle with that aspect of democracy.
For instance: they raised my property tax recently, and it’s been kind of difficult and frustrating. My fellow citizens did that to me, knowing I’m not able to resist their police forces. Nobody here thinks my fellow citizens bear any moral responsibility for my bad experience? That aspect of it doesn’t even cross your minds?
Reading all this, it’s like you think you get moral credit for the help done in disbursing the money, but no moral debit for the harm done collecting it — is that it?
I have a friend who can’t afford some medicine he needs. If he didn’t have to pay income tax, he could afford it. So you guys get moral charity credit for the medicine an African guy gets, but you’re not responsible for the medicine my friend lacks?
I’m not saying not to do foreign aid, I’m just saying you should consider the other side of the moral ledger. The people you take the money from have material needs too; not all US taxpayers are free from want.
(The property tax example is real but I’ve altered the details of the medicine example for anonymity.)
I want your buddy to get free at point of service medicine, and I want your property tax to be lower in relative terms (given you have to struggle.)
I would happily pay two or three or five or ten times the tax I do, if it resulted in a more equitable society. Unfortunately, everyone needs to pay at once or I'll run out of shit real quick, even though I have a lot of shit. Double unfortunately, enough people think that it is necessary for you to sweat about losing your house/ your friend to ration insulin or some shit in order to preserve my right to find out that I had 30k in one of my checking accounts by accident just sitting there, not even getting 4%.
So, I'll vote and stump for all the good things all the time, and maybe one day you will get a check from the government that has .5 of one of my cents in it, and we can call it good.
I'm not in that bad of a situation, it's not like a crisis. Just frustrating and troublesome. My complaint is less that me and mine are struggling and more that mainstream political ethics accords our trouble no moral weight.
Consensual charity and non-consensual taxation may be indistinguishable from the perspective of the person receiving the benefits, and maybe also to people with enough money not to care. But I don't think you're reasoning correctly if you don't accord some significance to the difference between acting with consent and without.
I just can't take hand wringing about consent seriously when we are born into a web of relations, duties, obligations, privileges, rites, and rights that one may not opt out of piecemeal.
Having feelings about this particular bit of compelled remuneration for services unrequested but not that bit comes of as special pleading, so the entire moral equation cancels to zero for me.
If someone wants to be a pure non cap non lib non social full anarchist, that is respectable, but if they accept any law but the law of nature you are defacto in favor of non-consensual social extraction, they just have a different place where they draw the boundary between freedom and tyranny.
TL;DR: being mad about "Im being taxed for X" rather than "I'm being taxed at all" or "They are spending my tax for X" makes no sense to me.
Given that I find the moral nature of the plight illustrated incoherent, my frustration shifts from the extraction side of the issue to the distribution side.
But if there were a checkbox to opt out of foreign aid, turbotax might decide to check it by default in order to claim in their advertisements that the average refund they got their clients was $N higher. If this or something similar happened, the opt out fraction could well become 90% rather than 10%.
If I honestly asked my tax preparation clients and explained the refund with and without the checkbox 90% (at least) would take the higher refund. Just to head off the natural response...I am a two person shop with a sophisticated, upper middle class clientele. Not a refund mill.
I strongly disagree that only 10-40% of voters would opt out. I think almost every Republican and a lot of democrats would. When you’re taxing someone 55%, it is a no brainer to not outsource charitable giving to the US government. Not checking the box would be irrational.
I may have missed it, but what about the expert direction of aid as a feature of government being the mechanism of aid distribution rather than relying on private donation?
Even in a diminished state, the State Department Office on East Africa will have a much better idea of how to help people in Sudan than a guy in Iowa deciding where he should send some charity money.
GiveWell would have an even better idea. Donors, like myself, can choose to listen to GiveWell rather than someone who can seize my money without having to convince me to part with it.
Maybe it's naive, but I think good things are good, and bad things are bad, and if you can do good things but don't you are bad.
So, I can't rob you with a gun and give your money to the poor (yet!) because society has not yet collapsed to the point where the benefit outweighs the damage.
The government, on the other hand, exists as a big gun pointed at everybody. When we use the government to take peoples money to do good things, we actually accomplish at least two good things, maybe even three! We get good things, we get wealth redistribution, and we pass some good karma on down the line! What a steal!
My intuitive explanation for the demand for taxation has always been that one can reasonably prefer not to diminish one's relative status in the service of virtue. If you want to be virtuous and give money to charitable causes, but doing so actually increases the utility (status, chance of attracting mates, success in competing for scarce resources or positional goods) of those who *didn't* donate, you're not only in some sense being a 'sucker,' but you are literally *creating a selection function against those who agree with you.* Coordinating virtuous action so as not to make defection a dominant strategy and specifically give a leg up to those who are not virtuous seems like a legitimate reason to enlist the coercive aid of government in the service of things that are good.
I argue for a variant of this: If you are going to extract money from the public, the way to do it while causing the least public objection and the least "economic distortion" is to tax people in such a way that the after-tax status hierarchy is the same as the before-tax status hierarchy. Universally, this is called a "fair" taxation system.
And a "fair" tax system is necessary because societies (or social systems) compete with each other in a more or less Darwinian way, and the most successful (i.e., most competitive) systems we've seen have a "welfare system" that consumes a large part of economic output. The optimal way to obtain the money you need for the necessary welfare system is a fair taxation system...
Making donations is a form of self-harm. If you consider yourself to be good and people who don't donate to be bad, then you will perceive your donation to undermine the cause of good in the sense that the good are now poorer than they were before while the bad are just as rich as they ever were. Taxes force the bad to donate so that the good do not self-annihilate. I'm not advocating anything here. I'm explaining why people want other people to be forced to donate through taxes.
Sure, people donate and do foreign aid because they think it is good. But it also harms themselves and makes them weaker than those that don't donate. I mean, why don't donors give away 100% of what they have? Because it would be bad for them and good for their enemies.
You seem to have a very unusual definition of good, if "spending some money to help others" = "making good people (the donor) poorer" = "undermining the cause of good".
If morality meant following your incentives at every moment, we wouldn't need a separate word for it. Typically, good people e.g. don't steal, even when they could do that with impunity. By the same logic, that makes good people poorer, and undermines the cause of good.
Self-harm for the purpose of self-harm is bad. Finding win/win solutions is good. But sometimes you find yourself in a position to help a stranger who *cannot* reciprocate. Maybe the stranger has nothing you need. Or maybe the transaction costs would make his attempt to reciprocate meaningless. Like, there is not much that an average African child could do for me, to reciprocate for being saved from malaria. Even meeting me to shake my hand and say "thank you" to my face would already vastly exceed the cost of the anti-malaria net. In such cases, goodness means helping others without expecting anything in return. (Sometimes people say "pay if forward", but they typically don't check it later.)
It is possible for the government to have real comparative advantage at providing certain goods, even if they could support either an independent market or be supplied through individual action (having to do with economies of scope or complements in production with core government activities)
A good example for this is food aid. The government already has a strong sourcing system for the useful kinds of food, (for rations for the military), and needs to exercise it anyway (for military purposes), so the real marginal cost of marking it as aid and doing the little bit extra to make it useful in humanitarian contexts might be really low. (See also soft power.)
In that case, (I am willing to make everybody pay for some good, so that society spends less on it overall) makes sense, especially because the other efficient option (Public donors coordinate to give the government money to take an action that is different from the one that is established by the budget) conflicts with preventing corruption.
I don't think our foreign aid is built off the military's food distribution system. I think the farm lobby pushes for exports, and the recipients don't get as much of a vote on their food preferences as our soldiers do.
Rather than a checkbox to (a) donate $ or (b) get a refund, I've always kind of wished you could set a budget. Your taxes don't get lowered, you can just choose what percent of your taxes go to which thing within some limited number of things (10-20 max). Defense, Foreign Aid, Welfare, Law Enforcement, ... Maybe only some percent of your taxes can get weighted and the rest is decided by congress, as it is now.
I'd be curious to find out, given such a system, what percent people would pick for each thing.
Note: I'm guessing some replies will be "this is too complicated" but it could be opt in (check here to budget your taxes). Don't check and they are added to congress's budget. It could also just be you enter a number or "high/med/low/none/unset" on each of the 10-20 items. The budgeted portion of your taxes gets divided by the ratios, and any items you didn't set get nothing.
Even just a simpler approval-voting like list would go a long way. Check the boxes of the Departments you're willing to support; if there's too little revenue from returns of those who checked a given Department to keep it going, too bad so sad, it shuts down.
Using my @negspace AI skill on this post, which finds surprising omissions in text.
shadow: “USAID is partially a state capacity / soft power operation that requires plausible deniability about which programs are strategic vs humanitarian.”
this explains several otherwise puzzling features:
1. why government, not private charity? because some of the value is state attribution—the US flag on the rice bag, the implicit “you owe us” ledger entry. private donations don’t accrue geopolitical capital.
2. why the bundling is load-bearing, not incidental. if you separated “strategic aid” from “humanitarian aid,” adversaries could target the former and recipients could free-ride on the latter. the ambiguity is the feature.
3. why the efficiency debate is partly theater. EA-types asking “is this GiveDirectly-competitive?” are measuring the wrong objective function. some programs are optimized for influence, not QALYs—but you can’t say that without collapsing the humanitarian cover.
4. why cuts are so politically charged. opponents aren’t just attacking “waste”—they’re (knowingly or not) attacking state capacity infrastructure that can’t defend itself openly.
this reframes scott’s whole essay as: he’s analyzing the demand side (voter preferences) while ignoring the supply side (why the state wants to be the vehicle).
his models—virtue signaling, time-inconsistency, transaction costs—all explain why citizens might prefer government aid. but they don’t explain why the state prefers to run it rather than, say, subsidize GiveWell.
the answer you’re gesturing at: the state captures option value from running aid directly—soft power, intelligence adjacencies, diplomatic leverage, economic entanglement. and that option value requires the humanitarian framing to remain credible.
Please remember that foreign aid can not only do things that some people value at zero, but can do things that are _strongly_ negative for many people. PEPFAR was fine - it had a track record of savings lives, and the lives it saved are unlikely to be people who will then try to kill some of us. For USAID as a whole... Well, I did a quick check with prodding Google's search AI (presumably Gemini) with
>What fraction of usaid money wound up going to terrorists?
and, amongst other things, I got:
>Investigations and reports, particularly those highlighted in early 2025 by the Middle East Forum (MEF) and congressional testimony, suggest that millions of dollars in USAID funds have been directed to organizations with ties to designated terrorist groups in regions such as Gaza, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan
>Terror-Aligned Grants: A multiyear study identified $164 million in grants to radical organizations, including $122 million specifically to groups "aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters".
There is a large multiplier for funding terrorists. If Isis gets to recruit _one_ Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 14 of us wind up dead and 57 injured.
I don't follow the virtue signaling argument. Both polls and elections are anonymous, so who are you signaling to? Do they just mean "I'll feel better about myself if I say yes on a poll, even though I don't actually want to pay for it?"
But how is that different from an honestly held preference? If you decide to give to charity because you like feeling good about yourself more than you like keeping your money, that's just... being charitable.
my best explanation I can come up with is he is borrowing from (or reinventing) the idea of "expressive voting". It reflects your values or identity (“I support humanitarianism,” “I’m tough on corruption,” “I’m pro-alliance”) and gives a moral satisfaction of sorts. Talk (vote) is cheap.
How much of a difference do you think opt-in vs. opt-out would make? CA state tax forms offer several opt-in charitable donation options targeting various charitable causes (endangered species, food banks, etc.). I can't find any total aggregate here, but individual charities on the list are considered to be doing very well to get 20,000 opt-ins and $600,000+ in donations. Out of 17.8 million tax returns. The presidential campaign fund on federal taxes gets something like 3% participation (that's lizardman constant levels).
You file taxes in CA (I'm assuming), do you donate to any of these? Do you instead take the money and donate to other better causes? I'm not sure you would get as high of participation as you think, even if it was opt-out rather then opt-in.
If I had a way to not pay taxes towards, say, California High Speed Rail I'd've been mashing that opt-out box for the last 10 years.
You're not bothering to discuss the times when charity is actively unhelpful, such as delivering polio cases to Pakistan (more from the oral vaccine than wild cases).
That one is particularly egregious.
You said "foreign aid" so you're going to get the Israel question. How much of our "Israel foreign aid" gets spent back home "funding" Lockheed Martin? I don't pay taxes to fund companies, regardless of "charitable bent."
I think that you need to grind the "Second, you could argue that supporters are disproportionately poor people who pay low taxes, and who suffer no personal downside in forcing the rich to donate." with further number analysis, because this is what I thought I see the most.
Regardless of how rich the supporters actually are (and usually they come from the same forum who claim to live paycheck to paycheck and is grinded by capitalism), they thought that there are even richer people who don't donate and this proposed tax would force them to. Again, this is regardless of what reality actually is. Of course I'm not counting the actual richest people that have pledged like Bill Gates or something, but the grass root sentiment force. This is like both political factions claim that they're "against the elite" regardless if the elites themselves are actually on their side.
So I need some numbers of what the actual demographics of the tax supporter is to accept or deny this argument.
I’ve been reading a lot of ancap econ lately. Against that, your several paragraphs about military assurance contracts ring hollow to me. I know it’s just a simplified vehicle for the larger point about transaction costs, but I’m objecting anyway.
- Zero defense spending is not a realistic equilibrium, even given your premises. Big businesses already do high-stakes, multilateral negotiations. It’s not obvious that they need to bring a bunch of middle-class residents to the bargaining table in order to keep their skyscrapers safe from Canadian aggression.
- Ceteris paribus, a freer society will tend to be a richer one, requiring a smaller percentage of GDP to pay for defense. (Not a decisive point, just a frequently neglected one.)
- It sounds like the government still has a monopoly on defense services in your scenario. That’s a specific policy choice, and the minarchists have not convinced me that it’s the right one—competitive defense markets still feel worth talking about.
The above is not meant as a strong case for voluntary defense spending, but as weak claims that push against the particular minarchist military argument you sketched out. I’m mostly drawing on the books “The Machinery of Freedom” (which you’ve reviewed) and “Chaos Theory” (which it would be awesome if you reviewed).
"Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy" (2002) by Robert P Murphy. Essay #2 is titled "Private Defense" and is about 6500 words.
In "Libertarian Law and Military Defense" (2017) he sketches out an interesting mechanism involving vicarious lawsuits by which a defense provider might find it profitable to preemptively strike a hostile foreign army, even though, having violated the NAP, private courts would find them liable for the damage.
An important element of this discussion is that rich people already get a multiplier on their charitable donations via the charity tax deduction. Anyone who rejects foreign aid as spending "our" money on "their" thing should have the charity tax deduction higher on their list of grievances
> In order to justify immigration enforcement via taxation rather than voluntary donation, you have to argue that the benefit of coordinating the people who do want fewer immigrants is greater than the unfair cost imposed on the people who don’t want that. But then you could make this same argument about charity.
But charity funded by voluntary donations really does exist, whereas law enforcement wielding the power of the state but funded by charity doesn't.
> You could solve some of these with coordination platforms like Kickstarter, and there are clever/complicated solutions to the others
A dominant assurance contract (which you discuss below) would be even better. There's little interest in that, because there's little interest in genuine public goods, and the reforms which would produce them, leading to Robin Hanson writing "The Elephant in the Brain".
> For example, it might say “Everyone will donate 5% of their income to the Pentagon to provide America with a military, and this contract will activate once every American has signed it.”
> So: right now, in the real world, do you support replacing military taxation with an assurance contract?
I would if I saw a viable example of that working somewhere. As I DO see viable examples of actual charities funding the things USAID funds.
> Some people live paycheck to paycheck and can’t pay 5% of their yearly income.
What assurance contract is priced in terms of percentage income rather than the input necessary to achieve the desired output? You want to incentivize entrepreneurs who will find the CHEAPEST way of producing the public good!
> Are they just virtue signaling when they talk about wokeness, and they don’t really care?
I would check revealed preference on that.
> Or would we announce the end of coercive military taxation to great fanfare, and then immediately be invaded by Canada and turned into the 11th province?
My lack of fear of Canada is one reason I think it's fine to abolish nation-states now and go back to city-states, since the military scale of the former displacing the latter is no longer that much of an issue under Sailer's "dirt theory" of war.
> Contra the economists, I’m not sure that we fund the military through coercive taxation only to avoid free rider problems. I think we fund it through taxation to avoid the same kinds of transaction cost issues that would sink the assurance contract
I'm with Franz Oppenheimer: a dominant military conquers people and extracts wealth from them, regardless of economic ideals.
> Since charity suffers these same transaction costs, the same arguments may apply.
But voluntarily funded charities really do exist!
> enlists a different, longer-term preference
I would use terms like "rational ignorance" and "rational irrationality" to describe the logic of voters.
> On the other hand, we don’t want to make a habit of this, or we’ll end up with Prohibition, or bans on porn, or some other dangerously totalitarian attempt to mandate virtue.
Have you ever written a blog post dedicated to addressing whether we should do those things?
> …as long as there are similar boxes for everything else the government does that can’t be justified under simple minarchist logic
I'm enthusiastic about this as a giant step toward minarchy.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box
I predict a lot more, which is precisely why the government won't do that.
> Do you agree that, if all foreign aid were cancelled outright, only a small fraction of people would donate on their own?
I donated on my own, and since I had no income last year, my donation was an infinite percent of that zero!
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
The games between voters with opposing preferences should also include all future taxpayers bound by such a rule. Thus in the limit, a group might rationally vote to codify something that would happen anyway under self-interest in order to imbue the institution with their preferences.
You seem to be missing a key point in the other people's money argument. It is not that people are not spending other people money because they are taxed too, the argument is that people can voluntarily give to charity without obligating others to involuntarily give to charity. Let's say you love community theater. One way to support that theater is to buy tickets and give them donations, voluntarily. Another way is to convince other people to voluntarily do the same. Unfortunately, what happens is people apply for and get taxpayer-funded grants, or worse donate to organizations who write those grants, to fund their pet interests. I think the same applys to foreign aid. One other problem here is that politics requires compromise and politicians are incented to horse trade spending higher than lower. So it is not that i don't get my pet spending and you don't get your pet spending - what happens is both horse trade and both spending occurs, even if most people in society don't want that spending. Too often government becomes an exercise in spending other people's money.
Foreign aid is not charity, it's the purchase of soft power. I don't get a 300 millionth of the global soft power of the US by personally giving to charity in any quantity.
Ok: not at any amount I can reasonably spend (one trip overseas for a little while every several years without actively investing in propaganda, not personally a millionaire).
Do we ever actually support government policies? Like I'm basically never aware of what's happening at a local politics level all the way up to federal politics level. I sometimes read about politics but the type of stuff that I read about is almost never the exact amount being sent in foreign aid. I'm not sure I've ever read a debate even close to "foreign aid should be 0.06% of the federal budget".
I'm also not sure our politicians are fully aware of the laws that they pass, given their statements on laws saying they have to pass bills to know what is in them and general 'staffers write the bills which are then passed along party lines' mechanics.
For your foreign aid taxation hypothetical, I might check the box but it would depend on how effective the aid was. My understanding is that it ran the full range from actively harmful to by far the best use of aid money prior to getting DOGE-d. Still, overall I'd expect that foreign aid is on net the most effective part of the federal budget, so if I had the full checklist of programs I would or would not fund based on my taxes, I would probably cut many other programs prior to foreign aid.
In general both in this article and in the comments, the missing mood is that people place negative value on foreign aid. It isn't really a coordination problem or a free rider problem. It's that some people really dislike the idea of money going to foreign aid and get mad at the idea of us sending any money to foreigners. This makes DOGE cuts to foreign aid a good thing in their eyes because why were we sending money to them at all?
I think you could see this perspective if you looked at the least effective foreign aid programs
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
Nope. Tax software would check this box by default (because they all promise to get you the biggest possible refund) so almost everyone would opt out of conteibuting to foreign aid.
> But this should be mysterious: if the pro-aid coalition is so strong, why don’t they just donate on their own?
This should not be mysterious. I don't understand why you take at all seriously the idea that they could do that. If you personally donate $100, it costs you $100, and $100 goes to aid. If you cast a decisive vote in favor of 100 million people (including you) being taxed $100 to spend on aid, this costs you $100, and $10 billion goes to aid. This is 100 million times as cost-effective as donating the money yourself. You should never expect anyone to behave the same way when the cost-effectiveness of some of their available actions change by a factor of 100 million; that would be absurd. This isn't something that needs to be explained by some quirk of human psychology; it's just something that happens by default in anything that's even a little bit like a rational agent.
> In order to justify immigration enforcement via taxation rather than voluntary donation, you have to argue that the benefit of coordinating the people who do want fewer immigrants is greater than the unfair cost imposed on the people who don’t want that. But then you could make this same argument about charity. I’m not sure how to think about this one, or *how to avoid having it justify almost anything*
There are indeed a wide variety of coordination problems affecting many but not almost all people in a certain constituency, which are difficult to solve except by having the whole constituency contribute. And this is in fact why governments spend money on a very wide variety of things, the vast majority of which don't benefit literally everyone. It seems to me straightforwardly good that this is possible, and I think you owe us an explanation for why it isn't permissible for an argument to show that governments should be able to do a very wide variety of things without worrying about whether they benefit literally everyone.
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
I think that if tax forms included a box that they could check to reduce their taxes, and the box came with an explanation that checking the box causes certain bad effects, that most people would check the box, for the same reason that most people don't give lots of money to every non-government charity that asks them for money and tells them that bad things will happen if they aren't funded. Also for the same reason that people tend to claim tax benefits when they qualify for them and are aware of them, even though they could simply not claim the tax benefit and pay more taxes; people are aware that the government spends their tax money on real things and that many of those things are things that they might benefit from or approve of, and don't need to be reminded of this by a piece of text next to the checkbox that they check off to claim a tax deduction. Giving people the option to not pay taxes just so long as they check a box saying "I am a freeloader" sounds like the sort of idea I'd expect to hear Big Bad Thing propose as a strategy for destroying our ability to fund good things.
I think you are significantly overstating what dominant assurance contracts can do. Looking at Tabarrok's paper (https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf), his justification for claiming that contributing is a dominant strategy comes from a model he describes in section 2: every agent is a rational actor, with exactly the same amount of benefit from the public good. In this model, he shows that the entrepreneur sets the threshhold to be that he will provide the public good if literally everyone signs the contract, and then literally everyone will in fact sign the contract. Obviously, this will not hold up in real life with any group of nontrivial size.
Luckily, the paper provides a more realistic model in section 3, in which there is incomplete information, and variation in how much benefit each person gets from the public good. In this model, contributing is not a dominant strategy, and in fact, there are Nash equilibria in which it is not guaranteed that that the public good is produced, even if the cost of producing the public good is zero, and it is common knowledge that its value to every agent is positive.
In other words, in your list of reasons why dominant assurance contracts might not work in practice, you should add:
> Some people would correctly understand the situation and come up with correct theories of how signing would hurt them, or how they could profit from refusing.
Dominant assurance contracts are not a practical solution to real-life coordination problems.
"So for example, if there’s a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid, then voting in favor of the law costs you $100, the same as if you donated the money yourself voluntarily."
That's not how the tax system works. The tax system works on percentages. If the median tax voter votes for a tax that costs him $100 he is voting for a tax that costs the richest people much much more.
As a personal data point against the "other people's money" argument, I'd note that prior to the first Trump administration I consistently donated 10% of my spending to charity. After the passage of the tax cut bill in 2017 (unless I'm misremembering the year), I increased that to 15% of my spending.
I felt that the tax cut was an undeserved benefit for me, and so I chose to balance it out by giving more to charity (I didn't take the time to do the math on how my decreased taxes compared to my increased charitable donations).
How about redistribution of happiness. Our govt for better or worse engages in redistribution of money. Proponents justify it on utilitarian grounds and in many use cases has popular support. But this principle doesnt require us to spend the money directly on citizens. The spending is done to increase the wellbeing of the citizens. If a large group of citizens are happy knowing a bunch of non citizens lives were saved, that transfer is as justified on utilitarian grounds as direct citizen spending.
In game theory, there's a lot of models for public good games. They generally show that with purely rational groups, it's hard to get any contribution to a public good like charity.
The main reasons are:
1. It's hard to argue a high reward for giving to the public good for purely rational/economic players. You need to model some kind of altruistic or status reward and this is a fragile thing.
2. In groups, there's a big tendency to follow. So if the status quo is to not donate, being the first or only one to donate will give you a very low relative reward. Hence people will be much more likely to donate through tax, cause everyone is doing it, then to choose to do it individually.
Luckily the US government has had good people that introduced USAID programs, which gives us a status quo where everyone contributes to aid.
The thing that is now happening, is that the MAGA movement is reprogramming people's utility functions into reducing the reward for altruism (or status from giving to the public good).
In a way this is still purely democratic, but feels like someone is gaming the system here..
Which brings me to my second point. One of the functions of government is to redistribute wealth amongst citizens. This way the more lucky individuals share some of that luck with the less lucky ones.
(I understand this is not perfect, and maybe I have a socialist view on the government, I'm from Netherlands, where our society functions really well by caring more for the unfortunate part of society)
Giving aid to unfortunate groups of people in your own country, but also outside, is just a way to redistribute wealth. Especially when you are the top 10 richest country on earth.
Ps. This completely disregards the actual effectiveness of aid as a tool for wealth distribution, but that was outside the scope of this discussion I think.
It is in experimental economics. You model charity via a public good game. Where players contribute their income and everyone receives a utilty or benefit from the result (less people die from Malaria would be good for everyone, except psychopaths).
Modeling charity with public goods games is invalid.
The essence of charity is that contributors & recipients are disjoint but the game assumes they're congruent (as is the case for actual public goods).
ETA: I suppose you could do it accurately of you set the factor to zero, but that'd be a waste of effort since the Nash equilibrium is trivially obvious.
You are talking about pure game theory, I'm trying to model the real world through game theory tools (this is what experimental economics is).
Game theory can be used to not only model payoffs by money, but 'utility'.
In reality, you don't get zero utility from charity, you get utility through channels other than direct material payback. The multiplication factor isn't about your personal consumption return, it's about the total social value created.
My malaria example actually fits perfectly:
- It's a genuine global public good (pandemic risk reduction, economic development)
- It's partly altruistic preference (you care about others not dying). Economists model this as Warm Glow, which is a measurable, real 'utility' people experience (and gladly so!)
This reminds me a lot of the Danish Lutheran church, a state church which is founded through a voluntary tax. Currently around 80% of Danes (not counting migrants and second gen migrants) are members. If your parents are members and you are baptized you will automatically be a member until you opt out.
Very few people opt out, even among the people who claim to be non-religious otherwise.
And so, in Denmark, the main fight neo-atheists are fighting is to make state church membership opt-in instead of opt-out.
I came here to say the same thing about the Swedish Church. There the fee is approximately 1% of gross income. Foreign aid costs about twice as much as the church, so such a foreign-aid tax would be approximately 2% in Sweden.
Aid through taxation is contrary to everyone's actual behaviour.
The rational way for everyone to give to charity is to decide what proportion of their income they are willing to give and to have that amount transferred to a charity of their choice every time they receive a paycheck (i.e. much like taxation) BUT when approached and asked to donate, most people will pay up. Even though they should just say that they have already contributed the maximum that they are willing to pay for the month, nobody (except me :-)) actually ever does this. It's hard to view this as anything other than emotional blackmail.
"VOTE NO: You feel like a bad person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes."
While I agree that some people donate to feel like a good person, I don't think that those who don't donate then feel like a bad person. I think the feeling range goes from 0 to 1, not -1 to +1.
There's a phenomenon I've noticed where people object to a Thing, but the objection they raise (sometimes straight off, sometimes after pushing and pointing out bad arguments) eventually ends up pointing to a much more radical position than they maybe intended.
In this case the argument "I don't want to pay tax to support other countries/do foreign aid" leads very quickly to "I don't want to pay tax/have government" unless you can cleanly separate foreign aid from other governmental functions, and I don't think you can since all forms of legitimacy for things we presumably like (e.g., emergency services, roads) apply just as well to foreign aid, or at minimum fail on the same metrics (e.g., popularity).
If you think taxation to do foreign aid is illegitimate if you don't like foreign aid, then you're essentially arguing that you can only be legitimately taxed for things you enjoy, ie tax should be voluntary and earmarked, ie all current forms of taxation are theft, which is technically distinct from but leads very quickly and easily to all taxation is theft, which means government is illegitimate. Which, fine, if you're an anarchist that's a perfectly consistent position, but I very much doubt people making this argument are.
(You can swap in "supporting police" or "having a military" or basically any other governmental function you like and the argument works just as well.)
> A simple problem with this argument is that actually, each voter’s money will also be taxed. So for example, if there’s a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid, then voting in favor of the law costs you $100, the same as if you donated the money yourself voluntarily.
I’d push against that. I’m pretty sure that support for foreign aid is heavily correlated with support for progressive taxation, "making the rich pay", "making big companies pay", and things like that.
Not until MAGA came along. It used to be very well understood in Republican circles that foreign aid was a very useful tool for spreading American influence in the world. Both to achieve our political goals as well as giving American businesses footholds in certain regions. Almost all the “aid” we provided to Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the USSR collapsed was based on that idea, not idealistic progressive notions. It used to be the Left hated USAID because it was seen as a tool of the CIA and American influence. Then the John Birch wing took over the GOP under the guise of MAGA and we’ve flipped.
I think this article is worse for being about the topic. Its a bunch of "But have you considered this other way in which things are more complicated?", and trying to better understand any one of those could have been good, but as is it mostly boils down to "Because theres all these open questions, *Im allowed* to believe this.".
"Second, you could argue that supporters are disproportionately poor people who pay low taxes, and who suffer no personal downside in forcing the rich to donate."
I think this argument is too abstracted from real life. It views suffering in absolute terms rather than relative. A very modest tax increase on a poor person who is struggling to make ends meet causes a lot more suffering than even a substantial tax increase on someone very well off.
In fact, i think that the inverse argument is much stronger. The well off have the luxury to detach. It's a form of negotiating power to not be desperate.
If we rely on voluntary donations to stop a plague in another country, and not enough people donate, we still suffer because pathogens don't respect borders. The tax machine is used to protect the commons with firefighters, why not with charity?
If 100 million random Americans donate $1 each, each individual gets $1 worth of Warm Glow Giving. The US gets nothing.
If the US donates $100m on behalf of all Americans, they get a meeting with the president of that country. There's also muttering about USAID providing cover for intelligence operations, for what such speculation is worth. It solves the coordination problem by aligning the selfish and altruistic incentives, and it leverages a better deal.
Some individuals may grumble, and there's room for debate on the most effective allocation. But when the Baptists and Bootleggers agree, what can you do but shrug?
>"But when the Baptists and Bootleggers agree, what can you do but shrug?"
Fight tooth & nail. When antagonistic groups that both work against my interests collaborate, it can only be disastrous for me; same reason "bipartisan" is the biggest possible red flag for legislation.
The "Bundling" argument seems to be the same one that people have for (against) voting. "My vote won't change anything, so why bother?" So when voting isn't required, you end up with pathetically low voting numbers, even for the most engaging, attention-grabbing races. Is that secretly an expressed preference against democratically electing representatives? Voting, after all, confers a cost to all citizens, even those who'd rather not vote (particularly if you have a mailbox that gets stuffed with misleading-at-best political ads). :) Maybe elections should be private affairs that individuals choose to fund on their own accord, but only if it's important to them in the moment ...
In any case, all these arguments show an important psychological factor -- the world doesn't run on pure computational logic alone, human factors are a key consideration, even of how governments function. As a (former) small-l and big-L Libertarian, that's one of the most consistent "bangs head against wall" issues I've had with folks of that bent. That, and not understanding the role of epistemology (which, really, is just another human factor).
Another observation. Foreign aid in particular is not entirely about helping others. It's also selfish, as it "buys" influence in the world which helps the global reputation and stability of one's own country, far beyond any individual's day-to-day sense. I think Scott has made this argument in a couple places before. So, for example, as the current U.S. regime winds down foreign assistance, this is hurting every U.S. citizen--and their children, and grandchildren--whether they realize it yet or not. As now competing nations like China will have the influence and connections and trade partners and access to resources and so on for decades to come. (If only that were the most damaging blow to U.S. influence ... )
The relevance here is that, because it's not of immediate notice to any individual, it's highly unlikely that individuals will be able to prioritize appropriately. Similar things are true about domestic aid, of course, in the long-term. Many a drug-dealing would-be warlord has made a local god out of themselves by being the only one seen to be helping their local community. "The government" gets blamed, but it's really the opposite: "the government" doesn't have the resources or the power to compel the resources, and folks in the community or the next community over who are in a position to do something individually just don't notice what's happening until it's far too late, or when they do notice, they have the dreaded coordination problems.
There's never an easy answer. If there were, governing would be easy, and governments could be designed by computers. Purity-of-ideology is the antithesis of good governance, unless and until everybody agrees on everything. Which, undoubtedly, won't even be true when the AIs replace humans.
I think your 10%-40% is low for the following reasons.
Firstly, there are various merchants who attempt to add a donation when I go to check-out and I always tick the box to cancel the donation. My expectation is that this is common behaviour and nearly the only people who make the donation are those not paying attention.
Secondly, it seems obviously correct for effective altruists to tick the box and instead give the money to an effective charity and I would expect most to do this. Of course effective altruists are a small minority of taxpayers, but the same logic applies to everyone. Everyone would prefer to give money to their favoured cause than to whatever the government is funding.
Thirdly, tax forms are full of boxes and taxpayers (or their accountants) are trying to fill them in to minimise their tax liability. It would be surprising to me if people took a different approach to this particular box. Suppose an accountant ticks the box, but then the client says that he did want to give the aid: he can just write the government a cheque. So ticking the box by default is the safe approach.
I mean, I generally support higher taxes (and no, I don't mean taxes that somehow dodge me and only get even richer people) and also don't really donate that much and sometimes vaguely wave to good or bad reasons why not[1], so this was an interesting one. I didn't have a clear answer as to what exact argument spoke the most to me, but I'd guess it's vaguely in the direction of the free rider problem more than the others.
[1] mostly I just think donating money is actually at odds with amassing as much power as possible (as lazily as possible), while well designed taxes should reduce everyone's power somewhat proportionally, thus letting me maintain my station. If the aforementioned sentence doesn't make it clear, I'm certainly not super motivated by the feeling of being a good person compared to actual concrete lives saved
I am working with Ukrainian charity that supports Ukrainian army. Our job is largely parallel to the ministry of defence, and one of our revenue streams is grants from foreign governments.
This surprised me at first - why does government X give money to charity supporting government Y rather than give directly to government Y?
Well, it turns out that charity can be much more effective than the government, largely due to being able to attract better people. Working for ukrainian government is a poison pill:
- You are not getting paid very much. Charity pays ~80% of market salary, government pays ~40%. Smart people in the government want to raise salaries, but public is EXTREMELY hostile and politicians follow the public sentiment.
- Working for a charity, you are subject to internal audit and a risk of dismissal. Working for a government, you are subject to anti-corruption law and a risk of imprisonment. I am not talking about embezzlement - I am talking what happens if you honestly fuck up and/or tail risk materializes.
- If you work for government for a single day, for the rest of your life you are PEP (politically exposed person) and will be randomly rejected when opening bank accounts, making money transfers etc.
So very few smart people join the MoD, making is chronically understaffed and underskilled, which in turn makes it relatively ineffective. Hence grants going to us instead of them.
Having previously worked in anti-corruption: only VIPs (e.g., policymakers, party officials, electoral candidates, family members thereof) get PEP tagged; random bureaucrats are generally beneath notice.
Maybe of interest the danish churchtax is a membership due (around 0.87% of income on average) collected together with the income tax. One can leave the church (or never enter it) in which case one can opt out of the tax. One does give up the ability to be married/buried in a church. 70% of danes are members.
From a skim of the comment section no one has said this yet (or at least nothing quite close enough to it), which somewhat surprises me and leads me to update that maybe my kneejerk reaction to the very premise of the article is wrong, but I found the argument rephrasing:
"IIUC, the argument is that people who would not donate to charity themselves find it more congenial to vote to tax other people and give their money to charity."
to be incorrect, and the opposite of a steel man. To me the argument is:
"Regardless WHETHER people would donate to charity themselves, they vote in a way that supports institutions that force other people to do the donation."
The difference is that the person making the argument may well be in favour of the charity in question! Heck, I often have this with *quite a few* government-run institutions - I think they're a net good, but I'm actually quite perturbed that by supporting the infrastructure they're embedded in, I'm making people who might disagree with me on that they're a net good also support them, by virtue of being backed by government force.
By corollary, my voting tendency is to minimise the government doing more things, preferring the government do less things if that's on the menu (haven't seen that be a real option for a long time over here, though), _even if_ I think they might be doing a good job of it right now.
I guess I'm weird about that.
(This is not an argument about the rest of the article, I was just sufficiently surprised by what felt like the opposite of a steelman from Scott that I wanted to say something. The fact I'm surprised about this is a good sign, though, Scott is pretty good about this sort of thing generally, and in this case I may well be the mutant.)
I did not finish reading this because I didn't feel it was useful, and I could not see straight for anger.
I invite you to consider the actual alternatives that happen today, as opposed to your imaginary scenarios:
1. A person writes a cheque (or I guess these days clicks on a form to charge their credit card) to a specific charity. They have to find out about the charity, read their blurb, then make an effort to write or click. This money they give is deductible from their income for purposes of income tax, so it doesn't cost them much, especially if they're in a high bracket. Admittedly I'm not American and not familiar with your income tax system, so this may not be true.
2. A person votes for a representative. That representative goes to Congress and votes on a number of bills, in some cases being pressured by the party whip to vote a certain way. One of those votes is for the budget (or these days the latest continuing resolution). It's a budget that has tens of thousands of line items, one of which is to give a certain amount of money to that same charity. This is due to some other representatives (or more likely their staff) inserting the line item, and no one is willing to spend the political capital to take it out again. The whole budget is voted up or down.
This is a classic collective action problem: Each person would rather keep an extra dollar than donate it themselves, yet everyone prefers the outcome where the military receives that dollar from each taxpayer. Similarly, each person would prefer keeping an extra dollar to donating it to starving Africans, but prefer the starving Africans receiving that dollar multiplied by the number of American taxpayers, to keeping it themselves.
Voting for foreign aid makes sense if there's high value in getting foreign aid dollars from folks and institutions (including the government itself) that would otherwise spend their dollars in less valuable ways. The case for foreign aid is strong if most other government spending is bad even compared to what selfish individuals do with their money, and the latter is bad compared to gov spending on foreign aid.
What's wrong with wanting to spend other people's money anyway? The starving kids need food more than the middle class Americans need a second smart TV. There are principled reasons why you might still vote against this, but I'm allowed to vote for it without being some kind of hypocrite or whatever the original accusation was.
Are you opposed to all taxation? If you're a principled libertarian, fair enough, but if you like some taxes and not others, I think taxes to fund foreign aid are some of the better ones.
Land value tax is different because land is different.
ETA: and the dividend in excess of the cost of public good provision belongs to the individual citizens; taxing that (or equivalently, funding non-public goods out of LVT proceeds before distributing the dividend) is still illegitimate.
You mix support for nice things in surveys and for nice things at the polls in the first part. A person may support foreign aid in a survey, knowing nothing about it and not having given it any thought. But if it’s on the ballot, eg as a proposition, then there are months for political ads to change their mind and for them to take this issue seriously.
If you steelman the libertarian critique, Hayekian knowledge problem becomes the key issue (Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society). Libertarians argue that foreign aid is inefficient because of this problem, especially when the aid is managed by the government, as the relevant info for effective aid (local situation and local incentives) is dispersed, remote, frequently tacit, and hard to verify and aggregate centrally.
On the other hand, some supporters of foreign aid think that governments handle this difficult cross-border knowledge problem even better than private voluntary donations can.
This is an interesting subject to me because, in the abstract, I mostly agree with the principle that the government should only be solving collective action problems, perhaps with an epicycle for prohibiting certain highly addictive behaviors that are very damaging to addicts (which are only collective action problems if you REALLY squint, but the prohibition of which seems hard to argue against e.g. crystal meth, unrestricted gambling advertising and facilitation, etc.).
That said, I’m also a giving what we can kind of guy and think shutting down USAID was very bad. So how do I reconcile these things? I don’t find Scott’s valiant efforts to do so here convincing.
Personally, I have made two arguments to myself:
1) Consequentialist Angle: I only believe in the collective action principle on consequentialist grounds in the first place—it’s an excellent heuristic for avoiding government overreach into stuff that it will just make worse compared to free markets and free choices. But if the consequentialist math is sufficiently skewed on a topic we should be willing to cautiously abandon it—same analysis that lets in banning heroin. Some of the USAID stuff pretty clearly maths out this way to me.
2) Virtue Angle: the government plainly does just absolute gobs of stuff that is unjustified by “solving collective action problems”, with much lower benefits. If you are focused on first getting rid of USAID rather than, say, enormous transfer payments to wealthy old people, or a whole host of burdensome and preference destroying business regulation, or subsidizing preferred industries, or really like 90 percent of the budget—then I think that says something bad about you. Makes me think actually you just don’t care when African children die of malaria compared to wealthy old people receiving even more end of life care etc. So unless you are saying “opposed in principle to spending on this in an ideal world, but still better than most of what our taxes do in practice so don’t change it anywhere near first”—you are probably exhibiting vice not virtue as regards this subject.
The modal OD is a mistake, due to increasing tolerance and uncertain dose size. The standardization & labeling one could expect post-legalization (cf. the marijuana market) would directly address the latter and might dampen the former (users would be less prone to escalating their consumption if commercial quantities were discretized; e.g., going from X grams to 1.05X grams from a bulk supply is subtler than going from 1 to 2 X gram units).
While I agree that the current legal regime vis a vis heroin is sub optimal, I disagree that an unregulated market in heroin (or a legal regime entirely focused on closing information asymmetries as opposed to actually restricting sale and use) would be optimal, which is the minimal claim I need to defend my view that government should be involved in discouraging the product and reducing use.
Accordingly, it’s still a perfectly good example of something that I think the government should be doing that is purely paternalistic (not collective action solving).
This is completely wrong, from beginning to end. The implicit assumption that the policies of a democratic government somehow reflect the preferences (under whatever definition) of the electorate can be demonstrated to be totally false by a simple information-theoretic argument. The democratic process doesn't even have the bandwidth to communicate the policy preferences of the electorate to the government, much less make it to enact corresponding policies.
No, you have been conquered and forced at gunpoint to render unto Caesar the same way every conquered people in history have ever been. You pay taxes to avoid going to jail. The amount you pay is some approximation of the Laffer-limit. You, as a voter, have zero influence on how your taxes are being spent and they are mostly spent in ways to keep you paying them. The entire democratic charade is just part of that effort (i.e. to keep you obedient) and it relates to exercising power like porn relates to sex.
Max Miller's latest YT video is about food in victorian workhouses. The story of English Poor Laws is very interesting. In the Middle Ages the Catholic church provided lots of aid for the poorest people. Henry VIII confiscated, looted and sold off the monasteries getting himself and his supporters very rich but killing the main aid source for the indigent. The result was a crisis that the Crown tried to solve by intensifying repression of the poor and through a tax that was collected but the money were quickly pocketed.
Eventually the workhouses were established to house and feed the poor while also keeping them contained and using them for work. The problem was that the managing bureaucracy was feeding them very poor quality meals contaminated with rat dropping while themselves were enjoying luxury dinners.
My main argument against any kind of aid directed by public institutions is that the Iron Law of Bureaucracy always kicks in and they turn in personal fiefs hostile to any democratic control or accountability. This is clearly the case with USAID.
An increasingly popular solution is a provision that allows the taxpayer to choose in their tax forms which public institution or NGO gets a part of their tax money.
A kind of counter-libertarian point of view. I know it isn't new or original, but in spaces like this one we get in a habit of not considering POVs of this sort because they don't appeal to our ethos for reasons that may or may not apply to a given debate:
Taxation is not a matter of taking the taxpayer's money.
It isn't a question of whether society has a right to tax for this purpose or that purpose. It's a question of whether society has a right to tax, and if so, how it chooses to use tax revenue. Under this view, society has a right to tax because not all *gross* income enjoys the full moral status of "private property".
Under this view, gross income is total value *captured* by an individual in commerce.
That captured value is the sum of
* individually added value
* the value added collectively by the system (the coordination of all of the workers, capitalists, bureaucrats, legislators, etc., in the system to which one belongs and
* rents
For this, I'll ignore rents. I think most of this group would agree that there's no real moral problem with just taxing rents to zero.
This group is probably inclined toward a view of private property that includes all non-rent incomes, for some good reasons. That view, however, is not written on any golden tablets, and a different formulation is possible that protects *some* income as private property more or less absolutely, and some income as private property for "good reasons", while not protecting all income as private property.
This view holds that not all income is truly sacrosanct private property, and society has a right to recapture some of the income that came from value added by society. It holds that it is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient condition that the government takes less in taxes than the part of the income representing value added by the agency of the society as a whole. IOW, some portion (up to 100%, but likely much lower) of *socially created value* both appears in individually captured income and represents the rightful property of the society as a whole.
Net income - after taxes, then, is 100% of individually created value plus some portion of socially created value. Taxed income would be the remaining fraction of the socially created value.
If we say that only net income (which must include 100% of individually added value) is an individual's property, then taxation is not the taking of the individual's property, because only after-tax income is in fact the individual's property.
Admittedly, the idea of added value is doing a lot of work without being defined under any particular theory of value. I certainly don't want to have to settle which theory of value applies, and figure out some mechanism for interpreting socially added versus individually added value based on that theory.
We can't call all commerce to a stop while that gets worked out. But on an intuitive basis: we could take as a maximum value for what an individual could possibly personally add as what we could imagine a hermit on an island creating by working as smart and hard as it is possible to work. On that intuitive basis, almost any person's after-tax income in almost any conceivable tax regime from the developed world includes 100% of the value they personally added as well as some of the value they didn't personally add.
IOW this view of net-income as property doesn't do violence to the concept of property as value personally added.
If anything, the problem is that there is *too* large a social component of value to set a useful upper limit on what taxation is proper or to define private property relative to individually added value.
If, however, we use other economic considerations to cooperatively decide other limits on taxation, then include *all net income* as part of private property, then it's possible in principle to keep a robust view of private property while leaving space for social re-capture of *some* socially created value.
That re-captured value can be used to maintain the infrastructure that made its creation possible. Additionally, some if it can be used to see to the collective moral obligations of a society (should we decide we have them).
I'm not saying it's the right approach.. but it's a less game theoretical approach and one that relies less on the concept of optional, voluntary "charity" for compulsory social activity, more on the concept of obligatory "moral obligation", which may be a more interesting category for thinking about compulsory social activity. At the same time, provided we don't get too carried away with creating moral obligations, it leaves a lot of room for free market value creation and capture that appeals to the libertarian ethos.
As a slight tangent, something that drives me up a wall is when someone will stake a claim on a certain hypothesis, not bother testing that hypothesis against reality, and then ignore other people who point out that the numbers are against them. In this case, "poor people voting against the rich" is a plausible hypothesis that will sound right to many people, who will never update even when faced with empirics that, no, rich people actually support this stuff more. "Voting with other people's money" as a concept immediately disappears once you discover that actually the Venn diagram of people who have money and people who support giving it away is nearly a circle. Or at least, goes from 'plausible second order harm' to 'fun story to debate about but shouldn't influence policy one iota'
Do people really think that wealthy countries like the US have foreign aid programs because they care about people? Although people who work in international aid largely do so for altruistic reasons, states themselves largely only care about establishing global soft power. Why do you think "the bad guys" (wherever that is for your country) all have foreign aid programs? Why do you think states invest in foreign aid even when their own citizens suffer?
As the global superpowers fight for political influence through soft diplomacy and land investments, America's withdrawal from the soft-power race puts American dollars in jeopardy. While those on the right continue to whine that "taxation is theft", their future returns will fall by the wayside as "the bad guys" see massive returns on soft-diplomacy investments. Perhaps the America of the future will try to use its overwhelming military power to secure access to natural resources in the DRC à la its recent actions in Venezuela, but Americans' long-term domestic portfolios will still have already suffered.
If you want to talk about what taxes should fund and how governments should determine that, you must have a better understanding of why they fund those things. The world is not so black and white.
"VOTE YES: You feel like a good person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes.
VOTE NO: You feel like a bad person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes.
...My true opinion on this is that I would be satisfied with a law that gives foreign aid by default, but allows any citizen who’s interested to check a box on their tax forms saying something like:
I request to cancel my participation in foreign aid this year and receive an $X tax refund. I understand this will result in Y amount of preventable death and suffering.
…as long as there are similar boxes for everything else the government does that can’t be justified under simple minarchist logic. I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome."
What if I vote no and *don't* feel like a bad person? Throw in a free T-shirt with the tax returns stating "I refused to pay foreign aid and all I got was this great T-shirt" and I'm in!
I don't mind (much) paying for Good Causes via taxation. I *do* mind very much being bludgeoned over the head with "you are a wicked, cruel, heartless, evil person if you don't contribute to this Good Cause!" where (1) your definition of a good cause may not line up with mine (e.g. 'who could object to curing the sick and feeding the hungry?' great, but that also got made the fig leaf for 'let the American ambassador host a nice concert in Dublin for, uh, cultural relationship? yeah, cultural relationship!')
"Suppose there’s a famine that will kill 50,000 people, and the only way to solve it is through a $5 million project - for example, buying a giant cargo ship to transport food. If there are 50,000 altruists with $100 each, this is a coordination problem, where you need to figure out some way to incentivize all of them to do their part."
Fret not, worried altruist, you can write off and ask for a Trócaire box:
In real world charity, big global events get advertised everywhere by the bodies already established to provide humanitarian aid, from private bodies to NGOs etc. There isn't any lack of ways to donate if you want to donate, so "but how can I make sure my $100 is impactful?" isn't really a problem, as Scott states:
"So there is no coordination problem here, and no need to call in the government’s coordination-problem-solving ability."
I was going to snark about "the problem wouldn’t be solved, but nobody would return their money to them" because why look for money back if you're giving it to a charitable cause, but it's true that there are - how can I put this delicately? - a lot of fucking scams out there. So it's reasonable to wonder if your money is really going to "help me pay my vet bill for my blind three-legged diabetic elderly dog who is my only friend in the entire world since my family all died in a tragic gardening accident" and not "woo-hoo, check out my Cabo trip on TikTok and Insta!", which is why I would say steer clear of Kickstarters and the likes and stick to the kinds of charities like Oxfam, which you may worry are not 'most effective use of my dollarinos' but at least are not going to pay for the CEO's new hair transplant and latest model EV.
It is a problem and I don't think there are simple explanations, but if you want one try "we're living off societal capital of the past where it was transmitted, via religion, that almsgiving was good, Western society had marinated in this to the point that even after junking religion the influences lingered on, but as we're using up the capital, now we're scrabbling around for 'this is the real rational reason for doing this thing' and coming up short".
> There’s no rule saying that government must always support people’s shortest-term and least-willpower-requiring preference
That’s underselling it: most modern republican institutions were explicitly designed to cushion policy from short-term thinking from citizens. That’s the whole point of having a judiciary instead of lynching mobs.
Why don’t we empower the revealed preferences of the masses? Because “revealed preferences” is terrible as a prescriptive tool, and championing them empowers populists and manipulators. Instead, describe me your actual utility function.
I think I have a different, separate theory that could explain part of the difference. My observation is that donating $100 feels substantially different than being taxed extra $100 and government spending it, because people don't (and IMHO shouldn't) interpret it as being taxed *extra* $100, but more like a reallocation of current taxes.
In essence, there seems to be an implied unstated assumption (with some basis in reality!) that the total tax amount is as much as "they" can get away with, and no matter what you do, it geenerally will be as high anyway. A vote "let's tax extra $100 for purpose X" is a decision whether to spend $100 on X, but in practical reality is not a meaningful vote about the total amount of tax paid - if this vote doesn't pass but the total tax amount can be reasonably increased, then there will be a different bill passed tomorrow to tax extra $100 for purpose Y, and vice versa, if this vote passes but the total tax amount already was at that level, then tomorrow there will be a bill passed to cut taxes by $100 by cutting $100 from purpose Y.
So what I'm saying is that if a thought experiment talks about "a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid", it gets interpreted (and IMHO should be interpreted) as "a vote on whether we'll spend $100 on foreign aid instead of Other Stuff, keeping the tax paid pretty much the same", and the answer to that question is and should be determined by comparing the expected subjective value (to the voter) of foreign aid versus the value of Other Stuff, i.e. the average pool of government expenditure.
Good post, but I would have titled that last part "The Ulysses Argument" rather than Multiple Preferences, in reference to Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens, where he has his men bind him to the mast beforehand so he can hear their song but without endangering himself or his ship. I'm a sucker for that allusion being used as a metaphor for pre-committing one's self to do or not do something.
That said, I'm still not sure why you all get to impose your preferences on everyone else because of your own time-inconsistent desires. Alcoholics don't try to outlaw booze entirely. They accept that they gotta take their own precautions.
> Alcoholics don't try to outlaw booze entirely. They accept that they gotta take their own precautions.
They literally did try it, and it didn't work because everyone fought against it. Well okay, I'm pretty sure most prohibitionists weren't alcoholics, but the point still stands. Unless they have a massive amount of leverage, the unpopular wants of a minority are irrelevant to policy-making.
>>The Bundling Argument asks: what if, psychologically, this isn’t true? What if “your $100 plus equal donations from the rest of our coalition of 49,999 other altruists can completely solve this famine” sounds more appealing then “if you donate $100, you can save one person from a famine which will still kill thousands of others”?<<
At least since I was a small child in the 80s, I've seen commercials asking me to donate an amount that will save one child from a famine. Sometimes they even send you a picture of a specific child, which alleviates the problem in the next paragraph about a 49999 death toll and a 50000 death toll feeling the same, because now I have this picture right here showing me the difference between those two things. So I would assume the psychological appeal of tying your particular donation to saving one particular child is much stronger, surely they run those commercials with those scripts for decades because it was found to increase donations.
It seems to me that if I'm one of 5000 people who contributed towards X, I may as well not have been involved at all, I did 0.02% of some task, whoop de doo. As one of 150 million taxpayers, my role is even more attenuated, I could not possibly derive any moral satisfaction from that. Consider the converse situation where I lost half my income, my tax bill goes way down, thus withdrawing my contribution towards that aim, would that make me feel bad? Surely nobody has ever had that thought, I've heard people say they regret with income going down they can't support their usual suite of local charities, but I've never heard anyone say they regret they aren't paying as much income tax to fund humanitarian projects. People do not seem to act as if they value their own participation in and contribution to these foreign aid projects via taxation.
I find the idea that people are losing sleep over the plight of faceless strangers in far flung lands to be very odd anyhow, would it have occurred to any human before the past couple centuries to think that way? Some missionaries to the New World undoubtedly felt sincerely that these native people's souls needed to be saved, but did they lose sleep thinking about the material conditions of those people? If you're intensely bothered by the plight of the global poor to the extent it disrupts your psychological health, that seems like a problem. It's socially acceptable to have such a level of concern, but it's a little weird, kind of like hearing about how those woke middle aged white ladies in New York were spending their weekly therapy sessions worrying about racial justice and guilt over white privilege. As silly as that seems from outside of that culture, I could easily imagine a culture finding it pathological to suffer emotional distress from the existence of famines in Africa, for all I know perhaps there are cultures right now today where a therapist would say so.
One purpose for foreign aid I haven't heard mentioned here yet is agricultural subsidies and price stabilization. When USAID budgets were cut the headlines were full of articles about farmers losing money because USAID is a major buyer. Canada famously straight up destroys extra milk production to avoid driving down prices; at least the US can get value out of our extra agricultural production by shipping it overseas.
The transaction costs argument is important, but I think that you've taken too narrow a view of it. Coordination is not the main issue for a rational actor: ideally you'd want every participant to be knowledgeable about all potential charitable causes, to be able to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each, and then to coordinate so that the aid donated has maximal effect. That's not something that can feasibly be coordinated between all the citizens of the US. Hence, there's a role for Government as a single coordinating agency to gather information, tax citizens and donate appropriately.
Consider what would happen if we funded healthcare by asking citizens to come together and decide which medical specialities would be hired in the town hospital, what services it would offer and how those would be paid for.
People care a lot about fairness. I would guess that people think foreign aid is a good use of money but don't want to be the only one making sacrifices to make it happen.
Even if the best way to economically model donations is as "purchasing a psychological good", I'd be surprised if people who donate experience it that way. I'd guess a more common view would be something like "I'm fulfilling a duty" or "I'm making a sacrifice", and it's annoying when other people don't do their part.
(This ignores the fact that foreign aid has more uses for governments than straightforward charity, as other commentators have pointed out).
Lately I’ve been seeing ads from four completely different charities - St. Jude’s Hospital, the Wounded Warrior Project, Shriners Children’s Hospitals and the ASPCA - all asking for pledges of $19 a month. Why all the same, odd amounts?
The same reason everything is X.99, I'd assume. A/B testing presumably resulted in the discovery that that is the optimal amount to ask for in order to maximize donations.
Your post explains why people vote for coerced aid, but it never states the limiting principle that distinguishes legitimate coercion from mere coalition preference. Under the rule of law, legitimacy requires hard, general constraints that bind winners and losers alike. Without a principled, administrable line, “we can vote to tax for X” becomes, in practice, “the stronger imposes its values,” and the same logic can be reused to justify any mandated moral project.
The solution is to limit power in general, not to assume that a government shaped by shifting coalitions and organized interests will reliably coalesce around only the moral schemes you approve of.
Making it a nudge doesn’t address the underlying issue. At best, it’s a regressive tax on inattention and compliance friction. At worst, if opting out becomes salient and widely used, you either accept the result (aid collapses) or you revert to the hard edge of coercion—revealing that the “nudge” was never a legitimacy answer, just an implementation tactic.
You don't mention social desirability bias but I think it's a good theory that resolves the problems with the signaling solution. You don't need epicycles of signaling, self signaling etc.
People will behave as if they hold the “good” beliefs, until they need to pay for their preferences.
This explains the consistency between polling and voting for example.
One prediction this theory implies is that the checkbox you describe in the end will be checked most of the time, much more than 40%. I'd be willing to bet on this.
Something related to this arises when you look at the theory of kin selection from evolutionary biology. The standard theory says you should help your kin when the fitness benefit to them is r times the fitness cost to you, with r being the coefficient of relatedness measuring shared genes. But it turns out that if you look at a gene for conditional nepotism (I will help needy kin if others can be induced to contribute as well), this gene can spread even when the cost-benefit ratio is higher than in the standard case. Altruism toward kin is a public good, and you can get more of it with mutual enforcement. You are effectively more closely related to your kin when several of you act together rather than separately. (For more of the theory, search for "socially enforced nepotism" and "extraordinary siblings".) This doesn't apply directly to large scale charity, but the general principle – it may be rational to treat altruism as a public good, and support collective altruism even where you wouldn't supply much charity on your own – may still apply.
This whole analysis seems to ignore the fact of lots of people who pay taxes but don't show up to vote.
Exactly what fraction of adult Americans that is becomes in practice surprisingly complex to calculate and then express -- remembering that paying taxes isn't only about federal ones; nor are opportunities to vote; some types of taxes are essentially universal while others vary widely in how many eligible voters pay them; some voters reliably show up for some levels of election but not for others; etc.
However you care to calculate it, as a fraction of US adults it's not trivial. Hence it seems like a relevant consideration or variable in at least some of the arguments summarized above.
> First, you could argue that supporters are using the government as a force multiplier.
The thing is, the force multiplier here is absolutely huge.
If there is a vote, and your vote isn't the tiebreaker, then it doesn't matter which way you vote.
If your vote is the tiebreaker, then in a population of 100 million, a vote to send $1 per person to charity costs you only $1, but gains the charity $100 million.
Voting for government mandated tax-charity is donation matching turned up to a million.
I don't think dominant assurance contracts solve this.
If the contract insists on 100% of the population signing it, then if anyone else refuses to sign, it doesn't matter what you do. If everyone else signs it, then you have a choice of risking getting invaded, or paying 5% of your money.
But a 90% contract is a very different beast. It's unlikely that precisely 90% of people sign it. It's unlikely that your decision controls whether or not the contract activates. Much much more likely is that 93% of people sign the contract, and so all this contract does is give away your money.
The transaction costs part is really missing a link to the Lizardman's Constant article.
I like the idea of the tax opt-out. After having worked for a while doing analytics for a software company, I can guarantee that just swapping a feature from opt-in to opt out has a massive effect in usage - not just of the "setting" being on or not, but actual usage. Meaning that once you make it the default, the user says "ah yes I actually like this", but large fractions never even consider it if it's opt-in. I'm not sure what "revealed preference" economists say about this behaviour... but yeah, their picture of reality certainly doesn't match my empirical experience.
"But this is rarely how real charity works. More likely, your $100 can save one life, and your marginal utility over total lives saved is pretty constant."
I don't think this is exactly true at large enough scales? It's reasonably true for individual small-scale donors because one normal person's donation won't generally make the difference between a new charity program existing or not; it's *most* true if, like, you give your money to GiveWell for regranting and GiveWell figures out where to send it based on its current funding bar. This is engaging with utility/money as somewhat of an abstraction.
But on the ground, charity doesn't actually mostly come in $100-sized pieces? USAID let entire programs exist that wouldn't have otherwise, and that an individual donor can't cause to slightly-exist by paying for a small chunk of the expense. Either a program can operate or it can't. (Yes, it can also operate better or worse, or be bigger or smaller. But you usually need a pretty significant investment for it to exist at all.)
So maybe a smaller version of the bundling argument is just true? You don't need ALL Americans to agree to fund ALL of USAID to get the benefit, but you need like, 100 Americans per USAID program, and having USAID handle this centrally greatly simplifies the logistics of each program finding 100 Americans to fund it.
I've thought in a similar way around environmental policies for a while.
I basically can't be arsed to change my lifestyle to fight climate change. I really care - at least I think I do - but in the moment I would really prefer to drive to work than cycle.
But what I can be arsed to do is vote for a political party that I know will basically coerce me (and, crucially, everyone else) into doing the right thing through e.g. steep carbon taxes.
Government is great for solving intra-personal conflicts like this in the direction of long-term benefit over short-term comfort and graitification.
Is it not enough to say "it's the right thing to do?" I guess EA needs to break down their entire thought processes to a level of rigour commensurate with a proof in propositional logic; however, I think taking it, and anything else, to an extreme discounts an appreciation of humanity that is implied to be the foundation of the practice.
This analysis is bottom-up, but a top-down view should be sufficient and would match most people's intuitions. While practically, it might increase one's tax burden, for most people, the impact of foreign aid on their taxes is perceived as negligible. Instead, you can perceive foreign aid contributions as a reallocation of the federal budget, rather than a separate fund pool we need to contribute to. At that point, it makes sense to contribute to foreign aid over a lot of "wasted federal programs"—whatever the taxpayer perceives that to be.
This debate is simply a proxy for libertarian economics, with the original commenter seeming convinced of absolving themselves of any moral responsibility at all. I think that's a much more principal battle that I can't address because it feels like it underlies the basics of being human.
There is a LessWrong post Moral Public Goods (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqKwra9rRYYMvySHc/moral-public-goods) which I think has the explanation. For altruistic things like charity, my preferences is that the more donated money the better. So maybe I think every dollar donated give me enough warm fuzzy feelings as spending one cent on booze and hookers for myself. In that case I would not want to spend any money on my own, but it *is* worth my while to force all 300 million americans to donate $100, even if I *also* get taxed $100. If other Americans have the same preferences, then everyone would make the same decision, and it this "tax for charity" really maximizes everbody's utility, *even though* everyone would be even better of if they could keep their own $100 for themselves. I guess the key point is that every dollar for charity gives warm fuzzy feelings for *everyone*, but every dollar spend on booze and hookers only benefits the single individual who spent it.
Why not? I suggest that you cultivate this taste. I promise it makes life much more pleasant (and under the xkcd sandwich principel, I truly believe anyone can find joy in it if they try).
My understanding is that in Germany, a ~10% tithe is taken out at the same time as your taxes and given to your church by default. You can get out of it by leaving the church but this requires some headache and comes at a social cost. Pretty similar to your foreign aide scheme, but with bigger hurdles than a checkbox. Personally, I think if you could get out of a meaningful fraction of your taxes just by selecting a number of checkboxes, then doing so would be wildly popular and even more so among the wealthy. E.g. Trump’s not paying taxes “makes me smart” quote.
I'm like 1/3 of the way through. But about the free rider and voluntary funding of ice. I wanted to say, I live in rural america, with a volunteer fire department. And as I write this I don't know the numbers, but my impression is it's mostly funded locally, through donations*(I send a check for $200 every year) and fund raising. (There's a fireman's fair every year, where it's your civic duty to go down, buy some food and drink, and spend some other money on games. It's a great time and I try and never miss it! There's nothing wrong with civic duty being fun.)
About donating (assurance contracting) for defense spending. Well first this sounds like a terrible idea. But second, if you set the number at ~75% every year, you'd get to the point where getting the last ~1-10% would be a big deal.
So you could make some box, where people get to 'assign' some of their tax dollars to some areas of government, this also sounds like a terrible idea.
About much of the rest, as far as gov. goes it seems best if we all just get a yes or no vote, and you've got to accept all the details. Oh and the more that gets done locally the better.
Hold it, you're giving me a set of boxes to check, and for every box I check I get ~x dollars back. My predictions is that most americans will check most of the boxes. (I think it would be a bad experiment to run.)
Oh, and finally I don't think most voters support foreign aid. (And I enjoyed the post so thank you.)
What you are cynically calling "The Virtue Signalling Argument" is a lot stronger in actuality. Altruistic motivations for voting are not simply more compelling, they are in fact the only rational basis for most political actions. Only a pure egoist could rationally prefer the infinitesimal benefits of selfish voting to the considerable benefits of unselfish voting. Despite the fact that most, if not the majority of people vote out of egoistic self-interest. I wrote about this here: https://dylanrichardson.substack.com/p/why-not-vote-on-principle
Concern about the coerciveness of unaccountable, anti-democratic governance is non-consequentialist. And although certain people may hold deontic values that constrain their personal actions, they should still prefer that the best outcomes are realized.
In sum:
1. Altruistic motivations are the only rational basis for (most) political action.
2. Even if USAID represents "forced charity", it promotes the greatest good.
3. Only those seeking to promote the greatest good should vote, otherwise they should remain silent.
4. Therefore: It is either irrational or immoral to vote against USAID.
I think there's a strong argument similar to what you talk about in your "insomnia argumnet" section. But I don't get why you phrase it as some sort of special "psychological good" — the math work out fine if you just model people as caring about other people's welfare a moderate amount.
Everyone in a group of people can reasonably have the preference “everyone donates to charity > no one donates to charity > only I donate to charity”, if each individual values “money to charity” more than they value money held by other people in the group. If so, agreeing to put taxes towards charity could be preferred by everyone. This is basically the same story as for normal public goods, where we normally accept that government has an important role to play (even if the public good funding isn't preferred by literally everyone). See Paul Christiano's "moral public goods" for a longer explanation & discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqKwra9rRYYMvySHc/moral-public-goods (I'm told that Milton Friedman wrote about this argument in the 1960s, in Capitalism and Freedom.)
It's possible that dominant assurance contracts could solve the funding of public goods without taxation. But based on Alex Mennen's comment above, it seems like it very well might not.
Your other response to this argument is that you're not sure "how to avoid having it justify almost anything" — but I don't see why it would be at risk of justifying almost anything. Most saliently, if democracy works ok, it can only justify paying for things where >50% of people do in fact thinks it's worthwhile for the country to pay for them. (Even though this will increase their own taxes slightly.)
Uhh what about the possibility that just charity is good and people do less of it than would be morally ideal? Why do we need this kind of complicated justification -- it seems to presume some kind of background moral assumption that you need a better argument than just: seems utility positive.
This post misses or glosses over what are in my mind the two best arguments in favor of foreign aid. For context, I am not an effective altruist nor are my ethics strictly utilitarian, though i think these arguments should appeal to those groups.
1) The process for determining tax rates is somewhat independent of the process of determining what taxes are spent on. Tax rates depend partly on how much the public is willing to pay on taxes before they complain loudly, as well as what the economy can bear. Many things that the government spends tax money on have little value or even net negative utility. If we stop spending on foreign aid, the likely result is not that we will get all that money back in lower taxes, but that the most of that money will be spent on worse options while we pay about the same taxes.
2) Foreign aid at the government level has additional benefits above foreign aid at the individual charitable contribution level. If done well, it improves the reputation of the government providing the aid. This then provides benefit to the citizens of the country giving the aid. They are better off than if they had all given to charity directly.
This is one of the silliest posts I have read for a long while for at least two reasons:
* The argument applies to *any* government spending not just to foreign aid and that includes spending on police and courts to enforce contracts and property rights too (the only functions of governments for "propertarians").
* The topic of tax-based funding of public services and public insurance of any type has been debated for ages and its only solution is political. This post reads like a sophomore essay on a topic that has a long and complex intellectual history.
There is another argument: paying taxes in a country is *entirely voluntary* as long as it is possible to leave that country. You do not like what other voters like to fund with your taxes? TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and shop for citizenship in another country with a taxation policy you like better. Same as when you do not like the price/value proposition of Wal*Mart, shop somewhere else; nobody forces you to shop at Wal*Mart and nobody forces you to live in the USA or the EU etc.
Dozens of thousands of people every year do TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and move to another country for tax reasons! What if you cannot afford the cost of moving to another country? Losers will be losers: it is the same as if you cannot afford to cost of renting in NYC even if that is where you would like to live.
Put another way the government of a country is like a housing association and if you do not like membership in that housing association buy membership in another or be a loser.
Another reason is that the author pretends not knowing that government foreign aid specifically is not about charity but about buying influence abroad and rewarding with contracts domestic "sponsors" and that applies not only to the foreign aid by the Department of War but also by other departments like the Department of Agriculture.
It is the perspective of the US government that every US citizen owes them taxes no matter where they live or what other citizenship they hold. (They may waive this if you pay sufficient taxes elsewhere and file your US tax return appropriately.) You can renounce your US citizenship, but this has various consequences.
«the US government that every US citizen owes them taxes no matter where they live or what other citizenship they hold. [...] You can renounce your US citizenship, but this has various consequences.»
I am well aware of that and does not change change anything as it is part of the terms & conditions for membership: USA citizenship is a voluntary membership contract entered into by the parents on behalf of their minor children at birth and reaffirmed by them when they become of age by TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and not applying for renounciation. Many private contracts also involve costs both if one does not use them and exit fees for termination.
The many people who purchase what for them is a more cost-effective country membership renounce their USA citizenship and pay both the exit fees from the USA and the entry fees for their new membership advisedly. Again same as for housing association membership.
Something I've heard in other contexts but probably applies here as well. About 10% of a group will actively try to improve the situation above their own needs. 10% will actively degrade the situation out of selfish interest. The remaining 80% pretty much just look around and mimic the morality they see in the world.
In this situation the 80% are the vast majority of people who are roughly fine with whatever taxes are used for now, even if they don't realistically have any understanding of it. They accept current spending levels because they are the status quo.
Anecdatally, I've seen a couple of college groups with privately optional but yes-by-default charity dues. Few opt out. I'm not sure which of these hypotheses that supports, but it's reminiscent of your final suggestion.
Nice list of arguments. The signalling argument related to voting that you start out with, is probably particularly important.
You do however assume that the motive for providing help is simply to help people who suffer. That is certainly a motive (a signalling motive if you are cynical, an internalized-reputational-concerns motive if you are less cynical).
But there are other arguments for helping people in far-off lands, including their governments, that you do not discuss. Where providing aid through your state rather than innumerable fragmented charity-NGOs make sense. I’ll limit myself to only one, just to illustrate the point: Negative externalities.
That is: If a low-income country does not have enough money to prioritize things such as eliminate spread of infectious diseases or prevent terrorists from having a safe haven, that will be a problem also for you. And since you get a benefit from combating stuff in foreign countries that have such negative externalities, you have a motive for providing help. This is not charity, it is enlightened self-interest. And thanks to the tragedy-of-the-commons situation that arises if you try to provide such help on a voluntary basis, it makes sense to channel such help through taxation & help from your state to their state.
An added concern related to this: Governments in low income countries are burdened with a coordination problem with regard to hundreds of charities, each with their own agenda and evaluation system, that descend on these poor governments to offer help. That’s why we have SWAPs (sector-wide approaches) to coordinate help. Such coordination is always difficult, but it is more difficult when you have to deal with hundreds of charities rather than a more limited number of states, each with a bigger development cooperation budget.
There's an argument missing from the post that I also have not seen in the comments, which surprises me. It's just a regular free rider problem.
The major things that foreign aid does - alleviating poverty, treating disease, building infrastructure, etc. - make the world a better and more stable place. Citizens of wealthy countries, whose taxes contribute to foreign aid, benefit from the results. A world where large swaths of people are in bad situations is a more dangerous world. People without resources or prospects will take risks, commit crimes, and otherwise behave antisocially. Diseases will spread more easily. A more stable world is safer and more productive. Everyone has a stake in that.
(One of the major problems with modern politics is that a substantial fraction of voters have retreated to the unenlightened view that they would rather live in a less stable world from which they *might* be able to extract personal leverage and short-term success.)
There's also a compiling problem. I might support taxation for X1..Xn, but at Xn+1 it just gets too much, even though all X1..Xn+1 are noble causes I would support individually.
"The Bundling Argument asks: what if, psychologically, this isn’t true? What if “your $100 plus equal donations from the rest of our coalition of 49,999 other altruists can completely solve this famine” sounds more appealing then “if you donate $100, you can save one person from a famine which will still kill thousands of others”?"
I strongly identify with this. That's the main reason I don't worry about things like not using plastic straws, or buying recycled paper. I don't want to contribute one millionth of a solution to a problem, I want the problem solved. I'm cynical enough to believe that most of the time, someone asking me to contribute one millionth of a solution is just and excuse to avoid solving the problem. After all, there are people out there who profit from not solving large scale problems--by shifting the responsibility to individuals, they can avoid getting the problem solved and continue to profit.
Examples abound. I could donate enough money to provide one child with enough school supplies for a year, but this would do nothing to improve the educational system. I could donate enough money to feed a family for a year and that would do nothing to alleviate poverty. I could donate enough money to fix a mile of road and that would do nothing to improve congestion. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. A million people could each donate one millionth of the cost of a solution, and the problem still wouldn't be solved. Not so much a coordination problem as a skilled solution problem. A million people working together won't generate a creative new solutions to a problem, it will just scale up the wrong one.
*Everything* the state or parts of it does is doing something using other people's money. Foreign aid is no different. We have decided that we use democracy to decide how much to tax and how to spend it. Aid is *no* different in principle. You think foreign aid is too high? Vote for someone who wants to lower it!
Of course, foreign aid has a very strong tendency to be inefficient, pointless, or even destructive, so there are plenty of pragmatic and practical reasons why it might be a bad idea, but now we're way past simplistic (and honestly, silly) arguments like "other people's money".
Almost everyone would check the refund box because TurboTax/HR Block/their accountant would do it for them because the tax prep industry's only incentive is to maximize refund amount and the majority of people use a tax prep service/software and don't actually fill out the forms. At *most* maybe a third of taxpayers actually fill out their own 1040 and related forms via freefillableforms or on paper - and a lot of them would still manually check the "bigger refund" box because they are the kind of people who like maximizing their tax return. Also, they could take that money, then donate it to a charity of their choice instead of the bureaucracy, and even possibly get a deduction out of it for next year!
I think it's simple. Most people care some amount about other people, but we're selfish and we care about ourselves more. If I donate money, it helps other people, but I have to bear the full cost. If I vote for the government to tax us and donate that, then it helps other people massively more than it costs me. And it taxes other people, but that hurts them way less than the foreign aid helps. And it would be to most people's preferences, because they would also receive the full benefit of other people being helped a ton while only bearing a small personal cost.
Forced charity is not charity. And foreign aid is not listed as something given to the Federal Government by the Constitution. The rest doesn't matter one whit.
1. Foreign aid isn't charity at all; see my more recent comment on this point a little below
2. The constitutional authorities for foreign aid are the Spending Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.1), the Foreign Commerce Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.3), and the Necessary and Proper Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.18).
1. Then why is everyone talking about it as if that's one of the big reasons to do it?
2. Citing those in this context is the equivalent of the psychic paper from Dr. Who. Using those to allow this is isomorphic to saying "there are no limits on the federal government except what's explicitly prohibited elsewhere", which entirely stands the whole Constitution on its head. I refuse to accept that as anything other than a naked power grab.
"Other people will be taxed, but you will also be taxed" is a straightforward Tragedy of the Commons setup. It will produce too much foreign aid, just as surely as common field grazing (without the legal restrictions that actual medieval villagers had in place) will produce too many sheep.
Surely that's a rhetorical statement and cannot be meant to be literally true. I mean, suppose we gave other countries so much of our annual income that most Americans were literally dying of starvation or malnutrition; I think it's easily understandable that that could be called "too much foreign aid," and that therefore the words do have an imaginable meaning. I don't suppose you mean that there is literally no upper limit to the amount of foreign aid that should be given.
And if you do grant that there can be an excessive amount, then, in the words of a very old joke, "I just want to haggle over the price."
The criterion I have in mind, though, is one that I think might make sense to an economist. How much foreign aid would person 1 choose to give, if they knew that they had to pay that amount out of their own income? How much would person 2 choose to give, if they knew they had go pay that amount out of their own income? Iterate through all such persons, and sum the amounts. That is the right amount of foreign aid; that is, it's the amount each person thinks is right to give when the costs fall on them. Any more than that is "too much." The standard is purely subjective, in each person's utility function.
You now admit a meaningful “right amount” can exist, but in your grandparent post you claim that /any/ taxation scheme will inevitably result in “too much foreign aid”, without mentioning amounts or elaborating or qualifying further.
I suggest that rhetorical statements not meant to be taken literally are a completely valid response to rhetorical statements not meant to be taken literally.
When I said, "It will produce too much foreign aid," that was not an assertion of complete inevitability; it was a statement that excess is a natural and probable outcome of the described institutional situation, just as an excessive number of sheep is a natural and probable outcome of a commons with unrestricted use. We might imagine a system of tax funded foreign aid that produced the "right amount," just as we might imagine a common field with just the right number of sheep grazing on it; I just think both are unlikely, because the institutional arrangements invite people to make poor decisions.
My criterion for "the right amount" is the amount that would be given if each potential donor freely chose to give some amount, and the amounts were summed. That is, it's the amount that would be given if foreign aid were not tax supported. I'm willing to entertain a proposal to make foreign aid decisions based on taxation that can be held to such an amount; do you have one in mind?
I'm reminded, in this discussion, of a conversation I had much earlier in this century, where a friend was talking about guaranteed medical care, and I said, "I don't consider my life infinitely valuable." He was shocked and horrified. But I though what I said was just obvious: I'm not prepared to pay an unlimited sum for medical treatment of potentially terminal illnesses, I'm not prepared to pay the premiums for actuarially fair insurance that would pay such sums, and I'm not prepared to pay or vote for the taxes that would support such a scheme through subsidies. At some point saving my life will costs too much. In particular, if the cost would leave no financial resources to help support my wife if she outlives me, I'm not willing to save my life at that cost (because I can't count on restoring the expended funds in my remaining life expectancy). Your statement sounded parallel to a claim that human life is infinitely valuable; I wanted to rule that interpretation out. But I went on to say "I just want to haggle over the price," that is, to invite discussion of what is "the right amount." I've put forth my statement of what is "the right amount" (twice now): It's the level people will approve when they are being generous with their own money. What's your concept of "the right amount," rhetoric aside?
What I value in any such system is the closing of the gap between what people say they would approve and what they actually approve. Without any mechanism to hold people to their boasts and signalling, the incentives are misaligned and result becomes very Soviet: huge numbers on paper, bare scraps in reality. A taxation system is one approach: we vote for stuff to happen, and the outcome is then enforced. Other arrangements are possible, but unlikely to work as well in practice.
The entire discussion proceeds from a faulty premise by agreeing to entertain an analogy between USAID, or other governmental foreign development aid, and individual charity.
Setting aside questions of execution (a big caveat, but the post starts from first principles so I will too), the purpose of foreign aid is to serve the national (security, economic, diplomatic, etc.) interests of the donor country--in this case, the United States. The decision to send foreign aid is not an instrument of charity, like the United Way; it is an instrument of state, like the decisions to open an embassy, enter a trade or defense treaty, or sell or give military equipment.
Discussions about bundling individual contributions from altruists etc. are totally irrelevant because the purpose of foreign aid is to exercise state power. It is a major form of "soft power." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
The benefits to the US of foreign aid can include, as a non-exhaustive list of examples: engendering friendly feelings toward the US amongst the population (at large, and/or a subgroup) and/or the government; enhancing the reputation of the US in other potential recipient countries and making them more likely to align with the US than with our rivals/enemies; helping stabilize a friendly but rickety government; creating in the recipient country a more favorable environment for future US economic (e.g., building infrastructure that will help build markets for US products) and/or defense relationships; preventing or mitigating problems (e.g., flooding, famine, etc.) in the recipient country that could spill over and destabilize neighboring countries or trade routes; etc.
For example, consider one of the most successful US foreign aid programs of all time, the Marshall Plan. Per the Wikipedia page, "The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity and prevent the spread of communism. The Marshall Plan proposed the reduction of interstate barriers and the economic integration of the European continent while also encouraging an increase in productivity as well as the adoption of modern business procedures." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Analogizing foreign aid to individual charitable donations fails to capture the most important aspects of foreign aid and will not lead to useful insights.
I think it's much simpler than this: it's a special pleading ("isolated demand for rigor" in your language). Whether they like it or not, Americans are giving the Milei govt 20B$ to save it from its own mismanagement. Since "no more foreign aid", let alone "no more non-minarchist expenditure" are not on the table, opening that line of discussion is misleading and unproductive.
I'd even go as far as to say it's potentially dishonest: it seems to imply the Trump admin is somehow acting in a libertarian framework, or at least moving closer to it wrt foreign expenditure, when it's patently not the case. An relatively uninformed bystander would logically infer that the options are "more taxpayer-funded charity" vs "less taxpayer funded charity", rather than "should taxpayers' money be directed toward preventing children from being born with HIV, or to ensure a foreign polician does not pay electoral cost for bad macroeconomic policies".
To take an extreme case: suppose that someone was under trial for idk, tax fraud, but in every interview and on their internet all his supporters kept screaming that "having strong opinions against Trump is not a crime" and "he had the IA right to say what he said". Sure, they are not quite explicitely lying about the charges, but they are very clearly and consciously misleading the public on the facts of the matter in a way that's morally if not legally tantamount to lying. How is this different?
> Since "no more foreign aid", let alone "no more non-minarchist expenditure" are not on the table, opening that line of discussion is misleading and unproductive.
This seems like a general purpose argument against anything.
If you've already done one bad thing then being perfect is off the table so it doesn't matter if you do a bunch of other bad things. There's no longer any point arguing about any particular bad thing any more.
Have you read my comment? Can you argue without constructing strawmen?
It's not a matter of having done "one bad thing" (who said it was bad? Why should we just assume your conclusion?). Any argument that applies generally against _any_ instance of X cannot be used to justify a shift from x1 to x2, and to do so is most likely dishonest (as it implicitely denies x2 happened).
If you want to make a general argument against meat-eating, do so. The argument is not invalid just because you eat meat yourself. But no argument against meat-eating will ever cogently justify the school cafeteria switching from pork to mutton (or vice versa). If you nonsensically insist in making that argument while forcing me to eat mutton instead of pork, it's probably bc you have ulterior motives against pork (eg religion), but then you should just state that and make your case for what you actually believe.
Even libertarians need to accept that coercion is permissible when it is necessary to secure compliance with especially weighty obligations to help others. If a child is drowning in front of you and you could easily save them but choose not to, and I cannot save them myself but can credibly threaten to shoot you with a taser unless you reach out and save them, I am permitted, if not required, to make that threat. Similarly, when people could save whole innocent lives at a relatively minor cost, but for whatever reason aren’t doing so, a government can permissibly tax those people to save the lives. In light of my previous example, we can see that doing so can be justifiable even granting that taxation is morally on a par with forced labour, as libertarians believe.
> Even libertarians need to accept that coercion is permissible when it is necessary to secure compliance with especially weighty obligations to help others
No, I don't think libertarians need to accept that at all.
A libertarian would deny the existence of "obligations to help others", or alternatively say that the term "obligation" is overloaded and not all obligations are things that it is permissible to use violence to obtain.
Also I think it's an unreasonable rhetorical trick to first establish a ridiculously unlikely situation (drowning child plus person who doesn't feel like helping plus person who can't help but has a taser) and immediately switch it out for an entirely everyday situation (therefore I can take your money and send it to Africa).
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
I believe presidental campaigns cost money, are a necessary part of democracy, and that corporate sponsorship of campaigns is problematic. I never check the $3 box for the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.
How many people check this box? Does that correlate with the number of people who believe public funding of elections would be better than corporate funding?
This isn't a perfect analogy! But it's one real data point.
I think the article misses the mark here by assessing this entirely as charitable giving. It is not that and was never intended to be.
The end for the US government, is projection of US soft power. Some of the means to achieve that end can be classed as charitable acts, but they are only means towards that end.
This (Ends = Soft Power, Means = Sometimes a meaningful charitable act) has actual important effects in assessing USAIDs value.
It is also this additional consideration that make it justifiable as a tax also, because assessed not as a charit, but as a contribution to community/soft power, makes clear that it is indeed a public and non-excludable good that is being purchased of the type taxes are economically justified for. You can't purchase soft power to the US with individual donations without a free rider problem.
This also changes the analysis for both the government and the voter.
For the US govt, "And if we lose this soft power, what other increased costs can we expect to bear?" is a crucial question. Perhaps they answer is "ultimately you're going to need 3 extra infantry divisions of hard power" as former allies now align with other powers that are a threat to the US, making USAID cost neutral on this face alone. Maybe it is "we will lose significant bargaining power in trade and access deals" and preventing that may make USAID cost neutral on its own. The benefits of the Marshall Plan were not that europeans got charitable giving to rebuild their nations, it WAS that western europe remained US aligned democratically rather than potentially democratically becoming USSR aligned in post-war elections. That potential cost would have lost the US far more money in military spending than the Marshall Plan cost them even if it didn't end in an irradiated US/Asian/European land mass.
So... in the first instance... you're not assessing the cost/benefits of USAID to the United States based on what they actually are. This also makes clear why there are donations to "Moldavan Wine Industries" alongside "PEPFAR". If $10m to Moldavan wine makers buys you more soft power than $10m to PEPFAR, you'd expect to see those donations in the mix... regardless if it appears "less charitably worthy".
This analysis also, therefore undersells the benefits to "The American Voter" of USAID as well. Because the benefits to them are both charitable, communitarian and IR realist.... not just a straight "USAID vs EA" cost benefit analysis on charity.
The voter is paying for both the means (charity) and the (ends) and also getting a bonus benefit (communitarian identity).... and comparing this to an EA donation undersells the benefits.
They get the charity donation to the unfortunate, sure. They also get to reap the benefits of the soft power (lower costs in hard power, beneficial trade relations that gain them jobs etc). They also get to reap a further benefit in "My community, America, being the good guys" and/or greater internal American group cohesion as a result of this community building.
I think USAID very obviously loses the straight "Charity vs Charity" comparison with EA (from a voters perspective) ... but very obviously wins the "Charity+Soft Power+Communitarian Identity vs Charity" comparison with EA. It very heavily changes the calculus here, even for the voter.
Similarly, it loses the Charity comparison even from the governments own view... because from the governments view it is not a charity. However, I also clearly think it wins the "Soft Power vs alternative costs of Harder Power/Other costs" comparison as well, which is the appropriate one from this perspective.
It's much simpler than you're making it out to be. This is exactly the expected behavior if everyone was a mix of selfish and altruism with both factors making a roughly equal contribution to their preferences. For each individual, if someone else gives money to charity they gain according to their altruistic values and do not lose according to their selfish values. It is easy for it to end up that giving money isn't worth it for their selfish cost, but if everyone else gives money and they are forced to give money too then the total altruistic value is well worth the selfish loss.
Here's a mathematical model: Say each person has hedonic value measuring how much happiness and comfort and personal life satisfaction this person has. Altruism is when a person's utility function, which is what a person values all-things-considered and is the measure the person uses to decide trade-offs, is different from their hedonic value. Since I'm supposing people are a mixture of selfish and altruistic, let's say you, a typical individual in this society, have a utility function which is the sum of your own hedonic value and the average of the hedonic values of everyone in the society. Say the society has a million people. Then for any one other person, you value that person's hedonic good one millionth less than your own.
Suppose that half the society is rich and half is poor, and one dollar is worth 1 point in hedonic value to a rich person and 100 points to a poor person. You happen to be rich. Do you want to give a poor stranger one dollar? Since you value the stranger one millionth less than yourself, the altruistic value of giving to the stranger is 0.0001 utility, and the selfish value is -1 utility. It is clearly not worth it!
But do you want your rich neighbor to give a poor person one dollar? Now both the 1 hedonic point and the 100 hedonic points are only important as altruistic value, no selfish value is involved, and you gain 0.000099 utility if this transfer happens.
Now what if every rich person gave one dollar to every poor person? Then half the population loses 1 hedonic point and half the population gains 100 hedonic points, on average that's a gain of 49.5 utility in altruistic value. Then adding the selfish loss of 1 hedonic point, that's a total of 48.5 utility gained. That's clearly a worthwhile tradeoff.
So we get that an individual doesn't want to donate money themselves, but if they're offered to make so that everyone is forced to give money including themselves they'll happily make that happen. And this is just with normal selfishness and altruism. No need to make up some nonlinearity or threshold effect on the effect of donation. No need to make a complicated psychological story where individuals are acting irrationally. The closest you get is in "The Insomnia Argument", but there you make it out as if we need to add an ad hoc new psychological preference to this model when the preference in question is just plain altruism, the same preference that makes some people donate freely, just weaker.
More broadly, I think rational choice theory and game theory are excellent theories of human behavior and often underestimated. I suspect if people spent more time acquiring a mastery of these theories and less seeking out exceptions to them our collective understanding of human behavior will be greater.
1. As a libertarian for deontologist reasons, I do not think not applying libertarianism in a specific context is justifiable by saying that's an inconsistent application of it. The more it is applied, the better.
2. The fact that it's more "difficult" to get as much foreign aid when done voluntarily should be counted as a feature (or at least as a neutral thing) rather than a bug. The government should not be making it easier (so-to-speak) by funding it by default and then letting people opt out, as it shouldn't be doing it for let's say funding something else that's philanthropic, because the government shouldn't be in the business of making such value judgments at all (any value judgments that go beyond its role as a night-watchman/minarchist state). Imagine your reaction to the government funding something by default that most people considered philanthropic but you didn't, e.g. meat-based products for poor people assuming you're a vegan.
3. Overseas military adventures shouldn't be funded by taxpayer dollars, only defense of the country.
Isn't a much more immediate argument against Foreign Aid just essentially a distrust of government to
1) actually efficiently use the money and
2) use this money for it's official, advertised purpose and not for discreetly funnel it towards different projects?
As someone with roots in left-wing activism long before the Left's identitarian turn, I had to chuckle as many of my openly Marxist friends and acquaintances bewailed Trump gutting USAID - when for decades the consensus among left-wingers was that USAID was an imperialist front, maliciously exploiting the needs of developing countries in order to quietly stamp out subversive movements abroad and consolidate political dependencies in the Third World!
I mean, USAID was literally created to counter rising Soviet soft power in the developing parts of the world - it's very origin and purpose is already different from what it frames itself as in public - helping the needy is a means to an end, but not the end goal itself. So being weary of your money going directly to it's coffers should be a given, even if all the aforementioned efficiency and scaling advantages you list apply to it fully.
Browsing this overview (and leaving out the more recent Trump attacks against USAID), it seems self-evident that the agency's foundational goal of expanding American influence and power repeatedly wins out over it's stated, formal goal of helping the vulnerable and encouraging economic and civic development.
Do you think your average liberal who gladly pays taxes for welfare and fully endorses USAID's stated goal would be pleased to discover his USAID tax contribution went to directly fund efforts to undermine Bolivia's democratically elected leftist government? Or went to fund the salaries of CIA agents employed at bogus USAID jobs as cover stories for their presence abroad? Or helped finance the OPS division of USAID, which amongst other things taught torture methods to the police of despotic regimes?
There is an argument against foreign aid that is neither inherently right-wing nor preoccupied with the scalability and efficient optimisation taxation allows: simple mistrust of government not to overreach it's power and misuse its people's wealth once it has legally been bestowed.
If USAID's only goal would plainly be to help the needy abroad, I would see little issue with it. If it, in turn, actually uses vital aid as a cudgel to manipulate foreign governments and has zero qualms about ceasing it's help if the foreign government refuses to, say, vote in favour of the Kuwait War at the UN in 1990 - as happened with Yemen - then I must conclude that USAID's goal is not actually helping the needy and therefore is unfit to receive tax money for that purpose.
I'm not inherently against a CIA or Pentagon existing, I can understand why in some situations a foreign intervention or regime change could be good and necessary. These agencies actually use their tax contributions for their stated purpose, meaning we can reign in or expand their budget depending on how well they appear to be able to use the money. What I do not want is a government agency that resists scrutiny or budget reduction by pointing at it's charitable nature and humanitarian purpose, only for the money spent for that goal to vanish into the dark, scheming recesses of American Empire. We already have the alphabet organisations for that - and we at least know that we're dealing with this Empire when we look at and confront them.
People can always choose to donate voluntarily to the government, but few people do. Whatever people like about government run charity, it seems very strongly tied to coercion. Coercion seems to be a feature, not a bug.
If I put on my "actual beliefs" had, the reason I support foreign aid is that it does very large amounts of good, and I am a utilitarian.
If I try to take in the assumptions of common-sense morality, then I think there's a similar rationale. Promoting the impartial good isn't the only purpose of government. Maybe governments have way more obligation to their citizens than others. But still, it seems like one important purpose. It would have been noble to stop the Rwandan genocide at minimal cost. One feature strongly counting in favor of ww2 intervention was that it stopped the Nazi holocaust.
It seems plausible that the tiny slice of money spent on foreign aid does more good than the rest of the federal budget, barring a few necessities like preventing America from being invaded. For this reason, I think commonsense supports foreign aid.
Interior Department does quite a bit, with significantly less. I’m not sure why some people’s values are held in higher regard than others’.
The estimates I've seen put the number of lives saved by USAID at millions every year. Does the Department of the Interior do that and if so, how?
How independent are these statistics? I think it does a lot of good (and some bad) but most people making statistics on Aid have strong incentives to suggest it is effective.
Pretty indepednent and done by sensible people I trust like Justin Sandefur.
Are they subtracting out the murdered? I mean, if you're giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood (or Hamas, or...). I'm certain they aren't doing knockoff effects, like "we can't negotiate with Egypt because USAID won't actually support our diplomatic efforts to Stop A War."
Sandefur’s job and identity are dependent on aid being successful and popular. It is hard if you find something saves millions of lives to not want to be involved but it means the research isn't independent.
You may trust this guy, but why should I? I don't know who he is or what his vested interests are, and maybe it's to his benefit (not monetarily, there are a lot of ways we get benefits from something) that the US government pay out a tranche of income tax revenue on LGBT or similar causes that are not "vaccination campaigns, food relief, emergency disaster aid" but get lumped in under the umbrella of "good causes that no decent right-thinking person could object to".
Looking him up, he doesn't seem to have been involved with "crazy shit" so there's that going for him.
On the other hand, I think it would be a good thing for everyone to be Catholic. Can I get some USAID towards teaching primary school children in Tanzania to say the Angelus? I'm sure I could dig up stats from somewhere about the benefits of religious schools in Third World countries!
I would expect a firm "No" to that one, no matter how impeccably sourced my stats, so "independent estimates" is a status in the eye of the beholder at times.
USAID was used to fund DEI performances in Ireland.
https://cbn.com/news/politics/white-house-releases-list-usaid-waste-and-abuse-everything-al-qaeda-trans-operas
Maybe you missed it?
We sent millions of dollars to bribe people to not grow opium in Afghanistan. Opium growth doubled, according to the UN. The Taliban BURNT all the opium fields, which put a stop to the growing of opium.
Increasing the human population and caring for it is a value. But life is not confined to humans. And most people are not interested in the sort of calculations beloved of commenters here, of the - if only each square foot of Earth could hold one person, something something would be maximized.
Perhaps ten percent of prople see things that way, at the outside. And why should we concern ourselves with the views of the ten percent as was explained to me elsewhere?
But most people's values imply that it is very good to prevent people from dying in large numbers.
I’ve got some terrible news for you.
I think your view here is just as fringe as utilitarianism/rationalism. Very confident most people are against mass death.
Most people's values are very, very dumb, and hence "hypocritical." Last I checked, "saving the environment" would require killing a third of the earth's population (and yes, it's gotten worse since then). You won't find many people whose "values" do not include "saving Planet Earth"
In the broader sense, "saving the poor and starving" harms the environment, and yet people tend to be "Pro Both" in a sort of "this is good" way. Expecting humanity to think through consequences is a step too far for many people (listen to the smoke detectors beeping, over and over again, because certain people can't tell there's a pattern. Do you really think these people are going to think through "consequences?")
So if we shut down USAID we would see 10s of millions of people dead in 10 years?
TEOWAWKI predictions stand as 50% of the world's population dead within 5-10 years, USAID or no. At times like these, USAID is a drop in the bucket.
Hypernormalicy is the only thing keeping people whining about USAID. "This was a good thing two years ago! Therefore I cannot see the changing circumstances and it as a (very minor) bad thing!"
> I’m not sure why some people’s values are held in higher regard than others
This is just what it means to have your own values. When I say "we should fight malaria" there's no implicit "if we feel like it" attached, the way there is for "we should build fewer Brutalist buildings". It is not an indexed statement. I literally just mean that the government should fight malaria. Brutalism is bad *for me*; malaria is *bad*.
It's also a paradox to express the value that all people's values should be held in equal regard. Most people do not share that view and think some values are better than others. To respect everyone's values, you'd have to also respect the value that not all values are equal.
Not all values are equal, though. The person who believes we should "save the environment", really believes it, is saying we should get rid of a third of Earth's population (or more, really). The plans on the books (Road To Zero, charming name, remember Operation Iraqi Liberation?) are optimized for a tenth of the current population, and literally do not work (are BAD investments) at the current population size (see: electric cars).
These are the same people pouring into your ears and mine that "all values are equal" and "diversity is our strength." (And saying that immigrants can't be expected to know not to sexually assault Italian women on Italian beaches, nevermind that maiming is a light punishment for rape in their home countries.)
Electric cars seem to be working just fine in China...
The only way for them to possibly outcompete oil-based cars is by reducing the world's population dramatically. There are significant economies of scale related to refineries (not to mention the issues with rare earth elements and needing to drive around a HUGE battery that is much heavier than an engine).
Huh? I said most people don't think all values are equal and that trying to regard them as equal is a paradox. Luciaphile is the one who suggested we should hold everyone's values in equal regard.
I am not as concerned about the making of human babies as aid proponents are (noting that once upon a time, not all that long ago, their spiritual and ideological brethren were just as impassioned and convinced if their own rectitude in service of the opposite goal).
But I think it is foolish to imagine that one can jettison, utterly, a regard for life writ large and imagine that somehow, human life in isolation will become more valuable in the exchange.
That seems like a highly uncharitable take on a lot of different things. I will tell you exactly the same thing I tell the "diversity is our strength" people, that people who disagree with you follow different logic supporting their arguments than you do opposing their arguments, which is why you get different answers. The different answers don't imply a values difference on the order of "you support murder while I oppose it", as I have seen claimed in so many unfortunate internet arguments. And also, you may have a happier life overall if you focus more on trying to believe things that are true than things that make your opponents look bad.
The People at Davos are NOT "most people I talk to on the internet" (even the rabidly brainwashed "I have no thoughts but Liberal" -- which I reserve for only one commenter around here, most are thoughtful enough to be worth engaging.) Capiche? My enemies are generally not "reasonable people who have different beliefs."
(Erm. Also my enemies are those who think that different beliefs mean you get to steal people's children. Dumb is dumb, and you may think my beliefs are such, but stealing people's children is a bridge too far).
I am not trying to make my opponents look bad, they do that quite well enough on their own.
Given that America has funded several genocides through "foreign aid" (I'm taking this as military as well as charity) within recent memory, I'd rather we not say that it does unalloyed good.
Don't make me start my own genocide NGO!
You win the thread.
> Maybe governments have way more obligation to their citizens than others.
That is the point of a republican government. The US Constitution's Preamble even states it's for "ourselves and our posterity".
> One feature strongly counting in favor of ww2 intervention was that it stopped the Nazi holocaust
The Holocaust still happened.
> The Holocaust still happened.
What are you arguing here? The Holocaust was stopped, as the parent comment said. Survivors were rescued. Would it have been fine to let it continue? Are you saying it wasn't worth stopping?
I think it is worth noting that America did not "intervene" in WW2 until they were attacked at Pearl Harbor. And even then, they waited for Hitler to declare war - if he had never done that, America might never have gone to war with Germany.
Point being, America didn't intervene until it was forced upon them.
But also no one knew about the Holocaust until after the war.
You seemingly don't know much about the holocaust. (or you're lying)
Maybe start by reading the wiki page, for example the part about mass shootings and mass deportations in many European countries, and think if that is really something that would have stayed secret.
Or scroll on directly to the International reactions part and notice the sentence about the united nations condemning the systemic murder of Jews in 1942!
I guess I was being imprecise. Obviously the persecution of Jews was known even before the war, but the extent and horror og the concentration camps wasn't really discovered until later in the war, after the US had already joined.
People were really upset and voted a certain way in part due to foreign aid. I think many people's common sense morality places negative value on foreign aid because they really don't think their money should leave the country or believe various conspiracies about foreign aid.
Even if you disagree with their reasoning, I would still call it common sense.
I am not a politics expert, but I really think foreign aid had almost nothing to do with the 2024 election. I definitely heard a lot of isolationist talk from Trump supporters and undecideds, but it was primarily focused on opposition to military interventionism and more involved forms of US participation in foreign affairs. In particular, I heard a lot about the idea that Trump/Vance was the pro-peace ticket while Kamala would be more likely to start foreign wars. I followed the election and discussion thereof pretty closely, and I don't think I had even heard of USAID until DOGE dismantled it.
Four years is a pretty long time to "follow the money." $700 billion dollars in fraud alone, used for buying votes and kickbacks (this isn't the USAID bit, this is the current "refugee" bit).
I'm pretty sure you could have found a lot of Trump supporters willing to say "we must safeguard our elections at all costs." (Okay, of course they don't really mean murdering people, they mean legal remedies -- or taking action on foreign entities that feel like a spoiled election is profitable for them. Nixing USAID was part of that).
Sorry, could you cite sources for $700B in refugee-related fraud? The refugee-related fraud I'm currently aware of has single-digit billions attached to it.
For comparison, USAID had an annual budget of ~$50B in its heyday, which would get you to ~$200B over four years -- so the question of whether we're talking about $700B or <$10B in fraud makes a difference for whether this is "much bigger than USAID" or "much smaller than USAID".
I'm citing a federal financial analyst (personal interview). The single-digit billions are presumably for "mostly Minnesota" -- the full extent of the Somali fraud alone covers Ohio and a few other states as well**. And it's replicatable, and was replicated across other states. Seattle's Mayor explicitly confirms she will NOT investigate claims of somali daycare fraud. Portland (maine) city councilman is calling ICE raids "an agenda of White Nationalism."
We have corrupt judges dismissing flurries of Somali fraud cases. Millions of dollars in actually prosecuted cases (speaking from experience: you have to be pretty damn awful to get taken to court by the Feds, it's a huge pain to substantiate theft).
And what's Walz's response: Dismiss school for the Month (to fill the daycares, one presumes -- or possibly to help protests).
These are easy layups, if you aren't involved. You sit down, keep quiet, and let Trump get rid of the criminals (and some proportion of "workingmen" whose job isn't selling drugs or being a gang), you investigate fraud -- there has NEVER been a Democratic voter who is in favor of letting fraud "just happen" (not since Teapot Dome, etc. at least. It's been a Hundred Years! We prosecuted the sobs in Illinois, in New Jersey, In New York, in Louisiana!)
One does presume that USAID could get more than 100% fraud, through a number of routes, including kickbacks... (Consider this unlikely... but large criminal conspiracies are potentially showing up here, so... your understanding of "likelihood" should be tweaked to represent that).
**Once you come up with a scam, and a way to make money off said scam, you distribute it to as many people as possible. The Somalis are just particularly bad at "not taking too many bites of the apple." Other people have daycares (and other businesses) that they're using to steal money from the government, but it's a little less obvious. They're s***ing bricks right now.
Thank you. I wish you had a more publicly available source than "personal interview" -- but I take your point that it is likely to be larger than MN (or than the Somali refugee community). I still find the $700B figure implausible, because that averages out to $14B per state, whereas you seemed to agree with me that MN was <$10B, and I thought it was believed to be the worst case.
Could you elaborate on "Walz's response is to dismiss school for the month"? I have a child in public school in a Twin Cities suburb. School is out today because it was -21F this morning; it was out on Monday because of MLK day; it will be out this coming Monday because of Grading Day (=end of the quarter). However, my kid was in school yesterday, and if he isn't going there on Tuesday it's news to me.
Wouldn't you think that like whatever department does the most polluting or removes the most forest does more good than the rest of the budget because it causes fewer animals to be born and thus minimizes animal suffering? Like chopping down 100 acres of forest probably prevents so many bugs that your math would say it dwarfs foreign aid.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
Presumably this 10-40% includes you and most EA folks since surely there is some charity we could spend the tax refund on that is better than "average US foreign aid"?
Not necessarily. Not checking the box (i.e. preserving funding for foreign aid) can help maintain a norm of funding these programs with only selfish weirdos opting out. Depending on one's mental model of how many marginal donations would not be replaced with effective private charity, that can increase the overall amount of good done.
maybe, but I have a hard time seeing the marginal signalling value (it's not even necessarily public) of one checkbox outweighing things if, say, the best private charity is >2x more effective. Also, you could commit publicly to take the refund $ and donate it to , say, givewell.
It’d be pretty public what the overall un-opted-out charity budget would be. A lot more people would see that overall budget than would see (say) Scott Alexander’s public commitment.
that's the wrong comparison. We are talking about the marginal impact. data on total private charitable funding is also publicly available
Sure, total charitable funding is public, but it wouldn’t be obvious how much of the total charitable funding was *due to* Scott’s decision to opt out and commit. It would seem much less salient when other people were deciding whether to opt out. I do find it hard to think about marginal impact - there would be nonlinearities and feedback loops. I think it’s plausible that there are “low” and “high” basins of attraction for the opt-out rate, where if people see the opt-out rate is already high they’re more likely to opt out. And that cut-off will fluctuate randomly from year to year, so really Scott’s decision is pushing the opt-out rate somewhere with different odds of ending up in the high-opt-out basin or the low-opt-out one. There’s a small chance of a big impact, and I don’t know how to compare them.
I guess you could circumvent this by having an option to choose the charity which the tax money is given to?
"help maintain a norm of funding these programs with only selfish weirdos opting out"
Speaking as a selfish weirdo...
Please stop thinking everyone who does not share your views down to the last full stop is a bad person or wrong. This is a hard lesson it took me a long time to learn.
Why? People are allowed to think anyone they want is bad and wrong. You can think of the person is replying to is bad and wrong too. The question is: what are you going to do about it? These people will continue to make your life hell unless they are stopped.
You can think someone is wrong and argue it out. You can even think someone is bad. But "this person is bad because they don't agree with me" doesn't work. It is entirely possible you are the person who's wrong in any particular case, so then you are now declaring "well then I must be a bad awful person because I'm wrong" which is absurd.
Only selfish weirdoes would refuse to sign on! But what if they have good reasons, or what they think are good reasons, to refuse? What if I think *you* are the selfish weirdo?
All that matters in the end is who has the power to enforce their will. Their moralizing means nothing if they lack the agency to do anything with it. That is why you should work to ensure that those who would stand against you are relieved of that agency. Goodness in society will not come naturally. It must be shaped by force.
This presumes that the investment opportunities for an individual are the same as for a government, which is not true at all. Economies of scale are a thing, as is the sovereign power of nations; these both give governments more leverage than individuals, for the same amount of spending.
Which is not to say that government *always* uses those advantages to do better than *any* individual could alone. But those factors exist and affect the calculation.
PEPFAR is maybe the best USAID program, and I've seen a cost effectiveness estimate of around $3,600 per life saved for it. Give well top charities are at around $3,500 per life for seasonal malaria prevention last I checked, so once you note PEPFAR is the best aid program and it's diluted by the other government aid, I'm pretty sure you can do far better at the margin by giving to Givewell.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/frequently-asked-questions-about-480?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true#footnote-anchor-1-157828526
Ozy Brennan notes that this comparison is incorrect "because GiveWell includes health and consumption effects in its numbers and [the] PEPFAR Report didn’t."
will check that out, thanks!
Warren Buffett used to complain about “his secretary paying more taxes than he did” but he did not as far as I know, give the proportional amount of money thus saved to the government. Instead he gave a whole lot to Bill Gates.
Wise man!
I would withdraw my money from US government chosen foreign aid to direct it to what GiveWell recommends. I don't trust the US government nearly as much as I trust GiveWell, precisely because the government can grab my money whether I'm willing to hand it over or not, whereas GiveWell has to convince me to each year.
There's also a cynical view, that foreign aid spending is just defense spending with a softer touch.
This applies firstly in a reputational sense. An America that solves famines and alleviates natural disasters is a "good guy America," and that kind of reputation has positive long-term effects. It also satisfies both prongs of the "why government?" question: a good reputation has free-rider benefits, and the reputation of the government/nation can't be replicated by private donations to private charities.
This also applies in a more literal sense. Government aid programs have from time to time also doubled as intelligence-gathering operations, whether (again) the soft touch of recruiting local sources or a harder touch of using programs as covers for covert operations. Programs that fail occasionally make the news, such as the alleged CIA-run fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan circa 2010 to find bin Laden via blood samples and DNA analysis.
Obviously, it's much easier to run intelligence operations through government-run or government-funded programs than through strictly private ones.
Foreign aid has other benefits as well; for example:
* It makes the aid recipients dependent on America, and thus more likely to offer concessions, such as allowing us to build military bases on their territory.
* It prevents foreign regimes from collapsing due to widespread famine-fueled unrest, thus maintaining our long-term relationships with the leaders.
* It generates goodwill among the populace, making it harder for other major foreign powers to recruit them as terrorists or spies.
This can be very dependent on what cruel dictatorship we're currently supporting.
True, the "goodwill" part certainly depends on this; but making a ruthless dictator's survival entirely dependent on your nation is a time-honored strategy among world powers. It tends to work really well, until the dictator gets deposed... at which point you can quickly switch support to the new dictator, business as usual.
Sadaam, the Taliban, maybe Zelensky, we have this long history of dictators/countries we've backstabbed who have subsequently turned on us...
[citation needed] for Zelensky
Can you stop trolling and posting gibberish on Russia-adjacent topics?
Hence why it's "maybe" Zelensky*.
Discussing Kitty History is hardly "Russian-adjacent topics" ... unless you are considering the Taliban to be Russian adjacent, as well as Sadaam Hussein? (Which, okay, I'm still going to keep talking about cold war stuff that I can cite).
*In that we haven't actually signed a peace treaty, yet, but have a significant probability of doing so. In doing so, we breach Nuland-related agreements and plans (that these plans were STUPID is immaterial to the breach, particularly if the breach results in Zelensky falling from his current position of power).
You are forgetting, or maybe you included it with your second point:
* It enables said regimes to cream off from the top and squirrel money away overseas so that should the house of cards collapse, they can get out and continue to live comfortably in exile. Why kill the golden goose by offending the Americans? As long as the aid cash flows, your bank balance grows!
Oh, absolutely. Basically, foreign aid allows us to buy poor countries instead of invading them. It's much cheaper and more reliable in the long term. It's not about making the world a better place for all people by helping our brothers overseas because of our shared humanity, it's about making America a better place by exploiting foreign leaders (however brutally dictatorial they turn out to be) before our adversaries can do the same.
You might say this is callous and inhumane, and maybe you're right, but then, so is open war...
Open war is bad, but it can have some benefits. We support a lot of child prostitution, which Russia is not very in favor of, for example (they prefer to prostitute their conscripts in the Army).
>There's also a cynical view, that foreign aid spending is just defense spending with a softer touch.
The less cynical (and more correct) view is that it's both, of course.
I feel like this is not merely cynical. Even if you do engage in foreign aid with self-aggrandizing motives, it still matters a lot for people that you're giving them medicine, instead of bullets at a high delivery speed.
Oh, sure:
A new study published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine (Okoro et al., 2025) reveals a startling trend: COVID-19 deaths increased in regions with higher vaccination coverage.
That's true when you're not giving Pakistani more polio than you're curing.
I don’t think that study proves what you’re suggesting it does.
Perhaps not*, but it's worth looking at -- and worth flagging whether our intuitions are saying "that's funny..." or "of course that's true!" Many discoveries come out of "that's funny..."
*There are semi-obvious confounds here, such as overreporting and underreporting. still, they did do a breakdown of Africa, which had relatively heterogenous reporting and vaccination.
"You're more likely to die visiting an oncologist than visiting a dermatologist"?
So many people think USAID is United States Aid, when its United States Agency for International Development - and International Development can be things like covering the costs of US charity workers' food and accommodation as they hand out sacks of millet to rural poor, all the way to funding an opposition campaign in a country that is not aligned with US interests.
Or you know funding terrorists over the strenuous objections of the Egyptian Government. When the diplomats came over to USAID to ask them to "not" fund the Muslim Brotherhood, as it was impeding negotiations, USAID told them to piss off.
USAID gave grants to treat Malaria.
It Also gave grants to fund investigative journalism, that just so happened to focus on government officials and polititicians the US found inconvenient.
A cynical sort might suppose the name was intentionally chosen to obfuscate such cooincidences.
I would not be NEARLY so down on a USAID that was doing America's Business Overseas. It's when the diplomats, the military tells USAID to "cut that shit out" and they refuse, that I start saying "we're funding terrorists? And USAID won't stop funding terrorists, when the government we're trying to negotiate with, wants us to stop funding their ideological enemies?"
I'm a big fan of realpolitik. At the end of the day, we can have a velvet glove if we choose (see Venezuela. Minimal Regime change for maximal benefit -- removing funding* for Cuban Training Camps for Antifa-types, while causing the least amount of havoc), but we pay money to get results (An intervention in Guyana that is notably "pro-Exxon", say, is within our National Interest, even if it is "against morals". According to the Biden Administration, letting Venezuela invade Guyana might have been worth it for cheap oil -- it was certainly under consideration)
*not exactly "willing" funding, or with Venezuela's interests in mind, I might add. Maduro had Cuban bodyguards, so when Cuba "asked" for some free oil... He found it politik to say yes.
Seems plausible. It also seems that investigative journalism about the abuses of US-opposed* politicians is a good thing too.
*Obviously, I mean the dictatorships and such that the US was historically opposed to, not Canada and Denmark or whoever else Trump has inexplicably started picking fights with
An America (or more broadly the West) that commits warcrimes is... also defense spending with a softer touch. We aren't the ones using bullets in Iran, after all.
It's honestly not that much easier to insert agents into government-run programs. But when one government must talk to another government, "these are our agents, Do Not Shoot", it is good to have a government run program*
This seems obviously correct. Every single dollar spent by Congress is fought over tooth and nail, because everyone has their own pet projects they would prefer to allocate funds to. USAID was funded because it advanced American interests abroad. You couldn't get 2 branches of government to agree to it if they didn't believe that.
Even the seemingly purely charitable spending such as food aid is at least partially a subsidy to American farmers giving them a leg up over other country's farmers.
>"You couldn't get 3 branches of government to agree to it if they didn't believe that."
I doubt the judiciary was consulted…
Corrected.
There is a likewise cynical view thar charity is just tax evasion.
I agree. To my mind, governments get involved in aid to exercise "soft power". There might be explicit strings attached, but more often it is just influence. Dont like what recipient government does? threaten to cut aid. Need support in international agreements? implicitly or explicitly use aid-generated influence. Whether the money is used wisely or pocketed by officials is irrelevant to the value generated. They might say lots of things about why they do this to get voter support, but the real raison d'être for using tax money is to buy influence.
China really gets this. Right through Pacific, if US, Australia and/or NZ withdraw aid, then in steps China. I guess this is happening worldwide. China is much more explicit about the transactional nature of this aid and is using that power. I dont think the current regime in US understand this use of aid at all and it's costing US influence.
Polling on foreign aid seem very susceptible to question wording, far more so than polling on other issues.
It seems to be much more popular under Biden than it was under Obama https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-data-says-about-us-foreign-aid/
A question: I have heard over the years a nontrivial number of Africans (I realize this is about foreign aid worldwide, but in truth I’ve only heard people from Africa say this) request that the West “leave us alone” full stop. Stop propping up our dictators. Stop sending us clothes. Stop disrupting our ways. Are these just people whose opinion is worthless? Are they prima facie rejected by the rationalist community?
I think probably only a small fraction of Africans (<10%) would say to stop sending them malaria nets. If you think a larger fraction think this, then I guess our crux is empirical. Otherwise, why are we getting blamed for rejecting a small fraction, in some way where we wouldn't reject the larger fraction who continue to want help?
It’s not all malaria nets though. I guess some feel that things are not what they could be, and never will be, as long as aid distorts the situation. There was a fairly prominent economist, nationality I don’t recall, who used to say that, but perhaps he was foolish, as ten-percenters sometimes are …
Dambisa Moyo wrote Dead Aid, that claims amongst other things that malaria net donations are bad actually because they destroy local jobs. Its not a consensus view. some of her ideas about aid corrupting govts are more well regarded.
I decided to google the guy I was thinking of, longer ago than I thought: James Shikwati. Here referenced with Dambisa Moyo:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dvky3MWgPYrMamoXz/another-call-to-end-aid-to-africa
It seems this view was less fringe among the fringe at one point.
Or at any rate, it is now wholly discarded as it forms no part of the discussion on ACX.
ETA: I’ve only glanced at the comments at that link, and they don’t seem sympathetic to these two economists.
> I’ve only glanced at the comments at that link, and they don’t seem sympathetic to these two economists.
This comment is technically ad-hominem, but feels relevant (because it addresses the implied reason why we should pay more attention to this specific person's opinions)
> In this particular context it seems a bit strange to describe Moyo as an African economist. She lives in London and so far as I can tell has lived in the West for most of her adult life. In particular, the two most obvious reasons one might have for trusting an African economist more on this issue -- that her self-interest is more closely aligned with what's best for Africa than with what's best for the West, and that she's constantly exposed to the economic realities of life in poor African countries -- are less applicable than they would be to someone who actually lives in Africa.
Another example to whom you might extend more grace is one we’ve recently been reminded of, Mahmood Mamdani. He seems uniformly critical of aid though it seems like he would surely approve cash payments to rulers he admires.
When something like this was debated on Less Wrong, I tried to ask for specific evidence about local malaria net industries, but didn't get a conclusive answer:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HkpYyr93P2j5R5Go7/does-anti-malaria-charity-destroy-the-local-anti-malaria
Wasn't that what doomed Toms(?) shoes, their free pair of shoes to a developing country put local cobblers out of business and making the target countries poorer?
I also recall an NPR piece how people are much more willing to help build a gravity water system in Africa, often right next to the one that was built twenty years ago but never maintained, maintenance being a much less sexy thing to donate to.
Sigh. this is why it's a better plan to buy your carbon filter from some company that's just going to give their carbon filters to some people in Africa. They'll take credit based on "how many villages saved" (and passing out filters for maintenance is cheaper than getting to a new village).
"You've heard about broken windown fallacy, now get ready for free malaria net fallacy!"
But regardless of how unbelievably dumb that particular argument was (I remember reading the book before knowing any econ and still finding it puzzling), there will always be a market for Counterintuive Big Brain ideas. If those ideas, beyond making you feel smarter than the poor simpletons who try to help their fellow man, also make you feel more *moral*, because good things are actually bad and the poor simpletons are akshually harming while they think they are helping, all the better.
I don't think we have particularly good polling from recipient countries. I have repeatedly heard negative views on aid from Africans in the West often couched in bizarre economic and conspiracy theories, but my sample is incredibly biased.
Aren't mosquito nets the Motte of International Development spending? 'AID' is the Agency for International Development after all - and there's a lot of meddling that accompanies the malaria nets.
Details? Citation?
Malaria nets aren't covid19 "writeoffs" for vaccinations:
A new study published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine (Okoro et al., 2025) reveals a startling trend: COVID-19 deaths increased in regions with higher vaccination coverage.
Remember when every news media you could find was "Brought to you by Pfizer!"
I think this study is based on "confirmed" data, and that it's consistent with a story where places that don't have access to covid vaccines are places with poor medical coverage. Ie places that are too poor to afford covid vaccines are also too poor to afford covid tests, and so don't get counted in official stats.
> 3 deaths per million in Burundi
Compared to
> or the USA which had 3,300 deaths per million
I think that the 3 per million number isn't credible.
A substantial fraction of the deaths in the USA happened before any of the vaccines were available. So this doesn't really fit a "vaccines are causing all those covid deaths" story.
Now Burundi has a GDP per capita of $489.
I think it's pretty clear what happened here. However many people covid killed in Burundi, they died in isolated villages in the middle of nowhere. Only a very small number of the richest people in Burindi went to an actual hospital that could take covid tests and add their death to the official total.
There are other possibilities. Like covid having R0 of less than 1 when everyone is in small villages and travel is weeks by donkey.
Or just the dictator fudged the numbers.
Pulling a bit more data:
https://worldcouncilforhealth.substack.com/p/new-study-shows-covid-19-deaths-were
Compare with Rwanda, which does have double the GDP of Burundi, but they're relatively similar otherwise (except for Rwanda shipping out blood diamonds they don't mine) -- I buy coffee from both places, similar climates and all, no major difference in rural population lifestyles.
Leave aside Madagascar, they're a nation of liars -- worse in a different way than China's manipulated data. And Chad's at war, so we can leave them off too, (Although so was Rwanda... i think that was more a border-war than "everyone is always in peril, do not show up to doctor appointments")
Rwanda has 1,344 confirmed deaths (WHO is modeling it as a little larger, but not even double.)
Burundi has 15 confirmed deaths (and WHO is modeling it as ten times that, at 159 -- I'd want to dive into the WHO's explanation for their modeling here, before I'd believe them, but take it as an upper bound? As a "stab at controlling for difficulties in reporting?")
Burundi has a nearly equal population to Rwanda, and they are quite similar in terms of climate and other "basics" (It's africa, so the ethnicity is going to be different).
Rwanda has notable spikes in deaths for Omicron (not as high as delta, but about equivalent for alpha/beta). Burundi does not.
What you're saying seems to be the WHO consensus, that only 10% of the dead Burundians made it to a hospital and were diagnosed with covid19. But that's only 10%, not 1%, and that's where we're sitting.
Again, neither of these countries is looking at being very dead from covid19.
https://library.sweetmarias.com/coffee-producing-countries/africa/rwanda-coffee-overview/
https://library.sweetmarias.com/coffee-producing-countries/africa/burundi-coffee-overview/
Yes, this is coffee-sperging. No, it isn't covering all of Burundi, as you can see on the map. However, I think from the pictures you'll see this isn't some place where travel is by mule -- we're looking at coffee industry (small time, like old time grain mills).
I'd be very surprised if a majority of people in Africa were opposed to sending things like medicine and bednets- which is ideally what foreign aid should focus on.
To the extent that aid recipients are critical of the aid, we should consider that feedback an extremely valuable source of information, but not the only relevant information. For example, local reports that every shipment of aid is being stolen and sold by a militia group would be a great reason to stop the aid, while a local belief that vaccines cause autism wouldn't. In the latter case, you might be helping a community against that community's will- which I'd say is morally risky, but not morally wrong. Helping someone against their will just requires an enormous amount of caution and honest consideration of their viewpoint.
They might prefer to buy whatever imports they need - medicine and bed nets included - at fair market rates, rather than risk having the local entrepreneurial spirit washed away by flash-floods of capricious charity that make long-term demand forecasting (and accordingly, plans for business profitability) functionally impossible.
Rationalism for me, but never for thee. Have another bednet.
Free medicine might suppress local investment specifically into medical import businesses, but so long as the aid isn't suddenly cut off, that's a good thing in the same way that automation and increases in productivity are a good thing- it redirects investment onto industries that would otherwise have been neglected, giving people the benefit of both those new industries and the free medicine. I think it improves growth overall, rather than suppressing it.
Of course, as we've seen recently, aid getting suddenly cut off and leaving people abandoned to die without an alternative is a very serious problem. But I think we can oppose that specific policy without opposing aid altogether.
If given a choice between pushing through a policy banning future aid and one banning the sudden cancellation of aid- maybe requiring that any reduction be tapered off over several years to allow locals to build market alternatives- I think the latter would be much more reasonable and no less realistic.
Any continued distribution of "free medicine" that enhances monopolies is bad for ALL countries' national security (Except China.) Antibiotics are pretty cheap to make, after all, it is entirely Our Fault (as citizens of the world) that 90% of antibiotics are made in China.
>it redirects investment onto industries that would otherwise have been neglected,
That logic only holds if there's a fixed pool of investment capital available, rather than elasticity based on expected yield, and accurate information with which to allocate it. Pervasive uncertainty adds risk premium to everything, uniformly, discouraging investment in general. It's not just the risk of a sudden cutoff, but the risk of new forms of "aid" suddenly coming in. Anything that can be made locally, which is important enough to pay for and has a broad enough addressable market to be worth making capital investments in scaling up, some foreigner might one day decide your people are "suffering for the lack of." and next thing you know your chicken coop is de facto competing against intermodal freight containers full of eggs being given away for free. What could possibly be used to hedge against that?
Personally I think some sorts of medical care, direct cash transfers, and maybe a few other things are beneficial enough to outweigh that effect, but I'm very sympathetic to the position of somebody who looks at aggregate results of the overall bundle of interventions and thinks their part of the world would be better off left alone rather than treated as a charity case.
Isn't a big part of public health interventions in Africa the fact that educated Westerners really do know better than poor Africans what is good for them? Africans are poor, but not so poor that they (or their governments) literally can't afford bednets or water chlorination. The problem is that they don't understand the true value of these things and so choose not to spend money on them.
I suspect that a lot of people in rich countries would also underconsume preventative healthcare (albeit not necessarily to the exact same extent as in poor countries) if their governments weren't there putting a thumb on the scale to get them to do it. Poor-country governments would like to do the same thing—they understand quite well how important it is—but they lack the capacity.
I doubt this. Were this the case, you'd see significant governmental uptake of low-cost solutions, rather than "selling entire branches of the government to your allies."
Preventative health care, in this particular case, seen as "fire safety" (burns are quite expensive to treat, and/or painful and sometimes deadly)
> Africans are poor, but not so poor that they (or their governments) literally can't afford bednets or water chlorination.
Their governments, sure - and in fact most governments *do* have bednet distribution programs, albeit underfunded ones. The challenges there are more political economy than purely fiscal.
Individuals, less so. Most African countries are highly unequal and the poor are *very* poor. Consider Kenya. In rural areas the 20th consumption percentile starts at ~$11 per person per month. Roughly $7 of that goes to food, $1 to fuel (mostly cooking), and $1 to transport, all of which are hard requirements for a farmer - so that's $2 per month for all healthcare, all equipment, all education, all clothing, all anything.
A $5 bed net is in principle attainable on that budget, but it's a massive expense. And this is the 20th percentile; many are much poorer.
See my above comment to Taymon Beal, in terms of $1 for fuel. Were the South African government serious about improving rural people's lives, they'd distribute cookers that let the rural people use waste products for fuel, instead of having to pay.
If so, opinions have changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. See question #2 here: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/09/16/key-findings-about-africans-views-on-economy-challenges
Like any public policy issue with more than 1 side, you could say that one side is 'right' and the 49.9% supporting other sides are universally worthless fools to be ignored.
Or you could recognize that probably the issue is very complex with very many moving pieces, and there's a useful synthesis of reform and reinvention that uses insights from every 'side' and is better than any one of them. Different blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, sort of deal.
The argument against sending $100 worth of clothes vs. $100 cash is that free clothes suppress the domestic clothing industry, since you can hardly compete with free. Of course, you still send material goods in emergency situations like war or famine when normal industry and logistics break down. Otherwise, it should be cash transfer that goes towards building their own capabilities, or at most means of production like electric generators that can yield economic interest.
Do NOT send bottled water if the roads are gone! (Seriously, send iodine tabs, water purification, anything PORTABLE).
I am quite upset that FEMA was unable to provide anything except bottled water (which is inhumane to transport via mule train, as well as ineffective at actually stopping water-borne illness, because you simply can't bring enough).
Well, even if there was zero aid, the west would never just leave Africa alone. Propping up anti-China and anti-Russia dictators, for example, is an independent consideration, and "disrupting our ways" would happen in a globalized world regardless. So, if meddling is inevitable, it might as well be not maximally cynical.
USAID that funds kill switches seems like it would be maximally cynical. Nothing like "watch us kill your entire population if you don't do this unpopular thing."
Africans are more than happy to accept all the free medications they can get. They are happy to get the all free healthcare they can get. The local government are happy to offload their healthcare and social services unto do-gooders. However Africans are likely to complain when western actions undermine local growing industries.
The most egregious example of this is the used clothes industry. There are youtube videos of trash heaps of imported used clothes in African countries. Literal trash heaps. Local industries can't compete. And when the countries try to ban the imports of used clothes, America actually threatens them for violating "free trade agreements" .
I’m surprised this was explained to me twice lol, as though I didn’t have a clue. But I apologize for my clumsy shorthand. I guess I thought it was the case that some of the folks bemoaning the loss of their local textile industry - extrapolated this to other gifts of the West.
You haven't actually heard Africans say this, you've heard someone else say that this is what Africans said. I know this because I've seen this exact comment on this exact blog before.
Well, a couple nominally African economists attracted some media attention; perhaps they really were alone.
Chances are all of them are economists of African *origin* currently living in USA or maybe EU. They probably already forgot what the situation was like at home.
People told me stories about people who emigrated from Czechoslovakia during communism. After a decade of living in USA, they absolutely lost any idea of what was it like before they left. For example, they kept sending their families food help, like packages of dried rice. But lack of food was *not* a problem in 1980s Chechoslovakia. We didn't have political freedoms or recent technology or maybe modern medicine or sometimes toilet paper, but basic raw food, like bread or potatoes or rice, was abundant and cheap. It is hard to believe that people can get confused about what was their everyday problem ten years ago, but apparently human brains work like that.
Perhaps for some Africans, the cost of an anti-malaria net is their weekly food budget that they cannot afford to spend on something else. Other things, like clothes, can be incredibly cheap to buy locally, because they can be simple, hand made, and the local costs of labor are extremely low. The anti-malaria net needs to have very little holes and be infused with some chemicals, that's not trivial technology.
I guess the expectation shared here is that SSA will go through a demographic transition that will make bednets moot. (It sounds wonderful and to be hoped for not to have to sleep under a bed net; I worked in a building that had operable windows - one day they washed the windows for the first time in years, and my boss was ordering the workers to throw away the window screens, and it seemed to me she had forgotten the point of them. Fortunate, but still not a good idea, malaria or no.) Or that the Bill Gates Foundation will end malaria. Before Abundance, people used to use the word “sustainability” (I assume the former will have a good run before suffering the same end.) It would have been less controversial under that watchword to posit that one thing it would be great to manufacture on the continent, is bednets. But I do recall reading here in one of the many posts touching on them, that bednets are much more complicated than one imagines.
What was the problem with obtaining toilet paper?
Americans were massively propagandized about the "problems" in Soviet Russia (and behind the Iron Curtain) -- it is not forgetting or being confused, but becoming a propaganda vessel, and believing what you are told. We were told there were long lines, and that the food would blow out, and not everyone would get what they wanted. I'm sure someone took this as "please send rice." (and, sadly, not please send a Katz' salami, which probably would have been treasured).
I was a teenager back then, so I can only describe what I experienced, and make a guess about the causes.
My best guess is that many problems were caused by the planned economy having no *slack*. I don't even mean the usual Hayekian argument of "the experts don't have all the necessary local data", but more like "even if they were omniscient about the economical needs, the system would still be very *fragile*".
Like, imagine that you know that the people need exactly 1 million pairs of shoes, so your factories produce exactly 1 million pairs of shoes. And then... one shoe breaks... and now there are only 999 999 pairs of shoes, and 1 million people who need them. So the people, after hearing the news, will rush the shops, because no one wants to be the last one left without the shoes. And because people rush the shops, it is possible that the shoes that were supposed to be sold during the entire year will be out of stock already in April. Even worse, people start buying *extra* pairs of shoes that they don't actually need, "just in case" -- maybe your relatives didn't make it to the shop in time, or maybe you can later trade the shoes for something else that you didn't get. And now you have an actual shortage (despite the economy producing, in theory, enough).
And unlike shoes, the toilet paper is cheap, small, and can be stocked for a year if you have some place in the cellar. So I imagine that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy -- whenever people started suspecting that there may be a toilet paper shortage, they actually caused it by buying a lot more than they needed. But individually it was a rational reaction -- from the past experience you knew that when people start saying "there may be a shortage of toilet paper soon", they were often right.
I remember the very long lines in front of the shops. I do not remember how often they happened; whether they were a rule or an exception; every other day or once in a month. They were often caused by people learning that some rare thing is sold now; for example, oranges were typically sold only before Christmas. So if you heard "they are selling oranges today", you ran to the line, because in the evening it might be too late.
In capitalism, the demand is somewhat unpredictable, too, but the shop owners can respond by making things temporarily more expensive (during a shortage) or give a huge discount (if they have extra food that would spoil). This was illegal during communism: if it spoils, it spoils, but giving someone a discount would be "unfair". Actually, the shop owners do not even need to respond very flexibly, because they typically sell similar things at different price levels; like there is a cheap cheese and an expensive cheese, and when the shop runs out of the cheap cheese, people can still buy the expensive one if they want. In communism, you had one kind of cheese at one price; when you sold it, it was over; the change was abrupt rather than gradual.
Generally, there were big economical differences between various communist countries (but it was a taboo to comment on that). Czechoslovakia was a relatively rich one. We had shortages of specific things (such as the oranges), but we didn't have shortages of food in general. The worst case was that you had to eat something other than you wanted, maybe the same thing for weeks. But you were not hungry, only annoyed.
Between one post about luxury believes and another about ignorant, cloistered elites, RW contrarians always find space to quote some affluent African, oft living in the West, who has strong believes about his much poorer connationals
The internet tells me that James Shikwati lives in Nairobi. But you’re in good company, famous aid expert Jeffrey Sachs, who I don’t believe lives in Africa? … also dislikes him and finds his views distasteful.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
10-40% of voters may account for a majority of the funding if that includes some very rich people! I know you mention that "supporters are on average wealthier than opponents" but top 1% taxpayers pay almost half of US tax revenues and they when facing a checkbox that saves them multiple thousands of dollars they may have a different view than answering an abstract survey.
I'll narrow the prediction and say that only 10% - 40% of US wealth would be owned by people who check the box.
strongly disagree then, the relevant people are sure to be often propositioned with similar charity offers and rejecting most of them. to the extent they want to be charitable, it is unlikely USG foreign aid is their first choice and they could withdraw the money and spend it on whatever charity they like more.
I would absolutely check the box and then turn around and spend the exact same amount on charity that I can account for.
This, despite having interviewed a number of farmers who directly described relying on benefits from foreign aid (for my Land Reform ACX grant). I would even pay that money directly! My wife makes fun of me because while all these people are doing their 'buy local' thing, I'm at the grocery saying, "Buy the plantains from Honduras! I know farmers who are counting on it to make a living."
I'm far happier patronizing Honduran farmers when they're getting a larger share of the proceeds, and the foods they are shipping are not declining in food quality by the time they arrive Stateside (same criticism about California produce, which I also won't buy if I have any choice).
As I posted elsewhere, I can assure you that your 10 to 40% is abysmally low based on my experience as a tax preparation firm.
'Since your taxes will be the same either way, voting yes strictly dominates. This is the virtue signaling model of voting, and it implies that even if no single voter supports raising taxes for foreign aid, the electorate might nevertheless vote to raise taxes for foreign aid!'
I'll admit that 'Moloch makes us vote for charity' was not an argument I was expecting to encounter.
'A stronger counterargument: the Virtue Signaling Argument implies that all “raise taxes slightly to do a nice thing” laws should succeed.'
I think this is only true if the desire to virtue signal is infinitely strong. It seems like instead we should model it as one benefit of voting yes, to be weighed against costs like a small chance (1/num_voters) of causing taxes to be raised.
>"Do you agree that, if all foreign aid were cancelled outright, only a small fraction of people would donate on their own?"
Yes.
>"And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?"
No. I think you would get approximately the same number of people checking the box as you do people who say no to those "would you like to round up your purchase to help [cause X]" questions at the cash register.
Or maybe I'm the only asshole who says no to those.
For all its flaws, I’m much more trusting of the federal government’s international aid efforts than I am of whatever discount charity some corporation has rounded up to put its logo on the cash register.
I'm the opposite https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-against-the-other-peoples/comment/203767902
I always say "No thanks, I'm a terrible person" to those asks. It often gets a laugh.
I feel like the answer might even be simpler than all this, and goes roughly as follows:
1) You are part of this country.
2) You want your country to do good things, and generally want both for you country to be seen as a positive force for good by others, and to feel yourself like your country is a positive force for good in the world.
3) You think foreign aid enables point '2' above.
This, I guess, is a 'kind' of virtue signaling, though it isn't as straightforward (or noxious, in my view) as the kind we see constantly on social media. Most of us want the nations-- or organizations, or institutions, or even families-- with which we're affiliated to be viewed positively, and to feel positive about them. I think we've internalized this to such an extent that we probably don't even notice we feel this way most of the time, but it's still there, and this value informs a whole legion of our behaviors.
As a thought experiment, consider a case where all of us are allowed to vote on whether, say, Slovakia will tax its citizens an extra $100 a year to provide foreign aid to the developing world. Some people in the US would, I imagine, certainly vote for this, but many of us (and I include myself here) would not, simply because I'm not Slovakian, I don't particularly care how the world views Slovakia, and also I don't feel like my opinions should be informing the Slovakian tax code.
I don't think you realize how many people don't ascribe to, are hostile to, or simply don't care about #2 and an even large number might buy it only the context of "taking care of our own people". For the non universal utilitarians, progressives, and humanists, we just don't care how many people in Somalia are dying of starvation when we got people sleeping on the street involuntarily in America and prisons that are overcrowded (for a variety of reasons but one that throwing money to build more of them would help).
To quote Val Kilmer "the average American wouldn't walk across the street to piss on someone even if they were on fire", we could care even less about dead Tamil's from malaria. To Scott's point, this is why people like him prefer it to be taken via the barrel of a gun out of the mouths of American babes and given to endangered spotted elephants in Congo. Because the public overwhelming wouldn't do so voluntarily. Authoritarianism at its best.
Oh and on that last one I would 100% vote yes, let the Slovak taxpayer fund malaria nets in Djibouti, better them than me. Especially if it was paired with "and reduce your own US taxes by $100 and have it rebated". And I'd bet there are more people than you think in my camp. I'm completely indifferent to America's reputation.
I only donate to GiveWell recommended charities that direct their funding to the Third World where it can go the farthest... but I absolutely oppose my government & tax dollars doing what I voluntarily choose to do with my donations.
The number of people who ascribe to the belief isn't relevant. The point is that this is ( believe) the rationale of the people who do ascribe to the belief.
It is possible that you overestimate what fraction of people think the same way as you do. Almost everyone does on almost every issue, and I don't see why sociopaths thinking about international aid should be the exception.
Fair but on this I'm pretty sure I'm not hence to Scott's point in this article, we have to FORCE people to give to foreign aid because charity doesn't work.
Count me as one who believes those three things, and also believes that they are common beliefs. I also vote no on the Slovakia question. I would add two other points.
First, my beliefs are not affected by the source of government funds: I would feel the same way whether the government raised its revenue through taxation or by mining and selling rare earth minerals from Greenland. How the government gets its money is independent of how it should spend its money, except for purpose-directed income such as license fees.
Second, I think there's an additional consideration: whether the nature of the assistance is most appropriately provided by a country or a different entity (corporations, foundations, private individuals). Something that's foreign-policy-adjacent or logistically challenging are in a country's wheelhouse. That's in addition to the foreign policy goal of being seen as a force for good.
I think a lot of people who vaguely support the idea of foreign aid are indeed operating on more or less a model of the US government as a literal Uncle Sam character who struts around the world in a red-white-and-blue outfit, flashing his silver-fox grin as he metes out freedom, justice, prosperity, and goodwill. And honestly this is a pretty good folk justification: the government is basically an imaginary person, and I want that imaginary person to be admirable and virtuous in a number of ways a real person might be virtuous: strong (military spending), prosperous (trade policy), admired (building international alliances), heroic (some military interventions, disaster relief), magnanimous (foreign aid, especially to poor countries).
This model also helps explain the emotional rationale behind why some people oppose all international aid: they want the US government to be "the BASED guy" where we crush others into submission, don't given any money to poors, take whatever we want, etc. Again, government as imagined person / avatar. Just playing a different character.
People do like them some narratives. Remember when people used to make their own entertainment?
You're missing a pretty obvious reason for foriegn aid - providing it is good for America, because it builds goodwill - with the people who receive the aid, with our allies who see the signal that if we'll give this much money to some random country in Africa, we'll definitely help them if something happens to them, and even with ourselves - cultivating the idea that we're the "good guys" makes people more likely to join the military, help out in thier school PTA, and pay thier taxes.
I've seen this argument a lot, but my perception is that the US has been disliked for the past two decades as world police and USAID has not moved the needle at all. Democrats in particular who now champion USAID have been the chief creators of that perception. As an example take The Newsroom speech about America not being the greatest country anymore. The group that does think America is great or who want to make it great again are not talking about it with USAID in mind.
On the other hand I think cutting USAID can make us feel more negative about America, but I think the status quo needs to change to capture our attention at all.
Hmm...I loved the Newsroom, but haven't watched it in a while so don't remember that speech. Maybe I'm out of step with the mainstream, but I've always thought of America doing more good for the world (via aid and the Team America World Police) than any other country for my whole lifetime (so since the late 80's). I've had to temper this a bit the more I learn about what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan when I was a kid, but I still think it stands, and I think most people in the US and the world would agree (or would have, say, 15 months ago...)
I think that's true in the PAX Americana sense, but the narrative I usually here is that we benefit massively from it so America doesn't really get to be good guys for guarding the worlds shipping lanes or sending aid. Instead it increases our soft power as the world's hegemon.
To be clear about my own stance I have found this line of thinking frustrating, but always considered myself the contrarian to the more popular belief that America is bad and any good we do is self-interest. I think if you went back and looked at reddit posts over the last decade you would be likely to see what I mean, but that by no means is representative of what the average person thinks so I could be out of touch.
> the narrative I usually here is that we benefit massively from it
Hey, I don't mind win/win solutions!
Exactly, and obviously there's a lot of doubt about what we get back and whether it's worth it, but I'd prefer for us to err on the side of improving the world even if it doesn't always generate an obvious "ROI"
I guess my argument is that it isn't necessarily win/win. My personal best feelings for America(ns) is how much they independently donate to the world and charity outside of our government. When the government is providing aid it is viewed as politically advantageous. It's much harder to discredit when it's grass roots donations.
There are still problems with this with regards to the super wealthy creating charitable foundations to pursue research with tax incentives. I think there's also been a lot of souring on charitable organizations which was one of the causes of effective altruism.
I want to get across the main thing I'm arguing against though that charitable government contributions specifically are not a good perception booster to the American public or to Americans abroad (Aside: this does not take into account specific actions taken during natural disasters like sending the air craft carrier to produce fresh water after the Japanese reactor meltdown). I think individual donations are much more effective on this one dimension. This is just my intuition and perception though and it would be interesting to see an actual study.
> It's much harder to discredit when it's grass roots donations.
Do not underestimate the power of social network bots to discredit anything.
> I think individual donations are much more effective on this one dimension.
Kinda yes, but individual donations don't build a powerful brand together. Imagine a foreign hospital with 1000 devices that come with a "USAID" sticker. Now imagine the same hospital with the same devices, one sticker says "John Doe", another sticker says...
But perhaps we could combine both. I imagine an organization that collects individual voluntary contributions, then sends useful stuff to recipients with a logo that contains the name of the organization, the name of the donor, and the country of the donor (the organization could be international). When you donate, you click either the specific cause or a general area, but either way your name ends up on one specific sticker, and the organization will send you a photo of the thing after it was delivered.
America can't even stop Yemen from strangling Israeli shipping. Pax Americana is dead.
It's an argument that makes people feel good but has absolutely no evidence for it, nor would it be particularly easy or worthwhile to collect that evidence.
The goodwill of poor Africans towards America does not matter to Americans in any tangible way. And I don't think third party allies are significantly influenced in their behavior towards America by out African aid. And I really don't think African aid has any effect at all on whether people join the PTA or pay taxes. Basically I think this is just a nice story you are telling yourself.
Africa may not yield a ton of benefits yet (although keep in mind how quickly their wealth and population are growing), but consider the aid we've given out since wwii - to Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, India. These places have much better relationships with us than you would expect (especially the ones we've been to war against), and I think it's pretty reasonable to think some of this is due to our aid programs. I definitely think the signalling benefits are there too. For the third one, I guess I can only speak for myself, but right now I work indirectly for the government, lead a Cub Scout troop (complete with weekly flag ceremonies etc.), and am happy to pay my taxes. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing any of these things if I didn't think America was a force for good in the world, and I can't imagine I'm the only one.
In an alternate history in which America did not give any significant foreign aid, but in which everything else is basically the same, do you think your feeling that America is a force for good in the world would be significantly weaker? Would you still lead a Cub Scout troop in this hypothetical? I bet you would.
You have to zoom out a little to include all the aid we've given since wwii, but yeah, I think so. It's hard for me to disentangle my feelings about America based on the "hard" military part of our foriegn policy from the "soft" aid part, but i really think they go hand in hand. The aid we give makes it much easier to believe the bad things we've done militarily were mistakes with good intentions versus selfish realpolitiks. There's a decent chance I would see America through a much more negative and cynical lens, which would make me less happy, and yeah might have led me to take a different job to avoid associating with the government, or work less hard at it, aggressively look for "tax breaks", and not want to indoctrinate my kids in American patriotism, or maybe not want to help in any programs my kids are part of at all, or maybe not even have kids at all. Think about civil society in Russia and China. Everything is highly multifactorial, but I see transactionalism vs. Altruism as two feedback loops that work in opposite directions, even on a national level, and foriegn aid is part of it.
USAID paid farmers in Afghanistan not to grow opium. During this time (according to the UN) the amount of opium produced doubled.
The Taliban BURNT the opium fields. This was quite effective at convincing people to grow wheat instead.
Now, yes, maybe this is just a foulup. But it's one that had concrete problems in our own country, as well as others.
Yeah that seems like a foul up. Government is pretty big, does a lot of things, they're not all gonna work out.
Jesus. How much do we need to tell you before you remodel your entire life?
Can I get some priors?
1) How many genocides?
2) How many couped/color revolutioned countries?
3) How many dead/crippled children?
4) How many sex slaves?
5) How many '10% chance of ending civilization' problems?
(These, um, should be taken as orthogonal questions. And it's perfectly fair to say "I find these Good Deeds counterbalance them", and that no number of genocides would cause you to stop leading the Cubscout troop).
I feel pretty good that the answers to 1-4 in the last century are lower with America than without. 5 is a bit more uncertain, but someone was gonna invent nukes and AI eventually
Nestle's the answer to 3, and I'm pretty sure their formula disaster wouldn't have happened under other governments (in particular, a more fractured united states).
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24452/w24452.pdf
212,000 excess deaths of children per year? You're going to say that Britain or Russia would have countenanced that?
Well, okay, nestle and the oral polio vaccine (causing more cases of live polio than actual endemic cases of polio) -- but the vaccine had a significantly lower disease rate (212,000 deaths is a lot!).
(and Okay, Fair on 5. Although you're certainly missing some civilization ending interventions (like Deepwater Horizon, but I feel fairly certain someone would have done it -- and probably not the Japanese or Germans, who have better safety records than we do). )
I uh, don't have time to read a 50 page document, could you tell me what US aid to other countries has to do with Nestle overmarketing thier formula?
Also, are you saying Deepwater Horizon had a 10 percent chance of destroying civilization?
Also, isn't Nestle a European company?
Also, skimming what you sent, it looks like Senate hearings in the US, specifically testimony from an expert at USAID is what finally forced nestle to stop marketing formula in third world countries...
Another angle is that there's just too much stuff for any individual to pay attention to. USAID may be a very worthy organization, but what fraction of the population is going to take the time to decide whether to donate, and instead just default to "no." We all have limited capacity for collecting information and acting rationally. There are what, hundreds if not thousands of government programs that, upon careful analysis, are worthy investments? But there's no way I'm going to navigate all that stuff myself and decide what I want to fund.
We elect representatives to manage that complexity for us. If duly elected representatives think USAID is a good use of US tax dollars, then that's great, they saved me the effort of figuring it out myself and donating to them. In the event that I do form a strong opinion about a government program, I can lobby my representatives and advocate for my positions.
In particular, I don't think one should insist government is only for problems that the private sector can't solve (free riders, externalities, etc.). I think it's also good that governments can solve the problem of "there's too much stuff, much of it important, for individuals to think about."
Problem is, there were public servants who didn't think USAID was a good use of taxdollars, and had some fun finding the "stupidest things ever" in order to get to the root of the corruption. And yes, this was advocating by lobbying representatives, including Trump (as Chief Executive Officer of our Executive Branch)
>"I don't think one should insist government is only for problems that the private sector can't solve…"
What would you suggest as an alternate limiting principle? Or is everything fair game?
I have to kinda dodge the question, I don't think there's an easy answer. In fact, I think the ideal role of government is something that will change over time, according to the current Overton window and moral zeitgeist.
I think some principles can be codified, like essential human rights. But beyond that, I personally take the view that's it better to focus on having a good process. Make sure elections are free, fair, and convenient. Have strong enforcement of corruption. Have robust checks and balances. The hope is that a good process will converge on good outcomes.
Some sort of voting system (not getting in the semantic quagmire of what "democracy" is or isn't) coupled with equality under the law and a reasonably free press seem to work pretty well.
Like even hardcore libertarians, who in principle think French dirigisme is as bad as anything ever done by Putin, would rather be born in France than Russia. Ultimately "the government gets to do whatever it thinks will increase their chance of re-election, under the costraint they cannot just fuck over X in particular or outlaw dissent" is not perfect but better than any alternative hitherto tried.
Why are we granting the assertion that foreign aid is charity? Because it looks like a duck and walks like a duck? Because "aid" sounds a lot like "charity" in the common parlance?
To somewhat echo Majromax below, governments have many rational reasons to provide foreign aid in whatever form, setting aside cover for CIA operations. Soft power projection is important. But also, growing the pie is important. Fighting the fight over there before it becomes a problem in your back yard is important.
If your targeted food aid prevents the displacement of whichever chunk of a foreign populace, that's cheaper and far easier than dealing with a million uneducated and malnourished migrants fleeing across your borders. Subsidizing infrastructure development, medicine, education, all of these foster the creation of new markets and potential economic partners.
You can address a fragmenting country with a carrier group, but you still have to send a humanitarian mission unless you're just going to blow everything to rubble and let God identify his own.
Realpolitik is not just about backstabbing when convenient. It's about pragmatism. The US won the post-WW2 world by taking the high road, relative to everyone else on the board (you can add however many caveats and asterisks as you'd like). Building more carrier groups than the rest of the world combined and sustaining the kind of military spend that our closest rival could only dream of was a side effect of running away with the ball, not the cause of our success. Foreign aid was a complement to our investment in human capital domestically, that went hand in hand with a rules-based world and domestic stability brought about by rule of law.
You'll damn well give Uncle Sam that tax dollar because he's got a better use for it than you do (or so it went before Reagan's famous line).
Mind you, there are certainly good and bad ways of doing any of the above, but that's downstream of the argument here.
I don't know why there has to be a special justification for using tax dollars for foreign aid as opposed to anything else. Why is it just to tax people without kids to pay for public schools, or to tax wealthy people for health and welfare services for poor people? (note that those items make up the vast majority of the budget of states like California https://ebudget.ca.gov/publication/e/2025-26/BudgetOverview)
Why, for that matter, is it just to tax me to pay to kill drug dealers in the Caribbean, if I think that is bad policy? Or to tax someone to pay for any government body that that person believes acts contrary to his interests, or acts in pursuit of poor policy?
Isn't the answer that, in a democratic society, that is the deal: The majority, or its representatives, get to decide how tax dollars are spent, subject only to established constitutional limits? Again, why is a special explanation needed?
And, the answer can't be that foreign aid doesn't serve US interests, because it is the majority that gets to decide what those interests are.
> why is a special explanation needed?
If your only justification for how you spend money when your side wins the election is "Vae victis!," then you don't really have a leg to stand on when the other side cuts funding to every cause you remotely like just to spite you after it wins, so if your goal is to argue that gutting USAID is bad, you need something more.
You are completely misunderstanding my point, which is about democratic theory, not "woe to the vanquished." In addition, if your model of democratic politics is simply that each "side" is trying to harm the other, you need a new model.
Moreover, no one said that it is the ONLY justification. For example, voting "just to spite" someone is unjustified for reasons unrelated to democratic legitimacy.
> you need a new model.
What do you observe that my model fails to describe?
I agree on those things, but many people believe education via schools is a public good.
The answer to your "why is it just" questions, actually, is that the taxation is not just in any of those cases. Your answer ("that is the deal") is wrong because there is not in fact any deal (social contract) in place.
As for special justification for foreign aid, I think that even many foreign aid supporters (e.g. Scott in the OP) think of it as a kind of charity, not as something that serves the material interests of US citizens. You might say that since the majority wants to help poor Africans, it is therefore in the US interest to help poor Africans. But that just seems wrong.
>The answer to your "why is it just" questions, actually, is that the taxation is not just in any of those cases
That's fine, but that does sort of reinforce my point that no special justification is needed.
>not as something that serves the material interests of US citizens.
1. You err in assuming that material interests are the only interests that matter. See, eg, https://public.websites.umich.edu/~satran/Ford%2006/Wk%206-2%20Sacred%20Values%20Varshney.pdf and the stupidity that is "What's the Matter with Kansas?" ("Frank applies his thesis to answer the question of why these social conservatives continue to vote for Republicans, even though they are voting against their best interests") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F_(book)
>You might say that since the majority wants to help poor Africans, it is therefore in the US interest to help poor Africans. But that just seems wrong.
I actually addressed that: "And, the answer can't be that foreign aid doesn't serve US interests, because it is the majority that gets to decide what those interests are." To clarify, what US interests are is a contested question, so the majority gets to decide what they are (subject to civil liberties limitations). The majority also gets do decide whether sometimes govt can act in a manner contrary to the best interests of the US or its citizens.
Re the latter, suppose a border patrol officer in the desert is simultaneously approached by 1) a US citizen and his young son, who have gotten lost on a hike and ran out of water 3 hours ago; and 2) an illegal immigrant and his young son, who have been abandoned by coyotes and ran out of water two days ago. The officer has one bottle of water. Would a policy (supported by the majority of voters) that requires him to give the water to the illegal immigrants be illegitimate, simply because it did not prioritize the material interests of the US citizens? I don't see why it would be,
I think you're missing a few angles here.
First, seconding Majroma above: soft power. Foreign aid is a carrot in foreign relations, often provides intelligence access, impacts local views on geopolitics, and none of that works if it's "US based organizations" rather than "the US government. I think a lot of people vote for US power.
Second: access. Suppose there's a famine in a nation exacerbated by an ongoing civil war. NGOs might be able to get food in, but they're less likely to be able to direct food to starving poor rather than soldiers, and very unlikely to be able to leverage aid to reduce military abuses in the conduct of the war. Direct governmental aid has, to some degree, the leverage I'd the government behind it and can potentially accomplish more.
Third: long term stability. Now, in light of the last year I don't think this has held up, but a year ago I would have said government directed aid was more likely to be able to maintain a given program over years and decades at a consistent level than the average NGO. For programs aiming to build up long term infrastructure, that's essential.
Fourth: coordinated decision making. Reaching agreement on how to use resources at a granular level is difficult (see: infinite EA debates), organizing and assigning decision makers is contentious, etc. Government has existing organisations with defined structures delegated to make these decisions, and the decision makers are far enough from the money source (voters) that individual decisions don't normally face pushback/argumentative delays. Again, last year blew a hole in this, but it had looked true until then.
I'm not interested in defending foreign aid based on soft power, because, although it might be true, I'm not willing to grant that once foreign aid stops giving us soft power, we should stop doing it.
I know you think that, but why? What possible justification could there be for spending resources in ways that won't benefit us even for 250 IQ LDT game theory reasons?
Why did I vote to increase my property taxes to fund a new swimming pool at the local high school, despite neither being a swimmer nor the parent of a child in the local school system? Why do people run into burning buildings to save strangers? Etc, etc.
Perhaps because instrumental goals are not the only ones that human beings pursue. https://public.websites.umich.edu/~satran/Ford%2006/Wk%206-2%20Sacred%20Values%20Varshney.pdf
It's obvious (I think. Maybe it's not obvious?) that there are 250 IQ LDT game theory reasons to run into burning buildings to save strangers. You want to live in the kind of society where people rescue each other from fires. It's less obvious for the high school pool, but you can kind of see how the same logic could apply (i.e. you want to live in the kind of society where recreational activies for teenagers are funded).
A good high school increases your property values, reduces the chances that teenagers will become hoodlums menacing you and your family, and maybe shapes the demographics of your neighborhood in a way you prefer.
It's also very likely that even though you don't have kids in the public high school, people in your local community who you care about do or will, so this also benefits people that you personally like and care about. Maybe you're even networking with local parents to raise money and building your relationship that way.
I mean maybe that's not why every person voted for those things but if none of them were true I don't think schools would get much funding. In the same way that I think the argument for government funded foreign aid is pretty weak if you don't think the government is getting something out of it geopolitically.
I can assure you that I did not vote to improve the swimming pool for that reason, nor do I think that the other voters who did so voted for that reason. The connection between a swimming pool and fewer teenage hoodlums is far, far too attenuated for that to be a plausible, or even rational, decision. And, no, I did not have friends or family with kids in the local schools.
Isn't the rationale the same for foreign aid? I.e., I want to live in the kind of world where children don't die of easily preventable disease, or suffer from malnutrition, etc?
Humans have innate moral sentiments that evolved as adaptive tools for group cooperation. While understandable sociologically, these sentiments are analytically irreducible at the individual level, as evidenced by frequent acts of seemingly inexplicable altruism.
Yes. Everyone should lie to everyone else, except when paid the actual value of the information.
... or were those NOT the innate moral sentiments you're talking about?
Humans are seriously good at coming up with "weird ideas that somewhat work."
Honesty is not always culturally the best policy.
I am not sure whether people who say things like this
(1) genuinely cannot conceive of one person preferring other people's lives to be better other than for "250 IA LDT game theory reasons", or
(2) can conceive of how that _could_ happen but have somehow convinced themselves that _obviously_ all apparent concern for other people is some sort of possibly-self-deceiving virtue-signalling bullshit, or
(3) understand perfectly well that some people actually do prefer other people's lives to be better even when the cost to themselves is non-zero but for some vice-signalling reason think they make themselves look better if they pretend to find that incomprehensible.
All three options seem strange to me. I think most likely it's #2: if one has in oneself only a howling void where others might have a conscience, then it's more comforting to decide that actually everyone else really has a howling void too but the other people are too stupid and self-deluding to admit it. (This is pretty uncharitable toward those people, but I actually can't think of _any_ opinion I could coherently have of people who profess to be baffled that anyone cares about the welfare of others, that wouldn't be uncharitable one way or another.)
It’s number 2. From my perspective, it looks like many people have decided that being FairBot is better than being PrudentBot. Using your terminology, it seems as though these people have a howling void in their brain where the utility maximization is supposed to be.
I think this might be the key difference between people who voluntarily donate to foreign aid, and those who do not but vote for taxation-based aid anyway. The latter may not care about Africans as much as you do, but they would still like to maintain American soft power.
I do think it was a mistake not to spend one sentence in the post saying this, to preempt the obvious objections. (I actually thought you *had* done so, but scrolled back up and couldn't find it—unless it's actually there and I missed it, in which case whoops.)
He hasn't, and I'd say that this is important enough to deserve more than one sentence.
To be clear, I meant this as explanation not defense. It is a significant reason that people indifferent to charity in general nonetheless vote in favor of foreign aid but went unmentioned in your discussion of reasons people might do so.
I agree that it's a reason orthogonal to charitable goals and not worth defending on that basis.
In what world would foreign aid cease being a useful vehicle for soft power - that is, approximately everyone involved hates it, wishes it would stop, resents and resists the decisionmakers ultimately responsible - but somehow remain ethically desirable?
Scott is less utilitarian and more virtue ethicist and moral realist than he generally comfortably admits, see: kidney. I think this is true of many EAs, who clearly have a highly developed sense of guilt and moral reality but no non-util language for it, so it all gets filtered through the woo-woo math.
Good things are good even when unpopular.
Even when unpopular with the very people they're supposedly benefiting? When it comes to moral reality, chanting about "the greater good" while doing something you know everybody's gonna hate tends to be a bad sign.
But that is my problem, Scott. USAID was not set up to be about 'let's be the good guys', it was about 'let's protect our interests and soft power is the way to go'.
I am not disputing that governments have the right to set a portion of the budget for foreign aid. I am disputing that USAID is the shining light its defenders claim. "But PEPFAR!" is the one answer that gets thrown back.
Fine. USAID operated *before* PEPFAR. Supposing there was no PEPFAR, what is the rationale for USAID *if* it is being used primarily as an engine of soft power regime change (hence the mockery about the transgender opera)?
While I think aid is generally good based on its own merits, I'm unconvinced by this near universal assumption that it is a vector for "soft power" Maybe very slightly and in exceptional situations but in the aggregate, US soft power is a result of US cultural hegemony. The refugees and starving villagers that receive those USAid branded sacks of rice have very little overall clout, even in poor third world countries, whether or not they are positive towards the US.
US soft power exists because in these countries, the children of the thin top layer of middle class to wealthy consume American media and absorb American cultural values. That's why even if China took on all of America's aid obligations, it would likely make little difference in soft power unless your point is the cynical idea that it's the corrupt politicians that skim off aid and charity that are intended to be influenced.
Ironically, the critical attitudes towards American hegemony and "imperialism" in US media has probably done more to damage US soft power than anything else because a large chunk of those wealthy to middle class 3rd world kids know and adopt all the anti imperialist and anti American talking points that they learned from Hollywood media. Though this is likely performative as they'll still gladly pick US universities over Chinese and US green cards over Chinese visas.
I get the sense that many people regard the 3rd world as monolithic, but there's a lot of stratification between classes, most people wouldn't even know what aid America sends to their country or whether it's been cut. Those that are aware, are too remote for most people to care, in the same way that people talk about the Appalachians and Rust Belt in America. Basically if you want soft power, fund Hollywood rah rah Murica! type media and spread it far and wide, aid is not the way to do it.
I think maybe the USAID stickers on the rice sacks are a bit misleading, in the sense that their presence makes people think they're the intended mechanism of action, when they're not really. The idea, for the relevant kind of soft power (which is different from the kind that comes from Hollywood), is for poorer-country governments to have a sense that the U.S. will help them with their problems. Starvation in random villages isn't *as* much of a problem for the villagers' national government as it is for the villagers themselves, but it is still a problem for the national government, which would prefer to see it addressed.
It was much more important in the context of the Cold War, when there was a plausible moral challenge to the US hegemony. Of course, these days the challenge comes from within.
American cultural hegemony is certainly another huge source of soft power!
And I agree that foreign aid does not generate most of its soft power via direct good will from individual recipients.
But that doesn't address other factors, such as a carrot (or stick with the threat of stopping) for other nations' governments, opportunities to insert intelligence assets, connections made with government officials in the process of organizing distribution, or the simple global benefit of the optics (belt-and-road never managed to look nearly as "we're good guys here for you!" As simple food delivery to starving people does).
I suspect you underestimate how many people would check it, but I may be overestimating. I know I would check it in a heartbeat; the government is IMO as likely to use my money to make things worse as better. I would roll my eyes at the caveat and not actually believe it; the government is lying through their teeth as usual, yada yada. In defense of this statement, I have a firm belief that the world in which I just reallocate all $X to charities I am confident in (or just whichever I prefer of GiveWell’s top ones!) is much better in terms of lives saved/utilons/however you wish to view it, and I would expect this argument to be widely made and not uncommonly followed.
(I’m not sure I wouldn’t follow it! It would depend on how much $X was, since I don’t actually trust the government to calculate how much I should be giving to charity (and my own calculations end up affected by ‘how much good does an extra dollar do right now’ concerns), but it would also be a convenient anchor point - and really tempting from a virtue signaling/proving the point perspective.)
You might try comparing private/public schools - that has some of the same logic as charity, where if the government is funding it out of everyone’s pockets it’s much harder for individual parents to pay for everyone’s school and also a different one for their own kids out of their own pockets, so you end up with it being very hard for anyone not already rich to access non-government schooling. Private schools can benefit people a whole lot, though (getting out of the wrong school can do so all by itself, but doing so without moving is AIUI hard for public schools) so rich people still do. Can you see any shift for either schooling or charity, in terms of the number of private dollars allocated, when government takes over in a given location or significantly ups the amount they’re contributing? The anecdotes I’ve heard make it sound like small-scale local charity was historically more common, but the plural of anecdote is not, in this context, data.
On the idea of opt-out check boxes on tax forms, I find myself puzzled by things like the Presidential Election Campaign Fund box, or how the state I live in staples a bunch of voluntary donation options to things like renewing a driver's license. In theory, I too enjoy the idea of giving citizens regular opportunities to decide directly how their government operates. In practice, they always feel like some lawmaker's pet amendment from 20 years ago, a handful of random funds that are a tiny fraction of overall spending and don't seem especially high-impact. Where are the boxes to say I want more or less money to go to Medicare, Social Security, or defense spending? (Marginally more or less, mind you, not "give me a full refund", which would run into the free rider problems in the "Insomnia" section.)
I don't believe the Presidential Election Campaign Fund box actually increases YOUR taxes. It just directs more money from the general tax pool to that.
It does. You pay $5 more in tax bill. I always pay it because of a hypothetical future where politicians only can use these funds and don’t have to fundraise/no pacs.
Not true; TGGP is correct. It says right on the form (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf): "Checking a box below will not change your tax or refund." (Also it's $3, not $5??)
edit: I should say explicitly that I'm talking about US federal taxes. I'll be less baffled if it turns out to work the way you describe in another country, or for one of the states.
Yep. I think if we had boxes for things like defense spending, I'd want it to work that way, letting taxpayers slightly shift funding priorities rather than directly getting their money back, again for reasons of free riders/not giving people an incentive to make other people worse off.
Meanwhile, the voluntary donations on the driver's license form do involve choosing to pay more money. To me this makes them more of an advertisement and a way to reduce friction in donating to a (not very EA) charity, rather than offering me any sort of control over government funding.
For a post on some of the nuts and bolts of how USAID in particular made a difference in the world -- with two very cool, short anedocates that made a real difference in how I think about aid -- I highly recommend:
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/18/notes-from-a-usaid-career/
Thank you!
There are also a few great comments by the author in the comment section:
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/18/notes-from-a-usaid-career/#comment-840752
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/18/notes-from-a-usaid-career/#comment-840756
Nice anecdotes, but when people are defending USAID for public consumption, it *is* "that starving kid in Sudan" and not "We helped modernise the Moldovan wine industry".
I think if tax donations were voted on for such concrete examples, people would say "what the hell is the Moldovan wine industry to me, if the Moldovan government can't get off its ass and figure out how to talk to its European neighbours about 'hey how can we make our shitty wine better?' that's not my problem".
Hospital bed story? Yeah, that's much better. And the kind of thing that should be done. But I'm willing to bet that political calculations mean that more of the "Moldovan wine industry so we can kick the Russians in the nuts economically" get funded over "some backwater rundown banana republic".
Private charities can do the hospital beds thing, but that doesn't mean USAID shouldn't do it as well. What I'm saying is, cut out the Moldovan wine and if you need to, stick it under some different umbrella or branch, and make USAID really about "equipment for hospitals where we won't see a dime return". *Then* the supporters of USAID can crow about their superior virtue with their "billionaires are just eeeevil sadists" commentary patting themselves on the back in the comments section there.
'I prefer George Ainslie’s economist-friendly explanation of genuinely time-inconsistent preferences'
FYI the link there is incorrect; it goes to to personal information about Ainslie. Maybe you meant https://www.picoeconomics.org/HTarticles/Bkdn_Precis/Precis2.html ?
Interesting hypotheticals, but if I wanted to donate money to an anti-woke organization (say, one opposing, oh, I don't know, feminism), who would I give it to? Just the RNC?
For immigration there's Steven Miller's America First thing. For anti-antiracism there's Chris Rufo...
There was a time when I was particularly mad at "woke" and almost donated to Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign. The only reason I didn't was that I knew I would be bombarded with infinite solicitation texts and emails for the rest of my life.
Could you anonymously mail some cash from a public mailbox?
Illegal donation, you're supposed to report anything over $20. I had the same thought.
I don't think in this situation most of us like the candidate enough to go to jail for them.
So to me, the primary justified purpose of a government is solving coordination problems. The poster frames things in these terms, and I read Scott as spending the first part of the article trying to see if charity can be framed as a coordination problem, and finding it mostly can't. I agree.
To me, the secondary justified purpose of a *democratic* government is economies of scale.
300,000,000 individuals each trying to do the research on which charities to give to and writing individual checks to the best two dozen each month and etc. is an inefficient nightmare that's doomed to flounder on incompetency, distraction, and zero-sum marketing wars, even if every one of those people sincerely wants it to happen and is willing to spend their own money on it.
Having all of that centralized through a single group that can hire the best experts and devote entire careers to getting competent at it, collect all the money through an existing channel with tiny added overhead, distribute funds from a singular hub in large chunks, and use its monopsony power to negotiate and force improvements, simply buys vastly more good for vastly less resources.
This is the practical justification - people can get more of what they want if they contribute to a central fund like this, than if they each try to figure it out on their own.
The moral justification for doing this on issues where less than 100% of taxpayers want something verges into the area of social contract theory. I acknowledge that social contract theory isn't 'real' in that you don't actually get a contract with the right to refuse, and the cost of renouncing citizenship and starting somewhere you like better is not zero. But I still think it's a very useful rhetorical device in clarifying the intuition of 'if you want the benefits of a community that pools its resources to do things that the community as a whole wants, you won't approve of 100% of the things your membership dues are used for, but you will get way more of the things you do want than if you tried living on your own outside any community'.
Governments exist to fill power vacuums. That's how they have been for thousands of years.
The experts on charity are at GiveWell, not the US government.
"Club goods" is part of my explanation for why it's sensible for governments to restrict immigration. But I don't believe that's why government exists.
On the number of taxpayers who would check the opt-out box, the number who currently check the presidential campaign fund box (about 3%), which does not increase tax liability, suggests that more people than you think might opt-out. What percentage of people make the small contributions solicited by the cashiers in Supermarket check-out lines? I expect that some of the folks in the foreign aid NGO community who raise money professionally have analyzed the likely effectiveness of opt-out and opt-in options.
I think the other people’s money force multiplier does work.
From an individual perspective, you’re being given a choice between a world where you pay $100 less in taxes and a world where you pay the $100 and the rest of the country gives a collective $20 billion. That’s an amazing return on $100. Now that’s an amazing tradeoff that probably makes some people who aren’t even that generous feel reasonable about losing $100.
People vote to spend other people's money all the time.
my argument in favor of government spending on USAID and similar programs is that giving a similar amount of money as a direct bribe to foreign dictators would probably be "money well spent" in terms of getting their cooperation on geostrategic goals (and their opposition to rivals' geostrategic goals), but it's money even more well spent if we make the lives of the actual people in that country better so that they have a favorable opinion of us even if the dictator later gets toppled
Let's say that the US government for some reason decided to make US taxpayer funding of ICE completely voluntary. Instead of a flat portion of taxes going to ICE, there is a custom 'fill in the blank' option on everybody's tax forms that would allow them to decide how much money to give to ICE. Pretty much everyone would write '$0' or '$5' and ICE would have a budgeting shortfall.
However, if the immigration issue became severe enough, and Congress refused to revoke this 'voluntary funding of ICE' law, maybe oligarchs and wealthy Silicon Valley people would step in. Maybe investors from Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be recruited. Minor GoFundMes would try to 'chip in', but the bulk of the 'voluntary funding' would come from wealthy investors.
This would create authority issues for ICE. ICE is supposed to be a federal agency that is accountable to the public and the federal government. However, if 25% of its funding comes from an Elon Musk adjacent crowd of investors, and 25% of its funding comes from a Larry Ellison adjacent crowd of investors, then these figures are going to have undeniable say in how ICE gets ran. Even if laws get passed that attempt to limit their formal influence (hiring, staffing, policy directives, etc), the implicit threat of the possibility of the funding getting revoked would give them a lot of implicit influence.
I think this principle applies to most questions of public policy. In theory, market-based approaches could handle most political issues. However, market-based approaches create drastic inequality where the wealthiest people of society are able to run major sectors of society as they see fit with minimal feedback from the public. Therefore, there is an unspoken norm of resolving political questions through the arena of public policy and not markets to preserve the status quo where normal people feel like they have a direct voice in the political process. It's like welfare/redistribution but for political influence instead of money.
We can then quibble over what counts as a 'political question'. There is kind of a bifurcated concern at play here: if you make your definition of 'political' too narrow, then society grows to feel like it is ran by and molded in the image of wealthy successful oligarchs where the discursive voice of normal people is not valued, and if you make your definition of 'political' too broad, then you create societies where the net aggregate trajectory of the society is negative and harmful because the best and smartest and wisest people do not have enough power. But I think the funding and scope of programs like USAID was small enough that if you are passionate about it you can advocate for the government using taxpayer dollars to fund it because you are passionate about it without feeling like a preference molding totalitarian.
As long as it was there, I can see that you could perhaps advocate for continuing it without "feeling like a preference molding totalitarian," but once it's been cut, I think having to argue for reinstituting it forces you to confront what you're doing.
I think using the term 'political' in the narrow sense you likely use it leads to the oligarch society I mentioned above. Markets do handle most ethical and societal concerns better than centralized actors, and they also preserve liberty much better, but a world where markets are expected to handle most issues of serious societal ethical and political concern is a society where the perspectives of normal people will matter much less than they do now. Debating questions of charity and global well-being as questions of governmental policy allows not rich people to have more of a say on these topics than they otherwise would.
To use charity as an example, a world where the government allocates funds to programs like USAID gives common people some say on what charitable causes most resources go to. In comparison, if the government does not, and 90%+ of charitable donations come from Mackenzie Bezos and Elon Musk, the average person gets no say on how they donate their private funds. You can say the latter world preserves liberty, and also might be better than the former world because someone like Elon Musk is likely really good at spending money, but it makes the 'common man's' perspective basically irrelevant. If you do this at scale, you get a society where the voices of most people do not matter in terms of how society progresses in a political and ethical dimension.
I did not say that we should donate to Terrorists. I did not say that a DEI musical was a good idea to perform in Ireland.
In principle, yes, government allocation to USAID means we get to have a say. In practice, we follow at the bootheels of Gates and company, and they get richer.
Bill Gates would actually be one the best possible picks to direct charitable funding. Leftists complain about philanthropy funded & directed by the wealthy rather than tax dollars, but they're wrong. On the other hand, Matt Yglesias is right that "the groups" funded by the wealthy pursue political projects that are unpopular and hurt the Democratic party. Maybe a good thing if you dislike that party :)
I forgot about this until I see it in the comments of that linked Paul Christiano LW post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/
I think a society where figures like Bill Gates were unconstrained to shape the future of American society without artificial government interference would lead to paradise, and it would create a paradise 58% of the American population would despise and topple. Even though it has low approval ratings, I think the government is usually pretty good at catering to the 'median voter', and politicians who do not do this get punished. The 'median voter' is just an idiot. But they are an idiot who deserves some say in the discourse.
The American population might be too old & lazy to topple a government now.
>"The 'median voter' is just an idiot. But they are an idiot who deserves some say in the discourse."
What possible justification could there be to actively include idiots in a decision-making process?
Paul Christiano made some similar arguments a few years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqKwra9rRYYMvySHc/moral-public-goods
Sounds like an assurance contract would work in his hypothetical. Only having a thousand nobles does simplify things.
> although I can’t find straight income data, more educated people are more likely to support [foreign aid programs], so probably supporters are on average wealthier than opponents
I found straight income data, and it's the other way around. I used this Pew dataset: https://www.pewresearch.org/dataset/march-2019-political-survey/
r=-0.1422 for correlation between income and support for foreign aid (q44mf2, "Economic assistance to needy people around the world", which was overall pretty evenly split between increasing, decreasing, and maintaining spending). Given, they support an overall smaller government (r=-0.2351), but even if you take foreign aid support minus a domestic spending support composite (average of science, military, unemployment, medicare, environment, and education) that is still negatively correlated with income (r=-0.1). Even just support for foreign aid spending minus support for unemployment spending is negatively correlated with income (r=-0.0526).
Here's the script I used for analysis. It's written by AI, but I reviewed it and also sanity checked the results manually (e.g. people in the highest three tiers of income proportionally supported increasing foreign aid less than those who were in other tiers of income). https://gist.github.com/PlasmaPower/0db1df97bf0eb3237b7b49111a7e42f6
Thanks for introducing some ugly facts to kill his beautiful theory.
Huh! I'm definitely surprised by this, thank you!
I wouldn't sign the military funding contract because I don't believe there are any plausible invasion scenarios and a standing army is more likely to be used for domestic oppression.
Isn't the lack of plausible invasion scenarios largely because of the big scary standing military?
I don't think so, no. The occupation forces in Germany had almost a million men between them, even after the postwar demobilization - the contemporary US has 30 times the land area, 5 times the population, a functioning state, a heavily armed civilian population, huge expanses of rugged terrain, and a porous northern border with an almost indistinguishable population. Occupying the continental United States would mean tens of millions of men, with supply lines measured in thousands of miles, fighting an incredibly bloody guerilla conflict for the foreseeable future. No state on Earth is capable of that, and all of them know it.
And then of course there are the nukes.
Surely there are things besides a full-blown occupation of the entire country that we might not want to let people do, ideally without having to answer the thorny question of first use of nukes?
Obviously, but the question was invasion. "This buys us the physical security of 300 million people" is a very different argument from "this buys us influence over other nations' trade policy" (or whatever other foreign policy aim is under consideration), even if you think it's worth it either way.
No, I mean, there are potential scenarios where an aggressor attacks the U.S. mainland with a goal in mind other than occupying the entire country.
Can you give an example? I think if the US did not have a military, and therefore would presumably have stopped throwing its weight around interfering in other countries' affairs, any invasion of the US would be pretty unlikely.
On the other hand, the US cavalry was useful once upon a time in defeating hostile indigenous tribes. Perhaps like fire departments used to fight fires https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/firefighters-dont-fight-fires.html
You don't think we should have a military, but also think it's the nukes that protect us from invasion... who do you think designs, builds, maintains, and operates the nukes and their associated logistics chains (warheads, delivery vehicles and their parts and fuel, storage facilities, targeting, intelligence for determining targets and if/how/where to launch, &c).
Do you envision a system where we somehow dismantle all of the military except the parts required to be a nuclear power? Do you think it would contribute to global stability (or even just American well-being) if we had no military options between "surrender" and "thermonuclear war"?
> You don't think we should have a military
I said no such thing.
The top comment is somebody who stated they wouldn't sign the military contract, i.e. who wouldn't fund a military. Not sure how to square that with wanting there to be a military.
Your comment follows on by listing all the non-military reasons why an occupation of the continental United States would be impossible. Am I to understand that you nonetheless would sign the contract? Otherwise we're back to having to square those positions.
I think they were answering the question (of whether the US would be invaded if they didn't have a standing army) in isolation and not commenting on any of the broader topics in this thread.
As the owner of a tax preparation company I can assure you that most people would check any box on their return that increases their refund. They would find many rationalizations for it, but they would choose bigger refund almost every time.
I trust you over Scott on this.
No rationalization is even needed. They would simply tell you "make the tax as small as possible, and don't bother me with technical details".
If you don't check the box, your competitors will advertise their ability to make the tax even smaller if the customer gives them a try.
Is USAID funding up to a vote? Trivial no if taken literally, (no federal referendum on the matter), but also false in the looser sense that USAID has never been even in the top 5 (10, 20, maybe even 50?) issues in any federal election.
So all this modeling of how voters form preferences seems pointless, if the intensity of preferences are far too low to swing elections.
Looking at it, USAID was a relic of cold-war soft-power strategy, and coasted on inertia for a few decades until someone tried to find savings that don't piss off the voters.
In a broad sense, no. In a narrow sense, every issue is "up for a vote". Campaigns look at exit polls and dig deep into the cross tabs. After the election, they look at who voted, and how, and all down the ballot. If they can pick up a few voters in precinct 43 by enacting policy X, they'll do it and be sure the mailers they send it to precinct 43 mention their stance on X.
If few people care about X among their constituents, they can trade their vote to someone who does, in exchange for electoral aid or help with a policy they do care about or just straight pork funneled to their district.
Ok, but does USAID clear even the low bar of making it onto a flyer? Eisenhower is a long time ago, but maybe the more recent changes that made it into a standalone agency (in 1998) could be looked at. Initial research into it makes it look 100% insider-driven, which is what I'd have expected. No voter ever told a pollster "I think USAID should be directly operating under the secretary of state instead of under IDCA". No voter was ever asked the question, either.
I have no doubt that campaigners are sophisticated, but saying "every issue is up for a vote" is clearly false. Voter preferences are coarse and elections are low-bandwidth. Maybe USAID clears the threshold, but it'd be easy to find policies with even-lower-voter-valence.
I'm not claiming the whole electorate is interested in every issue. I'm claiming that most issues have interested parties. For USAID, in certain zip codes of Maryland and Virginia it was a big deal when DOGE started slashing funding.
And I'm sure decisions like moving operations under the secretary of state aren't driven by electoral concerns. But politicians have multiple groups of people who are driven by narrow interests. Sometimes they pursue those constituents for campaign contributions, and sometimes they do it for votes.
I always wonder how precisely can they trust those exit polls. I guess it's fine when you just want to know how male demographics vote, but I don't think I can't trust its prediction for NB Asian wheelchair-user betel-addicted people. Seems like lizardman constant would drown anything too intersectional groups.
PEPFAR specifically was started in George W. Bush's presidency, post-Cold-War.
And it was a personal policy push by GWB that AFAICT was the result of the man's own (and his wife's) preferences, not voters'. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means trying to identify the cause of PEPFAR by talking about voters using government as a commitment strategy will explain much less than "GWB visited Gambia in the 1990s and decided the AIDS issue was something he personally cared about".
Makes me wonder how much of the political situation could be causally tracked back to: "GWB visited Gambia, Trump visited Russia".
Yeah, I think discussing the voters' preferences for something like this when it's initially created is sort of pointless. Voters don't really know the plausibility of this sort of thing in advance. You need somebody to get the ball rolling for a while.
You could say something like "voters want the government to do something about HIV/AIDS" but that's about it.
GWB had a mandate based on "compassionate conservatism" and PEPFAR and PMA are obvious outgrowths of this idea. Voters absolutely supported the broader concept of "a president who does good-guy Christian stuff"
Not an economist here, but I think you've missed the revealed preference argument. Let's take a close corollary from other rationalist arguments:
Say you believe candidate X will win the next election. What does that mean? It's easy enough to give an opinion when it costs you nothing to be wrong. But if instead I asked you to bet $100 of your own money on candidate X winning, you might reconsider whether Y has a better chance of winning, or maybe keep your money and not bet at all because you're uncertain.
I think there's something similar happening here. Some politician comes along and says, "X will do good in the world. Not only that, but I'm going to wave my hand vaguely at the magic slush fund while promising you it won't cost you anything, directly, so vote for more of X."
And in a false but still very real way this is how it works. False, because there is no free lunch. But still real because whether we spend that money on foreign aid or the military or toss it down the Money Hole or whatever, it won't change how much Uncle Sam takes in taxes from your paycheck this year or next. Maybe it hurts a smidge more in inflation, but there's no direct way to connect the policy to its true cost - for this or anything else.
So politics is a cheap hack that reverses the betting game, where instead of having skin in the game, you draw from the magic slush fund. This makes it easy to look at a poll and say, "look, I'm just doing what 80% of the population would do anyway, if given the chance." But there's no skin in the game for any of those poll participants either. How does a good rationalist dismiss what people do when it costs them something, in favor of a cost-free opinion? Nobody here, the voter or the poll participant, has skin in this game.
Because of this disconnect - where you use other people's money to remove your rationalist sense of skin in the game - I think an appeal to government programs should be used only when no other option is available, and that sparingly. Foreign aid is far from that threshold for me.
Under futarchy politics would be very different of course. Hopefully for the better, although it might start by "Giving the people what they want... good and hard".
"But there's no skin in the game for any of those poll participants either. How does a good rationalist dismiss what people do when it costs them something, in favor of a cost-free opinion? Nobody here, the voter or the poll participant, has skin in this game."
This is not a standard that people apply to any other political decision. Suppose some politician is saying, "We should give the DoT 10% more funding to build roads." A poll of voters shows that a majority of voters support this idea. But the voters who say there should be more funding for roads have no skin in the game, and their taxes will change minimally if it passes. Therefore, we shouldn't appeal to the poll, and stick with other options, like maintaining the same level of funding.
You can swap out "less" with "more" or "DoT" with any other government agency without affecting the structure of the argument, so this functions as a fully general argument for ignoring polls about how much to spend on various government functions.
This is exactly right. I tried to address this concern in my comment. All of politics is a game of separating the decision from the skin in the game cost for most voters (except for cases of direct costs, e.g. a 5% tax on gas). We're far from the days when Athenians would vote to go to war, and then turn around and prepare their sons for battle. We have a paid standing army and haven't used the draft in decades to insulate the public from exactly that kind of skin in the game.
I'm not saying polls should be entirely disregarded. I'm saying they should be treated differently when considering that the collective decision-making process is designed to separate costs from benefits. Sometimes they'll be useful, but not always.
To take your example, of building roads through collective action, we should use the best tools available to determine allocation of resources. Personally, if I had a poll result of people asking to spend less on roads, but data suggesting that if I don't increase road funding it will result in dramatic increases in driving accidents and car damage, I'll probably increase road funding. Because what does the public know about the minutiae of the transportation budget over 5 years?
I used to be pretty left wing but I've come around to the Musk/Trump position on USAID and similar endeavors. I see a firehose of money (and not just money but attention/effort/thought) going out the door, with plenty of examples of it being spent on absolutely ridiculous things.
Simultaneously I see opportunities everywhere for improving the lives of US citizens that are not acted on. I see resource constraints when responding to natural disasters. I see issues with the funding of our entitlement programs. I see fraud. I see old regulations that no longer serve us. And I wonder why we aren't focusing on those things first. It's not just the money, but attention and will to solve problems, which are in limited supply.
Perhaps if I felt that all the people freaking out about USAID cared equally about those other things I would be more inclined to look deeply into the details and think hard about whether we have made a mistake or whether there are parts that should be brought back. But I don't feel that. Mostly they don't seem to care that much about improving the lives of Americans.
Someone in the comments talked about work USAID did to improve the wine industry in Moldova - cool and not ridiculous. But where's the passion for conducting research that can improve the wine industry in the US? Why shouldn't we have the absolute best wine in the world that no other country can touch with all the resource we have? Apply that idea to literally everything.
Most of the rationalist/EA argument about USAID is about PEPFAR, the incredibly effective global anti-AIDS project, not so much the "we made wine better" thing.
Unfortunately it was not the only thing USAID did, just the most defensible. Also unfortunately, in politics doing big things is often easier than little things.
> Why shouldn't we have the absolute best wine in the world that no other country can touch with all the resource we have?
I don't know much about wine, but I suspect that the answer would start with: "everything in USA is way more expensive and way more regulated than in Moldova".
A more subtle argument could be that when you deal with wine producers in Moldova, you can give them a proposal like "I will give you lots of money if you make better wine", and their options are only to accept or reject. You can threaten to walk away if they don't do what you ask of them.
But when you give a proposal to wine producers in USA, another politician can compete with you by giving them a better proposal, such as "I will give you the same amount of money if you... keep doing what you were doing already, and vote for me". Guess which one of you will be more popular.
I mean, USA already spends zillions of dollars on its farmers, and the purpose is usually not increasing the quality of food, but producing more corn syrup that fuels the obesity epidemic. The thing is, unlike Moldovan producers, American producers can vote on what you subsidize them for. Seems like they don't want to be incentivized to compete on higher quality.
I think the US does spend far, far more attention and money on domestic concerns than on USAID. To clarify your position, which of the following statements would you most disagree with?
1. USAID was about 0.3% of federal spending before the cuts.
2. It saved tens of millions of lives, in addition to other quality of life benefits.
3. The cost is worth that benefit.
Or do you agree with those 3 statements and it's purely other concerns that make you against USAID overall?
Voting in favor of the law doesn't cost you $100. This is elementary public choice theory.
Indeed! There is so much rigorous work on this topic that this post missed the mark. A little surprised as this community is pretty familiar with Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan among others...
How much does it cost me?
I think the biggest problem with all debate about foreign aid, including this post, is that foreign aid is assumed to be a problem of morality/altruism.
I'm willing to bet that all foreign aid currently given can be justified on narrowly self-interested grounds. Every dollar that the USA (and every other country) gives to overseas aid is more than recouped in increased trade, security, and other benefits.
In which case, the problem of voter antipathy towards foreign aid is a problem of (1) lack of voter understanding about the benefits (99% of the issue); and (2) voter worries about the use of aid for transfers and corruption (1%, in reality much less).
Which, as always, suggests that the political problem is the poisonous media environment, supported by right wing political parties that are no longer fit for purpose.
How would you settle that bet? I think you're wrong for obvious public-choice reasons, but I don't think it's verifiable.
I'd like to know what the obvious reasons are, because they're not obvious to me at all!
To settle the bet, there'd be a few possibilities. One simple starter would be to look at how much of the foreign aid budget gets spent on goods from domestic suppliers. My guess is that once those are subtracted, the amount spent on foreign aid would start to look very small indeed.
Then you'd have to make some effort to measure benefits accruing to the home country from international development, increased trade, and international good will.
I think that (a) international aid helps to make the world more peaceful and developed; and (b) we all benefit from that. If I'm wrong about those assumptions, then I might be wrong that international aid is also in what economists call our "rational self interest".
Actually, now I do wonder if I misinterpreted your "every dollar" claim as a claim about every individual dollar whereas you might have meant that the aggregate has a positive return on investment? But I don't think there's much of a reason to believe that money spent domestically is necessarily in the national interest.
Yes, that's right that I was talking about a positive return on investment. Like, if you spend 100 bucks on mosquito nets for Africa, Americans don't directly get the benefit of those nets. But if the nets are purchased from a US company (as they often are), then maybe 50 bucks of that 100 bucks in aid flows back to the USA directly (so I think it doesn't count as a loss); and the other 50 bucks may get made up in other benefits, leading to a total net positive.
On the national interest - in general I think that a healthier, more peaceful world is very much in the national interest; as is a world with lots of positive feelings about Americans.
Subtracting the amount spent on domestic suppliers implies that they all would be unemployed without foreign aid because the internal demand for everything is already satisfied. You can argue for <1 multiplier, but simply zeroing it out is obviously ridiculous.
Wut? It's exports. Exports are a positive component of GDP.
I think you're trying to do economics that is way too clever. Everything I'm saying is at a really basic level. I'm sure there are clever multiplier effects on all components of my argument (I'd suggest the multiplier effect on altruism would be very large). But let's keep it simple for the sake of a BTL blog argument. On this basic level, exports are in our own rational interest; so a dollar spent to gain a dollar of exports is a net neutral.
Exports are good if and only if you're getting paid for them, enough to offset the opportunity cost of doing something else. That's, like, the entire point. In case of aid you're spending one dollar to gain zero dollars.
Yes, OK. I have thought it through and I see that you are right about the how the flow of money would work. Thanks!
> First, you could argue that supporters are using the government as a force multiplier. That is, suppose that 51% of people support spending $100 of their own money on foreign aid. If, instead of donating personally, they vote for a law that taxes everyone $100, they can make their “donation” go twice as far by “matching” it with $100 checks from the 49% of unwilling voters
My intuition has always been something much stronger than this. If your vote is decisive, then you’re getting more like 100 million x leverage. I think this intuition is clearer for something like taxes. No one is going to donate to the government, so by proposing a tax increase you go from zero dollars donated to your $100 plus $100 from everyone else. (Probably that’s what the assurance contract section is about, I just skimmed the post tbh.)
> This is the virtue signaling model of voting, and it implies that
This seems to badly misunderstand the concept of "virtue signaling". It assumes that the audience for virtue signaling is... yourself. There is very little reason you'd need to send a signal from yourself to yourself.
The right way to virtue signal on the proposition in question is to vote against it, and then lie to everyone about how you voted. Or, to tell everyone in advance how you plan to vote for it, because you're virtuous. But no part of either plan requires you to vote for it. Your vote is secret, and has no signaling value.
> But you could argue that poll respondents face the same incentive to virtue signal (polls also don’t change your taxes). Answers to poll questions do change based on changing realities (eg people are less likely to support foreign aid if they’re told the budget is tight), but, uh, maybe people are also trying to signal fiscal discipline, and, uh, somehow keep all of these signals straight so that it exactly matches what you would expect if they were voting and responding based on true beliefs.
Boy, this is unworthy of you.
Poll respondents, of course, have a much stronger incentive toward virtue signaling than voters do, because they're making a statement about themselves to whoever is polling them. This problem is so well known that it has its own name and its own wikipedia page:
> In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.
> The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias
But sure, you can use rhetorical tricks to imply that the very concept of social desirability bias is ridiculous, too. Who's to say what's right and what's wrong?
I think the original argument is also meant to invoke the moral cost of using the police to extract taxes from your fellow citizens. Empathetic people often struggle with that aspect of democracy.
For instance: they raised my property tax recently, and it’s been kind of difficult and frustrating. My fellow citizens did that to me, knowing I’m not able to resist their police forces. Nobody here thinks my fellow citizens bear any moral responsibility for my bad experience? That aspect of it doesn’t even cross your minds?
Reading all this, it’s like you think you get moral credit for the help done in disbursing the money, but no moral debit for the harm done collecting it — is that it?
I have a friend who can’t afford some medicine he needs. If he didn’t have to pay income tax, he could afford it. So you guys get moral charity credit for the medicine an African guy gets, but you’re not responsible for the medicine my friend lacks?
I’m not saying not to do foreign aid, I’m just saying you should consider the other side of the moral ledger. The people you take the money from have material needs too; not all US taxpayers are free from want.
(The property tax example is real but I’ve altered the details of the medicine example for anonymity.)
I want your buddy to get free at point of service medicine, and I want your property tax to be lower in relative terms (given you have to struggle.)
I would happily pay two or three or five or ten times the tax I do, if it resulted in a more equitable society. Unfortunately, everyone needs to pay at once or I'll run out of shit real quick, even though I have a lot of shit. Double unfortunately, enough people think that it is necessary for you to sweat about losing your house/ your friend to ration insulin or some shit in order to preserve my right to find out that I had 30k in one of my checking accounts by accident just sitting there, not even getting 4%.
So, I'll vote and stump for all the good things all the time, and maybe one day you will get a check from the government that has .5 of one of my cents in it, and we can call it good.
I'm not in that bad of a situation, it's not like a crisis. Just frustrating and troublesome. My complaint is less that me and mine are struggling and more that mainstream political ethics accords our trouble no moral weight.
Consensual charity and non-consensual taxation may be indistinguishable from the perspective of the person receiving the benefits, and maybe also to people with enough money not to care. But I don't think you're reasoning correctly if you don't accord some significance to the difference between acting with consent and without.
I just can't take hand wringing about consent seriously when we are born into a web of relations, duties, obligations, privileges, rites, and rights that one may not opt out of piecemeal.
Having feelings about this particular bit of compelled remuneration for services unrequested but not that bit comes of as special pleading, so the entire moral equation cancels to zero for me.
If someone wants to be a pure non cap non lib non social full anarchist, that is respectable, but if they accept any law but the law of nature you are defacto in favor of non-consensual social extraction, they just have a different place where they draw the boundary between freedom and tyranny.
TL;DR: being mad about "Im being taxed for X" rather than "I'm being taxed at all" or "They are spending my tax for X" makes no sense to me.
Given that I find the moral nature of the plight illustrated incoherent, my frustration shifts from the extraction side of the issue to the distribution side.
But if there were a checkbox to opt out of foreign aid, turbotax might decide to check it by default in order to claim in their advertisements that the average refund they got their clients was $N higher. If this or something similar happened, the opt out fraction could well become 90% rather than 10%.
If I honestly asked my tax preparation clients and explained the refund with and without the checkbox 90% (at least) would take the higher refund. Just to head off the natural response...I am a two person shop with a sophisticated, upper middle class clientele. Not a refund mill.
I strongly disagree that only 10-40% of voters would opt out. I think almost every Republican and a lot of democrats would. When you’re taxing someone 55%, it is a no brainer to not outsource charitable giving to the US government. Not checking the box would be irrational.
I may have missed it, but what about the expert direction of aid as a feature of government being the mechanism of aid distribution rather than relying on private donation?
Even in a diminished state, the State Department Office on East Africa will have a much better idea of how to help people in Sudan than a guy in Iowa deciding where he should send some charity money.
GiveWell would have an even better idea. Donors, like myself, can choose to listen to GiveWell rather than someone who can seize my money without having to convince me to part with it.
But Givewell isn’t really trying to achieve geopolitical aims with their aid.
Correct, which is part of what makes them way better charity.
Maybe it's naive, but I think good things are good, and bad things are bad, and if you can do good things but don't you are bad.
So, I can't rob you with a gun and give your money to the poor (yet!) because society has not yet collapsed to the point where the benefit outweighs the damage.
The government, on the other hand, exists as a big gun pointed at everybody. When we use the government to take peoples money to do good things, we actually accomplish at least two good things, maybe even three! We get good things, we get wealth redistribution, and we pass some good karma on down the line! What a steal!
>"So, I can't rob you with a gun and give your money to the poor … When we use the government to take peoples money to do good things…"
They're the same picture.
>"What a steal!"
Literally.
"That's the joke" - McBain
Now ask me what I think property is.
My intuitive explanation for the demand for taxation has always been that one can reasonably prefer not to diminish one's relative status in the service of virtue. If you want to be virtuous and give money to charitable causes, but doing so actually increases the utility (status, chance of attracting mates, success in competing for scarce resources or positional goods) of those who *didn't* donate, you're not only in some sense being a 'sucker,' but you are literally *creating a selection function against those who agree with you.* Coordinating virtuous action so as not to make defection a dominant strategy and specifically give a leg up to those who are not virtuous seems like a legitimate reason to enlist the coercive aid of government in the service of things that are good.
I argue for a variant of this: If you are going to extract money from the public, the way to do it while causing the least public objection and the least "economic distortion" is to tax people in such a way that the after-tax status hierarchy is the same as the before-tax status hierarchy. Universally, this is called a "fair" taxation system.
And a "fair" tax system is necessary because societies (or social systems) compete with each other in a more or less Darwinian way, and the most successful (i.e., most competitive) systems we've seen have a "welfare system" that consumes a large part of economic output. The optimal way to obtain the money you need for the necessary welfare system is a fair taxation system...
Making donations is a form of self-harm. If you consider yourself to be good and people who don't donate to be bad, then you will perceive your donation to undermine the cause of good in the sense that the good are now poorer than they were before while the bad are just as rich as they ever were. Taxes force the bad to donate so that the good do not self-annihilate. I'm not advocating anything here. I'm explaining why people want other people to be forced to donate through taxes.
I do not think you have an accurate model of the thinking of the typical person who considers charitable donations, foreign aid, etc., to be good.
Sure, people donate and do foreign aid because they think it is good. But it also harms themselves and makes them weaker than those that don't donate. I mean, why don't donors give away 100% of what they have? Because it would be bad for them and good for their enemies.
You seem to have a very unusual definition of good, if "spending some money to help others" = "making good people (the donor) poorer" = "undermining the cause of good".
If morality meant following your incentives at every moment, we wouldn't need a separate word for it. Typically, good people e.g. don't steal, even when they could do that with impunity. By the same logic, that makes good people poorer, and undermines the cause of good.
Self-harm for the purpose of self-harm is bad. Finding win/win solutions is good. But sometimes you find yourself in a position to help a stranger who *cannot* reciprocate. Maybe the stranger has nothing you need. Or maybe the transaction costs would make his attempt to reciprocate meaningless. Like, there is not much that an average African child could do for me, to reciprocate for being saved from malaria. Even meeting me to shake my hand and say "thank you" to my face would already vastly exceed the cost of the anti-malaria net. In such cases, goodness means helping others without expecting anything in return. (Sometimes people say "pay if forward", but they typically don't check it later.)
It is possible for the government to have real comparative advantage at providing certain goods, even if they could support either an independent market or be supplied through individual action (having to do with economies of scope or complements in production with core government activities)
A good example for this is food aid. The government already has a strong sourcing system for the useful kinds of food, (for rations for the military), and needs to exercise it anyway (for military purposes), so the real marginal cost of marking it as aid and doing the little bit extra to make it useful in humanitarian contexts might be really low. (See also soft power.)
In that case, (I am willing to make everybody pay for some good, so that society spends less on it overall) makes sense, especially because the other efficient option (Public donors coordinate to give the government money to take an action that is different from the one that is established by the budget) conflicts with preventing corruption.
I don't think our foreign aid is built off the military's food distribution system. I think the farm lobby pushes for exports, and the recipients don't get as much of a vote on their food preferences as our soldiers do.
I never put much stock in this argument since they, y’know, invaded Iraq with other people’s money. If I had to pay for that, they can pay for this.
Acc. to Google, these things aren’t wholly unconnected. In the case of Iraq, the one opened the door to the other:
“Post-War Context: In contrast, after the 2003 invasion, the U.S. alone provided over $24 billion in aid by 2005.”
Egypt another obvious example, and it has helped or caused it to treble its population. Presumably they no longer need aid.
Rather than a checkbox to (a) donate $ or (b) get a refund, I've always kind of wished you could set a budget. Your taxes don't get lowered, you can just choose what percent of your taxes go to which thing within some limited number of things (10-20 max). Defense, Foreign Aid, Welfare, Law Enforcement, ... Maybe only some percent of your taxes can get weighted and the rest is decided by congress, as it is now.
I'd be curious to find out, given such a system, what percent people would pick for each thing.
Note: I'm guessing some replies will be "this is too complicated" but it could be opt in (check here to budget your taxes). Don't check and they are added to congress's budget. It could also just be you enter a number or "high/med/low/none/unset" on each of the 10-20 items. The budgeted portion of your taxes gets divided by the ratios, and any items you didn't set get nothing.
This would be giving people with more taxable income more influence on budget priorities. An excellent idea, in my opinion.
This sounds like something that should be tried on a smaller scale first, like in an HOA or something, to see if it has any chance of working.
Even just a simpler approval-voting like list would go a long way. Check the boxes of the Departments you're willing to support; if there's too little revenue from returns of those who checked a given Department to keep it going, too bad so sad, it shuts down.
Using my @negspace AI skill on this post, which finds surprising omissions in text.
shadow: “USAID is partially a state capacity / soft power operation that requires plausible deniability about which programs are strategic vs humanitarian.”
this explains several otherwise puzzling features:
1. why government, not private charity? because some of the value is state attribution—the US flag on the rice bag, the implicit “you owe us” ledger entry. private donations don’t accrue geopolitical capital.
2. why the bundling is load-bearing, not incidental. if you separated “strategic aid” from “humanitarian aid,” adversaries could target the former and recipients could free-ride on the latter. the ambiguity is the feature.
3. why the efficiency debate is partly theater. EA-types asking “is this GiveDirectly-competitive?” are measuring the wrong objective function. some programs are optimized for influence, not QALYs—but you can’t say that without collapsing the humanitarian cover.
4. why cuts are so politically charged. opponents aren’t just attacking “waste”—they’re (knowingly or not) attacking state capacity infrastructure that can’t defend itself openly.
this reframes scott’s whole essay as: he’s analyzing the demand side (voter preferences) while ignoring the supply side (why the state wants to be the vehicle).
his models—virtue signaling, time-inconsistency, transaction costs—all explain why citizens might prefer government aid. but they don’t explain why the state prefers to run it rather than, say, subsidize GiveWell.
the answer you’re gesturing at: the state captures option value from running aid directly—soft power, intelligence adjacencies, diplomatic leverage, economic entanglement. and that option value requires the humanitarian framing to remain credible.
https://jordanmrubin.substack.com/p/what-do-you-have-unsaid
This is one of the only arguments or comments on the topic that resonates with me. Thumbs up!
Please remember that foreign aid can not only do things that some people value at zero, but can do things that are _strongly_ negative for many people. PEPFAR was fine - it had a track record of savings lives, and the lives it saved are unlikely to be people who will then try to kill some of us. For USAID as a whole... Well, I did a quick check with prodding Google's search AI (presumably Gemini) with
>What fraction of usaid money wound up going to terrorists?
and, amongst other things, I got:
>Investigations and reports, particularly those highlighted in early 2025 by the Middle East Forum (MEF) and congressional testimony, suggest that millions of dollars in USAID funds have been directed to organizations with ties to designated terrorist groups in regions such as Gaza, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan
>Terror-Aligned Grants: A multiyear study identified $164 million in grants to radical organizations, including $122 million specifically to groups "aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters".
There is a large multiplier for funding terrorists. If Isis gets to recruit _one_ Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 14 of us wind up dead and 57 injured.
I don't follow the virtue signaling argument. Both polls and elections are anonymous, so who are you signaling to? Do they just mean "I'll feel better about myself if I say yes on a poll, even though I don't actually want to pay for it?"
But how is that different from an honestly held preference? If you decide to give to charity because you like feeling good about yourself more than you like keeping your money, that's just... being charitable.
My understanding is that people have been know to lie to pollsters, saying what they think the pollster wants to hear.
my best explanation I can come up with is he is borrowing from (or reinventing) the idea of "expressive voting". It reflects your values or identity (“I support humanitarianism,” “I’m tough on corruption,” “I’m pro-alliance”) and gives a moral satisfaction of sorts. Talk (vote) is cheap.
How much of a difference do you think opt-in vs. opt-out would make? CA state tax forms offer several opt-in charitable donation options targeting various charitable causes (endangered species, food banks, etc.). I can't find any total aggregate here, but individual charities on the list are considered to be doing very well to get 20,000 opt-ins and $600,000+ in donations. Out of 17.8 million tax returns. The presidential campaign fund on federal taxes gets something like 3% participation (that's lizardman constant levels).
You file taxes in CA (I'm assuming), do you donate to any of these? Do you instead take the money and donate to other better causes? I'm not sure you would get as high of participation as you think, even if it was opt-out rather then opt-in.
If I had a way to not pay taxes towards, say, California High Speed Rail I'd've been mashing that opt-out box for the last 10 years.
You're not bothering to discuss the times when charity is actively unhelpful, such as delivering polio cases to Pakistan (more from the oral vaccine than wild cases).
That one is particularly egregious.
You said "foreign aid" so you're going to get the Israel question. How much of our "Israel foreign aid" gets spent back home "funding" Lockheed Martin? I don't pay taxes to fund companies, regardless of "charitable bent."
I think that you need to grind the "Second, you could argue that supporters are disproportionately poor people who pay low taxes, and who suffer no personal downside in forcing the rich to donate." with further number analysis, because this is what I thought I see the most.
Regardless of how rich the supporters actually are (and usually they come from the same forum who claim to live paycheck to paycheck and is grinded by capitalism), they thought that there are even richer people who don't donate and this proposed tax would force them to. Again, this is regardless of what reality actually is. Of course I'm not counting the actual richest people that have pledged like Bill Gates or something, but the grass root sentiment force. This is like both political factions claim that they're "against the elite" regardless if the elites themselves are actually on their side.
So I need some numbers of what the actual demographics of the tax supporter is to accept or deny this argument.
Someone else looked it up and found that Scott was indeed wrong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-against-the-other-peoples/comment/203721390
I’ve been reading a lot of ancap econ lately. Against that, your several paragraphs about military assurance contracts ring hollow to me. I know it’s just a simplified vehicle for the larger point about transaction costs, but I’m objecting anyway.
- Zero defense spending is not a realistic equilibrium, even given your premises. Big businesses already do high-stakes, multilateral negotiations. It’s not obvious that they need to bring a bunch of middle-class residents to the bargaining table in order to keep their skyscrapers safe from Canadian aggression.
- Ceteris paribus, a freer society will tend to be a richer one, requiring a smaller percentage of GDP to pay for defense. (Not a decisive point, just a frequently neglected one.)
- It sounds like the government still has a monopoly on defense services in your scenario. That’s a specific policy choice, and the minarchists have not convinced me that it’s the right one—competitive defense markets still feel worth talking about.
The above is not meant as a strong case for voluntary defense spending, but as weak claims that push against the particular minarchist military argument you sketched out. I’m mostly drawing on the books “The Machinery of Freedom” (which you’ve reviewed) and “Chaos Theory” (which it would be awesome if you reviewed).
Who wrote "Chaos Theory"?
"Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy" (2002) by Robert P Murphy. Essay #2 is titled "Private Defense" and is about 6500 words.
In "Libertarian Law and Military Defense" (2017) he sketches out an interesting mechanism involving vicarious lawsuits by which a defense provider might find it profitable to preemptively strike a hostile foreign army, even though, having violated the NAP, private courts would find them liable for the damage.
Both are available for free online.
An important element of this discussion is that rich people already get a multiplier on their charitable donations via the charity tax deduction. Anyone who rejects foreign aid as spending "our" money on "their" thing should have the charity tax deduction higher on their list of grievances
> In order to justify immigration enforcement via taxation rather than voluntary donation, you have to argue that the benefit of coordinating the people who do want fewer immigrants is greater than the unfair cost imposed on the people who don’t want that. But then you could make this same argument about charity.
But charity funded by voluntary donations really does exist, whereas law enforcement wielding the power of the state but funded by charity doesn't.
> You could solve some of these with coordination platforms like Kickstarter, and there are clever/complicated solutions to the others
A dominant assurance contract (which you discuss below) would be even better. There's little interest in that, because there's little interest in genuine public goods, and the reforms which would produce them, leading to Robin Hanson writing "The Elephant in the Brain".
> For example, it might say “Everyone will donate 5% of their income to the Pentagon to provide America with a military, and this contract will activate once every American has signed it.”
The problem is that there isn't an outcome to evaluate, there's no "paying for results". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/radical-pay-for-resultshtml Capitalism specializes in such things (though we still pay for inputs for many things like education, medicine and lawyers not on contingency), while governments specialize in not getting evaluated by results, and hence not bothering to do controlled experiments of policies https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/uncontrolled/
> So: right now, in the real world, do you support replacing military taxation with an assurance contract?
I would if I saw a viable example of that working somewhere. As I DO see viable examples of actual charities funding the things USAID funds.
> Some people live paycheck to paycheck and can’t pay 5% of their yearly income.
What assurance contract is priced in terms of percentage income rather than the input necessary to achieve the desired output? You want to incentivize entrepreneurs who will find the CHEAPEST way of producing the public good!
> Are they just virtue signaling when they talk about wokeness, and they don’t really care?
I would check revealed preference on that.
> Or would we announce the end of coercive military taxation to great fanfare, and then immediately be invaded by Canada and turned into the 11th province?
My lack of fear of Canada is one reason I think it's fine to abolish nation-states now and go back to city-states, since the military scale of the former displacing the latter is no longer that much of an issue under Sailer's "dirt theory" of war.
> Contra the economists, I’m not sure that we fund the military through coercive taxation only to avoid free rider problems. I think we fund it through taxation to avoid the same kinds of transaction cost issues that would sink the assurance contract
I'm with Franz Oppenheimer: a dominant military conquers people and extracts wealth from them, regardless of economic ideals.
> Since charity suffers these same transaction costs, the same arguments may apply.
But voluntarily funded charities really do exist!
> enlists a different, longer-term preference
I would use terms like "rational ignorance" and "rational irrationality" to describe the logic of voters.
> On the other hand, we don’t want to make a habit of this, or we’ll end up with Prohibition, or bans on porn, or some other dangerously totalitarian attempt to mandate virtue.
Have you ever written a blog post dedicated to addressing whether we should do those things?
> …as long as there are similar boxes for everything else the government does that can’t be justified under simple minarchist logic
I'm enthusiastic about this as a giant step toward minarchy.
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box
I predict a lot more, which is precisely why the government won't do that.
> Do you agree that, if all foreign aid were cancelled outright, only a small fraction of people would donate on their own?
I donated on my own, and since I had no income last year, my donation was an infinite percent of that zero!
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
Still no.
The games between voters with opposing preferences should also include all future taxpayers bound by such a rule. Thus in the limit, a group might rationally vote to codify something that would happen anyway under self-interest in order to imbue the institution with their preferences.
You seem to be missing a key point in the other people's money argument. It is not that people are not spending other people money because they are taxed too, the argument is that people can voluntarily give to charity without obligating others to involuntarily give to charity. Let's say you love community theater. One way to support that theater is to buy tickets and give them donations, voluntarily. Another way is to convince other people to voluntarily do the same. Unfortunately, what happens is people apply for and get taxpayer-funded grants, or worse donate to organizations who write those grants, to fund their pet interests. I think the same applys to foreign aid. One other problem here is that politics requires compromise and politicians are incented to horse trade spending higher than lower. So it is not that i don't get my pet spending and you don't get your pet spending - what happens is both horse trade and both spending occurs, even if most people in society don't want that spending. Too often government becomes an exercise in spending other people's money.
Foreign aid is not charity, it's the purchase of soft power. I don't get a 300 millionth of the global soft power of the US by personally giving to charity in any quantity.
Exactly.
You kinda could if you traveled abroad.
Ok: not at any amount I can reasonably spend (one trip overseas for a little while every several years without actively investing in propaganda, not personally a millionaire).
Do we ever actually support government policies? Like I'm basically never aware of what's happening at a local politics level all the way up to federal politics level. I sometimes read about politics but the type of stuff that I read about is almost never the exact amount being sent in foreign aid. I'm not sure I've ever read a debate even close to "foreign aid should be 0.06% of the federal budget".
I'm also not sure our politicians are fully aware of the laws that they pass, given their statements on laws saying they have to pass bills to know what is in them and general 'staffers write the bills which are then passed along party lines' mechanics.
For your foreign aid taxation hypothetical, I might check the box but it would depend on how effective the aid was. My understanding is that it ran the full range from actively harmful to by far the best use of aid money prior to getting DOGE-d. Still, overall I'd expect that foreign aid is on net the most effective part of the federal budget, so if I had the full checklist of programs I would or would not fund based on my taxes, I would probably cut many other programs prior to foreign aid.
In general both in this article and in the comments, the missing mood is that people place negative value on foreign aid. It isn't really a coordination problem or a free rider problem. It's that some people really dislike the idea of money going to foreign aid and get mad at the idea of us sending any money to foreigners. This makes DOGE cuts to foreign aid a good thing in their eyes because why were we sending money to them at all?
I think you could see this perspective if you looked at the least effective foreign aid programs
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
Nope. Tax software would check this box by default (because they all promise to get you the biggest possible refund) so almost everyone would opt out of conteibuting to foreign aid.
> But this should be mysterious: if the pro-aid coalition is so strong, why don’t they just donate on their own?
This should not be mysterious. I don't understand why you take at all seriously the idea that they could do that. If you personally donate $100, it costs you $100, and $100 goes to aid. If you cast a decisive vote in favor of 100 million people (including you) being taxed $100 to spend on aid, this costs you $100, and $10 billion goes to aid. This is 100 million times as cost-effective as donating the money yourself. You should never expect anyone to behave the same way when the cost-effectiveness of some of their available actions change by a factor of 100 million; that would be absurd. This isn't something that needs to be explained by some quirk of human psychology; it's just something that happens by default in anything that's even a little bit like a rational agent.
> In order to justify immigration enforcement via taxation rather than voluntary donation, you have to argue that the benefit of coordinating the people who do want fewer immigrants is greater than the unfair cost imposed on the people who don’t want that. But then you could make this same argument about charity. I’m not sure how to think about this one, or *how to avoid having it justify almost anything*
There are indeed a wide variety of coordination problems affecting many but not almost all people in a certain constituency, which are difficult to solve except by having the whole constituency contribute. And this is in fact why governments spend money on a very wide variety of things, the vast majority of which don't benefit literally everyone. It seems to me straightforwardly good that this is possible, and I think you owe us an explanation for why it isn't permissible for an argument to show that governments should be able to do a very wide variety of things without worrying about whether they benefit literally everyone.
> And do you agree that, if the tax form included a box like this, only a small fraction of people would check it?
I think that if tax forms included a box that they could check to reduce their taxes, and the box came with an explanation that checking the box causes certain bad effects, that most people would check the box, for the same reason that most people don't give lots of money to every non-government charity that asks them for money and tells them that bad things will happen if they aren't funded. Also for the same reason that people tend to claim tax benefits when they qualify for them and are aware of them, even though they could simply not claim the tax benefit and pay more taxes; people are aware that the government spends their tax money on real things and that many of those things are things that they might benefit from or approve of, and don't need to be reminded of this by a piece of text next to the checkbox that they check off to claim a tax deduction. Giving people the option to not pay taxes just so long as they check a box saying "I am a freeloader" sounds like the sort of idea I'd expect to hear Big Bad Thing propose as a strategy for destroying our ability to fund good things.
I think you are significantly overstating what dominant assurance contracts can do. Looking at Tabarrok's paper (https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf), his justification for claiming that contributing is a dominant strategy comes from a model he describes in section 2: every agent is a rational actor, with exactly the same amount of benefit from the public good. In this model, he shows that the entrepreneur sets the threshhold to be that he will provide the public good if literally everyone signs the contract, and then literally everyone will in fact sign the contract. Obviously, this will not hold up in real life with any group of nontrivial size.
Luckily, the paper provides a more realistic model in section 3, in which there is incomplete information, and variation in how much benefit each person gets from the public good. In this model, contributing is not a dominant strategy, and in fact, there are Nash equilibria in which it is not guaranteed that that the public good is produced, even if the cost of producing the public good is zero, and it is common knowledge that its value to every agent is positive.
In other words, in your list of reasons why dominant assurance contracts might not work in practice, you should add:
> Some people would correctly understand the situation and come up with correct theories of how signing would hurt them, or how they could profit from refusing.
Dominant assurance contracts are not a practical solution to real-life coordination problems.
"So for example, if there’s a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid, then voting in favor of the law costs you $100, the same as if you donated the money yourself voluntarily."
That's not how the tax system works. The tax system works on percentages. If the median tax voter votes for a tax that costs him $100 he is voting for a tax that costs the richest people much much more.
As a personal data point against the "other people's money" argument, I'd note that prior to the first Trump administration I consistently donated 10% of my spending to charity. After the passage of the tax cut bill in 2017 (unless I'm misremembering the year), I increased that to 15% of my spending.
I felt that the tax cut was an undeserved benefit for me, and so I chose to balance it out by giving more to charity (I didn't take the time to do the math on how my decreased taxes compared to my increased charitable donations).
How about redistribution of happiness. Our govt for better or worse engages in redistribution of money. Proponents justify it on utilitarian grounds and in many use cases has popular support. But this principle doesnt require us to spend the money directly on citizens. The spending is done to increase the wellbeing of the citizens. If a large group of citizens are happy knowing a bunch of non citizens lives were saved, that transfer is as justified on utilitarian grounds as direct citizen spending.
State is directed to justice. It has business doing any charity whatsoever.
Then the one who defines what "justice" means has most power over the state.
True but Scott Alexander rather explicitly was going on charity as something that should be done by the government.
In game theory, there's a lot of models for public good games. They generally show that with purely rational groups, it's hard to get any contribution to a public good like charity.
The main reasons are:
1. It's hard to argue a high reward for giving to the public good for purely rational/economic players. You need to model some kind of altruistic or status reward and this is a fragile thing.
2. In groups, there's a big tendency to follow. So if the status quo is to not donate, being the first or only one to donate will give you a very low relative reward. Hence people will be much more likely to donate through tax, cause everyone is doing it, then to choose to do it individually.
Luckily the US government has had good people that introduced USAID programs, which gives us a status quo where everyone contributes to aid.
The thing that is now happening, is that the MAGA movement is reprogramming people's utility functions into reducing the reward for altruism (or status from giving to the public good).
In a way this is still purely democratic, but feels like someone is gaming the system here..
Which brings me to my second point. One of the functions of government is to redistribute wealth amongst citizens. This way the more lucky individuals share some of that luck with the less lucky ones.
(I understand this is not perfect, and maybe I have a socialist view on the government, I'm from Netherlands, where our society functions really well by caring more for the unfortunate part of society)
Giving aid to unfortunate groups of people in your own country, but also outside, is just a way to redistribute wealth. Especially when you are the top 10 richest country on earth.
Ps. This completely disregards the actual effectiveness of aid as a tool for wealth distribution, but that was outside the scope of this discussion I think.
>"…public good like charity…"
Charity is NOT a public good.
It is in experimental economics. You model charity via a public good game. Where players contribute their income and everyone receives a utilty or benefit from the result (less people die from Malaria would be good for everyone, except psychopaths).
Public good games explained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game
Modeling charity with public goods games is invalid.
The essence of charity is that contributors & recipients are disjoint but the game assumes they're congruent (as is the case for actual public goods).
ETA: I suppose you could do it accurately of you set the factor to zero, but that'd be a waste of effort since the Nash equilibrium is trivially obvious.
You are talking about pure game theory, I'm trying to model the real world through game theory tools (this is what experimental economics is).
Game theory can be used to not only model payoffs by money, but 'utility'.
In reality, you don't get zero utility from charity, you get utility through channels other than direct material payback. The multiplication factor isn't about your personal consumption return, it's about the total social value created.
My malaria example actually fits perfectly:
- It's a genuine global public good (pandemic risk reduction, economic development)
- It's partly altruistic preference (you care about others not dying). Economists model this as Warm Glow, which is a measurable, real 'utility' people experience (and gladly so!)
- The disjoint/congruent distinction isn't binary
I wouldn't use the word "charity" for what you're describing, but that's a semantic issue on which we can agree to disagree.
This reminds me a lot of the Danish Lutheran church, a state church which is founded through a voluntary tax. Currently around 80% of Danes (not counting migrants and second gen migrants) are members. If your parents are members and you are baptized you will automatically be a member until you opt out.
Very few people opt out, even among the people who claim to be non-religious otherwise.
And so, in Denmark, the main fight neo-atheists are fighting is to make state church membership opt-in instead of opt-out.
I came here to say the same thing about the Swedish Church. There the fee is approximately 1% of gross income. Foreign aid costs about twice as much as the church, so such a foreign-aid tax would be approximately 2% in Sweden.
Aid through taxation is contrary to everyone's actual behaviour.
The rational way for everyone to give to charity is to decide what proportion of their income they are willing to give and to have that amount transferred to a charity of their choice every time they receive a paycheck (i.e. much like taxation) BUT when approached and asked to donate, most people will pay up. Even though they should just say that they have already contributed the maximum that they are willing to pay for the month, nobody (except me :-)) actually ever does this. It's hard to view this as anything other than emotional blackmail.
"VOTE NO: You feel like a bad person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes."
While I agree that some people donate to feel like a good person, I don't think that those who don't donate then feel like a bad person. I think the feeling range goes from 0 to 1, not -1 to +1.
There's a phenomenon I've noticed where people object to a Thing, but the objection they raise (sometimes straight off, sometimes after pushing and pointing out bad arguments) eventually ends up pointing to a much more radical position than they maybe intended.
In this case the argument "I don't want to pay tax to support other countries/do foreign aid" leads very quickly to "I don't want to pay tax/have government" unless you can cleanly separate foreign aid from other governmental functions, and I don't think you can since all forms of legitimacy for things we presumably like (e.g., emergency services, roads) apply just as well to foreign aid, or at minimum fail on the same metrics (e.g., popularity).
If you think taxation to do foreign aid is illegitimate if you don't like foreign aid, then you're essentially arguing that you can only be legitimately taxed for things you enjoy, ie tax should be voluntary and earmarked, ie all current forms of taxation are theft, which is technically distinct from but leads very quickly and easily to all taxation is theft, which means government is illegitimate. Which, fine, if you're an anarchist that's a perfectly consistent position, but I very much doubt people making this argument are.
(You can swap in "supporting police" or "having a military" or basically any other governmental function you like and the argument works just as well.)
> A simple problem with this argument is that actually, each voter’s money will also be taxed. So for example, if there’s a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid, then voting in favor of the law costs you $100, the same as if you donated the money yourself voluntarily.
I’d push against that. I’m pretty sure that support for foreign aid is heavily correlated with support for progressive taxation, "making the rich pay", "making big companies pay", and things like that.
Not until MAGA came along. It used to be very well understood in Republican circles that foreign aid was a very useful tool for spreading American influence in the world. Both to achieve our political goals as well as giving American businesses footholds in certain regions. Almost all the “aid” we provided to Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the USSR collapsed was based on that idea, not idealistic progressive notions. It used to be the Left hated USAID because it was seen as a tool of the CIA and American influence. Then the John Birch wing took over the GOP under the guise of MAGA and we’ve flipped.
I think this article is worse for being about the topic. Its a bunch of "But have you considered this other way in which things are more complicated?", and trying to better understand any one of those could have been good, but as is it mostly boils down to "Because theres all these open questions, *Im allowed* to believe this.".
"Second, you could argue that supporters are disproportionately poor people who pay low taxes, and who suffer no personal downside in forcing the rich to donate."
I think this argument is too abstracted from real life. It views suffering in absolute terms rather than relative. A very modest tax increase on a poor person who is struggling to make ends meet causes a lot more suffering than even a substantial tax increase on someone very well off.
In fact, i think that the inverse argument is much stronger. The well off have the luxury to detach. It's a form of negotiating power to not be desperate.
Fabian's distinction may be premature.
If we rely on voluntary donations to stop a plague in another country, and not enough people donate, we still suffer because pathogens don't respect borders. The tax machine is used to protect the commons with firefighters, why not with charity?
If 100 million random Americans donate $1 each, each individual gets $1 worth of Warm Glow Giving. The US gets nothing.
If the US donates $100m on behalf of all Americans, they get a meeting with the president of that country. There's also muttering about USAID providing cover for intelligence operations, for what such speculation is worth. It solves the coordination problem by aligning the selfish and altruistic incentives, and it leverages a better deal.
Some individuals may grumble, and there's room for debate on the most effective allocation. But when the Baptists and Bootleggers agree, what can you do but shrug?
>"But when the Baptists and Bootleggers agree, what can you do but shrug?"
Fight tooth & nail. When antagonistic groups that both work against my interests collaborate, it can only be disastrous for me; same reason "bipartisan" is the biggest possible red flag for legislation.
The "Bundling" argument seems to be the same one that people have for (against) voting. "My vote won't change anything, so why bother?" So when voting isn't required, you end up with pathetically low voting numbers, even for the most engaging, attention-grabbing races. Is that secretly an expressed preference against democratically electing representatives? Voting, after all, confers a cost to all citizens, even those who'd rather not vote (particularly if you have a mailbox that gets stuffed with misleading-at-best political ads). :) Maybe elections should be private affairs that individuals choose to fund on their own accord, but only if it's important to them in the moment ...
In any case, all these arguments show an important psychological factor -- the world doesn't run on pure computational logic alone, human factors are a key consideration, even of how governments function. As a (former) small-l and big-L Libertarian, that's one of the most consistent "bangs head against wall" issues I've had with folks of that bent. That, and not understanding the role of epistemology (which, really, is just another human factor).
Another observation. Foreign aid in particular is not entirely about helping others. It's also selfish, as it "buys" influence in the world which helps the global reputation and stability of one's own country, far beyond any individual's day-to-day sense. I think Scott has made this argument in a couple places before. So, for example, as the current U.S. regime winds down foreign assistance, this is hurting every U.S. citizen--and their children, and grandchildren--whether they realize it yet or not. As now competing nations like China will have the influence and connections and trade partners and access to resources and so on for decades to come. (If only that were the most damaging blow to U.S. influence ... )
The relevance here is that, because it's not of immediate notice to any individual, it's highly unlikely that individuals will be able to prioritize appropriately. Similar things are true about domestic aid, of course, in the long-term. Many a drug-dealing would-be warlord has made a local god out of themselves by being the only one seen to be helping their local community. "The government" gets blamed, but it's really the opposite: "the government" doesn't have the resources or the power to compel the resources, and folks in the community or the next community over who are in a position to do something individually just don't notice what's happening until it's far too late, or when they do notice, they have the dreaded coordination problems.
There's never an easy answer. If there were, governing would be easy, and governments could be designed by computers. Purity-of-ideology is the antithesis of good governance, unless and until everybody agrees on everything. Which, undoubtedly, won't even be true when the AIs replace humans.
I think your 10%-40% is low for the following reasons.
Firstly, there are various merchants who attempt to add a donation when I go to check-out and I always tick the box to cancel the donation. My expectation is that this is common behaviour and nearly the only people who make the donation are those not paying attention.
Secondly, it seems obviously correct for effective altruists to tick the box and instead give the money to an effective charity and I would expect most to do this. Of course effective altruists are a small minority of taxpayers, but the same logic applies to everyone. Everyone would prefer to give money to their favoured cause than to whatever the government is funding.
Thirdly, tax forms are full of boxes and taxpayers (or their accountants) are trying to fill them in to minimise their tax liability. It would be surprising to me if people took a different approach to this particular box. Suppose an accountant ticks the box, but then the client says that he did want to give the aid: he can just write the government a cheque. So ticking the box by default is the safe approach.
I mean, I generally support higher taxes (and no, I don't mean taxes that somehow dodge me and only get even richer people) and also don't really donate that much and sometimes vaguely wave to good or bad reasons why not[1], so this was an interesting one. I didn't have a clear answer as to what exact argument spoke the most to me, but I'd guess it's vaguely in the direction of the free rider problem more than the others.
[1] mostly I just think donating money is actually at odds with amassing as much power as possible (as lazily as possible), while well designed taxes should reduce everyone's power somewhat proportionally, thus letting me maintain my station. If the aforementioned sentence doesn't make it clear, I'm certainly not super motivated by the feeling of being a good person compared to actual concrete lives saved
I am working with Ukrainian charity that supports Ukrainian army. Our job is largely parallel to the ministry of defence, and one of our revenue streams is grants from foreign governments.
This surprised me at first - why does government X give money to charity supporting government Y rather than give directly to government Y?
Well, it turns out that charity can be much more effective than the government, largely due to being able to attract better people. Working for ukrainian government is a poison pill:
- You are not getting paid very much. Charity pays ~80% of market salary, government pays ~40%. Smart people in the government want to raise salaries, but public is EXTREMELY hostile and politicians follow the public sentiment.
- Working for a charity, you are subject to internal audit and a risk of dismissal. Working for a government, you are subject to anti-corruption law and a risk of imprisonment. I am not talking about embezzlement - I am talking what happens if you honestly fuck up and/or tail risk materializes.
- If you work for government for a single day, for the rest of your life you are PEP (politically exposed person) and will be randomly rejected when opening bank accounts, making money transfers etc.
So very few smart people join the MoD, making is chronically understaffed and underskilled, which in turn makes it relatively ineffective. Hence grants going to us instead of them.
Having previously worked in anti-corruption: only VIPs (e.g., policymakers, party officials, electoral candidates, family members thereof) get PEP tagged; random bureaucrats are generally beneath notice.
Maybe of interest the danish churchtax is a membership due (around 0.87% of income on average) collected together with the income tax. One can leave the church (or never enter it) in which case one can opt out of the tax. One does give up the ability to be married/buried in a church. 70% of danes are members.
From a skim of the comment section no one has said this yet (or at least nothing quite close enough to it), which somewhat surprises me and leads me to update that maybe my kneejerk reaction to the very premise of the article is wrong, but I found the argument rephrasing:
"IIUC, the argument is that people who would not donate to charity themselves find it more congenial to vote to tax other people and give their money to charity."
to be incorrect, and the opposite of a steel man. To me the argument is:
"Regardless WHETHER people would donate to charity themselves, they vote in a way that supports institutions that force other people to do the donation."
The difference is that the person making the argument may well be in favour of the charity in question! Heck, I often have this with *quite a few* government-run institutions - I think they're a net good, but I'm actually quite perturbed that by supporting the infrastructure they're embedded in, I'm making people who might disagree with me on that they're a net good also support them, by virtue of being backed by government force.
By corollary, my voting tendency is to minimise the government doing more things, preferring the government do less things if that's on the menu (haven't seen that be a real option for a long time over here, though), _even if_ I think they might be doing a good job of it right now.
I guess I'm weird about that.
(This is not an argument about the rest of the article, I was just sufficiently surprised by what felt like the opposite of a steelman from Scott that I wanted to say something. The fact I'm surprised about this is a good sign, though, Scott is pretty good about this sort of thing generally, and in this case I may well be the mutant.)
I did not finish reading this because I didn't feel it was useful, and I could not see straight for anger.
I invite you to consider the actual alternatives that happen today, as opposed to your imaginary scenarios:
1. A person writes a cheque (or I guess these days clicks on a form to charge their credit card) to a specific charity. They have to find out about the charity, read their blurb, then make an effort to write or click. This money they give is deductible from their income for purposes of income tax, so it doesn't cost them much, especially if they're in a high bracket. Admittedly I'm not American and not familiar with your income tax system, so this may not be true.
2. A person votes for a representative. That representative goes to Congress and votes on a number of bills, in some cases being pressured by the party whip to vote a certain way. One of those votes is for the budget (or these days the latest continuing resolution). It's a budget that has tens of thousands of line items, one of which is to give a certain amount of money to that same charity. This is due to some other representatives (or more likely their staff) inserting the line item, and no one is willing to spend the political capital to take it out again. The whole budget is voted up or down.
How moral is the second scenario?
I believe that depends on how blackmailed your representative is.
This is a classic collective action problem: Each person would rather keep an extra dollar than donate it themselves, yet everyone prefers the outcome where the military receives that dollar from each taxpayer. Similarly, each person would prefer keeping an extra dollar to donating it to starving Africans, but prefer the starving Africans receiving that dollar multiplied by the number of American taxpayers, to keeping it themselves.
>"…everyone prefers the outcome where the military receives that dollar from each taxpayer."
Mostly true.
>"…prefer the starving Africans receiving that dollar multiplied by the number of American taxpayers…"
Mostly false.
This reminded me to finally sign up for the trial pledge. I'm not at 10% yet, though.
Voting for foreign aid makes sense if there's high value in getting foreign aid dollars from folks and institutions (including the government itself) that would otherwise spend their dollars in less valuable ways. The case for foreign aid is strong if most other government spending is bad even compared to what selfish individuals do with their money, and the latter is bad compared to gov spending on foreign aid.
What's wrong with wanting to spend other people's money anyway? The starving kids need food more than the middle class Americans need a second smart TV. There are principled reasons why you might still vote against this, but I'm allowed to vote for it without being some kind of hypocrite or whatever the original accusation was.
>"What's wrong with wanting to spend other people's money anyway?"
It's theirs, not yours.
Are you opposed to all taxation? If you're a principled libertarian, fair enough, but if you like some taxes and not others, I think taxes to fund foreign aid are some of the better ones.
Georgist libertarian.
Land value tax is different because land is different.
ETA: and the dividend in excess of the cost of public good provision belongs to the individual citizens; taxing that (or equivalently, funding non-public goods out of LVT proceeds before distributing the dividend) is still illegitimate.
You mix support for nice things in surveys and for nice things at the polls in the first part. A person may support foreign aid in a survey, knowing nothing about it and not having given it any thought. But if it’s on the ballot, eg as a proposition, then there are months for political ads to change their mind and for them to take this issue seriously.
If you steelman the libertarian critique, Hayekian knowledge problem becomes the key issue (Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society). Libertarians argue that foreign aid is inefficient because of this problem, especially when the aid is managed by the government, as the relevant info for effective aid (local situation and local incentives) is dispersed, remote, frequently tacit, and hard to verify and aggregate centrally.
On the other hand, some supporters of foreign aid think that governments handle this difficult cross-border knowledge problem even better than private voluntary donations can.
This is an interesting subject to me because, in the abstract, I mostly agree with the principle that the government should only be solving collective action problems, perhaps with an epicycle for prohibiting certain highly addictive behaviors that are very damaging to addicts (which are only collective action problems if you REALLY squint, but the prohibition of which seems hard to argue against e.g. crystal meth, unrestricted gambling advertising and facilitation, etc.).
That said, I’m also a giving what we can kind of guy and think shutting down USAID was very bad. So how do I reconcile these things? I don’t find Scott’s valiant efforts to do so here convincing.
Personally, I have made two arguments to myself:
1) Consequentialist Angle: I only believe in the collective action principle on consequentialist grounds in the first place—it’s an excellent heuristic for avoiding government overreach into stuff that it will just make worse compared to free markets and free choices. But if the consequentialist math is sufficiently skewed on a topic we should be willing to cautiously abandon it—same analysis that lets in banning heroin. Some of the USAID stuff pretty clearly maths out this way to me.
2) Virtue Angle: the government plainly does just absolute gobs of stuff that is unjustified by “solving collective action problems”, with much lower benefits. If you are focused on first getting rid of USAID rather than, say, enormous transfer payments to wealthy old people, or a whole host of burdensome and preference destroying business regulation, or subsidizing preferred industries, or really like 90 percent of the budget—then I think that says something bad about you. Makes me think actually you just don’t care when African children die of malaria compared to wealthy old people receiving even more end of life care etc. So unless you are saying “opposed in principle to spending on this in an ideal world, but still better than most of what our taxes do in practice so don’t change it anywhere near first”—you are probably exhibiting vice not virtue as regards this subject.
>"…same analysis that lets in banning heroin…"
Which led to the fentanyl epidemic.
So to be clear your position is that if there were no restrictions on the sale of any opioids there will be fewer opioid addicts and overdose deaths?
I disagree with this prediction, if so.
More addicts, fewer deaths.
The modal OD is a mistake, due to increasing tolerance and uncertain dose size. The standardization & labeling one could expect post-legalization (cf. the marijuana market) would directly address the latter and might dampen the former (users would be less prone to escalating their consumption if commercial quantities were discretized; e.g., going from X grams to 1.05X grams from a bulk supply is subtler than going from 1 to 2 X gram units).
While I agree that the current legal regime vis a vis heroin is sub optimal, I disagree that an unregulated market in heroin (or a legal regime entirely focused on closing information asymmetries as opposed to actually restricting sale and use) would be optimal, which is the minimal claim I need to defend my view that government should be involved in discouraging the product and reducing use.
Accordingly, it’s still a perfectly good example of something that I think the government should be doing that is purely paternalistic (not collective action solving).
While it may not be perfect (nothing ever is), legalization could nevertheless be optimal (i.e., better than any alternative); I suspect it is.
And even if it's suboptimal, that's insufficient reason to reject sober it's still likely an improvement over the current regime.
Even if legalization were optimal, I doubt you would accept an unregulated market.
This is completely wrong, from beginning to end. The implicit assumption that the policies of a democratic government somehow reflect the preferences (under whatever definition) of the electorate can be demonstrated to be totally false by a simple information-theoretic argument. The democratic process doesn't even have the bandwidth to communicate the policy preferences of the electorate to the government, much less make it to enact corresponding policies.
No, you have been conquered and forced at gunpoint to render unto Caesar the same way every conquered people in history have ever been. You pay taxes to avoid going to jail. The amount you pay is some approximation of the Laffer-limit. You, as a voter, have zero influence on how your taxes are being spent and they are mostly spent in ways to keep you paying them. The entire democratic charade is just part of that effort (i.e. to keep you obedient) and it relates to exercising power like porn relates to sex.
More foreign aid = less democracy at home
Max Miller's latest YT video is about food in victorian workhouses. The story of English Poor Laws is very interesting. In the Middle Ages the Catholic church provided lots of aid for the poorest people. Henry VIII confiscated, looted and sold off the monasteries getting himself and his supporters very rich but killing the main aid source for the indigent. The result was a crisis that the Crown tried to solve by intensifying repression of the poor and through a tax that was collected but the money were quickly pocketed.
Eventually the workhouses were established to house and feed the poor while also keeping them contained and using them for work. The problem was that the managing bureaucracy was feeding them very poor quality meals contaminated with rat dropping while themselves were enjoying luxury dinners.
My main argument against any kind of aid directed by public institutions is that the Iron Law of Bureaucracy always kicks in and they turn in personal fiefs hostile to any democratic control or accountability. This is clearly the case with USAID.
An increasingly popular solution is a provision that allows the taxpayer to choose in their tax forms which public institution or NGO gets a part of their tax money.
A kind of counter-libertarian point of view. I know it isn't new or original, but in spaces like this one we get in a habit of not considering POVs of this sort because they don't appeal to our ethos for reasons that may or may not apply to a given debate:
Taxation is not a matter of taking the taxpayer's money.
It isn't a question of whether society has a right to tax for this purpose or that purpose. It's a question of whether society has a right to tax, and if so, how it chooses to use tax revenue. Under this view, society has a right to tax because not all *gross* income enjoys the full moral status of "private property".
Under this view, gross income is total value *captured* by an individual in commerce.
That captured value is the sum of
* individually added value
* the value added collectively by the system (the coordination of all of the workers, capitalists, bureaucrats, legislators, etc., in the system to which one belongs and
* rents
For this, I'll ignore rents. I think most of this group would agree that there's no real moral problem with just taxing rents to zero.
This group is probably inclined toward a view of private property that includes all non-rent incomes, for some good reasons. That view, however, is not written on any golden tablets, and a different formulation is possible that protects *some* income as private property more or less absolutely, and some income as private property for "good reasons", while not protecting all income as private property.
This view holds that not all income is truly sacrosanct private property, and society has a right to recapture some of the income that came from value added by society. It holds that it is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient condition that the government takes less in taxes than the part of the income representing value added by the agency of the society as a whole. IOW, some portion (up to 100%, but likely much lower) of *socially created value* both appears in individually captured income and represents the rightful property of the society as a whole.
Net income - after taxes, then, is 100% of individually created value plus some portion of socially created value. Taxed income would be the remaining fraction of the socially created value.
If we say that only net income (which must include 100% of individually added value) is an individual's property, then taxation is not the taking of the individual's property, because only after-tax income is in fact the individual's property.
Admittedly, the idea of added value is doing a lot of work without being defined under any particular theory of value. I certainly don't want to have to settle which theory of value applies, and figure out some mechanism for interpreting socially added versus individually added value based on that theory.
We can't call all commerce to a stop while that gets worked out. But on an intuitive basis: we could take as a maximum value for what an individual could possibly personally add as what we could imagine a hermit on an island creating by working as smart and hard as it is possible to work. On that intuitive basis, almost any person's after-tax income in almost any conceivable tax regime from the developed world includes 100% of the value they personally added as well as some of the value they didn't personally add.
IOW this view of net-income as property doesn't do violence to the concept of property as value personally added.
If anything, the problem is that there is *too* large a social component of value to set a useful upper limit on what taxation is proper or to define private property relative to individually added value.
If, however, we use other economic considerations to cooperatively decide other limits on taxation, then include *all net income* as part of private property, then it's possible in principle to keep a robust view of private property while leaving space for social re-capture of *some* socially created value.
That re-captured value can be used to maintain the infrastructure that made its creation possible. Additionally, some if it can be used to see to the collective moral obligations of a society (should we decide we have them).
I'm not saying it's the right approach.. but it's a less game theoretical approach and one that relies less on the concept of optional, voluntary "charity" for compulsory social activity, more on the concept of obligatory "moral obligation", which may be a more interesting category for thinking about compulsory social activity. At the same time, provided we don't get too carried away with creating moral obligations, it leaves a lot of room for free market value creation and capture that appeals to the libertarian ethos.
>"…society has a right to recapture some of the income that came from value added by society."
That's just rents; ATCOR.
As a slight tangent, something that drives me up a wall is when someone will stake a claim on a certain hypothesis, not bother testing that hypothesis against reality, and then ignore other people who point out that the numbers are against them. In this case, "poor people voting against the rich" is a plausible hypothesis that will sound right to many people, who will never update even when faced with empirics that, no, rich people actually support this stuff more. "Voting with other people's money" as a concept immediately disappears once you discover that actually the Venn diagram of people who have money and people who support giving it away is nearly a circle. Or at least, goes from 'plausible second order harm' to 'fun story to debate about but shouldn't influence policy one iota'
Do people really think that wealthy countries like the US have foreign aid programs because they care about people? Although people who work in international aid largely do so for altruistic reasons, states themselves largely only care about establishing global soft power. Why do you think "the bad guys" (wherever that is for your country) all have foreign aid programs? Why do you think states invest in foreign aid even when their own citizens suffer?
As the global superpowers fight for political influence through soft diplomacy and land investments, America's withdrawal from the soft-power race puts American dollars in jeopardy. While those on the right continue to whine that "taxation is theft", their future returns will fall by the wayside as "the bad guys" see massive returns on soft-diplomacy investments. Perhaps the America of the future will try to use its overwhelming military power to secure access to natural resources in the DRC à la its recent actions in Venezuela, but Americans' long-term domestic portfolios will still have already suffered.
If you want to talk about what taxes should fund and how governments should determine that, you must have a better understanding of why they fund those things. The world is not so black and white.
"VOTE YES: You feel like a good person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes.
VOTE NO: You feel like a bad person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes.
...My true opinion on this is that I would be satisfied with a law that gives foreign aid by default, but allows any citizen who’s interested to check a box on their tax forms saying something like:
I request to cancel my participation in foreign aid this year and receive an $X tax refund. I understand this will result in Y amount of preventable death and suffering.
…as long as there are similar boxes for everything else the government does that can’t be justified under simple minarchist logic. I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome."
What if I vote no and *don't* feel like a bad person? Throw in a free T-shirt with the tax returns stating "I refused to pay foreign aid and all I got was this great T-shirt" and I'm in!
I don't mind (much) paying for Good Causes via taxation. I *do* mind very much being bludgeoned over the head with "you are a wicked, cruel, heartless, evil person if you don't contribute to this Good Cause!" where (1) your definition of a good cause may not line up with mine (e.g. 'who could object to curing the sick and feeding the hungry?' great, but that also got made the fig leaf for 'let the American ambassador host a nice concert in Dublin for, uh, cultural relationship? yeah, cultural relationship!')
"Suppose there’s a famine that will kill 50,000 people, and the only way to solve it is through a $5 million project - for example, buying a giant cargo ship to transport food. If there are 50,000 altruists with $100 each, this is a coordination problem, where you need to figure out some way to incentivize all of them to do their part."
Fret not, worried altruist, you can write off and ask for a Trócaire box:
https://www.trocaire.org/ways-to-help/lenten-giving/trocaire-box-order-form/
In real world charity, big global events get advertised everywhere by the bodies already established to provide humanitarian aid, from private bodies to NGOs etc. There isn't any lack of ways to donate if you want to donate, so "but how can I make sure my $100 is impactful?" isn't really a problem, as Scott states:
"So there is no coordination problem here, and no need to call in the government’s coordination-problem-solving ability."
I was going to snark about "the problem wouldn’t be solved, but nobody would return their money to them" because why look for money back if you're giving it to a charitable cause, but it's true that there are - how can I put this delicately? - a lot of fucking scams out there. So it's reasonable to wonder if your money is really going to "help me pay my vet bill for my blind three-legged diabetic elderly dog who is my only friend in the entire world since my family all died in a tragic gardening accident" and not "woo-hoo, check out my Cabo trip on TikTok and Insta!", which is why I would say steer clear of Kickstarters and the likes and stick to the kinds of charities like Oxfam, which you may worry are not 'most effective use of my dollarinos' but at least are not going to pay for the CEO's new hair transplant and latest model EV.
It is a problem and I don't think there are simple explanations, but if you want one try "we're living off societal capital of the past where it was transmitted, via religion, that almsgiving was good, Western society had marinated in this to the point that even after junking religion the influences lingered on, but as we're using up the capital, now we're scrabbling around for 'this is the real rational reason for doing this thing' and coming up short".
> There’s no rule saying that government must always support people’s shortest-term and least-willpower-requiring preference
That’s underselling it: most modern republican institutions were explicitly designed to cushion policy from short-term thinking from citizens. That’s the whole point of having a judiciary instead of lynching mobs.
Why don’t we empower the revealed preferences of the masses? Because “revealed preferences” is terrible as a prescriptive tool, and championing them empowers populists and manipulators. Instead, describe me your actual utility function.
I think I have a different, separate theory that could explain part of the difference. My observation is that donating $100 feels substantially different than being taxed extra $100 and government spending it, because people don't (and IMHO shouldn't) interpret it as being taxed *extra* $100, but more like a reallocation of current taxes.
In essence, there seems to be an implied unstated assumption (with some basis in reality!) that the total tax amount is as much as "they" can get away with, and no matter what you do, it geenerally will be as high anyway. A vote "let's tax extra $100 for purpose X" is a decision whether to spend $100 on X, but in practical reality is not a meaningful vote about the total amount of tax paid - if this vote doesn't pass but the total tax amount can be reasonably increased, then there will be a different bill passed tomorrow to tax extra $100 for purpose Y, and vice versa, if this vote passes but the total tax amount already was at that level, then tomorrow there will be a bill passed to cut taxes by $100 by cutting $100 from purpose Y.
So what I'm saying is that if a thought experiment talks about "a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid", it gets interpreted (and IMHO should be interpreted) as "a vote on whether we'll spend $100 on foreign aid instead of Other Stuff, keeping the tax paid pretty much the same", and the answer to that question is and should be determined by comparing the expected subjective value (to the voter) of foreign aid versus the value of Other Stuff, i.e. the average pool of government expenditure.
I think that's a good point. For whatever reason, school boards would prefer, in this order:
(1) Legislators just to allocate them money.
(2) A public vote that says "the government should fund the school" but doesn't specifically create a new tax to pay for it.
(3) A public vote that says "tax everyone XYZ and give it to the schools."
It seems like it's easier to get #1 done than #3.
Good post, but I would have titled that last part "The Ulysses Argument" rather than Multiple Preferences, in reference to Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens, where he has his men bind him to the mast beforehand so he can hear their song but without endangering himself or his ship. I'm a sucker for that allusion being used as a metaphor for pre-committing one's self to do or not do something.
That said, I'm still not sure why you all get to impose your preferences on everyone else because of your own time-inconsistent desires. Alcoholics don't try to outlaw booze entirely. They accept that they gotta take their own precautions.
> Alcoholics don't try to outlaw booze entirely. They accept that they gotta take their own precautions.
They literally did try it, and it didn't work because everyone fought against it. Well okay, I'm pretty sure most prohibitionists weren't alcoholics, but the point still stands. Unless they have a massive amount of leverage, the unpopular wants of a minority are irrelevant to policy-making.
>>The Bundling Argument asks: what if, psychologically, this isn’t true? What if “your $100 plus equal donations from the rest of our coalition of 49,999 other altruists can completely solve this famine” sounds more appealing then “if you donate $100, you can save one person from a famine which will still kill thousands of others”?<<
At least since I was a small child in the 80s, I've seen commercials asking me to donate an amount that will save one child from a famine. Sometimes they even send you a picture of a specific child, which alleviates the problem in the next paragraph about a 49999 death toll and a 50000 death toll feeling the same, because now I have this picture right here showing me the difference between those two things. So I would assume the psychological appeal of tying your particular donation to saving one particular child is much stronger, surely they run those commercials with those scripts for decades because it was found to increase donations.
It seems to me that if I'm one of 5000 people who contributed towards X, I may as well not have been involved at all, I did 0.02% of some task, whoop de doo. As one of 150 million taxpayers, my role is even more attenuated, I could not possibly derive any moral satisfaction from that. Consider the converse situation where I lost half my income, my tax bill goes way down, thus withdrawing my contribution towards that aim, would that make me feel bad? Surely nobody has ever had that thought, I've heard people say they regret with income going down they can't support their usual suite of local charities, but I've never heard anyone say they regret they aren't paying as much income tax to fund humanitarian projects. People do not seem to act as if they value their own participation in and contribution to these foreign aid projects via taxation.
I find the idea that people are losing sleep over the plight of faceless strangers in far flung lands to be very odd anyhow, would it have occurred to any human before the past couple centuries to think that way? Some missionaries to the New World undoubtedly felt sincerely that these native people's souls needed to be saved, but did they lose sleep thinking about the material conditions of those people? If you're intensely bothered by the plight of the global poor to the extent it disrupts your psychological health, that seems like a problem. It's socially acceptable to have such a level of concern, but it's a little weird, kind of like hearing about how those woke middle aged white ladies in New York were spending their weekly therapy sessions worrying about racial justice and guilt over white privilege. As silly as that seems from outside of that culture, I could easily imagine a culture finding it pathological to suffer emotional distress from the existence of famines in Africa, for all I know perhaps there are cultures right now today where a therapist would say so.
One purpose for foreign aid I haven't heard mentioned here yet is agricultural subsidies and price stabilization. When USAID budgets were cut the headlines were full of articles about farmers losing money because USAID is a major buyer. Canada famously straight up destroys extra milk production to avoid driving down prices; at least the US can get value out of our extra agricultural production by shipping it overseas.
The transaction costs argument is important, but I think that you've taken too narrow a view of it. Coordination is not the main issue for a rational actor: ideally you'd want every participant to be knowledgeable about all potential charitable causes, to be able to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each, and then to coordinate so that the aid donated has maximal effect. That's not something that can feasibly be coordinated between all the citizens of the US. Hence, there's a role for Government as a single coordinating agency to gather information, tax citizens and donate appropriately.
Consider what would happen if we funded healthcare by asking citizens to come together and decide which medical specialities would be hired in the town hospital, what services it would offer and how those would be paid for.
People care a lot about fairness. I would guess that people think foreign aid is a good use of money but don't want to be the only one making sacrifices to make it happen.
Even if the best way to economically model donations is as "purchasing a psychological good", I'd be surprised if people who donate experience it that way. I'd guess a more common view would be something like "I'm fulfilling a duty" or "I'm making a sacrifice", and it's annoying when other people don't do their part.
(This ignores the fact that foreign aid has more uses for governments than straightforward charity, as other commentators have pointed out).
Lately I’ve been seeing ads from four completely different charities - St. Jude’s Hospital, the Wounded Warrior Project, Shriners Children’s Hospitals and the ASPCA - all asking for pledges of $19 a month. Why all the same, odd amounts?
The same reason everything is X.99, I'd assume. A/B testing presumably resulted in the discovery that that is the optimal amount to ask for in order to maximize donations.
Why are we spending money we don't have?
Your post explains why people vote for coerced aid, but it never states the limiting principle that distinguishes legitimate coercion from mere coalition preference. Under the rule of law, legitimacy requires hard, general constraints that bind winners and losers alike. Without a principled, administrable line, “we can vote to tax for X” becomes, in practice, “the stronger imposes its values,” and the same logic can be reused to justify any mandated moral project.
The solution is to limit power in general, not to assume that a government shaped by shifting coalitions and organized interests will reliably coalesce around only the moral schemes you approve of.
Making it a nudge doesn’t address the underlying issue. At best, it’s a regressive tax on inattention and compliance friction. At worst, if opting out becomes salient and widely used, you either accept the result (aid collapses) or you revert to the hard edge of coercion—revealing that the “nudge” was never a legitimacy answer, just an implementation tactic.
You don't mention social desirability bias but I think it's a good theory that resolves the problems with the signaling solution. You don't need epicycles of signaling, self signaling etc.
People will behave as if they hold the “good” beliefs, until they need to pay for their preferences.
This explains the consistency between polling and voting for example.
One prediction this theory implies is that the checkbox you describe in the end will be checked most of the time, much more than 40%. I'd be willing to bet on this.
Something related to this arises when you look at the theory of kin selection from evolutionary biology. The standard theory says you should help your kin when the fitness benefit to them is r times the fitness cost to you, with r being the coefficient of relatedness measuring shared genes. But it turns out that if you look at a gene for conditional nepotism (I will help needy kin if others can be induced to contribute as well), this gene can spread even when the cost-benefit ratio is higher than in the standard case. Altruism toward kin is a public good, and you can get more of it with mutual enforcement. You are effectively more closely related to your kin when several of you act together rather than separately. (For more of the theory, search for "socially enforced nepotism" and "extraordinary siblings".) This doesn't apply directly to large scale charity, but the general principle – it may be rational to treat altruism as a public good, and support collective altruism even where you wouldn't supply much charity on your own – may still apply.
This whole analysis seems to ignore the fact of lots of people who pay taxes but don't show up to vote.
Exactly what fraction of adult Americans that is becomes in practice surprisingly complex to calculate and then express -- remembering that paying taxes isn't only about federal ones; nor are opportunities to vote; some types of taxes are essentially universal while others vary widely in how many eligible voters pay them; some voters reliably show up for some levels of election but not for others; etc.
However you care to calculate it, as a fraction of US adults it's not trivial. Hence it seems like a relevant consideration or variable in at least some of the arguments summarized above.
> First, you could argue that supporters are using the government as a force multiplier.
The thing is, the force multiplier here is absolutely huge.
If there is a vote, and your vote isn't the tiebreaker, then it doesn't matter which way you vote.
If your vote is the tiebreaker, then in a population of 100 million, a vote to send $1 per person to charity costs you only $1, but gains the charity $100 million.
Voting for government mandated tax-charity is donation matching turned up to a million.
I don't think dominant assurance contracts solve this.
If the contract insists on 100% of the population signing it, then if anyone else refuses to sign, it doesn't matter what you do. If everyone else signs it, then you have a choice of risking getting invaded, or paying 5% of your money.
But a 90% contract is a very different beast. It's unlikely that precisely 90% of people sign it. It's unlikely that your decision controls whether or not the contract activates. Much much more likely is that 93% of people sign the contract, and so all this contract does is give away your money.
The transaction costs part is really missing a link to the Lizardman's Constant article.
I like the idea of the tax opt-out. After having worked for a while doing analytics for a software company, I can guarantee that just swapping a feature from opt-in to opt out has a massive effect in usage - not just of the "setting" being on or not, but actual usage. Meaning that once you make it the default, the user says "ah yes I actually like this", but large fractions never even consider it if it's opt-in. I'm not sure what "revealed preference" economists say about this behaviour... but yeah, their picture of reality certainly doesn't match my empirical experience.
"But this is rarely how real charity works. More likely, your $100 can save one life, and your marginal utility over total lives saved is pretty constant."
I don't think this is exactly true at large enough scales? It's reasonably true for individual small-scale donors because one normal person's donation won't generally make the difference between a new charity program existing or not; it's *most* true if, like, you give your money to GiveWell for regranting and GiveWell figures out where to send it based on its current funding bar. This is engaging with utility/money as somewhat of an abstraction.
But on the ground, charity doesn't actually mostly come in $100-sized pieces? USAID let entire programs exist that wouldn't have otherwise, and that an individual donor can't cause to slightly-exist by paying for a small chunk of the expense. Either a program can operate or it can't. (Yes, it can also operate better or worse, or be bigger or smaller. But you usually need a pretty significant investment for it to exist at all.)
So maybe a smaller version of the bundling argument is just true? You don't need ALL Americans to agree to fund ALL of USAID to get the benefit, but you need like, 100 Americans per USAID program, and having USAID handle this centrally greatly simplifies the logistics of each program finding 100 Americans to fund it.
I've thought in a similar way around environmental policies for a while.
I basically can't be arsed to change my lifestyle to fight climate change. I really care - at least I think I do - but in the moment I would really prefer to drive to work than cycle.
But what I can be arsed to do is vote for a political party that I know will basically coerce me (and, crucially, everyone else) into doing the right thing through e.g. steep carbon taxes.
Government is great for solving intra-personal conflicts like this in the direction of long-term benefit over short-term comfort and graitification.
Is it not enough to say "it's the right thing to do?" I guess EA needs to break down their entire thought processes to a level of rigour commensurate with a proof in propositional logic; however, I think taking it, and anything else, to an extreme discounts an appreciation of humanity that is implied to be the foundation of the practice.
This analysis is bottom-up, but a top-down view should be sufficient and would match most people's intuitions. While practically, it might increase one's tax burden, for most people, the impact of foreign aid on their taxes is perceived as negligible. Instead, you can perceive foreign aid contributions as a reallocation of the federal budget, rather than a separate fund pool we need to contribute to. At that point, it makes sense to contribute to foreign aid over a lot of "wasted federal programs"—whatever the taxpayer perceives that to be.
This debate is simply a proxy for libertarian economics, with the original commenter seeming convinced of absolving themselves of any moral responsibility at all. I think that's a much more principal battle that I can't address because it feels like it underlies the basics of being human.
There is a LessWrong post Moral Public Goods (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqKwra9rRYYMvySHc/moral-public-goods) which I think has the explanation. For altruistic things like charity, my preferences is that the more donated money the better. So maybe I think every dollar donated give me enough warm fuzzy feelings as spending one cent on booze and hookers for myself. In that case I would not want to spend any money on my own, but it *is* worth my while to force all 300 million americans to donate $100, even if I *also* get taxed $100. If other Americans have the same preferences, then everyone would make the same decision, and it this "tax for charity" really maximizes everbody's utility, *even though* everyone would be even better of if they could keep their own $100 for themselves. I guess the key point is that every dollar for charity gives warm fuzzy feelings for *everyone*, but every dollar spend on booze and hookers only benefits the single individual who spent it.
>every dollar for charity gives warm fuzzy feelings for *everyone*
I can confirm that it doesn't.
Why not? I suggest that you cultivate this taste. I promise it makes life much more pleasant (and under the xkcd sandwich principel, I truly believe anyone can find joy in it if they try).
Ah yes, the "take it till you like it" argument. Why didn't I think of that.
My understanding is that in Germany, a ~10% tithe is taken out at the same time as your taxes and given to your church by default. You can get out of it by leaving the church but this requires some headache and comes at a social cost. Pretty similar to your foreign aide scheme, but with bigger hurdles than a checkbox. Personally, I think if you could get out of a meaningful fraction of your taxes just by selecting a number of checkboxes, then doing so would be wildly popular and even more so among the wealthy. E.g. Trump’s not paying taxes “makes me smart” quote.
I'm like 1/3 of the way through. But about the free rider and voluntary funding of ice. I wanted to say, I live in rural america, with a volunteer fire department. And as I write this I don't know the numbers, but my impression is it's mostly funded locally, through donations*(I send a check for $200 every year) and fund raising. (There's a fireman's fair every year, where it's your civic duty to go down, buy some food and drink, and spend some other money on games. It's a great time and I try and never miss it! There's nothing wrong with civic duty being fun.)
About donating (assurance contracting) for defense spending. Well first this sounds like a terrible idea. But second, if you set the number at ~75% every year, you'd get to the point where getting the last ~1-10% would be a big deal.
So you could make some box, where people get to 'assign' some of their tax dollars to some areas of government, this also sounds like a terrible idea.
About much of the rest, as far as gov. goes it seems best if we all just get a yes or no vote, and you've got to accept all the details. Oh and the more that gets done locally the better.
Hold it, you're giving me a set of boxes to check, and for every box I check I get ~x dollars back. My predictions is that most americans will check most of the boxes. (I think it would be a bad experiment to run.)
Oh, and finally I don't think most voters support foreign aid. (And I enjoyed the post so thank you.)
*I know several fireman so I'll ask them.
What you are cynically calling "The Virtue Signalling Argument" is a lot stronger in actuality. Altruistic motivations for voting are not simply more compelling, they are in fact the only rational basis for most political actions. Only a pure egoist could rationally prefer the infinitesimal benefits of selfish voting to the considerable benefits of unselfish voting. Despite the fact that most, if not the majority of people vote out of egoistic self-interest. I wrote about this here: https://dylanrichardson.substack.com/p/why-not-vote-on-principle
But it goes further still. As @rychappell argues, Deontologists Shouldn't Vote: https://open.substack.com/pub/rychappell/p/deontologists-shouldnt-vote?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Concern about the coerciveness of unaccountable, anti-democratic governance is non-consequentialist. And although certain people may hold deontic values that constrain their personal actions, they should still prefer that the best outcomes are realized.
In sum:
1. Altruistic motivations are the only rational basis for (most) political action.
2. Even if USAID represents "forced charity", it promotes the greatest good.
3. Only those seeking to promote the greatest good should vote, otherwise they should remain silent.
4. Therefore: It is either irrational or immoral to vote against USAID.
Scott, you should tell us what will go wrong with [fiscal anarchy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/22/ot87-ulpian-thread/#comment-558645).
I, personally, never feel bad about voting against more taxes
I think there's a strong argument similar to what you talk about in your "insomnia argumnet" section. But I don't get why you phrase it as some sort of special "psychological good" — the math work out fine if you just model people as caring about other people's welfare a moderate amount.
Everyone in a group of people can reasonably have the preference “everyone donates to charity > no one donates to charity > only I donate to charity”, if each individual values “money to charity” more than they value money held by other people in the group. If so, agreeing to put taxes towards charity could be preferred by everyone. This is basically the same story as for normal public goods, where we normally accept that government has an important role to play (even if the public good funding isn't preferred by literally everyone). See Paul Christiano's "moral public goods" for a longer explanation & discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqKwra9rRYYMvySHc/moral-public-goods (I'm told that Milton Friedman wrote about this argument in the 1960s, in Capitalism and Freedom.)
It's possible that dominant assurance contracts could solve the funding of public goods without taxation. But based on Alex Mennen's comment above, it seems like it very well might not.
Your other response to this argument is that you're not sure "how to avoid having it justify almost anything" — but I don't see why it would be at risk of justifying almost anything. Most saliently, if democracy works ok, it can only justify paying for things where >50% of people do in fact thinks it's worthwhile for the country to pay for them. (Even though this will increase their own taxes slightly.)
Uhh what about the possibility that just charity is good and people do less of it than would be morally ideal? Why do we need this kind of complicated justification -- it seems to presume some kind of background moral assumption that you need a better argument than just: seems utility positive.
This post misses or glosses over what are in my mind the two best arguments in favor of foreign aid. For context, I am not an effective altruist nor are my ethics strictly utilitarian, though i think these arguments should appeal to those groups.
1) The process for determining tax rates is somewhat independent of the process of determining what taxes are spent on. Tax rates depend partly on how much the public is willing to pay on taxes before they complain loudly, as well as what the economy can bear. Many things that the government spends tax money on have little value or even net negative utility. If we stop spending on foreign aid, the likely result is not that we will get all that money back in lower taxes, but that the most of that money will be spent on worse options while we pay about the same taxes.
2) Foreign aid at the government level has additional benefits above foreign aid at the individual charitable contribution level. If done well, it improves the reputation of the government providing the aid. This then provides benefit to the citizens of the country giving the aid. They are better off than if they had all given to charity directly.
This is one of the silliest posts I have read for a long while for at least two reasons:
* The argument applies to *any* government spending not just to foreign aid and that includes spending on police and courts to enforce contracts and property rights too (the only functions of governments for "propertarians").
* The topic of tax-based funding of public services and public insurance of any type has been debated for ages and its only solution is political. This post reads like a sophomore essay on a topic that has a long and complex intellectual history.
There is another argument: paying taxes in a country is *entirely voluntary* as long as it is possible to leave that country. You do not like what other voters like to fund with your taxes? TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and shop for citizenship in another country with a taxation policy you like better. Same as when you do not like the price/value proposition of Wal*Mart, shop somewhere else; nobody forces you to shop at Wal*Mart and nobody forces you to live in the USA or the EU etc.
Dozens of thousands of people every year do TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and move to another country for tax reasons! What if you cannot afford the cost of moving to another country? Losers will be losers: it is the same as if you cannot afford to cost of renting in NYC even if that is where you would like to live.
Put another way the government of a country is like a housing association and if you do not like membership in that housing association buy membership in another or be a loser.
«for at least two reasons»
Another reason is that the author pretends not knowing that government foreign aid specifically is not about charity but about buying influence abroad and rewarding with contracts domestic "sponsors" and that applies not only to the foreign aid by the Department of War but also by other departments like the Department of Agriculture.
It is the perspective of the US government that every US citizen owes them taxes no matter where they live or what other citizenship they hold. (They may waive this if you pay sufficient taxes elsewhere and file your US tax return appropriately.) You can renounce your US citizenship, but this has various consequences.
«the US government that every US citizen owes them taxes no matter where they live or what other citizenship they hold. [...] You can renounce your US citizenship, but this has various consequences.»
I am well aware of that and does not change change anything as it is part of the terms & conditions for membership: USA citizenship is a voluntary membership contract entered into by the parents on behalf of their minor children at birth and reaffirmed by them when they become of age by TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and not applying for renounciation. Many private contracts also involve costs both if one does not use them and exit fees for termination.
The many people who purchase what for them is a more cost-effective country membership renounce their USA citizenship and pay both the exit fees from the USA and the entry fees for their new membership advisedly. Again same as for housing association membership.
Alternative explanation:
Something I've heard in other contexts but probably applies here as well. About 10% of a group will actively try to improve the situation above their own needs. 10% will actively degrade the situation out of selfish interest. The remaining 80% pretty much just look around and mimic the morality they see in the world.
In this situation the 80% are the vast majority of people who are roughly fine with whatever taxes are used for now, even if they don't realistically have any understanding of it. They accept current spending levels because they are the status quo.
Anecdatally, I've seen a couple of college groups with privately optional but yes-by-default charity dues. Few opt out. I'm not sure which of these hypotheses that supports, but it's reminiscent of your final suggestion.
Nice list of arguments. The signalling argument related to voting that you start out with, is probably particularly important.
You do however assume that the motive for providing help is simply to help people who suffer. That is certainly a motive (a signalling motive if you are cynical, an internalized-reputational-concerns motive if you are less cynical).
But there are other arguments for helping people in far-off lands, including their governments, that you do not discuss. Where providing aid through your state rather than innumerable fragmented charity-NGOs make sense. I’ll limit myself to only one, just to illustrate the point: Negative externalities.
That is: If a low-income country does not have enough money to prioritize things such as eliminate spread of infectious diseases or prevent terrorists from having a safe haven, that will be a problem also for you. And since you get a benefit from combating stuff in foreign countries that have such negative externalities, you have a motive for providing help. This is not charity, it is enlightened self-interest. And thanks to the tragedy-of-the-commons situation that arises if you try to provide such help on a voluntary basis, it makes sense to channel such help through taxation & help from your state to their state.
An added concern related to this: Governments in low income countries are burdened with a coordination problem with regard to hundreds of charities, each with their own agenda and evaluation system, that descend on these poor governments to offer help. That’s why we have SWAPs (sector-wide approaches) to coordinate help. Such coordination is always difficult, but it is more difficult when you have to deal with hundreds of charities rather than a more limited number of states, each with a bigger development cooperation budget.
There's an argument missing from the post that I also have not seen in the comments, which surprises me. It's just a regular free rider problem.
The major things that foreign aid does - alleviating poverty, treating disease, building infrastructure, etc. - make the world a better and more stable place. Citizens of wealthy countries, whose taxes contribute to foreign aid, benefit from the results. A world where large swaths of people are in bad situations is a more dangerous world. People without resources or prospects will take risks, commit crimes, and otherwise behave antisocially. Diseases will spread more easily. A more stable world is safer and more productive. Everyone has a stake in that.
(One of the major problems with modern politics is that a substantial fraction of voters have retreated to the unenlightened view that they would rather live in a less stable world from which they *might* be able to extract personal leverage and short-term success.)
There's also a compiling problem. I might support taxation for X1..Xn, but at Xn+1 it just gets too much, even though all X1..Xn+1 are noble causes I would support individually.
"The Bundling Argument asks: what if, psychologically, this isn’t true? What if “your $100 plus equal donations from the rest of our coalition of 49,999 other altruists can completely solve this famine” sounds more appealing then “if you donate $100, you can save one person from a famine which will still kill thousands of others”?"
I strongly identify with this. That's the main reason I don't worry about things like not using plastic straws, or buying recycled paper. I don't want to contribute one millionth of a solution to a problem, I want the problem solved. I'm cynical enough to believe that most of the time, someone asking me to contribute one millionth of a solution is just and excuse to avoid solving the problem. After all, there are people out there who profit from not solving large scale problems--by shifting the responsibility to individuals, they can avoid getting the problem solved and continue to profit.
Examples abound. I could donate enough money to provide one child with enough school supplies for a year, but this would do nothing to improve the educational system. I could donate enough money to feed a family for a year and that would do nothing to alleviate poverty. I could donate enough money to fix a mile of road and that would do nothing to improve congestion. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. A million people could each donate one millionth of the cost of a solution, and the problem still wouldn't be solved. Not so much a coordination problem as a skilled solution problem. A million people working together won't generate a creative new solutions to a problem, it will just scale up the wrong one.
*Everything* the state or parts of it does is doing something using other people's money. Foreign aid is no different. We have decided that we use democracy to decide how much to tax and how to spend it. Aid is *no* different in principle. You think foreign aid is too high? Vote for someone who wants to lower it!
Of course, foreign aid has a very strong tendency to be inefficient, pointless, or even destructive, so there are plenty of pragmatic and practical reasons why it might be a bad idea, but now we're way past simplistic (and honestly, silly) arguments like "other people's money".
Almost everyone would check the refund box because TurboTax/HR Block/their accountant would do it for them because the tax prep industry's only incentive is to maximize refund amount and the majority of people use a tax prep service/software and don't actually fill out the forms. At *most* maybe a third of taxpayers actually fill out their own 1040 and related forms via freefillableforms or on paper - and a lot of them would still manually check the "bigger refund" box because they are the kind of people who like maximizing their tax return. Also, they could take that money, then donate it to a charity of their choice instead of the bureaucracy, and even possibly get a deduction out of it for next year!
I think it's simple. Most people care some amount about other people, but we're selfish and we care about ourselves more. If I donate money, it helps other people, but I have to bear the full cost. If I vote for the government to tax us and donate that, then it helps other people massively more than it costs me. And it taxes other people, but that hurts them way less than the foreign aid helps. And it would be to most people's preferences, because they would also receive the full benefit of other people being helped a ton while only bearing a small personal cost.
Forced charity is not charity. And foreign aid is not listed as something given to the Federal Government by the Constitution. The rest doesn't matter one whit.
1. Foreign aid isn't charity at all; see my more recent comment on this point a little below
2. The constitutional authorities for foreign aid are the Spending Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.1), the Foreign Commerce Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.3), and the Necessary and Proper Clause (art. I, s.8, cl.18).
1. Then why is everyone talking about it as if that's one of the big reasons to do it?
2. Citing those in this context is the equivalent of the psychic paper from Dr. Who. Using those to allow this is isomorphic to saying "there are no limits on the federal government except what's explicitly prohibited elsewhere", which entirely stands the whole Constitution on its head. I refuse to accept that as anything other than a naked power grab.
"Other people will be taxed, but you will also be taxed" is a straightforward Tragedy of the Commons setup. It will produce too much foreign aid, just as surely as common field grazing (without the legal restrictions that actual medieval villagers had in place) will produce too many sheep.
What is “too much foreign aid”? The individual words make sense, but this combination of them is new to me.
Surely that's a rhetorical statement and cannot be meant to be literally true. I mean, suppose we gave other countries so much of our annual income that most Americans were literally dying of starvation or malnutrition; I think it's easily understandable that that could be called "too much foreign aid," and that therefore the words do have an imaginable meaning. I don't suppose you mean that there is literally no upper limit to the amount of foreign aid that should be given.
And if you do grant that there can be an excessive amount, then, in the words of a very old joke, "I just want to haggle over the price."
The criterion I have in mind, though, is one that I think might make sense to an economist. How much foreign aid would person 1 choose to give, if they knew that they had to pay that amount out of their own income? How much would person 2 choose to give, if they knew they had go pay that amount out of their own income? Iterate through all such persons, and sum the amounts. That is the right amount of foreign aid; that is, it's the amount each person thinks is right to give when the costs fall on them. Any more than that is "too much." The standard is purely subjective, in each person's utility function.
You now admit a meaningful “right amount” can exist, but in your grandparent post you claim that /any/ taxation scheme will inevitably result in “too much foreign aid”, without mentioning amounts or elaborating or qualifying further.
I suggest that rhetorical statements not meant to be taken literally are a completely valid response to rhetorical statements not meant to be taken literally.
When I said, "It will produce too much foreign aid," that was not an assertion of complete inevitability; it was a statement that excess is a natural and probable outcome of the described institutional situation, just as an excessive number of sheep is a natural and probable outcome of a commons with unrestricted use. We might imagine a system of tax funded foreign aid that produced the "right amount," just as we might imagine a common field with just the right number of sheep grazing on it; I just think both are unlikely, because the institutional arrangements invite people to make poor decisions.
My criterion for "the right amount" is the amount that would be given if each potential donor freely chose to give some amount, and the amounts were summed. That is, it's the amount that would be given if foreign aid were not tax supported. I'm willing to entertain a proposal to make foreign aid decisions based on taxation that can be held to such an amount; do you have one in mind?
I'm reminded, in this discussion, of a conversation I had much earlier in this century, where a friend was talking about guaranteed medical care, and I said, "I don't consider my life infinitely valuable." He was shocked and horrified. But I though what I said was just obvious: I'm not prepared to pay an unlimited sum for medical treatment of potentially terminal illnesses, I'm not prepared to pay the premiums for actuarially fair insurance that would pay such sums, and I'm not prepared to pay or vote for the taxes that would support such a scheme through subsidies. At some point saving my life will costs too much. In particular, if the cost would leave no financial resources to help support my wife if she outlives me, I'm not willing to save my life at that cost (because I can't count on restoring the expended funds in my remaining life expectancy). Your statement sounded parallel to a claim that human life is infinitely valuable; I wanted to rule that interpretation out. But I went on to say "I just want to haggle over the price," that is, to invite discussion of what is "the right amount." I've put forth my statement of what is "the right amount" (twice now): It's the level people will approve when they are being generous with their own money. What's your concept of "the right amount," rhetoric aside?
What I value in any such system is the closing of the gap between what people say they would approve and what they actually approve. Without any mechanism to hold people to their boasts and signalling, the incentives are misaligned and result becomes very Soviet: huge numbers on paper, bare scraps in reality. A taxation system is one approach: we vote for stuff to happen, and the outcome is then enforced. Other arrangements are possible, but unlikely to work as well in practice.
The entire discussion proceeds from a faulty premise by agreeing to entertain an analogy between USAID, or other governmental foreign development aid, and individual charity.
Setting aside questions of execution (a big caveat, but the post starts from first principles so I will too), the purpose of foreign aid is to serve the national (security, economic, diplomatic, etc.) interests of the donor country--in this case, the United States. The decision to send foreign aid is not an instrument of charity, like the United Way; it is an instrument of state, like the decisions to open an embassy, enter a trade or defense treaty, or sell or give military equipment.
Discussions about bundling individual contributions from altruists etc. are totally irrelevant because the purpose of foreign aid is to exercise state power. It is a major form of "soft power." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
The benefits to the US of foreign aid can include, as a non-exhaustive list of examples: engendering friendly feelings toward the US amongst the population (at large, and/or a subgroup) and/or the government; enhancing the reputation of the US in other potential recipient countries and making them more likely to align with the US than with our rivals/enemies; helping stabilize a friendly but rickety government; creating in the recipient country a more favorable environment for future US economic (e.g., building infrastructure that will help build markets for US products) and/or defense relationships; preventing or mitigating problems (e.g., flooding, famine, etc.) in the recipient country that could spill over and destabilize neighboring countries or trade routes; etc.
For example, consider one of the most successful US foreign aid programs of all time, the Marshall Plan. Per the Wikipedia page, "The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity and prevent the spread of communism. The Marshall Plan proposed the reduction of interstate barriers and the economic integration of the European continent while also encouraging an increase in productivity as well as the adoption of modern business procedures." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Analogizing foreign aid to individual charitable donations fails to capture the most important aspects of foreign aid and will not lead to useful insights.
I think it's much simpler than this: it's a special pleading ("isolated demand for rigor" in your language). Whether they like it or not, Americans are giving the Milei govt 20B$ to save it from its own mismanagement. Since "no more foreign aid", let alone "no more non-minarchist expenditure" are not on the table, opening that line of discussion is misleading and unproductive.
I'd even go as far as to say it's potentially dishonest: it seems to imply the Trump admin is somehow acting in a libertarian framework, or at least moving closer to it wrt foreign expenditure, when it's patently not the case. An relatively uninformed bystander would logically infer that the options are "more taxpayer-funded charity" vs "less taxpayer funded charity", rather than "should taxpayers' money be directed toward preventing children from being born with HIV, or to ensure a foreign polician does not pay electoral cost for bad macroeconomic policies".
To take an extreme case: suppose that someone was under trial for idk, tax fraud, but in every interview and on their internet all his supporters kept screaming that "having strong opinions against Trump is not a crime" and "he had the IA right to say what he said". Sure, they are not quite explicitely lying about the charges, but they are very clearly and consciously misleading the public on the facts of the matter in a way that's morally if not legally tantamount to lying. How is this different?
> Since "no more foreign aid", let alone "no more non-minarchist expenditure" are not on the table, opening that line of discussion is misleading and unproductive.
This seems like a general purpose argument against anything.
If you've already done one bad thing then being perfect is off the table so it doesn't matter if you do a bunch of other bad things. There's no longer any point arguing about any particular bad thing any more.
Have you read my comment? Can you argue without constructing strawmen?
It's not a matter of having done "one bad thing" (who said it was bad? Why should we just assume your conclusion?). Any argument that applies generally against _any_ instance of X cannot be used to justify a shift from x1 to x2, and to do so is most likely dishonest (as it implicitely denies x2 happened).
If you want to make a general argument against meat-eating, do so. The argument is not invalid just because you eat meat yourself. But no argument against meat-eating will ever cogently justify the school cafeteria switching from pork to mutton (or vice versa). If you nonsensically insist in making that argument while forcing me to eat mutton instead of pork, it's probably bc you have ulterior motives against pork (eg religion), but then you should just state that and make your case for what you actually believe.
Even libertarians need to accept that coercion is permissible when it is necessary to secure compliance with especially weighty obligations to help others. If a child is drowning in front of you and you could easily save them but choose not to, and I cannot save them myself but can credibly threaten to shoot you with a taser unless you reach out and save them, I am permitted, if not required, to make that threat. Similarly, when people could save whole innocent lives at a relatively minor cost, but for whatever reason aren’t doing so, a government can permissibly tax those people to save the lives. In light of my previous example, we can see that doing so can be justifiable even granting that taxation is morally on a par with forced labour, as libertarians believe.
> Even libertarians need to accept that coercion is permissible when it is necessary to secure compliance with especially weighty obligations to help others
No, I don't think libertarians need to accept that at all.
A libertarian would deny the existence of "obligations to help others", or alternatively say that the term "obligation" is overloaded and not all obligations are things that it is permissible to use violence to obtain.
Also I think it's an unreasonable rhetorical trick to first establish a ridiculously unlikely situation (drowning child plus person who doesn't feel like helping plus person who can't help but has a taser) and immediately switch it out for an entirely everyday situation (therefore I can take your money and send it to Africa).
Concerning the meta point of "ridiculously unlikely situation -> entirely everyday situation", see Scott's own post 'Extremism In Thought Experiments Is No Vice' (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/26/high-energy-ethics/).
Ok, I guess you think Robert Nozick is not a libertarian then. Even though he’s the central guiding figure. Nice background reading you’ve done!
> I predict that only 10% - 40% of voters - the same number who say they disapprove of foreign aid in polls - would check this he box, and I’d be satisfied with this outcome.
I believe presidental campaigns cost money, are a necessary part of democracy, and that corporate sponsorship of campaigns is problematic. I never check the $3 box for the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.
How many people check this box? Does that correlate with the number of people who believe public funding of elections would be better than corporate funding?
This isn't a perfect analogy! But it's one real data point.
I think the article misses the mark here by assessing this entirely as charitable giving. It is not that and was never intended to be.
The end for the US government, is projection of US soft power. Some of the means to achieve that end can be classed as charitable acts, but they are only means towards that end.
This (Ends = Soft Power, Means = Sometimes a meaningful charitable act) has actual important effects in assessing USAIDs value.
It is also this additional consideration that make it justifiable as a tax also, because assessed not as a charit, but as a contribution to community/soft power, makes clear that it is indeed a public and non-excludable good that is being purchased of the type taxes are economically justified for. You can't purchase soft power to the US with individual donations without a free rider problem.
This also changes the analysis for both the government and the voter.
For the US govt, "And if we lose this soft power, what other increased costs can we expect to bear?" is a crucial question. Perhaps they answer is "ultimately you're going to need 3 extra infantry divisions of hard power" as former allies now align with other powers that are a threat to the US, making USAID cost neutral on this face alone. Maybe it is "we will lose significant bargaining power in trade and access deals" and preventing that may make USAID cost neutral on its own. The benefits of the Marshall Plan were not that europeans got charitable giving to rebuild their nations, it WAS that western europe remained US aligned democratically rather than potentially democratically becoming USSR aligned in post-war elections. That potential cost would have lost the US far more money in military spending than the Marshall Plan cost them even if it didn't end in an irradiated US/Asian/European land mass.
So... in the first instance... you're not assessing the cost/benefits of USAID to the United States based on what they actually are. This also makes clear why there are donations to "Moldavan Wine Industries" alongside "PEPFAR". If $10m to Moldavan wine makers buys you more soft power than $10m to PEPFAR, you'd expect to see those donations in the mix... regardless if it appears "less charitably worthy".
This analysis also, therefore undersells the benefits to "The American Voter" of USAID as well. Because the benefits to them are both charitable, communitarian and IR realist.... not just a straight "USAID vs EA" cost benefit analysis on charity.
The voter is paying for both the means (charity) and the (ends) and also getting a bonus benefit (communitarian identity).... and comparing this to an EA donation undersells the benefits.
They get the charity donation to the unfortunate, sure. They also get to reap the benefits of the soft power (lower costs in hard power, beneficial trade relations that gain them jobs etc). They also get to reap a further benefit in "My community, America, being the good guys" and/or greater internal American group cohesion as a result of this community building.
I think USAID very obviously loses the straight "Charity vs Charity" comparison with EA (from a voters perspective) ... but very obviously wins the "Charity+Soft Power+Communitarian Identity vs Charity" comparison with EA. It very heavily changes the calculus here, even for the voter.
Similarly, it loses the Charity comparison even from the governments own view... because from the governments view it is not a charity. However, I also clearly think it wins the "Soft Power vs alternative costs of Harder Power/Other costs" comparison as well, which is the appropriate one from this perspective.
It's much simpler than you're making it out to be. This is exactly the expected behavior if everyone was a mix of selfish and altruism with both factors making a roughly equal contribution to their preferences. For each individual, if someone else gives money to charity they gain according to their altruistic values and do not lose according to their selfish values. It is easy for it to end up that giving money isn't worth it for their selfish cost, but if everyone else gives money and they are forced to give money too then the total altruistic value is well worth the selfish loss.
Here's a mathematical model: Say each person has hedonic value measuring how much happiness and comfort and personal life satisfaction this person has. Altruism is when a person's utility function, which is what a person values all-things-considered and is the measure the person uses to decide trade-offs, is different from their hedonic value. Since I'm supposing people are a mixture of selfish and altruistic, let's say you, a typical individual in this society, have a utility function which is the sum of your own hedonic value and the average of the hedonic values of everyone in the society. Say the society has a million people. Then for any one other person, you value that person's hedonic good one millionth less than your own.
Suppose that half the society is rich and half is poor, and one dollar is worth 1 point in hedonic value to a rich person and 100 points to a poor person. You happen to be rich. Do you want to give a poor stranger one dollar? Since you value the stranger one millionth less than yourself, the altruistic value of giving to the stranger is 0.0001 utility, and the selfish value is -1 utility. It is clearly not worth it!
But do you want your rich neighbor to give a poor person one dollar? Now both the 1 hedonic point and the 100 hedonic points are only important as altruistic value, no selfish value is involved, and you gain 0.000099 utility if this transfer happens.
Now what if every rich person gave one dollar to every poor person? Then half the population loses 1 hedonic point and half the population gains 100 hedonic points, on average that's a gain of 49.5 utility in altruistic value. Then adding the selfish loss of 1 hedonic point, that's a total of 48.5 utility gained. That's clearly a worthwhile tradeoff.
So we get that an individual doesn't want to donate money themselves, but if they're offered to make so that everyone is forced to give money including themselves they'll happily make that happen. And this is just with normal selfishness and altruism. No need to make up some nonlinearity or threshold effect on the effect of donation. No need to make a complicated psychological story where individuals are acting irrationally. The closest you get is in "The Insomnia Argument", but there you make it out as if we need to add an ad hoc new psychological preference to this model when the preference in question is just plain altruism, the same preference that makes some people donate freely, just weaker.
More broadly, I think rational choice theory and game theory are excellent theories of human behavior and often underestimated. I suspect if people spent more time acquiring a mastery of these theories and less seeking out exceptions to them our collective understanding of human behavior will be greater.
1. As a libertarian for deontologist reasons, I do not think not applying libertarianism in a specific context is justifiable by saying that's an inconsistent application of it. The more it is applied, the better.
2. The fact that it's more "difficult" to get as much foreign aid when done voluntarily should be counted as a feature (or at least as a neutral thing) rather than a bug. The government should not be making it easier (so-to-speak) by funding it by default and then letting people opt out, as it shouldn't be doing it for let's say funding something else that's philanthropic, because the government shouldn't be in the business of making such value judgments at all (any value judgments that go beyond its role as a night-watchman/minarchist state). Imagine your reaction to the government funding something by default that most people considered philanthropic but you didn't, e.g. meat-based products for poor people assuming you're a vegan.
3. Overseas military adventures shouldn't be funded by taxpayer dollars, only defense of the country.
Isn't a much more immediate argument against Foreign Aid just essentially a distrust of government to
1) actually efficiently use the money and
2) use this money for it's official, advertised purpose and not for discreetly funnel it towards different projects?
As someone with roots in left-wing activism long before the Left's identitarian turn, I had to chuckle as many of my openly Marxist friends and acquaintances bewailed Trump gutting USAID - when for decades the consensus among left-wingers was that USAID was an imperialist front, maliciously exploiting the needs of developing countries in order to quietly stamp out subversive movements abroad and consolidate political dependencies in the Third World!
I mean, USAID was literally created to counter rising Soviet soft power in the developing parts of the world - it's very origin and purpose is already different from what it frames itself as in public - helping the needy is a means to an end, but not the end goal itself. So being weary of your money going directly to it's coffers should be a given, even if all the aforementioned efficiency and scaling advantages you list apply to it fully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Concerns_and_criticism
Browsing this overview (and leaving out the more recent Trump attacks against USAID), it seems self-evident that the agency's foundational goal of expanding American influence and power repeatedly wins out over it's stated, formal goal of helping the vulnerable and encouraging economic and civic development.
Do you think your average liberal who gladly pays taxes for welfare and fully endorses USAID's stated goal would be pleased to discover his USAID tax contribution went to directly fund efforts to undermine Bolivia's democratically elected leftist government? Or went to fund the salaries of CIA agents employed at bogus USAID jobs as cover stories for their presence abroad? Or helped finance the OPS division of USAID, which amongst other things taught torture methods to the police of despotic regimes?
There is an argument against foreign aid that is neither inherently right-wing nor preoccupied with the scalability and efficient optimisation taxation allows: simple mistrust of government not to overreach it's power and misuse its people's wealth once it has legally been bestowed.
If USAID's only goal would plainly be to help the needy abroad, I would see little issue with it. If it, in turn, actually uses vital aid as a cudgel to manipulate foreign governments and has zero qualms about ceasing it's help if the foreign government refuses to, say, vote in favour of the Kuwait War at the UN in 1990 - as happened with Yemen - then I must conclude that USAID's goal is not actually helping the needy and therefore is unfit to receive tax money for that purpose.
I'm not inherently against a CIA or Pentagon existing, I can understand why in some situations a foreign intervention or regime change could be good and necessary. These agencies actually use their tax contributions for their stated purpose, meaning we can reign in or expand their budget depending on how well they appear to be able to use the money. What I do not want is a government agency that resists scrutiny or budget reduction by pointing at it's charitable nature and humanitarian purpose, only for the money spent for that goal to vanish into the dark, scheming recesses of American Empire. We already have the alphabet organisations for that - and we at least know that we're dealing with this Empire when we look at and confront them.
People can always choose to donate voluntarily to the government, but few people do. Whatever people like about government run charity, it seems very strongly tied to coercion. Coercion seems to be a feature, not a bug.