Paul Graham was right about this. It's useful for getting a kind of generic consensus opinion but not for actually doing deep thinking or original ideas.
Yeah I feel like if someone says this, it's more than valid to just point to that as them being at best unworthy of further engagement and basically not seriously engaging, and leave it there. Just totally absurd.
Unless you are a subject level expert, and I mean top of your game, all the LLMs know more than you. In testing against my own area of expertise it’s always right.
(I’m sure there’s some hallucinations but that tends to happens when it doesn’t know something and starts to make it up).
These things hallucinate like mad and are completely untrustworthy, and there's no good heuristic for when they're going to lie for no reason and when they're going to tell the truth.
strongly disagree! i feel like you develop a *very* good sense of when you've wandered out into hallucination territory after using a given model for a practical purpose after a few hours
it's a bit annoying that each new model that gets released mixes things up, and you have to relearn these habits, but i don't think it's fair to say there are no good heuristics whatsoever. i think we develop pretty good heuristics pretty much automatically, just through use
I read a UK news article the other day in which they quoted a politician as having said the phrase "if we hadn't have complied" and it sounded totally wrong to me. But not being British, and they being the ones who ostensibly invented the language, I figured I could be wrong, so I checked it on the Google AI (whatever it's called). It's response:
"No, "if we hadn't have complied" is not correct. The correct phrase should be "if we hadn't complied". "Hadden't" is the correct past perfect negative form when using the "had" auxiliary verb, as in the conditional sentence "if we hadn't met".
Hadden't???
I then checked "hadden" and turns out it is the Dutch past tense of "had"...
>so I checked it on the Google AI (whatever it's called)
Gemini.
IME, Google Gemini is abnormally bad at this kind of thing compared to other frontier AIs. It seems like Google optimized it so hard to be a good assistant for coders that they inadvertently made it completely useless for anything else. Less of an "artificial intelligence" and more of an "artificial idiot savant".
I'm a native British English speaker (albeit one without much formal/structured knowledge of the language). I think ”hadn't have complied” is grammatically valid but this politician may have been misusing it.
Consider a rail service where you can just board and then only eventually pay for a ticket when the conductor gets around to you, versus a rail service where you're not allowed to be aboard at all without having a ticket.
For the former service, you could say ”the conductor asked me for a ticket and if I hadn't bought one I would have been put off the train” and for the latter you could say ”the conductor asked me for a ticket and if I hadn't [already] have bought one beforehand...”
(In the latter case I think it would be a bit grammatically tidier to say ”..if I hadn't had one..”, but I can't seem to see anything grammatically wrong with ”..if I hadn't have bought one beforehand..”)
Not at all. It’s only when they don’t know something that they hallucinate and that’s rare enough. They also make mistakes with new intellectual production, like code, but that’s getting better.
When it comes to established facts like in engineering science or math they are pretty accurate.
Yeah that is um, totally false. They routinely hallucinate even when they do know the correct answer. Seems like you've really fallen for their bs lol.
Humans at least tend to have the common courtesy of expressing degrees of confidence that are not "I'm 100% convinced". Which makes "human is wrong" way easier to spot than "AI is hallucinating".
We both know you are talking about a subset of humanity there, not all of them. Speaking as one of those humans who always opines with 100% confidence.
This is correct as of 2023. Today you can request the models search the internet, provide specific citations and double check all their claims. This is probably better than 95% of discussions on the internet, although maybe it's only an OK substitute for what Cowen and Scott could do themselves.
I've had very nearly the opposite experience: when I ask LLMs about stuff I already know the answers to, the answers have ranged from "serviceable" to "absolutely wrong". More advanced models are laughably absurd less often (e.g. newer versions of ChatGPT will no longer tell me that a certain minor celebrity is her own brother, nor will tell me that a certain Japanese public health official from the late 20th century flew dozens of successful kamikaze missions during WW2), but they're still making fairly severe errors in subtler ways that require more care and expertise to notice.
I suspect a big part of the difference is that my experience has been with using the LLMs as toys rather than tools, with the exception of making minor use of the Copilot IDE plugin. If you're using them in good faith, they are really, really good at picking up the implicit assumptions in your prompts and giving you answers shaped to fit your expectations. This can improve the quality of answers if your assumptions are correct, but if you as a prompt based on wrong assumptions, a common failure mode is to use your assumptions to craft an answer that will seem good to you while compounding your mistakes.
In one of the previous posts Scott made about Tyler Cowen, I compared this last issue to the Electric Monks from the first Dirk Gently novel. The Monks are "labor saving devices" that "believe things for you", the same way a dishwasher washes dishes for you or a video recorder watches television for you. The civilization that created them uses them, among other things, as sources of comfort and reassurance. Like the Monks, LLMs will believe whatever you tell them to believe (explicitly or implicitly) and can be very persuasive and reassuring in affirming their beliefs. But this makes them less than optimal as tools for discovering the truth.
Yeah that's my experience, too. Checking them on basic matters of fact where I already know the answer showed them to be routinely making things up out of whole cloth.
And yes - they are so servile and subservient, so eager to please, that your implicit assumptions get baked into the answer, hard.
Asking them how to solve a simple problem, as an alternative to stack exchange, where the wrong answer will be obvious and just waste a little time? Sure. Anything else? No thanks.
I am very careful with my prompts. It’s fairly exact. What a lot of people get wrong is asking shorter questions thinking that’s easier for the A.I. to understand but it’s better to be more verbose.
I think this is the same kind of dismissive response as people got for "fact checking with the Internet" in 2000 or "fact checking with Wikipedia" in 2008. o3 is actually incredibly smart and has caught many errors for me, although you need some basic information literacy skills to use it well. I'll write a post on this soon.
For this post, everything I got from o3 has also been given a cited source - for example, o3 told me Mercatus' overhead, but also linked me to their Form 990 and told me how to calculate it from the numbers on the form.
I think o3 was blameless in Tyler's original post - all of its numbers were correct and had the correct context, and it was Tyler who misinterpreted them.
Fact checking should be done against primary sources IMO. If you want to source those via o3, or Wikipedia, or Google, go crazy... but say "fact checked with [primary source]", not "fact checked with Google". I agree o3 is a killer tool with a huge amount of knowledge, but I don't think it's accurate enough to cite directly as a source.
I guess my point is that the phrase "fact checked with o3" should raise eyebrows, despite o3 being a great resource.
Yeah, especially since Cowen once fell for a lie told by an AI. Long story short, he posted that he asked ChatGPT who the biggest opponent of the printing press was. ChatGPT said Francis Bacon, and then made up a quote about the printing press being bad and attributed it to Bacon's New Atlantis. A day later Cowen realized it was some machine-generated hoax, took the post down, and didn't offer any explanation or even admit the mistake. I'd be a little more wary of using AI to fact-check if that were me. https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/03/28/i-have-spread-lie-16968
That should be a big negative update on Tyler Cowen's reputation imo.
I always liked to imagine him as the smart man's Joe Rogan (and Dwarkesh as the smart man's Lex Friedman) and I still do, but it seems he might have a bit more of Joe Rogan's ego and aversion to fact-checking than I thought.
My 2 cents: your evaluation of Dwarkesh and Friedman are backwards.
I think a good interviewer should cede the spotlight to the guest, and play a support role in basically just keeping the guest talking. Friedman has always seemed very good at this, while Dwarkesh comes accross as desperate to show how much _he_ knows about the topic at hand. Not that Dwarkesh isn't knowledgable, but if you're talking to a world expert in a topic, you should probably just stick to asking questions.
I struggle to get through Dwarkesh interviews for this reason... it's often a minute or two of the guest talking about something very interesting, then a min of Dwarkesh asking some convoluted "question" that is just an excuse to string together a few facts he knows about the topic.
I'll admit I've only watched a few Dwarkesh interviews (because I can't stand him as an interviewer), so it's possible my sample isn't representative.
I'm curious, though — did you actually open the link to their Form 990? I'm still finding that about 25% of the links that o3 gives are faulty in some way. Lately, the bad links frequently send me to 404 dead ends, but then when I search Google, CoPilot, or Scholar, I can find the study that o3 alerted me to. I'm making a habit of double-checking anything any LLM hands to me. OTOH, LLMs save me a shitload of time researching a subject despite the fact that many of the responses are equivalent to Wikipedia articles that haven't been brought up to snuff yet.
I think wikipedia/o3 is perfectly fine if you know what you are doing. Every time someone rejects my argument because I used wikipedia or chatgpt as the data source, it is done in bad faith. I can understand that for controversial socio-political issues but for STEM, especially in my field, it is very good.
In fact, citing some low quality studies can be much worse despite them being the primary source. Wikipedia editors will have done at least some vetting when writing an article.
I have no opinion about your disagreement with MR. I have no time to delve deep. But most discussions on internet are not like university thesis either. Requiring them to be backed up with the primary sources is not reasonable. Using wikipedia or o3 is exactly the help we need to make the conversation flow faster and more smoothly. Rarely the cause of disagreement is that wikipedia data is wrong. It could be in some cases and then I would be happy to hear why wikipedia failed in the particular instance. Mostly the disagreement is that someone doesn't like wikipedia data, cannot show that it is wrong because all other sources agree with it and then wants to win the argument on technicality – you used the untrustable source!
Based on the philosophy of science we should not deny the use of o3/wiki.
Science is not about checking every fact by yourself. It is a social thing, discoveries are made by groups of people who all work together.
No one can read and check all the studies. Instead, we can read literature reviews and select what we need. The literature reviews may not be written by the best scientists who are busy doing something else. A lot of people involved will help to write them. The same applies to wikipedia articles which are often written by people at universities, sometimes professors, sometimes students etc.
Ultimately we have to trust each other. Sometimes this trust is broken, of course. We gradually learn to understand which groups can be trusted more and which cannot be trusted. I would easily trust wikipedia for basic data about something, such as common disease, a medicine, gdp of a country. Probably won't be enough if you want to go deeper but for most purposes it is fine to rely on wikipedia.
It is not comparable to trusting someone on twitter who tells some previously unheard facts about some medicine.
> Science is not about checking every fact by yourself. It is a social thing, discoveries are made by groups of people who all work together.
o3 isn't a person and the people programming o3 don't generally have any specialized domain knowledge. The problem with LLMs as sourcing is they regularly "hallucinate," i.e. give false but correct-sounding results. The fact that they're now given access to search engines makes this better, but it's not perfect; I recently tried to find the age of GJ 1002 and Google gave me an inaccurate age via its AI summary, linking to a page about a gas giant which mentioned the age of the system but was around a different star (at time of publishing, I could not replicate this error, but it was annoying when it happened).
Obviously, there are risks but o3 is a tool created by other people and it can be very useful tool if you use it correctly.
The most common reason it “hallucinates” is that you request data that does not exist.
In a way it is similar to pubmed search tool. You can find all types of studies, including those of very low quality. You need some understanding to use it properly.
The same is with o3. If you understand it properly and use it to find and extract data that you know already exists, then you have greatly reduced the chances that it will provide “hallucinations”.
it’s also an odd comment for rationalists. I’m very dubious about AGI or the future singularity. But, I find LLMs to be excellent synthesisers of existing knowledge.
And you can always ask it for sources. During the anti Wikipedia panic of the 2010s I used to garner information from wiki, sometimes quote it, but include sources.
"Used an LLM to find sources" is very different from "asked an LLM and just trusted what it said" -- and the latter is what Tyler Cowen apparently did.
This is also *very* different from trusting the words of a mostly earnest community of editors collaboratively building a wiki and vetting each others work. (Especially in 2008, when the community was smaller and even more earnest...)
I've once, ever, encountered a Wikipedia source link that failed to back up the claim it was cited for. But they're voluminous with LLMs. You really can't reasonably put these on a level with each other.
With wikipedia the usual argument against it as a trusted source was that we don't know who writes it. Anyone can do it and we have plenty of examples where it has gone wrong. The whole Scottish language wiki was written by someone who didn't even speak Scottish but only a perverted version of English language dialect (https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html).
And yet, wikipedia became a powerful tool despite all these real and imagined issues. Probably ChatGPT will follow the same path. People will learn how to use it properly and ChatGPT developers will also work to make it more trustable.
I think the problem with "fact checked by o3" is that it can give the impression that you're just glibly going along with it. Even a sanity check is frequently not good enough since LLM hallucinations usually seem pretty plausible. Good to hear that you checked the cites and verified the calculation.
What part of it? In full "I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates* have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many USAID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
* estimates: about how much the US government is doing aid by giving tax money to NGOs instead of running their own programmes. How competent USAID can be, if they hardly do their own stuff on the ground? And other considerations. - At least, worth to discuss. But it is all "Musk/Trump killing millions of children" - Scott links to Vox - and the only discussion is: malice or ignorance, must be both!
Statistically, you can expect blind-hatchet-job cuts to even moderately effective aid programs to kill millions of people over the next century or so, so I don't think this is an outlandish projection.
If a state does politics that change GDP growth by 1% a year - over a "century or so" you will see HUGE differences. Tyler often mentions this comparing USofA and Mexico. And pretty much all of us will be dead after a century, too. In the long run ... capitalism - markets, trade and rule-of-law - creates wealth and health. Not charity.
AIDS kills. Wonderful, the USofA spend so much on medicine to save the lives of infected abroad. Sad to hear, there seems some disruption now. Where are those billionaire-pledgers when you need them!
Ukraine needs help. Wonderful the West gives money so it can keep services running. I would not put that in the charity-budget, though.
> "If a state does politics that change GDP growth by 1% a year - over a "century or so" you will see HUGE differences"
Setting aside that aid programs can be helpful in expanding GDP in the global south, I think GDP expansion in the developed world hasn't been translating into substantial improvements in quality-of-life for quite some time.
You should also be aware that aid programs are a tiny percentage of government expenditure across the western world. The welfare state is far more profligate.
As I read all of ACX and SSC - and lots of MR - I can see, Scott does not judge TC`s post as "contemptible". See: Scott and Tyler respect each other highly for many years now. Yes, they do not agree on everything. Mostly it is disagreement in degree. (The one exception may be their opinion of brutalist architecture.)
Scott misread Tyler´s first post, as most did (me too). Scott explains why he misread Tyler. Then he explains why he does not see the outsourcing of USAID to other NPO/NGOs as problematic (unlike Tyler). Scott does show signs of exasperation with Tyler´s style (in this discussion and in his posts on MR); to the uninitiated, it may read as Scott calling Tyler "arrogant". The truth is, Scott knows that Tyler is extremely smart and knowledgeable. That's why he cares about Tyler's opinion. And similar for Tyler towards Scott. - Similar for Scott and Bryan Caplan. Oh, and Bryan Caplan "versus" Tyler Cowen. Three people who respect each other deeply, regard each other highly, blurb each others books. If you sense "contempt", you misunderstood.
The article describes why Tyler's post was contemptible, without himself making that value judgement. But what a comment “hear hear, Tyler's post was contemptible” in response to this article means is “yes, I agree with all the points raised in this article, and for those reasons, I find it contemptible”. Replying to that with “what is contemptible about it?” is obtuse; the answer is already in the article.
Nope. Scott is not convinced Tyler is correct in seeing it as problematic USAID is spent to such a high degree via third parties. And he says Tyler should elaborate. - The other part of the article is about Scott elaborating on overhead/NGO , his stance on altruism (his "breaking point") and defending his first reaction to Tylers first post. And again, that post was written in a way that lead to misreading. As Scott points out, again. But it was NOT in itself "contemptible" though Scott considers it unconvincing. Again, Tyler stated this as his opinion, and in exactly this words:
"I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates* have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many USAID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
So, if the commenter would explain, please, his/her "contempt" for exactly this statement? - I do see, Scott disagrees with the statement. Show Scott´s contempt for the actual statement in the article. Yes, he wrote he and other hated it as they misread it as an endorsement of bad policies. So, unlucky framing.
"If Tyler will condemn this as a terrible decision, then we’re on the same page and everything else here is minor nitpicking." - Well, Tyler wrote in his first post: "I do support PEPFAR". Who fails at reading comprehension?
Scott’s argument is that he checked with experts to debunk another expert. People who make money from the former status quo, a status quo that involves corruption; and doing this while acknowledging thats it’s an inferior model. He’s agreeing with Cowen but getting squeamish about the optics so it’s time to obfuscate and cope. Just agree and move on with the better model
*How much* corruption do you believe there is? Enough to justify cutting off lifesaving AIDS medication to millions of people? As they say, the optimal amount of fraud is not zero.
Why would we continue to provide goods that people in those countries don’t want? They asked for upgrades and relationships involving trade. Not medication for sexually transmitted disease. This is a common red herring
Who exactly is "they"? I'm pretty sure that the specific HIV-positive individuals who rely on PEPFAR clinics for their meds would not prefer if the U.S. shut down the clinics and instead did some kind of trade deal.
They have their own country that they live in. A country which is having other countries intervene. The same dollars could do what those countries prefer. Taxpayer owes them nothing is the starting point, there is no obligation or duty owed. The aid gave them a head start and they need to complete the work
That's not his argument at all. He went directly to the data to debunk him. He only brought up the opinions of other experts because of Tyler's obnoxious appeal to authority chest puffing.
Data compiled by the same industry isn’t oversight - it’s to justify further pumping. Any grown adult can ascertain basic motives. A proper education would inoculate people against not doing so but a modern one would have the opposite effect
Do you have any evidence to support the notion that these charities are committing accounting fraud (this seems to be what you are alleging)? The mere existence of a motive to lie does not prove deceit. I'm not seeing any reason to believe fraud is actually occurring other than pure speculation.
Lol it’s built into the system. It’s in the article too. If you need a low-resolution view just look at the goofy disclosures in the news cycle this year. It’s also all debt-driven US money. Or do a degree in international relations and pay attention to the aid literature and lecture then go experience it. Don’t play Pollyanna because you think a simulacra/ blank slate “good person” would
Yup, everyone in any industry with corruption, is corrupt. So, 100% of police are corrupt, 100% of politicians are corrupt. Wait, I think this means you are corrupt and we should, by your own admission, discount your opinion. \S
I think it’s reasonable to assume that most people in the business of charity are doing it for genuinely altruistic reasons, and aren’t just trying to make money (if they were, they’d be in the wrong business.)
“Basic motives” seems to be pulling a lot of legwork in your argument. Is the insinuation that the USAID people are somehow siphoning money in a corrupt way?
Sorry but who do you expect to provide the data? The various organizations who work on this and whose data you can crossreference to see if one of them seems off, or someone completly disconnected from the situation? With this logic you can't trust any medical research since everyone who works in medical research is indirectly or directly employed by the medical needs and system. Same for most fields.
If you believe that there is widespread coordinated data manipulation from enough companies that crossreferencing doesn't work then the burden of proof is on you. You can advocate for an external audit, you can try to find whistleblowerts in the single companies, you can make calculations based on NGOs from other countries and make comparisons.
Has this happened? No, not a single one. Instead you make a scathing claim of doubt, with as of now zero proof and expect potentially millions to die for this.
Following this logic i could take a case of let's say 5B military spending ending in waste or fraud and argue we must immediately abolish the US military to avoid more waste and fraud since it must be endemic. My proof behind this? I don't need none.
That's not his argument at all. Like, do you expect the rest of us to have not actually read the article, such that you can just make up whatever you want about what it says, without us noticing?
Just because you don’t like something or disagree with it doesn’t mean it isn’t true or something to engage. It usually means the opposite, as it’s says more about you then it does about others or any topic. It’s big indicator of incomplete conclusions
It's not that I disagree with the view you're expressing, it's that the entire premise of what you say the argument of the article is is a misrepresentation, so I doubt your good faith.
The person acting in bad faith doubts someone else’s when the author does not. You’re not engaging any points, merely trying to prove something that’s not provable and the opposite has a paper trail. It’s discarded by default
...in the heat of the moment, yes, it's pretty crass and probably wrong.
But if you can step back from the emotion, there's an entirely fair meta-point that needs to be considered. If someone is a sufficiently god-tier persuader, you can't trust your own judgment in evaluating their arguments; it's only safe to literally cover your ears and say "la la la can't hear you". That's basically what the case for AI pessimism boils down to, right? "AIs are superpersuaders. AIs are so far above you that you can't even viably think towards how to stop them."
That said, it doesn't look like Micah was taking it in that direction. Oh well, I still think it's interesting and deserves being pointed out (or don't want to have wasted my time typing this).
+1 for this, I can see that it's truly not a strong point in Scott's argument that he only talks to people with obvious bend for USAID side (I don't even think the professors can be trusted that much). Then again I'm curious what other side we can listen to to expose any corruption (if there's any). Local good NGO that's spurned by USAID and willing to gather enough evidence to shame them?
> it's truly not a strong point in Scott's argument that he only talks to people with obvious bend for USAID side
Scott's in-group is largely composed of *anti-establishment liberal-libertarians* who want to improve the world for everyone in the most efficient manner possible. If you're asserting that that this group is homologous to exclusive proponents of USAID, and that Scott couldn't find anyone to talk to that disagreed, then that is itself very strong evidence of Scott's point that USAID is effective and not corrupt.
Haha I forget that EA people should actually be anti-USAID. Point taken then. Though now I'm curious that just like NASA's reputation, are they always this clean and why, and if they do, can we copy whatever makes them so.
That sounds like a pretty distorted take on one particular AI argument (among many).
AI becoming highly persuasive is one of several possible threat vectors. This threat vector does not require anything close to "god-tier" in order to be very dangerous.
Ordinary human persuaders already do a lot of harm right now, in the form of marketing and scams and propaganda and psyops. I think it is possible to think your way out of all of that stuff, in principle; but I also think it's very naive for a human being to think that they will completely 100% succeed in doing so against all the persuasion that they will encounter in ordinary life. The world wouldn't be full of this stuff if it didn't have any effect.
There is a certain sense in which the only way to completely defend yourself from ordinary human persuasion is to make sure you never hear it. That's not the strategy I'd recommend, for a bunch of reasons, but whatever you're doing instead is going to be noticeably less effective than that (at the narrow goal of avoiding harmful persuasion) even against ordinary humans right now.
I’m just replying to what people are throwing out there. It’s goofy stuff largely; having to re-explain basics to people who can’t reflect on their own conditioning. Tackling the layer you describe is another level of analysis that I would rather move onto, but we seem to be bogged down in a quasi-religious ideology programming loop that a truck driver could unravel in seconds
You didn’t even read the article that you’re commenting on and you don’t understand the concepts. You’re failing to complete the loop. You’ve lost track of what’s even being discussed. What are you trying to accomplish? You’re undermining Scott in order to defend him which is silly and weird.
Do you have experience in international development? I know a couple of people who work in this field. One is former USAID, the other worked for a similar European agency. One has years of experience working in various African countries, the other has years of experience in Afghanistan and some other challenging places. Both of them have language skills and experience in some highly-specialized areas that you don't see in the United States, but are extremely important global issues.
If a person was a grifter, they wouldn't be spending years of their life in places like Afghanistan or Mali, subjecting themselves to personal danger in a miserable environment for lousy pay.
Right, but because they do that they’re willing to justify the corruption. I spent years in Israel-West Bank. Those jobs and projects are largely built on clouds, not stone and very open to disruption not by the market but by politics - they are contrived
Those countries need to chart their own future and they can’t do so if other do it for them or it’s being siphoned away to create more conflict. In this case you have both going on
It’s not the US or EU interest to do any of this be it done better or worse - it’s all debt with no end in sight. It’s legitimate to drop the bad model and pursue one that’s more like Scott’s
Everything I've learned about USAID and the NGOs it supports leads me to believe that these are extremely dedicated people who choose to work on very difficult problems, often enduring miserable conditions.
There may be projects that you disagree with ideologically, or projects that are ill conceived or poorly executed. That also happens in every other area of human endeavor. But I have never seen any evidence that there's a widespread "grift".
I understand that it's pointless to argue with you about this, but I would like to defend the honor of people who try to do good in the world - often at great personal risk.
The article explicitly states that money is diverted and siphoned away inefficiently. It can be witnessed firsthand. The dedication masks a person’s psychology - they get paid using debt dollars from another country to benefit people not from that country but they also have utopian beliefs or have done it so long they have to continue. Everyone in aid knows this is a thing
Which article, i might have missed this but i didn't see an article cited in the text or from you claiming that any considerable part of the aid was siphoned away
I was under a state department grant and studying abroad on diplomatic work though the University of California Regent (Irvine). I was guest of the Palestinian Authority and the Kingdom of Jordan. Our org was (Covid death) The Olive Tree Initiative. We gained funding from the Dalai Lama foundation and attached to a constellation of orgs working in the region. I never got to Jericho but a made the round trip of refugee camps and camps-now-cities in several countries. I would occasionally get to see a PA gunbust and their stockpile of seized weapons, or have to assist with plumbing and electrical repairs (somewhat our money at work) across the street from mansions (mostly our money at work). I got to view conflict in Syria from UN security posts as well. Had lots of guns brandished or aimed at, and detained a few times (both probably us money) in related countries
I think my favorite groups were SkatePal and Israeli kibbutzers near Megiddo. The most unhinged was the museum in Hebron and the men who were dying inside because they weren’t strong enough to kill tons of people weeping in my arms. It’s not a big jump from the kids in the camps their parents choose to remain in with the same look in their eyes they have in Southside Stockton, California; no respectable male figures around, mothers who see them as martyr fodder who will otherwise amount to nothing, and OFC no respect for older male figures = none for peace
USAID and European agency people working challenging places do not get miserable pay at all, and it is well documented but folks like bill easterly that they have done more harm than good
One of these people "in on the grift" was Scott Alexander himself, so if you don't trust people in on the grift, you should save yourself the time and just stop reading his posts.
Lol no he wasn’t, this is disingenuous. SA follows his own funding model through his foundation. It’s even detailed in and largely the topic of the article we are responding to.
It’s has nothing to do with trust, it’s a low-trust proposition. Observable behavior factors into the conclusive analysis of the administration. You either want entitlement and corruption to continue because you have a utopian goal to subject people to or you would rather start over clean. Scott’s model is a clean start, work with Cowen even
He wrote in this very post about delivering medical care in third-world countries, almost certainly through some sort of nonprofit humanitarian organization, which would be according to you, a grift.
Nope, way off. SA is about direct aid and no overhead. You’re proposing degrees of badness beyond those ideas - which is what we’ve had going in the aid/development world.
Right and he asked a small sample of people who confirmed his bias, who are currently playing defense for their programs. Everyone who works in that lane knows it’s rotten but they think their salvation rests on it. It’s effectively unchallenged cognitive dissonance.
Sorry, I might have been unclear. I'm saying Tyler asked if Scott had talked to people in the Trump administration about their actions. In other words, he suggested that Scott's position would be better informed by asking the people who defunded the programs for their justification in doing so. That certainly doesn't seem more serious than what you're criticizing as unserious.
I see lots of confident assertions from you, but zero evidence. No numbers, no surveys, no papers, not even anecdotes, just mere assertions. For example, do you have a survey showing "everyone who works in that lane knows it’s rotten", or failing that, anything at all demonstrating your claim?
When a grant is to develop thousands of jobs and it develops an only few jobs - yet all the money was spent…it’s the system functioning as it is. Calling it out is how it’s supposed to work and it should get canceled.
This was public info earlier this year if you weren’t under a rock
You want me to provide evidence of fraud that this very article mentions. There whole volumes of textbooks dedicated to this in international relations and political science, some in anthropology and sociology. You could say management books have the most.
This is bad argumentation: You’re basically moving the goalpost and not producing evidence contra - when this very article mentions fraud as a major topic
- People shouldn't check with USAID experts before writing posts on USAID
- People should check with those experts before writing the post
I don't think it's honest to switch back and forth between "you didn't consult experts? guess you're too uninformed to have an opinion" and "you did consult experts? guess your sources are too biased for you to have an opinion".
I'm not accusing either you or Tyler of doing this - you're both using only one horn of the dilemma - but my checking with experts was an attempt to fend this off.
Also, I tried to present an argument that it would be hard for USAID to be "grift" in this post. Do you have a counterargument?
You’re presenting abundant evidence for grift + saying you have a better alternative to prevent it. But then you defend grift. So why would a better model (yours) be useful at all if the status quo is in its final most refined form? I don’t find the optics disturbing, so there’s no need to write an article where typo agree but don’t agree with Tyler Cowen when you simply not only agree but agree so much you started your own nonprofit that uses reformed methods. Or just be “based” because if you believe need is that urgent to meet you would do it with full honesty and urgency, no hand-wringing or pearl clutching about our established sacred cows of foreign aid and development (whatever those mean and what their actual goal is seems likely gnostic rather than holy)
Checking with “the experts” doesn’t necessarily reveal, it can just as easily obfuscate. Experts have disagreement with one another. It’s selective listening and paychecks depend on it continuing. People operating in institutions are subject to schema of the institution but they must keep it going. The “experts” that write the textbooks on this topic are extremely critical of it but amazingly the moment they get contacted they deliver the PR payload. They love the attention and want to portray “first date behavior” nothing to see here, etc. They’re human beings working in a set of circumstances; their job happens to be in government and tax break induced consumption, doesn’t produce any product, no skin in the game etc - in a different lane where guilt drives benevolence without resolving the core issue.
Needless to say you would seek out and possibly steelman broader perspectives and not take the PR at face value. Human beings have personal motives that diverge from, reframe, re-interpret, ‘the plan’ and that includes seeing corruption as justifiable and pursuing it as if it were normal. They may just be seeing it for what it really is and developed a coping mechanism. You need people who can acknowledge this and could tell you what should go and what shouldn’t specifically
I’m not saying that you had malicious intention, but that you may have stumbled into malfeasance unintentionally; in the pursuit of doing good you glazed over doing right
I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but it looks like no one can understand what you're trying to say.
Here's a summary of the position Scott Alexander supports:
1. Scott's overhead is 0% and Tyler Cowen's overhead is 2-5%. but there's no magic trick involved. Both Scott and Tyler have administrative overheads just like USAID charities do, but other companies/organizations pay for that overhead. In other words, the "administrative overhead" that USAID charities have doesn't mean that USAID is somehow full of grift, and is certainly not an argument for shutting USAID down.
2. Scott supports the continued existence of USAID, including PEPFAR, which distributes medication that impoverished HIV/AIDS affected people use, for free.
Separately, this here is my opinion, not Scott's:
3. Your argument that it's somehow wrong for the US government to borrow money on the taxpayer's dime, and spend it to help people in third world countries - it's badly flawed.
So the US saved $40 billion a year. Great! Now what's the plan for the *checks notes* THIRTY SIX THOUSAND BILLION dollars (36 TRILLION) of national debt that the US has racked up so far? And that doesn't include the $3800 Billion ($3.8 TRILLION) that Trump himself has proposed to borrow THIS YEAR ALONE in his Big Beautiful Bill?
I think you're not aware of who the US borrows money from. 75% of US debt is held by US entities and individuals. Most of that is retirement savings accounts, one way or another. China holds around $757 billion, but most of the remaining 25% of debt is held mostly by US Allies.
That's not all! Every dollar in circulation is, in effect, money that the US owes. And most dollars are similarly held by American entities and foreign allies, and also China.
My own third-world country of India holds around $700 billion of US debt and currency.
ALL of the countries and private entities that the US borrows money from - ALL OF THEM want the US to retain its position as a leader on the world stage. Nobody gives a shit if the US sends foreign aid. In fact, that's a good and expected thing from the richest country on earth.
What IS a problem however, is the US political leadership becoming increasingly unhinged and dysfunctional. If the US keeps shooting itself in the foot and practically keeps begging China to take its place as the Top Dog in world affairs, That's a huge problem for every single person and country that is holding US debt and currency.
I’m aware of of all that, but you’re using fallacious arguments to justify things that aren’t justifiable. Fraud doesn’t just occur in the home country but abroad and it corrupts local institutions and destabilizes societies that comes into. This is brushed aside in these goofy “utility” arguments; you have to factor the big picture and that gets murkier the further out you go, the more layers you add, the scale and scope creeps. I guess civil unrest and regime change aren’t a big deal to armchair “ethics” far away from the savior fields
We don’t use the Peace Corps anymore because locals could do the job for a fraction of the money and get a lot more done - it’s magnitudes better. Clearly the purpose of the peace corps was something else.
That’s a laughable argument that the US borrowing money is somehow good. The mental gymnastics required to think this is sound are astounding - it’s just reinforcement of justification to do unethical things. You’re essentially saying that corruption is intrinsic and that everyone being dependent is an unalloyed good. This is diversion from the topic to deflect and obfuscate; muddy waters reward scoundrels.
And again, we would please need some proof that there is widespread fraud with the local contributions from USAID.
At the end the question seems to boil down to: Do we think that the % of waste in USAID is a worthy tradeoff for the millions of lives saved or not.
Depending on that % everyone will have their own answer, but if as of now that % for USAID seems quite small then i personally think the answer is a clear yes.
What is your percentage and what is your proof? Once we have that we can decide if USAID is worth it or not, Scott arrived to the conclusion that it is, what is your data?
Clearly we need to find someone in a quantum superposition where we are unable to know whether they are/are not involved with NGOs.
Lock some kind of administrative expert in a box, where the decay of a particle determines whether he does or does not get employed by an NGO and then get his opinion at the half-life period.
Might be a bit tricky getting his views on USAID out of the box for us to examine, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I think the basic point that *maybe* 10% of USAID's budget was even plausibly related to DEI, wokeness or personal grift is a basically obvious grift, and if Elon felt otherwise he could have had the courtesy to make some attempt at actually vetting the content of specific programs.
PEPFAR being axed without him even *knowing* about it does not speak well to the level of oversight being exercised here. That was inexcusable.
In Trump/Elon's general defence, however, speaking up about the farm murders in South Africa might help avert an ethnic cleansing or two down the line. (I think the ANC and EFF are probably too disorganised and incompetent to actually murder or expel SA's white population, but if mass migration keeps going there are plenty of other countries that could go the way of Zimbabwe.)
Scott was being diplomatically polite to you in his reply. You said that the core argument of the argument is an appeal to authority. But it very clearly isn't, and I think the only way to reach that conclusion is to have stopped reading it early on, or to have read the whole article and then decided to misrepresent it.
Grants making agencies divvy up costs into direct costs, which are allocable directly to an objective, and indirect costs, which are not allocable but are important to keeping an organization functioning. Indirect costs are frequently recaptured via a Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA). The indirect rate is applied to a Modified Total Direct Cost Base (MTDBC), the drivers of which are spelled out in the agreement. The MTDBC will frequently exclude capital goods, infrastructure, subawards, etc. Generally it consists of the recipient’s direct costs to administer a grant or subgrant - allocated salary of a project officer, for example. MTDCB is generally only a small portion of a total award.
I worked for a company whose primary business was USAID contracts for many years, on projects in various disciplines all over the developing world, and the company ultimately didn't last because it was _impossible to make money_.
There are basically two ways you can bill USAID - Time and Materials, i.e. your hours and stuff you buy for the project, or Firm Fixed Price, i.e. you set a price and then deliver on it, if you can come in under budget, you profit more. Time and Materials, you make your small percentage but it ultimately has to come back to the hours you billed and your overheads. You can't make much, and it creates a frustrating incentive system where if you work efficiently you get less money.
So you'd think Firm Fixed Price is a chance to get some profit out of being a USAID contractor. Well you'd be wrong! It works in theory but it never turned out that way. The people in DC who contracted you are completely different from the people actually running the project in, say, Afghanistan, who might not even get why you were hired as a subcontract. The deliverables are defined at the time of bidding, and by the time projects even get started everything has changed, it's impossible to adapt, and USAID has total veto over whether a 'deliverable' is to be met. Run out of budget? You have no leverage, you can't just stop working or you'll never get another contract, just gotta figure it out and work for free.
Where there's waste in USAID it's in setting priorities that can't be done effectively - a lot of civil society projects fall here - poor coordination of resources and over-reliance on vaguely defined goals, like measuring trainings instead of actual changes. Overreliance on expensive American or Western employees is also an issue, but much more complicated to fix. But I assure you there's no pot of gold to be had contracting for USAID - six or seven years ago I basically swore never to do it again, the monitoring was extremely strict and it just wasn't worthwhile to jump through the hoops.
When I last worked in the USAID contractor system -- about twenty years ago, in Afghanistan -- the big contractors (e.g. Chemonics, DAI, FHI, RTI) were making comfortable profits from the nine-figure contracts they managed. They were hyper-specialized in hoop-jumping and in carrying out the (sub)contractor management tasks that USAID used to do directly before the Clinton administration part-privatized it.
It was the subs and smaller orgs (both profit and nonprofit, US and local) that generally found themselves squeezed, sometimes right out of existence.
Given the minimal change in the list of the biggest USAID contractors in those two decades, my guess is that those dynamics still prevail. If I'm wrong, or if my Afghan-centric lens has misled me, I'm grateful to anyone who can update me.
So I was at a subcontractor to DAI, Chemonics and the like, indeed we were squeezed a lot more than they were. They had comfortable profits - rumour has it that DAI had a wine cellar installed in their Bethesda office - but they could never be more than comfortable, even the biggest contracts you could only make a certain percentage on. One thing that could actually be described as a grift is danger pay - they updated their scales so rarely that I was getting 2x salary when spending time in places that were perfectly safe like Erbil.
Afghanistan during the war in particular was probably the worst it was anywhere, along with Iraq, because of the special conditions of the war - profits weren't as tidy as everywhere else. There was one SIGAR report that was really bad and things really tightened up after that, and overall I saw a consistent tightening of requirements during the years I worked on USAID contracts (roughly 2010-2017), with more and more oversight from the USAID officers overseeing it.
Not saying profits weren't made, but it wasn't anything on the scale of say municipal NGOs doing complete bullshit, and things seem to be getting tighter and tighter over time.
"It’s because the 30% number I gave yesterday is an accounting concept called NICRA which is often cited as overhead, but different from the common-sense conception."
Only slightly related, but I'd like to point out that accounting is a lot more complicated than normal, non-account people think.
In 2001 JDS Uniphase had a $56 billion dollar loss. JDS Uniphase did not have $56 billion less in the company treasury at the end of 2001 than at the beginning.
In 2002 Time-Warner "lost" almost $100 billion, again, without being out that amount of cash.
Warren Buffett has written about this sort of thing before and he has noted that while he isn't exactly HAPPY about the accounting standards he is also not prepared to offer better ones. Fixing what we have often creates new problems.
This doesn't help with the current post, but is (hopefully) useful background information about accounting weirdness.
>accounting is a lot more complicated than normal, non-account people think
Normal people think that most of the complications are artificially introduced in other to make fraud/grift less detectable, and protestations from people presumably in on said misbehavior would unlikely be persuasive.
Normal people usually operate on a cash basis. With the exception of very large-ticket items like houses and cars, everything comes out of a single 'consumption' conceptual bucket. To a normal household, a $1000 couch is a consumption item that's somewhat fungible with a $1000 vacation.
Accounting rules are complicated because businesses do (and should) operate on an accrual basis. $1000 spent on the employee holiday party is qualitatively different than $1000 spent on raw materials for production, which is different yet from $1000 spent on machinery or tooling.
Regardless of what the standards for financial reports say, a well-operated business at least needs to know which one of those three things it's doing, but the devil is always in the details. How do you account for the real value of a brand that only exists intangibly? How about software that's in-development and will be released or made operational later? What about the invoice you've sent out for completed work but has a 120-day payment term?
OK, but on the other hand, there used to be a practice of aggregating junk ("subprime") loans into AAA-rated "financial instruments", which eventually led to a certain economic disturbance, for which pretty much nobody responsible was substantially punished, so what are normal people to make of that?
That specific example is more finance than accounting, but yes, you're correct that accounting scandals are common, and there are many ways to do very sketchy things with accounting rules. (Look at any large accounting firm on Wikipedia - they'll have a section titled "Accounting scandals.")
On the flip side, accounting on a consumption basis (which is what people usually want to do rather than complicated accounting rules) is an accounting choice, and it usually doesn't accurately reflect reality (like the examples Majromax gave). So complicated accounting rules are a necessary evil. Accounting is like CAD software: the way things are currently done isn't very good, but I've never seen a better alternative proposed.
>complicated accounting rules are a necessary evil
I'm pretty sure that more sophisticated normal people understand that, but they have no idea about whether tradeoffs currently being made are reasonable, and no legible unbiased experts no trust.
Yes, and exploiting the complexity of our models biochemistry, a certain promising ingenuée defrauded investors for billions promising blood testing machines that could not work, but that even the experts consulted before signing the checks were convinced could work. What are normal people to make of that?
That we should go back to the humor theory of physiology, so to reduce the complexity and the opportunities for grift it creates? Or that reality is complex, any useful conceptualization of reality is going to be complex, and this unfortunately creates some scope for fraud?
If the American people aren't getting anything out of feeding starving Africans, then a US government program that spends money for the purpose of feeding starving Africans is waste, even if 100% of the money goes to feeding starving Africans.
I totally get why you're frustrated that people keep bringing up nonsensical objections, but this is their real objection. This is why running sob-stories about the people who are dying because of USAID cuts doesn't work. People don't actually care about this.
That USAID helped Moldova get out from under Putin's thumb is, from Trump's perspective, reason to *oppose* it. Of course, for a long time there were many in the Republican Party, including in positions of power and influence, who thought differently—and programs like USAID (which have never played very well with the median voter) were heavily reliant on their (relatively quiet) support—but Trump and his faction have crushed them, at least for the time being.
Because back then there wasn't a prominent faction on the right that considered the "deep state" to work in the interests of the left, and the left to be worse than Putin.
Yep, it would be interesting to know whether TC would agree with both of: 1. The US government should never do anything that the American people "aren't getting anything out of" (maybe) and 2. The American people don't get anything out of feeding starving Africans (I doubt he agrees with this).
This seems like it hinges on who you're trying to convince. I believe that the majority of Americans aren't psychopaths, and if we could magically wish away all the information asymmetries, they'd be willing to pay the 10 cents per week (on average) that it costs to keep PEPFAR going.
In real life, it's a lot harder than this to win the political arguments around foreign aid, because the median voter doesn't know anything about program evaluation and furthermore doesn't know how to put ten-figure budget numbers in perspective, so they evaluate based on coarse-grained vibes, and "government gives resources to foreigners instead of to you" is a much less popular position in the absence of any specifics about why it's worth it. But this is why there's value in writing posts that explain what's at stake; it probably won't reach the median voter, but it might reach some people who genuinely didn't know and who maybe, just maybe, might change their minds if they did.
Yeah exactly. Assholes who don't care if little kids die in other countries are highly overrepresented in right wing online spaces.
"It's good that we spend some of our wealth on desperately poor people in other countries" is a normie opinion, even without the "and this benefits us via soft power" addendum (but that's also a normie opinion).
First, what a narrow and shriveled view of life. But second, these “people [who] don’t actually care” should say what they mean, not bring up nonsensical objections. If your view is that it’s of no consequence to you if your actions cause untold suffering and death as long as it happens far away and to people who are unlike you, surely it should be easy to just say that in public, right? One wonders why people beat around the bush so much when it’s so easy to say that more Africans should die horribly so we can give bigger subsidies to corn farmers.
The status quo ante was that we were funding these programs. Defunding them is not the absence of life saving action, it is an active imposition of suffering.
You've got to decide if you're being a utilitarian or not.
If you're deontologist, then yes, it literally is the cessation of life-saving action. We wouldn't call a doctor a monster if he quit his profession and fewer lives were saved in his region as a result.
If you're a utilitarian, then it works.... and you are causing some number of deaths yourself. How many is it? 5? 50?
Scott et al have argued ad nauseum about this in the context of EA. An important principle of EA thinking is that it can be counterproductive to donate too much. Why? Because we want to grow the EA movement ― to encourage as many people as possible to donate as much as possible.
If we give as much as we can, substantially degrading our quality of life, let's say 50% of after-tax income ― that's going to actively discourage others from joining the movement because it sounds like a very hard thing to do (and is). So we'd get huge donations from very few people and it won't make a big difference to the world. If we give very little, let's say 0.01%, that's very easy but won't make a big difference to the world even if we make the movement 100 times bigger. So I think the typical EA ETG giver ends up giving 1% to 10% of before-tax income, small enough that salesmanship to attract new members can work, but large enough that EAs can be a major force for good in the world. I'm doing 10%.
The nice thing about USAID is, of course, not having to convince every individual person to voluntarily give. Therefore it could potentially do even more good than EA with a much smaller percentage of everyone's income. I understand USAID's budget is below 0.1% of U.S. GDP and below 0.5% of the Federal budget. This ought to be the kinds of numbers people can be convinced are worth giving, especially as USAID bolsters U.S. soft power. But of course, USAID wasn't cut because Americans didn't believe in it, it was cut because an unelected man who wasn't confirmed by the senate both runs and doesn't run an agency that isn't really called DOGE[1][2] in order to block Congress's constitutional power of the purse in violation of the APA and the impoundment control act of 1974.[3]
I think we should be careful about simultaneously making the argument:
1. You shouldn't be doing this, and also
2. You're doing it wrong
It's better to focus on one or the other. If you genuinely believe that something shouldn't be done, then focus your critique on that rather than flipping back and forth between the "shouldn't be done" and "doing it wrong" critiques.
A person who doesn't agree with the actual goal being pursued is generally pretty poorly qualified to comment on whether it's being pursued in the right way, because their inclination is toward nitpicking and FUD rather than constructive criticism. And yet it happens all the time. Most of the people who say that DOGE is doing a bad job of cutting government spending don't actually think that government spending should be cut. Most of the people who critiqued the conduct of the Iraq War didn't think that Iraq should have been invaded in the first place. And the people most inclined to nitpick the precise way in which USAID gives away American taxpayers' money to the great unwashed of the third world are people who think that this shouldn't be happening in the first place.
And then we have the related problem where people who genuinely support the goal feel obliged to be quiet about their criticisms of the way it's being pursued, lest they seem like one of those goal-doubters. So we do everything in the stupidest possible way, criticised only by the doubters and unquestioningly supported by the supporters.
>Most of the people who say that DOGE is doing a bad job of cutting government spending don't actually think that government spending should be cut.
I'm not sure thats true. I am definitely against what DOGE is actually up to (intentionally destroying govt programs RWers do not like + crippling regulation of industries, particularly those Elon is personally involved in).... but I wouldn't be opposed at all to what DOGE is supposed to be doing (increasing efficiency) even if I think govt. spending should go up.
People who support increased govt spending are not interested in the spending per se, but in accessing the effects of that spending. This is not symmetrical around the spend more/spend less axis. No one just "Wants the govt to spend $100m". Lots of people DO want "$100m of additional food/healthcare to go to poor people".
What DOGE should be doing is orthogonal to actual spending.
Whether decision made elsewhere in govt. (and nothing to do with DOGE) means spending goes up OR down.... if the govt. is more efficient, then there will be more "food/healthcare for poor people" than there were compared to baseline, whether that baseline is going up or down.
In the best case scenario it would even assist achieving the ends even if spending went down (e.g. $100m cut to spending + saving $100m in efficiency gain = $Exactly_the_same_amount_of_end_funding + *Lower pressure to cut funding of ends in the future as the deficit is reduced $100m* = a "win" for people who want the ends funded)
As far as I can see almost all the opposition to DOGE's actual actions isn't driven from a desire to retain govt. spending at current levels, but of the (in best case) Ham-handed/Wasteful/Callous way they are doing it OR (in the worst case) Corrupt/Deliberately Harmful/Deceptive way they are pursuing other ends like "ending investigations into Tesla law breaking" or "dismantling the administrative state" under the fig-leaf of pretending to increase govt efficiency.
A relative of mine works on a government health database tracking AIDS cases and outbreaks.
My understanding is that we actually have enough granularity through medical records and contact tracing that we could effectively stamp out the spread of AIDS in the US by asking the right patients to ask their partners to go on prep and other meds, and doing informational outreach with high-risk communities.
The main reason this doesn't work is that we get novel outbreaks in unpredictable places due to people from high-incidence areas coming to the US and creating new spreads, which don't show up on medical records for months or years.
Living on a better planet with less disease and poverty and suffering is better for everyone. Even if you don't have a soul and don't care about other people's suffering, suffering *never* stays fully contained to the person or place it originates.
I mostly buy this. There’s a reason I specifically used feeding starving people as my example. There is a tendency to group tropical infectious disease control in with other things like food relief and direct cash subsidies as well as one big “humanitarian aid” concept, but these are very different things.
In polls, 89% of people say they support 1% of the budget (the pre-Trump amount) going to foreign aid. They support PEPFAR in particular by 66-19.
I think this is why people have to say untrue things in order to justify cutting it. If people really didn't support it, then it would be the supporters who would have to say untrue things!
“As of May 2024, 22% of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (21%). Last year, 16% said they trusted the government just about always or most of the time, which was among the lowest measures in nearly seven decades of polling.”
I think it’s this (public trust in government). While 89% of people would support certain foreign aid certainly only a tiny minority trusts that the government would
a) do a good job
b) not just steal it
c) not use it to distract from their other incompetences and crimes
The overall sentiment of ‘America First’ is priorities and observable results. Why discuss USAID continuance at all when the highest executive in the land went from being able to drone strike US citizens (Obama) to being powerless to deport a single non-citizen criminal to their nation of origin (Trump)? I mean that as a sign of a major systemic issue in general.
Considering that the discussion in question is *an example of the government not doing what is right*, taking an action that somewhere between 66% and 90% oppose, I don't think that poll actually supports your argument.
"The populace not trusting the government to do the right thing is evidence that they want it to end programs with supermajority popular support" is not a logical argument. The former in no way implies the latter, and in fact the arrow of causality clearly goes the opposite direction.
It also involves the expectation of incompetence and malfeasance, which you have left out.
Your formulation of my view:
•People don't trust gov to do the right thing
•There is popular program
=People want to end popular program. Doesn't make sense, right, got it.
Throwing in some of the bits from my a/b/c:
•People don't trust the government to get desired results
•gov says they want to do thing that -purportedly- will give people popular thing
=People don't want gov to do it.
In fact my formulation implies that people understand, or believe, that having the government explicitly seek something will reliably create a deficit of it. And a lot of people believe that right now across the board, hence the low trust.
> It also involves the expectation of incompetence and malfeasance
Right, and cutting USAID is malfeasance in the eyes of >66% of its constituents.
>Throwing in some of the bits from my a/b/c:
>•People don't trust the government to get desired results
Your A is wrong. The actual predicate, based on the survey, is that "People don't trust the government to get desired results *most of the time*".
It does *not*, in any circumstance, logically follow that people distrust the government *all of the time*, so your inference is not valid.
And since we have *direct evidence* of 66% of people saying they support the thing the government *is already doing*, what you are positing is not only logically invalid, it is *objectively* untrue. (As in, untrue at the object level, because we direct and specific have evidence against it).
I feel we’re losing the plot here. Things like Solyndra (federal solar) or Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD, the federal fiber optics network) come to people’s minds quite easily these days as examples of federal spending that reliably failed to do what they said they’d do.
This tortured discussion does not mean people don’t want solar or they don’t want fiber optics but as the poll about trust and Trump’s election in general demonstrates people are losing faith that everything the fed does isn’t another Solyndra or BEAD.
It’s been interesting to say the least, to find the judiciary so brazen in their recent demonstrations (indistinguishable from fits of pique, or creative writing) that the so-called imperial presidency (or whatever was the popular term, I have forgotten) was merely their creature all along, which power they could revoke at will.
Political power in America inheres in the judiciary, and it feels no need to be coy about it.
I guess it should have been a sign, back in the 80s - our parents could for some reason think of nothing better for us than that we should go to law school. What the hell?!
So, polls say, people are mostly fine with 1% USAID. Also PEPFAR, now that they heard about it first time in their life. ... Well, people are also very fine with more money for schools, better defence, safer streets, cleaner air, fair trials, better medicine, nice neighborhoods … . And lower taxes, less debt, affordable housing … .
Of course, vote for parties who promise even more. Be angry, if a party/president comes to power, who see things differently. Speak your mind and vote. Legit. But I am not convinced by Vox, that Trump or some reckless billionaires are joyfully “killing millions of Africans” by stopping USAID (if it turns out he does, things seem to change daily with this clown).
Sure, some/many will die, if no one steps in. I wonder: where are the big foundations and donors eager to step in. Oh, then they would have to do this forever ...
What I have seen in my life - I agree with Milton Friedman: Gov. is usu. 50% less efficient compared with what markets would deliver. Therefore it should stick to the bare essentials. This is surely true for schools. Probably for roads and trains. This is true for “aid”. I assume, it is even more true for “aid”. Again, nearly all my professional life was NPO/NGO, nearly all financed by tax-money. Would I switch off all funding to DAAD and Goethe if I could? I hate to say it: yes. Would this hit some fine programmes a lot of people (incl. me) like a lot? Yes. Would it be possible to substitute them: yes. Would it be possible to cut only the least efficient 80%? And do then 5 time more of the great stuff? One might try. I doubt it. As those NGOs could not do it. It is not about orgies, wine cellars or "corruption". You have fine jobs, hard to see why you should lose them.
I wonder if the functions of PEPFAR were broken down whether that would remain true.
Presumably support for PMTC interventions would be high, and similarly for ART. But a lot of people justifiably push back at PrEP coverage even in the USA, myself included, as it feels a lot like we're paying people $20,000/yr to have promiscuous lifestyles. Although I am finding claims that PEPFAR paid for PrEP, I am not seeing it in the charts of the most recent report I could find (2022.) Under a 2019 agreement, Gilead committed to providing sufficient Truvada to treat 200k Africans for 11 years on its own dime, however I do not see whether that means only 200k Africans can get Truvada or if PEPFAR is paying taxpayer money for additional PrEP patients above Gilead's commitment.
I'm glad this inspired me to do a cursory review of the program just to get a better handle on what it consisted of. I think my review was sufficient to confirm to me that ART and ARV distribution was the majority of expenditures, and that those treatments continue to drive the majority of AIDS cases prevented worldwide. But since I can't find data on PrEP expenditures and can't figure out what the "socio-economic" slice of PEPFAR spending consists of (the report understandably highlights the Orphans and Vulnerable Children set-aside portion, but I'd need a deeper dive to know whether the rest of it was as broadly acceptable), I would probably keep open some % probability that there are substantial objectionable chunks that may not enjoy public support at the same favorability level as cited for the program overall.
Thanks for this comment. When someone feels uncared for at home, sending dollars overseas to care for others feels fundamentally unfair. We must balance the justice of extending charity to the sick and poor abroad with the justice of fulfilling our duty to our fellow citizens at home. My hunch is that many Americans' view on foreign aid is going to be dependent on how they feel about the state of that balance at that moment. Ultimately the argument comes down to proving that foreign aid benefits US citizens as a whole more than if the US had used that money to take care of people in the US.
How they feel about "the state of that balance" has a lot to do with how well-informed they are about that balance. As Scott noted in his comment, ask people if they're happy for the government to spend 1% of the budget on foreign aid and 89% say yes. The negativity toward foreign aid is linked to the median US citizen wrongly assuming the government is spending 25% or more of its budget on other countries. (That's what polls have suggested for about as long as I've been following the issue.)
My guess is that if they knew it was 1%, most Americans would consider it part of "the justice of extending charity to the sick and poor abroad," rather than insisting that that 1% needs to directly "benefit US citizens."
Much of the waste in the system comes from the latter impulse. Laws requiring USAID to spend on American companies; the bias toward food aid as a way of justifying farm surpluses; a preference for US professionals over high-caliber national professionals. Better to make the case for 1% spent as efficiently as possible on the goal of helping the poorest people in the world.
If that needs justification in terms of US interests, it's a small price for extending America's soft power in countries whose attitude toward intrusive empires would otherwise be uniformly hostile.
I agree. I think USAID is great. I think it’s a marketing problem. We need the arguments to move beyond “is this an effective program” to “here’s what you’re getting for your money as an American”, which are two different questions. The standard response is “soft power” as you mentioned but that is too ambiguous. What has that power gotten the US in real terms? Do we now have a stronghold of influence in Africa or are we actually saving future terrorists? I don’t know. So long as countries receiving USAID go against or do not align with US interests, some US citizens will be upset. “Why are we saving our enemies when we are suffering at home?” is the mindset. People think we’re being taken advantage of. This is one part of the populist nationalism driving current US foreign policy. Just articulating the viewpoint.
The demand that we justify "soft power" as a sort of commercial or tributary exchange with unambiguous quid-pro-quo benefits is very populist, very Trumpy. It's representative of a mess of interconnected problems that could never be fixed by something as minor as a USAID marketing campaign.
American insularity means a huge percentage of us don't appreciate just how **ridiculously** rich and powerful we are, such that our poorest state is richer than most of our rich-country rivals. (https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/01/03/the-poorest-us-state-rivals-germany-gdp-per-capita-in-the-us-and-europe) We're a crazily overpowered empire by any historical standard, and the main reason more Americans don't realize that is we spend most of our time comparing ourselves to other Americans.
One of the reasons the other countries of the world haven't tried to balance-of-power the USA into some semblance of reasonable equilibrium is because we've poured a lot of resource over the years into demonstrating that America's idea of its self-interest is a relatively enlightened one, based on rules and ideals. US hegemony generally hasn't meant "align with our interests, all the time, or we'll cut you off." We've pursued ideals like human rights and democracy, not with anything like full consistency, but into enough genuinely costly situations to persuade most of the world that the US was serious about them. We prided ourselves on turning wrecked enemies into prosperous allies and countries formerly wracked by poverty into US customers and trading partners.
We built a liberal hegemony that was incredibly enriching and empowering overall for America by *not* insisting that every rule or ideal in that hegemonic structure justify itself in terms of immediate commercial or hard-power interest. That's why so much of the world has both tolerated and participated in our dominance.
In retrospect, it was always vulnerable to some political entrepreneur coming along and claiming that this was a racket where the US was being taken advantage of. Trump has attacked pretty much every dimension of US soft power, and we're about to see how many blocks can be taken out of that particular Jenga tower before it falls down -- and if it does, what a world looks like where more countries see benefit in resisting US hegemony than playing along with it.
I agree. It's hard to really understand the power differential until you travel to other places. I think a marketing campaign could work, like Mr. Beast videos: "We donated $2 billion and saved 1 million lives!" Right now it's so abstract and Americans feel disconnected from it all. But like Scott mentions it changes when you see real humans being happy to receive aid, etc. There is real value in literally showing the impact of aid instead of just hearing about it or measuring it. I agree with your point about hegemony too.
There is also an implication in your last few paragraphs that our aid to these countries is what keeps them from resisting us in pursuit of a balance of power. The idea that countries will turn against the US if we don't pay them off is the "taken advantage of" component of their viewpoint. The MAGA thinking really is: "we cure their AIDS and they cozy up to the Russians/Chinese and throw us out?" This disproves your claim that USAID is perpetuating US hegemony. And that resentment is the issue. It applies well beyond USAID, like to NATO: "We all agreed to meet 2% and many countries still didn't do so. Then Russia started a war. Are we just fools being taken advantage of by Europe?". Even to trade policy: "We lower our tariffs to let you trade in our country, but you don't let us into yours on equal footing?"
You're right that it's a big mess of interconnected grievances! They're all connected to the idea that the current order is actually not a good return on investment for the US, and therefore we need to change the relationship we have with the rest of the world. Hence the current administration's focus on reciprocity.
I think we have different understandings on the balance of power point. Investing a tiny share of our wealth in development and humanitarian aid is one relatively low-cost way that America signals to the whole world -- not just to the specific, often very weak, countries receiving the aid -- that we'll use our overweening power in constructive ways that leave everyone better off.
Soft power is aimed as much at near-peers and middle-income rising countries as it is at the biggest aid recipient countries. Aid is a signal to Europe and Japan and Brazil and India and South Africa that we're a benevolent rather than malevolent hegemon, and that they're better off participating in a liberal hegemony than challenging it. Aid engages us in problems that affect them (through refugee and migrant flows, climate impacts, conflict management). It's not just about buying loyalty from aid recipients.
And hegemony doesn't mean everyone follows the rules you set 100% of the time. A country getting closer to Russia or China than we'd like doesn't "disprove" US hegemony. France pulling its troops out of NATO back in the '60s was in one way a challenge to US hegemony (we didn't want them to do that) but ultimately highlighted the core difference between liberal and Soviet hegemony (we didn't send in the tanks) which led to the former system's triumph.
The idea that the current administration is actually focused on restoring "reciprocity" is nonsense. Trump has never been about reciprocity; he's about the extraction of maximum personal profit by any means, however many relationships and institutions he has to trample along the way. He's an avatar of unenlightened self-interest, quick to toss out any commitment that stops him from grabbing at some momentary win. His global 10% tariffs, to say nothing of the many ridiculous 30%+ ones, were imposed on a host of countries that had 1-2% tariff rates on the US.
You're right that the image of an America being exploited and taken advantage of is widespread -- but it's deeply mistaken, grounded in ignorance of just how much economically better off the median American is compared to pretty much any other country on earth, and ignorance of how much of our wealth has grown out of a system of global rules that the populists are now recklessly tearing down.
He's also (more or less) a libertarian. He might be fine with giving his own money away or encouraging others to do so while thinking it's not in the state's interest.
In that case, he should actually make the argument of why the interests of the state should not be aligned with the interests of its populace in this case, instead of relying on internet commentors guessing at his private thoughts.
Because the government using its power to to collectively do things in the interest of its citizens -- utilizing economies of scale and avoiding the distributed failure of the tragedy of the commons-- is just about the only justification for government to exist.
This probably explains why Congress has repeatedly funded it. In a democracy, if the majority wants to fund something, they have the right to fund it*, even if some people consider it "waste." After all, there are people who think lots of things the govt funds is waste. Much military funding is an obvious example.
As for whether it is American interests, those interests are defined by the voters. And btw not all interests are material: I once voted to raise my property taxes to fund a school swimming pool, despite not having kids and not being a swimmer. Was that illegitimate or irrational somehow?
*Unless it violates the Constitution in some fashion.
There's one line of argument that says we shouldn't be doing program X, and another line of argument that says program X is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. Those two arguments have to be addressed separately--worthwhile programs can be eaten alive by fraud, and worthless or even counterproductive programs can be run well and have very little corruption.
This is a bit when the "they're eating cats and dogs!!!" story got debunked and all the edgy types came out saying that the problem was not what Haitians were eating, it was that they were on US soil in the first place.
Had that been the majority opinion... Why concoct lies? When someone lies, they're implicitely admitting they would not get very far with the truth. Haitians just working in some midwestern town is not the average American's nightmare. 10c/week/person going to starving children in Africa with 6% overhead expenses is something most Americans are happy with. Otherwise, why the lies?
Nope. The American people vote for governments who are then empowered to raise revenue and set the budget. The concept of "waste" does not enter this equation. It's just, who did we elect to Congress, and what did they allocate money to in the budget. They're perfectly free to allocate money to things that "the American people aren't getting anything out of", if they so choose.
> I agree that it’s important to try to keep overhead as low as possible
It isn't. Overhead is irrelevant. It's effect per dollar spent. I think chasing low overhead is just a bad heuristic that's meant to exclude cash machines that spend more on advertising than doing work. And that is a real failure mode that is solved by it. But there's nothing wrong with overhead so long as it's more effective per resource spent with overhead than not.
> Do these groups charge an additional overhead layer? I’m having trouble figuring this out.
They do. However, as I said, this doesn't bother me. This is simple gains from specialization. The US has an advantage in manufacturing and logistics. The US government is literally the only organization on earth that can get climate controlled medicine anywhere in the world with enough determination. The EU can't do that. China can't do that. Russia can't do that. But it doesn't have last mile delivery capability. And there's no compelling reason for the US to develop a network to deliver regular packages to rural Kenya. It's cheaper to leverage local organizations even if that means more salaries.
You want a big, central organization to handle the high level international stuff like negotiating with drug companies, distribution, cold storage, complex specialist tasks. And then you want on the ground people to do the local stuff. As far as I've seen, this division is widely regarded as sensible and attempts to put actual Americans into rural Kenya or to have local advocates run the big picture stuff tend to make it worse. Which often comes as various forms of progressive stupidity where you want to center indigenous voices about basically scientific questions or conservative concerns that paying an African a organization to perform a function is somehow an unforgivable sin.
> I would love to see a careful analysis of whether it’s more efficient to fund local vs. US charities.
This has been done and it was basically determined that local charities should do last mile, basic medical care, etc and the US should do everything above that. Because there's no special Kenyan advantage to manufacturing drugs or doing cold storage and that can be concentrated in a few key facilities and capabilities the US keeps up anyway as part of global power projection. But there is a Kenyan advantage in dealing with Kenyans. (I'm picking on Kenyans at random but you get the idea.)
This is an old criticism of EAs I have actually. The traditional charity/NGO world actually does do this kind of self-assessment.
By the way, I have plenty of criticisms of USAID. I think they are wrong in significant and meaningful ways. I think they're blinkered by ideology. I have very negative experiences of them being snobs to me personally and looking down on what I was doing. I have gotten into multiple arguments on this blog about how this should work and I was not generally pro-USAID. And further my attempts to get people interested in supporting other measures have been insulted because of basically progressive pieties. So if someone had put me in charge of USAID I would not have been gentle and I'm sure there'd have been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth. But nor would I have taken it out behind the shed and shot it.
PREACH! I had similar comments on overhead in the original thread. It’s the wrong thing to focus on. There are many ways to assess value for money, overhead is overly simplistic and is weaponised by those obsessed with cost cutting, not with maximising results.
It was a reaction to a real problem ("charities" that basically spend their money on advertising and pay fat executive salaries). But it used a very, very blunt instrument and one that's unnecessary if you can do a more fine tuned evaluation. Unfortunately, even EA's charity evaluation is not that sophisticated.
Nit: overhead is irrelevant until you so offend people's intuitive-but-illogical sense of justice, that they grab the legal system and successfully force you to stop doing good things. Perceptions of overhead not grounded in fact are *even more* irrelevant until [ditto].
Certainly if you can stay far short of that point, calculate net value all you want. What you're saying about last-mile activity immediately clicks with me; viewed that way any cut that isn't discovering outright corruption is incomprehensible. And yet, the cuts happened. Think of a little effort on keeping overhead and corruption down - and legibly so - as insurance. Get it done, don't think about it after, don't skip it, certainly don't ignore it when your house just burned down.
That's true of anything though. I don't think the offense to their sense of justice is that overhead is bad. I think it's the idea that charity people are making a profit off donations or that the actual work is not being done. I think if I told someone, "There are two charities, one has 10% overhead costs but saves 1 life per every $100, the other has 5% overhead but saves 1 life per $200" most would intuitively get the first charity is better because they're trying to maximize lives saved. However, simultaneously, you would want to make sure the overhead was not going to mansions and lamborghinis.
I of course agree that if you can get the same result for less overhead then you should do it. And that you should loudly and thoroughly investigate corruption and the like. Both for credibility reasons and because efficiency is good and corruption is bad.
Also, just point of fact, my house hasn't burned down yet. (Well, the house I'm involved with part time.) I am in an entirely different house that got sneered at by the USAID folks. It looked like we were going to be fine but now Trump has decided that his war on trade includes us so we might get smacked anyway. Despite this, I don't expect it to actually stop us. One of the core beliefs we've always had is that instability like this could happen so we're prepositioned better.
> It isn't. Overhead is irrelevant. It's effect per dollar spent. I think chasing low overhead is just a bad heuristic that's meant to exclude cash machines that spend more on advertising than doing work.
On a purely utilitarian level, you are correct. If the CEO of one charity has a secret sauce which enables him to deliver more QALYs than other charities while also paying himself 80% of the donations as a salary, then a utilitarian would happily continue to donate to him.
One argument against this is that the general public is not very utilitarian. So USAID might in theory rationally prefer to have fund a slightly less efficient charity with a low overhead because they anticipate that otherwise their budget will be cut drastically once the public finds out about them paying for a lavish lifestyle of a otherwise very efficient charity's CEO.
The other thing to consider is that charities have generally no moat, no secret sauce which allows them to perform much more efficiently than their competitors. If someone has an amazing idea for a charity and delivers great value while also pocketing half of the donations, an even more altruistic person doing the same thing while also only paying himself a living wage is sure to pop up and outcompete him.
Also, there is a background of non-EA charities which do not try very hard to optimize for effect but are basically in the business of selling a warm fuzzy feeling to their donors.
I think that there is also a streetlight effect going on. Judging the overall effectiveness of charities is hard. Determining the overhead is comparatively easy, and a charity with a very high overhead is unlikely to be very effective. So people focus on a trivial overhead to avoid having to judge the overall effectiveness, and I broadly agree with you that this is bullshit.
If your charity is most effective when it runs with 9% overhead, run with 9% overhead. If it is more effective when it runs with either 6% or 12% overhead, then by all means run with that overhead instead.
The general public is not utilitarian about ends but is utilitarian about means. They think something is good for basically emotional reasons but then they want ruthless utilitarianism in getting that good thing done. Further, the public seems very willing to support professional level salaries for charities so long as they have a visible and solid effect. So I think you're underestimating the public here.
Also charities have moats all the time. That's just wrong. The right way to model the lower salaries isn't a lack of a moat but that people are getting paid partially in prestige/sense of purpose/admiration/whatever. Because they're not being competed anywhere near to zero.
There are bad charities but I think EA overestimates how bad most are by a lot. The idea of measuring effectiveness or effect per dollar spent is not something they invented. And in some ways their methods are more primitive than their mainstream competitors.
I agree that it was used because it's a simpler metric to judge. But it's not that hard to develop alternative metrics.
Basically, an economic moat is what prevents a competitor with adequate funding to just rise to your level. If your business model is growing and selling carrots, you have no moat, nothing prevents the farmer down the road from doing the same, and if your prices are much above the costs of production, you will not sell much.
If your business model is that you own the copyright to the most common operating system for desktop computers in the 2000s, then you have a moat. The typical corporate customer was firmly embedded in the Windows world, running a bunch of expensive Windows-only software, and the cost of switching would have been prohibitively expensive for them.
Typically, moats do not arise by accident, they are the result of strategic decisions made by their owner who cares about cornering the market.
I would imagine that for most charities, this is not much of a consideration. The CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation is likely not kept awake at night worrying that Musk or Bezos might spend a billion to build the Malaria Prevention Foundation as their direct competitor. Thus the AMF is likely not investing resources in proprietary, patented bednet mounts which will not work with their competitors. Their goal is to prevent malaria, not to get rich while selling the public their malaria-prevention.
> I agree that it was used because it's a simpler metric to judge. But it's not that hard to develop alternative metrics.
Perhaps for the AMF. You take the past QALY cost of a child getting malaria, divide that by the cost of preventing one child from getting malaria (though there might be ethical issues with running a control group), and voila, the effectiveness of your charity in QALY per dollar spent.
But next you want to evaluate a charity which builds schools for girls. I would describe the task of determining the effectiveness in units of QALY/$ as "hard". You might half-way estimate the QALY impact on the women themselves due to economic benefits, but then you have higher order effects. What is the QALY adjustment for children per year of school their mother had? What are the overall economic effects? Will this lead to women replacing men in some jobs, so that you have a gap between double income families and no-income families? Is this a good way to transform a society to be more like ours and less terrible? Will this lead to women having fewer children, and will this be bad (a question where utilitarians differ)? Will the Taliban take back control in a decade and proceed to murder any women who is unwilling to be subjugated? (I am not arguing that schools for girls are ineffective or counter-productive, merely pointing out that it is really hard to measure these things.)
I assume you are accepting "economic moat" metaphorically since the most obvious sign of an economic moat is profits because it's a moat against competition and non-profits don't have profits. If that is what you mean and you accept moat to mean something like "the ability to produce desired outcomes such that the marginal dollar is best given to you over a competing charity" then yes, charities absolutely have moats. Something like AMF's experience with bed net production and distribution is itself a moat.
And I'd say AMF and most EA is actually an example of how easy it is! They've basically invented a standard out of thin air with giant gaping holes and a bunch of unproven assumptions. They're actually quite bad at it. And yet they've still done better than "just look at overhead and minimize that."
> The US government is literally the only organization on earth that can get climate controlled medicine anywhere in the world with enough determination. The EU can't do that.
I don't understand this. Are you saying, that the EU can not send refrigerated medicine to countries like Kenya?
Not reliably and in large quantities without assistance from American logistics networks. Cold chain supply is something America is uniquely good at. I don't think the Europeans or Soviets even got close globally though the EU has some local ability.
But even more generally, the EU can't even consistently get things to North Africa without American support or leaning on private networks far earlier than the US has to. The US has that because it's an expeditionary military capability. The US maintains the ability to send an army into Central Africa complete with medicine, ammunition, and even ice cream. The EU largely does not. And while PEPFAR did not use military capability it did use those government logistics experts, those supply networks, and negotiated with various drug companies.
The US is literally the only country that can do this all throughout Africa (or anywhere else). Russia can't, China can't, the EU can't. The USSR used to be able to but that's atrophied. They have some regional logistics networks that work but they're not global and, in the EU's case, does not extend into Kenya but does extend into some parts of Africa.
I was under the impression, that at least France has some strong networks in Africa. Maybe not everywhere equally, but there should be some former french colonies, where today France has stronger logistical networks than the US has.
France had strong networks in its former colonies in West Africa/the Sahel. However, those networks have largely been collapsed through a combination of terrorism, militias, and (often Russian backed) coups that have expelled the French. The US networks have also shrunk but the US has a longer tether so its remaining bases are sufficient while France's largely aren't.
Of course, France could also pay local networks. But Chadians don't have cold storage and the US is able to bring its own while France would need to develop it in a more anchored way. And, importantly for war, means that France has to come in by degrees while the US can just drop the army in the capital if it wants it. Which also works to get medicine there within a week or so if Trump decides he wants to be the King of Chad.
The only region where other countries have stronger logistical networks (region singular) is Central Asia. The US is stronger than everyone else everywhere else. Not counting, of course, internal logistics. Obviously Russia has stronger logistics in Russia than any foreign country.
Just curious, why would central asia have such strong logistics networks? Because of its former status as soviet satellites? something to do with steppe nomads?
I believe people are naturally very skeptical of non-profits being good stewards of federal funds. Scott does a great job digging into the data and asking well-founded questions. Coming from a country where corruption is a normal part of life, it's very hard to believe that a grant made to a local third party wouldn't be extremely corrupt. So I read the post, and wonder "what is he missing?". This is similar to when Elon found the imaginary Social Security fraud. I don't have a horse in the race, but it did feel like something which could be possible. We've heard stories of foreign sweat shops applying for e.g.: student loans and pocketing the proceeds. I suspect part of the problem is that the numbers being discussed are so big, that either we over-estimate the problem, because $60M is only single digits percent; or we under-estimate it because $60M is, after all, a lot of money.
If you can save millions of people with some administrative handover that is one thing. If the argument is that you must send money overseas forever because they cannot live without it that is absurd.
I think it depends, but perpetual dependency does not seem like the most moral path for anyone. Aid should focus on building real capabilities (health systems, schools, accountable governance) so people can claim their basic rights and live however they want. Keeping people dependent on aid does not contribute to self-determination, freedom, agency, etc. It might take a very long time. Climate change may require long-term aid to some countries too. I think PEPFAR is a great example of this idea. From the article you linked:
>National governments in sub-Saharan Africa have also made it a priority to build out local capacity to fight the disease. The majority of funding for HIV services now comes from domestic sources rather than foreign donors. Rather than relying on foreign researchers and international groups to implement HIV interventions, local organizations — which are more integrated into the communities they serve and are more attuned to local social and cultural challenges — are increasingly running the show.
The Southern States have been perpetually dependent on Northern States for 150 years. Should we cut them off too? Or use that 150-and-counting figure for international aid as well? What's the moral state of Southerns living in perpetual dependency?
They are not dependent in the sense that they will all die, they receive more money than they pay in and this is done because they are part of the same country.
You may find it difficult to maintain a country that has no form of equalization, but supposing it were possible, my point is not so much that this is more moral but that it isn't analogous
They’re on the family plan. We are part of the same country and they are our fellow citizens. Different states are endowed with different resources. I agree with the US’ current approach of helping seed factories and drivers of economic growth through targeted investment. I’m not a big fan of direct transfers.
"I think it depends, but perpetual dependency does not seem like the most moral path for anyone."
I think this framing includes an implicit assumption that's potentially very unsound. You say "perpetual dependency" and "anyone" as if we're talking about uncle Bob, who needed a $50 handout to buy food (which might actually be booze) this week, and can be counted on to come back next week asking for another $50.
But of course when [country] receives foreign aid year on year, it's be no means assure that it will be *the same humans* being helped from one year to the next. Indeed, I can imagine quite a large number of cases where it is not. Let me illustrate with a concrete example:
Imagine a hypothetical birth defect, lets call it cantwalkia. People born with cantwalkia are totally unable to walk: this naturally limits their ability to work and care for themselves, *especially* in underdeveloped countries with low urbanization and poor disability accommodations. Fortunately there is surgery that is capable of completely and permanently correcting cantwalkia. Unfortunately, this surgery requires specialized training and equipment that is completely impractical for developing countries to source locally. So the U.S. steps in and pays for trained personnel and equipment to operate in the impoverished country of Pooristan, allowing every Pooristani born with cantwalkia to be treated.
So, in this somewhat-contrived example:
1. No person in Pooristan ever benefits from this form of aid more than once (they're treated and cured permanently)
2. Each individual thus treated becomes substantially and permanently more capable of caring for themselves and contributing to society.
3. It is not possible (short of a medical breakthrough) for the problem to ever be "fixed" to where aid of this sort no longer needs to be provided by somebody. A consistent fraction of babies are born with cantwalkia year after year, which isn't going change at all if more or less aid is provided.
Is this a state of "perpetual dependence?" It does not seem unreasonable to answer yes: after all, the U.S. government is perpetually providing something that (certain) people in Pooristan badly need. And one could certainly argue that it *should* be the government of Pooristan paying for these treatments. But that *government* isn't dependent on this aid: it's not even going to the government. And while lots of individuals depend on the aid acutely, once, no individual is stuck in dependence on it. Meanwhile, there's no sense in which Pooristan is being disincentivized from building up their own capacity; even if the Pooristani government is left footing the bill (which they might simply fail to do, leaving the people unhelped) economies of scale dictate that the training and equipment will always be foreign originating. It's never going to be economically sensible for Pooristan to teach and manufacture such things locally.
My point for all this is simply to underscore that "providing non-time-limited help fosters dependency and prevents people from building their capacity to help themselves" is a heuristic, not a law. It can be a good heuristic: things do work that way sometimes. But even among individuals it's not always and forever true. And even less so when you're dealing with entire nations, being composed of many people with different interests and capabilities.
Ignoring PEPFAR, and just as a theoretical construct (I do not have the knowledge of this to make a huge argument either way here) by providing large amounts of aid with no end in sight, you pervert the way the local economy runs and develops to where "maximize for aid dollars" is the optimal way for its best and brightest to spend their time, and he who controls the aid dollars controls the universe or something like that. Sort of an externally driven version of the resource curse.
I definitely read an article that made a more detailed argument of this kind, I believe focusing on Malawi...I'll see if I can dig it up.
If you offer people unlimited medical supplies, then you're incentivizing them to spend their money elsewhere, while holding out their hand for the medicine.
Charity in the form of goods is equivalent to cash + a minimum spending constraint in that category of goods. But money is still fungible!
In an extremely poor country with no economic engine, they won't have enough resources to develop a domestic pharmaceutical / real medical industry. I can think of a few ways "subsidizing" that for them would go:
* They go from spending $0 on local pharmaceutical / medical expenses (and getting no help) to still spending $0 (but getting help). This seems good to me
* They go from spending $[SMALL] on medical expenses (because they don't have money, so they literally can't spend much) to spending $0 and spending the money elsewhere. This also seems good to me, because the goal should be to get an economic engine running in that country. Nobody "lifts off" by first developing a domestic medical industry, any economic benefits from that would come from something like health security leading to better workers (which you would still get from charity)
* Same as above, but the money goes straight to warlords. This seems like a situation where you would need to do a cost-benefit analysis, but I think it would usually tend to still doing the charity. You're not giving the warlords the money used for the treatment, instead you're giving them the money the native residents WOULD HAVE SPENT on similar treatments if you hadn't stepped in. If they're not spending any money on the treatments because they're too poor, it's the same as the first situation. If they're spending some money on it already, it's probably for something like a few "medicinal herb leaves" that don't do anything, so you're giving the warlords the equivalent of a few plants while saving people from horrible suffering.
If the county had an economy that could THEORETICALLY support a good medical industry but is choosing to spend it on automotive manufacturing or something I'd say you have a point. If you're talking about underdeveloped African villages, I don't think there's anything to warp
If the contention is that they could develop more domestic healthcare production but they stopped by the injection of aid, that's trivially false. There is no good reason why they should produce healthcare if they're really bad at it. Also, we don't give out the entire "heathcare" bundle, we give out some durables and some consumables, but not others (eg doctor's hours). Since these are highly complementary, by giving out beds and syringes, we *incentivize* the production of what we don't give out (eg trained personnel)
If the contention is that giving them *anything* will reduce their incentive to create wealth in general, bc money is fungible, that's pretty weak. The Inada condition applies to each good, not to "consumption" in general. If we give them healthcare but eg no shelter, their incentive to create wealth so to have shelter is as strong as ever.
Maybe. This review of PEPFAR shows that the salaries offered by aid are higher than other healthcare practices, which can cause the unintended effect of pulling healthcare workers from preventative or essential healthcare services towards this more niche offering. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215379/
By providing large amounts of police with no end in sight, you pervert the way the local economy runs and develops to where "maximize for police dollars" is the optimal way for its best and brightest to spend their time, and he who controls the police dollars controls the universe or something like that.
The problem with this whole line of argument is: just as it is good for a city to have a functional, non-corrupt police force, it is good for children not to die of AIDS. Africa is not poor because there aren't enough children dying of AIDS, it's poor because of a wide variety of factors, and kids dying of AIDS helps make it poorer (imagine spending an enormous amount of money educating someone to become a doctor, scientist, computer programmer, etc - and then them dying of AIDS halfway through).
I lead off with ignoring the PEPFAR portion of it (though maybe you shouldn't just ignore it).
I think this comment is far too flippant about something that has a lot of literature around it with the completely spurious comparison to a police force.
I'm pretty sure that IS what he is saying. What does that have to do with neo-colonialism? I thought neo-colonialism had something to do with US being economically dependent on resources from the underdeveloped world.
Yes, resource extraction is one half of the equation. The other half is control over the government, economy, and society of the underdeveloped countries. The former is managed by military and business; the latter is facilitated in part through agencies like USAID and other mechanisms for distributing humanitarian aid.
Note that the resource extraction often depends on control over local governments and societies because there’s always a risk of the locals renegotiating or nationalizing the resources.
Step 2: Millions of people die of preventable causes, none is the wiser, their economies are even worse with the additional drag of a sicklier and worse nourished population
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: <s>Profit<s> Based thirdworldist utopia where every African state is on technological parity with the West and now you can marxistly agree with your Fox News-addicted uncle
No, I don’t support of Trump in this fight. I’m just not naive about USAID and the humanitarian aid industry either.
The status quo of US foreign policy in the Global South has been a disaster. And Trump is worsening it.
Now, he wouldn’t be able to do this if US policy were more clearly and unequivocally beneficial for Americans and the Third Worlders it claimed to help.
See, it’s not just that the soft power strategies of USAID are often opposed to the sovereignty of underdeveloped countries, but that these soft power strategies, when compared to Chinese Belt and Road Initiatives, are unpopular and ineffective.
Part of the problem is that many educated and well-intentioned Americans actually believe that these programs are principally altruistic not primarily about geopolitical dominance.
When it’s brought to your attention that there is actually a lot of reason to be critical of USAID from a humanitarian perspective, your response is mockery. Are you unwilling to have a serious discussion about these matters?
The nice thing about doing foreign aid is that you can leverage the power it gives you to get the locals to do things like pay their own money into helping their people.
A couple points: NICRAs are not comparable between implementors. Each partner would negotiate with the responsible Agency depending on where they get most of their funds. So a USAID grantee might have a NICRA with DoD or State, but it would have been applicable to their USAID award. NICRAs are ‘negotiated’ so there is a rate base tied to where there is a direct relationship between a cost base and indirect costs. Finally, NICRAs are audited and would apply to all USG awards.
This is a tearjerking anecdote, no joke, but it doesn't tell us anything. If he has any way to generalize these two anecdotes that would be useful. Unfortunately I don't know how much money Americans spent on getting a handful of old hospital beds to a shithole country. That anecdote is useless by itself.
I'm so confused - how could Tyler possibly think his original post doesn't read as supportive of Rubio? He's clearly an intelligent person. The only explanation that seems vaguely plausible is acting in bad faith, but his response does seem pretty sincere. Wtf?
Overall this seems not worth your time to engage with, for whatever that's worth
I don't think it's confusing, if you assume that Cowen is simply heavily biased in favor of assessing Rubio and the Trump administration's actions as reasonable. He sees a tweet by Rubio, runs an extremely quick and dirty automated "fact check," and thinks "this sounds pretty big if taken seriously, it sounds like people across the aisle aren't talking about this because it looks pretty bad for them."
Scott points out that this is rooted in a misunderstanding of the information in question, and leads to deeply destructive conclusions if followed through on. This looks bad for Cowen, and he doesn't want to admit "the position I took is stupid and destructive," so instead he covers himself by arguing "I didn't *actually* commit to the position you're criticizing me for, and you're being disingenuous by acting like I did.
From his perspective, he might feel he's being intellectually honest, because he didn't actually stick his neck out and stake his reputation on a claim that Rubio was strictly correct, he basically just signal-boosted him with an affirmation of "Gosh, that *does* look bad, those libs are might suspicious!" And it feels mean for Scott to go after him so hard when he wasn't technically *wrong*. But his perspective on whether he, or anyone else, is being intellectually honest, doesn't seem like a particularly useful one for anyone else to inform themselves with.
Also, for him it clearly isn't a sacred issue (like it is for Scott), so he considers Scott's perceived overreaction to his minor sloppiness be a faux pas and not something to give in to.
USAID and the SF homeless industrial complex face a similar predicament. Both are dedicated to Fixing Poverty but for complicated historical reasons we will not countenance the policies that might actually do that. So we have a permanent Poverty industry that attract a mix of dedicated charitable people, insane ideologues, and shameless grifters. You should probably be more excited about any opportunity to chase off the crazies and crooks because what they do is actively harmful to the most vulnerable people in the world.
Richer African countries could afford their buying AIDS drugs on their own (individually, or with local government expenditures) instead of needing foreign charity to finance them.
But as much as I agree with Clay that almost everything USAID wants to fix is downstream of low GDP-per-capita which is downstream of low productivity growth which is downstream of mostly-dysfunctional governments, actively re-focusing USAID on "improve foreign governments" is likely to do more harm than good. The US grew out of poverty more than a century and a half ago, and no longer has the institutional know-how (hell, I'm not sure it has the institutional knowledge on how to keep being a wealthy country).
Which population do you think is better-equipped to build stable, functional, long-term governmental institutions: one burdened by the social strain of a deadly public health crisis, or one who has that crisis significantly mitigated by a targeted program largely resistant to local corruption?
From empirical attempts at measuring the impact of AIDS on growth, the one study I found that attempts to control for other factors finds that most of the correlation between lower per-capita GDP growth and AIDS prevalence is due to shared causation by other factors. See https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5148/w5148.pdf
And indeed my go-to for Sub-Saharan African country that has its shit reasonably together, Botswana, both grew significantly while hit hard by AIDS and is now apparently financing around 2/3 of their AIDS response themselves.
USAID and the gigantic network of non-profits are utterly byzantine and opaque, and fund numerous non-public goods. It's grift regardless of how ideologically motivated the participants are.
Don't fall out of your chair, but there's a lot of shameless grift in the US defense industry as well. Anywhere A gets to spend B's money on C and there is no accounting profit to provide signals or inflict market discipline this is going to happen
Yes, you may not have heard about it, but it's called "PEPFAR". A major sign of its activities, besides all the public records you haven't bothered to read, is the graphs of HIV cases in Africa that show cases going down over time.
Well it is good to see that the ‘Cowen’ of the original post has become (mostly) the ’Tyler’ of the second post. Let’s hope the bridge building continues!
Honestly I find the way USAID was run more concerning than ever reading through this. The obfuscation of funding and operation wasn’t just opportunistic by bad actors, but actually codified into the framework of USAID itself. Pretty disturbing imo
Opaque, non-standard internal accounting is usually something you see with fraud cases in large organizations. Some may claim it makes things easier to account for in a way like you describe in the post, like we have a way of doing X thing, we’ll just standardize that in our accounting so we don’t have to do onerous accounting work for X thing every time it comes up. But in the end this makes looking into the actual accounting harder and means anyone on the “outside” like an IG is at a distinct disadvantage in looking for fraud. It doesn’t just make fraud easier, it can trivialize it. This doesn’t mean that those using standard accounting don’t suffer widespread fraud (or the risk of it) i.e. the U.S. military. It just means that anytime someone avoids standard accounting practices (of which there are really only a handful in widespread use globally), we should be highly skeptical.
> I hear a lot about how USAID is funding foreign journalists to be really liberal, but it looks like all “democracy and human rights” grants combined - the category that this would fall into - are 2-5% of the budget (and this category also includes a lot of things like election observers).
I hear that they issue scholarships to underrepresented women in permaculture, so I'm pretty sure there must be a lot of waste there somewhere.
>For some of us, it’s when people kill millions of children.
Who is killing millions of people, and how exactly? This piece has an implicit accusation of MURDER in it, but I think I would have seen it on the news if Musk or Trump had gone around the third world with AK47s or whatnot.
Choosing not to give away free stuff in perpetuity is not killing people. Sure, it's probably a good idea to jump into the pond to save the drowning person, but that doesn't mean you have to quit your job and become a volunteer 24/7 lifeguard. If entire polities are failing at simply doing what being a human is, it's not our fault, it's theirs.
I think if there is a child on life support, and I break into the hospital and disconnect the life support, I have killed him.
I agree there is an argument that we should use some more neutral term, like "directly caused the end of their life", for things that are legal, and especially for things where someone ends aid that they themselves provided. I don't think that Trump/Rubio/Musk is an example of this, because Congress legally granted the aid, and Trump/Rubio/Musk illegally stopped it without asking them.
Is there any off ramp of US taxpayer funded medical charitable giving that you would find acceptable? Would you be more comfortable if we immediately, with no exceptions whatsoever, stopped taking on additional patients or providing additional services, but maintained our current offerings until our current charitable recipients die?
I'm in favor of charity, but I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy or even a murderer just for choosing to give away slightly less free money. If every dollar in aid is just us volunteering to be more of a villain I'd rather just not bother. I don't think the "you must do the thing you clearly don't want to do or you're killing millions of people" is a winning argument in favor of USAID, nobody wants to be preached to and made to feel like a bad guy.
You could keep funding health programs until HIV is eradicated or suppressed to near-zero levels, something which we were on track to achieve in a few decades. You could also keep funding aid until undeveloped countries become developed countries and no longer require such extensive support, another thing that could be the case within 50 years and is accelerated by foreign aid. As you note, an earlier point to cease aid without arousing offense would be to fill out current contracts while declining all renewals, instead of defunding all operations without warning as actually happened.
An easy way to avoid being accused of murder for defunding foreign aid is to not defund foreign aid. If you would like the United States to be looked up to instead of villainized, the quickest way to do this would be to increase funding to the department that gives hundreds of millions of people boxes of food and medicine labeled "From the American people".
Why are you so desperate to reclaim this particular 0.3% of the federal budget? What is your reason for singling out this section of the government over all others, most of which have much higher budgets?
"America" in the collective is not, near as I can tell, the proximate entity receiving the blame for what happened with USAID-- these were the actions of a few very specific people, acting in a way that went against the will of the American people when you directly ask them about it (i.e. PEPFAR in specific and "how much foreign aid should we have in our budget" more broadly) and represented an extremely callous and outcome-indifferent approach towards institutional reform.
The reality we live in is radically different from this hypothetical one where an administration asked to have a thoughtful public discussion about how to reform its aid-giving process, and then got finger-wagged for even considering such a thing.
Trump did not even make a campaign promise to end all foreign aid, or to destroy USAID, so the American people did not even meaningfully vote for this.
Just for starters, the Administration could ask Congress not to include medical charitable giving in it's budget. Thus would be the legal way to do it. I would still call that immoral, but the word "murder" would no longer apply.
> I'm in favor of charity, but I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy or even a murderer just for choosing to give away slightly less free money.
That's only partly the problem. "America is being treated as immoral" only because of *why* it's doing this. If Trump's administration scaled back aid because it showed the targets were met and less aid would do just as much, no one would care. But the justification is fundamentally a sociopathic one - foreigners shouldn't get charity from the US. In the place of charitable giving for humanitarian (and soft power) reasons is...nothing, because it bothers some people to hear that pennies they wouldn't even notice had immense positive impact on others.
Legally, Congress could refuse to fund it in their next budget, or pass a law stripping funding. This would generally come with an end of service date six months or more in the future, which would make it much easier for other organizations to pick up any of the slack.
> I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy [...] just for choosing to give away slightly less free money
1. As Scott already implied, "America" didn't choose, but a handful of individuals including Musk who was not elected, nor confirmed by the Senate, nor empowered legally, and in court filings isn't the head of the organization whose name isn't actually DOGE[1][2].
2. "Slightly less" is exactly why it's so outrageous. If Musk sacrifices 300,000 lives to save 1% of GDP, that would be one thing, but 0.1% is another thing. (Edited. Google tells me USAID spent $21.7 billion in fiscal year 2024, which is less than 0.1% and I have heard that less than half of that is actually needed to save the lives in question. I thought I saw a 7-figure number of lives saved by USAID, but I didn't find that page again when I went looking for it. Instead I found this dashboard[3], which is confusing because on one hand it projects about 300,000 deaths caused by funding discontinuation, but separately, on the table, clearly shows a larger number of "1-Yr" deaths on rows marked "terminated". We should also consider that USAID isn't just about saving lives, but also about economic development and quality of life, so lives are not the only things being lost.)
It's a different scenario, if say, it was TRM blocking the Gates foundation from providing charity. But in this case the money came from Americans collectively, not from the pockets of Congress. Congress granted the aid on behalf of Americans, and TRM stopped it on behalf of Americans.
Condemning the voluntary cessation of charity is a bad precedence to set because it sets the expectation that all charity are perpetual commitments, which increases the barrier to giving in the first place.
Scott's comment is talking about the distinction between killing people legally and killing them illegally. Given that the executive branch does not, in the United States, have the option to decline to spend funds that were allocated by Congress, that means that the elimination of USAID isn't legal, so any killing that comes from it is illegal killing.
I don't think he's condemning the voluntary cessation of charity in general - the comment is only condemning it when it's illegal.
They aren't being robbed at gunpoint in the first place.
A democratic government funding itself with taxation, is not an equivalent of robbing people at gunpoint... no matter what the extreme libertarian right/left say. Its a collective decision we all contribute too.
Introducing an illegal act as the first stage of your analogy breaks the symmetry that Scott's analogy has with the real world.
In his there is a lawful act keeping someone alive, that is stopped by an unlawful act. That's what makes it equivalent to murder. That symmetry is preserved across his analogy and the real world actions.
Congress levying taxation, and legally distributing the money is that initial lawful act..... Impoundment by the Trump administration of those allocated funds, without congressional agreement, is the latter unlawful act that kills.
To preserve the symmetry in your analogy it would require proving that congress passing laws on taxation is illegal. Its not. You can't have that initial illegal act in your analogy, its not symmmetrical with the real world situation. That renders the rest of your analogy entirely moot.
If an immoral action is justified by the democratic process, then regardless of the morality of Trump's actions, it is justified - he won the election.
I'm not sure you understand how the system works - Congress did not pass a law that said $10 million should be spent on life support. Congress passed a law saying that said $10 million should be spent how the president likes. And the president thinks it should be given back to the people - so the collective decision is AGAINST you, not for you.
To be clear, I dont agree with the premise that democracy makes taxation moral - that would require freedom to unassociate from that democracy, which America does not have.
There is an genuine consequentialist argument here that could be made here, but an appeal to a democratic process that ruled against you is not it.
Edit: If you would like a more "accurate" analogy:
9 people have a vote. 5 people vote to hire a person to rob all of them at gunpoint for varying amounts, some of which will be spent on life support, with the amounts to be decided by one of them, again decided by a vote.
Later, they have a vote and the majority appoint a person who openly believes they should stop robbing them (and thus funding life support).
Are they killing the people who are on life support? Who is doing the killing here if so?
>If an immoral action is justified by the democratic process...
Absolutely, what would normally be an "immoral" action is absolutely rendered legal and often moral by the democratic process.
If I take money from you without your permission, that's theft. If a democratically governed country uses its legal processes to do so that's taxation, or possibly a fine.
If I lock you up and refuse to let you go, that's kidnapping. If a democratically governed country does so according to its legal processes, that's imprisonment.
>.... then regardless of the morality of Trump's actions, it is justified - he won the election.
No, that does not follow. Trump wasn't elected king, he was elected president.
That means he has to follow the laws, and one of those laws is that congress decides where and when to spend taxed money.... and the president cannot decide not to do so if congress has authorised the spend. Thats "impoundment".
So him being elected president does NOT mean he can just refuse to fund USAID. Congress has to do that, and the fact that they didn't is what makes Trumps action illegal.
Just as whilst arresting you for a crime and imprisoning you according to the laws of the land is legal.... that doesn't mean a cop can arrest you and bang you up for 20 years because he decided you deserve it.
The correct process and law must be followed. If its not, goes back to being illegal/immoral. That cop is "kidnapping" and not "imprisoning" because he didn't follow the law and process.... What Trump did is impoundment and illegal on the same basis.
>I'm not sure you understand how the system works - Congress did not pass a law that said $10 million should be spent on life support. Congress passed a law saying that said $10 million should be spent how the president likes.
NO. I am very sure YOU do not understand the law. Congress does not (or at least did not in this instance) pass a law saying the president can spend $10m where he likes.
They appropriated $10m for the purpose of spending on a certain programme within USAID (say PEPFAR, or perhaps some "Food to Country X" programme) and it is legally bound to be spent on that exact programme. Thats what budgets and appropriations are. Instructions to the executive that congress has specified this money is to be spent in this way. It is the presidents job to "take care that this law was faithfully executed" and spend it as directed. He's not a king. He is there to "execute" the laws and directions of congress (at least as far as budget appropriations are concerned). He can veto the "entire budget" but he can't "veto" any line of the budget he wants. Its an all or nothing deal. He does not have any "line item veto".
Congress does devolve some spending to the presidents discretion. This is known as the "discretionary budget" and shows in the WH budget as discretionary spending, but this is a small part of the total, and neither USAID nor PEPFAR nor a lot of other executive agencies are funded from this budget, they're funded by congressional appropriations for a specific purpose. In not spending the funds allocated for those specific purposes Trump is acting illegally, specifically he is "Impounding" those funds.
>Impoundment is an act by a President of the United States of not spending money that has been appropriated by the U.S. Congress. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to exercise the power of impoundment in 1801. The power was available to all presidents up to and including Richard Nixon, and was regarded as a power inherent to the office, although one with limits. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed in response to high impoundments under President Nixon.[1] The Act removed that power, and Train v. City of New York (whose facts predate the 1974 Act, but which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court after its passage) closed potential loopholes in the 1974 Act.[citation needed] The president's ability to indefinitely reject congressionally approved spending was thus removed.[2]
The law's still in force.
>To be clear, I dont agree with the premise that democracy makes taxation moral - that would require freedom to unassociate from that democracy, which America does not have.
Um, pretty sure it does. You can move abroard and renounce US citizenship.
Once you've completed all the forms you pay file your final Tax return and you're done.
>There is an genuine consequentialist argument here that could be made here, but an appeal to a democratic process that ruled against you is not it.
It didn't rule against USADI/PEPFAR. Those appropriations were made by congress. The democratic process agreed that spending. Its illegal for Trump to impound it.
>[Your 2nd Analogy]
Again, this falls down in the fact that its not symmetric with reality.
5 people did not cote to be robbed at gunpoint.
9 people agreed to a system of taxation and spending of that money via the use of a democratic process, they all had the option to opt-out by revoking citizenship but declined and agreed to the deal where they'd all vote and abide by the result.
They voted, with differing views on the amount of taxation and the spending of that money. A majority of 5 won the vote. The government taxed them in the way democratically agreed, and spent it as democratically agreed.
One official in the govt did not like this solution. He didn't have the power to change it. Indeed, the legislative had specifically passed a law saying "This official can't just take away this money, that's illegal" targeting that officials office directly.
Despite that law the official took the money away and did not spend it as agreed by the democratic process, saying he disagreed with the result.
Doing so killed a few hundred thousand people on life support.
By the way US law works, and also ethically/morally, that's Murder.
You "Do an illegal act".... People die as a result of the direct consequences of that illegal act.... that's pretty much Murder I. Or it would be if the illegal act is a felony. Not sure if impoundment is a felony.
In any case. (to go back to your original analogy). It wasn't an illegal act (the robbery at gunpoint) countered by a legal act (refusing to spend the money on life support)..... but the exact opposite. A legal act (taxation) where the cutting off of life support is explicitly illegal (Presidential Impoundment).
Yeah, if someone who consistently wants to abolish taxes and all or nearly all government makes this argument, I think I will believe it is sincere. If someone who wants other tax-funded government programs to continue makes this argument about one he dislikes, it's pretty obvious that he's not making it in good faith.
You have a process you can follow to not pay taxes. (revoking your citizenship and exiting the US). Even anarchists can do so.
By not following that process, you are agreeing to the taxation. Its a voluntary exchange... just as someone parking their car in a "paid parking" spot agrees to that exchange.
If this is "taking money at gunpoint" then all monetary exchanges are "taking money at gunpoint". In so far, as non-payment of any agreed upon exchange can be followed to the point at which someone turns up with a gun to escort you to jail.
I know anarchists like to claim the opposite, but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you are able to revoke citizenship/exit the US.
I didn't park my car in a "paid parking" spot, I was born in the US. Other monetary exchanges aren't like that at all, because I seek them out, and for larger sums (on the scale of taxation) they are for contractually specified products/services. The US government simply takes whatever they decide upon, and they don't have any contractual obligation to provide any service in return for taxation. SCOTUS has explicitly ruled that government agencies whose job is supposed to be protecting people cannot be sued for not doing that https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again Fitting with that, David Gross stopped paying federal income taxes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AskPyNg6hHP6SrmEy/redirecting-one-s-own-taxes-as-an-effective-altruism-method and lost no government services as a result because there is no relationship between an individual's taxes and services, and thus he's not going to get "cut off" like a customer who won't pay their tab.
Oh, I did not know the Trump administration was our first anarchist goverment! Time to tell everyone that the borders are open because any tax necessary to fund ICE would be robbery, which this admin would never commit!
You want an analogy that preserve anarchist ethics without being misleading about the facts, it's Don Corleone dies and his son keeps the extortion racket going, spends even more money in lavish parties for his wiseguys (contracting loans to be financed by future exhortions), but cancels the periodic donation his father used to make to the children's hospital.
It's hard to not conclude that as bad as you think Corleone Sr. was, Corleone Jr. is *worse*
If a "hospital" does not pay the bills for water/electricity, and then gets disconnected - and then patients die - who is the killer? The utilities - who had delivered without pay for some months? More likely the hospital-admin, maybe stingy customers, maybe the Greens/NIMBYs who made electricity more expensive. Or a virus.
Also: Last time I looked, there were ways to catch HIV. And ways to avoid it.
Anyways: I do hope PEPFAR et al. come back. Preferably funded by Gates. I do hope less tax money goes to woke or feel-good causes. And as those wokeys caused much of the present backlash: Call them the killers, if one must.
"And as those wokeys caused much of the present backlash: Call them the killers, if one must."
No, sorry, Trump did it. You can't say "the woke made me mad, therefore I had to kill a bunch of kids." The woke can make you as mad as it wants, defunding PEPFAR without Congressional approval is Trump's own personal evil.
Wokeys are just one of six suggestion. If none of USAID had gone to "diversity", cutting it would be a harder sell. - If Trump as the elected presidents says: "I withhold funding of projects abroad", that is legit (as long as it is - if elected congress said the funding must not be withheld, different story). I refuse to accept this "murderer" howls. Yes, life-saving medicine saves lives. Not my job nor my gov. obligation to pay for medicine in countries far away. If we do: praiseworthy. I we do not: shrug.
Say, if Musk went: "oops, I did not mean to disrupt PEPFAR, I will pay it out of my pocket the next 2 years" -would you then put his poster on your wall? He just saved the lives of "millions" of innocent babies and their maybe innocent mothers!!! Nope. You wanna hate. Do. I dislike Trump. A lot. Mostly, because I do care about Ukraine. But he is neither a murderer for halting PEPFAR nor for halting help to Ukraine (for a month). Both wrong. But: The murderer in the one case is Putin. In the other: AIDS+guys who do not care+their crap-gov..
Who cries "Trump kills kids in Africa" is just a Trump-hater who found a fine slogan. Not saving nobody. Not even trying.
PEPFAR is set up by statute. If it was ended by statute, I would be very unhappy with that, but there is a difference between that and routing around Congress. If Congress authorized a massive aid package to Ukraine, and then the President just said "nah I'm not gonna give it lol" - not as like, it'll take a month longer than expected, or we need to double check the contents, or whatever, just arbitrarily declaring he's not going to do it, period, for fun - he would be murdering Ukrainians, in the same way somebody who breaks into a hospital and unplugs people from lifesaving machines is.
> Say, if Musk went: "oops, I did not mean to disrupt PEPFAR, I will pay it out of my pocket the next 2 years" -would you then put his poster on your wall?
Yes, I would stop hating his guts for murdering babies if he did that. (I never put his face on my wall.) This specific sin dwarfs all his others to an unimaginable degree, and I would grit my teeth about his extremely stupid political opinions and agree that he was a basically good person who was perhaps misguided on some issues.
PEPFAR is an issue I genuinely care about. I understand as a person who tries to blame "the woke" for the actions Republicans voluntarily and actively take when they control the House, Senate, Presidency, and SCOTUS, it's hard for you to understand. But I actually care about PEPFAR, period, period, period. It is one of a very small handful of issues I have actually written to my Congresspeople about. I post and talk about it. I talked about it back in 2023 when it looked like it might not get renewed. This is not some fun partisan thing where I just stake out a position because it helps my side win. I care about PEPFAR, specifically. I think Bush 2 was the best President of my lifetime specifically because he did PEPFAR, it had such a major and clear positive effect, and it almost certainly would not have happened without him.
I respect your position. (Stating "I think Bush 2 was the best President of my lifetime specifically because he did PEPFAR" passes Caplan's mood test.) Hoping PEPFAR comes back. And sure, Trump is the worst POTUS I have seen in my life-time.
Hear, hear. MR was the only blog on my Favorites tab but I’ve noticed lately (perhaps more than lately) this curdling of Tyler’s reasoning & in fact performative obsession with niche facts as a way to demonstrate some sort of exalted comprehension beyond us plebs that’s made him obtusely dense & insufferably smug.
It is insofar as a lot of people read Cowen and pointing out his bullshit possibly has practical importance. Just because it's the same "Putin as a man of ideas" and "SBF reduces the status of single men in their 30s" and "UFOs are probably space aliens" guy doesn't mean it isn't worth debunking him.
The argument, as I understood it, was that the NGO complex is too ideological and not focused on doing the best it can in terms of efficacy. Some programs and the existence proof were shown as an example of this.
Now, the folks I know I'm the sector have widely varying views about it, from "so counterproductive it's a net loss" to "is no worse than any company and the only way to do things". In either case it's less of an actual loss that's easily quantifiable ("they stole the 15% of the budget for parties in Abuja") and more likely they did $1 of good with $3 of resources, and many things just didn't get done. The invisible graveyard of ideas, if you will.
None of which is to say I support cutting USAID off as if it was meaningless. But that the discussion around it seems to say "show me the grift or otherwise it's pristine" is missing he point. It's like saying IBM is a very well run company because we can't see someone stealing mainframes out the front door.
Which programs were shown as examples of this? I haven't seen any examples from Tyler, and the examples I've seen from Trump/Musk/Rubio are both false, and, even if they were true, would be 0.01% of USAID's budget.
I think the average person opposed to USAID in fact thinks they were stealing the money for parties (or something equally flagrant), and that it's useful to argue this isn't happening. Once people lower their concern to "might not be the most effective use of charity dollars", we can have that discussion.
But also, as far as I can tell, USAID is, in fact, extremely efficient in terms of how it uses charity dollars. We all know global health is among the most effective causes. The humanitarian stuff - responses to natural disasters and so on - also seems pretty effective, maybe not in a pure utilitarian sense but I don't begrudge normal people for caring more about someone starving to death after a hurricane than about shaving 0.1% off malaria death rates, even if the latter is technically "more efficient". I'm not qualified to judge the governance stuff, but helping Ukraine continue to have a government right now seems pretty defensible too. Everything that isn't in that category is too small to bring down overall efficiency numbers even if it was 0% efficient, and the anecdotes (admittedly just anecdotes) I've heard about it suggest it's plenty efficient for what it is.
My guess is that the average USAID dollar goes much further than the average private charity dollar (simply because it's more likely to be spent on global health), and approximately the same distance as a cause-matched private charity dollar. I think the people who disagree should provide some kind of evidence that this isn't true, but I don't think we've even gotten there because the people who disagree are so far just lying and saying it's all wild parties and transgender operas.
> I think the average person opposed to USAID in fact thinks they were stealing the money for parties (or something equally flagrant), and that it's useful to argue this isn't happening. Once people lower their concern to "might not be the most effective use of charity dollars", we can have that discussion.
We agree rather violently here, including the fact that the average person is so misinformed as to be useless even as a weight filler in a prediction market.
My point is that the skeptics, some of them at least, have a different set of assumptions that are not easily falsifiable using budgets. They think the
One of my best friends works in Gaza. I regularly ask him to please leave and move elsewhere where I don't have to worry about him getting shelled. He doesn't. But last time I met him, a month ago, he did complain a ton about overt and covert influences that the US govt makes, either as concessions to dei or equivalent, that makes his job harder. (He also, by the way, argues against the cutting off of it because the soft power is enormously important.) I love the guy but I take it with a pinch of salt of course, however it demonstrated that the arguments people are making are, in a way, existential or structural, not just procedural. Hence the “burn it all down and rebuild” energy.
You are blowing off the failures because they are a small proportion of the budget, but they do suggest to me a profound lack of judgement and/or oversight. If you can get transgender operas and Iraqi Sesame Street funded, I have to seriously question the ability of the organization to at the very least, manage its PR.
It kinda reminds me of the Penn State professor that was letting his dog lick his anus in the park. He was by all accounts a great guy, standout professor, brilliant engineer. But I'm just not going to trust the guy with anything, even if the dog anus licking is a small part of his overall time budget.
It's pretty bad that everyone judges USAID on fake things, and even when they're told about a bunch of real good things, they're so angry about the fake ones that they say it doesn't matter.
I suggest you look at any large organization you consider good and effective - Google, Tesla, Mossad - and you will be able to find at least one thing that seems dumb and wasteful. Make that ten things if it's anywhere close to a government. I don't think "never spends even a small percent of budget on things that look bad to a hostile observer" is a fair/attainable thing to judge an organization on.
(for the record, although an Iraqi Sesame Street would hardly be effective altruism and is not what I would spend money on, it doesn't seem to me like a completely disqualifying example of ridiculous charity. Early childhood educational programming seems potentially positive, the government funds US Sesame Street, and there's a lot of research suggesting it has useful developmental effects - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_research - although I am too genetics-pilled to really believe it)
The state department funding this does not exactly make me comfortable about the fate of my tax dollars in general, so I'm less inclined to trust even more fringe agencies. I realize there is a mix of real/fake/exaggerated in the mix of things that reach the press, but Iraqi Sesame Street completely undermines public confidence in the decision making of the agency.
You know that the "useful development effects" are not effective altruism in this case. More to the point, the potential PR disaster associated with spending tax dollars on this should be immediately apparent to the people who run things.
The fact things like this slip by suggests ideological capture. To be clear, I don't think these things are a big deal, and I believe you that USAID does effective work. The critical thing here is BELIEVE. The information sources I trust deem this agency effective; I will never be able to verify this myself. This is a real constraint on the ability to do effective charity with a government agency, not something that can be hand waved away.
As a non-American I am completely baffled by the argument here. Important intellectual background is that I'm fundamentally against the US project, call me "anti-American" in outlook if you want, for reasons of disliking the monoculture, plus the Iraq War was a Bad Idea, plus all that Chomsky stuff.
Nonetheless, I grew up with Sesame Street on my TV as a kid, and obviously it had a huge propaganda effect on everything from how my peers pronounce the letter 'z', exposure to "what does New York look like", how should people interact, any number of things like that. Every child who grew up watching Sesame Street is in some sense more American, more acculturated to American values, and correspondingly less British, Australian, Canadian, Iraqi.
Especially given the, ahem, recent history of US engagement in Iraq -- From a brutal realpolitik perspective, funding Iraqi Sesame Street seems to me like the kind of obvious no-shit incredibly simple cheap win propaganda victory that every American taxpayer should be completely on board with. Compared to how cheap the input is, the output effect is enormous when considered over time, even if it's only being seen by the children of the 10,000 richest most urban elitist families in the country, whose kids will grow up to go to Harvard and make connections with oil company CEOs of the future, or whatever.
It may surprise you, but US, ahem, policy in Iraq over the past two decades is extremely unpopular with the American public. Most of us view the attempt to change Iraqi culture as a contemptible overreach at cultural domination (from the left) or simply a pathetic failure (from the right).
Going from "shock and awe" to Sesame Street is just a reminder of the increasingly pathetic attempt to remake Iraqi society as a western country . Again, you have to win the PR battle, even if it is stupid.
Tyler is a retweeter, nothing much more. He aggregates interesting content that you can then conveniently click through. He is not a careful or rigorous thinker and where he makes his own arguments I know to expect not much.
I don't think Tyler is in this camp, but I do think a lot of opponents to USAID are just against US taxpayer dollars going to foreign aid at all. Even in a world where USAID operated completely perfectly they would still be against it. For these people cancelling everything is of course a win - they wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And when they discuss high overheads or corruption or funding woke nonsense, they're really just working optics to get the rest of us to focus on the bathwater.
Tyler does seems to have fallen victim to this narrative framing. Rather than a post about how PEPFAR shouldn't have been cancelled (with a concession about USAID also having some waste) its a post about how USAID has waste (with a concession that maybe PEPFAR shouldn't have been cancelled).
Obviously those people exist, since you can find a bunch of them in the comments of this and the previous post, stating clearly that this is their position. But I suspect that they're somewhat marginal. In particular, in order to hold this position, you have to both lack empathy and be scope-insensitive.
To elaborate on the latter point, I have a certain amount of respect for the position that cutting U.S. government spending is an urgent moral priority, even though I don't think I agree. But from this perspective, foreign aid is a dumb thing to focus on, simply because we don't spend that much on it, so even reducing it to zero wouldn't really move the needle on the overall deficit. You'd have to basically believe in a deontological prohibition against spending taxpayer money on foreigners, and again, some people do, but it's weird and fringe.
The cynical take is that the foreign aid cuts are a trial balloon; if they aren't blocked by the courts or otherwise forcibly backpedaled on, then that's a sign that it's safe to start cutting things that actually matter. And if they are, then the political consequences won't be too severe since the median voter doesn't feel very protective of foreign aid.
Most pro-cuts sentiment, of course, is coming from people who aren't especially well-informed about the issue and are just going off vibes.
You can also have some principled idea of what is and is not a legitimate job of the federal government, and believe that charity to foreigners is not one of those jobs. You can believe that even while thinking charity to foreigners is good overall. I just think if that's the argument you want to make, you should make it directly and not pretend that you are cutting the program you always wanted to cut for ideological reasons because of the extraordinary amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in that program.
Cutting charitable foreign aid isn't something I "focus on". It's just one of a number of positions I hold. It follows directly from thinking that the government exists only to do things that the private sector (including charities) can't.
> “Oh, have you been to 570 different countries? Have you eaten a burrito prepared by an Ethiopian camel farmer with under-recognized talent? Have you read 800 million books, then made a post about each one consisting of a randomly selected paragraph followed by the words ‘this really makes you think, for those of you paying attention’?”
Holy shit, this is spicy.
I'm not a long time reader of Tyler's, but I have noticed that he often is pretty flippant about stuff and this annoys me. Some of it seems to be personality, and god knows it's probably personally better to be that way. I have to assume he isn't that way about his own areas of expertise though. And when it carries over to other important things like the current topic or AI it's really jarring.
I'm not even sure what his area of expertise is. He has a history of getting economics way wrong, not even understanding the underlying ideas (e.g. this https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/no-one-wants-to-talk-about-the-liquidity-trap-any-more.html). He once dismissed economists using "exotic" multiple equilibrium models to explain the Great Recession... literally every DSGE model is a multiple equilibrium model, including the most basic New Keynesian model.
In other areas his knowledge seems to come from skimming through the introductory chapter of books as quickly as possible and assuming he's better read because of it.
Like someone else said, he's good at finding interesting links and not much more. But even now a disproportionate number of those links are AI fluff (e.g. linking to Blanchard saying "DeepSeek and what happened yesterday: Probably the largest positive one day change in the present discounted value of total factor productivity growth in the history of the world.")
25 years ago or so, Tyler Cowen was a real breath of fresh air who had interesting ideas and could walk you through how he'd come to acquire them. Today he's mostly a lazy pundit whose thinking is no better than the typical op-ed page and usually much sloppier. What happened? My guess is that too many people told him how brilliant he is and he started to believe it and to believe also that he no longer needed to think but could just be oracular or, worse, vaguely aphoristic in a "Straussian" (closer to "Nostradamian" in execution) way.
So, Scott: you're presumably also surrounded by people who are impressed by your interesting ideas and careful reasoning and occasionally cannot help themselves but tell you how brilliant you are. How do you plan to avoid this failure mode, or, since you've been at this game a while now, how have you managed to avoid it?
I believe Scott to be more autistically devoted to truth-seeking and ethical norms of debate than Tyler. That is the most parsimonious way to describe their differences. Completely agree with you re:
the impact of being continuously flattered, or even simply continuously successful.
I don't actually know anything about American foreign aid in general or USAID in particular, but I feel in the interest of fairness that the Mike Benz perspective should be represented (this perspective is very common among Twitter/X users and is endorsed by Elon Musk himself) which is that USAID is largely a soft power operation with some minimal human rights overlay to sugarcoat it.
"And I think the calls for reform are going to get louder and louder as people realize the reality that's been constructed around them is downstream of something that was started very long ago when American statecraft, to manage the American empire for the benefit of the American people began to warp and distort every institution in American life, from the media to now the social media companies, to the unions, to the universities and academics, to the NGOs and think tanks, to the prosecutors, to our conception of terrorism, to our conception of activity in the drug trade, to our, you know, what we're really doing with public health programs and the medical establishment and what drives that all the way into poverty relief, and you name it. I mean, every institution is instrumentalized by this apparatus, supposedly to help us, but really starting this has been done in US history before. This happened against the left, against the democrats in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA and its sister orgs like USAID and whatnot were pumping money into domestic politics to stop the anti Vietnam War movement. And this led to the reforms of the late 1970s, the church committee hearing, the Pike Committee hearing, the establishment of a Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee, Committee for Oversight. But even that was a very small glimpse into the window."
"What is USAID authorized to do under statute? Well, something they call judicial reform, which is USAID poaching funding financially the networks around judges, around courts, around the legal system, around the governance structure of every country on planet Earth. I mean Jamie, if you want to just go through a fun exercise right now, you can even put on screen just a simple Google search so people can see just how open source this is. And I can walk through specific damning examples of this. But if you just type in on Google the word USAID and then in a Boolean quotes judicial reform and what you're going to see are basically 100 countries that USAID is going after, the judges going after the legal system in order to rig the scales of justice in favor of the foreign policy establishment's interest there.
"And this has fully come home. And I can go through some examples of this. For example, there's a group called the OCCRP which you can think of as the Corruption Reporting Project. This is a group that half of its funding comes from USAID and the US State Department. [...] They do investigative hit piece journalism about corruption. And what they do is they go after all of the State Department and USAID and DOD's opponents in the region."
"[...] you'll see USA spending, USAID spending, USAID funding is $20 million. $20 million that our taxpayers paid to every. Listen, they don't report on, you know, kittens being saved from falling out of trees. Everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption that can be used by prosecutors in the area to arrest the political opponents of the State Department. [...] This is USAID, the US Government bragging about the achievements of what they achieved by spending $20 million, at least 4.5 billion in fines levied against targets of these hit pieces. Now by the way, I should note that the head of the OCCRP was busted in a major documentary that has very little distribution. But I encourage everyone to watch where he said because this was, this was I think a year and a half ago or whatnot, but they're up to over $10 billion now.
ROGAN: What's the documentary?
BENZ: It's on the WikiLeaks X page right now. It's by a group of German journalists who had one on one interviews with the head of this group OCCRP as well as the USAID grant coordinator and others. So it's straight from the horse's mouth. And they say, he says in that interview, I believe his name is Drew Sullivan, that It's now over $10 billion. And he brags that that is a, I think he said it was a 20,000% return on investment because all these dollars were returned to government coffers. So for $20 million of mercenary media for the state, state sponsored hit pieces, the government's got $10 billion back. That's a 1995 Amazon level return on investment. But now let's get into the darker stuff. 548 policy changes by the government or actions by civil society in the private sector. Now we don't know if these policy changes are good or bad. Do you think USAID would list them as accomplishments if they were not in furtherance of USAID's or the state Department's foreign policy goals in the region? What they are saying and trying to sort of speak through their teeth as they say it, is that they proudly sponsored hit piece journalism to ruin people's lives and go after political targets in order to change the policies of foreign governments from the inside.
Now it goes on to say 21 resignations and sackings including of a president and prime minister. Now the head of OCCRP in this documentary openly says that their reporting caused, I think it was five or six different governments to topple and turn over and be transitioned. So this is state sponsored media hit pieces so that prosecutors can arrest presidents and prime ministers to regime change their government and install a more pro US political vassal figure in the region. And then the Last one is 456 arrests and indictments. And this again is listed as a USAID achievement. We don't know what these people did. We don't know whether they're guilty or innocent or whether or not these were political prosecutions like you see right now with the New York District Attorney's office, which is a whole other USAID connected can of worms. But these are state sponsored hit pieces for hire in order to give the Justice Departments, the prosecutors in a region, the ammunition to arrest the enemies of the state."
"Most of the worst scandals of U.S. statecraft and covert action in the past two decades have actually been from USAID rather than CIA. And there's, there's a reason for this. So after the big scandals against the Democrats and liberals and anti war groups in the 60s and 70s, reforms are put in place. And some of this goes back to the 40s itself. But every covert action the CIA does has to be authorized by the President in what's called a presidential finding, to take that covert action. So if the CIA senior leadership, or just a rogue cell that's not even at the top of leadership, but just a rogue desk, a rogue portfolio, a rogue network wants to run a covert action in a region, but they don't think the President will approve, or the President doesn't want to formally sign off on it in case it goes wrong, they can walk right over to USAID who can do the exact same thing the CIA does, except they can call it discreet democracy promotion because it's not technically an intelligence agency, so it's not technically covert action. So it doesn't require executive branch approval or foreknowledge."
"And they've gotten in trouble in these cases in some pretty incredible ways. Can I show that, please? So let's start with even the whitewashed version. Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo [...] This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. Now we were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. By the way, I have to say for the record, I'm no fan of the Cuban government and I'm not even weighing in on whether it's the right or wrong thing to do in terms of regime change there or, you know, liberating people there from autocratic excess by that government. I'm simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House. It was an online social networking microblogging service created by USAID and marketed to Cuban users. This was a Twitter knockoff.
See the background of this is, this is 2009, 2014. That period the State Department and USAID were gangbusters, gung ho on the promise of Arab Spring style social media revolutions to topple other governments. The Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution and a Twitter revolution. USAID pumped $1.2 billion in and we sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to use in order to create those a pro democracy predicate for it. But the problem was at the time, Cuba did not allow US social media in. So they said, hmm, so they're not allowing Twitter in. How can we get a Twitter there but without calling it Twitter, without making it look like it's coming from the US?
So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like and retweet button. Zunzunio is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So it means it's bird. It was the Twitter bird, the whole thing. But the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it's coming from the Cubans if you're going to do this operation. So what you'll see is it began running. So this is 2010, this is right during the Arab Spring. And what you'll see is they took funds, millions of dollars of funds that were concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan. [...] So they concealed in the budget from Senate, from Congress, from the White House, National Security Council. They said that these were humanitarian funds for Pakistan and then they ran that to their contractor CAI to quote, set up a byzantine system of front companies using Cayman Islands bank accounts and recruiting unsuspecting business executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US Government.
[...] It's humanitarian work for, you know, that's we're saving lives by doing this. But the whole point is once they hit a critical mass, they would create rental riots and they would use this the same way they used it in Egypt and Tunisia to topple those governments under the Obama administration. They would organize smart mobs rental riots. [...] Mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or as one USA document put it, renegotiate the balance of power between state and society. And, you know, so one more thing. If you want to look up on this, you see how they conceal it. If you just type in USAID Zanzanillo and discrete or discrete action, and you'll see how USAID, when this scandal popped off, everyone said, what the hell? How did this happen? This is classic CIA work. You're using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You're saying you're earmarking it for Pakistani aid. This has clear implications for US Statecraft if this gets busted."
"Last week, Elon Musk held an X space directly with Senator Joni Ernst, who has been on this crusade to reform USAID excesses. And there's a really scandalous moment there where Senator Ernst revealed that she was actually threatened by USAID when she tried to get insight into what they were actually doing. [...] There was a formal hearing on this for oversight of what happened. And what the staffers said is staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is supposed to be the thing that reins in, that gives the American people oversight and accountability for USAID gone rogue. And what the Senate staffers overseeing USAID said is we had no visibility on this entire operation the entire time because USAID told us if they had to tell us what we were doing, people could die. This is classic CIA stuff. But the Senate was blocked. And I should note again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to usaid. This is why these drug operations and these terrorist operations run primarily through USAID rather than directly at the CIA."
"BENZ: If a bank did it, you would go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not have liberty again for the next 20 years of your life. But if USAID does it, it's completely legal right now. And so this is how you have USAID giving they just last week $122 million to ISIS. We found they fund all the terrorist groups in Pakistan. They fund the terrorist groups in the Sahel in Africa.
ROGAN: And for what purpose?
BENZ: Paramilitary terrorist groups are extremely useful to US statecraft for DoD special operations work as well as for political destabilization work. [...] U.S. national Security Adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. Could you pause for a sec? Notice how he said he wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. Okay. The whole point was to pump up this, you know, fundamentalist, extremist terrorist group with the funding and support they need, but without revealing America's role.
[...] We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right and God is on your side. That land is yours. Go out there and take it. We'll give you the money."
"But also, how did we fund the Mujahideen? Well, the Mujahideen is in Afghanistan. They were before they became Al Qaeda and ISIS. What asset does Afghanistan have to play with in order to fund its war network, its paramilitary network? Well, it's the drug network. They happen to sit on the, you know, so basically the poppy fields that, when exploited, comprise 95% of the world's heroin, if you export that. And so the CIA backed State Department, USAID backed. And we can go through receipts of USAID doing the same drugs for cash, for guns work in the 1960s, practically from the day it was born. But what they were doing is they were taking those poppy harvests and then they were depositing them in CIA proprietary banks like bcci, the bank of Credit and Commerce International. Everyone can look this up. Or if you want to plug in CIA, BCCI and look at all the mainstream media reporting on this. It was a major, major, major scandal. It become one of the world's largest banks. And it was basically a CIA front and it was a Pakistani frontman for this. And it was converting, effectively washing the proceeds of these drugs so that the Mujahideen could buy arms while the Pakistani militants were being funded and trained in Pakistan. And then they go to Afghanistan and conduct military operations against the Russians who were our stated Cold War enemy. The same thing's happening today, though. If you go on my X feed right now, I'm going to show you something related to this and how this still goes on today. USAID has been busted multiple times for actually cultivating the poppy and heroin production in Afghanistan."
"USAID and Ronald Reagan played the key role in fundamentally creating the restructured blob that we live under after the scandals of the 1970s that the CIA was busted in church committee hearings, heart attack, Gun Mockingbird, MK Ultra, you know, assassinations, all that stuff. Jimmy Carter got into power 1976, carried out the harshest destruction of CIA operations capacity and funding ever in American history. He laid off 30% of the entire CIA operations division in a single day. That was called the Halloween massacre. Crippled their budget. Then the Iran hostage situation pops off in 79. The National Security State argues this wouldn't have happened unless the CIA had its old powers back. Democrats still hated the CIA at that time because it had been directly interfering in their own domestic politics and trying to thwart factions of them, just like they're doing today against the MAGA movement side of the Republican Party. You know, the universal thump has been passed around in that way. But so they couldn't get a legislative bill to do this. So what they did is they restructured the intelligence apparatus, the COVID action capacities and the way our statecraft is done through USAID and the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy to take the baton from what the CIA used to do. But the whole point of it is in tandem now. That's why you have these John Bolton at USAID. This is why you have Liz Cheney at USAID. This is what we're fighting against as we're reforming. This is it's not really a partisan issue as I see it, even though I know statistics show there's disproportionate Democrat beneficiaries."
"Well, that's why we need to create a legacy and a pipeline of people to carry on these reforms, which is part of my personal struggle here, which is that most people, 99% of people who got involved with the MAGA movement did it because they care about the domestic. [...] Because their school curriculum is woke, because the police allow crime in the streets and the infrastructure's crumbling and there's corruption everywhere and no one's held accountable. They don't think about Pakistan, they don't think about Bangladesh. They don't think about who's on the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and how if they're living in Louisiana or Houston or, or Oklahoma, that actually their jobs at ExxonMobil and Chevron sort of depend on this strong arm diplomacy that we have with Persian Gulf countries. They don't care about the Persian Gulf, they care about local Oklahoma. But they have to now in order to understand the world they live in, in order to understand what's driving the world around them, in order to understand and the actual true face of the characters they thought they've known. They're going to have to become international minded."
"Elon Musk this week tweeted out about a horrible situation where someone from the PIs, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, I believe is now facing arrest for clicking the like button on a social media post. [...]
Poland plays an absolutely huge, probably the linchpin role in all of Eastern Europe with everything that's happening with Ukraine, because the whole play was to kill Russian gas. And then you need an alternative gas supply into Europe to offset that. And there's only two ways to do that. One is Ukraine builds up its own gas infrastructure and exploits its endogenous hydrocarbon supply, which it has a lot of. It's the third largest in Europe. But it's underexploited, unfortunately they can't do that right now because Russia reconquered that exact territory in Eastern Ukraine that those sit on. The only other way to do that is through exporting LNG liquefied natural gas from North America, from the Permian Basin or whatnot in Houston, freezing it, shipping it 6,000, 7,000 miles across the Atlantic, up through the Baltic Straits, through these newly built routing terminals into Poland and the terminals there and then routing it there into Slovakia and Ukraine and Central Europe and on from there.[...]
But the point is Poland basically has a veto right on this whole plan. Because if the Poland government says hey, you know what, we don't want to antagonize the Russians, the Russians may actually attack us. This is provocative because this is in tandem with the plan to cut off Gazprom. Also we don't want to become a political vassal state of the US or the UK or NATO. And this is what was starting to happen with the law and order, you know, Law and Justice PIs party in Poland. And so this whole network, the Atlantic Council network, was backing to the full hilt Donald Tusk who became the Prime Minister of Poland in I believe December 2023.
[...]
USAID's partner in operations arm National Endowment for Democracy has been specifically demanding Don Tusk's government in Poland must find ways to arrest high ranking members of the PIs party in order to quote, stamp out populists. They wrote this the first month in office. So. And again you'll see this is responding to someone facing three years for language. [...] So again, NATO was at war with the PIs party. They wanted more cooperation on, on security, on economic issues. So they're saying, listen, it's not an autocracy in Poland, unfortunately, we can't call it a dictator like Putin or the ccp. It's democracy because the people voted for it and they won fair and square. But it's illiberal democracy because the democratic institutions don't, you know, are not having their way. But here's what it says Poland may be saying on its first steps in stamping out populism and holding those responsible for the worst violations of rule of law. That means the criminal justice system. Now get to the next one. Next slide. Poland's new government must therefore do more than just return to liberal democracy. It must address trend, address transitional justice. The same thing all over every USAID operation. It has to arrest the people from the government we just transitioned from. Prime Minister Tusk and his coalition must again not, not should, not maybe, should consider maybe if there's something there, must stabilize the political system, mean ensure the reign against losing in the next election to ensure that populism does not return in the next election.
[...]
The new government should therefore focus attention on whether and how suspective criminals can be punished. At present, there are a number of cases that should be tried immediately. The chutzpah. The frigging chutzpah. This is a foreign, as far as the Polish people's people are concerned, this is a foreign government. Its foreign CIA front apparatus imploring their own elected government about which citizens there that they need to arrest those citizens and even giving them the list of targets."
BENZ: Hey, does what happened to Donald Trump now after the transitional justice that happened when Biden Justice Department took power. Starting to make a little bit more sense now. Should be held responsible. But legally proving allegations against him will likely be difficult. Damn. The problem is we don't have a case. We want to arrest him, but we actually don't really have anything good to get him on. So let's get all his lieutenants and again, the objective, pacification, stability, you don't need to worry about them winning the next election. Populism as a political possibility in Poland will be stamped out because the intelligence networks and the money arm of USAID and the corrupted and warped prosecutors are all on the take.
ROGAN: Jesus.
BENZ: By the way, multiply this problem basically in every country on earth because you know, we can get to a dozen of these.
"In 2014, USAID was busted running a covert operation where, according to their own people who were involved in the operation, they set up an HIV prevention program in foreign countries because it would be the perfect excuse, because counterintelligence would never think, think that the HIV clinics were the place that they were using as keynotes in the regime change network. How many other facilities they were caught there, how many others? But in every single one of those, it's dual purpose. Because the fundamental reason you do this out of USAID is to dupe people. And this puts our oversight bodies in a difficult spot. Let's just say we're funding transgender dance festivals in some country because turns out they really dislike a government that we consider authoritarian. And so you could actually see a sort of, I don't know the situation in Venezuela, but let's just say that the Trump administration, who's been at war with Maduro and wants to pursue a policy of turning over that government, and it just so happens that that government is persecuting the transgender population.
And the transgender population, if they could just be built up more, you know, would be able to convert, you know, convert more hearts and minds to vote against Maduro. Well, you could see a sort of, if I may say again, I'm not saying this should be done. I'm just saying you could see a sort of MAGA foreign policy explanation for funding transgender dance festivals in Venezuela, if that's what the baseline assessment reveals. The problem is American people are never going to be allowed to know about it, because imagine the Senate Oversight Committee, why are we funding these transgender dance festivals in Venezuela? Oh, actually, because we're running a lie there, by the way. Everyone in Venezuela can watch this live hearing. The whole thing is actually a carefully constructed lie because we're cynically exploiting the transgender people to serve as battering rams against the head of state we want to overthrow. But we have not declared that publicly. I mean, we're back to plausible deniability."
This is traditionally the left wing knock on USAID. There’s a lot to it, but it’s not the line the Trump Administration or Fox News is selling to the people. Benz and Musk want to get rid of USAID not because it’s wasteful, but because it’s actually an effective imperial tool at spreading American influence and secular values and protecting American interests. And if you hate America, naturally you would destroy USAID first chance you get.
>In 2014, USAID was busted running a covert operation where, according to their own people who were involved in the operation, they set up an HIV prevention program in foreign countries because it would be the perfect excuse, because counterintelligence would never think, think that the HIV clinics were the place that they were using as keynotes in the regime change network.
Very much don't think this is true.
Counter Intelligence absolutely would consider those likely nodes for antagonistic covert operations. Would probably be at the very top of the list of "things going on in our country that are likely to be fronts for foreign covert ops". Cuba has frequently publicly said as much!
Counter Intelligence is famously, and rightly given their job, absolutely paranoid about such things and Cuba in particular would have every reason to be so... given that they also are very frequently accused of utilising *their* well known export of "Cuban medical personnel" all over the 3rd world in such a manner themselves (as part of intelligence operations).
If you're Intelligence is accused of "doing it" then your counter intelligence will absolutely assume that the enemy intelligence service is also "doing it" .... whatever it is.
THE TRANSGENDER DANCE FESTIVALS IN VENEZUELA ARE FAKE! I CAN'T STRESS ENOUGH, THESE PEOPLE ARE JUST MAKING THINGS UP.
As far as I can tell, the seed that this myth grew out of is that the US Embassy in Colombia did a small grants program to support the arts in that country, and one of the things it funded was a transgender opera.
But a random US embassy is not the same as USAID, an arts grant is not charity, an opera is not a dance festival, and Colombia is not Venezuela. I think they transferred the story to Venezuela to make it more plausible that this was about "destabilizing a US enemy", because, I cannot stress this enough, THEY ARE JUST MAKING EVERYTHING THEY SAY UP.
I'm trying to fact-check the rest of this, but I can't even begin. The guy says "Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo", so I thought this would be a good start. I tried! It doesn't have one! There are zero uses of that term anywhere on Wikipedia! When I Google it, the only results are transcripts of this interview! Possibly you spelled it wrong or something, but I think you should also strongly consider the possibility that a random guy on the Joe Rogan Experience, known for hosting UFO believers and an episode on "The Truth About Psychic Powers", is a deranged conspiracy theorist!
Feels like the start of some Borges-flavored scifi. Has potential.
Anyways, that does seem to be a weird artifact of the transcript because he spells it right after, it's supposed to be ZunZeneo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo), which is... much less flattering to USAID than PEPFAR. The rest of this comment is quotes, damn Substack's lack of formatting:
>The word "zunzuneo" is Cuban slang for a hummingbird's call.[10] The origins of ZunZuneo result from USAID allocating millions of dollars concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan.[1][11] Contractors funded by USAID "set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit[ed] unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the U.S. government," according to an Associated Press (AP) report which traced the origin of the service... According to Creative Associates, the idea arose after they were provided 500,000 stolen Cuban cellphone numbers from a "source" who said they were available on the black market....
>ZunZuneo was founded in 2010, shortly after the arrest of USAID contractor Alan Gross in Cuba.[17] The network, dubbed the "Cuban Twitter," reached about 60,000 subscribers.[1][18] The initiative also appears to have had a surveillance dimension, allowing "a vast database about Cuban ZunZuneo subscribers, including gender, age, 'receptiveness' and 'political tendencies'" to be built, with the AP noting that such data could be used in the future for "political purposes."
Sorry, I did spell it wrong. As ProfGerm kindly pointed out it’s Zunzuneo.
Mike Benz is a former state department official under the first Trump administration. He has since rebranded as an independent media guy exposing corruption (he claims) in a wide range of (mostly left-leaning) global institutions he calls “the Blob” which seems to me to be roughly the same as what Moldbug means by “the Cathedral.”
I accept your correction, but to be fair to Rogan/Benz I don’t interpret them as making the claim “USAID were funding transgenders in Venezuela,” rather “if you did hypothetically find a line item on USAID expense reports going to transgenders in Venezuela, it’s not because they care about transgender representation in Latin America, it’s to build US capacity to engineer societal change in the region”
While I don’t know anything about various political factions in Cuba or Venezuela and so can’t comment on the accuracy of Benz’s claims, he leads up to a chilling point which is that in the most recent decade the “Blob” has been running the same playbook in Western democracies.
What we’ve seen undeniably has been the rise of “historically marginalised” groups, and under the guise of equity and social justice, giving BIPOC and LGBTQ people more political and institutional power. In Australia we have a large Indigenous/First Nations people lobby which was nonexistent just 15 years ago.
Who benefits? Well, not the actual Indigenous people. They suffer from higher disease burden, lower socioeconomic class, family and sexual violence, mental illness, low life expectancy. This has not significantly changed in 15 years.
However there is a class of Indigenous people (who may have, say, one indigenous grandparent) who leverage this inequality into favourable government treatment - for example easier entry into competitive university programs, representation on company boards, access to free government services, affirmative action in hiring. These people fully exploit the government programs and tend to move institutions more left-wing.
One interesting aspect of the recent 2023 Voice referendum which aimed to give Aboriginal people extra representation in Australian politics (and was soundly rejected at the polls, despite lots of advertising and near-universal favourable media coverage) is that the districts which voted overwhelmingly for it were inner-city white liberals, and the districts which voted against it were the rural areas where Indigenous people are a much greater percentage of population per capita.
So there is something going on here more than the claimed altruistic impulse to improve life for the marginalised. (If that was the case, why not spend the money for the Voice referendum on medical outreach to Indigenous communities to better treat, say, keratitis, rheumatic fever and crusted scabies, which cause a great deal of reversible morbidity?)
It’s analogous to BLM and the “abolish the police” do-gooders when polls of actual crime-ridden Black communities show that what they want is MORE policing.
There’s a political agenda in amplifying this message and giving these people a voice. “Tackling racism” is a fig leaf. (If that were the goal, why do we keep seeing poll after poll showing that most people think racism is worse now that it was in the early 2000s?)
And look, I don’t have the receipts. I can’t prove that the Open Society Foundation, or the WEF, or USAID, or any of the orgs that Benz and Elon love to hate are funding racially divisive community orgs, doing judicial reform to appoint their buddies to powerful court positions, funding hit pieces on politicians they don’t like, etc, in Western democracies to “build capacity” - that is, increase central and global control over every political system in the world. It’s just… strange that every Western democracy seems to be struggling with worsening inflation, crime, rising inequality, rising house prices, out of control immigration, increasing limits on free speech, and politicians on both sides seem powerless to do anything about it.
Maybe my earlier comment was too cryptic, too snarky, or both, in which case I apologize and try again more directly:
Tyler Cowen is definitely a very productive aggregator, but not a serious thinker. My main point of contact with his analyses are his occasional Bloomberg opinion articles, and more than once I found myself scroll up to check the author name after doing an early morning coffee spit take, and yes, sure enough, it’s by him.
In one that personally almost triggered me enough to complain to the editor, he argued – maybe ironically, maybe seriously – that on one hand, Europe should just get with the times and buy ACs (I completely agree!), but on the other, that unlivably hot apartments make for more people hanging out in streets and cafes, which in turn creates a more appealing ambiance to him as a tourist – apparently the primary function of people living in said cities.
Maybe I’ve been burned a bit too much by the lack of AC in most European buildings myself to appreciate the humor, but from this and other articles I’ve come away with the impression that he’s just too detached/“economist brained” to be taken seriously.
I live in Austria. Some people have AC. A lot of us really don’t need AC. I live in a 19th century building in an apartment with 3 m high ceilings that stays comfortably cool for most of the summer. August can get a bit warm, but like good Europeans we generally leave the city in August. An AC would bring zero added value into my life. Restaurants lack AC, but we prefer - like you say - to eat outside anyway. Movie theaters, malls, and modern office buildings in Europe generally do have AC, maybe Tyler is unaware of that point?
What do you mean you leave the city? I think if your house is effectively uninhabitable for a month every year you should probably get AC. I'm from Florida, so the lengths to which some Europeans go to avoid getting AC often seems absurd to me.
Leaving the city in August for a vacation at the beach or in the mountains is an ancient Viennese cultural tradition that would continue even if we had AC (and is also observed by people who have AC), so why get AC for that one month when we just wouldn't be home to use it? You live in Florida - do you have a wood stove or a furnace for central heating?
I suppose if you're already doing that it's fine. I'm mostly just amused that so many Europeans (who don't live in the mountains for part of the year) will insist they don't need AC while also admitting that their homes are inhospitable for 1-2 months every year. I don't have a furnace, but my heat pump AC can be used for heating just as easily for when the temperature drops into the 40s as it does for a month in the winter.
I lived in England for a few years, and during the summer summer our house's only option for cooling was to open the windows and let in all variety of insect life, because the windows didn't have screens. Maybe it's just a matter of preference, but I think the English are missing more than they think.
Wait, are we talking about the same England? My house - towards the South of England, in a relatively warm area by English standards - would be uninhabitable without good /heating/, but deliberately making it colder strikes me as a laughable idea.
I'm not saying you should do it all the time by any means, but having the option is worthwhile. England and the rest of Europe still have heat waves sometimes, and every time it happens thousands of seniors die because you don't have the slightest cooling capacity!
Not every ancient tradition is worth preserving. I personally prefer going on vacation in Winter – why leave my city when there's the most daylight and good weather for outdoor activities instead of in the darkest months of the year?
It's also not nearly available to everybody due to work schedules etc., even in Austria.
I grew up in Europe, and I've lived both in buildings where AC would have been largely useless, and in ones where the working from home, or even just getting restful sleep, was essentially impossible for 2-3 months of every year without one (due to the lack of any cross draft and the outside wall being heated by the summer sun during the afternoon and evening hours).
I'm with you on this, on TC's style in general, and MR's long slide into vague Trump apologism. MR is useful, commendable even (I wonder who finds all these links... presumably not a busy professor, personally). It has given me a lot over the years. But it's also long been rubbing me the wrong way.
I agree with you on all the actual points, but I think Tyler (or at least my possibly-incorrect model of Tyler) is correct in that political rage of the sort that gets you to say opponents should be sent to hell is bad (both corrosive to society and bad for you personally, in that in the case you are wrong - which I don't think includes this case - it makes it harder to see it). It's a net negative in terms of truth seeking or utility maximizing. And I think that directionally it's actually worse to do this about dead children - which are incredibly emotionally moving or enraging - than dry statistical deaths.
There is a counterpoint which is that caring too little - like Musk does here - is also a pretty bad risk. I want to say these are different types of mood, but they do at least somewhat come from the same place, so maybe you can't entirely avoid the second without risking the first. Maybe this is like dry statistical deaths in that unlike almost everything else, people put natural distance so they were towards feeling too little instead of too much? But even if the tradeoff in category errors should correctly be more towards being outraged here, I still think the outrage itself is at best a negative side effect of a positive thing (caring enough) and not something to support as its own goal.
(Otoh, it's probably at least somewhat unavoidable if you're shaped to care enough)
I'm deeply concerned that somehow the entire world has had it's brain fried by...IDK what...Social media? 24/7 News? Something else?
Even knowing about Chinese Robbers and echo chambers and social bubbles, it seems impossible to actually frame anything outside of the influence of whatever media and information sources you're downstream of. IDK Tyler personally, but I know a few of his fellows. Even though they are smart people they seem to have all bought the "government is wasteful" line, and no amount of data will convince them because they are suspicious of the source. How do you find a bug in your epistemology?
I think this is part of the underlying dynamic here.
Libertarians have been prominent in intellectual debates but mostly marginal (no pun intended) or unsuccessful in actual policy implementation in Washington DC for decades — and then suddenly found in Trump 47 and DOGE their ideas about costcutting and the excesses of government bureaucracy at long last put into effect at massive scale — but in the most slapdash and baseless and even cruel way possible. And in a way so flawed that it massively discredits the libertarian cause.
Longstanding and sincere libertarians have been left to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it all. Some (e.g, Megan McCardle) have been clear eyed enough to criticize DOGE forcefully for its irrationality and lies. Others like Tyler have chosen to paper over or hand wave past the problems.
I've definitely become less of a libertarian as a result of this whole debacle. If this *gestures broadly* is what is meant by libertarianism, no thanks
This might be a case where fusion food works - injera would pair nicely with classic burrito fillings. And Tej would make an interesting complement to agave wine or pulque.
People yell that impactful aid is a “hostage puppy” covering a bunch of fraud so we should get rid of USAID, they refuse to recognize they are more arguing never to swim in the ocean because people pee in it.
The question most relevant, and least correctly answered, is, "why did the American people elect a guy who we all knew was the kind of person who'd let a million people die just to own the libs?" Even after all these years, people who hate him still get this completely wrong. And it's a huge mistake not to understand your enemy, if you hope for any success in opposing him.
What you're misunderstanding about Tyler's posts is this context. He does not misunderstand why America elected Trump in 2024. And I think this is why you especially misunderstood his point about "how the rationalist community should be presenting itself."
To try and put it briefly: Conquest's Law + the great awokening of 2020 made every leftish institution in America suddenly seem like they were in a coordinated war to destroy America from the inside. Now obviously, an NGO that's saving the lives of Africans with HIV is not in any conceivable way going to destroy America; but that's a very lefty description. Now maybe all those USAID-funded NGOs--unlike basically 100% of other NGOs the media, higher education, K-12 education, professional associations, museums, HR departments, etc.--were not rapidly taken over by a hateful, anti-American ideology; I'm not even being sarcastic, it's definitely possible.
But maybe some small portion of everyone's outrage and fury and disgust at Trump should be directed towards the people who worked so hard to intellectually and morally destroy America's progressive institutions from within; and towards all the well-meaning members and stewards of those institutions who surrendered them without a fight. If you want charities that save millions of lives, and medical research, etc. to keep being funded--sustainably and in the long-term--then you can't let a totalitarian ideology make a mockery of the fundamental values driving that work.
If the cops shoot you while trying to arrest your drug-dealer roommate, blame the cops for their poor aim. But also blame the roommate for pulling a gun on them. And blame yourself for letting the drug-dealer move into your house.
I suppose it depends on what “America” means to you. From my perspective, as the descendant of white settlers who arrived in the 1700s, and whose ancestors fought in every major war, it is clearly MAGA that is on a mission to destroy the country my ancestors built over the past 250 years. My America’s founding principles are the rule of law, the Constitution, separation of powers, reasonable tolerance of unorthodox ideas, respect for public service, and a belief that trade is a net positive for both parties. MAGA believes in none of this. I also believe that the USA is a Federal Republic where states should have some autonomy and ability to protect themselves from Federal overreach. I used to align with conservatives on that point, but not anymore apparently. I’m not a huge fan of lesbian puppet shows or silly attempts to depict black women as turning the gears of history but I fail to see how they “destroy” America. Having actually lived in socially repressive countries like Russia, Dubai and Turkey, I have to say I actually don’t even mind USAID funding “lefty” DEI nonsense in those places because it’s usually a stick in the eye to the corrupt venal men who run those places.
It’s also obviously true that the “Great Awokening” is mostly a strawman that exists in the fever dreams of the internet and Fox News. I work in finance adjacent to all the real global power centers - and everything important is still run by white and Asian men. “Woke” is mostly code for rich technocrats and hedge fund managers who are outraged they have to follow the same laws as ordinary Americans. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t buy a pardon the way you can cut lines at Disney World?
>everything important is still run by white and Asian men
Some of them do get bitten (e.g. Weinstein), but DEI dictums overwhelmingly get enforced on the levels below (propaganda, affirmative action, etc). Of course, half the country thinks that those are actually good things, but for some reason they love to claim that they are also not happening.
I think you're overestimating how much swing voters care about any of this. They mostly aren't that ideological, and voted for change because they were mad about banal stuff like inflation.
This plus immigration. And fwiw I would not be surprised to find that a majority of Trump voters would support cutting USAID regardless of how effective it is at helping foreigners
> But maybe some small portion of everyone's outrage and fury and disgust at Trump should be directed towards the people who worked so hard to intellectually and morally destroy America's progressive institutions from within; and towards all the well-meaning members and stewards of those institutions who surrendered them without a fight.
Plenty of people have been doing this including Scott. Check Slow Boring if you want more of it.
I just want to push back on this idea of "poll says people support X" as a piece of meaningful evidence. Polls are going to vary significantly depending on how the questions are structured, like something as banal as whether the question is positively (Do you approve of USAID?) or negatively (Do you disapprove of USAID?) framed. See general approval rates of Congress vs incumbent reelections, or the general broad appeal of fiscal conservatism vs the support for cutting any particular government spending. To get a meaningful result, I think the questions need to be directly on the topic with relevant cost/benefit data attached. Something like "USAID prevents X number of deaths from AIDS each year; this costs the average taxpayer Y dollars each year. Would you pay Y dollars each year to fund USAID?" Otherwise it's just noise.
Ideally this would be paired with actual monetary implications, as revealed preferences are the most descriptive of reality. But this is probably the best we can do without making every aspect of public policy into a direct referendum.
I have some ideas on that - and distributing free AIDS drugs in Africa or free needles in SF might be the right thing to do in the short term but it needs to be understood as an emergency humanitarian measure not a solution.
I grew up in DC, and worked in the "development industry" out of school, but my father was a contractor and later an advisor to the administrator of USAID, and father in law was a USAID political appointee under multiple administrations. So I have some context and experience here.
I don't have to tell you that there are competing goals within USAID. There is a genuine desire to make the world a better place by treating diseases, feeding the hungry, saving people from mistreatment. But there is also a mandate to extend American power in the world. The point is, the organization is a charity glove around a soft power fist, and creating markets for the output of US companies is a big part of the program.
At the most basic level, domestic farmers, drug companies, charities/NGOs, and for-profit contractors produce a thing, sell it to the US government for some price that's above their cost, and deliver it to Africa for free.
This seems great, but it has 2nd order effects. Economies focused on domestic production collapse because nobody can compete with free stuff from the west - the ex-farmers and artisans end up moving into vast slums where disease is rampant. Then we get to work on a whole new set of interventions to solve their problems - a cascade of dysfunction, corruption, and dependency.
And of course players on our side learn how the game works, get good at lobbying, distributing the spoils around various congressional districts, buying influence from universities and the media.
To the extent that I think it's a capital G Grift, I see the same dynamics as the defense industry - they need the machine to keep going. The 3rd world has to remain dependent and dysfunctional so there's no competing power center, we have cheap labor for the cobalt mines, and a place to dispose of surplus corn.
I don't see how any of this makes sense with the actual topic of discussion. Yes, donating free stuff can crash domestic markets and inhibit their development, but overall the third world has become richer at an accelerating pace over the time foreign aid has become more popular. I think the people in this area mostly know about the risk of counterproductive effects you describe and do their best to avoid them, mostly successfully. Aside from that, where is the domestic market for HIV drugs in Africa? Why *shouldn't* distributing HIV drugs be considered a solution when HIV keeps dropping?
Scott Alexander supports the neocolonialist side of USAID. He has concern for starving African children, but he also wants to keep their parents and societies dependent on the West.
If there was a magic button that could remove that dependence, obviously I would press it. Absent a magic button, this is just another faux-profound slogan.
No. There is a profound historical and contemporary reality of intervention in the post-colonial world. From the CFA Franc to funding coups and bribing warlords, there are real — not magical — policies, that exist to maintain Western geopolitical dominance and mitigate African sovereignty. The charity sector is not disconnected from the geopolitical realities here.
For example, the donation of second-hand clothes to Africa is seen by many as a good way to help poor people, while it is also a means of preventing African textile and apparel industries from competing.
The fact that many of the superficially wonderful health and development charities you support are also covers for CIA meddling is not a distraction from their purpose, it is the key fact we must address head-on.
Now, I realize this is a touchy subject; you may justify these policies with your dim view of the cognitive potential of African people, but you don’t want to be explicit because you understandably expect blowback for directly arguing that neocolonialism is good and necessary.
But rejoice! Now that Trump is president again, and the richest man in the world has programmed his AI propaganda machine to talk about “white genocide”, you can openly argue for neocolonialism. You won’t get cancelled.
> the donation of second-hand clothes to Africa is seen by many as a good way to help poor people, while it is also a means of preventing African textile and apparel industries from competing
I dunno man, this sounds reasonable until you think about it the other way. Imagine clothes grew on trees and then suddenly the clothes tree blight arrived and killed all the clothes trees and now we had to make clothes in factories instead. Would we all be like, yay, this will be great for our apparel workers? Or would we be like, oh no, now we have to spend more human labor working in poor conditions in order to have clothes, which are now more expensive as a result?
There's a larger conversation to be had about development economics and industrial policy. I mean, it's being had right now with the US vis a vis China. Basically, while it's short term positive to import fish, it's longterm positive++ to know how to fish. If you already know how to fish, you might not want to fish because you have better opportunities selling information, but if you don't have knowhow in broad sectors of the economy, you won't have a stable and informed middle class.
I don't want to rehash the tariff debates, but in the condition that you don't have a highly stable state and civil society, it's disadvantageous to export raw materials and import finished goods, because the incentives to fight over land and raw materials drown out all other economic activity — and how could you build a business if your people get subsidized food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education from humanitarian charities? And doubly so when materiel and manpower get shipped in from foreign countries to secure the supply chain.
I say this as someone who has awesome respect for Tyler Cowen's intellect and a somewhat tarnished respect for his intellectual honesty: Cowen is completely full of shit here. The plain English meaning of his original post is exactly what Scott says it is. This isn't a question of interpretation or ambiguous wording or nuance. Tyler is just straight up saying that Rubio's claim is credible even if not accurate to the decimal point.
The phrase "I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…" does not, as Tyler claims, show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed. It is a standard "to be sure" clause, an assertion that even though the overall picture allows for some nuance, the general claim is still correct in the main.
I don't know what to think about this. Tyler's original post is awful and his follow-up is shrill. MR has an enormously powerful soapbox. The whole thing is disappointing.
I read your dad’s book. We should all be able to immediately coordinate on helping sick kids wherever they are for however long we are able. To quote Cormac McCarthy, if the child is not the word of God then God never spoke.
I'm confused by how "supporting services" are defined as it relates here:
"But the percent of their money spent on administrative costs , which is probably closer to what most people mean by overhead, was 6.3% (supporting/total on page 22 here). Of that 6.3%, about 4%pp went to salaries and 2%pp to fundraising."
For example, on p.8 of the pdf, there are ~$280 million in salary expenses, ~$310 million in subgrants to implementing partners, ~$100 million in project labor and materials, ~$74 million in travel/training/representation, & ~$40 million in contracting and professional fees. CRS has ~5.2k employees so...we're looking at an average of...~$60k per employee, not counting training or professional fees. That sounds like Western employees. I can't find any clear definition of who's working in the US or not, the closest I found was p.52 which broke it down by "Overseas operations" and "US Operations" but that doesn't actually define who's working or where, just what they're working on (I think).
So how are "support services" or "supporting services" defined? This has to be, like, a legal thing for reporting reasons but my Google-fu is failing and neither document defines it. NICRA is defined but it makes no sense to me.
As to the overall question of how much potential waste or fraud might be in this, here’s my best guess.
First, there’s some stuff that’s probably really dumb, like “Justice, Peacebuilding, and Youth” but that’s like $37 mil out of a $1.25 billi budget so who cares. The majority of the spending is in “Emergency”, $616 mil, which is pretty clearly just buying food for poor people in starving countries like Ethiopia, Haiti, those kinda places.
Except the cost breakdown for Emergency is $178 mil in food and other commodities, or like 28%. The other big expenses are subgrants to other partners ($180 mil), salaries ($100 mil), and project labor and materials ($67 mil). This gets weirder because…I think USAID just gave CRS like $130 mil in corn? Check out p.51 and the $128 million in commodities that were donated under “Food for Peace Emergency Program - Non Cash Assistance”. Food for Peace is American food (1) so this is just…literally $128 million dollars of American corn, right? That…might not be optimal. Like, there’s nothing wrong with American corn but when you can almost certainly buy it from anywhere else cheaper and closed, that might just be a US farmer subsidy. US corn to Haiti, awesome, but Ethiopia is a lot closer to Europe than other spots.
Sorry, I know I promised to give an opinion on how much could be waste but I’m writing this on the fly and…I dunno man. I’m pretty sure the $50 mil of the $178 mil spent on food that’s not $128 mil of American corn is good. Otherwise I feel more confused than when I started.
If somebody can provide clarity here, that would be greatly appreciated.
I didn't want to wade into this, but I wrote something else in here that would be pretty substantially derailing from this serious and important discussion, and that feels rude.
So, I'll just join the pile-on by saying that that first weasely "fact-check" example was by far the worst deliberate intellectual dishonesty I have ever seen. It's simultaneously intentional and evil, but also very skillfully subtle. I mean, I'm certain that he could have slipped that by me if it was just me reading on my own, and I don't like that. People can try to convince me of much worse things, but it's less of a problem if I have a pretty good chance to catch it.
I appreciate you not pulling your punches and showing you aren't the only one who's serious about referencing Hell here. I think this verse is too harsh to apply to Tyler Cowen, who strikes me much more as misdiagnosing problems rather than being actively malicious, but when Musk described USAID as "evil" and "a ball of worms," I could only think of this Bible verse:
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil [...] Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight [...] who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent. Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel."
-Isaiah 5:20-24.
My wife is a researcher on GiveWell's malaria team, and believe me, she has plenty of criticisms of USAID. But burning the whole thing down without any care or consideration to the lives taken invites God's judgment, and that's not a phrase I use lightly.
It seems like Musk is on his way out of Washington, and it can't come soon enough.
Now that you've seen what qualifies as debunking on the Trump affiliated Right, it would be a good time to do a deep dive post on Russian influence in the 2016 election.
You're spending a lot of time here talking about overhead/administrative costs, whereas Tyler ... doesn't?
I mean, overhead is something you can get a reasonable handle on. There's data there you can argue about. It just isn't what Tyler actually seems to be talking about: "these institutions are pretty wasteful (not closedly tied to measured overhead btw)"
His emphasis is on the idea of "channeling through", repeatedly. Grift of this form doesn't look like "Paying for extravagant parties"; it may look more like "Buying wheat from my friend Jeff's company at twice the market rate", or even just "Buying wheat from my friend Jeff's company at the US market rate instead of the international bulk rate".
If that is what Tyler means he should say it then. And call me old fashioned but if you are going to assert that an institution is wasteful I expect you to provide at least an example, and preferably some aggregated data on the overall effectiveness of the institution in question.
As to footnote 1: there's a hash symbol in the top right margin of each MR comment with the comment's permalink. Following the link takes you to the MR post instead of the directly to the comment itself, but when you scroll down past the post to the comments, the linked comment is presented stand-alone (with its responses).
>Have you read 800 million books, then made a post about each one consisting of a randomly selected paragraph followed by the words ‘this really makes you think, for those of you paying attention’?”
Tyler has things he is good at, but his own opinions are not worth a lot. He was not against the Iraq war (Alex was). He is against NYC’s tolls. He thought SF has the right level of housing density. I think Tyler tries too hard to be contrarian including on Trump adjacent topics. And he is widely read but not an expert in anything.
There were some more centrist libertarians like Megan McArdle who endorsed the Iraq War. But TC's opposition to congestion tolls is really bizarre. Every other economist seems to disagree with him on that.
During my years working for USAID contractors in Afghanistan, I saw plenty of waste and plenty of failure. One agriculture project I briefly worked with ultimately did enough counterproductive stuff to fill a CSM expose (https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0728/Afghanistan-war-How-USAID-loses-hearts-and-minds). Even some of the better programs saw millions of dollars spent ineffectively -- for example $1m worth of trees in the "Greening of Kabul" when the US ambassador suddenly decided that was a priority, only to watch the saplings wither or feed goats over the next few months because no one actually cared enough to keep them alive.
As that article and example suggest, the problems I saw didn't stem from any proto-wokeness on USAID's part. Indeed, some of the biggest wastage came from conservative, pro-business USAID leaders who'd made their name by e.g. linking farmers in Guatemala and Honduras to WalMart, and thought they could do the same in Afghanistan. They tried to get Dole Foods to invest millions near Mazar-e-Sharif, and when that failed spent millions trying to build a big commercial farm as a proof of concept...only to realize too late that the only aquifer under it was salt water. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/national/2009/06/19/us-pursues-a-new-way-to-rebuild-in-afghanistan/1a38cd39-0f41-4220-aac1-044a47fa348e/)
Afghanistan was especially dysfunctional thanks to the worsening security situation (which made monitoring hard) and the unusual, President-driven urgency of pushing money out the door, even before we take into account the general tendency of big aid programs to develop their blueprints in isolation from local realities (https://odi.org/en/publications/ten-traps-to-avoid-aid-programming-context-afghanistan/).
That made for many situations where programs failed but were still rewarded -- for example, the contractor that could claim their uninspiring program had added a trillion dollars of value to the Afghan economy, thanks to some assumptions USAID had built into the start-of-project deliverables on how much cash value they'd assume for every meter of improved irrigation infrastructure. A project that did large amounts of canal-cleaning (including one-meter-deep drains) could look transformative. The understaffed USAID monitoring teams didn't build up the counterevidence to question that picture, which was doubly hard given that they were mostly confined to bunkers in Kabul.
I also saw big US funding flows absolutely destroy local organizations, when big US contractors that realized their own lack of competence to do the last-mile work all poured their money into capable but desperately overstretched Afghan NGOs. As one of my friends memorably said, "If you hook up a rabbit to a firehose, it'll look like you've taught the rabbit to dance... until the water's turned off."
All of that is part of why I left USAID-land for more effective parts of the humanitarian economy. But the problems haven't stemmed from "NGOs pocketing the money" or promotion of woke ideology avant la lettre or the stuff that Elon rants about. Despite its dysfunctions, USAID was keeping a lot of people alive, and the people who've axed it rather than fixing it are villains.
I think that this comment provides the "much needed clarity" that Scott was looking for, and would be a much better post than the original MR one.
Tellingly, the kind of "waste" that you noticed *does not count* as overhead, but instead are actual taxpayer dollars spent on the proper mission of the NGOs that USAID is regranting.
That means that, as other commenters have pointed out, the whole focus on overhead is *wrong*, what matters is how much good-for-dollars is being made.
On this I think that the gold standard is GiveWell (GW).
GW's evaluation model assumes that you can directly compare the impact of lives saved by how many *healthy* years you can improve (i.e. better to save children who can live 50+ years than a middle-aged adult who might live only 30 years). Additionally, if you can save a children, but he ends up with a disability, GW believes that you can *quantify* this by, say, halving the "healthy" years saved (i.e. the children lives 50 years with a 50% disability, which is equivalent to living 25 years).
Some people criticize these assumptions, under the idea that "all lives are worth the same", and that is "ableist" to say that disabled peoples lives should be counted as "less healthy".
GW also assumes that you can compare the good created from medical charities (which is controversially measured in healthy years of life saved) with the good created from other kinds of charities (i.e. pulling people out of poverty, promoting democracy, and even supporting the arts).
What I believe is that reasonable people can disagree about this stuff, but the *methodology* of GW is just *the best* at evaluating the *real efficiency* of a charity, and critics should just create their own GW which evaluates charities with pretty much the same methodology, but under different assumptions.
I agree with you and Scott that overhead doesn't tell us much about effectiveness, especially in the US government contractor system that gives everyone a bespoke NICRA.
Also unhelpful: Rubio's distinction between what "reaches recipients" and what's spent by anti-poverty organizations. On Scott's first counter-MR post, I left a comment highlighting what I've seen work well in the aid world, and how much of it was achieved through training, networking, and organizing rather than giving stuff away.(https://substack.com/@joelhafvenstein684423/note/c-119587047?)
Reasonable people can definitely disagree on the best way to measure aid effectiveness. GiveWell's approach has tremendous intellectual integrity. But as I've written elsewhere, it's also representative of "major negative trends in the sector as a whole: charities being pushed to spend an ever-higher proportion of their time and resources generating monitoring data, and risk aversion hiding behind the language of cost-efficiency/waste avoidance." (https://substack.com/@joelhafvenstein684423/note/c-92670351?)
It's been mentioned upthread that the ideal amount of fraud and waste (and certainly failure!) isn't zero. Similarly, the ideal amount of confidence you have in your work's effectiveness isn't 100%. Past a certain point, the resources you spend on monitoring and impact analysis will be reducing your capacity to actually do good in the world.
"although the expert I talked to also volunteered that they have never seen someone who has vast personal experience with and expertise in USAID refer to the program as “US AID” with a space, the way Tyler regularly does"
Tyler is correct on this one, just look at the USAID flag/logo/wordmark - US in blue, AID in red, with a subheader "From the American people", clearly meant to read: "US aid from the American people"
I cringe every time i hear an "expert" pronounce it as U.S.A.I.D., it's like self-thought-censorship of the very idea and concept that the primary purpose is foreign *aid*
The point is that while most would pronounce it US AID, it is almost always written USAID as it is on the logo. I too have never seen anyone write it as US AID except Tyler.
Scott and Tyler are both wrong. And right. Great they kinda talk! As "aid" is both doing good and feeding leeches. I was one of them. So, about Tyler, Scott, 3. conclusion and 4. my aid-experience:
1. Tyler loves to say "it is context that`s scarce". While putting out lots of posts with zero/near-zero context. Cheers for Scott! - The original Tyler-post I also read as Scott did. OTOH: a) who follows the blog, had a chance to know some context from older posts, but surprise: most human brains do not work like an LLM, neither mine nor Scott's. b) Great, Tyler reacted to Scott. He reads him and invited Scott to his Conversation with Tyler - would love to read transcript!
2. Scott did initially over-react. And Tyler rightly pointed that out. It is fun to read Scott's apologia - hell is just 12 month with Saturdays off - but as ACX discourages 'high-temperature' comments, just apologizing might be better? Musk is not 24/7 guarded by the Secret service - nor was Trump saved by them, but by sheer luck. That's why Putin does not go places. If you can: kill V.V.P.. I would. Musk or Trump - nay.
3. Think straight! If you love aid - fund it! Taxing others to fund stuff you like - not so holy, Robin. And those who vote against being taxed for this, are not criminals. More seriously - PEPFAR being so great , why can those donors with deep pockets not jump in?! At least for this year. Gates. Buffet. Ford foundation. https://time.com/collections/time100-philanthropy-2025/ - Tyler is on the list, though not as a big spender - And if philanthropes spend their private money, all overhead is theirs.
4. Most of my job-life was paid by NPOs - sending me to teach German at schools/colleges in the East (Ukraine, Russia, ...). DAAD, GI, ZfA, VDA were all state-funded, Bosch foundation was company-money (saves taxes, too!). Bosch was by far the best, they paid just a quarter of what DAAD/GI did, got better people, were cost-conscious and took care not to get stuck in a for-ever routine. The others - waste on every step. Pointless to wonder about "overhead", my salary would not count nor the 100k/year I had to spent on silly "projects". We sure had to have our receipts in order. When I talked to other expats in other NPOs (usu. their bizz was "job-qualification", sounds kinda sustainable, right?) - the same. Immense waste, projects no participant would have paid for, because useless. Was the overhead 10% or 90% - not the question to ask. And in all cases - except Bosch - the first commandment was and is: never write bad about the programm. - Obviously, Tyler has much deeper insight into those issues than me or Scott - and can afford more honesty than most "researchers" - most of them very keen to work at NPO/NGO/GOs. I deeply respect Scott's father who went for weeks to Haiti et al. to provide free health-care as an MD. - Haiti is still a mess 20 years later, as Tyler posted today: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/haiti-fact-of-the-day-the-future-comes-to-haiti-first.html
>Think straight! If you love aid - fund it! Taxing others to fund stuff you like - not so holy, Robin.
It seems perverse to apply this logic to the only form of government spending that's so beneficial to the human race that people would willingly pay extra, and reserve spending tax dollars for things that people agree are not so beneficial.
I would argue that it's economically and morally equivalent. Whether all are benefiting from a service with only a subset contributing to the cost, or none are benefiting from a service with only a subset contributing to the cost, you still have disparate payment for equivalent benefit.
Effective reform requires participants who act in good faith toward a generally shared objective. That objective could be: "Balance the goals of expanding American soft-power while distributing high-impact development aid cost-effectively."
We have not one shred of evidence that Musk/Trump/Rubio are interested at all in making USAID more efficient and effective or have the same objective in mind for the organization. They also clearly aren't concerned about cutting off the flow of aid that has been identified as useful, for all or some of USAID's supposed objectives.
They are reorienting the entire US government as quickly as possible to support Trump's view of the world, and if aid is cut, or organizations become less or more efficient in the short-term, they just don't care. Trump places next to no value on soft power or on the lives of the people who don't support him, so gutting USAID is the best thing to do.
Guilelessly presenting the justifications of a man who supports and enacts Trump's actual obvious agenda like Tyler did is either hopelessly naive, willfully obfuscatory, or signaling some Straussian support for cutting international aid delivered by the federal government.
If it's the latter, he should say clearly: "I don't think the US government should be in the business of international aid, and even if there are soft-power concerns, we should just cut checks to people". This would be way clearer and more intellectually honest than pretending Rubio has some good faith point to make about overhead costs.
I give money to Medicins Sans Frontier. I assume a lot goes to admin and medical staff, and the overheads involved in buying medicine, and very little goes directly to patients.
I love Minecraft. That is not a call for Trump's assassination. I can't help it if people are going to interpret that as a call for Trump's assassination despite the fact that I explicitly said it's not. I love Minecraft. Such a fun video game.
The actual issue with USAID has nothing, zero, to do with how efficiently or wastefully the money is spent, but rather with the basic premise that it's good or necessary to take money from the paychecks of the Americans who worked for it and send it to foreigners who didn't. Especially when the American taxpayer seems to be the only taxpayer in the world who is held to this obligation.
Why do you invoke this very unpopular view of legitimate taxation regarding USAID and not any other government departments with higher budgets? If this view is the core issue and popularly held, why do people like Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, and JD Vance expend so much effort on claiming that USAID is bad because it wastes its money on culture war issues instead of just saying that they don't want to fund highly effective health causes?
Are you aware that most other countries spend higher percentages of their budgets on foreign aid, making your last sentence obviously false?
I dunno where you get the idea that it's "unpopular" to not like taxes. I can think of zero people who enjoy having a third of every working hour taken from them and spent on things that don't benefit them. Personally, it infuriates me to see my tax bill every April.
I want to defund those other departments too.
If those other countries are doing so much foreign aid then I guess it's not so bad if the US pulls out.
> I dunno where you get the idea that it's "unpopular" to not like taxes. I can think of zero people who enjoy having a third of every working hour taken from them and spent on things that don't benefit them. Personally, it infuriates me to see my tax bill every April.
Everybody hates taxes, everybody loves medicare and social security and the like. The gap in public understanding on how these issues are connected is known.
> I want to defund those other departments too.
Have you asked the people you know if they want to defund medicare, medicaid, social security, the department of defense, the VA, and SNAP benefits? Given your keen interest in taxation issues, I expect you know that these and similar programs take up the bulk of your tax bill. Do you have any thoughts on why the new administration mostly ignored them and instead focused on USAID spending, something that likely costs you around $5 a year?
> If those other countries are doing so much foreign aid then I guess it's not so bad if the US pulls out.
It's still destructive because the United States is the richest country in the world by such a high degree that minor expenditures on our part still provide vast benefits. Please try to understand matters of proportion when discussing matters of global scale.
> If this view is the core issue and popularly held, why do people like Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, and JD Vance expend so much effort on claiming that USAID is bad because it wastes its money on culture war issues instead of just saying that they don't want to fund highly effective health causes?
Still waiting on an answer to this. Have you tried telling the other commenters here that it doesn't matter how USAID money was spent? A lot of people here seem to think it does and I'm sure they could benefit from your knowledge.
I agree that that is _an_ issue, but calling it _the_ issue is somewhat disingenuous.
Firstly, many people do plainly believe that it is good and moral to help the rest of the world. Both here, and in the polity at large. I think it's safe to say that a majority of people would agree with that statement, as long as the price tag isn't too high and the side effects aren't too bad.
If you're going to take the absolutist stance that foreign aid is never okay, as a matter of principle, that is a perfectly legitimate stance to take. But you're going to need to make that stance explicit rather than just introduce it as an angle nobody is paying attention to, and you should not assume that it is backed by a silent majority just waiting for someone to speak first.
Rubio and Tyler are ironically America first trumpists . They see no value in making the USA good in the world’s eyes . I guess they are scared of having people want to move here 😁
As a fan of both MR and ACX, I was glad to read post.
If I ever make a blog, I would aspire to write a take-down of Tyler's notions about scientific innovation and the supposed "great stagnation" that we are in. An hobbyhorse that he often discusses immediately after a post about MRNA vaccines and just before one about AI.
Still, he is good and interesting in other areas. I agree with his optimistic stance on AI, for example. It is more frustrating when there is someone you agree with on 90% of things and they're wrong about 10% than if you disagree with them about a lot.
I've seen several comments suggesting that this interaction was "not worth your effort" or something to this effect. I'd like to register an opposing opinion; that this and the previous post are important, that they matter, and should have been written.
One of the pieces of your writing that influenced the way I perceive the world was UNSONG in the parts which described how the goodness of one person can disproportionately create much more goodness. One of my favorite scenes is the conversation between the Comet King and Thamiel, where the Comet King tells Thamiel that if it were him, instead of Abraham, with God in Sodom, he would not have stopped at 10 righteous men: he "would have told God to save the city for the sake of one righteous man, and God would have done it", because "a single good man is equivalent to a multitude of good men. Because he can convince others, set up incentives, build institutions, drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming <...> because one man can be a great multitude when kabbalistically necessary".
There is the obvious point that simple straightforward things should be argued for and explained when they're not understood — that death really sucks, that the fact that people die of very cheaply preventable causes is sad, that if we have a reasonable opportunity to help we should help, etc., and people might listen, because many of them genuinely don't know about the situation due to the "filter by misery". But it's not just that. I think even you may not fully appreciate the way your values, and your ability to see the otherwise invisible suffering, cascade from your readers into the rest of the world.
I'm very far from the Bay Area and don't have anyone in the rationalist / EA sphere in my life. So I'm the odd one out and I'm trying to tell people about all these basic things, because unlike in your bubble, people don't know. And of course, I sometimes I get the less-utilitarian-than-thou shit or fail some kind of vibe check in a person's ideology. But sometimes, a friend will text me and ask: "What was the name of that charity again?", and that makes it all worth it.
So please continue to speak, and to allow your goodness to guide you. It is not pointless. It is not obsolete. People still don't have a sense of scale for questions like deaths of millions — and you're actually still very effective in making death and killing uncool.
Also, a regular reminder that people who agree are less likely to comment than people who disagree, so the discussion seems often too harsh on the author, despite many readers being in fact happy about the article.
As a note: PEPFAR isn't "a small number of triumphs." USAID TARRs out even if that's the only single part of it that ever did any good. TC is old enough to remember the AIDS crisis personally, it's super first world convenient to forget about it now.
It's also pretty first world to forget USAID was a prominent vehicle for Rinderpest eradication funding, and was a vehicle for Yaws, Malaria, Guinea Worm, and Polio eradication funding. Hopefully we all agree those are good.
Being that enthusiastic about cutting USAID suggests being short on memory, morals, or something else.
Beside the point but the worst thing about internet discussions is the "I didn't *technically* say that" of it all.
"If we pass this tax plan, gorillas could eat our babies!"
"Why? Please support that idea."
"Well, the fact is that gorillas could always eat our babies, and so because the second statement is always true, it's true under the conditional."
"...okay, but do you oppose the tax plan?"
"Yeah, cuz of the baby eating."
I think this hits the rationalist community harder than most where people are genuinely trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, and avoid imputing motive. It makes good faith discussion impossible and poisons me against being willing to interface with your ideas at all...
Scott, you and Tyler are both obviously right (about different things).
You're right that his post was misleading and that he hasn't clarified or edited it. You're also right that overhead != effectiveness, as a very well known EA talking point. You're also right that overhead != pocketing the money, obviously.
Tyler is right that you were (still are, it seems) angry, and that lowers your standards of argumentation. An example of this is that you broadly characterized Trump as making these cuts to enrich his billionaire cronies. I don't know what motivates Trump, but I'm not sure this is it, he is crazy in many ways. And certainly if that was the reason then cuts to USAID aren't the best source of funds (I think he's mostly counting on increasing the deficit, which is a much much larger sum). I also give weight to his judgment that there is waste and potentially systemic problems in NGOs <-> USAID, though it would have been better to provide evidence. That "most aid is wasted" is also a pretty standard EA talking point, though wasted != pocketed, of course. And it is something to ponder that suddenly EAs turn from criticizing lots of aid to defending it (I understand it's because of the debate shifting and so we want to clarify what side we're on, but the facts shouldn't change, and maybe also not their presentation).
Being angry made you be mean to him a tiny bit about vibe camp LLC, and now much more about his book reviews and everything. You can recognize that emotion being so strong that it must come from defending your in-group (I know. I feel it too!). You're above that stuff, don't get tangled in it. It also isn't the best way to advance the cause, I think. I mention this because you asked us to keep you from writing angry posts.
About the arguments in this post, though mostly correct, I would rely less on broad categories of "types of aid", or even "NGO vs. direct" - these are very broad categories with place in each one to be very useful or very note useful. Even if NGO is better than direct on average, I wouldn't switch funding to direct en masse - there's a wide distribution.
Regarding the last point - I don't know as much about how charity funding works, but for infrastructure (or military) government contracting there's a common argument that the most efficient way to do it is for the government to contract out the actual work but have enough of a staff to have the expertise to understand the details of what work gets done/needs to be done and how the costs break down. I'd be surprised if aid works differently.
If true this would imply that usaid should probably employ more (technical, non-ideological) staff for grant analysis (although finding technical people who care about cost effectiveness in usaid and also aren't too ideological to work under a system with clear policy goals is hard - there's only so many givewell people. But probably doable).
In regards to your footnote, eternal damnation is definitely part of Jewish traditional thought (no 100% agreement on it tho, like everything, but it is very mainstream).
The Gemarah, Rambam, the Sefer HaIkkarim and other commentators all believe in it.
That’s a much more defensible hell than “you lived a mostly good life but not perfect so no heaven for you. Instead spend all eternity being tortured. “
Claim under discussion. Cowen highlights Senator Marco Rubio’s assertion that only 12 cents on each USAID dollar reaches intended recipients while the remaining 88 cents is absorbed by NGOs.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Quick fact-check. Using GPT-4o (“o3”), Cowen confirms that before 2017 “well over half—and usually 75-90 percent—” of USAID disbursements flowed through third-party NGOs, contractors, or multilateral agencies rather than directly to partner-country governments or local actors.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Assessment. Cowen concedes that some third-party spending is productive—he explicitly endorses flagship efforts such as PEPFAR and earlier U.S.-backed vaccine programs—but argues that the overall allocation pattern “seems badly off.” In his view, USAID defenders largely sidestepped these magnitudes during earlier policy debates.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Overall position. While not dismissing the value of targeted health initiatives, Cowen is skeptical of USAID’s broader spending model. He suggests that channeling such a large share of aid through intermediary organizations is at odds with getting resources to people on the ground and warrants more scrutiny and reform.
* The 88 % ≠ “overhead.” It finances most program inputs; only a slice is administrative cost.
* Intermediaries add value. Large NGOs often have logistics networks, compliance systems, and surge capacity local groups lack—especially in fragile states.
* Outcomes matter more than disbursement channel. Programs like PEPFAR (which Tyler himself praises) rely heavily on U.S. contractors but still save millions of lives.
Bottom line
* Agree: USAID should publish clearer, project-level cost breakdowns, police indirect-cost rates aggressively, and move faster on its localization targets.
* Disagree: Equating “not direct to locals” with “money wasted” oversimplifies how modern aid operations work.
Even if we steal man the existence of USAID — why is anyone arguing that Americans, who are trillions in debt, should fund the world.
“I am not an expert on aid. But the development fellows and econ professors I mentioned above are, and they agree with my criticism. I ran this post by someone who’s worked closely with USAID and affiliated programs for a decade and they said they took my side.”
Another way to put it would be — “The beneficiaries of the money flowing into this system would like it to continue to exist, so they may continue benefiting financially.”
USAID is a scam, and obvious CIA outlet, by even the most generous measures.
How is anyone defending it as a publicly-funded entity? If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?
If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?
Scott: I personally know many people who do invaluable work under this agency and they have told me of the apocalyptic damage it has suffered.
You: But have you considered that USAID only exists to be a CIA front according to my favorite X users?
All government agencies know each other and interact to some degree, that's all it is. If you don't like the CIA, argue for its defunding directly and stop obstructing disease eradication.
> If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?
Wow, a fully general counter-argument against literally every public program ever! If you don't understand why governments exist, please review your civics textbooks before speaking further.
>"If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?"
This is such a disingenuous take.
Try to start with one of big rocks and the criticism would be akin to "Why are you attacking this program that has clearer benefits for Americans when money's being wasted on foreigners?"
No I wouldn't, because you would actually be taking action that would lower the overall debt. This isn't an impossible thing, Bill Clinton did it, all you need to do is raise taxes without starting two wars in two years. I also wouldn't complain about spending money on foreign aid because I like it when we do that. Jessica Riedel has written extensively on how to lower the deficit for years and I think her ideas are worth talking about. She also thinks slashing USAID like this is pointless psychopathy because, as noted, it saves millions of lives for 0.3% of federal spending and cannot possibly solve the debt problem.
Anyways, are you planning to cut big things, raise taxes, or both? I'm all ears.
Ok, cutting medicare, medicaid, and social security would make a big impact on the federal budget. It would also make almost the entire country hate you for taking out the most popular social welfare programs ever created. What's your plan to win the public over on that? Do you think cutting USAID will make the country like cutting things in general or something?
“ If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?”
1% is the figure. 1% of revenue (and 0.7% of spending, but that’s not the value that matters).
You’re essentially saying: “we’re broke, so what’s the point in not buying luxuries for other people.”
USAID as CIA front — why don’t you simply research it?
“Wow, a fully general counter-argument against literally every public program ever! If you don't understand why governments exist, please review your civics textbooks before speaking further.”
How is USAID providing a public good or protection for Americans who are dying by the hundreds of thousands per year through deaths of despair, being invaded actively by multiple nations/peoples, etc.
How is the USAID protecting Americans or providing them a public good (like functional roads, clean water, etc.)?
Maybe you should review the civics textbook you so covet.
> You’re essentially saying: “we’re broke, so what’s the point in not buying luxuries for other people.”
I'm saying, as are most actual economists who care about the national debt, that removing foreign aid spending alone will not have a noticable effect on the debt. It will, however, kill tens of millions. You do not present plans to reduce federal spending or increase federal revenue, therefore it is clear you don't actually care about the debt.
> USAID as CIA front — why don’t you simply research it?
"The CIA has previously planted spies in USAID programs" does not mean that effective aid is not a significant part of USAID activities worth preserving. If you care so deeply about stopping CIA activities, you would ask your government to disband the CIA first. You show no signs of doing this, therefore you don't actually care about the CIA.
> How is USAID providing a public good or protection for Americans
Your prosperity as an American rests on the place of the United States at the center of a global network of trade, built over decades for your benefit. USAID gets favor from other nations, leading to the favorable trade agreements that grow your pension fund. Please stop breaking it.
> who are dying by the hundreds of thousands per year through deaths of despair
I would take your professed care for your countrymen more seriously if you didn't support the "Defund All Welfare Programs" party.
> being invaded actively by multiple nations/peoples
Immigration isn't an invasion, it's just that people with actually hard lives have a greater appreciation of the inheritance you squander than you could ever grasp. You want to fight an invasion, go help Ukraine. A dose of true hardship might improve your character.
> Maybe you should review the civics textbook you so covet.
You're the one who keeps admitting they don't know why their government works the way it does.
"If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?" -- there are a lot of collective action problems like this, where the benefits to any given individual (or, sometimes, to individuals with wealth above a relevant threshold) are minuscule enough that the problem is unlikely to be funded adequately to solve it through private trade or individual voluntary action. It's one of the main reason governments exist.
Much of modern politics is arguing about which problems we ought to wield government on, and if you want to argue that aid isn't one of them, feel free. But it shouldn't be surprising that some important collective action problems can't be addressed by private funding alone.
This is not in the text itself, but I read Tyler Cowen's quote on the political violence thing as being more about his fears that someone would target *him* personally. I'm not saying that's credible, nor can I be sure that's what he meant, but I thought he was implying that by calling the claim monstrous, and then saying that Tyler was aligned with it, he was basically accusing Tyler ALSO of belonging in the same circle of hell. Which is actually what I took from Scott's original post, so if that's not what Scott meant then perhaps he should clarify that. Again, I don't think anyone reading Scott's blog is going to be like "Yes, the obvious thing to save USaid is to shoot Tyler Cowen," but I also don't think its a stretch to say that the overall tone of that post was "Tyler Cowen is a complicit bastard," the downstream effects of which are what Tyler's complaining about most.
Scott clarified very clearly in this post that he didn't want anyone killed. Past that, Tyler's asking that nobody ever say that the policies he supports have monstrous consequences, no matter what he says. Nobody has a right to that treatment.
>Certainly it makes him better than the ghouls cheering on its cancellation.
No, not really. Like, if you add another office with the power to potentially cut PEPFAR, which is what everyone agrees is what happened, that alone makes you worse than everyone just posting words online through the potential suffering you create.
And speaking of, THIS IS YOUR MOVEMENT. You created the dark enlightenment. You created rationalism. You and Yudkowsky, the two new kings of eugenics; you should be *cheering*, bragging, that your sons, Yarvin and Thiel, through their sons, Vance and Musk, have killed tens of thousands of Africans, with millions more on the way. You have nothing to fear or cry about; to do so is disingenuous. You were the one who couldn't endorse Hillary when the shit hit the fan. And look where you are. This is your moment. This is your world.
Why do you think rationalism has anything to do with the other 2?
The dark enlightenment and neo reactionarism are the same movement or at least have a 95% overlap in ideology, rationalism is distinct and has very little overlap with them.
Scott specifically wrote a thirty thousand word essay about how stupid Curtis Yarvin is (my description, not his) back in 2013: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . Frankly, it was so devastating I'm shocked people listen to Yarvin, particularly given I've now had to read some of his tweets. He's absolutely not responsible for Yarvin.
And not one part of that is about his cruelty or racism or fascism. It's all squabbling about meaningless BS about how many God-Kings there should be and if death should be banned or voluntary; because they agree on every *real* issue, specifically whether to murder as many people in Central/Southern Africa as possible.
A deeply half-assed, unethusiastic endorsement clearly not meant to actually persuade anyone, and one in which he takes time to warn of the dangerous brown hordes.
An endorsement like that seems much more likely to convince truly undecideds than a million endorsements from major publications. Being willing to be controversial and to be honest about your various concerns makes people trust you and be more open to your arguments. His endorsement there rings much truer precisely for the ambivalence in that piece. Vox or whoever was always going to endorse Hillary, and they weren't going to be even slightly torn about it. Which means their reasoning isn't really worth reading. Scott endorsing Hillary on the other hand, says something about Trump.
What an absolutely horrible thing to say. Scott is a good man who literally *donated a kidney* to a stranger because he was convinced that was the right thing to do. I believe he is genuinely appalled at what Musk has done to USAID. He never wanted any of this.
Criticize Scott all you want, but this kind of hyperbole helps no one.
I am going to write a top-level reply here, because it is silly to help build a complicated comment tree where the only content is you screaming random accusations, never backing them up by evidence, and then writing some more of the same when someone replies to you.
So far, these are the things you have accused Scott of, in this thread:
* that he created "the dark enlightement"
* that he is a "new king of eugenics"
* that Yarvin and Thiel are his sons, and Vance and Musk his grandsons -- okay, this one was probably means metaphorically, but it still somehow allows you to blame Scott for their actions
* that he "couldn't endorse Hillary"... wait, actually he *did*, but it was a "deeply half-assed, unethusiastic endorsement clearly not meant to actually persuade anyone"
* that he either is Hitler, or is fucking Hitler -- probably also metaphorical
* that Scott and neo-reaction "agree on every *real* issue, specifically whether to murder as many people in Central/Southern Africa as possible"
* that he "believes Black people are naturally inferior"
You make further claims that:
* rationalism, dark enlightenment, and neo-reaction are "all truly one"
* that the goal of rationalism is literally that "the genetically superior whites live forever with everyone else being dead or subservient"
* that "Yudkowsky defined genetic intelligence as the only reason anyone would have to exist"
These do not seem like comments of a sane person who actually knows Scott. For starters, given the number of accusations and the pushback you get, you should provide some *evidence*. Assuming that you are not full of hot air, it is should be possible to provide a specific *quote* about e.g. murdering people in Africa. Don't keep me waiting, please.
Instead, the only evidence we got in this thread so far, was evidence *against* your claims, for example a link where Scott explicitly endorsed Hillary (or just generally anyone other than Trump), which is the opposite of what you said. Then you reacted with moving the goalpost into an unfalsifiable territory of: yes, he wrote that, but he didn't *mean* it, deep down.
Your accusations seems to be not only random, but actually opposite to reality. For example, it was Scott who wrote the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (hint: "anti" means: against, opposed to). Scott regularly promotes effective altruism on his blog, and guess what, a large part of effective altruism is about saving African lives by curing malaria. He posted photos of his children, and clearly neither of them seems like Yarvin or Thiel (unless there was a dramatic progress in anti-aging research that I missed). He posted an endorsement of Hillary, or perhaps merely an anti-endorsement of Trump... well, you already kinda admitted this one. Now that Scott has disclosed his real identity, I think we can safely conclude that he is not Hitler.
Being somewhat familiar with rationalism, I think an important part of it is providing *evidence* for your claims. Which is what I am asking you to do here. If you can't do that at all, then maybe this is not a good place for you to be, and you should try to find a community which is vibes-based rather than evidence-based and which communicates using insults and accusations rather than quotes and reasoning. There should be enough of those on the internet. Or you could, dunno, https://www.readthesequences.com/ and learn something about what this rationality thing is about, as it seems to be a topic you are interested it.
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
There are two independent issues here: one is whether or not USAID and similar government programs are worth preserving, and the other is whether Tyler's critique, and others like it, make their point correctly. Based soley on Scott's reporting here, it seems T is engaging in the rhetorical technique of implying something is true without coming right out and saying it, then denying having made the implication when called out on it: "In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed."
Also the technique of accusing the other person of doing what they just accused you of, without clearly answering the original accusation: "Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing." It would appear that it was Tyler who lumped himself in with Rubio, not Scott.
Guilt by association not germane to the argument: "In a time when innocent Americans are gunned down in the streets for their (ostensible) political views, and political assassination attempts seem to be rising, and there even has been a rationalist murder cult running around"
Moving the goal posts--Tyler points out that Scott does not appear to have interviewed not quoted Trump administration officials regarding the other side of the argument. But Scott's post wasn't about the Trump administration, it was about Tyler himself, and the arguments he uses in his post. It's right there in the original title: "Contra MR".
These are all right out of the disinformation handbook. I will give Tyler the benefit of the doubt and assume he's simply copying the rhetorical techniques that he and everyone else sees used so widely on the internet. That doesn't make it a strong argument, it makes it a weak one based on disingenuous rhetoric.
“into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.”
Just insert your “X” in front of the quote and this applies to us all.
But if we make it purely political you could insert other political rhetoric that goes beyond “normal political lying” and should therefore condemn people to hell. Remembering to always assume the rhetoric stems from evil motives.
"Will you and such as you decide what men shall live, what men shall die! Oh God, to hear the Insect on the leaf, pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
There is a distinction between instrumental values and terminal values. The former are valuable because they are means to some end, like money is valuable because it would allow you to achieve your other goals, while the latter are valuable because that's just how your value system works.
For many people, preserving their own life, at least, is a terminal value, necessary not just because it allows them to pursue their other goals, but also because they have a preference for staying alive for its own sake. Then people who are smart enough to intuitively understand the game-theoretic nature of the question (even if they've never heard of game theory) realize that it's in their best interest to coordinate around living in a world where everyone helps everyone stay alive. They will help others not die and others will help *them* not die. They realize that repeatedly defecting in iterated prisoners dilemma will end up in someone defecting against you, in a moment when it's inconvenient not to have someone help you not die.
(And then there are people like myself who treat lives of others like a terminal value. Like a poem that makes the world better by just existing in it — only a thousand times more so.)
But for some people, this "treat others as you would have them treat you" game-theoretic logic is too galaxy-brained. Why should I spend my hard-earned money to help some strangers, they wonder, when it has no relation at all with my life? They've never met one of these African kids, after all, perhaps that 10$ on a malaria net would be better spent on a cup of coffee.
I think what these people are missing is, just because misery is invisible, doesn't mean the misery of others has no influence over you. Perhaps you dislike those annoying immigrants coming to your beautiful country? They come because their own countries offer less safety and prosperity. You like the fact that your friends mostly don't have HIV? Are you sure that would be the case in a world without PEPFAR, that fighting the epidemic abroad didn't also stop people from bringing it to your countries in bigger quantities? You see, *misery catches*. You may be under the impression that money spent charitably is money retracted from caring about your own needs. But it's actually money spend on building a generally safer world around you, and when a rich country can afford that, isn't it a wise investment?
And I think this is part of a more general life lesson: being all cynical and clever and "I know how the world works" is surprisingly less rewarding in life than just being good.
ACX doesn't seem to have likes on the web interface, so I'll reply just to say that this is a Good Comment. Particularly the last bit.
Feels like there was a time, before Scott became really well known, when you could expect most commenters to show up already with an understanding of this sort of thing. Alas, we've been swamped by barbarians. Or maybe just children. Don't become disillusioned! We're still here Scott!
What is missing in all this discussion is that USAID was funding religious organizations, who are doing aid work in the name of their religion but actually using your and my money. The example of CRS is very important. when CRS does aid work in Nigeria, do they say to the recipients, that the money is actually from the US government or do they pass of the aid as something Catholics have been giving.
Is this not another way of evangelizing by using american govt money. If you want to show how generous Catholics are, raise money from your own religious brothers/sisters and spend it. Reading this makes it seem that America was using secular dollars for religious purposes. If the shoe was on the other foot, (say Pakistanis funding Jaish e Mohammed and they were going around giving aid to poor students in America), we would be shouting how it is wrong. I won't be surprised if some Muslim charities have already figured out the con, and were using US money to support "charities" like hamas.
Shame on the US government for supporting these religious NGO's and shame on scott for covering for them. You should be arguing for No funding for religions NGO.
Once again: National Catholic Reporter (not the be confused with National Catholic Register which is an ordinary, respectable newspaper -- yes they did in fact purposely name themselves after a real, older catholic newspaper to purposefully confuse people) is to Catholicism as moon landing deniers are to NASA. They notably have no affiliation with the church whatsoever -- the church has actually multiple times asked them to remove the word "catholic" from their name for being innaccurate to the church's teachings, schismatic, and for their "poisonous character", among other things.
Not to mention the relevant claim of the article would be considered *heretical* by most Christian denominations. I would like to kindly request Scott to either remove this reference or at least give the context that this is from a highly disreputable (arguably fraudulent) source.
I only skimmed this a couple of days ago, because blogger beef is inherently uninteresting. But I came back to read Scott's hilarious snark, and then found the impassioned and real argument at the end. I hope the argument succeeds very much, because Cowen should be on our side of this argument, and it would be better if he was.
(My personal best guess at what's happened: Cowen, like much of the media, has realised that saying "Trump is horrific and dumb" in response to every horrific and dumb thing he does is boring. So he's started trying to steelman Trump's policies, to see if he can find anything interesting in there. He's taken that process too far, and in that post ended up in absurd territory. As before, I don't really mind when he gets stuff wrong. But Scott makes an excellent argument for minding a bit in this case.)
From the linked wikipedia article on Gehenna (what Scott is calling Hell):
> The Talmud states that all who enter Gehenna eventually leave it, except for adulterers, those who humiliate others in public, and those who call others by derogatory names.
Uh, I don't think Trump is getting out of there in 12 months
Worked for USAID as a foreign service officer for 8 years and am co-founder/owner of an engineering firm that (previously) strictly worked on USAID projects as a sub to large NGOs to help with construction activities.
A couple points here:
1) That NICRA rate seems extremely low. I would assume that CRS is having overhead/no-project costs being supplemented by outside funders. A better indicator is to look at Chemonics - an "NGO" that receives the vast majority of their funding from USAID - Their rate, based on a USAID audit is: Fringe Benefits: 12.99%/Overhead: 45.89%/General & Administrative (G&A): 4.69% - this even seems low to me based on my experience. It is VERY expensive to set up offices and work overseas, especially when you need specific expertise. For an ex-pat to run a program overseas (typically required for programs over ~$10 m) it costs in the ballpark of $1m/year all things considered.
2) A huge category of expenses are wrapped up in program oversight (Called monitoring, Learning and Evaluation - MEL). Each program has internal monitoring evaluation and external monitoring and evaluation. The insane thing about the "Doge discoveries" is that everything has been out in the open for years, its just that no one ever cared enough about it. USAID employees and sector experts have long called for reform around this and a refocus in how we do business/reporting. USAID and NGO teams have huge amount of internal resources just dedicated to reporting While working in Afghanistan SIGAR - the congressional oversight unit, had significantly more people dedicated to oversee/evaluated my project than I did to run it. USG regulation is also why we cannot go directly to a lot of local firms - the reporting, auditing and accounting requirements are too complex for them to run these programs.
3) This conversation is solely based on humanitarian aid. As your graphic indicates (btw this graphic seems to be completely invented, I work in infrastructure and have never seen this broken out on foreignassistance.gov), $9.9B goes to humanitarian aid. Its typically the other types of programs that are more controversial -environmental mitigation/civil society programs for example. What's missing is the conversation around "soft power". If USAID funds a $100m program that is not efficiently spent, but was agreed upon so that country provides policing troops in Somalia so we don't have to - is that still a waste of money? I'm not arguing one way or another but USAID's main mission is not humanitarian work, it is a tool of statecraft, along with diplomacy and defense (this is ingrained in you as a USAID officer). There's no discussion around this whatsoever instead this seems to evaluated USAID as only a charity funder which is incorrect.
4) Agree that I have no idea what Tyler's 12% goes to people on the ground means. If we build a school for a $100,000 what % of that 100,000 goes to the people on the ground? There needs to be some definition to what is meant at all.
There's a lot more I can go on about but it seems like Scott's argument is only scratching the surface and I'm not quite clear what the hell Tyler is arguing.
Another important point is that the % for NICRA is not enough to understand how it works! Most organizations don't apply their NICRA to their total costs. Many NGOs don't apply their NICRA to food or medicine. Others only apply NICRA to salaries. So the actual indirect cost rate is much lower.
FYI that CRS' NICRA is now lower than what you cite (about 2/3 of the figure you're using). NICRA rates change each fiscal year and it's common for them to go up and down.
On top of several million dying, several million more unwanted children are likely to be born into poverty, given that US Aid was the largest global funder of contraception and family planning.
The obsession with abortion ignores the fact that proper family planning education reduces abortion and miscarriage rates.
I should also add that some of those millions who will die will be the mothers of those being born, given the impact on maternity service funding.
(Again, because of the obsession with abortion, maternity services often come under crossfire)
"Fact check with o3" seems like a self own.
Yeah, that's pretty lazy.
Paul Graham was right about this. It's useful for getting a kind of generic consensus opinion but not for actually doing deep thinking or original ideas.
That's why LLMs usually give you sources.
Sometimes the sources even exist!
And if they don't, that's informative too. We need not be so stupid about using tools.
Yeah I feel like if someone says this, it's more than valid to just point to that as them being at best unworthy of further engagement and basically not seriously engaging, and leave it there. Just totally absurd.
Don't love that Scott basically does that, too.
Unless you are a subject level expert, and I mean top of your game, all the LLMs know more than you. In testing against my own area of expertise it’s always right.
(I’m sure there’s some hallucinations but that tends to happens when it doesn’t know something and starts to make it up).
These things hallucinate like mad and are completely untrustworthy, and there's no good heuristic for when they're going to lie for no reason and when they're going to tell the truth.
strongly disagree! i feel like you develop a *very* good sense of when you've wandered out into hallucination territory after using a given model for a practical purpose after a few hours
it's a bit annoying that each new model that gets released mixes things up, and you have to relearn these habits, but i don't think it's fair to say there are no good heuristics whatsoever. i think we develop pretty good heuristics pretty much automatically, just through use
Apologies for posting the same thing twice, but Cowen used ChatGPT a lot and still fell for a hallucination. https://newsletter.mathewingram.com/tyler-cowen-francis-bacon-and-the-chatgpt-engine/
I read a UK news article the other day in which they quoted a politician as having said the phrase "if we hadn't have complied" and it sounded totally wrong to me. But not being British, and they being the ones who ostensibly invented the language, I figured I could be wrong, so I checked it on the Google AI (whatever it's called). It's response:
"No, "if we hadn't have complied" is not correct. The correct phrase should be "if we hadn't complied". "Hadden't" is the correct past perfect negative form when using the "had" auxiliary verb, as in the conditional sentence "if we hadn't met".
Hadden't???
I then checked "hadden" and turns out it is the Dutch past tense of "had"...
>so I checked it on the Google AI (whatever it's called)
Gemini.
IME, Google Gemini is abnormally bad at this kind of thing compared to other frontier AIs. It seems like Google optimized it so hard to be a good assistant for coders that they inadvertently made it completely useless for anything else. Less of an "artificial intelligence" and more of an "artificial idiot savant".
As a native British English speaker, hadn't've sounds idiomatic to me.
I'm a native British English speaker (albeit one without much formal/structured knowledge of the language). I think ”hadn't have complied” is grammatically valid but this politician may have been misusing it.
Consider a rail service where you can just board and then only eventually pay for a ticket when the conductor gets around to you, versus a rail service where you're not allowed to be aboard at all without having a ticket.
For the former service, you could say ”the conductor asked me for a ticket and if I hadn't bought one I would have been put off the train” and for the latter you could say ”the conductor asked me for a ticket and if I hadn't [already] have bought one beforehand...”
(In the latter case I think it would be a bit grammatically tidier to say ”..if I hadn't had one..”, but I can't seem to see anything grammatically wrong with ”..if I hadn't have bought one beforehand..”)
Not at all. It’s only when they don’t know something that they hallucinate and that’s rare enough. They also make mistakes with new intellectual production, like code, but that’s getting better.
When it comes to established facts like in engineering science or math they are pretty accurate.
Yeah that is um, totally false. They routinely hallucinate even when they do know the correct answer. Seems like you've really fallen for their bs lol.
No I know my subject matter and it’s non controversial engineering and science. By the way you don’t really prove your point by repeating it.
This is generally a problem with new technology, there’s always some adverse reaction.
You should see how bad humans are! At least I know how to handle a hallucinating LLM.
Also, if unsure, ask another LLM to critique the first output.
Humans at least tend to have the common courtesy of expressing degrees of confidence that are not "I'm 100% convinced". Which makes "human is wrong" way easier to spot than "AI is hallucinating".
You haven’t met my wife then, have you.
We both know you are talking about a subset of humanity there, not all of them. Speaking as one of those humans who always opines with 100% confidence.
This is correct as of 2023. Today you can request the models search the internet, provide specific citations and double check all their claims. This is probably better than 95% of discussions on the internet, although maybe it's only an OK substitute for what Cowen and Scott could do themselves.
The fun part is that the "reasoning" AI models hallucinate even more.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-models-hallucinate-more/
I've had very nearly the opposite experience: when I ask LLMs about stuff I already know the answers to, the answers have ranged from "serviceable" to "absolutely wrong". More advanced models are laughably absurd less often (e.g. newer versions of ChatGPT will no longer tell me that a certain minor celebrity is her own brother, nor will tell me that a certain Japanese public health official from the late 20th century flew dozens of successful kamikaze missions during WW2), but they're still making fairly severe errors in subtler ways that require more care and expertise to notice.
I suspect a big part of the difference is that my experience has been with using the LLMs as toys rather than tools, with the exception of making minor use of the Copilot IDE plugin. If you're using them in good faith, they are really, really good at picking up the implicit assumptions in your prompts and giving you answers shaped to fit your expectations. This can improve the quality of answers if your assumptions are correct, but if you as a prompt based on wrong assumptions, a common failure mode is to use your assumptions to craft an answer that will seem good to you while compounding your mistakes.
In one of the previous posts Scott made about Tyler Cowen, I compared this last issue to the Electric Monks from the first Dirk Gently novel. The Monks are "labor saving devices" that "believe things for you", the same way a dishwasher washes dishes for you or a video recorder watches television for you. The civilization that created them uses them, among other things, as sources of comfort and reassurance. Like the Monks, LLMs will believe whatever you tell them to believe (explicitly or implicitly) and can be very persuasive and reassuring in affirming their beliefs. But this makes them less than optimal as tools for discovering the truth.
Yeah that's my experience, too. Checking them on basic matters of fact where I already know the answer showed them to be routinely making things up out of whole cloth.
And yes - they are so servile and subservient, so eager to please, that your implicit assumptions get baked into the answer, hard.
Asking them how to solve a simple problem, as an alternative to stack exchange, where the wrong answer will be obvious and just waste a little time? Sure. Anything else? No thanks.
I am very careful with my prompts. It’s fairly exact. What a lot of people get wrong is asking shorter questions thinking that’s easier for the A.I. to understand but it’s better to be more verbose.
Could you give an example of a good long prompt and the ways a shorter prompt might go wrong in the same situation?
I think this is the same kind of dismissive response as people got for "fact checking with the Internet" in 2000 or "fact checking with Wikipedia" in 2008. o3 is actually incredibly smart and has caught many errors for me, although you need some basic information literacy skills to use it well. I'll write a post on this soon.
For this post, everything I got from o3 has also been given a cited source - for example, o3 told me Mercatus' overhead, but also linked me to their Form 990 and told me how to calculate it from the numbers on the form.
I think o3 was blameless in Tyler's original post - all of its numbers were correct and had the correct context, and it was Tyler who misinterpreted them.
Fact checking should be done against primary sources IMO. If you want to source those via o3, or Wikipedia, or Google, go crazy... but say "fact checked with [primary source]", not "fact checked with Google". I agree o3 is a killer tool with a huge amount of knowledge, but I don't think it's accurate enough to cite directly as a source.
I guess my point is that the phrase "fact checked with o3" should raise eyebrows, despite o3 being a great resource.
Yeah, it does look silly, and, in Scott's words, "it looks like it’s offering much-needed clarity, but in fact it’s the opposite".
Yeah, especially since Cowen once fell for a lie told by an AI. Long story short, he posted that he asked ChatGPT who the biggest opponent of the printing press was. ChatGPT said Francis Bacon, and then made up a quote about the printing press being bad and attributed it to Bacon's New Atlantis. A day later Cowen realized it was some machine-generated hoax, took the post down, and didn't offer any explanation or even admit the mistake. I'd be a little more wary of using AI to fact-check if that were me. https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/03/28/i-have-spread-lie-16968
That should be a big negative update on Tyler Cowen's reputation imo.
I always liked to imagine him as the smart man's Joe Rogan (and Dwarkesh as the smart man's Lex Friedman) and I still do, but it seems he might have a bit more of Joe Rogan's ego and aversion to fact-checking than I thought.
"Tyler Cowen is the smart man's Joe Rogan" seems like a devastating insult even without additional context.
My 2 cents: your evaluation of Dwarkesh and Friedman are backwards.
I think a good interviewer should cede the spotlight to the guest, and play a support role in basically just keeping the guest talking. Friedman has always seemed very good at this, while Dwarkesh comes accross as desperate to show how much _he_ knows about the topic at hand. Not that Dwarkesh isn't knowledgable, but if you're talking to a world expert in a topic, you should probably just stick to asking questions.
I struggle to get through Dwarkesh interviews for this reason... it's often a minute or two of the guest talking about something very interesting, then a min of Dwarkesh asking some convoluted "question" that is just an excuse to string together a few facts he knows about the topic.
I'll admit I've only watched a few Dwarkesh interviews (because I can't stand him as an interviewer), so it's possible my sample isn't representative.
I'm curious, though — did you actually open the link to their Form 990? I'm still finding that about 25% of the links that o3 gives are faulty in some way. Lately, the bad links frequently send me to 404 dead ends, but then when I search Google, CoPilot, or Scholar, I can find the study that o3 alerted me to. I'm making a habit of double-checking anything any LLM hands to me. OTOH, LLMs save me a shitload of time researching a subject despite the fact that many of the responses are equivalent to Wikipedia articles that haven't been brought up to snuff yet.
I think wikipedia/o3 is perfectly fine if you know what you are doing. Every time someone rejects my argument because I used wikipedia or chatgpt as the data source, it is done in bad faith. I can understand that for controversial socio-political issues but for STEM, especially in my field, it is very good.
In fact, citing some low quality studies can be much worse despite them being the primary source. Wikipedia editors will have done at least some vetting when writing an article.
I have no opinion about your disagreement with MR. I have no time to delve deep. But most discussions on internet are not like university thesis either. Requiring them to be backed up with the primary sources is not reasonable. Using wikipedia or o3 is exactly the help we need to make the conversation flow faster and more smoothly. Rarely the cause of disagreement is that wikipedia data is wrong. It could be in some cases and then I would be happy to hear why wikipedia failed in the particular instance. Mostly the disagreement is that someone doesn't like wikipedia data, cannot show that it is wrong because all other sources agree with it and then wants to win the argument on technicality – you used the untrustable source!
Based on the philosophy of science we should not deny the use of o3/wiki.
Science is not about checking every fact by yourself. It is a social thing, discoveries are made by groups of people who all work together.
No one can read and check all the studies. Instead, we can read literature reviews and select what we need. The literature reviews may not be written by the best scientists who are busy doing something else. A lot of people involved will help to write them. The same applies to wikipedia articles which are often written by people at universities, sometimes professors, sometimes students etc.
Ultimately we have to trust each other. Sometimes this trust is broken, of course. We gradually learn to understand which groups can be trusted more and which cannot be trusted. I would easily trust wikipedia for basic data about something, such as common disease, a medicine, gdp of a country. Probably won't be enough if you want to go deeper but for most purposes it is fine to rely on wikipedia.
It is not comparable to trusting someone on twitter who tells some previously unheard facts about some medicine.
> Science is not about checking every fact by yourself. It is a social thing, discoveries are made by groups of people who all work together.
o3 isn't a person and the people programming o3 don't generally have any specialized domain knowledge. The problem with LLMs as sourcing is they regularly "hallucinate," i.e. give false but correct-sounding results. The fact that they're now given access to search engines makes this better, but it's not perfect; I recently tried to find the age of GJ 1002 and Google gave me an inaccurate age via its AI summary, linking to a page about a gas giant which mentioned the age of the system but was around a different star (at time of publishing, I could not replicate this error, but it was annoying when it happened).
Obviously, there are risks but o3 is a tool created by other people and it can be very useful tool if you use it correctly.
The most common reason it “hallucinates” is that you request data that does not exist.
In a way it is similar to pubmed search tool. You can find all types of studies, including those of very low quality. You need some understanding to use it properly.
The same is with o3. If you understand it properly and use it to find and extract data that you know already exists, then you have greatly reduced the chances that it will provide “hallucinations”.
it’s also an odd comment for rationalists. I’m very dubious about AGI or the future singularity. But, I find LLMs to be excellent synthesisers of existing knowledge.
And you can always ask it for sources. During the anti Wikipedia panic of the 2010s I used to garner information from wiki, sometimes quote it, but include sources.
"Used an LLM to find sources" is very different from "asked an LLM and just trusted what it said" -- and the latter is what Tyler Cowen apparently did.
This is also *very* different from trusting the words of a mostly earnest community of editors collaboratively building a wiki and vetting each others work. (Especially in 2008, when the community was smaller and even more earnest...)
I've once, ever, encountered a Wikipedia source link that failed to back up the claim it was cited for. But they're voluminous with LLMs. You really can't reasonably put these on a level with each other.
With wikipedia the usual argument against it as a trusted source was that we don't know who writes it. Anyone can do it and we have plenty of examples where it has gone wrong. The whole Scottish language wiki was written by someone who didn't even speak Scottish but only a perverted version of English language dialect (https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html).
And yet, wikipedia became a powerful tool despite all these real and imagined issues. Probably ChatGPT will follow the same path. People will learn how to use it properly and ChatGPT developers will also work to make it more trustable.
I think the problem with "fact checked by o3" is that it can give the impression that you're just glibly going along with it. Even a sanity check is frequently not good enough since LLM hallucinations usually seem pretty plausible. Good to hear that you checked the cites and verified the calculation.
Hear, hear. Tyler’s original post was contemptible.
What part of it? In full "I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates* have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many USAID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
* estimates: about how much the US government is doing aid by giving tax money to NGOs instead of running their own programmes. How competent USAID can be, if they hardly do their own stuff on the ground? And other considerations. - At least, worth to discuss. But it is all "Musk/Trump killing millions of children" - Scott links to Vox - and the only discussion is: malice or ignorance, must be both!
Statistically, you can expect blind-hatchet-job cuts to even moderately effective aid programs to kill millions of people over the next century or so, so I don't think this is an outlandish projection.
If a state does politics that change GDP growth by 1% a year - over a "century or so" you will see HUGE differences. Tyler often mentions this comparing USofA and Mexico. And pretty much all of us will be dead after a century, too. In the long run ... capitalism - markets, trade and rule-of-law - creates wealth and health. Not charity.
AIDS kills. Wonderful, the USofA spend so much on medicine to save the lives of infected abroad. Sad to hear, there seems some disruption now. Where are those billionaire-pledgers when you need them!
Ukraine needs help. Wonderful the West gives money so it can keep services running. I would not put that in the charity-budget, though.
> "If a state does politics that change GDP growth by 1% a year - over a "century or so" you will see HUGE differences"
Setting aside that aid programs can be helpful in expanding GDP in the global south, I think GDP expansion in the developed world hasn't been translating into substantial improvements in quality-of-life for quite some time.
You should also be aware that aid programs are a tiny percentage of government expenditure across the western world. The welfare state is far more profligate.
... Scott's whole post just laid out in great detail the reasons that TC's post was contemptible.
Very weird to ask someone saying "hear hear" to all of that to rehash those points!
Makes it seem like you might not have read the article you're commenting on?
As I read all of ACX and SSC - and lots of MR - I can see, Scott does not judge TC`s post as "contemptible". See: Scott and Tyler respect each other highly for many years now. Yes, they do not agree on everything. Mostly it is disagreement in degree. (The one exception may be their opinion of brutalist architecture.)
Scott misread Tyler´s first post, as most did (me too). Scott explains why he misread Tyler. Then he explains why he does not see the outsourcing of USAID to other NPO/NGOs as problematic (unlike Tyler). Scott does show signs of exasperation with Tyler´s style (in this discussion and in his posts on MR); to the uninitiated, it may read as Scott calling Tyler "arrogant". The truth is, Scott knows that Tyler is extremely smart and knowledgeable. That's why he cares about Tyler's opinion. And similar for Tyler towards Scott. - Similar for Scott and Bryan Caplan. Oh, and Bryan Caplan "versus" Tyler Cowen. Three people who respect each other deeply, regard each other highly, blurb each others books. If you sense "contempt", you misunderstood.
The article describes why Tyler's post was contemptible, without himself making that value judgement. But what a comment “hear hear, Tyler's post was contemptible” in response to this article means is “yes, I agree with all the points raised in this article, and for those reasons, I find it contemptible”. Replying to that with “what is contemptible about it?” is obtuse; the answer is already in the article.
Nope. Scott is not convinced Tyler is correct in seeing it as problematic USAID is spent to such a high degree via third parties. And he says Tyler should elaborate. - The other part of the article is about Scott elaborating on overhead/NGO , his stance on altruism (his "breaking point") and defending his first reaction to Tylers first post. And again, that post was written in a way that lead to misreading. As Scott points out, again. But it was NOT in itself "contemptible" though Scott considers it unconvincing. Again, Tyler stated this as his opinion, and in exactly this words:
"I do support PEPFAR and the earlier vaccine programs, but perhaps those estimates* have been underreported as of late? I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful, nonetheless something seems badly off here. Nor were many USAID defenders keen to deal with such estimates when the major debate was going on."
So, if the commenter would explain, please, his/her "contempt" for exactly this statement? - I do see, Scott disagrees with the statement. Show Scott´s contempt for the actual statement in the article. Yes, he wrote he and other hated it as they misread it as an endorsement of bad policies. So, unlucky framing.
"If Tyler will condemn this as a terrible decision, then we’re on the same page and everything else here is minor nitpicking." - Well, Tyler wrote in his first post: "I do support PEPFAR". Who fails at reading comprehension?
“ so I checked with the people who are in on the grift and they agree that stopping the grift in order to reform is bad”
This seems to miss the point entirely, come on.
Scott’s argument is that he checked with experts to debunk another expert. People who make money from the former status quo, a status quo that involves corruption; and doing this while acknowledging thats it’s an inferior model. He’s agreeing with Cowen but getting squeamish about the optics so it’s time to obfuscate and cope. Just agree and move on with the better model
>a status quo that involves corruption
*How much* corruption do you believe there is? Enough to justify cutting off lifesaving AIDS medication to millions of people? As they say, the optimal amount of fraud is not zero.
Why would we continue to provide goods that people in those countries don’t want? They asked for upgrades and relationships involving trade. Not medication for sexually transmitted disease. This is a common red herring
Who exactly is "they"? I'm pretty sure that the specific HIV-positive individuals who rely on PEPFAR clinics for their meds would not prefer if the U.S. shut down the clinics and instead did some kind of trade deal.
They have their own country that they live in. A country which is having other countries intervene. The same dollars could do what those countries prefer. Taxpayer owes them nothing is the starting point, there is no obligation or duty owed. The aid gave them a head start and they need to complete the work
Feels like you simply don't care that much about "cutting off lifesaving AIDS medication to millions of people", and food etc.
Which is a point that people make! I also have conflicted feelings about this. But Scott wants us to admit we're biting that very bitter bullet.
I bet you know all about the red herrings in the global charity space, definitely the common ones, based on your extensive global charity work.
That's not his argument at all. He went directly to the data to debunk him. He only brought up the opinions of other experts because of Tyler's obnoxious appeal to authority chest puffing.
Data compiled by the same industry isn’t oversight - it’s to justify further pumping. Any grown adult can ascertain basic motives. A proper education would inoculate people against not doing so but a modern one would have the opposite effect
Do you have any evidence to support the notion that these charities are committing accounting fraud (this seems to be what you are alleging)? The mere existence of a motive to lie does not prove deceit. I'm not seeing any reason to believe fraud is actually occurring other than pure speculation.
Lol it’s built into the system. It’s in the article too. If you need a low-resolution view just look at the goofy disclosures in the news cycle this year. It’s also all debt-driven US money. Or do a degree in international relations and pay attention to the aid literature and lecture then go experience it. Don’t play Pollyanna because you think a simulacra/ blank slate “good person” would
Yup, everyone in any industry with corruption, is corrupt. So, 100% of police are corrupt, 100% of politicians are corrupt. Wait, I think this means you are corrupt and we should, by your own admission, discount your opinion. \S
So you’ve resorted to being childish because you don’t like being wrong. Waste of post
I think it’s reasonable to assume that most people in the business of charity are doing it for genuinely altruistic reasons, and aren’t just trying to make money (if they were, they’d be in the wrong business.)
“Basic motives” seems to be pulling a lot of legwork in your argument. Is the insinuation that the USAID people are somehow siphoning money in a corrupt way?
Sorry but who do you expect to provide the data? The various organizations who work on this and whose data you can crossreference to see if one of them seems off, or someone completly disconnected from the situation? With this logic you can't trust any medical research since everyone who works in medical research is indirectly or directly employed by the medical needs and system. Same for most fields.
If you believe that there is widespread coordinated data manipulation from enough companies that crossreferencing doesn't work then the burden of proof is on you. You can advocate for an external audit, you can try to find whistleblowerts in the single companies, you can make calculations based on NGOs from other countries and make comparisons.
Has this happened? No, not a single one. Instead you make a scathing claim of doubt, with as of now zero proof and expect potentially millions to die for this.
Following this logic i could take a case of let's say 5B military spending ending in waste or fraud and argue we must immediately abolish the US military to avoid more waste and fraud since it must be endemic. My proof behind this? I don't need none.
That's not his argument at all. Like, do you expect the rest of us to have not actually read the article, such that you can just make up whatever you want about what it says, without us noticing?
Just because you don’t like something or disagree with it doesn’t mean it isn’t true or something to engage. It usually means the opposite, as it’s says more about you then it does about others or any topic. It’s big indicator of incomplete conclusions
It's not that I disagree with the view you're expressing, it's that the entire premise of what you say the argument of the article is is a misrepresentation, so I doubt your good faith.
The person acting in bad faith doubts someone else’s when the author does not. You’re not engaging any points, merely trying to prove something that’s not provable and the opposite has a paper trail. It’s discarded by default
...in the heat of the moment, yes, it's pretty crass and probably wrong.
But if you can step back from the emotion, there's an entirely fair meta-point that needs to be considered. If someone is a sufficiently god-tier persuader, you can't trust your own judgment in evaluating their arguments; it's only safe to literally cover your ears and say "la la la can't hear you". That's basically what the case for AI pessimism boils down to, right? "AIs are superpersuaders. AIs are so far above you that you can't even viably think towards how to stop them."
That said, it doesn't look like Micah was taking it in that direction. Oh well, I still think it's interesting and deserves being pointed out (or don't want to have wasted my time typing this).
+1 for this, I can see that it's truly not a strong point in Scott's argument that he only talks to people with obvious bend for USAID side (I don't even think the professors can be trusted that much). Then again I'm curious what other side we can listen to to expose any corruption (if there's any). Local good NGO that's spurned by USAID and willing to gather enough evidence to shame them?
> it's truly not a strong point in Scott's argument that he only talks to people with obvious bend for USAID side
Scott's in-group is largely composed of *anti-establishment liberal-libertarians* who want to improve the world for everyone in the most efficient manner possible. If you're asserting that that this group is homologous to exclusive proponents of USAID, and that Scott couldn't find anyone to talk to that disagreed, then that is itself very strong evidence of Scott's point that USAID is effective and not corrupt.
Haha I forget that EA people should actually be anti-USAID. Point taken then. Though now I'm curious that just like NASA's reputation, are they always this clean and why, and if they do, can we copy whatever makes them so.
The article is not in any way built on talking to experts. So weird to accept this premise that that's what it's about!
That sounds like a pretty distorted take on one particular AI argument (among many).
AI becoming highly persuasive is one of several possible threat vectors. This threat vector does not require anything close to "god-tier" in order to be very dangerous.
Ordinary human persuaders already do a lot of harm right now, in the form of marketing and scams and propaganda and psyops. I think it is possible to think your way out of all of that stuff, in principle; but I also think it's very naive for a human being to think that they will completely 100% succeed in doing so against all the persuasion that they will encounter in ordinary life. The world wouldn't be full of this stuff if it didn't have any effect.
There is a certain sense in which the only way to completely defend yourself from ordinary human persuasion is to make sure you never hear it. That's not the strategy I'd recommend, for a bunch of reasons, but whatever you're doing instead is going to be noticeably less effective than that (at the narrow goal of avoiding harmful persuasion) even against ordinary humans right now.
I’m just replying to what people are throwing out there. It’s goofy stuff largely; having to re-explain basics to people who can’t reflect on their own conditioning. Tackling the layer you describe is another level of analysis that I would rather move onto, but we seem to be bogged down in a quasi-religious ideology programming loop that a truck driver could unravel in seconds
You didn't even read the article you're commenting on. There's no higher level of analysis. It's just shit you made up all the way down.
You didn’t even read the article that you’re commenting on and you don’t understand the concepts. You’re failing to complete the loop. You’ve lost track of what’s even being discussed. What are you trying to accomplish? You’re undermining Scott in order to defend him which is silly and weird.
You claimed that Scott never once personally participated in foreign humanitarian work when he explicitly said so in this very post.
Do you have experience in international development? I know a couple of people who work in this field. One is former USAID, the other worked for a similar European agency. One has years of experience working in various African countries, the other has years of experience in Afghanistan and some other challenging places. Both of them have language skills and experience in some highly-specialized areas that you don't see in the United States, but are extremely important global issues.
If a person was a grifter, they wouldn't be spending years of their life in places like Afghanistan or Mali, subjecting themselves to personal danger in a miserable environment for lousy pay.
Right, but because they do that they’re willing to justify the corruption. I spent years in Israel-West Bank. Those jobs and projects are largely built on clouds, not stone and very open to disruption not by the market but by politics - they are contrived
Those countries need to chart their own future and they can’t do so if other do it for them or it’s being siphoned away to create more conflict. In this case you have both going on
It’s not the US or EU interest to do any of this be it done better or worse - it’s all debt with no end in sight. It’s legitimate to drop the bad model and pursue one that’s more like Scott’s
Everything I've learned about USAID and the NGOs it supports leads me to believe that these are extremely dedicated people who choose to work on very difficult problems, often enduring miserable conditions.
There may be projects that you disagree with ideologically, or projects that are ill conceived or poorly executed. That also happens in every other area of human endeavor. But I have never seen any evidence that there's a widespread "grift".
I understand that it's pointless to argue with you about this, but I would like to defend the honor of people who try to do good in the world - often at great personal risk.
The article explicitly states that money is diverted and siphoned away inefficiently. It can be witnessed firsthand. The dedication masks a person’s psychology - they get paid using debt dollars from another country to benefit people not from that country but they also have utopian beliefs or have done it so long they have to continue. Everyone in aid knows this is a thing
Which article, i might have missed this but i didn't see an article cited in the text or from you claiming that any considerable part of the aid was siphoned away
Can you elaborate what projects you worked on in the WB? I'm just asking out of curiosity, dont want to argue with you or disprove your point
I was under a state department grant and studying abroad on diplomatic work though the University of California Regent (Irvine). I was guest of the Palestinian Authority and the Kingdom of Jordan. Our org was (Covid death) The Olive Tree Initiative. We gained funding from the Dalai Lama foundation and attached to a constellation of orgs working in the region. I never got to Jericho but a made the round trip of refugee camps and camps-now-cities in several countries. I would occasionally get to see a PA gunbust and their stockpile of seized weapons, or have to assist with plumbing and electrical repairs (somewhat our money at work) across the street from mansions (mostly our money at work). I got to view conflict in Syria from UN security posts as well. Had lots of guns brandished or aimed at, and detained a few times (both probably us money) in related countries
I think my favorite groups were SkatePal and Israeli kibbutzers near Megiddo. The most unhinged was the museum in Hebron and the men who were dying inside because they weren’t strong enough to kill tons of people weeping in my arms. It’s not a big jump from the kids in the camps their parents choose to remain in with the same look in their eyes they have in Southside Stockton, California; no respectable male figures around, mothers who see them as martyr fodder who will otherwise amount to nothing, and OFC no respect for older male figures = none for peace
USAID and European agency people working challenging places do not get miserable pay at all, and it is well documented but folks like bill easterly that they have done more harm than good
Do you have any links to Easterley's work on the subject?
One of these people "in on the grift" was Scott Alexander himself, so if you don't trust people in on the grift, you should save yourself the time and just stop reading his posts.
Lol no he wasn’t, this is disingenuous. SA follows his own funding model through his foundation. It’s even detailed in and largely the topic of the article we are responding to.
It’s has nothing to do with trust, it’s a low-trust proposition. Observable behavior factors into the conclusive analysis of the administration. You either want entitlement and corruption to continue because you have a utopian goal to subject people to or you would rather start over clean. Scott’s model is a clean start, work with Cowen even
He wrote in this very post about delivering medical care in third-world countries, almost certainly through some sort of nonprofit humanitarian organization, which would be according to you, a grift.
Nope, way off. SA is about direct aid and no overhead. You’re proposing degrees of badness beyond those ideas - which is what we’ve had going in the aid/development world.
It is not possible to deliver medicine and treatment without some form of administrative labor involved, even if that labor is donated.
Yes. Water is wet
You’re saying something obvious and pretending it’s the topic. Basic fallacy
Tyler suggested he check with the people who did the thing to ask if doing the thing was good. That seems worse, if anything.
Right and he asked a small sample of people who confirmed his bias, who are currently playing defense for their programs. Everyone who works in that lane knows it’s rotten but they think their salvation rests on it. It’s effectively unchallenged cognitive dissonance.
Sorry, I might have been unclear. I'm saying Tyler asked if Scott had talked to people in the Trump administration about their actions. In other words, he suggested that Scott's position would be better informed by asking the people who defunded the programs for their justification in doing so. That certainly doesn't seem more serious than what you're criticizing as unserious.
So why isn’t the article about that? Seems like reality was providing a bullseye to content and knowledge gold
Sorry, I'm having difficulty parsing what you're saying.
He talked to both development / aid experts but not people in the admin? Missed opportunity
That was "As an additional “am I understanding this issue correctly?” check", not indicating that the Trump admin was a reliable source on itself.
I see lots of confident assertions from you, but zero evidence. No numbers, no surveys, no papers, not even anecdotes, just mere assertions. For example, do you have a survey showing "everyone who works in that lane knows it’s rotten", or failing that, anything at all demonstrating your claim?
It’s in the article …lol. I’m agreeing / seconding information in the article, that’s being downplayed because of …feelings?
Less of this, please.
I don't see any evidence that a grift is being stopped here, or that anybody involved is interested in reform.
You may have unrealistic ideas then. It’s the baked into the premise of the article
And yet, the articles with that premise seem unable to present any actual evidence.
When a grant is to develop thousands of jobs and it develops an only few jobs - yet all the money was spent…it’s the system functioning as it is. Calling it out is how it’s supposed to work and it should get canceled.
This was public info earlier this year if you weren’t under a rock
If you have evidence, present it. I live in another country, which I guess might be a bit like being under a rock from your point of view.
Though I'm not sure why you're talking about jobs - as far as I can tell, this argument is not about jobs programs.
You want me to provide evidence of fraud that this very article mentions. There whole volumes of textbooks dedicated to this in international relations and political science, some in anthropology and sociology. You could say management books have the most.
This is bad argumentation: You’re basically moving the goalpost and not producing evidence contra - when this very article mentions fraud as a major topic
In 2025 USAID had an earthquake, start there.
I think you can have one of two positions:
- People shouldn't check with USAID experts before writing posts on USAID
- People should check with those experts before writing the post
I don't think it's honest to switch back and forth between "you didn't consult experts? guess you're too uninformed to have an opinion" and "you did consult experts? guess your sources are too biased for you to have an opinion".
I'm not accusing either you or Tyler of doing this - you're both using only one horn of the dilemma - but my checking with experts was an attempt to fend this off.
Also, I tried to present an argument that it would be hard for USAID to be "grift" in this post. Do you have a counterargument?
You’re presenting abundant evidence for grift + saying you have a better alternative to prevent it. But then you defend grift. So why would a better model (yours) be useful at all if the status quo is in its final most refined form? I don’t find the optics disturbing, so there’s no need to write an article where typo agree but don’t agree with Tyler Cowen when you simply not only agree but agree so much you started your own nonprofit that uses reformed methods. Or just be “based” because if you believe need is that urgent to meet you would do it with full honesty and urgency, no hand-wringing or pearl clutching about our established sacred cows of foreign aid and development (whatever those mean and what their actual goal is seems likely gnostic rather than holy)
Checking with “the experts” doesn’t necessarily reveal, it can just as easily obfuscate. Experts have disagreement with one another. It’s selective listening and paychecks depend on it continuing. People operating in institutions are subject to schema of the institution but they must keep it going. The “experts” that write the textbooks on this topic are extremely critical of it but amazingly the moment they get contacted they deliver the PR payload. They love the attention and want to portray “first date behavior” nothing to see here, etc. They’re human beings working in a set of circumstances; their job happens to be in government and tax break induced consumption, doesn’t produce any product, no skin in the game etc - in a different lane where guilt drives benevolence without resolving the core issue.
Needless to say you would seek out and possibly steelman broader perspectives and not take the PR at face value. Human beings have personal motives that diverge from, reframe, re-interpret, ‘the plan’ and that includes seeing corruption as justifiable and pursuing it as if it were normal. They may just be seeing it for what it really is and developed a coping mechanism. You need people who can acknowledge this and could tell you what should go and what shouldn’t specifically
I’m not saying that you had malicious intention, but that you may have stumbled into malfeasance unintentionally; in the pursuit of doing good you glazed over doing right
I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but it looks like no one can understand what you're trying to say.
Here's a summary of the position Scott Alexander supports:
1. Scott's overhead is 0% and Tyler Cowen's overhead is 2-5%. but there's no magic trick involved. Both Scott and Tyler have administrative overheads just like USAID charities do, but other companies/organizations pay for that overhead. In other words, the "administrative overhead" that USAID charities have doesn't mean that USAID is somehow full of grift, and is certainly not an argument for shutting USAID down.
2. Scott supports the continued existence of USAID, including PEPFAR, which distributes medication that impoverished HIV/AIDS affected people use, for free.
Separately, this here is my opinion, not Scott's:
3. Your argument that it's somehow wrong for the US government to borrow money on the taxpayer's dime, and spend it to help people in third world countries - it's badly flawed.
So the US saved $40 billion a year. Great! Now what's the plan for the *checks notes* THIRTY SIX THOUSAND BILLION dollars (36 TRILLION) of national debt that the US has racked up so far? And that doesn't include the $3800 Billion ($3.8 TRILLION) that Trump himself has proposed to borrow THIS YEAR ALONE in his Big Beautiful Bill?
I think you're not aware of who the US borrows money from. 75% of US debt is held by US entities and individuals. Most of that is retirement savings accounts, one way or another. China holds around $757 billion, but most of the remaining 25% of debt is held mostly by US Allies.
That's not all! Every dollar in circulation is, in effect, money that the US owes. And most dollars are similarly held by American entities and foreign allies, and also China.
My own third-world country of India holds around $700 billion of US debt and currency.
ALL of the countries and private entities that the US borrows money from - ALL OF THEM want the US to retain its position as a leader on the world stage. Nobody gives a shit if the US sends foreign aid. In fact, that's a good and expected thing from the richest country on earth.
What IS a problem however, is the US political leadership becoming increasingly unhinged and dysfunctional. If the US keeps shooting itself in the foot and practically keeps begging China to take its place as the Top Dog in world affairs, That's a huge problem for every single person and country that is holding US debt and currency.
I’m aware of of all that, but you’re using fallacious arguments to justify things that aren’t justifiable. Fraud doesn’t just occur in the home country but abroad and it corrupts local institutions and destabilizes societies that comes into. This is brushed aside in these goofy “utility” arguments; you have to factor the big picture and that gets murkier the further out you go, the more layers you add, the scale and scope creeps. I guess civil unrest and regime change aren’t a big deal to armchair “ethics” far away from the savior fields
We don’t use the Peace Corps anymore because locals could do the job for a fraction of the money and get a lot more done - it’s magnitudes better. Clearly the purpose of the peace corps was something else.
That’s a laughable argument that the US borrowing money is somehow good. The mental gymnastics required to think this is sound are astounding - it’s just reinforcement of justification to do unethical things. You’re essentially saying that corruption is intrinsic and that everyone being dependent is an unalloyed good. This is diversion from the topic to deflect and obfuscate; muddy waters reward scoundrels.
> That’s a laughable argument that the US borrowing money is somehow good. The mental gymnastics required to think this is sound are astounding
The only mental gymnastics here is you comparing borrowing money to aid programs. The former isn’t necessary for the latter.
> This is diversion from the topic to deflect and obfuscate; muddy waters reward scoundrels.
It does, doesn’t it.
And again, we would please need some proof that there is widespread fraud with the local contributions from USAID.
At the end the question seems to boil down to: Do we think that the % of waste in USAID is a worthy tradeoff for the millions of lives saved or not.
Depending on that % everyone will have their own answer, but if as of now that % for USAID seems quite small then i personally think the answer is a clear yes.
What is your percentage and what is your proof? Once we have that we can decide if USAID is worth it or not, Scott arrived to the conclusion that it is, what is your data?
So if you're not involved with NGOs then you don't know what you're talking about so you don't get to comment.
But if you are involved with NGOs then you're in on the grift so you don't get to comment.
Just wondering what kind of magical being would satisfy the requirements to actually engage in this discussion.
Clearly we need to find someone in a quantum superposition where we are unable to know whether they are/are not involved with NGOs.
Lock some kind of administrative expert in a box, where the decay of a particle determines whether he does or does not get employed by an NGO and then get his opinion at the half-life period.
Might be a bit tricky getting his views on USAID out of the box for us to examine, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Heisenberg's Impartiality Principle: you can either get an informed opinion or an impartial one, but never both at the same time?
I think the basic point that *maybe* 10% of USAID's budget was even plausibly related to DEI, wokeness or personal grift is a basically obvious grift, and if Elon felt otherwise he could have had the courtesy to make some attempt at actually vetting the content of specific programs.
PEPFAR being axed without him even *knowing* about it does not speak well to the level of oversight being exercised here. That was inexcusable.
In Trump/Elon's general defence, however, speaking up about the farm murders in South Africa might help avert an ethnic cleansing or two down the line. (I think the ANC and EFF are probably too disorganised and incompetent to actually murder or expel SA's white population, but if mass migration keeps going there are plenty of other countries that could go the way of Zimbabwe.)
You did not read the article.
You didn’t read the article
I did, which is how I know you didn't.
Or I mean, it's possible you're just lying about what you read. I tend to assume ignorance rather than dishonesty, but you tell me which it is.
You’re making an unprovable claim. I have many posts referencing the article and Scott has replied himself.
It’s a big leap to say “lying”, if you thought you wouldn’t be require to post. It’s inappropriate conduct in a rational discussion on a rational blog
You’re pure bad faith right now. All I have to do is copy-paste your statement back to you and it’s over
Scott was being diplomatically polite to you in his reply. You said that the core argument of the argument is an appeal to authority. But it very clearly isn't, and I think the only way to reach that conclusion is to have stopped reading it early on, or to have read the whole article and then decided to misrepresent it.
Excellent piece, but I did notice that the "hypothetical psychopath" line gets used twice. Slipped past editing?
Yes, thank you, fixed.
Sure thing!
Grants making agencies divvy up costs into direct costs, which are allocable directly to an objective, and indirect costs, which are not allocable but are important to keeping an organization functioning. Indirect costs are frequently recaptured via a Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA). The indirect rate is applied to a Modified Total Direct Cost Base (MTDBC), the drivers of which are spelled out in the agreement. The MTDBC will frequently exclude capital goods, infrastructure, subawards, etc. Generally it consists of the recipient’s direct costs to administer a grant or subgrant - allocated salary of a project officer, for example. MTDCB is generally only a small portion of a total award.
I worked for a company whose primary business was USAID contracts for many years, on projects in various disciplines all over the developing world, and the company ultimately didn't last because it was _impossible to make money_.
There are basically two ways you can bill USAID - Time and Materials, i.e. your hours and stuff you buy for the project, or Firm Fixed Price, i.e. you set a price and then deliver on it, if you can come in under budget, you profit more. Time and Materials, you make your small percentage but it ultimately has to come back to the hours you billed and your overheads. You can't make much, and it creates a frustrating incentive system where if you work efficiently you get less money.
So you'd think Firm Fixed Price is a chance to get some profit out of being a USAID contractor. Well you'd be wrong! It works in theory but it never turned out that way. The people in DC who contracted you are completely different from the people actually running the project in, say, Afghanistan, who might not even get why you were hired as a subcontract. The deliverables are defined at the time of bidding, and by the time projects even get started everything has changed, it's impossible to adapt, and USAID has total veto over whether a 'deliverable' is to be met. Run out of budget? You have no leverage, you can't just stop working or you'll never get another contract, just gotta figure it out and work for free.
Where there's waste in USAID it's in setting priorities that can't be done effectively - a lot of civil society projects fall here - poor coordination of resources and over-reliance on vaguely defined goals, like measuring trainings instead of actual changes. Overreliance on expensive American or Western employees is also an issue, but much more complicated to fix. But I assure you there's no pot of gold to be had contracting for USAID - six or seven years ago I basically swore never to do it again, the monitoring was extremely strict and it just wasn't worthwhile to jump through the hoops.
When I last worked in the USAID contractor system -- about twenty years ago, in Afghanistan -- the big contractors (e.g. Chemonics, DAI, FHI, RTI) were making comfortable profits from the nine-figure contracts they managed. They were hyper-specialized in hoop-jumping and in carrying out the (sub)contractor management tasks that USAID used to do directly before the Clinton administration part-privatized it.
It was the subs and smaller orgs (both profit and nonprofit, US and local) that generally found themselves squeezed, sometimes right out of existence.
Given the minimal change in the list of the biggest USAID contractors in those two decades, my guess is that those dynamics still prevail. If I'm wrong, or if my Afghan-centric lens has misled me, I'm grateful to anyone who can update me.
So I was at a subcontractor to DAI, Chemonics and the like, indeed we were squeezed a lot more than they were. They had comfortable profits - rumour has it that DAI had a wine cellar installed in their Bethesda office - but they could never be more than comfortable, even the biggest contracts you could only make a certain percentage on. One thing that could actually be described as a grift is danger pay - they updated their scales so rarely that I was getting 2x salary when spending time in places that were perfectly safe like Erbil.
Afghanistan during the war in particular was probably the worst it was anywhere, along with Iraq, because of the special conditions of the war - profits weren't as tidy as everywhere else. There was one SIGAR report that was really bad and things really tightened up after that, and overall I saw a consistent tightening of requirements during the years I worked on USAID contracts (roughly 2010-2017), with more and more oversight from the USAID officers overseeing it.
Not saying profits weren't made, but it wasn't anything on the scale of say municipal NGOs doing complete bullshit, and things seem to be getting tighter and tighter over time.
That fits. Thanks.
Danger pay and post diff (hardship pay) were the griftiest things about working for USAID contractors in Afghanistan, too.
"It’s because the 30% number I gave yesterday is an accounting concept called NICRA which is often cited as overhead, but different from the common-sense conception."
Only slightly related, but I'd like to point out that accounting is a lot more complicated than normal, non-account people think.
In 2001 JDS Uniphase had a $56 billion dollar loss. JDS Uniphase did not have $56 billion less in the company treasury at the end of 2001 than at the beginning.
In 2002 Time-Warner "lost" almost $100 billion, again, without being out that amount of cash.
Warren Buffett has written about this sort of thing before and he has noted that while he isn't exactly HAPPY about the accounting standards he is also not prepared to offer better ones. Fixing what we have often creates new problems.
This doesn't help with the current post, but is (hopefully) useful background information about accounting weirdness.
>accounting is a lot more complicated than normal, non-account people think
Normal people think that most of the complications are artificially introduced in other to make fraud/grift less detectable, and protestations from people presumably in on said misbehavior would unlikely be persuasive.
Normal people usually operate on a cash basis. With the exception of very large-ticket items like houses and cars, everything comes out of a single 'consumption' conceptual bucket. To a normal household, a $1000 couch is a consumption item that's somewhat fungible with a $1000 vacation.
Accounting rules are complicated because businesses do (and should) operate on an accrual basis. $1000 spent on the employee holiday party is qualitatively different than $1000 spent on raw materials for production, which is different yet from $1000 spent on machinery or tooling.
Regardless of what the standards for financial reports say, a well-operated business at least needs to know which one of those three things it's doing, but the devil is always in the details. How do you account for the real value of a brand that only exists intangibly? How about software that's in-development and will be released or made operational later? What about the invoice you've sent out for completed work but has a 120-day payment term?
OK, but on the other hand, there used to be a practice of aggregating junk ("subprime") loans into AAA-rated "financial instruments", which eventually led to a certain economic disturbance, for which pretty much nobody responsible was substantially punished, so what are normal people to make of that?
That specific example is more finance than accounting, but yes, you're correct that accounting scandals are common, and there are many ways to do very sketchy things with accounting rules. (Look at any large accounting firm on Wikipedia - they'll have a section titled "Accounting scandals.")
On the flip side, accounting on a consumption basis (which is what people usually want to do rather than complicated accounting rules) is an accounting choice, and it usually doesn't accurately reflect reality (like the examples Majromax gave). So complicated accounting rules are a necessary evil. Accounting is like CAD software: the way things are currently done isn't very good, but I've never seen a better alternative proposed.
>complicated accounting rules are a necessary evil
I'm pretty sure that more sophisticated normal people understand that, but they have no idea about whether tradeoffs currently being made are reasonable, and no legible unbiased experts no trust.
Yes, and exploiting the complexity of our models biochemistry, a certain promising ingenuée defrauded investors for billions promising blood testing machines that could not work, but that even the experts consulted before signing the checks were convinced could work. What are normal people to make of that?
That we should go back to the humor theory of physiology, so to reduce the complexity and the opportunities for grift it creates? Or that reality is complex, any useful conceptualization of reality is going to be complex, and this unfortunately creates some scope for fraud?
Yep, normal people are not enamored of science/tech either these days, beyond tribal affiliations.
I'd venture that "normal people" have neither any knowledge, or any opinion of, accounting techniques.
If the American people aren't getting anything out of feeding starving Africans, then a US government program that spends money for the purpose of feeding starving Africans is waste, even if 100% of the money goes to feeding starving Africans.
I totally get why you're frustrated that people keep bringing up nonsensical objections, but this is their real objection. This is why running sob-stories about the people who are dying because of USAID cuts doesn't work. People don't actually care about this.
Hi Daniel -- and anyone else with this type of cynical take.
I think the brief story at the following link has some details that may prove eye-opening. It certainly was useful to me!
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/18/notes-from-a-usaid-career/
Two brief sentences to sum it up: "Soft power in action. It worked!"
That USAID helped Moldova get out from under Putin's thumb is, from Trump's perspective, reason to *oppose* it. Of course, for a long time there were many in the Republican Party, including in positions of power and influence, who thought differently—and programs like USAID (which have never played very well with the median voter) were heavily reliant on their (relatively quiet) support—but Trump and his faction have crushed them, at least for the time being.
Of course, strengthening Putin's empire doesn't help Americans any more than saving Africans from malaria helps Americans.
Because back then there wasn't a prominent faction on the right that considered the "deep state" to work in the interests of the left, and the left to be worse than Putin.
I share the cynical take, but want to point out that Daniel's comment began with the word "If".
Soft power is much likelier to benefit Americans in Eastern Europe than in Central Africa.
Surely if that’s Tyler’s position he should say so. It would be uncharitable for Scott to suggest that was so without Tyler copping to it.
Yep, it would be interesting to know whether TC would agree with both of: 1. The US government should never do anything that the American people "aren't getting anything out of" (maybe) and 2. The American people don't get anything out of feeding starving Africans (I doubt he agrees with this).
This seems like it hinges on who you're trying to convince. I believe that the majority of Americans aren't psychopaths, and if we could magically wish away all the information asymmetries, they'd be willing to pay the 10 cents per week (on average) that it costs to keep PEPFAR going.
In real life, it's a lot harder than this to win the political arguments around foreign aid, because the median voter doesn't know anything about program evaluation and furthermore doesn't know how to put ten-figure budget numbers in perspective, so they evaluate based on coarse-grained vibes, and "government gives resources to foreigners instead of to you" is a much less popular position in the absence of any specifics about why it's worth it. But this is why there's value in writing posts that explain what's at stake; it probably won't reach the median voter, but it might reach some people who genuinely didn't know and who maybe, just maybe, might change their minds if they did.
>"government gives resources to foreigners instead of to you" is a much less popular position
It seems to be pretty popular after all: as you note, most Americans are not psychopaths. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-americans-support-several-but-not-all-types-of-foreign-aid/
Yeah exactly. Assholes who don't care if little kids die in other countries are highly overrepresented in right wing online spaces.
"It's good that we spend some of our wealth on desperately poor people in other countries" is a normie opinion, even without the "and this benefits us via soft power" addendum (but that's also a normie opinion).
First, what a narrow and shriveled view of life. But second, these “people [who] don’t actually care” should say what they mean, not bring up nonsensical objections. If your view is that it’s of no consequence to you if your actions cause untold suffering and death as long as it happens far away and to people who are unlike you, surely it should be easy to just say that in public, right? One wonders why people beat around the bush so much when it’s so easy to say that more Africans should die horribly so we can give bigger subsidies to corn farmers.
There's a good point here, but your language seems off.
Or, how many deaths have you caused by not giving your money? How many are dying horribly that are apparently your fault?
The language is accurate.
The status quo ante was that we were funding these programs. Defunding them is not the absence of life saving action, it is an active imposition of suffering.
You've got to decide if you're being a utilitarian or not.
If you're deontologist, then yes, it literally is the cessation of life-saving action. We wouldn't call a doctor a monster if he quit his profession and fewer lives were saved in his region as a result.
If you're a utilitarian, then it works.... and you are causing some number of deaths yourself. How many is it? 5? 50?
Scott et al have argued ad nauseum about this in the context of EA. An important principle of EA thinking is that it can be counterproductive to donate too much. Why? Because we want to grow the EA movement ― to encourage as many people as possible to donate as much as possible.
If we give as much as we can, substantially degrading our quality of life, let's say 50% of after-tax income ― that's going to actively discourage others from joining the movement because it sounds like a very hard thing to do (and is). So we'd get huge donations from very few people and it won't make a big difference to the world. If we give very little, let's say 0.01%, that's very easy but won't make a big difference to the world even if we make the movement 100 times bigger. So I think the typical EA ETG giver ends up giving 1% to 10% of before-tax income, small enough that salesmanship to attract new members can work, but large enough that EAs can be a major force for good in the world. I'm doing 10%.
The nice thing about USAID is, of course, not having to convince every individual person to voluntarily give. Therefore it could potentially do even more good than EA with a much smaller percentage of everyone's income. I understand USAID's budget is below 0.1% of U.S. GDP and below 0.5% of the Federal budget. This ought to be the kinds of numbers people can be convinced are worth giving, especially as USAID bolsters U.S. soft power. But of course, USAID wasn't cut because Americans didn't believe in it, it was cut because an unelected man who wasn't confirmed by the senate both runs and doesn't run an agency that isn't really called DOGE[1][2] in order to block Congress's constitutional power of the purse in violation of the APA and the impoundment control act of 1974.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ziKJQC32qk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvSwJT0rLU
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmBkk4nvp9A
I think we should be careful about simultaneously making the argument:
1. You shouldn't be doing this, and also
2. You're doing it wrong
It's better to focus on one or the other. If you genuinely believe that something shouldn't be done, then focus your critique on that rather than flipping back and forth between the "shouldn't be done" and "doing it wrong" critiques.
A person who doesn't agree with the actual goal being pursued is generally pretty poorly qualified to comment on whether it's being pursued in the right way, because their inclination is toward nitpicking and FUD rather than constructive criticism. And yet it happens all the time. Most of the people who say that DOGE is doing a bad job of cutting government spending don't actually think that government spending should be cut. Most of the people who critiqued the conduct of the Iraq War didn't think that Iraq should have been invaded in the first place. And the people most inclined to nitpick the precise way in which USAID gives away American taxpayers' money to the great unwashed of the third world are people who think that this shouldn't be happening in the first place.
And then we have the related problem where people who genuinely support the goal feel obliged to be quiet about their criticisms of the way it's being pursued, lest they seem like one of those goal-doubters. So we do everything in the stupidest possible way, criticised only by the doubters and unquestioningly supported by the supporters.
>Most of the people who say that DOGE is doing a bad job of cutting government spending don't actually think that government spending should be cut.
I'm not sure thats true. I am definitely against what DOGE is actually up to (intentionally destroying govt programs RWers do not like + crippling regulation of industries, particularly those Elon is personally involved in).... but I wouldn't be opposed at all to what DOGE is supposed to be doing (increasing efficiency) even if I think govt. spending should go up.
People who support increased govt spending are not interested in the spending per se, but in accessing the effects of that spending. This is not symmetrical around the spend more/spend less axis. No one just "Wants the govt to spend $100m". Lots of people DO want "$100m of additional food/healthcare to go to poor people".
What DOGE should be doing is orthogonal to actual spending.
Whether decision made elsewhere in govt. (and nothing to do with DOGE) means spending goes up OR down.... if the govt. is more efficient, then there will be more "food/healthcare for poor people" than there were compared to baseline, whether that baseline is going up or down.
In the best case scenario it would even assist achieving the ends even if spending went down (e.g. $100m cut to spending + saving $100m in efficiency gain = $Exactly_the_same_amount_of_end_funding + *Lower pressure to cut funding of ends in the future as the deficit is reduced $100m* = a "win" for people who want the ends funded)
As far as I can see almost all the opposition to DOGE's actual actions isn't driven from a desire to retain govt. spending at current levels, but of the (in best case) Ham-handed/Wasteful/Callous way they are doing it OR (in the worst case) Corrupt/Deliberately Harmful/Deceptive way they are pursuing other ends like "ending investigations into Tesla law breaking" or "dismantling the administrative state" under the fig-leaf of pretending to increase govt efficiency.
This is apropos of so much, in America at least. And to think it only describes our “smart people”.
A relative of mine works on a government health database tracking AIDS cases and outbreaks.
My understanding is that we actually have enough granularity through medical records and contact tracing that we could effectively stamp out the spread of AIDS in the US by asking the right patients to ask their partners to go on prep and other meds, and doing informational outreach with high-risk communities.
The main reason this doesn't work is that we get novel outbreaks in unpredictable places due to people from high-incidence areas coming to the US and creating new spreads, which don't show up on medical records for months or years.
Living on a better planet with less disease and poverty and suffering is better for everyone. Even if you don't have a soul and don't care about other people's suffering, suffering *never* stays fully contained to the person or place it originates.
Good point
I mostly buy this. There’s a reason I specifically used feeding starving people as my example. There is a tendency to group tropical infectious disease control in with other things like food relief and direct cash subsidies as well as one big “humanitarian aid” concept, but these are very different things.
> "People don't actually care about this."
In polls, 89% of people say they support 1% of the budget (the pre-Trump amount) going to foreign aid. They support PEPFAR in particular by 66-19.
I think this is why people have to say untrue things in order to justify cutting it. If people really didn't support it, then it would be the supporters who would have to say untrue things!
“As of May 2024, 22% of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (21%). Last year, 16% said they trusted the government just about always or most of the time, which was among the lowest measures in nearly seven decades of polling.”
I think it’s this (public trust in government). While 89% of people would support certain foreign aid certainly only a tiny minority trusts that the government would
a) do a good job
b) not just steal it
c) not use it to distract from their other incompetences and crimes
The overall sentiment of ‘America First’ is priorities and observable results. Why discuss USAID continuance at all when the highest executive in the land went from being able to drone strike US citizens (Obama) to being powerless to deport a single non-citizen criminal to their nation of origin (Trump)? I mean that as a sign of a major systemic issue in general.
Considering that the discussion in question is *an example of the government not doing what is right*, taking an action that somewhere between 66% and 90% oppose, I don't think that poll actually supports your argument.
"The populace not trusting the government to do the right thing is evidence that they want it to end programs with supermajority popular support" is not a logical argument. The former in no way implies the latter, and in fact the arrow of causality clearly goes the opposite direction.
It also involves the expectation of incompetence and malfeasance, which you have left out.
Your formulation of my view:
•People don't trust gov to do the right thing
•There is popular program
=People want to end popular program. Doesn't make sense, right, got it.
Throwing in some of the bits from my a/b/c:
•People don't trust the government to get desired results
•gov says they want to do thing that -purportedly- will give people popular thing
=People don't want gov to do it.
In fact my formulation implies that people understand, or believe, that having the government explicitly seek something will reliably create a deficit of it. And a lot of people believe that right now across the board, hence the low trust.
> It also involves the expectation of incompetence and malfeasance
Right, and cutting USAID is malfeasance in the eyes of >66% of its constituents.
>Throwing in some of the bits from my a/b/c:
>•People don't trust the government to get desired results
Your A is wrong. The actual predicate, based on the survey, is that "People don't trust the government to get desired results *most of the time*".
It does *not*, in any circumstance, logically follow that people distrust the government *all of the time*, so your inference is not valid.
And since we have *direct evidence* of 66% of people saying they support the thing the government *is already doing*, what you are positing is not only logically invalid, it is *objectively* untrue. (As in, untrue at the object level, because we direct and specific have evidence against it).
I feel we’re losing the plot here. Things like Solyndra (federal solar) or Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD, the federal fiber optics network) come to people’s minds quite easily these days as examples of federal spending that reliably failed to do what they said they’d do.
This tortured discussion does not mean people don’t want solar or they don’t want fiber optics but as the poll about trust and Trump’s election in general demonstrates people are losing faith that everything the fed does isn’t another Solyndra or BEAD.
It’s been interesting to say the least, to find the judiciary so brazen in their recent demonstrations (indistinguishable from fits of pique, or creative writing) that the so-called imperial presidency (or whatever was the popular term, I have forgotten) was merely their creature all along, which power they could revoke at will.
Political power in America inheres in the judiciary, and it feels no need to be coy about it.
I guess it should have been a sign, back in the 80s - our parents could for some reason think of nothing better for us than that we should go to law school. What the hell?!
So, polls say, people are mostly fine with 1% USAID. Also PEPFAR, now that they heard about it first time in their life. ... Well, people are also very fine with more money for schools, better defence, safer streets, cleaner air, fair trials, better medicine, nice neighborhoods … . And lower taxes, less debt, affordable housing … .
Of course, vote for parties who promise even more. Be angry, if a party/president comes to power, who see things differently. Speak your mind and vote. Legit. But I am not convinced by Vox, that Trump or some reckless billionaires are joyfully “killing millions of Africans” by stopping USAID (if it turns out he does, things seem to change daily with this clown).
Sure, some/many will die, if no one steps in. I wonder: where are the big foundations and donors eager to step in. Oh, then they would have to do this forever ...
What I have seen in my life - I agree with Milton Friedman: Gov. is usu. 50% less efficient compared with what markets would deliver. Therefore it should stick to the bare essentials. This is surely true for schools. Probably for roads and trains. This is true for “aid”. I assume, it is even more true for “aid”. Again, nearly all my professional life was NPO/NGO, nearly all financed by tax-money. Would I switch off all funding to DAAD and Goethe if I could? I hate to say it: yes. Would this hit some fine programmes a lot of people (incl. me) like a lot? Yes. Would it be possible to substitute them: yes. Would it be possible to cut only the least efficient 80%? And do then 5 time more of the great stuff? One might try. I doubt it. As those NGOs could not do it. It is not about orgies, wine cellars or "corruption". You have fine jobs, hard to see why you should lose them.
I wonder if the functions of PEPFAR were broken down whether that would remain true.
Presumably support for PMTC interventions would be high, and similarly for ART. But a lot of people justifiably push back at PrEP coverage even in the USA, myself included, as it feels a lot like we're paying people $20,000/yr to have promiscuous lifestyles. Although I am finding claims that PEPFAR paid for PrEP, I am not seeing it in the charts of the most recent report I could find (2022.) Under a 2019 agreement, Gilead committed to providing sufficient Truvada to treat 200k Africans for 11 years on its own dime, however I do not see whether that means only 200k Africans can get Truvada or if PEPFAR is paying taxpayer money for additional PrEP patients above Gilead's commitment.
I'm glad this inspired me to do a cursory review of the program just to get a better handle on what it consisted of. I think my review was sufficient to confirm to me that ART and ARV distribution was the majority of expenditures, and that those treatments continue to drive the majority of AIDS cases prevented worldwide. But since I can't find data on PrEP expenditures and can't figure out what the "socio-economic" slice of PEPFAR spending consists of (the report understandably highlights the Orphans and Vulnerable Children set-aside portion, but I'd need a deeper dive to know whether the rest of it was as broadly acceptable), I would probably keep open some % probability that there are substantial objectionable chunks that may not enjoy public support at the same favorability level as cited for the program overall.
Thanks for this comment. When someone feels uncared for at home, sending dollars overseas to care for others feels fundamentally unfair. We must balance the justice of extending charity to the sick and poor abroad with the justice of fulfilling our duty to our fellow citizens at home. My hunch is that many Americans' view on foreign aid is going to be dependent on how they feel about the state of that balance at that moment. Ultimately the argument comes down to proving that foreign aid benefits US citizens as a whole more than if the US had used that money to take care of people in the US.
How they feel about "the state of that balance" has a lot to do with how well-informed they are about that balance. As Scott noted in his comment, ask people if they're happy for the government to spend 1% of the budget on foreign aid and 89% say yes. The negativity toward foreign aid is linked to the median US citizen wrongly assuming the government is spending 25% or more of its budget on other countries. (That's what polls have suggested for about as long as I've been following the issue.)
My guess is that if they knew it was 1%, most Americans would consider it part of "the justice of extending charity to the sick and poor abroad," rather than insisting that that 1% needs to directly "benefit US citizens."
Much of the waste in the system comes from the latter impulse. Laws requiring USAID to spend on American companies; the bias toward food aid as a way of justifying farm surpluses; a preference for US professionals over high-caliber national professionals. Better to make the case for 1% spent as efficiently as possible on the goal of helping the poorest people in the world.
If that needs justification in terms of US interests, it's a small price for extending America's soft power in countries whose attitude toward intrusive empires would otherwise be uniformly hostile.
I agree. I think USAID is great. I think it’s a marketing problem. We need the arguments to move beyond “is this an effective program” to “here’s what you’re getting for your money as an American”, which are two different questions. The standard response is “soft power” as you mentioned but that is too ambiguous. What has that power gotten the US in real terms? Do we now have a stronghold of influence in Africa or are we actually saving future terrorists? I don’t know. So long as countries receiving USAID go against or do not align with US interests, some US citizens will be upset. “Why are we saving our enemies when we are suffering at home?” is the mindset. People think we’re being taken advantage of. This is one part of the populist nationalism driving current US foreign policy. Just articulating the viewpoint.
The demand that we justify "soft power" as a sort of commercial or tributary exchange with unambiguous quid-pro-quo benefits is very populist, very Trumpy. It's representative of a mess of interconnected problems that could never be fixed by something as minor as a USAID marketing campaign.
American insularity means a huge percentage of us don't appreciate just how **ridiculously** rich and powerful we are, such that our poorest state is richer than most of our rich-country rivals. (https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/01/03/the-poorest-us-state-rivals-germany-gdp-per-capita-in-the-us-and-europe) We're a crazily overpowered empire by any historical standard, and the main reason more Americans don't realize that is we spend most of our time comparing ourselves to other Americans.
One of the reasons the other countries of the world haven't tried to balance-of-power the USA into some semblance of reasonable equilibrium is because we've poured a lot of resource over the years into demonstrating that America's idea of its self-interest is a relatively enlightened one, based on rules and ideals. US hegemony generally hasn't meant "align with our interests, all the time, or we'll cut you off." We've pursued ideals like human rights and democracy, not with anything like full consistency, but into enough genuinely costly situations to persuade most of the world that the US was serious about them. We prided ourselves on turning wrecked enemies into prosperous allies and countries formerly wracked by poverty into US customers and trading partners.
We built a liberal hegemony that was incredibly enriching and empowering overall for America by *not* insisting that every rule or ideal in that hegemonic structure justify itself in terms of immediate commercial or hard-power interest. That's why so much of the world has both tolerated and participated in our dominance.
In retrospect, it was always vulnerable to some political entrepreneur coming along and claiming that this was a racket where the US was being taken advantage of. Trump has attacked pretty much every dimension of US soft power, and we're about to see how many blocks can be taken out of that particular Jenga tower before it falls down -- and if it does, what a world looks like where more countries see benefit in resisting US hegemony than playing along with it.
I agree. It's hard to really understand the power differential until you travel to other places. I think a marketing campaign could work, like Mr. Beast videos: "We donated $2 billion and saved 1 million lives!" Right now it's so abstract and Americans feel disconnected from it all. But like Scott mentions it changes when you see real humans being happy to receive aid, etc. There is real value in literally showing the impact of aid instead of just hearing about it or measuring it. I agree with your point about hegemony too.
There is also an implication in your last few paragraphs that our aid to these countries is what keeps them from resisting us in pursuit of a balance of power. The idea that countries will turn against the US if we don't pay them off is the "taken advantage of" component of their viewpoint. The MAGA thinking really is: "we cure their AIDS and they cozy up to the Russians/Chinese and throw us out?" This disproves your claim that USAID is perpetuating US hegemony. And that resentment is the issue. It applies well beyond USAID, like to NATO: "We all agreed to meet 2% and many countries still didn't do so. Then Russia started a war. Are we just fools being taken advantage of by Europe?". Even to trade policy: "We lower our tariffs to let you trade in our country, but you don't let us into yours on equal footing?"
You're right that it's a big mess of interconnected grievances! They're all connected to the idea that the current order is actually not a good return on investment for the US, and therefore we need to change the relationship we have with the rest of the world. Hence the current administration's focus on reciprocity.
I think we have different understandings on the balance of power point. Investing a tiny share of our wealth in development and humanitarian aid is one relatively low-cost way that America signals to the whole world -- not just to the specific, often very weak, countries receiving the aid -- that we'll use our overweening power in constructive ways that leave everyone better off.
Soft power is aimed as much at near-peers and middle-income rising countries as it is at the biggest aid recipient countries. Aid is a signal to Europe and Japan and Brazil and India and South Africa that we're a benevolent rather than malevolent hegemon, and that they're better off participating in a liberal hegemony than challenging it. Aid engages us in problems that affect them (through refugee and migrant flows, climate impacts, conflict management). It's not just about buying loyalty from aid recipients.
And hegemony doesn't mean everyone follows the rules you set 100% of the time. A country getting closer to Russia or China than we'd like doesn't "disprove" US hegemony. France pulling its troops out of NATO back in the '60s was in one way a challenge to US hegemony (we didn't want them to do that) but ultimately highlighted the core difference between liberal and Soviet hegemony (we didn't send in the tanks) which led to the former system's triumph.
The idea that the current administration is actually focused on restoring "reciprocity" is nonsense. Trump has never been about reciprocity; he's about the extraction of maximum personal profit by any means, however many relationships and institutions he has to trample along the way. He's an avatar of unenlightened self-interest, quick to toss out any commitment that stops him from grabbing at some momentary win. His global 10% tariffs, to say nothing of the many ridiculous 30%+ ones, were imposed on a host of countries that had 1-2% tariff rates on the US.
You're right that the image of an America being exploited and taken advantage of is widespread -- but it's deeply mistaken, grounded in ignorance of just how much economically better off the median American is compared to pretty much any other country on earth, and ignorance of how much of our wealth has grown out of a system of global rules that the populists are now recklessly tearing down.
OK, but Tyler Cowen certainly does not feel this way. He regularly gives money to foreigners.
He's also (more or less) a libertarian. He might be fine with giving his own money away or encouraging others to do so while thinking it's not in the state's interest.
In that case, he should actually make the argument of why the interests of the state should not be aligned with the interests of its populace in this case, instead of relying on internet commentors guessing at his private thoughts.
Because the government using its power to to collectively do things in the interest of its citizens -- utilizing economies of scale and avoiding the distributed failure of the tragedy of the commons-- is just about the only justification for government to exist.
I am a US voter. I support using tax dollars to feed starving children. So, too, do the vast majority of Americans, apparently. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-americans-support-several-but-not-all-types-of-foreign-aid/
This probably explains why Congress has repeatedly funded it. In a democracy, if the majority wants to fund something, they have the right to fund it*, even if some people consider it "waste." After all, there are people who think lots of things the govt funds is waste. Much military funding is an obvious example.
As for whether it is American interests, those interests are defined by the voters. And btw not all interests are material: I once voted to raise my property taxes to fund a school swimming pool, despite not having kids and not being a swimmer. Was that illegitimate or irrational somehow?
*Unless it violates the Constitution in some fashion.
There's one line of argument that says we shouldn't be doing program X, and another line of argument that says program X is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. Those two arguments have to be addressed separately--worthwhile programs can be eaten alive by fraud, and worthless or even counterproductive programs can be run well and have very little corruption.
If a clod is washed away by the sea, the whole of Europe is diminished.
St. Peter is going to show you this comment at the pearly gates when he explains why you're going to hell.
This is a bit when the "they're eating cats and dogs!!!" story got debunked and all the edgy types came out saying that the problem was not what Haitians were eating, it was that they were on US soil in the first place.
Had that been the majority opinion... Why concoct lies? When someone lies, they're implicitely admitting they would not get very far with the truth. Haitians just working in some midwestern town is not the average American's nightmare. 10c/week/person going to starving children in Africa with 6% overhead expenses is something most Americans are happy with. Otherwise, why the lies?
Nope. The American people vote for governments who are then empowered to raise revenue and set the budget. The concept of "waste" does not enter this equation. It's just, who did we elect to Congress, and what did they allocate money to in the budget. They're perfectly free to allocate money to things that "the American people aren't getting anything out of", if they so choose.
> I agree that it’s important to try to keep overhead as low as possible
It isn't. Overhead is irrelevant. It's effect per dollar spent. I think chasing low overhead is just a bad heuristic that's meant to exclude cash machines that spend more on advertising than doing work. And that is a real failure mode that is solved by it. But there's nothing wrong with overhead so long as it's more effective per resource spent with overhead than not.
> Do these groups charge an additional overhead layer? I’m having trouble figuring this out.
They do. However, as I said, this doesn't bother me. This is simple gains from specialization. The US has an advantage in manufacturing and logistics. The US government is literally the only organization on earth that can get climate controlled medicine anywhere in the world with enough determination. The EU can't do that. China can't do that. Russia can't do that. But it doesn't have last mile delivery capability. And there's no compelling reason for the US to develop a network to deliver regular packages to rural Kenya. It's cheaper to leverage local organizations even if that means more salaries.
You want a big, central organization to handle the high level international stuff like negotiating with drug companies, distribution, cold storage, complex specialist tasks. And then you want on the ground people to do the local stuff. As far as I've seen, this division is widely regarded as sensible and attempts to put actual Americans into rural Kenya or to have local advocates run the big picture stuff tend to make it worse. Which often comes as various forms of progressive stupidity where you want to center indigenous voices about basically scientific questions or conservative concerns that paying an African a organization to perform a function is somehow an unforgivable sin.
> I would love to see a careful analysis of whether it’s more efficient to fund local vs. US charities.
This has been done and it was basically determined that local charities should do last mile, basic medical care, etc and the US should do everything above that. Because there's no special Kenyan advantage to manufacturing drugs or doing cold storage and that can be concentrated in a few key facilities and capabilities the US keeps up anyway as part of global power projection. But there is a Kenyan advantage in dealing with Kenyans. (I'm picking on Kenyans at random but you get the idea.)
This is an old criticism of EAs I have actually. The traditional charity/NGO world actually does do this kind of self-assessment.
By the way, I have plenty of criticisms of USAID. I think they are wrong in significant and meaningful ways. I think they're blinkered by ideology. I have very negative experiences of them being snobs to me personally and looking down on what I was doing. I have gotten into multiple arguments on this blog about how this should work and I was not generally pro-USAID. And further my attempts to get people interested in supporting other measures have been insulted because of basically progressive pieties. So if someone had put me in charge of USAID I would not have been gentle and I'm sure there'd have been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth. But nor would I have taken it out behind the shed and shot it.
PREACH! I had similar comments on overhead in the original thread. It’s the wrong thing to focus on. There are many ways to assess value for money, overhead is overly simplistic and is weaponised by those obsessed with cost cutting, not with maximising results.
It was a reaction to a real problem ("charities" that basically spend their money on advertising and pay fat executive salaries). But it used a very, very blunt instrument and one that's unnecessary if you can do a more fine tuned evaluation. Unfortunately, even EA's charity evaluation is not that sophisticated.
A club is not productive when the procedure calls for a scalpel. 🐸
Nit: overhead is irrelevant until you so offend people's intuitive-but-illogical sense of justice, that they grab the legal system and successfully force you to stop doing good things. Perceptions of overhead not grounded in fact are *even more* irrelevant until [ditto].
Certainly if you can stay far short of that point, calculate net value all you want. What you're saying about last-mile activity immediately clicks with me; viewed that way any cut that isn't discovering outright corruption is incomprehensible. And yet, the cuts happened. Think of a little effort on keeping overhead and corruption down - and legibly so - as insurance. Get it done, don't think about it after, don't skip it, certainly don't ignore it when your house just burned down.
That's true of anything though. I don't think the offense to their sense of justice is that overhead is bad. I think it's the idea that charity people are making a profit off donations or that the actual work is not being done. I think if I told someone, "There are two charities, one has 10% overhead costs but saves 1 life per every $100, the other has 5% overhead but saves 1 life per $200" most would intuitively get the first charity is better because they're trying to maximize lives saved. However, simultaneously, you would want to make sure the overhead was not going to mansions and lamborghinis.
I of course agree that if you can get the same result for less overhead then you should do it. And that you should loudly and thoroughly investigate corruption and the like. Both for credibility reasons and because efficiency is good and corruption is bad.
Also, just point of fact, my house hasn't burned down yet. (Well, the house I'm involved with part time.) I am in an entirely different house that got sneered at by the USAID folks. It looked like we were going to be fine but now Trump has decided that his war on trade includes us so we might get smacked anyway. Despite this, I don't expect it to actually stop us. One of the core beliefs we've always had is that instability like this could happen so we're prepositioned better.
> It isn't. Overhead is irrelevant. It's effect per dollar spent. I think chasing low overhead is just a bad heuristic that's meant to exclude cash machines that spend more on advertising than doing work.
On a purely utilitarian level, you are correct. If the CEO of one charity has a secret sauce which enables him to deliver more QALYs than other charities while also paying himself 80% of the donations as a salary, then a utilitarian would happily continue to donate to him.
One argument against this is that the general public is not very utilitarian. So USAID might in theory rationally prefer to have fund a slightly less efficient charity with a low overhead because they anticipate that otherwise their budget will be cut drastically once the public finds out about them paying for a lavish lifestyle of a otherwise very efficient charity's CEO.
The other thing to consider is that charities have generally no moat, no secret sauce which allows them to perform much more efficiently than their competitors. If someone has an amazing idea for a charity and delivers great value while also pocketing half of the donations, an even more altruistic person doing the same thing while also only paying himself a living wage is sure to pop up and outcompete him.
Also, there is a background of non-EA charities which do not try very hard to optimize for effect but are basically in the business of selling a warm fuzzy feeling to their donors.
I think that there is also a streetlight effect going on. Judging the overall effectiveness of charities is hard. Determining the overhead is comparatively easy, and a charity with a very high overhead is unlikely to be very effective. So people focus on a trivial overhead to avoid having to judge the overall effectiveness, and I broadly agree with you that this is bullshit.
If your charity is most effective when it runs with 9% overhead, run with 9% overhead. If it is more effective when it runs with either 6% or 12% overhead, then by all means run with that overhead instead.
The general public is not utilitarian about ends but is utilitarian about means. They think something is good for basically emotional reasons but then they want ruthless utilitarianism in getting that good thing done. Further, the public seems very willing to support professional level salaries for charities so long as they have a visible and solid effect. So I think you're underestimating the public here.
Also charities have moats all the time. That's just wrong. The right way to model the lower salaries isn't a lack of a moat but that people are getting paid partially in prestige/sense of purpose/admiration/whatever. Because they're not being competed anywhere near to zero.
There are bad charities but I think EA overestimates how bad most are by a lot. The idea of measuring effectiveness or effect per dollar spent is not something they invented. And in some ways their methods are more primitive than their mainstream competitors.
I agree that it was used because it's a simpler metric to judge. But it's not that hard to develop alternative metrics.
> Also charities have moats all the time. That's just wrong.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat
Basically, an economic moat is what prevents a competitor with adequate funding to just rise to your level. If your business model is growing and selling carrots, you have no moat, nothing prevents the farmer down the road from doing the same, and if your prices are much above the costs of production, you will not sell much.
If your business model is that you own the copyright to the most common operating system for desktop computers in the 2000s, then you have a moat. The typical corporate customer was firmly embedded in the Windows world, running a bunch of expensive Windows-only software, and the cost of switching would have been prohibitively expensive for them.
Typically, moats do not arise by accident, they are the result of strategic decisions made by their owner who cares about cornering the market.
I would imagine that for most charities, this is not much of a consideration. The CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation is likely not kept awake at night worrying that Musk or Bezos might spend a billion to build the Malaria Prevention Foundation as their direct competitor. Thus the AMF is likely not investing resources in proprietary, patented bednet mounts which will not work with their competitors. Their goal is to prevent malaria, not to get rich while selling the public their malaria-prevention.
> I agree that it was used because it's a simpler metric to judge. But it's not that hard to develop alternative metrics.
Perhaps for the AMF. You take the past QALY cost of a child getting malaria, divide that by the cost of preventing one child from getting malaria (though there might be ethical issues with running a control group), and voila, the effectiveness of your charity in QALY per dollar spent.
But next you want to evaluate a charity which builds schools for girls. I would describe the task of determining the effectiveness in units of QALY/$ as "hard". You might half-way estimate the QALY impact on the women themselves due to economic benefits, but then you have higher order effects. What is the QALY adjustment for children per year of school their mother had? What are the overall economic effects? Will this lead to women replacing men in some jobs, so that you have a gap between double income families and no-income families? Is this a good way to transform a society to be more like ours and less terrible? Will this lead to women having fewer children, and will this be bad (a question where utilitarians differ)? Will the Taliban take back control in a decade and proceed to murder any women who is unwilling to be subjugated? (I am not arguing that schools for girls are ineffective or counter-productive, merely pointing out that it is really hard to measure these things.)
I assume you are accepting "economic moat" metaphorically since the most obvious sign of an economic moat is profits because it's a moat against competition and non-profits don't have profits. If that is what you mean and you accept moat to mean something like "the ability to produce desired outcomes such that the marginal dollar is best given to you over a competing charity" then yes, charities absolutely have moats. Something like AMF's experience with bed net production and distribution is itself a moat.
And I'd say AMF and most EA is actually an example of how easy it is! They've basically invented a standard out of thin air with giant gaping holes and a bunch of unproven assumptions. They're actually quite bad at it. And yet they've still done better than "just look at overhead and minimize that."
> The US government is literally the only organization on earth that can get climate controlled medicine anywhere in the world with enough determination. The EU can't do that.
I don't understand this. Are you saying, that the EU can not send refrigerated medicine to countries like Kenya?
Not reliably and in large quantities without assistance from American logistics networks. Cold chain supply is something America is uniquely good at. I don't think the Europeans or Soviets even got close globally though the EU has some local ability.
But even more generally, the EU can't even consistently get things to North Africa without American support or leaning on private networks far earlier than the US has to. The US has that because it's an expeditionary military capability. The US maintains the ability to send an army into Central Africa complete with medicine, ammunition, and even ice cream. The EU largely does not. And while PEPFAR did not use military capability it did use those government logistics experts, those supply networks, and negotiated with various drug companies.
The US is literally the only country that can do this all throughout Africa (or anywhere else). Russia can't, China can't, the EU can't. The USSR used to be able to but that's atrophied. They have some regional logistics networks that work but they're not global and, in the EU's case, does not extend into Kenya but does extend into some parts of Africa.
is this true?
I was under the impression, that at least France has some strong networks in Africa. Maybe not everywhere equally, but there should be some former french colonies, where today France has stronger logistical networks than the US has.
France had strong networks in its former colonies in West Africa/the Sahel. However, those networks have largely been collapsed through a combination of terrorism, militias, and (often Russian backed) coups that have expelled the French. The US networks have also shrunk but the US has a longer tether so its remaining bases are sufficient while France's largely aren't.
Of course, France could also pay local networks. But Chadians don't have cold storage and the US is able to bring its own while France would need to develop it in a more anchored way. And, importantly for war, means that France has to come in by degrees while the US can just drop the army in the capital if it wants it. Which also works to get medicine there within a week or so if Trump decides he wants to be the King of Chad.
The only region where other countries have stronger logistical networks (region singular) is Central Asia. The US is stronger than everyone else everywhere else. Not counting, of course, internal logistics. Obviously Russia has stronger logistics in Russia than any foreign country.
Just curious, why would central asia have such strong logistics networks? Because of its former status as soviet satellites? something to do with steppe nomads?
I believe people are naturally very skeptical of non-profits being good stewards of federal funds. Scott does a great job digging into the data and asking well-founded questions. Coming from a country where corruption is a normal part of life, it's very hard to believe that a grant made to a local third party wouldn't be extremely corrupt. So I read the post, and wonder "what is he missing?". This is similar to when Elon found the imaginary Social Security fraud. I don't have a horse in the race, but it did feel like something which could be possible. We've heard stories of foreign sweat shops applying for e.g.: student loans and pocketing the proceeds. I suspect part of the problem is that the numbers being discussed are so big, that either we over-estimate the problem, because $60M is only single digits percent; or we under-estimate it because $60M is, after all, a lot of money.
Yeah, we really need more data. And so far it looks like neither one have that. But of course given ones we do have, Tyler really doesn't look good.
If you can save millions of people with some administrative handover that is one thing. If the argument is that you must send money overseas forever because they cannot live without it that is absurd.
I don't think PEPFAR in particular is indefinite - see https://archive.is/M8dTJ for discussion of how it is currently winning its fight.
But I also disagree with your statement. Why is this absurd? It seems like a very possible way that the world could be.
I think it depends, but perpetual dependency does not seem like the most moral path for anyone. Aid should focus on building real capabilities (health systems, schools, accountable governance) so people can claim their basic rights and live however they want. Keeping people dependent on aid does not contribute to self-determination, freedom, agency, etc. It might take a very long time. Climate change may require long-term aid to some countries too. I think PEPFAR is a great example of this idea. From the article you linked:
>National governments in sub-Saharan Africa have also made it a priority to build out local capacity to fight the disease. The majority of funding for HIV services now comes from domestic sources rather than foreign donors. Rather than relying on foreign researchers and international groups to implement HIV interventions, local organizations — which are more integrated into the communities they serve and are more attuned to local social and cultural challenges — are increasingly running the show.
The Southern States have been perpetually dependent on Northern States for 150 years. Should we cut them off too? Or use that 150-and-counting figure for international aid as well? What's the moral state of Southerns living in perpetual dependency?
They are not dependent in the sense that they will all die, they receive more money than they pay in and this is done because they are part of the same country.
Being part of the same country does not imply receiving more money than is paid.
You may find it difficult to maintain a country that has no form of equalization, but supposing it were possible, my point is not so much that this is more moral but that it isn't analogous
They’re on the family plan. We are part of the same country and they are our fellow citizens. Different states are endowed with different resources. I agree with the US’ current approach of helping seed factories and drivers of economic growth through targeted investment. I’m not a big fan of direct transfers.
"I think it depends, but perpetual dependency does not seem like the most moral path for anyone."
I think this framing includes an implicit assumption that's potentially very unsound. You say "perpetual dependency" and "anyone" as if we're talking about uncle Bob, who needed a $50 handout to buy food (which might actually be booze) this week, and can be counted on to come back next week asking for another $50.
But of course when [country] receives foreign aid year on year, it's be no means assure that it will be *the same humans* being helped from one year to the next. Indeed, I can imagine quite a large number of cases where it is not. Let me illustrate with a concrete example:
Imagine a hypothetical birth defect, lets call it cantwalkia. People born with cantwalkia are totally unable to walk: this naturally limits their ability to work and care for themselves, *especially* in underdeveloped countries with low urbanization and poor disability accommodations. Fortunately there is surgery that is capable of completely and permanently correcting cantwalkia. Unfortunately, this surgery requires specialized training and equipment that is completely impractical for developing countries to source locally. So the U.S. steps in and pays for trained personnel and equipment to operate in the impoverished country of Pooristan, allowing every Pooristani born with cantwalkia to be treated.
So, in this somewhat-contrived example:
1. No person in Pooristan ever benefits from this form of aid more than once (they're treated and cured permanently)
2. Each individual thus treated becomes substantially and permanently more capable of caring for themselves and contributing to society.
3. It is not possible (short of a medical breakthrough) for the problem to ever be "fixed" to where aid of this sort no longer needs to be provided by somebody. A consistent fraction of babies are born with cantwalkia year after year, which isn't going change at all if more or less aid is provided.
Is this a state of "perpetual dependence?" It does not seem unreasonable to answer yes: after all, the U.S. government is perpetually providing something that (certain) people in Pooristan badly need. And one could certainly argue that it *should* be the government of Pooristan paying for these treatments. But that *government* isn't dependent on this aid: it's not even going to the government. And while lots of individuals depend on the aid acutely, once, no individual is stuck in dependence on it. Meanwhile, there's no sense in which Pooristan is being disincentivized from building up their own capacity; even if the Pooristani government is left footing the bill (which they might simply fail to do, leaving the people unhelped) economies of scale dictate that the training and equipment will always be foreign originating. It's never going to be economically sensible for Pooristan to teach and manufacture such things locally.
My point for all this is simply to underscore that "providing non-time-limited help fosters dependency and prevents people from building their capacity to help themselves" is a heuristic, not a law. It can be a good heuristic: things do work that way sometimes. But even among individuals it's not always and forever true. And even less so when you're dealing with entire nations, being composed of many people with different interests and capabilities.
Ignoring PEPFAR, and just as a theoretical construct (I do not have the knowledge of this to make a huge argument either way here) by providing large amounts of aid with no end in sight, you pervert the way the local economy runs and develops to where "maximize for aid dollars" is the optimal way for its best and brightest to spend their time, and he who controls the aid dollars controls the universe or something like that. Sort of an externally driven version of the resource curse.
I definitely read an article that made a more detailed argument of this kind, I believe focusing on Malawi...I'll see if I can dig it up.
That is a risk if you give people money. Not so much if you give them medical supplies.
If you offer people unlimited medical supplies, then you're incentivizing them to spend their money elsewhere, while holding out their hand for the medicine.
Charity in the form of goods is equivalent to cash + a minimum spending constraint in that category of goods. But money is still fungible!
In an extremely poor country with no economic engine, they won't have enough resources to develop a domestic pharmaceutical / real medical industry. I can think of a few ways "subsidizing" that for them would go:
* They go from spending $0 on local pharmaceutical / medical expenses (and getting no help) to still spending $0 (but getting help). This seems good to me
* They go from spending $[SMALL] on medical expenses (because they don't have money, so they literally can't spend much) to spending $0 and spending the money elsewhere. This also seems good to me, because the goal should be to get an economic engine running in that country. Nobody "lifts off" by first developing a domestic medical industry, any economic benefits from that would come from something like health security leading to better workers (which you would still get from charity)
* Same as above, but the money goes straight to warlords. This seems like a situation where you would need to do a cost-benefit analysis, but I think it would usually tend to still doing the charity. You're not giving the warlords the money used for the treatment, instead you're giving them the money the native residents WOULD HAVE SPENT on similar treatments if you hadn't stepped in. If they're not spending any money on the treatments because they're too poor, it's the same as the first situation. If they're spending some money on it already, it's probably for something like a few "medicinal herb leaves" that don't do anything, so you're giving the warlords the equivalent of a few plants while saving people from horrible suffering.
If the county had an economy that could THEORETICALLY support a good medical industry but is choosing to spend it on automotive manufacturing or something I'd say you have a point. If you're talking about underdeveloped African villages, I don't think there's anything to warp
If the contention is that they could develop more domestic healthcare production but they stopped by the injection of aid, that's trivially false. There is no good reason why they should produce healthcare if they're really bad at it. Also, we don't give out the entire "heathcare" bundle, we give out some durables and some consumables, but not others (eg doctor's hours). Since these are highly complementary, by giving out beds and syringes, we *incentivize* the production of what we don't give out (eg trained personnel)
If the contention is that giving them *anything* will reduce their incentive to create wealth in general, bc money is fungible, that's pretty weak. The Inada condition applies to each good, not to "consumption" in general. If we give them healthcare but eg no shelter, their incentive to create wealth so to have shelter is as strong as ever.
Maybe. This review of PEPFAR shows that the salaries offered by aid are higher than other healthcare practices, which can cause the unintended effect of pulling healthcare workers from preventative or essential healthcare services towards this more niche offering. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215379/
By providing large amounts of police with no end in sight, you pervert the way the local economy runs and develops to where "maximize for police dollars" is the optimal way for its best and brightest to spend their time, and he who controls the police dollars controls the universe or something like that.
The problem with this whole line of argument is: just as it is good for a city to have a functional, non-corrupt police force, it is good for children not to die of AIDS. Africa is not poor because there aren't enough children dying of AIDS, it's poor because of a wide variety of factors, and kids dying of AIDS helps make it poorer (imagine spending an enormous amount of money educating someone to become a doctor, scientist, computer programmer, etc - and then them dying of AIDS halfway through).
I lead off with ignoring the PEPFAR portion of it (though maybe you shouldn't just ignore it).
I think this comment is far too flippant about something that has a lot of literature around it with the completely spurious comparison to a police force.
My opinion was normative so I'm confused about the phrasing "a [way] the world could be." Unless secular people are now getting into moral facts.
I have many personal disagreements with the philosophy but I wonder which one, if any, would be most persuasive to an EA kind of person...
If a growing population will always die without US deficit spending, that is like a human asset bubble where the deleveraging is deaths.
If anyone wanted to see evidence of what was always underneath the ideology of this blog and community, here it is: pure neocolonialism.
could you elaborate?
I’m reading Scott Alexander as saying that it’s not absurd that the underdeveloped world must perpetually live with economic dependency on the West.
I'm pretty sure that IS what he is saying. What does that have to do with neo-colonialism? I thought neo-colonialism had something to do with US being economically dependent on resources from the underdeveloped world.
Yes, resource extraction is one half of the equation. The other half is control over the government, economy, and society of the underdeveloped countries. The former is managed by military and business; the latter is facilitated in part through agencies like USAID and other mechanisms for distributing humanitarian aid.
Note that the resource extraction often depends on control over local governments and societies because there’s always a risk of the locals renegotiating or nationalizing the resources.
Step 1: Cut all foreign funding
Step 2: Millions of people die of preventable causes, none is the wiser, their economies are even worse with the additional drag of a sicklier and worse nourished population
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: <s>Profit<s> Based thirdworldist utopia where every African state is on technological parity with the West and now you can marxistly agree with your Fox News-addicted uncle
No, I don’t support of Trump in this fight. I’m just not naive about USAID and the humanitarian aid industry either.
The status quo of US foreign policy in the Global South has been a disaster. And Trump is worsening it.
Now, he wouldn’t be able to do this if US policy were more clearly and unequivocally beneficial for Americans and the Third Worlders it claimed to help.
See, it’s not just that the soft power strategies of USAID are often opposed to the sovereignty of underdeveloped countries, but that these soft power strategies, when compared to Chinese Belt and Road Initiatives, are unpopular and ineffective.
Part of the problem is that many educated and well-intentioned Americans actually believe that these programs are principally altruistic not primarily about geopolitical dominance.
When it’s brought to your attention that there is actually a lot of reason to be critical of USAID from a humanitarian perspective, your response is mockery. Are you unwilling to have a serious discussion about these matters?
The nice thing about doing foreign aid is that you can leverage the power it gives you to get the locals to do things like pay their own money into helping their people.
A couple points: NICRAs are not comparable between implementors. Each partner would negotiate with the responsible Agency depending on where they get most of their funds. So a USAID grantee might have a NICRA with DoD or State, but it would have been applicable to their USAID award. NICRAs are ‘negotiated’ so there is a rate base tied to where there is a direct relationship between a cost base and indirect costs. Finally, NICRAs are audited and would apply to all USG awards.
I want to mention this piece again just because it's so danged useful: a non-cynical, informed take on USAID.
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/02/18/notes-from-a-usaid-career/
This is excellent, and highlights exactly why the pro-authoritarian Trump administration wants USAID destroyed
This is a tearjerking anecdote, no joke, but it doesn't tell us anything. If he has any way to generalize these two anecdotes that would be useful. Unfortunately I don't know how much money Americans spent on getting a handful of old hospital beds to a shithole country. That anecdote is useless by itself.
I'm so confused - how could Tyler possibly think his original post doesn't read as supportive of Rubio? He's clearly an intelligent person. The only explanation that seems vaguely plausible is acting in bad faith, but his response does seem pretty sincere. Wtf?
Overall this seems not worth your time to engage with, for whatever that's worth
I don't think it's confusing, if you assume that Cowen is simply heavily biased in favor of assessing Rubio and the Trump administration's actions as reasonable. He sees a tweet by Rubio, runs an extremely quick and dirty automated "fact check," and thinks "this sounds pretty big if taken seriously, it sounds like people across the aisle aren't talking about this because it looks pretty bad for them."
Scott points out that this is rooted in a misunderstanding of the information in question, and leads to deeply destructive conclusions if followed through on. This looks bad for Cowen, and he doesn't want to admit "the position I took is stupid and destructive," so instead he covers himself by arguing "I didn't *actually* commit to the position you're criticizing me for, and you're being disingenuous by acting like I did.
From his perspective, he might feel he's being intellectually honest, because he didn't actually stick his neck out and stake his reputation on a claim that Rubio was strictly correct, he basically just signal-boosted him with an affirmation of "Gosh, that *does* look bad, those libs are might suspicious!" And it feels mean for Scott to go after him so hard when he wasn't technically *wrong*. But his perspective on whether he, or anyone else, is being intellectually honest, doesn't seem like a particularly useful one for anyone else to inform themselves with.
Also, for him it clearly isn't a sacred issue (like it is for Scott), so he considers Scott's perceived overreaction to his minor sloppiness be a faux pas and not something to give in to.
I don't see him trying to make the Trump admin look reasonable here:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/yours-truly-on-the-trump-tariffs-at-the-free-press.html
Rather, TC just appears to have distinctive views about philanthropy resulting from his participation in it.
re footnote 1, you can link individual anything using the relatively new web feature "text fragments", which allows linking to a range of text (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments). For example, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-wrong-about#:~:text=ACX%20subreddit%20sources%3A%201,22%20of%20them links to footnote 1. Chat AIs are good at doing the encoding
(just found out it doesn't work so well with substack. still should work with MR from the looks 🙂 )
USAID and the SF homeless industrial complex face a similar predicament. Both are dedicated to Fixing Poverty but for complicated historical reasons we will not countenance the policies that might actually do that. So we have a permanent Poverty industry that attract a mix of dedicated charitable people, insane ideologues, and shameless grifters. You should probably be more excited about any opportunity to chase off the crazies and crooks because what they do is actively harmful to the most vulnerable people in the world.
What is the policy that would actually end AIDS in Africa?
And what is your evidence for shameless grifters in USAID? (especially considering the attempted counterevidence I presented in the post)
Richer African countries could afford their buying AIDS drugs on their own (individually, or with local government expenditures) instead of needing foreign charity to finance them.
But as much as I agree with Clay that almost everything USAID wants to fix is downstream of low GDP-per-capita which is downstream of low productivity growth which is downstream of mostly-dysfunctional governments, actively re-focusing USAID on "improve foreign governments" is likely to do more harm than good. The US grew out of poverty more than a century and a half ago, and no longer has the institutional know-how (hell, I'm not sure it has the institutional knowledge on how to keep being a wealthy country).
And of course, the things that would help (from my perspective) would look even more like grift, because the causation is so remote and tenuous (see the example of ICRIER https://www.cgdev.org/publication/perils-partial-attribution ).
Which population do you think is better-equipped to build stable, functional, long-term governmental institutions: one burdened by the social strain of a deadly public health crisis, or one who has that crisis significantly mitigated by a targeted program largely resistant to local corruption?
I'm sure it helps somewhat, but that kind of argument can be applied to any program that has a positive impact. And much of the US/UK/etc transition to rich countries pre-dates modern medicine. Life expectancy is something in which poor countries are catching up faster than GDP, IIRC (A quick peruse of this graph in timeline mode says that's the case https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-per-capita?time=1983..latest&country=MOZ~SWZ~BDI~CMR~ZWE~TGO~LBR~CIV~SLE~BFA~BEN~GIN~NER~MLI~LSO~TCD~NGA~CAF~COD~MDG~GNQ~KEN~GNB~NAM ). This is good, but if it was a big causal contributor to growth we'd have seen the effect by now.
From empirical attempts at measuring the impact of AIDS on growth, the one study I found that attempts to control for other factors finds that most of the correlation between lower per-capita GDP growth and AIDS prevalence is due to shared causation by other factors. See https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5148/w5148.pdf
And indeed my go-to for Sub-Saharan African country that has its shit reasonably together, Botswana, both grew significantly while hit hard by AIDS and is now apparently financing around 2/3 of their AIDS response themselves.
>Richer African countries could afford
The problem is that there are very few of them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
There are many countries which struggle with very basic government functions like collecting taxes.
> What is the policy that would actually end AIDS in Africa?
Mandatory testing of the entire population, then quarantining everyone infected. Would probably exceed the state capacity of any state there.
USAID was ending AIDS in Africa?
USAID and the gigantic network of non-profits are utterly byzantine and opaque, and fund numerous non-public goods. It's grift regardless of how ideologically motivated the participants are.
Don't fall out of your chair, but there's a lot of shameless grift in the US defense industry as well. Anywhere A gets to spend B's money on C and there is no accounting profit to provide signals or inflict market discipline this is going to happen
Yes, you may not have heard about it, but it's called "PEPFAR". A major sign of its activities, besides all the public records you haven't bothered to read, is the graphs of HIV cases in Africa that show cases going down over time.
Well it is good to see that the ‘Cowen’ of the original post has become (mostly) the ’Tyler’ of the second post. Let’s hope the bridge building continues!
Honestly I find the way USAID was run more concerning than ever reading through this. The obfuscation of funding and operation wasn’t just opportunistic by bad actors, but actually codified into the framework of USAID itself. Pretty disturbing imo
Can you explain what you mean?
Opaque, non-standard internal accounting is usually something you see with fraud cases in large organizations. Some may claim it makes things easier to account for in a way like you describe in the post, like we have a way of doing X thing, we’ll just standardize that in our accounting so we don’t have to do onerous accounting work for X thing every time it comes up. But in the end this makes looking into the actual accounting harder and means anyone on the “outside” like an IG is at a distinct disadvantage in looking for fraud. It doesn’t just make fraud easier, it can trivialize it. This doesn’t mean that those using standard accounting don’t suffer widespread fraud (or the risk of it) i.e. the U.S. military. It just means that anytime someone avoids standard accounting practices (of which there are really only a handful in widespread use globally), we should be highly skeptical.
> I hear a lot about how USAID is funding foreign journalists to be really liberal, but it looks like all “democracy and human rights” grants combined - the category that this would fall into - are 2-5% of the budget (and this category also includes a lot of things like election observers).
I hear that they issue scholarships to underrepresented women in permaculture, so I'm pretty sure there must be a lot of waste there somewhere.
What proportion of funding goes towards that?
It's a joke, that poster was critical of Scott for including a line about that topic in the prior post related to this one.
>For some of us, it’s when people kill millions of children.
Who is killing millions of people, and how exactly? This piece has an implicit accusation of MURDER in it, but I think I would have seen it on the news if Musk or Trump had gone around the third world with AK47s or whatnot.
Choosing not to give away free stuff in perpetuity is not killing people. Sure, it's probably a good idea to jump into the pond to save the drowning person, but that doesn't mean you have to quit your job and become a volunteer 24/7 lifeguard. If entire polities are failing at simply doing what being a human is, it's not our fault, it's theirs.
I think if there is a child on life support, and I break into the hospital and disconnect the life support, I have killed him.
I agree there is an argument that we should use some more neutral term, like "directly caused the end of their life", for things that are legal, and especially for things where someone ends aid that they themselves provided. I don't think that Trump/Rubio/Musk is an example of this, because Congress legally granted the aid, and Trump/Rubio/Musk illegally stopped it without asking them.
Is there any off ramp of US taxpayer funded medical charitable giving that you would find acceptable? Would you be more comfortable if we immediately, with no exceptions whatsoever, stopped taking on additional patients or providing additional services, but maintained our current offerings until our current charitable recipients die?
I'm in favor of charity, but I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy or even a murderer just for choosing to give away slightly less free money. If every dollar in aid is just us volunteering to be more of a villain I'd rather just not bother. I don't think the "you must do the thing you clearly don't want to do or you're killing millions of people" is a winning argument in favor of USAID, nobody wants to be preached to and made to feel like a bad guy.
You could keep funding health programs until HIV is eradicated or suppressed to near-zero levels, something which we were on track to achieve in a few decades. You could also keep funding aid until undeveloped countries become developed countries and no longer require such extensive support, another thing that could be the case within 50 years and is accelerated by foreign aid. As you note, an earlier point to cease aid without arousing offense would be to fill out current contracts while declining all renewals, instead of defunding all operations without warning as actually happened.
An easy way to avoid being accused of murder for defunding foreign aid is to not defund foreign aid. If you would like the United States to be looked up to instead of villainized, the quickest way to do this would be to increase funding to the department that gives hundreds of millions of people boxes of food and medicine labeled "From the American people".
Why are you so desperate to reclaim this particular 0.3% of the federal budget? What is your reason for singling out this section of the government over all others, most of which have much higher budgets?
"America" in the collective is not, near as I can tell, the proximate entity receiving the blame for what happened with USAID-- these were the actions of a few very specific people, acting in a way that went against the will of the American people when you directly ask them about it (i.e. PEPFAR in specific and "how much foreign aid should we have in our budget" more broadly) and represented an extremely callous and outcome-indifferent approach towards institutional reform.
The reality we live in is radically different from this hypothetical one where an administration asked to have a thoughtful public discussion about how to reform its aid-giving process, and then got finger-wagged for even considering such a thing.
Trump did not even make a campaign promise to end all foreign aid, or to destroy USAID, so the American people did not even meaningfully vote for this.
Just for starters, the Administration could ask Congress not to include medical charitable giving in it's budget. Thus would be the legal way to do it. I would still call that immoral, but the word "murder" would no longer apply.
>Is there any off ramp of US taxpayer funded medical charitable giving that you would find acceptable?
I'm a world in which Americans spend money on crotch deodorant, probably not. https://www.menshealth.com/grooming/g44701962/ball-deodorant/
> I'm in favor of charity, but I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy or even a murderer just for choosing to give away slightly less free money.
That's only partly the problem. "America is being treated as immoral" only because of *why* it's doing this. If Trump's administration scaled back aid because it showed the targets were met and less aid would do just as much, no one would care. But the justification is fundamentally a sociopathic one - foreigners shouldn't get charity from the US. In the place of charitable giving for humanitarian (and soft power) reasons is...nothing, because it bothers some people to hear that pennies they wouldn't even notice had immense positive impact on others.
Legally, Congress could refuse to fund it in their next budget, or pass a law stripping funding. This would generally come with an end of service date six months or more in the future, which would make it much easier for other organizations to pick up any of the slack.
> I don't appreciate America being treated as the bad guy [...] just for choosing to give away slightly less free money
1. As Scott already implied, "America" didn't choose, but a handful of individuals including Musk who was not elected, nor confirmed by the Senate, nor empowered legally, and in court filings isn't the head of the organization whose name isn't actually DOGE[1][2].
2. "Slightly less" is exactly why it's so outrageous. If Musk sacrifices 300,000 lives to save 1% of GDP, that would be one thing, but 0.1% is another thing. (Edited. Google tells me USAID spent $21.7 billion in fiscal year 2024, which is less than 0.1% and I have heard that less than half of that is actually needed to save the lives in question. I thought I saw a 7-figure number of lives saved by USAID, but I didn't find that page again when I went looking for it. Instead I found this dashboard[3], which is confusing because on one hand it projects about 300,000 deaths caused by funding discontinuation, but separately, on the table, clearly shows a larger number of "1-Yr" deaths on rows marked "terminated". We should also consider that USAID isn't just about saving lives, but also about economic development and quality of life, so lives are not the only things being lost.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ziKJQC32qk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvSwJT0rLU
[3] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard
It's a different scenario, if say, it was TRM blocking the Gates foundation from providing charity. But in this case the money came from Americans collectively, not from the pockets of Congress. Congress granted the aid on behalf of Americans, and TRM stopped it on behalf of Americans.
Condemning the voluntary cessation of charity is a bad precedence to set because it sets the expectation that all charity are perpetual commitments, which increases the barrier to giving in the first place.
Scott's comment is talking about the distinction between killing people legally and killing them illegally. Given that the executive branch does not, in the United States, have the option to decline to spend funds that were allocated by Congress, that means that the elimination of USAID isn't legal, so any killing that comes from it is illegal killing.
I don't think he's condemning the voluntary cessation of charity in general - the comment is only condemning it when it's illegal.
This is a noncentral example of an illegal death-causing.
A more realistic comparison is:
A person is going around robbing people at gunpoint. They are using most of that money to fund life support for children.
If you stop them from both robbing people and funding life support, are you you killing the people on life support?
They aren't being robbed at gunpoint in the first place.
A democratic government funding itself with taxation, is not an equivalent of robbing people at gunpoint... no matter what the extreme libertarian right/left say. Its a collective decision we all contribute too.
Introducing an illegal act as the first stage of your analogy breaks the symmetry that Scott's analogy has with the real world.
In his there is a lawful act keeping someone alive, that is stopped by an unlawful act. That's what makes it equivalent to murder. That symmetry is preserved across his analogy and the real world actions.
Congress levying taxation, and legally distributing the money is that initial lawful act..... Impoundment by the Trump administration of those allocated funds, without congressional agreement, is the latter unlawful act that kills.
To preserve the symmetry in your analogy it would require proving that congress passing laws on taxation is illegal. Its not. You can't have that initial illegal act in your analogy, its not symmmetrical with the real world situation. That renders the rest of your analogy entirely moot.
Your argument has no merit.
If an immoral action is justified by the democratic process, then regardless of the morality of Trump's actions, it is justified - he won the election.
I'm not sure you understand how the system works - Congress did not pass a law that said $10 million should be spent on life support. Congress passed a law saying that said $10 million should be spent how the president likes. And the president thinks it should be given back to the people - so the collective decision is AGAINST you, not for you.
To be clear, I dont agree with the premise that democracy makes taxation moral - that would require freedom to unassociate from that democracy, which America does not have.
There is an genuine consequentialist argument here that could be made here, but an appeal to a democratic process that ruled against you is not it.
Edit: If you would like a more "accurate" analogy:
9 people have a vote. 5 people vote to hire a person to rob all of them at gunpoint for varying amounts, some of which will be spent on life support, with the amounts to be decided by one of them, again decided by a vote.
Later, they have a vote and the majority appoint a person who openly believes they should stop robbing them (and thus funding life support).
Are they killing the people who are on life support? Who is doing the killing here if so?
>If an immoral action is justified by the democratic process...
Absolutely, what would normally be an "immoral" action is absolutely rendered legal and often moral by the democratic process.
If I take money from you without your permission, that's theft. If a democratically governed country uses its legal processes to do so that's taxation, or possibly a fine.
If I lock you up and refuse to let you go, that's kidnapping. If a democratically governed country does so according to its legal processes, that's imprisonment.
>.... then regardless of the morality of Trump's actions, it is justified - he won the election.
No, that does not follow. Trump wasn't elected king, he was elected president.
That means he has to follow the laws, and one of those laws is that congress decides where and when to spend taxed money.... and the president cannot decide not to do so if congress has authorised the spend. Thats "impoundment".
So him being elected president does NOT mean he can just refuse to fund USAID. Congress has to do that, and the fact that they didn't is what makes Trumps action illegal.
Just as whilst arresting you for a crime and imprisoning you according to the laws of the land is legal.... that doesn't mean a cop can arrest you and bang you up for 20 years because he decided you deserve it.
The correct process and law must be followed. If its not, goes back to being illegal/immoral. That cop is "kidnapping" and not "imprisoning" because he didn't follow the law and process.... What Trump did is impoundment and illegal on the same basis.
>I'm not sure you understand how the system works - Congress did not pass a law that said $10 million should be spent on life support. Congress passed a law saying that said $10 million should be spent how the president likes.
NO. I am very sure YOU do not understand the law. Congress does not (or at least did not in this instance) pass a law saying the president can spend $10m where he likes.
They appropriated $10m for the purpose of spending on a certain programme within USAID (say PEPFAR, or perhaps some "Food to Country X" programme) and it is legally bound to be spent on that exact programme. Thats what budgets and appropriations are. Instructions to the executive that congress has specified this money is to be spent in this way. It is the presidents job to "take care that this law was faithfully executed" and spend it as directed. He's not a king. He is there to "execute" the laws and directions of congress (at least as far as budget appropriations are concerned). He can veto the "entire budget" but he can't "veto" any line of the budget he wants. Its an all or nothing deal. He does not have any "line item veto".
Congress does devolve some spending to the presidents discretion. This is known as the "discretionary budget" and shows in the WH budget as discretionary spending, but this is a small part of the total, and neither USAID nor PEPFAR nor a lot of other executive agencies are funded from this budget, they're funded by congressional appropriations for a specific purpose. In not spending the funds allocated for those specific purposes Trump is acting illegally, specifically he is "Impounding" those funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_funds
>Impoundment is an act by a President of the United States of not spending money that has been appropriated by the U.S. Congress. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to exercise the power of impoundment in 1801. The power was available to all presidents up to and including Richard Nixon, and was regarded as a power inherent to the office, although one with limits. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed in response to high impoundments under President Nixon.[1] The Act removed that power, and Train v. City of New York (whose facts predate the 1974 Act, but which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court after its passage) closed potential loopholes in the 1974 Act.[citation needed] The president's ability to indefinitely reject congressionally approved spending was thus removed.[2]
The law's still in force.
>To be clear, I dont agree with the premise that democracy makes taxation moral - that would require freedom to unassociate from that democracy, which America does not have.
Um, pretty sure it does. You can move abroard and renounce US citizenship.
https://1040abroad.com/faq/renouncing-u-s-citizenship/
Once you've completed all the forms you pay file your final Tax return and you're done.
>There is an genuine consequentialist argument here that could be made here, but an appeal to a democratic process that ruled against you is not it.
It didn't rule against USADI/PEPFAR. Those appropriations were made by congress. The democratic process agreed that spending. Its illegal for Trump to impound it.
>[Your 2nd Analogy]
Again, this falls down in the fact that its not symmetric with reality.
5 people did not cote to be robbed at gunpoint.
9 people agreed to a system of taxation and spending of that money via the use of a democratic process, they all had the option to opt-out by revoking citizenship but declined and agreed to the deal where they'd all vote and abide by the result.
They voted, with differing views on the amount of taxation and the spending of that money. A majority of 5 won the vote. The government taxed them in the way democratically agreed, and spent it as democratically agreed.
One official in the govt did not like this solution. He didn't have the power to change it. Indeed, the legislative had specifically passed a law saying "This official can't just take away this money, that's illegal" targeting that officials office directly.
Despite that law the official took the money away and did not spend it as agreed by the democratic process, saying he disagreed with the result.
Doing so killed a few hundred thousand people on life support.
By the way US law works, and also ethically/morally, that's Murder.
You "Do an illegal act".... People die as a result of the direct consequences of that illegal act.... that's pretty much Murder I. Or it would be if the illegal act is a felony. Not sure if impoundment is a felony.
In any case. (to go back to your original analogy). It wasn't an illegal act (the robbery at gunpoint) countered by a legal act (refusing to spend the money on life support)..... but the exact opposite. A legal act (taxation) where the cutting off of life support is explicitly illegal (Presidential Impoundment).
It is taking money at gunpoint. The only argument is whether it's acceptable to do so. Non-anarchists believe that it is.
Yeah, if someone who consistently wants to abolish taxes and all or nearly all government makes this argument, I think I will believe it is sincere. If someone who wants other tax-funded government programs to continue makes this argument about one he dislikes, it's pretty obvious that he's not making it in good faith.
You have a process you can follow to not pay taxes. (revoking your citizenship and exiting the US). Even anarchists can do so.
By not following that process, you are agreeing to the taxation. Its a voluntary exchange... just as someone parking their car in a "paid parking" spot agrees to that exchange.
If this is "taking money at gunpoint" then all monetary exchanges are "taking money at gunpoint". In so far, as non-payment of any agreed upon exchange can be followed to the point at which someone turns up with a gun to escort you to jail.
I know anarchists like to claim the opposite, but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you are able to revoke citizenship/exit the US.
I didn't park my car in a "paid parking" spot, I was born in the US. Other monetary exchanges aren't like that at all, because I seek them out, and for larger sums (on the scale of taxation) they are for contractually specified products/services. The US government simply takes whatever they decide upon, and they don't have any contractual obligation to provide any service in return for taxation. SCOTUS has explicitly ruled that government agencies whose job is supposed to be protecting people cannot be sued for not doing that https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again Fitting with that, David Gross stopped paying federal income taxes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AskPyNg6hHP6SrmEy/redirecting-one-s-own-taxes-as-an-effective-altruism-method and lost no government services as a result because there is no relationship between an individual's taxes and services, and thus he's not going to get "cut off" like a customer who won't pay their tab.
Oh, I did not know the Trump administration was our first anarchist goverment! Time to tell everyone that the borders are open because any tax necessary to fund ICE would be robbery, which this admin would never commit!
You want an analogy that preserve anarchist ethics without being misleading about the facts, it's Don Corleone dies and his son keeps the extortion racket going, spends even more money in lavish parties for his wiseguys (contracting loans to be financed by future exhortions), but cancels the periodic donation his father used to make to the children's hospital.
It's hard to not conclude that as bad as you think Corleone Sr. was, Corleone Jr. is *worse*
If a "hospital" does not pay the bills for water/electricity, and then gets disconnected - and then patients die - who is the killer? The utilities - who had delivered without pay for some months? More likely the hospital-admin, maybe stingy customers, maybe the Greens/NIMBYs who made electricity more expensive. Or a virus.
Also: Last time I looked, there were ways to catch HIV. And ways to avoid it.
Anyways: I do hope PEPFAR et al. come back. Preferably funded by Gates. I do hope less tax money goes to woke or feel-good causes. And as those wokeys caused much of the present backlash: Call them the killers, if one must.
Obviously, the legal point may be valid, as in many other of the crazier Trump-admin attempts. Just today on MR https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/trump-tariffs-struck-down.html
"And as those wokeys caused much of the present backlash: Call them the killers, if one must."
No, sorry, Trump did it. You can't say "the woke made me mad, therefore I had to kill a bunch of kids." The woke can make you as mad as it wants, defunding PEPFAR without Congressional approval is Trump's own personal evil.
Wokeys are just one of six suggestion. If none of USAID had gone to "diversity", cutting it would be a harder sell. - If Trump as the elected presidents says: "I withhold funding of projects abroad", that is legit (as long as it is - if elected congress said the funding must not be withheld, different story). I refuse to accept this "murderer" howls. Yes, life-saving medicine saves lives. Not my job nor my gov. obligation to pay for medicine in countries far away. If we do: praiseworthy. I we do not: shrug.
Say, if Musk went: "oops, I did not mean to disrupt PEPFAR, I will pay it out of my pocket the next 2 years" -would you then put his poster on your wall? He just saved the lives of "millions" of innocent babies and their maybe innocent mothers!!! Nope. You wanna hate. Do. I dislike Trump. A lot. Mostly, because I do care about Ukraine. But he is neither a murderer for halting PEPFAR nor for halting help to Ukraine (for a month). Both wrong. But: The murderer in the one case is Putin. In the other: AIDS+guys who do not care+their crap-gov..
Who cries "Trump kills kids in Africa" is just a Trump-hater who found a fine slogan. Not saving nobody. Not even trying.
> I refuse to accept this "murderer" howls.
PEPFAR is set up by statute. If it was ended by statute, I would be very unhappy with that, but there is a difference between that and routing around Congress. If Congress authorized a massive aid package to Ukraine, and then the President just said "nah I'm not gonna give it lol" - not as like, it'll take a month longer than expected, or we need to double check the contents, or whatever, just arbitrarily declaring he's not going to do it, period, for fun - he would be murdering Ukrainians, in the same way somebody who breaks into a hospital and unplugs people from lifesaving machines is.
> Say, if Musk went: "oops, I did not mean to disrupt PEPFAR, I will pay it out of my pocket the next 2 years" -would you then put his poster on your wall?
Yes, I would stop hating his guts for murdering babies if he did that. (I never put his face on my wall.) This specific sin dwarfs all his others to an unimaginable degree, and I would grit my teeth about his extremely stupid political opinions and agree that he was a basically good person who was perhaps misguided on some issues.
PEPFAR is an issue I genuinely care about. I understand as a person who tries to blame "the woke" for the actions Republicans voluntarily and actively take when they control the House, Senate, Presidency, and SCOTUS, it's hard for you to understand. But I actually care about PEPFAR, period, period, period. It is one of a very small handful of issues I have actually written to my Congresspeople about. I post and talk about it. I talked about it back in 2023 when it looked like it might not get renewed. This is not some fun partisan thing where I just stake out a position because it helps my side win. I care about PEPFAR, specifically. I think Bush 2 was the best President of my lifetime specifically because he did PEPFAR, it had such a major and clear positive effect, and it almost certainly would not have happened without him.
I respect your position. (Stating "I think Bush 2 was the best President of my lifetime specifically because he did PEPFAR" passes Caplan's mood test.) Hoping PEPFAR comes back. And sure, Trump is the worst POTUS I have seen in my life-time.
Are you going to edit and apologize once the Supreme Court rules that Trump was within his right to terminate USAID?
Hear, hear. MR was the only blog on my Favorites tab but I’ve noticed lately (perhaps more than lately) this curdling of Tyler’s reasoning & in fact performative obsession with niche facts as a way to demonstrate some sort of exalted comprehension beyond us plebs that’s made him obtusely dense & insufferably smug.
Well, Favorites tab getting lighter.
I'm not sure Tyler Cowen is worth all this effort.
Fewer comments like this, please.
It is insofar as a lot of people read Cowen and pointing out his bullshit possibly has practical importance. Just because it's the same "Putin as a man of ideas" and "SBF reduces the status of single men in their 30s" and "UFOs are probably space aliens" guy doesn't mean it isn't worth debunking him.
It's been a while since we got anything close to this level of angry-Scott; I enjoyed the fire.
I don't see how else one could read the original MR post either.
The argument, as I understood it, was that the NGO complex is too ideological and not focused on doing the best it can in terms of efficacy. Some programs and the existence proof were shown as an example of this.
Now, the folks I know I'm the sector have widely varying views about it, from "so counterproductive it's a net loss" to "is no worse than any company and the only way to do things". In either case it's less of an actual loss that's easily quantifiable ("they stole the 15% of the budget for parties in Abuja") and more likely they did $1 of good with $3 of resources, and many things just didn't get done. The invisible graveyard of ideas, if you will.
None of which is to say I support cutting USAID off as if it was meaningless. But that the discussion around it seems to say "show me the grift or otherwise it's pristine" is missing he point. It's like saying IBM is a very well run company because we can't see someone stealing mainframes out the front door.
Which programs were shown as examples of this? I haven't seen any examples from Tyler, and the examples I've seen from Trump/Musk/Rubio are both false, and, even if they were true, would be 0.01% of USAID's budget.
I think the average person opposed to USAID in fact thinks they were stealing the money for parties (or something equally flagrant), and that it's useful to argue this isn't happening. Once people lower their concern to "might not be the most effective use of charity dollars", we can have that discussion.
But also, as far as I can tell, USAID is, in fact, extremely efficient in terms of how it uses charity dollars. We all know global health is among the most effective causes. The humanitarian stuff - responses to natural disasters and so on - also seems pretty effective, maybe not in a pure utilitarian sense but I don't begrudge normal people for caring more about someone starving to death after a hurricane than about shaving 0.1% off malaria death rates, even if the latter is technically "more efficient". I'm not qualified to judge the governance stuff, but helping Ukraine continue to have a government right now seems pretty defensible too. Everything that isn't in that category is too small to bring down overall efficiency numbers even if it was 0% efficient, and the anecdotes (admittedly just anecdotes) I've heard about it suggest it's plenty efficient for what it is.
My guess is that the average USAID dollar goes much further than the average private charity dollar (simply because it's more likely to be spent on global health), and approximately the same distance as a cause-matched private charity dollar. I think the people who disagree should provide some kind of evidence that this isn't true, but I don't think we've even gotten there because the people who disagree are so far just lying and saying it's all wild parties and transgender operas.
> I think the average person opposed to USAID in fact thinks they were stealing the money for parties (or something equally flagrant), and that it's useful to argue this isn't happening. Once people lower their concern to "might not be the most effective use of charity dollars", we can have that discussion.
We agree rather violently here, including the fact that the average person is so misinformed as to be useless even as a weight filler in a prediction market.
My point is that the skeptics, some of them at least, have a different set of assumptions that are not easily falsifiable using budgets. They think the
One of my best friends works in Gaza. I regularly ask him to please leave and move elsewhere where I don't have to worry about him getting shelled. He doesn't. But last time I met him, a month ago, he did complain a ton about overt and covert influences that the US govt makes, either as concessions to dei or equivalent, that makes his job harder. (He also, by the way, argues against the cutting off of it because the soft power is enormously important.) I love the guy but I take it with a pinch of salt of course, however it demonstrated that the arguments people are making are, in a way, existential or structural, not just procedural. Hence the “burn it all down and rebuild” energy.
You are blowing off the failures because they are a small proportion of the budget, but they do suggest to me a profound lack of judgement and/or oversight. If you can get transgender operas and Iraqi Sesame Street funded, I have to seriously question the ability of the organization to at the very least, manage its PR.
It kinda reminds me of the Penn State professor that was letting his dog lick his anus in the park. He was by all accounts a great guy, standout professor, brilliant engineer. But I'm just not going to trust the guy with anything, even if the dog anus licking is a small part of his overall time budget.
You can't get transgender operas funded by USAID! That one was fake! https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/
It looks like the Iraqi Sesame Street thing was also possibly fake, although this one is less clear, see https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/20/sesame-street-usaid-iraq/
It's pretty bad that everyone judges USAID on fake things, and even when they're told about a bunch of real good things, they're so angry about the fake ones that they say it doesn't matter.
I suggest you look at any large organization you consider good and effective - Google, Tesla, Mossad - and you will be able to find at least one thing that seems dumb and wasteful. Make that ten things if it's anywhere close to a government. I don't think "never spends even a small percent of budget on things that look bad to a hostile observer" is a fair/attainable thing to judge an organization on.
(for the record, although an Iraqi Sesame Street would hardly be effective altruism and is not what I would spend money on, it doesn't seem to me like a completely disqualifying example of ridiculous charity. Early childhood educational programming seems potentially positive, the government funds US Sesame Street, and there's a lot of research suggesting it has useful developmental effects - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_research - although I am too genetics-pilled to really believe it)
Reminds me.of how the EU was judged on fake stories about straight bananas and the like.
The state department funding this does not exactly make me comfortable about the fate of my tax dollars in general, so I'm less inclined to trust even more fringe agencies. I realize there is a mix of real/fake/exaggerated in the mix of things that reach the press, but Iraqi Sesame Street completely undermines public confidence in the decision making of the agency.
You know that the "useful development effects" are not effective altruism in this case. More to the point, the potential PR disaster associated with spending tax dollars on this should be immediately apparent to the people who run things.
The fact things like this slip by suggests ideological capture. To be clear, I don't think these things are a big deal, and I believe you that USAID does effective work. The critical thing here is BELIEVE. The information sources I trust deem this agency effective; I will never be able to verify this myself. This is a real constraint on the ability to do effective charity with a government agency, not something that can be hand waved away.
As a non-American I am completely baffled by the argument here. Important intellectual background is that I'm fundamentally against the US project, call me "anti-American" in outlook if you want, for reasons of disliking the monoculture, plus the Iraq War was a Bad Idea, plus all that Chomsky stuff.
Nonetheless, I grew up with Sesame Street on my TV as a kid, and obviously it had a huge propaganda effect on everything from how my peers pronounce the letter 'z', exposure to "what does New York look like", how should people interact, any number of things like that. Every child who grew up watching Sesame Street is in some sense more American, more acculturated to American values, and correspondingly less British, Australian, Canadian, Iraqi.
Especially given the, ahem, recent history of US engagement in Iraq -- From a brutal realpolitik perspective, funding Iraqi Sesame Street seems to me like the kind of obvious no-shit incredibly simple cheap win propaganda victory that every American taxpayer should be completely on board with. Compared to how cheap the input is, the output effect is enormous when considered over time, even if it's only being seen by the children of the 10,000 richest most urban elitist families in the country, whose kids will grow up to go to Harvard and make connections with oil company CEOs of the future, or whatever.
It may surprise you, but US, ahem, policy in Iraq over the past two decades is extremely unpopular with the American public. Most of us view the attempt to change Iraqi culture as a contemptible overreach at cultural domination (from the left) or simply a pathetic failure (from the right).
Going from "shock and awe" to Sesame Street is just a reminder of the increasingly pathetic attempt to remake Iraqi society as a western country . Again, you have to win the PR battle, even if it is stupid.
Tyler is a retweeter, nothing much more. He aggregates interesting content that you can then conveniently click through. He is not a careful or rigorous thinker and where he makes his own arguments I know to expect not much.
I like his podcast better than his blog.
Alex is the real "truth tracker" of MR https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/11/the_excellent_a.html
I don't think Tyler is in this camp, but I do think a lot of opponents to USAID are just against US taxpayer dollars going to foreign aid at all. Even in a world where USAID operated completely perfectly they would still be against it. For these people cancelling everything is of course a win - they wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And when they discuss high overheads or corruption or funding woke nonsense, they're really just working optics to get the rest of us to focus on the bathwater.
Tyler does seems to have fallen victim to this narrative framing. Rather than a post about how PEPFAR shouldn't have been cancelled (with a concession about USAID also having some waste) its a post about how USAID has waste (with a concession that maybe PEPFAR shouldn't have been cancelled).
Obviously those people exist, since you can find a bunch of them in the comments of this and the previous post, stating clearly that this is their position. But I suspect that they're somewhat marginal. In particular, in order to hold this position, you have to both lack empathy and be scope-insensitive.
To elaborate on the latter point, I have a certain amount of respect for the position that cutting U.S. government spending is an urgent moral priority, even though I don't think I agree. But from this perspective, foreign aid is a dumb thing to focus on, simply because we don't spend that much on it, so even reducing it to zero wouldn't really move the needle on the overall deficit. You'd have to basically believe in a deontological prohibition against spending taxpayer money on foreigners, and again, some people do, but it's weird and fringe.
The cynical take is that the foreign aid cuts are a trial balloon; if they aren't blocked by the courts or otherwise forcibly backpedaled on, then that's a sign that it's safe to start cutting things that actually matter. And if they are, then the political consequences won't be too severe since the median voter doesn't feel very protective of foreign aid.
Most pro-cuts sentiment, of course, is coming from people who aren't especially well-informed about the issue and are just going off vibes.
Isn't it enough to *either* lack empathy *or* be scope insensitive. You don't need both
You can also have some principled idea of what is and is not a legitimate job of the federal government, and believe that charity to foreigners is not one of those jobs. You can believe that even while thinking charity to foreigners is good overall. I just think if that's the argument you want to make, you should make it directly and not pretend that you are cutting the program you always wanted to cut for ideological reasons because of the extraordinary amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in that program.
Cutting charitable foreign aid isn't something I "focus on". It's just one of a number of positions I hold. It follows directly from thinking that the government exists only to do things that the private sector (including charities) can't.
> In particular, in order to hold this position, you have to both lack empathy and be scope-insensitive.
Nah, it's perfectly possible to have empathy for the plight of others without feeling obligated to do anything about it.
> “Oh, have you been to 570 different countries? Have you eaten a burrito prepared by an Ethiopian camel farmer with under-recognized talent? Have you read 800 million books, then made a post about each one consisting of a randomly selected paragraph followed by the words ‘this really makes you think, for those of you paying attention’?”
Holy shit, this is spicy.
I'm not a long time reader of Tyler's, but I have noticed that he often is pretty flippant about stuff and this annoys me. Some of it seems to be personality, and god knows it's probably personally better to be that way. I have to assume he isn't that way about his own areas of expertise though. And when it carries over to other important things like the current topic or AI it's really jarring.
I'm not even sure what his area of expertise is. He has a history of getting economics way wrong, not even understanding the underlying ideas (e.g. this https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/no-one-wants-to-talk-about-the-liquidity-trap-any-more.html). He once dismissed economists using "exotic" multiple equilibrium models to explain the Great Recession... literally every DSGE model is a multiple equilibrium model, including the most basic New Keynesian model.
In other areas his knowledge seems to come from skimming through the introductory chapter of books as quickly as possible and assuming he's better read because of it.
Like someone else said, he's good at finding interesting links and not much more. But even now a disproportionate number of those links are AI fluff (e.g. linking to Blanchard saying "DeepSeek and what happened yesterday: Probably the largest positive one day change in the present discounted value of total factor productivity growth in the history of the world.")
He just isn't credible.
25 years ago or so, Tyler Cowen was a real breath of fresh air who had interesting ideas and could walk you through how he'd come to acquire them. Today he's mostly a lazy pundit whose thinking is no better than the typical op-ed page and usually much sloppier. What happened? My guess is that too many people told him how brilliant he is and he started to believe it and to believe also that he no longer needed to think but could just be oracular or, worse, vaguely aphoristic in a "Straussian" (closer to "Nostradamian" in execution) way.
So, Scott: you're presumably also surrounded by people who are impressed by your interesting ideas and careful reasoning and occasionally cannot help themselves but tell you how brilliant you are. How do you plan to avoid this failure mode, or, since you've been at this game a while now, how have you managed to avoid it?
I believe Scott to be more autistically devoted to truth-seeking and ethical norms of debate than Tyler. That is the most parsimonious way to describe their differences. Completely agree with you re:
the impact of being continuously flattered, or even simply continuously successful.
+1 for Scott. Tyler's response seems basically disingenuous.
I don't actually know anything about American foreign aid in general or USAID in particular, but I feel in the interest of fairness that the Mike Benz perspective should be represented (this perspective is very common among Twitter/X users and is endorsed by Elon Musk himself) which is that USAID is largely a soft power operation with some minimal human rights overlay to sugarcoat it.
Full three-hour podcast is here -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPc8OVNngg
Notable quotes -
"And I think the calls for reform are going to get louder and louder as people realize the reality that's been constructed around them is downstream of something that was started very long ago when American statecraft, to manage the American empire for the benefit of the American people began to warp and distort every institution in American life, from the media to now the social media companies, to the unions, to the universities and academics, to the NGOs and think tanks, to the prosecutors, to our conception of terrorism, to our conception of activity in the drug trade, to our, you know, what we're really doing with public health programs and the medical establishment and what drives that all the way into poverty relief, and you name it. I mean, every institution is instrumentalized by this apparatus, supposedly to help us, but really starting this has been done in US history before. This happened against the left, against the democrats in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA and its sister orgs like USAID and whatnot were pumping money into domestic politics to stop the anti Vietnam War movement. And this led to the reforms of the late 1970s, the church committee hearing, the Pike Committee hearing, the establishment of a Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee, Committee for Oversight. But even that was a very small glimpse into the window."
"What is USAID authorized to do under statute? Well, something they call judicial reform, which is USAID poaching funding financially the networks around judges, around courts, around the legal system, around the governance structure of every country on planet Earth. I mean Jamie, if you want to just go through a fun exercise right now, you can even put on screen just a simple Google search so people can see just how open source this is. And I can walk through specific damning examples of this. But if you just type in on Google the word USAID and then in a Boolean quotes judicial reform and what you're going to see are basically 100 countries that USAID is going after, the judges going after the legal system in order to rig the scales of justice in favor of the foreign policy establishment's interest there.
"And this has fully come home. And I can go through some examples of this. For example, there's a group called the OCCRP which you can think of as the Corruption Reporting Project. This is a group that half of its funding comes from USAID and the US State Department. [...] They do investigative hit piece journalism about corruption. And what they do is they go after all of the State Department and USAID and DOD's opponents in the region."
"[...] you'll see USA spending, USAID spending, USAID funding is $20 million. $20 million that our taxpayers paid to every. Listen, they don't report on, you know, kittens being saved from falling out of trees. Everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption that can be used by prosecutors in the area to arrest the political opponents of the State Department. [...] This is USAID, the US Government bragging about the achievements of what they achieved by spending $20 million, at least 4.5 billion in fines levied against targets of these hit pieces. Now by the way, I should note that the head of the OCCRP was busted in a major documentary that has very little distribution. But I encourage everyone to watch where he said because this was, this was I think a year and a half ago or whatnot, but they're up to over $10 billion now.
ROGAN: What's the documentary?
BENZ: It's on the WikiLeaks X page right now. It's by a group of German journalists who had one on one interviews with the head of this group OCCRP as well as the USAID grant coordinator and others. So it's straight from the horse's mouth. And they say, he says in that interview, I believe his name is Drew Sullivan, that It's now over $10 billion. And he brags that that is a, I think he said it was a 20,000% return on investment because all these dollars were returned to government coffers. So for $20 million of mercenary media for the state, state sponsored hit pieces, the government's got $10 billion back. That's a 1995 Amazon level return on investment. But now let's get into the darker stuff. 548 policy changes by the government or actions by civil society in the private sector. Now we don't know if these policy changes are good or bad. Do you think USAID would list them as accomplishments if they were not in furtherance of USAID's or the state Department's foreign policy goals in the region? What they are saying and trying to sort of speak through their teeth as they say it, is that they proudly sponsored hit piece journalism to ruin people's lives and go after political targets in order to change the policies of foreign governments from the inside.
Now it goes on to say 21 resignations and sackings including of a president and prime minister. Now the head of OCCRP in this documentary openly says that their reporting caused, I think it was five or six different governments to topple and turn over and be transitioned. So this is state sponsored media hit pieces so that prosecutors can arrest presidents and prime ministers to regime change their government and install a more pro US political vassal figure in the region. And then the Last one is 456 arrests and indictments. And this again is listed as a USAID achievement. We don't know what these people did. We don't know whether they're guilty or innocent or whether or not these were political prosecutions like you see right now with the New York District Attorney's office, which is a whole other USAID connected can of worms. But these are state sponsored hit pieces for hire in order to give the Justice Departments, the prosecutors in a region, the ammunition to arrest the enemies of the state."
"Most of the worst scandals of U.S. statecraft and covert action in the past two decades have actually been from USAID rather than CIA. And there's, there's a reason for this. So after the big scandals against the Democrats and liberals and anti war groups in the 60s and 70s, reforms are put in place. And some of this goes back to the 40s itself. But every covert action the CIA does has to be authorized by the President in what's called a presidential finding, to take that covert action. So if the CIA senior leadership, or just a rogue cell that's not even at the top of leadership, but just a rogue desk, a rogue portfolio, a rogue network wants to run a covert action in a region, but they don't think the President will approve, or the President doesn't want to formally sign off on it in case it goes wrong, they can walk right over to USAID who can do the exact same thing the CIA does, except they can call it discreet democracy promotion because it's not technically an intelligence agency, so it's not technically covert action. So it doesn't require executive branch approval or foreknowledge."
"And they've gotten in trouble in these cases in some pretty incredible ways. Can I show that, please? So let's start with even the whitewashed version. Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo [...] This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. Now we were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. By the way, I have to say for the record, I'm no fan of the Cuban government and I'm not even weighing in on whether it's the right or wrong thing to do in terms of regime change there or, you know, liberating people there from autocratic excess by that government. I'm simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House. It was an online social networking microblogging service created by USAID and marketed to Cuban users. This was a Twitter knockoff.
See the background of this is, this is 2009, 2014. That period the State Department and USAID were gangbusters, gung ho on the promise of Arab Spring style social media revolutions to topple other governments. The Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution and a Twitter revolution. USAID pumped $1.2 billion in and we sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to use in order to create those a pro democracy predicate for it. But the problem was at the time, Cuba did not allow US social media in. So they said, hmm, so they're not allowing Twitter in. How can we get a Twitter there but without calling it Twitter, without making it look like it's coming from the US?
So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like and retweet button. Zunzunio is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So it means it's bird. It was the Twitter bird, the whole thing. But the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it's coming from the Cubans if you're going to do this operation. So what you'll see is it began running. So this is 2010, this is right during the Arab Spring. And what you'll see is they took funds, millions of dollars of funds that were concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan. [...] So they concealed in the budget from Senate, from Congress, from the White House, National Security Council. They said that these were humanitarian funds for Pakistan and then they ran that to their contractor CAI to quote, set up a byzantine system of front companies using Cayman Islands bank accounts and recruiting unsuspecting business executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US Government.
[...] It's humanitarian work for, you know, that's we're saving lives by doing this. But the whole point is once they hit a critical mass, they would create rental riots and they would use this the same way they used it in Egypt and Tunisia to topple those governments under the Obama administration. They would organize smart mobs rental riots. [...] Mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or as one USA document put it, renegotiate the balance of power between state and society. And, you know, so one more thing. If you want to look up on this, you see how they conceal it. If you just type in USAID Zanzanillo and discrete or discrete action, and you'll see how USAID, when this scandal popped off, everyone said, what the hell? How did this happen? This is classic CIA work. You're using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You're saying you're earmarking it for Pakistani aid. This has clear implications for US Statecraft if this gets busted."
"Last week, Elon Musk held an X space directly with Senator Joni Ernst, who has been on this crusade to reform USAID excesses. And there's a really scandalous moment there where Senator Ernst revealed that she was actually threatened by USAID when she tried to get insight into what they were actually doing. [...] There was a formal hearing on this for oversight of what happened. And what the staffers said is staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is supposed to be the thing that reins in, that gives the American people oversight and accountability for USAID gone rogue. And what the Senate staffers overseeing USAID said is we had no visibility on this entire operation the entire time because USAID told us if they had to tell us what we were doing, people could die. This is classic CIA stuff. But the Senate was blocked. And I should note again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to usaid. This is why these drug operations and these terrorist operations run primarily through USAID rather than directly at the CIA."
"BENZ: If a bank did it, you would go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not have liberty again for the next 20 years of your life. But if USAID does it, it's completely legal right now. And so this is how you have USAID giving they just last week $122 million to ISIS. We found they fund all the terrorist groups in Pakistan. They fund the terrorist groups in the Sahel in Africa.
ROGAN: And for what purpose?
BENZ: Paramilitary terrorist groups are extremely useful to US statecraft for DoD special operations work as well as for political destabilization work. [...] U.S. national Security Adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. Could you pause for a sec? Notice how he said he wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. Okay. The whole point was to pump up this, you know, fundamentalist, extremist terrorist group with the funding and support they need, but without revealing America's role.
[...] We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right and God is on your side. That land is yours. Go out there and take it. We'll give you the money."
"But also, how did we fund the Mujahideen? Well, the Mujahideen is in Afghanistan. They were before they became Al Qaeda and ISIS. What asset does Afghanistan have to play with in order to fund its war network, its paramilitary network? Well, it's the drug network. They happen to sit on the, you know, so basically the poppy fields that, when exploited, comprise 95% of the world's heroin, if you export that. And so the CIA backed State Department, USAID backed. And we can go through receipts of USAID doing the same drugs for cash, for guns work in the 1960s, practically from the day it was born. But what they were doing is they were taking those poppy harvests and then they were depositing them in CIA proprietary banks like bcci, the bank of Credit and Commerce International. Everyone can look this up. Or if you want to plug in CIA, BCCI and look at all the mainstream media reporting on this. It was a major, major, major scandal. It become one of the world's largest banks. And it was basically a CIA front and it was a Pakistani frontman for this. And it was converting, effectively washing the proceeds of these drugs so that the Mujahideen could buy arms while the Pakistani militants were being funded and trained in Pakistan. And then they go to Afghanistan and conduct military operations against the Russians who were our stated Cold War enemy. The same thing's happening today, though. If you go on my X feed right now, I'm going to show you something related to this and how this still goes on today. USAID has been busted multiple times for actually cultivating the poppy and heroin production in Afghanistan."
"USAID and Ronald Reagan played the key role in fundamentally creating the restructured blob that we live under after the scandals of the 1970s that the CIA was busted in church committee hearings, heart attack, Gun Mockingbird, MK Ultra, you know, assassinations, all that stuff. Jimmy Carter got into power 1976, carried out the harshest destruction of CIA operations capacity and funding ever in American history. He laid off 30% of the entire CIA operations division in a single day. That was called the Halloween massacre. Crippled their budget. Then the Iran hostage situation pops off in 79. The National Security State argues this wouldn't have happened unless the CIA had its old powers back. Democrats still hated the CIA at that time because it had been directly interfering in their own domestic politics and trying to thwart factions of them, just like they're doing today against the MAGA movement side of the Republican Party. You know, the universal thump has been passed around in that way. But so they couldn't get a legislative bill to do this. So what they did is they restructured the intelligence apparatus, the COVID action capacities and the way our statecraft is done through USAID and the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy to take the baton from what the CIA used to do. But the whole point of it is in tandem now. That's why you have these John Bolton at USAID. This is why you have Liz Cheney at USAID. This is what we're fighting against as we're reforming. This is it's not really a partisan issue as I see it, even though I know statistics show there's disproportionate Democrat beneficiaries."
"Well, that's why we need to create a legacy and a pipeline of people to carry on these reforms, which is part of my personal struggle here, which is that most people, 99% of people who got involved with the MAGA movement did it because they care about the domestic. [...] Because their school curriculum is woke, because the police allow crime in the streets and the infrastructure's crumbling and there's corruption everywhere and no one's held accountable. They don't think about Pakistan, they don't think about Bangladesh. They don't think about who's on the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and how if they're living in Louisiana or Houston or, or Oklahoma, that actually their jobs at ExxonMobil and Chevron sort of depend on this strong arm diplomacy that we have with Persian Gulf countries. They don't care about the Persian Gulf, they care about local Oklahoma. But they have to now in order to understand the world they live in, in order to understand what's driving the world around them, in order to understand and the actual true face of the characters they thought they've known. They're going to have to become international minded."
"Elon Musk this week tweeted out about a horrible situation where someone from the PIs, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, I believe is now facing arrest for clicking the like button on a social media post. [...]
Poland plays an absolutely huge, probably the linchpin role in all of Eastern Europe with everything that's happening with Ukraine, because the whole play was to kill Russian gas. And then you need an alternative gas supply into Europe to offset that. And there's only two ways to do that. One is Ukraine builds up its own gas infrastructure and exploits its endogenous hydrocarbon supply, which it has a lot of. It's the third largest in Europe. But it's underexploited, unfortunately they can't do that right now because Russia reconquered that exact territory in Eastern Ukraine that those sit on. The only other way to do that is through exporting LNG liquefied natural gas from North America, from the Permian Basin or whatnot in Houston, freezing it, shipping it 6,000, 7,000 miles across the Atlantic, up through the Baltic Straits, through these newly built routing terminals into Poland and the terminals there and then routing it there into Slovakia and Ukraine and Central Europe and on from there.[...]
But the point is Poland basically has a veto right on this whole plan. Because if the Poland government says hey, you know what, we don't want to antagonize the Russians, the Russians may actually attack us. This is provocative because this is in tandem with the plan to cut off Gazprom. Also we don't want to become a political vassal state of the US or the UK or NATO. And this is what was starting to happen with the law and order, you know, Law and Justice PIs party in Poland. And so this whole network, the Atlantic Council network, was backing to the full hilt Donald Tusk who became the Prime Minister of Poland in I believe December 2023.
[...]
USAID's partner in operations arm National Endowment for Democracy has been specifically demanding Don Tusk's government in Poland must find ways to arrest high ranking members of the PIs party in order to quote, stamp out populists. They wrote this the first month in office. So. And again you'll see this is responding to someone facing three years for language. [...] So again, NATO was at war with the PIs party. They wanted more cooperation on, on security, on economic issues. So they're saying, listen, it's not an autocracy in Poland, unfortunately, we can't call it a dictator like Putin or the ccp. It's democracy because the people voted for it and they won fair and square. But it's illiberal democracy because the democratic institutions don't, you know, are not having their way. But here's what it says Poland may be saying on its first steps in stamping out populism and holding those responsible for the worst violations of rule of law. That means the criminal justice system. Now get to the next one. Next slide. Poland's new government must therefore do more than just return to liberal democracy. It must address trend, address transitional justice. The same thing all over every USAID operation. It has to arrest the people from the government we just transitioned from. Prime Minister Tusk and his coalition must again not, not should, not maybe, should consider maybe if there's something there, must stabilize the political system, mean ensure the reign against losing in the next election to ensure that populism does not return in the next election.
[...]
The new government should therefore focus attention on whether and how suspective criminals can be punished. At present, there are a number of cases that should be tried immediately. The chutzpah. The frigging chutzpah. This is a foreign, as far as the Polish people's people are concerned, this is a foreign government. Its foreign CIA front apparatus imploring their own elected government about which citizens there that they need to arrest those citizens and even giving them the list of targets."
BENZ: Hey, does what happened to Donald Trump now after the transitional justice that happened when Biden Justice Department took power. Starting to make a little bit more sense now. Should be held responsible. But legally proving allegations against him will likely be difficult. Damn. The problem is we don't have a case. We want to arrest him, but we actually don't really have anything good to get him on. So let's get all his lieutenants and again, the objective, pacification, stability, you don't need to worry about them winning the next election. Populism as a political possibility in Poland will be stamped out because the intelligence networks and the money arm of USAID and the corrupted and warped prosecutors are all on the take.
ROGAN: Jesus.
BENZ: By the way, multiply this problem basically in every country on earth because you know, we can get to a dozen of these.
"In 2014, USAID was busted running a covert operation where, according to their own people who were involved in the operation, they set up an HIV prevention program in foreign countries because it would be the perfect excuse, because counterintelligence would never think, think that the HIV clinics were the place that they were using as keynotes in the regime change network. How many other facilities they were caught there, how many others? But in every single one of those, it's dual purpose. Because the fundamental reason you do this out of USAID is to dupe people. And this puts our oversight bodies in a difficult spot. Let's just say we're funding transgender dance festivals in some country because turns out they really dislike a government that we consider authoritarian. And so you could actually see a sort of, I don't know the situation in Venezuela, but let's just say that the Trump administration, who's been at war with Maduro and wants to pursue a policy of turning over that government, and it just so happens that that government is persecuting the transgender population.
And the transgender population, if they could just be built up more, you know, would be able to convert, you know, convert more hearts and minds to vote against Maduro. Well, you could see a sort of, if I may say again, I'm not saying this should be done. I'm just saying you could see a sort of MAGA foreign policy explanation for funding transgender dance festivals in Venezuela, if that's what the baseline assessment reveals. The problem is American people are never going to be allowed to know about it, because imagine the Senate Oversight Committee, why are we funding these transgender dance festivals in Venezuela? Oh, actually, because we're running a lie there, by the way. Everyone in Venezuela can watch this live hearing. The whole thing is actually a carefully constructed lie because we're cynically exploiting the transgender people to serve as battering rams against the head of state we want to overthrow. But we have not declared that publicly. I mean, we're back to plausible deniability."
This is traditionally the left wing knock on USAID. There’s a lot to it, but it’s not the line the Trump Administration or Fox News is selling to the people. Benz and Musk want to get rid of USAID not because it’s wasteful, but because it’s actually an effective imperial tool at spreading American influence and secular values and protecting American interests. And if you hate America, naturally you would destroy USAID first chance you get.
>In 2014, USAID was busted running a covert operation where, according to their own people who were involved in the operation, they set up an HIV prevention program in foreign countries because it would be the perfect excuse, because counterintelligence would never think, think that the HIV clinics were the place that they were using as keynotes in the regime change network.
Very much don't think this is true.
Counter Intelligence absolutely would consider those likely nodes for antagonistic covert operations. Would probably be at the very top of the list of "things going on in our country that are likely to be fronts for foreign covert ops". Cuba has frequently publicly said as much!
Counter Intelligence is famously, and rightly given their job, absolutely paranoid about such things and Cuba in particular would have every reason to be so... given that they also are very frequently accused of utilising *their* well known export of "Cuban medical personnel" all over the 3rd world in such a manner themselves (as part of intelligence operations).
If you're Intelligence is accused of "doing it" then your counter intelligence will absolutely assume that the enemy intelligence service is also "doing it" .... whatever it is.
Possibly a conflation, deliberate or accidental, with the CIA polio vaccine campaign around that same time? https://www.csis.org/blogs/smart-global-health/fake-cia-vaccine-campaign-when-end-doesnt-justify-means
THE TRANSGENDER DANCE FESTIVALS IN VENEZUELA ARE FAKE! I CAN'T STRESS ENOUGH, THESE PEOPLE ARE JUST MAKING THINGS UP.
As far as I can tell, the seed that this myth grew out of is that the US Embassy in Colombia did a small grants program to support the arts in that country, and one of the things it funded was a transgender opera.
But a random US embassy is not the same as USAID, an arts grant is not charity, an opera is not a dance festival, and Colombia is not Venezuela. I think they transferred the story to Venezuela to make it more plausible that this was about "destabilizing a US enemy", because, I cannot stress this enough, THEY ARE JUST MAKING EVERYTHING THEY SAY UP.
I'm trying to fact-check the rest of this, but I can't even begin. The guy says "Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo", so I thought this would be a good start. I tried! It doesn't have one! There are zero uses of that term anywhere on Wikipedia! When I Google it, the only results are transcripts of this interview! Possibly you spelled it wrong or something, but I think you should also strongly consider the possibility that a random guy on the Joe Rogan Experience, known for hosting UFO believers and an episode on "The Truth About Psychic Powers", is a deranged conspiracy theorist!
>"Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo"
Feels like the start of some Borges-flavored scifi. Has potential.
Anyways, that does seem to be a weird artifact of the transcript because he spells it right after, it's supposed to be ZunZeneo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo), which is... much less flattering to USAID than PEPFAR. The rest of this comment is quotes, damn Substack's lack of formatting:
>The word "zunzuneo" is Cuban slang for a hummingbird's call.[10] The origins of ZunZuneo result from USAID allocating millions of dollars concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan.[1][11] Contractors funded by USAID "set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit[ed] unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the U.S. government," according to an Associated Press (AP) report which traced the origin of the service... According to Creative Associates, the idea arose after they were provided 500,000 stolen Cuban cellphone numbers from a "source" who said they were available on the black market....
>ZunZuneo was founded in 2010, shortly after the arrest of USAID contractor Alan Gross in Cuba.[17] The network, dubbed the "Cuban Twitter," reached about 60,000 subscribers.[1][18] The initiative also appears to have had a surveillance dimension, allowing "a vast database about Cuban ZunZuneo subscribers, including gender, age, 'receptiveness' and 'political tendencies'" to be built, with the AP noting that such data could be used in the future for "political purposes."
Sorry, I did spell it wrong. As ProfGerm kindly pointed out it’s Zunzuneo.
Mike Benz is a former state department official under the first Trump administration. He has since rebranded as an independent media guy exposing corruption (he claims) in a wide range of (mostly left-leaning) global institutions he calls “the Blob” which seems to me to be roughly the same as what Moldbug means by “the Cathedral.”
I accept your correction, but to be fair to Rogan/Benz I don’t interpret them as making the claim “USAID were funding transgenders in Venezuela,” rather “if you did hypothetically find a line item on USAID expense reports going to transgenders in Venezuela, it’s not because they care about transgender representation in Latin America, it’s to build US capacity to engineer societal change in the region”
While I don’t know anything about various political factions in Cuba or Venezuela and so can’t comment on the accuracy of Benz’s claims, he leads up to a chilling point which is that in the most recent decade the “Blob” has been running the same playbook in Western democracies.
What we’ve seen undeniably has been the rise of “historically marginalised” groups, and under the guise of equity and social justice, giving BIPOC and LGBTQ people more political and institutional power. In Australia we have a large Indigenous/First Nations people lobby which was nonexistent just 15 years ago.
Who benefits? Well, not the actual Indigenous people. They suffer from higher disease burden, lower socioeconomic class, family and sexual violence, mental illness, low life expectancy. This has not significantly changed in 15 years.
However there is a class of Indigenous people (who may have, say, one indigenous grandparent) who leverage this inequality into favourable government treatment - for example easier entry into competitive university programs, representation on company boards, access to free government services, affirmative action in hiring. These people fully exploit the government programs and tend to move institutions more left-wing.
One interesting aspect of the recent 2023 Voice referendum which aimed to give Aboriginal people extra representation in Australian politics (and was soundly rejected at the polls, despite lots of advertising and near-universal favourable media coverage) is that the districts which voted overwhelmingly for it were inner-city white liberals, and the districts which voted against it were the rural areas where Indigenous people are a much greater percentage of population per capita.
So there is something going on here more than the claimed altruistic impulse to improve life for the marginalised. (If that was the case, why not spend the money for the Voice referendum on medical outreach to Indigenous communities to better treat, say, keratitis, rheumatic fever and crusted scabies, which cause a great deal of reversible morbidity?)
It’s analogous to BLM and the “abolish the police” do-gooders when polls of actual crime-ridden Black communities show that what they want is MORE policing.
There’s a political agenda in amplifying this message and giving these people a voice. “Tackling racism” is a fig leaf. (If that were the goal, why do we keep seeing poll after poll showing that most people think racism is worse now that it was in the early 2000s?)
And look, I don’t have the receipts. I can’t prove that the Open Society Foundation, or the WEF, or USAID, or any of the orgs that Benz and Elon love to hate are funding racially divisive community orgs, doing judicial reform to appoint their buddies to powerful court positions, funding hit pieces on politicians they don’t like, etc, in Western democracies to “build capacity” - that is, increase central and global control over every political system in the world. It’s just… strange that every Western democracy seems to be struggling with worsening inflation, crime, rising inequality, rising house prices, out of control immigration, increasing limits on free speech, and politicians on both sides seem powerless to do anything about it.
Maybe my earlier comment was too cryptic, too snarky, or both, in which case I apologize and try again more directly:
Tyler Cowen is definitely a very productive aggregator, but not a serious thinker. My main point of contact with his analyses are his occasional Bloomberg opinion articles, and more than once I found myself scroll up to check the author name after doing an early morning coffee spit take, and yes, sure enough, it’s by him.
In one that personally almost triggered me enough to complain to the editor, he argued – maybe ironically, maybe seriously – that on one hand, Europe should just get with the times and buy ACs (I completely agree!), but on the other, that unlivably hot apartments make for more people hanging out in streets and cafes, which in turn creates a more appealing ambiance to him as a tourist – apparently the primary function of people living in said cities.
Maybe I’ve been burned a bit too much by the lack of AC in most European buildings myself to appreciate the humor, but from this and other articles I’ve come away with the impression that he’s just too detached/“economist brained” to be taken seriously.
I live in Austria. Some people have AC. A lot of us really don’t need AC. I live in a 19th century building in an apartment with 3 m high ceilings that stays comfortably cool for most of the summer. August can get a bit warm, but like good Europeans we generally leave the city in August. An AC would bring zero added value into my life. Restaurants lack AC, but we prefer - like you say - to eat outside anyway. Movie theaters, malls, and modern office buildings in Europe generally do have AC, maybe Tyler is unaware of that point?
What do you mean you leave the city? I think if your house is effectively uninhabitable for a month every year you should probably get AC. I'm from Florida, so the lengths to which some Europeans go to avoid getting AC often seems absurd to me.
Leaving the city in August for a vacation at the beach or in the mountains is an ancient Viennese cultural tradition that would continue even if we had AC (and is also observed by people who have AC), so why get AC for that one month when we just wouldn't be home to use it? You live in Florida - do you have a wood stove or a furnace for central heating?
I suppose if you're already doing that it's fine. I'm mostly just amused that so many Europeans (who don't live in the mountains for part of the year) will insist they don't need AC while also admitting that their homes are inhospitable for 1-2 months every year. I don't have a furnace, but my heat pump AC can be used for heating just as easily for when the temperature drops into the 40s as it does for a month in the winter.
I lived in England for a few years, and during the summer summer our house's only option for cooling was to open the windows and let in all variety of insect life, because the windows didn't have screens. Maybe it's just a matter of preference, but I think the English are missing more than they think.
Wait, are we talking about the same England? My house - towards the South of England, in a relatively warm area by English standards - would be uninhabitable without good /heating/, but deliberately making it colder strikes me as a laughable idea.
I'm not saying you should do it all the time by any means, but having the option is worthwhile. England and the rest of Europe still have heat waves sometimes, and every time it happens thousands of seniors die because you don't have the slightest cooling capacity!
Not every ancient tradition is worth preserving. I personally prefer going on vacation in Winter – why leave my city when there's the most daylight and good weather for outdoor activities instead of in the darkest months of the year?
It's also not nearly available to everybody due to work schedules etc., even in Austria.
It really depends on your specific situation.
I grew up in Europe, and I've lived both in buildings where AC would have been largely useless, and in ones where the working from home, or even just getting restful sleep, was essentially impossible for 2-3 months of every year without one (due to the lack of any cross draft and the outside wall being heated by the summer sun during the afternoon and evening hours).
I'm with you on this, on TC's style in general, and MR's long slide into vague Trump apologism. MR is useful, commendable even (I wonder who finds all these links... presumably not a busy professor, personally). It has given me a lot over the years. But it's also long been rubbing me the wrong way.
I agree with you on all the actual points, but I think Tyler (or at least my possibly-incorrect model of Tyler) is correct in that political rage of the sort that gets you to say opponents should be sent to hell is bad (both corrosive to society and bad for you personally, in that in the case you are wrong - which I don't think includes this case - it makes it harder to see it). It's a net negative in terms of truth seeking or utility maximizing. And I think that directionally it's actually worse to do this about dead children - which are incredibly emotionally moving or enraging - than dry statistical deaths.
There is a counterpoint which is that caring too little - like Musk does here - is also a pretty bad risk. I want to say these are different types of mood, but they do at least somewhat come from the same place, so maybe you can't entirely avoid the second without risking the first. Maybe this is like dry statistical deaths in that unlike almost everything else, people put natural distance so they were towards feeling too little instead of too much? But even if the tradeoff in category errors should correctly be more towards being outraged here, I still think the outrage itself is at best a negative side effect of a positive thing (caring enough) and not something to support as its own goal.
(Otoh, it's probably at least somewhat unavoidable if you're shaped to care enough)
I'm deeply concerned that somehow the entire world has had it's brain fried by...IDK what...Social media? 24/7 News? Something else?
Even knowing about Chinese Robbers and echo chambers and social bubbles, it seems impossible to actually frame anything outside of the influence of whatever media and information sources you're downstream of. IDK Tyler personally, but I know a few of his fellows. Even though they are smart people they seem to have all bought the "government is wasteful" line, and no amount of data will convince them because they are suspicious of the source. How do you find a bug in your epistemology?
I think this is part of the underlying dynamic here.
Libertarians have been prominent in intellectual debates but mostly marginal (no pun intended) or unsuccessful in actual policy implementation in Washington DC for decades — and then suddenly found in Trump 47 and DOGE their ideas about costcutting and the excesses of government bureaucracy at long last put into effect at massive scale — but in the most slapdash and baseless and even cruel way possible. And in a way so flawed that it massively discredits the libertarian cause.
Longstanding and sincere libertarians have been left to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it all. Some (e.g, Megan McCardle) have been clear eyed enough to criticize DOGE forcefully for its irrationality and lies. Others like Tyler have chosen to paper over or hand wave past the problems.
TC wasn't papering over problems with https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/nicholas-bagley-on-doge.html or https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/peter-coy-on-doge.html although he was admittedly mostly quoting other people.
Yes, fair point. I was too quick to criticize.
I've definitely become less of a libertarian as a result of this whole debacle. If this *gestures broadly* is what is meant by libertarianism, no thanks
As an aside, I would love a burrito prepared by an Ethiopian camel farmer with under recognized talent, that sounds delicious
Sounds like cultural appropriation to me, I am so tired of “fusion” cuisine.
This might be a case where fusion food works - injera would pair nicely with classic burrito fillings. And Tej would make an interesting complement to agave wine or pulque.
OK, then, a camelito.
Does it? I’m mostly imagining eating a burrito while in the vicinity of a camel farm and the smell is not pleasant.
You ignored the underrecognized talent part
Eating a great burrito next to a camel farm still sounds unappealing.
People yell that impactful aid is a “hostage puppy” covering a bunch of fraud so we should get rid of USAID, they refuse to recognize they are more arguing never to swim in the ocean because people pee in it.
I am increasingly convinced that the "hostage puppy" people just like killing puppies and don't want to admit it.
It does seem that way.
The question most relevant, and least correctly answered, is, "why did the American people elect a guy who we all knew was the kind of person who'd let a million people die just to own the libs?" Even after all these years, people who hate him still get this completely wrong. And it's a huge mistake not to understand your enemy, if you hope for any success in opposing him.
What you're misunderstanding about Tyler's posts is this context. He does not misunderstand why America elected Trump in 2024. And I think this is why you especially misunderstood his point about "how the rationalist community should be presenting itself."
To try and put it briefly: Conquest's Law + the great awokening of 2020 made every leftish institution in America suddenly seem like they were in a coordinated war to destroy America from the inside. Now obviously, an NGO that's saving the lives of Africans with HIV is not in any conceivable way going to destroy America; but that's a very lefty description. Now maybe all those USAID-funded NGOs--unlike basically 100% of other NGOs the media, higher education, K-12 education, professional associations, museums, HR departments, etc.--were not rapidly taken over by a hateful, anti-American ideology; I'm not even being sarcastic, it's definitely possible.
But maybe some small portion of everyone's outrage and fury and disgust at Trump should be directed towards the people who worked so hard to intellectually and morally destroy America's progressive institutions from within; and towards all the well-meaning members and stewards of those institutions who surrendered them without a fight. If you want charities that save millions of lives, and medical research, etc. to keep being funded--sustainably and in the long-term--then you can't let a totalitarian ideology make a mockery of the fundamental values driving that work.
If the cops shoot you while trying to arrest your drug-dealer roommate, blame the cops for their poor aim. But also blame the roommate for pulling a gun on them. And blame yourself for letting the drug-dealer move into your house.
I suppose it depends on what “America” means to you. From my perspective, as the descendant of white settlers who arrived in the 1700s, and whose ancestors fought in every major war, it is clearly MAGA that is on a mission to destroy the country my ancestors built over the past 250 years. My America’s founding principles are the rule of law, the Constitution, separation of powers, reasonable tolerance of unorthodox ideas, respect for public service, and a belief that trade is a net positive for both parties. MAGA believes in none of this. I also believe that the USA is a Federal Republic where states should have some autonomy and ability to protect themselves from Federal overreach. I used to align with conservatives on that point, but not anymore apparently. I’m not a huge fan of lesbian puppet shows or silly attempts to depict black women as turning the gears of history but I fail to see how they “destroy” America. Having actually lived in socially repressive countries like Russia, Dubai and Turkey, I have to say I actually don’t even mind USAID funding “lefty” DEI nonsense in those places because it’s usually a stick in the eye to the corrupt venal men who run those places.
It’s also obviously true that the “Great Awokening” is mostly a strawman that exists in the fever dreams of the internet and Fox News. I work in finance adjacent to all the real global power centers - and everything important is still run by white and Asian men. “Woke” is mostly code for rich technocrats and hedge fund managers who are outraged they have to follow the same laws as ordinary Americans. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t buy a pardon the way you can cut lines at Disney World?
>everything important is still run by white and Asian men
Some of them do get bitten (e.g. Weinstein), but DEI dictums overwhelmingly get enforced on the levels below (propaganda, affirmative action, etc). Of course, half the country thinks that those are actually good things, but for some reason they love to claim that they are also not happening.
>It’s also obviously true that the “Great Awokening” is mostly a strawman that exists in the fever dreams of the internet and Fox News
Did you miss the historic spike in the murder rate and the best-selling children's book describing whiteness as a deal with the devil?
>I work in finance adjacent to all the real global power centers - and everything important is still run by white and Asian men
Surely you understand why that would be wildly unconvincing and completely irrelevant to the majority of people who voted for Trump?
I think you're overestimating how much swing voters care about any of this. They mostly aren't that ideological, and voted for change because they were mad about banal stuff like inflation.
This plus immigration. And fwiw I would not be surprised to find that a majority of Trump voters would support cutting USAID regardless of how effective it is at helping foreigners
> But maybe some small portion of everyone's outrage and fury and disgust at Trump should be directed towards the people who worked so hard to intellectually and morally destroy America's progressive institutions from within; and towards all the well-meaning members and stewards of those institutions who surrendered them without a fight.
Plenty of people have been doing this including Scott. Check Slow Boring if you want more of it.
I just want to push back on this idea of "poll says people support X" as a piece of meaningful evidence. Polls are going to vary significantly depending on how the questions are structured, like something as banal as whether the question is positively (Do you approve of USAID?) or negatively (Do you disapprove of USAID?) framed. See general approval rates of Congress vs incumbent reelections, or the general broad appeal of fiscal conservatism vs the support for cutting any particular government spending. To get a meaningful result, I think the questions need to be directly on the topic with relevant cost/benefit data attached. Something like "USAID prevents X number of deaths from AIDS each year; this costs the average taxpayer Y dollars each year. Would you pay Y dollars each year to fund USAID?" Otherwise it's just noise.
Ideally this would be paired with actual monetary implications, as revealed preferences are the most descriptive of reality. But this is probably the best we can do without making every aspect of public policy into a direct referendum.
I have some ideas on that - and distributing free AIDS drugs in Africa or free needles in SF might be the right thing to do in the short term but it needs to be understood as an emergency humanitarian measure not a solution.
I grew up in DC, and worked in the "development industry" out of school, but my father was a contractor and later an advisor to the administrator of USAID, and father in law was a USAID political appointee under multiple administrations. So I have some context and experience here.
I don't have to tell you that there are competing goals within USAID. There is a genuine desire to make the world a better place by treating diseases, feeding the hungry, saving people from mistreatment. But there is also a mandate to extend American power in the world. The point is, the organization is a charity glove around a soft power fist, and creating markets for the output of US companies is a big part of the program.
At the most basic level, domestic farmers, drug companies, charities/NGOs, and for-profit contractors produce a thing, sell it to the US government for some price that's above their cost, and deliver it to Africa for free.
This seems great, but it has 2nd order effects. Economies focused on domestic production collapse because nobody can compete with free stuff from the west - the ex-farmers and artisans end up moving into vast slums where disease is rampant. Then we get to work on a whole new set of interventions to solve their problems - a cascade of dysfunction, corruption, and dependency.
And of course players on our side learn how the game works, get good at lobbying, distributing the spoils around various congressional districts, buying influence from universities and the media.
To the extent that I think it's a capital G Grift, I see the same dynamics as the defense industry - they need the machine to keep going. The 3rd world has to remain dependent and dysfunctional so there's no competing power center, we have cheap labor for the cobalt mines, and a place to dispose of surplus corn.
I don't see how any of this makes sense with the actual topic of discussion. Yes, donating free stuff can crash domestic markets and inhibit their development, but overall the third world has become richer at an accelerating pace over the time foreign aid has become more popular. I think the people in this area mostly know about the risk of counterproductive effects you describe and do their best to avoid them, mostly successfully. Aside from that, where is the domestic market for HIV drugs in Africa? Why *shouldn't* distributing HIV drugs be considered a solution when HIV keeps dropping?
Scott Alexander supports the neocolonialist side of USAID. He has concern for starving African children, but he also wants to keep their parents and societies dependent on the West.
If there was a magic button that could remove that dependence, obviously I would press it. Absent a magic button, this is just another faux-profound slogan.
No. There is a profound historical and contemporary reality of intervention in the post-colonial world. From the CFA Franc to funding coups and bribing warlords, there are real — not magical — policies, that exist to maintain Western geopolitical dominance and mitigate African sovereignty. The charity sector is not disconnected from the geopolitical realities here.
For example, the donation of second-hand clothes to Africa is seen by many as a good way to help poor people, while it is also a means of preventing African textile and apparel industries from competing.
The fact that many of the superficially wonderful health and development charities you support are also covers for CIA meddling is not a distraction from their purpose, it is the key fact we must address head-on.
Now, I realize this is a touchy subject; you may justify these policies with your dim view of the cognitive potential of African people, but you don’t want to be explicit because you understandably expect blowback for directly arguing that neocolonialism is good and necessary.
But rejoice! Now that Trump is president again, and the richest man in the world has programmed his AI propaganda machine to talk about “white genocide”, you can openly argue for neocolonialism. You won’t get cancelled.
> the donation of second-hand clothes to Africa is seen by many as a good way to help poor people, while it is also a means of preventing African textile and apparel industries from competing
I dunno man, this sounds reasonable until you think about it the other way. Imagine clothes grew on trees and then suddenly the clothes tree blight arrived and killed all the clothes trees and now we had to make clothes in factories instead. Would we all be like, yay, this will be great for our apparel workers? Or would we be like, oh no, now we have to spend more human labor working in poor conditions in order to have clothes, which are now more expensive as a result?
There's a larger conversation to be had about development economics and industrial policy. I mean, it's being had right now with the US vis a vis China. Basically, while it's short term positive to import fish, it's longterm positive++ to know how to fish. If you already know how to fish, you might not want to fish because you have better opportunities selling information, but if you don't have knowhow in broad sectors of the economy, you won't have a stable and informed middle class.
I don't want to rehash the tariff debates, but in the condition that you don't have a highly stable state and civil society, it's disadvantageous to export raw materials and import finished goods, because the incentives to fight over land and raw materials drown out all other economic activity — and how could you build a business if your people get subsidized food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education from humanitarian charities? And doubly so when materiel and manpower get shipped in from foreign countries to secure the supply chain.
I say this as someone who has awesome respect for Tyler Cowen's intellect and a somewhat tarnished respect for his intellectual honesty: Cowen is completely full of shit here. The plain English meaning of his original post is exactly what Scott says it is. This isn't a question of interpretation or ambiguous wording or nuance. Tyler is just straight up saying that Rubio's claim is credible even if not accurate to the decimal point.
The phrase "I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…" does not, as Tyler claims, show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed. It is a standard "to be sure" clause, an assertion that even though the overall picture allows for some nuance, the general claim is still correct in the main.
I don't know what to think about this. Tyler's original post is awful and his follow-up is shrill. MR has an enormously powerful soapbox. The whole thing is disappointing.
I read your dad’s book. We should all be able to immediately coordinate on helping sick kids wherever they are for however long we are able. To quote Cormac McCarthy, if the child is not the word of God then God never spoke.
I'm confused by how "supporting services" are defined as it relates here:
"But the percent of their money spent on administrative costs , which is probably closer to what most people mean by overhead, was 6.3% (supporting/total on page 22 here). Of that 6.3%, about 4%pp went to salaries and 2%pp to fundraising."
But when I pull their 990/audit for 2024, available here (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_audit/2024-09-GSAFAC-0000356666) I notice a number of potential costs that I or others might be concerned about.
For example, on p.8 of the pdf, there are ~$280 million in salary expenses, ~$310 million in subgrants to implementing partners, ~$100 million in project labor and materials, ~$74 million in travel/training/representation, & ~$40 million in contracting and professional fees. CRS has ~5.2k employees so...we're looking at an average of...~$60k per employee, not counting training or professional fees. That sounds like Western employees. I can't find any clear definition of who's working in the US or not, the closest I found was p.52 which broke it down by "Overseas operations" and "US Operations" but that doesn't actually define who's working or where, just what they're working on (I think).
So how are "support services" or "supporting services" defined? This has to be, like, a legal thing for reporting reasons but my Google-fu is failing and neither document defines it. NICRA is defined but it makes no sense to me.
As to the overall question of how much potential waste or fraud might be in this, here’s my best guess.
First, there’s some stuff that’s probably really dumb, like “Justice, Peacebuilding, and Youth” but that’s like $37 mil out of a $1.25 billi budget so who cares. The majority of the spending is in “Emergency”, $616 mil, which is pretty clearly just buying food for poor people in starving countries like Ethiopia, Haiti, those kinda places.
Except the cost breakdown for Emergency is $178 mil in food and other commodities, or like 28%. The other big expenses are subgrants to other partners ($180 mil), salaries ($100 mil), and project labor and materials ($67 mil). This gets weirder because…I think USAID just gave CRS like $130 mil in corn? Check out p.51 and the $128 million in commodities that were donated under “Food for Peace Emergency Program - Non Cash Assistance”. Food for Peace is American food (1) so this is just…literally $128 million dollars of American corn, right? That…might not be optimal. Like, there’s nothing wrong with American corn but when you can almost certainly buy it from anywhere else cheaper and closed, that might just be a US farmer subsidy. US corn to Haiti, awesome, but Ethiopia is a lot closer to Europe than other spots.
Sorry, I know I promised to give an opinion on how much could be waste but I’m writing this on the fly and…I dunno man. I’m pretty sure the $50 mil of the $178 mil spent on food that’s not $128 mil of American corn is good. Otherwise I feel more confused than when I started.
If somebody can provide clarity here, that would be greatly appreciated.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_for_Peace
I didn't want to wade into this, but I wrote something else in here that would be pretty substantially derailing from this serious and important discussion, and that feels rude.
So, I'll just join the pile-on by saying that that first weasely "fact-check" example was by far the worst deliberate intellectual dishonesty I have ever seen. It's simultaneously intentional and evil, but also very skillfully subtle. I mean, I'm certain that he could have slipped that by me if it was just me reading on my own, and I don't like that. People can try to convince me of much worse things, but it's less of a problem if I have a pretty good chance to catch it.
I appreciate you not pulling your punches and showing you aren't the only one who's serious about referencing Hell here. I think this verse is too harsh to apply to Tyler Cowen, who strikes me much more as misdiagnosing problems rather than being actively malicious, but when Musk described USAID as "evil" and "a ball of worms," I could only think of this Bible verse:
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil [...] Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight [...] who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent. Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel."
-Isaiah 5:20-24.
My wife is a researcher on GiveWell's malaria team, and believe me, she has plenty of criticisms of USAID. But burning the whole thing down without any care or consideration to the lives taken invites God's judgment, and that's not a phrase I use lightly.
It seems like Musk is on his way out of Washington, and it can't come soon enough.
Now that you've seen what qualifies as debunking on the Trump affiliated Right, it would be a good time to do a deep dive post on Russian influence in the 2016 election.
You're spending a lot of time here talking about overhead/administrative costs, whereas Tyler ... doesn't?
I mean, overhead is something you can get a reasonable handle on. There's data there you can argue about. It just isn't what Tyler actually seems to be talking about: "these institutions are pretty wasteful (not closedly tied to measured overhead btw)"
His emphasis is on the idea of "channeling through", repeatedly. Grift of this form doesn't look like "Paying for extravagant parties"; it may look more like "Buying wheat from my friend Jeff's company at twice the market rate", or even just "Buying wheat from my friend Jeff's company at the US market rate instead of the international bulk rate".
If that is what Tyler means he should say it then. And call me old fashioned but if you are going to assert that an institution is wasteful I expect you to provide at least an example, and preferably some aggregated data on the overall effectiveness of the institution in question.
As to footnote 1: there's a hash symbol in the top right margin of each MR comment with the comment's permalink. Following the link takes you to the MR post instead of the directly to the comment itself, but when you scroll down past the post to the comments, the linked comment is presented stand-alone (with its responses).
Sounds to me like it has devolved into a typical "he said, she said U SAID" argument...
>Have you read 800 million books, then made a post about each one consisting of a randomly selected paragraph followed by the words ‘this really makes you think, for those of you paying attention’?”
Oooh
Anyway, thanks Scott, might have changed my mind
Beautifully written. One of the rare occasions where I'm super glad such an eloquent writer is also capable of considerable rage and snark.
Tyler has things he is good at, but his own opinions are not worth a lot. He was not against the Iraq war (Alex was). He is against NYC’s tolls. He thought SF has the right level of housing density. I think Tyler tries too hard to be contrarian including on Trump adjacent topics. And he is widely read but not an expert in anything.
There were some more centrist libertarians like Megan McArdle who endorsed the Iraq War. But TC's opposition to congestion tolls is really bizarre. Every other economist seems to disagree with him on that.
Scott, what is your opinion on the whole Harvard-Trump situation?
Vaguely in favor of Harvard stopping discriminatory admissions, but think it's a low blow to take it out on international students.
During my years working for USAID contractors in Afghanistan, I saw plenty of waste and plenty of failure. One agriculture project I briefly worked with ultimately did enough counterproductive stuff to fill a CSM expose (https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0728/Afghanistan-war-How-USAID-loses-hearts-and-minds). Even some of the better programs saw millions of dollars spent ineffectively -- for example $1m worth of trees in the "Greening of Kabul" when the US ambassador suddenly decided that was a priority, only to watch the saplings wither or feed goats over the next few months because no one actually cared enough to keep them alive.
As that article and example suggest, the problems I saw didn't stem from any proto-wokeness on USAID's part. Indeed, some of the biggest wastage came from conservative, pro-business USAID leaders who'd made their name by e.g. linking farmers in Guatemala and Honduras to WalMart, and thought they could do the same in Afghanistan. They tried to get Dole Foods to invest millions near Mazar-e-Sharif, and when that failed spent millions trying to build a big commercial farm as a proof of concept...only to realize too late that the only aquifer under it was salt water. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/national/2009/06/19/us-pursues-a-new-way-to-rebuild-in-afghanistan/1a38cd39-0f41-4220-aac1-044a47fa348e/)
Afghanistan was especially dysfunctional thanks to the worsening security situation (which made monitoring hard) and the unusual, President-driven urgency of pushing money out the door, even before we take into account the general tendency of big aid programs to develop their blueprints in isolation from local realities (https://odi.org/en/publications/ten-traps-to-avoid-aid-programming-context-afghanistan/).
That made for many situations where programs failed but were still rewarded -- for example, the contractor that could claim their uninspiring program had added a trillion dollars of value to the Afghan economy, thanks to some assumptions USAID had built into the start-of-project deliverables on how much cash value they'd assume for every meter of improved irrigation infrastructure. A project that did large amounts of canal-cleaning (including one-meter-deep drains) could look transformative. The understaffed USAID monitoring teams didn't build up the counterevidence to question that picture, which was doubly hard given that they were mostly confined to bunkers in Kabul.
I also saw big US funding flows absolutely destroy local organizations, when big US contractors that realized their own lack of competence to do the last-mile work all poured their money into capable but desperately overstretched Afghan NGOs. As one of my friends memorably said, "If you hook up a rabbit to a firehose, it'll look like you've taught the rabbit to dance... until the water's turned off."
All of that is part of why I left USAID-land for more effective parts of the humanitarian economy. But the problems haven't stemmed from "NGOs pocketing the money" or promotion of woke ideology avant la lettre or the stuff that Elon rants about. Despite its dysfunctions, USAID was keeping a lot of people alive, and the people who've axed it rather than fixing it are villains.
I think that this comment provides the "much needed clarity" that Scott was looking for, and would be a much better post than the original MR one.
Tellingly, the kind of "waste" that you noticed *does not count* as overhead, but instead are actual taxpayer dollars spent on the proper mission of the NGOs that USAID is regranting.
That means that, as other commenters have pointed out, the whole focus on overhead is *wrong*, what matters is how much good-for-dollars is being made.
On this I think that the gold standard is GiveWell (GW).
GW's evaluation model assumes that you can directly compare the impact of lives saved by how many *healthy* years you can improve (i.e. better to save children who can live 50+ years than a middle-aged adult who might live only 30 years). Additionally, if you can save a children, but he ends up with a disability, GW believes that you can *quantify* this by, say, halving the "healthy" years saved (i.e. the children lives 50 years with a 50% disability, which is equivalent to living 25 years).
Some people criticize these assumptions, under the idea that "all lives are worth the same", and that is "ableist" to say that disabled peoples lives should be counted as "less healthy".
GW also assumes that you can compare the good created from medical charities (which is controversially measured in healthy years of life saved) with the good created from other kinds of charities (i.e. pulling people out of poverty, promoting democracy, and even supporting the arts).
What I believe is that reasonable people can disagree about this stuff, but the *methodology* of GW is just *the best* at evaluating the *real efficiency* of a charity, and critics should just create their own GW which evaluates charities with pretty much the same methodology, but under different assumptions.
I agree with you and Scott that overhead doesn't tell us much about effectiveness, especially in the US government contractor system that gives everyone a bespoke NICRA.
Also unhelpful: Rubio's distinction between what "reaches recipients" and what's spent by anti-poverty organizations. On Scott's first counter-MR post, I left a comment highlighting what I've seen work well in the aid world, and how much of it was achieved through training, networking, and organizing rather than giving stuff away.(https://substack.com/@joelhafvenstein684423/note/c-119587047?)
Reasonable people can definitely disagree on the best way to measure aid effectiveness. GiveWell's approach has tremendous intellectual integrity. But as I've written elsewhere, it's also representative of "major negative trends in the sector as a whole: charities being pushed to spend an ever-higher proportion of their time and resources generating monitoring data, and risk aversion hiding behind the language of cost-efficiency/waste avoidance." (https://substack.com/@joelhafvenstein684423/note/c-92670351?)
It's been mentioned upthread that the ideal amount of fraud and waste (and certainly failure!) isn't zero. Similarly, the ideal amount of confidence you have in your work's effectiveness isn't 100%. Past a certain point, the resources you spend on monitoring and impact analysis will be reducing your capacity to actually do good in the world.
"operas about transgender people" - has it not been made clear these kinds of costs are fake titles for CIA black money?
Sorry, I think this is false.
First of all, see https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/, this wasn't even a USAID program. It was part of a US embassy in Colombia trying to support local art.
Second, the opera was put on! People watched it! There were reviews! You can see pictures of it at https://www.julianamoralescarreno.com/en/portfolio-collections/directora/as-one-de-laura-kaminsky ! Come on!
"although the expert I talked to also volunteered that they have never seen someone who has vast personal experience with and expertise in USAID refer to the program as “US AID” with a space, the way Tyler regularly does"
Tyler is correct on this one, just look at the USAID flag/logo/wordmark - US in blue, AID in red, with a subheader "From the American people", clearly meant to read: "US aid from the American people"
I cringe every time i hear an "expert" pronounce it as U.S.A.I.D., it's like self-thought-censorship of the very idea and concept that the primary purpose is foreign *aid*
The point is that while most would pronounce it US AID, it is almost always written USAID as it is on the logo. I too have never seen anyone write it as US AID except Tyler.
When I was young, I was advised "never beg, you're old enough to steal..."
If you disagree plainly, then folks are free to agree with you, instead of him.
Too many assume there's more to civil conduct than just finding ways to work together. That's all it is. Nothing by men is written in stone.
Besides. There's a vast difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum .
Funny that in a threat on the overly-obscurantist Tyler Cowen, the most obscurantist writing comes from you. How does your comment apply to the post?
Let's see if fourth grade level is easier for you:
"A silly person wrote this post.
You are not silly so you disagree.
When you disagree, just say so.
Don’t be so nice to silly people.
Anyway, it’s just words."
Writing clearly isn't a sign of stupidity. Writing opaquely and being an asshole might be more reliable signs.
Well you've expressed you opinion, and I have expressed mine.
You have done so with rather less good will and humor than one might hope, but there it is.
We are done now.
Unless you burn with the yearning for the last word, in which case I'm glad to indulge your weakness.
Scott and Tyler are both wrong. And right. Great they kinda talk! As "aid" is both doing good and feeding leeches. I was one of them. So, about Tyler, Scott, 3. conclusion and 4. my aid-experience:
1. Tyler loves to say "it is context that`s scarce". While putting out lots of posts with zero/near-zero context. Cheers for Scott! - The original Tyler-post I also read as Scott did. OTOH: a) who follows the blog, had a chance to know some context from older posts, but surprise: most human brains do not work like an LLM, neither mine nor Scott's. b) Great, Tyler reacted to Scott. He reads him and invited Scott to his Conversation with Tyler - would love to read transcript!
2. Scott did initially over-react. And Tyler rightly pointed that out. It is fun to read Scott's apologia - hell is just 12 month with Saturdays off - but as ACX discourages 'high-temperature' comments, just apologizing might be better? Musk is not 24/7 guarded by the Secret service - nor was Trump saved by them, but by sheer luck. That's why Putin does not go places. If you can: kill V.V.P.. I would. Musk or Trump - nay.
3. Think straight! If you love aid - fund it! Taxing others to fund stuff you like - not so holy, Robin. And those who vote against being taxed for this, are not criminals. More seriously - PEPFAR being so great , why can those donors with deep pockets not jump in?! At least for this year. Gates. Buffet. Ford foundation. https://time.com/collections/time100-philanthropy-2025/ - Tyler is on the list, though not as a big spender - And if philanthropes spend their private money, all overhead is theirs.
4. Most of my job-life was paid by NPOs - sending me to teach German at schools/colleges in the East (Ukraine, Russia, ...). DAAD, GI, ZfA, VDA were all state-funded, Bosch foundation was company-money (saves taxes, too!). Bosch was by far the best, they paid just a quarter of what DAAD/GI did, got better people, were cost-conscious and took care not to get stuck in a for-ever routine. The others - waste on every step. Pointless to wonder about "overhead", my salary would not count nor the 100k/year I had to spent on silly "projects". We sure had to have our receipts in order. When I talked to other expats in other NPOs (usu. their bizz was "job-qualification", sounds kinda sustainable, right?) - the same. Immense waste, projects no participant would have paid for, because useless. Was the overhead 10% or 90% - not the question to ask. And in all cases - except Bosch - the first commandment was and is: never write bad about the programm. - Obviously, Tyler has much deeper insight into those issues than me or Scott - and can afford more honesty than most "researchers" - most of them very keen to work at NPO/NGO/GOs. I deeply respect Scott's father who went for weeks to Haiti et al. to provide free health-care as an MD. - Haiti is still a mess 20 years later, as Tyler posted today: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/haiti-fact-of-the-day-the-future-comes-to-haiti-first.html
>Think straight! If you love aid - fund it! Taxing others to fund stuff you like - not so holy, Robin.
It seems perverse to apply this logic to the only form of government spending that's so beneficial to the human race that people would willingly pay extra, and reserve spending tax dollars for things that people agree are not so beneficial.
There's no free rider problem in charitable giving, so no justification for taxes.
The free rider problem in charitable giving is that those who see a moral duty to help save lives are disadvantaged over those who don't.
The free rider problem is a specific thing and that's not it.
I would argue that it's economically and morally equivalent. Whether all are benefiting from a service with only a subset contributing to the cost, or none are benefiting from a service with only a subset contributing to the cost, you still have disparate payment for equivalent benefit.
Effective reform requires participants who act in good faith toward a generally shared objective. That objective could be: "Balance the goals of expanding American soft-power while distributing high-impact development aid cost-effectively."
We have not one shred of evidence that Musk/Trump/Rubio are interested at all in making USAID more efficient and effective or have the same objective in mind for the organization. They also clearly aren't concerned about cutting off the flow of aid that has been identified as useful, for all or some of USAID's supposed objectives.
They are reorienting the entire US government as quickly as possible to support Trump's view of the world, and if aid is cut, or organizations become less or more efficient in the short-term, they just don't care. Trump places next to no value on soft power or on the lives of the people who don't support him, so gutting USAID is the best thing to do.
Guilelessly presenting the justifications of a man who supports and enacts Trump's actual obvious agenda like Tyler did is either hopelessly naive, willfully obfuscatory, or signaling some Straussian support for cutting international aid delivered by the federal government.
If it's the latter, he should say clearly: "I don't think the US government should be in the business of international aid, and even if there are soft-power concerns, we should just cut checks to people". This would be way clearer and more intellectually honest than pretending Rubio has some good faith point to make about overhead costs.
I give money to Medicins Sans Frontier. I assume a lot goes to admin and medical staff, and the overheads involved in buying medicine, and very little goes directly to patients.
I love Minecraft. That is not a call for Trump's assassination. I can't help it if people are going to interpret that as a call for Trump's assassination despite the fact that I explicitly said it's not. I love Minecraft. Such a fun video game.
The actual issue with USAID has nothing, zero, to do with how efficiently or wastefully the money is spent, but rather with the basic premise that it's good or necessary to take money from the paychecks of the Americans who worked for it and send it to foreigners who didn't. Especially when the American taxpayer seems to be the only taxpayer in the world who is held to this obligation.
Why do you invoke this very unpopular view of legitimate taxation regarding USAID and not any other government departments with higher budgets? If this view is the core issue and popularly held, why do people like Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, and JD Vance expend so much effort on claiming that USAID is bad because it wastes its money on culture war issues instead of just saying that they don't want to fund highly effective health causes?
Are you aware that most other countries spend higher percentages of their budgets on foreign aid, making your last sentence obviously false?
I dunno where you get the idea that it's "unpopular" to not like taxes. I can think of zero people who enjoy having a third of every working hour taken from them and spent on things that don't benefit them. Personally, it infuriates me to see my tax bill every April.
I want to defund those other departments too.
If those other countries are doing so much foreign aid then I guess it's not so bad if the US pulls out.
> I dunno where you get the idea that it's "unpopular" to not like taxes. I can think of zero people who enjoy having a third of every working hour taken from them and spent on things that don't benefit them. Personally, it infuriates me to see my tax bill every April.
Everybody hates taxes, everybody loves medicare and social security and the like. The gap in public understanding on how these issues are connected is known.
> I want to defund those other departments too.
Have you asked the people you know if they want to defund medicare, medicaid, social security, the department of defense, the VA, and SNAP benefits? Given your keen interest in taxation issues, I expect you know that these and similar programs take up the bulk of your tax bill. Do you have any thoughts on why the new administration mostly ignored them and instead focused on USAID spending, something that likely costs you around $5 a year?
> If those other countries are doing so much foreign aid then I guess it's not so bad if the US pulls out.
It's still destructive because the United States is the richest country in the world by such a high degree that minor expenditures on our part still provide vast benefits. Please try to understand matters of proportion when discussing matters of global scale.
> If this view is the core issue and popularly held, why do people like Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, and JD Vance expend so much effort on claiming that USAID is bad because it wastes its money on culture war issues instead of just saying that they don't want to fund highly effective health causes?
Still waiting on an answer to this. Have you tried telling the other commenters here that it doesn't matter how USAID money was spent? A lot of people here seem to think it does and I'm sure they could benefit from your knowledge.
I agree that that is _an_ issue, but calling it _the_ issue is somewhat disingenuous.
Firstly, many people do plainly believe that it is good and moral to help the rest of the world. Both here, and in the polity at large. I think it's safe to say that a majority of people would agree with that statement, as long as the price tag isn't too high and the side effects aren't too bad.
If you're going to take the absolutist stance that foreign aid is never okay, as a matter of principle, that is a perfectly legitimate stance to take. But you're going to need to make that stance explicit rather than just introduce it as an angle nobody is paying attention to, and you should not assume that it is backed by a silent majority just waiting for someone to speak first.
Rubio and Tyler are ironically America first trumpists . They see no value in making the USA good in the world’s eyes . I guess they are scared of having people want to move here 😁
"The government prioritizes the welfare of its own citizens" is one hell of a reason to not want to move somewhere
As a fan of both MR and ACX, I was glad to read post.
If I ever make a blog, I would aspire to write a take-down of Tyler's notions about scientific innovation and the supposed "great stagnation" that we are in. An hobbyhorse that he often discusses immediately after a post about MRNA vaccines and just before one about AI.
Still, he is good and interesting in other areas. I agree with his optimistic stance on AI, for example. It is more frustrating when there is someone you agree with on 90% of things and they're wrong about 10% than if you disagree with them about a lot.
Tyler is a libertarian and not a good one. He hates government reflexively 😆
I've seen several comments suggesting that this interaction was "not worth your effort" or something to this effect. I'd like to register an opposing opinion; that this and the previous post are important, that they matter, and should have been written.
One of the pieces of your writing that influenced the way I perceive the world was UNSONG in the parts which described how the goodness of one person can disproportionately create much more goodness. One of my favorite scenes is the conversation between the Comet King and Thamiel, where the Comet King tells Thamiel that if it were him, instead of Abraham, with God in Sodom, he would not have stopped at 10 righteous men: he "would have told God to save the city for the sake of one righteous man, and God would have done it", because "a single good man is equivalent to a multitude of good men. Because he can convince others, set up incentives, build institutions, drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming <...> because one man can be a great multitude when kabbalistically necessary".
There is the obvious point that simple straightforward things should be argued for and explained when they're not understood — that death really sucks, that the fact that people die of very cheaply preventable causes is sad, that if we have a reasonable opportunity to help we should help, etc., and people might listen, because many of them genuinely don't know about the situation due to the "filter by misery". But it's not just that. I think even you may not fully appreciate the way your values, and your ability to see the otherwise invisible suffering, cascade from your readers into the rest of the world.
I'm very far from the Bay Area and don't have anyone in the rationalist / EA sphere in my life. So I'm the odd one out and I'm trying to tell people about all these basic things, because unlike in your bubble, people don't know. And of course, I sometimes I get the less-utilitarian-than-thou shit or fail some kind of vibe check in a person's ideology. But sometimes, a friend will text me and ask: "What was the name of that charity again?", and that makes it all worth it.
So please continue to speak, and to allow your goodness to guide you. It is not pointless. It is not obsolete. People still don't have a sense of scale for questions like deaths of millions — and you're actually still very effective in making death and killing uncool.
Also, a regular reminder that people who agree are less likely to comment than people who disagree, so the discussion seems often too harsh on the author, despite many readers being in fact happy about the article.
Yeah, MR got this one way wrong.
As a note: PEPFAR isn't "a small number of triumphs." USAID TARRs out even if that's the only single part of it that ever did any good. TC is old enough to remember the AIDS crisis personally, it's super first world convenient to forget about it now.
It's also pretty first world to forget USAID was a prominent vehicle for Rinderpest eradication funding, and was a vehicle for Yaws, Malaria, Guinea Worm, and Polio eradication funding. Hopefully we all agree those are good.
Being that enthusiastic about cutting USAID suggests being short on memory, morals, or something else.
Why can’t USAID survive in a free market?
Because the free market under supplies public goods. There are other reasons, but that’s the most econ 101 answer.
Charity for other nations is not a “public good,” and is least efficiently managed by government.
Eliminating polio from the world so it doesn’t come back to the U.S. sure is.
Beside the point but the worst thing about internet discussions is the "I didn't *technically* say that" of it all.
"If we pass this tax plan, gorillas could eat our babies!"
"Why? Please support that idea."
"Well, the fact is that gorillas could always eat our babies, and so because the second statement is always true, it's true under the conditional."
"...okay, but do you oppose the tax plan?"
"Yeah, cuz of the baby eating."
I think this hits the rationalist community harder than most where people are genuinely trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, and avoid imputing motive. It makes good faith discussion impossible and poisons me against being willing to interface with your ideas at all...
If you think saving lifes is immoral, I would categorise it as "lack empathy"
😆
Scott, you and Tyler are both obviously right (about different things).
You're right that his post was misleading and that he hasn't clarified or edited it. You're also right that overhead != effectiveness, as a very well known EA talking point. You're also right that overhead != pocketing the money, obviously.
Tyler is right that you were (still are, it seems) angry, and that lowers your standards of argumentation. An example of this is that you broadly characterized Trump as making these cuts to enrich his billionaire cronies. I don't know what motivates Trump, but I'm not sure this is it, he is crazy in many ways. And certainly if that was the reason then cuts to USAID aren't the best source of funds (I think he's mostly counting on increasing the deficit, which is a much much larger sum). I also give weight to his judgment that there is waste and potentially systemic problems in NGOs <-> USAID, though it would have been better to provide evidence. That "most aid is wasted" is also a pretty standard EA talking point, though wasted != pocketed, of course. And it is something to ponder that suddenly EAs turn from criticizing lots of aid to defending it (I understand it's because of the debate shifting and so we want to clarify what side we're on, but the facts shouldn't change, and maybe also not their presentation).
Being angry made you be mean to him a tiny bit about vibe camp LLC, and now much more about his book reviews and everything. You can recognize that emotion being so strong that it must come from defending your in-group (I know. I feel it too!). You're above that stuff, don't get tangled in it. It also isn't the best way to advance the cause, I think. I mention this because you asked us to keep you from writing angry posts.
About the arguments in this post, though mostly correct, I would rely less on broad categories of "types of aid", or even "NGO vs. direct" - these are very broad categories with place in each one to be very useful or very note useful. Even if NGO is better than direct on average, I wouldn't switch funding to direct en masse - there's a wide distribution.
Regarding the last point - I don't know as much about how charity funding works, but for infrastructure (or military) government contracting there's a common argument that the most efficient way to do it is for the government to contract out the actual work but have enough of a staff to have the expertise to understand the details of what work gets done/needs to be done and how the costs break down. I'd be surprised if aid works differently.
If true this would imply that usaid should probably employ more (technical, non-ideological) staff for grant analysis (although finding technical people who care about cost effectiveness in usaid and also aren't too ideological to work under a system with clear policy goals is hard - there's only so many givewell people. But probably doable).
In regards to your footnote, eternal damnation is definitely part of Jewish traditional thought (no 100% agreement on it tho, like everything, but it is very mainstream).
The Gemarah, Rambam, the Sefer HaIkkarim and other commentators all believe in it.
IIRC it's only for certain especially severe categories of offense, not including defunding charitable programs.
That’s a much more defensible hell than “you lived a mostly good life but not perfect so no heaven for you. Instead spend all eternity being tortured. “
I asked o3 to summarize Tyler's original post.
============================================================
Summary of Tyler Cowen’s argument and stance
Claim under discussion. Cowen highlights Senator Marco Rubio’s assertion that only 12 cents on each USAID dollar reaches intended recipients while the remaining 88 cents is absorbed by NGOs.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Quick fact-check. Using GPT-4o (“o3”), Cowen confirms that before 2017 “well over half—and usually 75-90 percent—” of USAID disbursements flowed through third-party NGOs, contractors, or multilateral agencies rather than directly to partner-country governments or local actors.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Assessment. Cowen concedes that some third-party spending is productive—he explicitly endorses flagship efforts such as PEPFAR and earlier U.S.-backed vaccine programs—but argues that the overall allocation pattern “seems badly off.” In his view, USAID defenders largely sidestepped these magnitudes during earlier policy debates.
Marginal REVOLUTION
Overall position. While not dismissing the value of targeted health initiatives, Cowen is skeptical of USAID’s broader spending model. He suggests that channeling such a large share of aid through intermediary organizations is at odds with getting resources to people on the ground and warrants more scrutiny and reform.
"Do you agree with Tyler?"
==========================================================
Where I disagree with Tyler’s post
* The 88 % ≠ “overhead.” It finances most program inputs; only a slice is administrative cost.
* Intermediaries add value. Large NGOs often have logistics networks, compliance systems, and surge capacity local groups lack—especially in fragile states.
* Outcomes matter more than disbursement channel. Programs like PEPFAR (which Tyler himself praises) rely heavily on U.S. contractors but still save millions of lives.
Bottom line
* Agree: USAID should publish clearer, project-level cost breakdowns, police indirect-cost rates aggressively, and move faster on its localization targets.
* Disagree: Equating “not direct to locals” with “money wasted” oversimplifies how modern aid operations work.
Read the whole reply here:
https://chatgpt.com/share/683893f1-a630-8006-a6a1-4c339cabdea6
Aid is not development.
Even if we steal man the existence of USAID — why is anyone arguing that Americans, who are trillions in debt, should fund the world.
“I am not an expert on aid. But the development fellows and econ professors I mentioned above are, and they agree with my criticism. I ran this post by someone who’s worked closely with USAID and affiliated programs for a decade and they said they took my side.”
Another way to put it would be — “The beneficiaries of the money flowing into this system would like it to continue to exist, so they may continue benefiting financially.”
USAID is a scam, and obvious CIA outlet, by even the most generous measures.
How is anyone defending it as a publicly-funded entity? If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?
If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?
Scott: I personally know many people who do invaluable work under this agency and they have told me of the apocalyptic damage it has suffered.
You: But have you considered that USAID only exists to be a CIA front according to my favorite X users?
All government agencies know each other and interact to some degree, that's all it is. If you don't like the CIA, argue for its defunding directly and stop obstructing disease eradication.
> If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?
Wow, a fully general counter-argument against literally every public program ever! If you don't understand why governments exist, please review your civics textbooks before speaking further.
>"If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?"
This is such a disingenuous take.
Try to start with one of big rocks and the criticism would be akin to "Why are you attacking this program that has clearer benefits for Americans when money's being wasted on foreigners?"
No I wouldn't, because you would actually be taking action that would lower the overall debt. This isn't an impossible thing, Bill Clinton did it, all you need to do is raise taxes without starting two wars in two years. I also wouldn't complain about spending money on foreign aid because I like it when we do that. Jessica Riedel has written extensively on how to lower the deficit for years and I think her ideas are worth talking about. She also thinks slashing USAID like this is pointless psychopathy because, as noted, it saves millions of lives for 0.3% of federal spending and cannot possibly solve the debt problem.
Anyways, are you planning to cut big things, raise taxes, or both? I'm all ears.
I'm not talking about you per se.
Politically, cuts have to start with programs with the smallest constituency (within the electorate; foreigners don't count here).
I would cut basically everything FDR & LBJ implemented.
Ok, cutting medicare, medicaid, and social security would make a big impact on the federal budget. It would also make almost the entire country hate you for taking out the most popular social welfare programs ever created. What's your plan to win the public over on that? Do you think cutting USAID will make the country like cutting things in general or something?
Ok, my mistake for trying to engage you in good faith when you've been all over the comment sections with your bullshit.
Yep
“ If you care about the debt, why are you complaining about 0.3% of federal spending instead of attacking programs that take far more of the budget?”
1% is the figure. 1% of revenue (and 0.7% of spending, but that’s not the value that matters).
You’re essentially saying: “we’re broke, so what’s the point in not buying luxuries for other people.”
USAID as CIA front — why don’t you simply research it?
“Wow, a fully general counter-argument against literally every public program ever! If you don't understand why governments exist, please review your civics textbooks before speaking further.”
How is USAID providing a public good or protection for Americans who are dying by the hundreds of thousands per year through deaths of despair, being invaded actively by multiple nations/peoples, etc.
How is the USAID protecting Americans or providing them a public good (like functional roads, clean water, etc.)?
Maybe you should review the civics textbook you so covet.
> You’re essentially saying: “we’re broke, so what’s the point in not buying luxuries for other people.”
I'm saying, as are most actual economists who care about the national debt, that removing foreign aid spending alone will not have a noticable effect on the debt. It will, however, kill tens of millions. You do not present plans to reduce federal spending or increase federal revenue, therefore it is clear you don't actually care about the debt.
> USAID as CIA front — why don’t you simply research it?
"The CIA has previously planted spies in USAID programs" does not mean that effective aid is not a significant part of USAID activities worth preserving. If you care so deeply about stopping CIA activities, you would ask your government to disband the CIA first. You show no signs of doing this, therefore you don't actually care about the CIA.
> How is USAID providing a public good or protection for Americans
Your prosperity as an American rests on the place of the United States at the center of a global network of trade, built over decades for your benefit. USAID gets favor from other nations, leading to the favorable trade agreements that grow your pension fund. Please stop breaking it.
> who are dying by the hundreds of thousands per year through deaths of despair
I would take your professed care for your countrymen more seriously if you didn't support the "Defund All Welfare Programs" party.
> being invaded actively by multiple nations/peoples
Immigration isn't an invasion, it's just that people with actually hard lives have a greater appreciation of the inheritance you squander than you could ever grasp. You want to fight an invasion, go help Ukraine. A dose of true hardship might improve your character.
> Maybe you should review the civics textbook you so covet.
You're the one who keeps admitting they don't know why their government works the way it does.
"If the work they do is so important, why don’t people fund it privately?" -- there are a lot of collective action problems like this, where the benefits to any given individual (or, sometimes, to individuals with wealth above a relevant threshold) are minuscule enough that the problem is unlikely to be funded adequately to solve it through private trade or individual voluntary action. It's one of the main reason governments exist.
Much of modern politics is arguing about which problems we ought to wield government on, and if you want to argue that aid isn't one of them, feel free. But it shouldn't be surprising that some important collective action problems can't be addressed by private funding alone.
Because government support is a force multiplier
It’s an expense multiplier, that’s for sure.
This is not in the text itself, but I read Tyler Cowen's quote on the political violence thing as being more about his fears that someone would target *him* personally. I'm not saying that's credible, nor can I be sure that's what he meant, but I thought he was implying that by calling the claim monstrous, and then saying that Tyler was aligned with it, he was basically accusing Tyler ALSO of belonging in the same circle of hell. Which is actually what I took from Scott's original post, so if that's not what Scott meant then perhaps he should clarify that. Again, I don't think anyone reading Scott's blog is going to be like "Yes, the obvious thing to save USaid is to shoot Tyler Cowen," but I also don't think its a stretch to say that the overall tone of that post was "Tyler Cowen is a complicit bastard," the downstream effects of which are what Tyler's complaining about most.
Scott clarified very clearly in this post that he didn't want anyone killed. Past that, Tyler's asking that nobody ever say that the policies he supports have monstrous consequences, no matter what he says. Nobody has a right to that treatment.
I agree with you. I was mostly just wondering if Tyler meant something different than what Scott interpreted him to mean in his response.
>Certainly it makes him better than the ghouls cheering on its cancellation.
No, not really. Like, if you add another office with the power to potentially cut PEPFAR, which is what everyone agrees is what happened, that alone makes you worse than everyone just posting words online through the potential suffering you create.
And speaking of, THIS IS YOUR MOVEMENT. You created the dark enlightenment. You created rationalism. You and Yudkowsky, the two new kings of eugenics; you should be *cheering*, bragging, that your sons, Yarvin and Thiel, through their sons, Vance and Musk, have killed tens of thousands of Africans, with millions more on the way. You have nothing to fear or cry about; to do so is disingenuous. You were the one who couldn't endorse Hillary when the shit hit the fan. And look where you are. This is your moment. This is your world.
You Hitler. You fucking Hitler.
This is not “his movement” and Scott did not create or was involved in any significant way with the dark enlightenment movement.
Rationalism, The Dark Enlightenment, and Neo-Reactionarism are like the Trinity. They are not the same, yet they are all truly one.
Why do you think rationalism has anything to do with the other 2?
The dark enlightenment and neo reactionarism are the same movement or at least have a 95% overlap in ideology, rationalism is distinct and has very little overlap with them.
They literally have the same goals; the genetically superior whites live forever with everyone else being dead or subservient.
Why do you think that? Nothing Scott or any other rationalist has written would suggest that.
Everything they have would suggest it. Remember when Yudkowsky defined genetic intelligence as the only reason anyone would have to exist?
Poe's law rearing its ugly head.
For me, or Siskind?
For you. Poe's law on stilts. I can't tell if you are genuinely unhinged or taking the piss.
I am literally just stating facts.
You are not being properly medicated.
And you are following a fascist, the thought-leader behind a massive ongoing genocide.
Scott specifically wrote a thirty thousand word essay about how stupid Curtis Yarvin is (my description, not his) back in 2013: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . Frankly, it was so devastating I'm shocked people listen to Yarvin, particularly given I've now had to read some of his tweets. He's absolutely not responsible for Yarvin.
And not one part of that is about his cruelty or racism or fascism. It's all squabbling about meaningless BS about how many God-Kings there should be and if death should be banned or voluntary; because they agree on every *real* issue, specifically whether to murder as many people in Central/Southern Africa as possible.
Scott did endorse Hillary, or at least anyone but Trump, with a specific recommendation to vote for her if you live in a swing state: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
Same for Biden and Harris.
A deeply half-assed, unethusiastic endorsement clearly not meant to actually persuade anyone, and one in which he takes time to warn of the dangerous brown hordes.
An endorsement like that seems much more likely to convince truly undecideds than a million endorsements from major publications. Being willing to be controversial and to be honest about your various concerns makes people trust you and be more open to your arguments. His endorsement there rings much truer precisely for the ambivalence in that piece. Vox or whoever was always going to endorse Hillary, and they weren't going to be even slightly torn about it. Which means their reasoning isn't really worth reading. Scott endorsing Hillary on the other hand, says something about Trump.
What an absolutely horrible thing to say. Scott is a good man who literally *donated a kidney* to a stranger because he was convinced that was the right thing to do. I believe he is genuinely appalled at what Musk has done to USAID. He never wanted any of this.
Criticize Scott all you want, but this kind of hyperbole helps no one.
Scott Siskind is a eugenicist who believes Black people are naturally inferior.
This has got to be a red tribe false flag, right?
I am going to write a top-level reply here, because it is silly to help build a complicated comment tree where the only content is you screaming random accusations, never backing them up by evidence, and then writing some more of the same when someone replies to you.
So far, these are the things you have accused Scott of, in this thread:
* that he created "the dark enlightement"
* that he is a "new king of eugenics"
* that Yarvin and Thiel are his sons, and Vance and Musk his grandsons -- okay, this one was probably means metaphorically, but it still somehow allows you to blame Scott for their actions
* that he "couldn't endorse Hillary"... wait, actually he *did*, but it was a "deeply half-assed, unethusiastic endorsement clearly not meant to actually persuade anyone"
* that he either is Hitler, or is fucking Hitler -- probably also metaphorical
* that Scott and neo-reaction "agree on every *real* issue, specifically whether to murder as many people in Central/Southern Africa as possible"
* that he "believes Black people are naturally inferior"
You make further claims that:
* rationalism, dark enlightenment, and neo-reaction are "all truly one"
* that the goal of rationalism is literally that "the genetically superior whites live forever with everyone else being dead or subservient"
* that "Yudkowsky defined genetic intelligence as the only reason anyone would have to exist"
These do not seem like comments of a sane person who actually knows Scott. For starters, given the number of accusations and the pushback you get, you should provide some *evidence*. Assuming that you are not full of hot air, it is should be possible to provide a specific *quote* about e.g. murdering people in Africa. Don't keep me waiting, please.
Instead, the only evidence we got in this thread so far, was evidence *against* your claims, for example a link where Scott explicitly endorsed Hillary (or just generally anyone other than Trump), which is the opposite of what you said. Then you reacted with moving the goalpost into an unfalsifiable territory of: yes, he wrote that, but he didn't *mean* it, deep down.
Your accusations seems to be not only random, but actually opposite to reality. For example, it was Scott who wrote the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (hint: "anti" means: against, opposed to). Scott regularly promotes effective altruism on his blog, and guess what, a large part of effective altruism is about saving African lives by curing malaria. He posted photos of his children, and clearly neither of them seems like Yarvin or Thiel (unless there was a dramatic progress in anti-aging research that I missed). He posted an endorsement of Hillary, or perhaps merely an anti-endorsement of Trump... well, you already kinda admitted this one. Now that Scott has disclosed his real identity, I think we can safely conclude that he is not Hitler.
Being somewhat familiar with rationalism, I think an important part of it is providing *evidence* for your claims. Which is what I am asking you to do here. If you can't do that at all, then maybe this is not a good place for you to be, and you should try to find a community which is vibes-based rather than evidence-based and which communicates using insults and accusations rather than quotes and reasoning. There should be enough of those on the internet. Or you could, dunno, https://www.readthesequences.com/ and learn something about what this rationality thing is about, as it seems to be a topic you are interested it.
TLDR: My brother in Hashem, you made the sandwich.
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
I don’t think theoretical waste is the correct reason to cancel usaid. The more coherent reason is the principle that it is not under the governments purview to fund charities more generally. I’m in favor of charity, not of the government being the source of charity funding. A minarchist position basically
But don’t we want people to envy America???🇺🇸
There are two independent issues here: one is whether or not USAID and similar government programs are worth preserving, and the other is whether Tyler's critique, and others like it, make their point correctly. Based soley on Scott's reporting here, it seems T is engaging in the rhetorical technique of implying something is true without coming right out and saying it, then denying having made the implication when called out on it: "In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed."
Also the technique of accusing the other person of doing what they just accused you of, without clearly answering the original accusation: "Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing." It would appear that it was Tyler who lumped himself in with Rubio, not Scott.
Guilt by association not germane to the argument: "In a time when innocent Americans are gunned down in the streets for their (ostensible) political views, and political assassination attempts seem to be rising, and there even has been a rationalist murder cult running around"
Moving the goal posts--Tyler points out that Scott does not appear to have interviewed not quoted Trump administration officials regarding the other side of the argument. But Scott's post wasn't about the Trump administration, it was about Tyler himself, and the arguments he uses in his post. It's right there in the original title: "Contra MR".
These are all right out of the disinformation handbook. I will give Tyler the benefit of the doubt and assume he's simply copying the rhetorical techniques that he and everyone else sees used so widely on the internet. That doesn't make it a strong argument, it makes it a weak one based on disingenuous rhetoric.
“into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.”
Just insert your “X” in front of the quote and this applies to us all.
But if we make it purely political you could insert other political rhetoric that goes beyond “normal political lying” and should therefore condemn people to hell. Remembering to always assume the rhetoric stems from evil motives.
Can you make the argument that saving African lives is even a net good?
Die.
"Will you and such as you decide what men shall live, what men shall die! Oh God, to hear the Insect on the leaf, pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
There is a distinction between instrumental values and terminal values. The former are valuable because they are means to some end, like money is valuable because it would allow you to achieve your other goals, while the latter are valuable because that's just how your value system works.
For many people, preserving their own life, at least, is a terminal value, necessary not just because it allows them to pursue their other goals, but also because they have a preference for staying alive for its own sake. Then people who are smart enough to intuitively understand the game-theoretic nature of the question (even if they've never heard of game theory) realize that it's in their best interest to coordinate around living in a world where everyone helps everyone stay alive. They will help others not die and others will help *them* not die. They realize that repeatedly defecting in iterated prisoners dilemma will end up in someone defecting against you, in a moment when it's inconvenient not to have someone help you not die.
(And then there are people like myself who treat lives of others like a terminal value. Like a poem that makes the world better by just existing in it — only a thousand times more so.)
But for some people, this "treat others as you would have them treat you" game-theoretic logic is too galaxy-brained. Why should I spend my hard-earned money to help some strangers, they wonder, when it has no relation at all with my life? They've never met one of these African kids, after all, perhaps that 10$ on a malaria net would be better spent on a cup of coffee.
I think what these people are missing is, just because misery is invisible, doesn't mean the misery of others has no influence over you. Perhaps you dislike those annoying immigrants coming to your beautiful country? They come because their own countries offer less safety and prosperity. You like the fact that your friends mostly don't have HIV? Are you sure that would be the case in a world without PEPFAR, that fighting the epidemic abroad didn't also stop people from bringing it to your countries in bigger quantities? You see, *misery catches*. You may be under the impression that money spent charitably is money retracted from caring about your own needs. But it's actually money spend on building a generally safer world around you, and when a rich country can afford that, isn't it a wise investment?
And I think this is part of a more general life lesson: being all cynical and clever and "I know how the world works" is surprisingly less rewarding in life than just being good.
ACX doesn't seem to have likes on the web interface, so I'll reply just to say that this is a Good Comment. Particularly the last bit.
Feels like there was a time, before Scott became really well known, when you could expect most commenters to show up already with an understanding of this sort of thing. Alas, we've been swamped by barbarians. Or maybe just children. Don't become disillusioned! We're still here Scott!
Yeah they need to come to America and throw balls thru nets 😎
Pocketing is for maga silly rabbit 🐇 😆😡😳
What is missing in all this discussion is that USAID was funding religious organizations, who are doing aid work in the name of their religion but actually using your and my money. The example of CRS is very important. when CRS does aid work in Nigeria, do they say to the recipients, that the money is actually from the US government or do they pass of the aid as something Catholics have been giving.
Is this not another way of evangelizing by using american govt money. If you want to show how generous Catholics are, raise money from your own religious brothers/sisters and spend it. Reading this makes it seem that America was using secular dollars for religious purposes. If the shoe was on the other foot, (say Pakistanis funding Jaish e Mohammed and they were going around giving aid to poor students in America), we would be shouting how it is wrong. I won't be surprised if some Muslim charities have already figured out the con, and were using US money to support "charities" like hamas.
Shame on the US government for supporting these religious NGO's and shame on scott for covering for them. You should be arguing for No funding for religions NGO.
I know it's just a joke but this is the second time Scott has linked this same ridiculous nonsense article:
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/will-musk-and-trump-go-hell-defunding-corporal-works-mercy
Once again: National Catholic Reporter (not the be confused with National Catholic Register which is an ordinary, respectable newspaper -- yes they did in fact purposely name themselves after a real, older catholic newspaper to purposefully confuse people) is to Catholicism as moon landing deniers are to NASA. They notably have no affiliation with the church whatsoever -- the church has actually multiple times asked them to remove the word "catholic" from their name for being innaccurate to the church's teachings, schismatic, and for their "poisonous character", among other things.
Not to mention the relevant claim of the article would be considered *heretical* by most Christian denominations. I would like to kindly request Scott to either remove this reference or at least give the context that this is from a highly disreputable (arguably fraudulent) source.
It's just straight up untrue to be saying your 'fact-checking' a claim when your confirming a tangibly related claim
I only skimmed this a couple of days ago, because blogger beef is inherently uninteresting. But I came back to read Scott's hilarious snark, and then found the impassioned and real argument at the end. I hope the argument succeeds very much, because Cowen should be on our side of this argument, and it would be better if he was.
(My personal best guess at what's happened: Cowen, like much of the media, has realised that saying "Trump is horrific and dumb" in response to every horrific and dumb thing he does is boring. So he's started trying to steelman Trump's policies, to see if he can find anything interesting in there. He's taken that process too far, and in that post ended up in absurd territory. As before, I don't really mind when he gets stuff wrong. But Scott makes an excellent argument for minding a bit in this case.)
From the linked wikipedia article on Gehenna (what Scott is calling Hell):
> The Talmud states that all who enter Gehenna eventually leave it, except for adulterers, those who humiliate others in public, and those who call others by derogatory names.
Uh, I don't think Trump is getting out of there in 12 months
Worked for USAID as a foreign service officer for 8 years and am co-founder/owner of an engineering firm that (previously) strictly worked on USAID projects as a sub to large NGOs to help with construction activities.
A couple points here:
1) That NICRA rate seems extremely low. I would assume that CRS is having overhead/no-project costs being supplemented by outside funders. A better indicator is to look at Chemonics - an "NGO" that receives the vast majority of their funding from USAID - Their rate, based on a USAID audit is: Fringe Benefits: 12.99%/Overhead: 45.89%/General & Administrative (G&A): 4.69% - this even seems low to me based on my experience. It is VERY expensive to set up offices and work overseas, especially when you need specific expertise. For an ex-pat to run a program overseas (typically required for programs over ~$10 m) it costs in the ballpark of $1m/year all things considered.
2) A huge category of expenses are wrapped up in program oversight (Called monitoring, Learning and Evaluation - MEL). Each program has internal monitoring evaluation and external monitoring and evaluation. The insane thing about the "Doge discoveries" is that everything has been out in the open for years, its just that no one ever cared enough about it. USAID employees and sector experts have long called for reform around this and a refocus in how we do business/reporting. USAID and NGO teams have huge amount of internal resources just dedicated to reporting While working in Afghanistan SIGAR - the congressional oversight unit, had significantly more people dedicated to oversee/evaluated my project than I did to run it. USG regulation is also why we cannot go directly to a lot of local firms - the reporting, auditing and accounting requirements are too complex for them to run these programs.
3) This conversation is solely based on humanitarian aid. As your graphic indicates (btw this graphic seems to be completely invented, I work in infrastructure and have never seen this broken out on foreignassistance.gov), $9.9B goes to humanitarian aid. Its typically the other types of programs that are more controversial -environmental mitigation/civil society programs for example. What's missing is the conversation around "soft power". If USAID funds a $100m program that is not efficiently spent, but was agreed upon so that country provides policing troops in Somalia so we don't have to - is that still a waste of money? I'm not arguing one way or another but USAID's main mission is not humanitarian work, it is a tool of statecraft, along with diplomacy and defense (this is ingrained in you as a USAID officer). There's no discussion around this whatsoever instead this seems to evaluated USAID as only a charity funder which is incorrect.
4) Agree that I have no idea what Tyler's 12% goes to people on the ground means. If we build a school for a $100,000 what % of that 100,000 goes to the people on the ground? There needs to be some definition to what is meant at all.
There's a lot more I can go on about but it seems like Scott's argument is only scratching the surface and I'm not quite clear what the hell Tyler is arguing.
Another important point is that the % for NICRA is not enough to understand how it works! Most organizations don't apply their NICRA to their total costs. Many NGOs don't apply their NICRA to food or medicine. Others only apply NICRA to salaries. So the actual indirect cost rate is much lower.
FYI that CRS' NICRA is now lower than what you cite (about 2/3 of the figure you're using). NICRA rates change each fiscal year and it's common for them to go up and down.
On top of several million dying, several million more unwanted children are likely to be born into poverty, given that US Aid was the largest global funder of contraception and family planning.
The obsession with abortion ignores the fact that proper family planning education reduces abortion and miscarriage rates.
I should also add that some of those millions who will die will be the mothers of those being born, given the impact on maternity service funding.
(Again, because of the obsession with abortion, maternity services often come under crossfire)