Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
That’s a strange way to value a life.
On the capitalist side, it’s hard to imagine funding some guy to not work a standard job is more efficient than funding a bunch of people to not be starved or blind or diseased. $50,000 is supposed to save, what, 10 to 15 lives?
Evaluating cultural impact is even weirder. The right side of the scale gets one man’s cultural output. The left, whatever cachet is gained by allocating an extra 0.012% to bed nets, scaled down by how much that reflects on distantly correlated progressive projects. These both feel like laughably small quantities.
Why is it that $50,000 can save 10 to 15 lives? That's such a laughably small amount of money. We abhor slavery in the States (as we should) but there are probably hundreds of millions of people whose temporal circumstances would be immediately and meaningfully improved if they became slaves. Not to advocate for that, I think a poor free life is much better than a slightly less poor enslaved one, but where did things go so wrong?
I have a very successful African friend. He came to America with the explicit goal of getting rich, returning to Africa, and lifting his countrymen out of poverty. He did get rich, he did return to Africa, he started an array of businesses designed to help the people more than to earn money, and corruption sank all of them. Employees, customers, and government officials all stole from his business. At one point he essentially had an entire company stolen and had to steal it back, which is when he gave up on the project entirely and returned to America.
$5000 apiece is a steal to save a human life, and anyone who donates is absolutely making a good decision, but more than saving those lives I want to fix whatever problem made those lives so cheap in the first place. The AMF does great work, but should be, and as far as I know is not, dwarfed by our efforts to fix the underlying system. From what I can tell the issue lies not in physical technology but in social technology--if they could build a more high-trust society most of their problems would evaporate instantly.
They don't do so because culture is nigh-impossible to change. We could help--we could, and have, forced better social technology upon them via colonies, which seems to have produced meaningful and lasting benefits to the affected countries. We have also given up on that due to culture.
Culture created Africa's problems, culture can fix its problems, and culture prevents us from fixing its problems. Organizations like the AMF do great work treating the disease but ultimately do very little to cure it.
"One man's cultural output" is on a power law distribution depending entirely on the man. I happen to believe that the sort of person I have in mind--one who is inclined to put their family above their personal artistic dreams--is 2-3 standard deviations better at art than those who will sacrifice everything for an artistic pursuit. Art benefits from real life experience, and so the most passionate artists (relative to their passion for more grounded things, not relative to a baseline of apathy) may paradoxically be the worst at actually creating good art. This is why I think a cultural patronage movement has a chance to succeed big and create at least one major artist, though on its face "pay someone for a year to write that novel they've always talked about" sounds like a terrible idea.
Maybe focus on fixing African culture, then, instead of US culture? (unless you also suggest opening immigration way up, which would help the people on its own)
My perspective is that all culture is incredibly flawed. Africa might look bad in comparison to America but we're all hives of scum and villainy compared to what we could be, so Africa is less of a low-hanging fruit than it appears to be at first glance. $5,000 is, again, an extremely low price to pay to save a life, and the fact that that need isn't completely and easily met by Americans reflects extremely poorly on us.
Also, I'm not African, and have a much better chance to (directly or indirectly) affect American culture than African.
Immigration is sort of related to what I was saying about colonialism, but with colonialism you don't cause nearly so much brain drain, one of many reasons to prefer it.
Nah... I don't think anybody has an obligation to help people who won't help themselves. There might be an obligation to teach a man to fish, but a positive obligation to give a man a fish just encourages helplessness.
I think we do have a positive obligation to help others, which when taken seriously also leads to considerations like encouraging self-sufficiency. There's no contradiction there. I don't think we should really ever let people die from easily preventable causes. Either we should step in and forcibly change their culture if it's that bad, or we should feed them if it's not that bad (and thus their issues are caused by external factors outside of their control).
It depends what you mean by "help". I know a woman who "helps" her stoner grandson by covering his rent and living costs, while dude does absolutely nothing with his life. I don't think she has any obligation to do that, and I think she's making thing worse, in fact.
Not strictly speaking, but these are forces pulling in opposite directions.
You do you, but I disagree, and again would argue that people have no obligation to help those that won't help themselves, no matter how preventable their causes are.
This has been deemed taboo by the powers that be, and until that taboo is abolished you have no right to wag your finger at people who won't shell out $5K to save the life of someone on the other side of the planet.
Nowadays this is only true on an individual level (talented people born into corrupt societies), or as an immediate result of a natural disaster.
I think compassion and charity naturally lead to "I want this person to have a better life" which naturally leads to "I want this person to be self-sufficient." It is good and ennobling to not have to rely on charity your whole life, so those who provide charity should naturally want that for their beneficiaries. These forces pull in the same direction unless you have been suckered by the prevailing counter-narrative, which is that any expectation or desire for self-sufficiency is uncharitable. That counter-narrative couldn't be more wrong.
I agree that at some point charity becomes harmful, but if you're talking about extremely powerful organizations like the US, there are alternatives besides giving up. Your friend can't ground her grandson, but if she could (say, if he was much younger), she should continue covering his rent and living costs and also confiscate the drugs. We have the power to do that on a national level.
If the man refuses to learn how to fish then at some point maybe it's better to let him starve to death, but not until we've put in a lot more effort than we are currently putting in.
If a nation's culture turns people into lackadaisical troublemakers who deserve to die, then allowing children to be raised in such a culture is if anything worse than allowing them to die--one involves an innocent child's death, the other an innocent child's corruption into a moral mutant.
If the difference is entirely biological, and thus the children are already latent moral mutants, then sure, leave them be, but I don't think it is biological. Africans are people after all, and people are generally capable of self-reflection and change.
Well that's why I'm talking about abolishing that taboo. In the meantime I can certainly wag my finger at those who both uphold the taboo and won't shell out $5k to save a life. There are more than enough of those in America to save every $5k life in Africa.
You can want it for them all you want, but if you keep bailing people out, they'll come to expect it, and start acting accordingly. If you can show me how you successfully pulled a community into self-sufficiency, then you can start telling me how these forces pull in the same direction, at the moment it just flies in the face of observable reality.
There's something to be said for autonomy, even if it leads to bad outcomes, both at the personal and national level, but generally I'm not against what you're putting forward, the issue is that in current circumstances, it's not politically feasible.
From what I understand we actually put quite a lot of effort into a lot of these poor countries.
Hold on there, I reserve the term "deserve to die" for people who I'd personally pull the trigger on. People who will stay stuck in a defect-defect loop to the point of starvation do not meet these criteria, but they are also not my responsibility.
Oh-oh. When you proposed a touch of authoritarianism above to solve the problem, I was not against it, but it's quickly starting to look like your "charity" is an excuse for global totalitarian control.
Your original criticism didn't seem quite so precisely tailored, if this is who it's limited to, fair enough.
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Sure, I was just addressing:
What I meant by that last part is that our culture prevents us from fixing its problems, though I suppose its culture does as well, to a lesser extent.
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