Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: “aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses” ?
Now I must say that this is a very long-standing debate. One way this debate has taken place is between Jeff Sachs and William Easterly. (Easterly basically takes the same position as you in this post.) Sachs and Easterly have been writing books on this for years. You provide a link to one general economic history book, and a link to an RCT evaluation of GiveDirectly. This is a good start, but I don’t think it brings any new insight, let alone warrant a 90% confidence in your beliefs. The rise of RCT in developement economics came out of the observation that the Sachs-Easterly debate was targeting unanswerable grand questions instead of limited and specific ones. There is now an extensive literature trying to answer the exact question “Can aid interventions create utils? How much?”. GiveWell try to answer the same question. I don’t think providing some standard arguments from the Easterly camp is advancing the discussion much.
Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: “aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses” ?
The first half of your “summary” is a utilitarian framing, and the second half is a recommendation of investment in the West. Neither are anywhere in the post. So no, this is not a fair summary.
My two-sentence summary would be:
Effective methods rely on a tight feedback loop between action and results, which is best provided by a market. Wealth is a function of productive capacity, which requires investment, which requires consumption to be foregone, so the route to a richer tomorrow is through consuming less, not more, today.
You’ll note that all these concepts are mentioned in the post, rather than surreptitiously snuck in from outside.
Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: “aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses” ?
Now I must say that this is a very long-standing debate. One way this debate has taken place is between Jeff Sachs and William Easterly. (Easterly basically takes the same position as you in this post.) Sachs and Easterly have been writing books on this for years. You provide a link to one general economic history book, and a link to an RCT evaluation of GiveDirectly. This is a good start, but I don’t think it brings any new insight, let alone warrant a 90% confidence in your beliefs. The rise of RCT in developement economics came out of the observation that the Sachs-Easterly debate was targeting unanswerable grand questions instead of limited and specific ones. There is now an extensive literature trying to answer the exact question “Can aid interventions create utils? How much?”. GiveWell try to answer the same question. I don’t think providing some standard arguments from the Easterly camp is advancing the discussion much.
edit: added links
The first half of your “summary” is a utilitarian framing, and the second half is a recommendation of investment in the West. Neither are anywhere in the post. So no, this is not a fair summary.
My two-sentence summary would be:
You’ll note that all these concepts are mentioned in the post, rather than surreptitiously snuck in from outside.