Has he ever been to these nations? I hate to say this but even if his opposition to give aid to poor nations in the form of money is right, the reason couldn't be further from the truth.

Here, the people don't have power over the government, ever. As long as the tyrant or wanna-be tyrant doesn't mess with the military powers that be, he or she can do whatever they want to.

Throwing unsupervised aid money is meaningless because none of it will never, ever reach the intended target. The folks in charge of administrating such aid will keep it to themselves.

The best way to give foreign aid is in the form of medical aid. And if people are sending donations in the form of clothing, food, medicines. Make sure to send people to supervise the donations. People in charge of charities here tend to have sticky fingers, keeping the good stuff to themselves.

Oh, and do not use charities like Samaritan's Purse. They love to force people to pray evangelical prayers (even if the people receiving the help is not Christian) against their will if they want to get the much needed help.

Why are we giving money to other countries at all? We borrow money, to give it away. It's insane. If we had our own house in order, then sure, medical facilities and supplies, or crop-growing experts, or something tangible in the "learn to fish" way. But right now, we have plenty of poor people in our own country, and plenty of our own debt, and plenty of our own problems to solve. It's insane. Let other countries sink or swim on their own.

If Samaritans Purse wants to make people pray to get aid, who cares? People providing aid can stick whatever conditions on it they want. Don't like it? Start an atheist charity. (notice there really aren't any of those? Interesting...)

Sixclaws, I think you and Deaton are saying similar things. You start your second paragraph with "Here." Is there a particular place you're referring to?

As regarding M4's atheist charities: While I wouldn't consider the Red Cross strictly atheist, they didn't strike me as particularly religious, either. Neither was the group my eldest worked with in Japan during the Fukishima cleanup.

This is well known. Back in 2005 an African economist said "please stop the aid!¨

Aid flows mostly to corrupt politicians and their cronies. On the giving end, aid flows from politicians, NGOs and charities - all of whom are run by people who benefit from the aid money they handle, in power, prestige or directly in the form of salary.

Who cares that aid screws up the local economies and destroys local livelihoods? It's not about helping people, at least, not the people you think it's supposed to help.

Case in point: The American Red Cross collected $500 million for Haiti, and managed to build exactly six houses with it. Exactly where all that money went? Very unclear...

Old RPM,

While not tied to any specific church the Red Cross was started by devout Christians. Similarly the Red Crescent is a clear invocation of Islam. There is no Red Star of David because Muslim leaders objected to it when the Geneva Conventions were adopted. The Red Crystal was added in 2006 to cover non-Christian and non-Muslim groups.

I also don't understand what Sixclaws is objecting to. He doesn't appear to contradict the article.

In addition Deaton's work here is not new or novel. But it is good if someone is rigorously documenting things and if someone famous is popularizing the findings. The reality is this applies inside a nation as well as between nations. Money is the most sought after and often least effective way of helping people. But it is easy on both the giver and receiver so I doubt we'll see much change.

What Sixclaws said, x100.

The problem with foreign aid intended to alleviate the suffering and hunger of individuals is that the mechanisms for distributing it are governed by the ways that the governments doing the giving see as the 'proper' and 'ordinary' ways of delivering and distributing aid. In practice, they will search for whatever passes for a government in the place they want to help, and then deploy the same resources they have used before - the UN and the 'usual suspect' NGOs - to distribute the aid.

This always fails, because if the 'governments' of Zimbabwe or Somalia were even 5% competent, its people wouldn't be starving in the first place. As another has famously shown, no functioning democracy has ever had a famine - when people are starving, it's never an issue of a shortage of food - they are starving because of the gross incompetence and/or corruption of their governments, and sometimes (lamentably) because food and famine are being used to resolve internal political or tribal differences.

Despite the blinding obviousness of this, aid-giving countries continue to deal with the feckless incompetents who created the problem in the first place. And the network of NGOs and transnational organizations that have made careers out of 'administering' aid work in much the same way. Their motivations are good, but they have no way to prevent the clowns and thieves they are dealing with from wasting, losing or stealing the aid that is being supplied. You'll note that the government officials and soldiers in the places that aid is typically sent to are always well-fed.

You could solve these problems quickly, and spend far less for a much-better result, by finding better ways to distribute aid, especially food aid and medical aid. Just find ways to get it directly into the hands of the hungry and sick people. But distributing aid has now become an entrenched process - far too many people are making a living from the process, and far too many people have found ways to use the process for their own purposes, for it to be changed.

A wiser man than I has suggested that, instead of sending ever-more food aid to these poor, benighted places, we would do better to send them 50% food and 50% guns, by dollar value - thus allowing the people to throw out the tyrants, despots and clowns who have reduced them to starvation in the first place. A bit extreme, perhaps, but the thinking is sound.

My personal preference, which I have been describing for more than a decade now, is the C54 plan - we wet-lease 100 C54 transport planes from the vast armada of them parked in the Arizona desert. Take off the doors and fill them with sacks of high-protein meal. Then fly a box pattern at 250' AGL over whichever-nation is starving today, and start kicking out sacks every time you see people. More people = more sacks.

No convoys, no shipping, no permits, no rations, no inspections, no licenses, no trucks, no plans, no schedules, no studies - from the warehouse full of food to the hands of hungry person. It's the 101 middlemen in the current system that screw it all up.

llater,

llamas

Some years ago Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda asked Bono "What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?"

Seems foreign aid is similar to social welfare programs. It's fine to help you get through tough times, but if it becomes dependency what has been accomplished?

@Momof4

The problem large charity organizations is that they love to take advantage of people in need. Samaritan's Purse held a free HIV testing rally at the campus and I heard some complaints. Turns out that they wouldn't give the people the blood results unless they gave a prayer all the while keeping a doom and gloom act. So imagine these college kids having having their first HIV test and these condescending scumbags using emotional blackmail. And all this happened at a public university. Never saw them again.

@Old RPM Daddy

The problem with Deaton is that he actually believes these governments care. Anyone who cares either finds him(her)self out of a job or in pieces inside a plastic bag near the sugar cane plantations.

And "here" is the most corrupt and violent nation in The Americas. The only reason we are in better economical shape than Haiti is because hurricanes rarely reach here.

The nature of the state - Cafe Hayek
=== ===
[edited]  There is a notion that the state is a legitimate agency deserving respect; that despite its flaws, it generally promotes or tries to promote the welfare of its citizens. This is increasingly difficult to understand, much less to accept.

The late Mancur Olson had a far more realistic view: The state is a Stationary Bandit. Ordinary people might have to tolerate this, but they should understand that dealing with the state is dealing with organized thuggery. Obey the state because it can unleash its guns and prisons on you. But, please don’t pretend that the state’s commands are issued with your best interests in mind.
=== ===

The fundamental problem with politics is that it is driven by incentives, like all other activities. Political parties are organized to collect the spoils of government. They benefit from implementing good policy only to the extent that they can confiscate more of the wealth of the citizens.

Their fight for dominance is not primarily driven by greater prosperity for the average citizen, and so increased prosperity will often suffer from the fight.

The most efficient government would just take the resources (taxes) it could. But, this is a democracy. So, the bandit wastes resources on poorly implemented but well advertized benefits to convince the majority that they are good guys dealing with a difficult world.

Motto: Things are bad now, but without us in government, they would be so much worse.

Foreign aid
-> Provides another source of funds for local graft. It is spent on US goods from favored companies
-> Advertises that our government is caring and good.
-> Supports a world network of luxury manufacturers with complicated kickbacks. Poor countries sell most of the food aid to buy weapons (a luxury) and to buy high value cosumption goods for the elite of the receiving country.

"And "here" is the most corrupt and violent nation in The Americas."
Yeah, that's why I'm moving to Honduras or Brazil or maybe even Mexico soon! What a stupid assertion.

I agree that we shouldn't be handing out foreign aid, at all.

If you don't like what the Red Cross or Samaritan's purse are doing, you don't have to give them money. We don't have any choice about where our tax money goes, and our government can give it out to corrupt warlords and ISIS and groups that have "death to America" pep rallies without consulting us.

Sixclaws: "Oh, and do not use charities like Samaritan's Purse. They love to force people to pray evangelical prayers... against their will..."

They love to force people to pray evangelical prayers? Nonsense. Just how would they go about doing that? Brandish guns? Behead those who refuse? Every evangelical Christian I've ever known would consider a coerced prayer to be worse than no prayer at all.

Over the past few months Samaritan's Purse has given free aid and assistance to tens of thousands of Muslims swarming into Europe. I have a bit of an issue with that - how would Americans feel about some charitable organization from Europe or Australia setting up on our southern border and aiding and assisting illegal immigrants swarming into this country? But it's nonsense to say they're somehow forcing all those Muslims to say an evangelical Christian prayer (do you think they even could if they wanted to?) I'm sure they're not exactly keeping their Christian faith to themselves while they hand out the freebies - why should they when those beliefs are what motivates them to do it? It's stupid to get all offended by that, but since Samaritan's Purse is a Christian organization, and not Muslim, if someone does get offended it's safe to bitch and cry about it.

@AHW

No, it's not. Remember in July that surge of illegal immigrant kids trying to enter the USA? They're from here. These kids would rather face rape, and murder while crossing Guatemala and Mexico to reach the USA than stay at home.

How bad things are for them? The Maras (organized crime originated from the nation of El Salvador) would "recruit" these kids. It was not an option, either you say yes or face torture followed by death.

They also charge the kids a toll fee (roughly $0.50) if they want to go out of the neighborhood. If the kid had no money then they would take him to a "Casa Loca" (abandoned house seized by the Maras) where they torture and murder their victims.

At height of this mess a mother lost 3 of her 4 kids in one day. She spent all of her life savings so that he could flee the country.

Back on topic, the charities that actually do have a positive impact here are the medical brigades. Just don't donate medicines and/or medical equipment because the former will rot inside the warehouses because it is in the best interest of the farmaceutical companies (local and importers) for the sick to not have access to free medicines and the latter will also rot due to lack of maintenance because the chief doctors in charge of the labs who use said donated equipment also own a private practice that competes with it.

As long as the tyrant or wanna-be tyrant doesn't mess with the military powers that be, he or she can do whatever they want to.

Including...how shall we say? liberating aid supplies and doling them out to his followers first?

Or maybe they receive more aid BECAUSE their economies suck

Either way it does seem like most aid gets misused.

Sixclaws, where is "here?" Nobody knows what country you're talking about. To most of us, our "here" is the US, which is probably part of the reason what you're saying doesn't make sense. Nobody *here* is a mind reader. There are several countries in Central and South America that seem to be in a competition for "most corrupt and violent."

NicoleK,

Even here in the US it has been shown accepting outside aid damages the local economy. States that increase the amount of pork from DC then have underperforming economies after the increase. States that reduce and reject DC pork usually then see an increase in economic growth. Large outside spending is inherently problematic and typically destabilizing.

@AHW

You almost guessed. It's Honduras. I used to say Central America but too many people were saying "oh, Houston!"

There are several countries in Central and South America that seem to be in a competition for "most corrupt and violent."

I was gonna say Maryland.

Flood any system with easy money and you'll get corruption, a financial bubble, and a reduction in people taking the steps necessary to get the hard money.

Witness the housing bubble. We gave people housing loans with no down payment or credit worthiness required and wondered why they walked away when the payments were too much.

And we're about to do the same with student loans.

It even applies to local governments. I would love our school system to give up all federal funds and all the strings that come with those funds. I strongly suspect you would have more money for actual education once you eliminate all those administrative jobs the federal money requires. Instead the quality of education keeps going down and the costs go up.

Read Jonathan Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman-- it's offered to Econ students in college now.
Perkins describes how foreign aid really works: Agents form country x (like the US) talk with a foreign country about infrastructure improvements, with the idea that those improvements will allow companies from country x to rape the other country's resources. The aid money never leaves X; it goes to the companies (like Bechtel or Halliburton) that build those improvements. The money never leaves X, but the local people of the object country get stuck with the bill.
Economic Hitmen are the 'boots on the ground' for NGOs like World Bank and IMF.
They are universally reviled; they are the main reason the US is so hated.
When the EHMs fail to clinch a deal, the CIA sends in their 'Jackals' to eliminate local obstacles.
If the jackals also fail, we start bombing.