[eutectic]

Why only consider within-country inequality (and, yes, I realize that the answer is 'because it's partly a publicity stunt, and humans are biased and parochial')?

The average American is incomparable wealthy compared to the average African, and you can on average save a life for only a few $thousand to one of Givewell's top recommended charities.

[Strilanc]

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [1] strikes again.

1: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

[hactually]

That was a fantastic read, thank you for sharing.

It's incredible how humans do this.

Doing something for some people and is better than the status quo but instead we lambast them for not doing even more.

[emmelaich]

Excellent read, thanks. Worth reading through the comments on that article too.

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855

[Zhyl]

Is it mandated that every top level comment on HN has to be some kind of cynical, nit-picky whining? Lighten up. This is incredible.

[jessaustin]

Is it mandated..?

Actually, it's an emergent phenomenon!

[adwf]

Because people have a natural tendency to give when they have plenty.

A poor person can spare little, a comfortably off person can spare more. If you really want to increase the charitable givings of a population, decreasing wealth disparity and making more people feel comfortable about their finances (ie. redistributing wealth), is a pragmatic way to do it.

The more I have, the more I give. The more the general population has, the more they will give.

Everyone ultimately has to focus on themselves in hard times. Want to increase charitable givings? Make it easy to be charitable.

[fjsolwmv]

That has nothing to do with a choice to give money to cah customers vs the global poorest.

[topmonk]

The poorest countries all have something in common, which is overpopulation. It seems as if the poorest have enough offspring so that they are always on the edge of starvation. I wonder if by giving them additional money, so they can have more kids, and even cause a greater strain on the local environment, have we actually done a good thing?

If there is an overpopulation of deer, we don't put big buckets of feed in the forest to support them. But for the human animal, that is exactly what we do.

I know this is a taboo subject, but I think that we may be creating more misery by giving charity, then by doing nothing.

[whack]

Your comment actually got me thinking... By what metric have you decided that a country is overpopulated?

Using the absolute population size? If so, is America far more "overpopulated" compared to every other developed nation? If China were to split up into 20 sovereign nations, would it suddenly stop being overpopulated?

Or perhaps you're using population density? If so, Taiwan, South-Korea and Netherlands must be absolute cesspools to live in, since they all have population densities higher than India's.

Or more likely, you think that a country is overpopulated because it has a lot of poor people? If so, that sounds like a mighty fine circular reasoning. "Why is XYZ so poor? Because they are overpopulated." "What makes you say they are overpopulated? Because they are so poor."

[topmonk]

Alright, maybe you're right about that.

But, what about the rest of it? Do you agree that people breed themselves to the natural edge of starvation? Would it be better to give them the means to have even more kids, perpetuating the cycle, or let them be?

[whack]

It sounds like you're describing a malthusian trap, where providing people with resources would simply lead to higher population and a return to the baseline quality of life? If that were true, we would expect to see poverty and malnutrition remain relatively constant over the past decades. Instead, what we've seen is a dramatic reduction in both poverty and malnutrition, all over the world. At the rate we're going, extreme poverty and malnutrition will both be eradicated within our lifetimes.

Nicholas Kristof actually had a great article on this very topic, which will restore your faith in humanity: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/good-news-...

[strangecasts]

Education and better healthcare are correlated with lower birthrates.

Charity is very much better than doing nothing.

[topmonk]

It can't be that simple...

[FLGMwt]

I have a feeling that it's a smarmy communication for legitimate legal concerns. That doesn't make the relativism any less legitimate but, :shrug:

[notatoad]

yes, why do something good when you could do something else?

they found a good thing to do. The fact that there are other good things they could have done doesn't make this less good.

[jquery]

It's a stunt to prove socialism is great. What it actually demonstrated is that charity works great. Charity is not socialism.

[geofft]

If charity works great, why doesn't government-mandated charity work even better?

There are a lot of things, like civil defense and firefighting and road building, that historically started working more reliably when they became government-run instead of depending on volunteers or private industry. What makes charity different?

[nine_k]

Government-mandated things usually work worse than the fame things done without governmental intervention.

This is why government is best left to handle things that cannot be adequately done without a central command, like keeping the military forces, or collecting taxes. It can also step in where private or public efforts fail, but don't expect it to be as efficient.

[geofft]

I neither want nor expect it to be efficient, just reliable. Those are two vert different goals. By "efficient" I think you mean something like, as high a percentage of every dollar given as possible goes to where it's needed, and as low as possible goes towards overhead or corruption. By "reliable" I mean that everyone in poverty gets the resources needed to get out, whatever the overhead is needed to get people to that point. I find it a preferable outcome to have one million people worrying how they're going to pay for their next meal, and some guy skimming $1M for himself off the top, than ten million people worrying how they're going to pay for their next meal and nobody getting rich off the process.

I think that's the big difference with things like defense at scale. You don't need war to be cheap, or to optimize dead enemies per dollar; you just need a guarantee that if someone attacks you anywhere and in any manner, there will always be some sort of armed force to defend you. Central command is nice but not necessary. Same with roads; central command is certainly unnecessary, but having reliable nationwide roads is better for a society than intermittent roads where they're profitable.

Do you believe that govermment-run charity will be less reliable than the status quo; that is, do you believe it will help less people? Why?

(I'm not asking about whether it's moral, just whether it works.)

[nine_k]

Being more expensive for the sake of reliability / guaranteed response is fine by me. But relatively often the efficiency is so low, that, given the required scale, a low-efficiency solution becomes infeasible, prohibitively expensive.

The expense is not always monetary. While US clinics ask exorbitant amounts of money, clinics in certain countries with universal healthcare ask for large amounts of time. You need a surgery? Please wait 4-6 months. (E.g. https://expathealth.org/healthcare-news/global-patient-wait-...)

[geofft]

As a matter of amoral public policy (optimizing for "long-term survival and happiness of the people"), it's entirely possible a scheme that gets everyone surgeries with 4-6 month delays is better than one that gets rich people surgeries with 1 month delays and poor people no surgeries at all.

(Your moral system might also find that better, but morality is hard to argue.)

[jquery]

Because socialism has been proven to fail, over and over and over. Roads are not socialism. Roads have not destroyed societies like Venezuela or Cuba. Socialism is when the government decides private property is illegitimate and it fails every time it’s tried. Some amount of socialism may not kill the host but it’s a thing to be feared and wielded carefully not lauded.

[fjsolwmv]

Banana and cotton plantations are capitalism. The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.

[jquery]

> Banana and cotton plantations are capitalism

and? I never said capitalism didn't require any guardrails. Stop straw-manning other people.

> The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.

Why is Japan wealthy? South Korea? European countries? Is this the social justice theory of economics? There's not much evidence for that theory. It's pretty clear that capitalism (with appropriate guardrails and the rule of law) is wildly more successful than its alternatives. I think you're trying to argue that capitalism is beside the point and it's war and oppression that creates wealth. That's obviously nonsense.

[alphonsegaston]

You’re right - war and oppression are tools used by Capitalists to secure and grow their wealth.

Japan, South Korea, and side swathes of Europe are wealthy because of their positions as client states in the American Capitalist Imperium.

[geofft]

And US military intervention, economic sanctions, etc. in Venezuela and Cuba aren't to blame at all, I guess?

The US has spent trillions of dollars over the years trying to convince everyone that socialism can't work by making sure it doesn't work. It seems absolutely unscientific to ignore that.

In any case, I am not asking about the abolition of private property, just about government-mandated charity at scale. Let's say you get a marginal tax of 100% on salaries over $200K, and on wealth over $10M. That's more private property than most Americans will ever have in their life. Is tbat proven to fail? Where and how?

[dragonwriter]

> Because socialism has been proven to fail, over and over and over.

Except for Leninism and it's descendents, where has socialism of any kind been tried and failed?

[GunlogAlm]

Ah, the old "private charity will solve all our problems" meme.