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by pewpewlasergun
5493 days ago
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I feel like this article is an example of how a lot of charity and social businesses are half-baked at best. First is the idea, mostly held by people at places like Dartmouth, that because these problems exist it must mean that nobody is trying to solve them. In reality, plenty of people are trying to solve them, its just difficult. This leads people to start their own charities that end up competing with each other for donations and thus it is difficult to develop the economies of scale that makes this stuff efficient. The article mostly talks about the lack of market research. Its not difficult to ask someone 'What do you need' or 'Why don't you have running water' or 'Do you need your house to double as a workshop' and this would have helped guide the designs. A simple walk through and critical thinking would have shown designers that many people lived in apartments, and perhaps a 3000 dollar apartment building would get more use. The article brings up putting local laborers out of business. I'm not sure I buy this argument against charity. The authors had spent previous paragraphs explaining the need for customization. The builders would not automatically be out of work if people bought prefab houses. I guess in conclusion I think a lot of people who go into charity have the 'saving the world' attitude that makes them arrogant. This leads to people trying the same thing over and over again, and while competition is great in a market economy, when non-profits are competing for donations it leads to the non-profits viewing the donators as their customers and the most important people to please rather than the people they claim to help. |
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Market incentives aren't really there to reward charities for being really effective; most charities raise money by telling a good story. Few people dig deeper because digging deeper is hard.
As far as I know, http://givewell.org/ is the best thing out there when it comes to evaluating charities. Also, I highly recommend reading Poor Economics, a book that just came out that describes some more solid research using randomized trials.