[troad]

The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here.

I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive and an obligation to shareholders on top of those difficult-to-align incentives.

The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc) are generally powerless vis-à-vis those non-profits, and there is a perpetual risk of corruption arising from that effective lack of accountability. The paying customers of a business are relatively much more powerful vis-à-vis that business. If Gmail upsets you, you switch to Fastmail; if your soup kitchen upsets you, you... what? Don't eat?

This stuff is very, very hard, and something I'm sceptical will ever be solved, least of all here on HN.

[qcnguy]

How are non-profits "accountable" to the poor? Are the poor going to threaten to stop giving them donations if they don't shape up? You seem to contradict yourself when you say that indeed if the soup kitchen upsets you then you can't do anything about it. Thus the soup kitchen isn't accountable to the poor who use it.

I think non-profits are accountable to their donors but the problem with charity is that the donors are giving money mostly to be seen to give money. They rarely care much about outcomes. Indeed if the non-profit actually solved the problem they were set up to tackle the donors would have a problem as now they'd need to find a new cause to demonstrate their philanthropic loveliness with.

And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.

[troad]

> How are non-profits "accountable" to the poor?

They're not, in any effective way. Re-read my post. All attempts to make non-profits accountable to someone else - government, donors - are an attempt to work around the fact that the only real stakeholders in a soup kitchen are completely powerless, and wouldn't it be nice if someone powerful could exert accountability? It would! And yet it doesn't seem to work in practice, perhaps because the homeless' interest is in soup, and the donor's interest is in plaques with their names on them, and the two aren't the same thing. It's often donor pressures that reduce non-profit effectiveness.

> And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.

It is obvious to the point of complete absurdity that making poor people richer would alleviate poverty. Meanwhile, while you work on the small, pesky matter of solving poverty, people are hungry right now. Are you proposing we shut down soup kitchens until your plucky effort to solve all poverty succeeds? Because if you're not, we're back to where we started.

Posts are like these are precisely why HN isn't solving poverty. "Wouldn't it be nice if the poor weren't poor? Maybe we should teach them how not to be poor? That's surely never been tried before."

[qcnguy]

I was/am confused by this part then: "The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc)". But as you say, they aren't accountable to the poor or minorities really.

In a world with unlimited time and resources, obviously we'd want to do both soup kitchens and other anti-poverty initiatives, but opportunity costs are real. There's limited resources, time and attention to go around. The people spending money on soup kitchens aren't spending money on other things.

In most societies there's a lot of low hanging fruit for reducing (absolute) poverty. Lots of things we know work well to create wealth and reduce poverty get ignored. For example, maybe if taxes were lower fewer soup kitchens would get funded, but fewer people would find themselves needing them to begin with - a win. We know that small state libertarianism creates wealth, so initiatives to address poverty often end up creating the issues they're trying to solve.

Given that, if you have three people and limited time/money, is it better to run a soup kitchen or lobby against poverty-creating government policies? You can't necessarily do both.

Substitute "run education schemes" for lobbying if you prefer. Same tradeoffs apply.

[troad]

> I was/am confused by this part then: "The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc)". But as you say, they aren't accountable to the poor or minorities really.

That's fair. I wrote the post quickly, wanted to avoid words like 'stakeholder' and ended up inadvertently overloading the word 'accountable'. What I meant to say is that a soup kitchen is effectively in a monopoly position vis-à-vis its 'customers', its 'customers' are largely powerless against it, and that creates bad incentives. Trying to engineer clever business structures for the soup kitchen does not remove said incentives.

> (tail)

I am very sympathetic to both libertarianism and soup kitchens, so I'm going to be a somewhat idiosyncratic defender of the latter, but I think the moral hazard argument against charity is a relatively weak one. In reality, people in need of aid divide largely into two groups: (a) people in temporary straits, often through external factors (e.g. fleeing an abusive relationship with nothing but the shirts on their backs), and (b) people with persistent mental health issues. Neither are really groups who would benefit from education on how not to be poor - it would be patronising to the former and wasted on the latter. There is widespread societal consensus that people in situations such as the above probably shouldn't starve to death, which I would posit is a good thing.

[homefree]

In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.

At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.

This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.

[troad]

> In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

Yes, that's why FAANG keeps losing employees to soup kitchens. The fabulous pay.

> This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.

Real issues. I don't think I ever said that non-profits work well; they don't. My problem is with the idea that there's some simple alternative that we could whip up in VS Code, some clever business structure that somehow makes the organisation immune from basic incentives.

Non-profits become bloated and ineffective in exactly the same way as monopolies, and for exactly the same reason - their 'customers' are powerless against them. This is a fundamental issue of power relations, not something someone designed to work this way because they thought starting a soup kitchen is a great get-rich-quick scheme (in the Bay Area, no less. No other way to get rich quick there!).

There's an incredible amount of naïveté in tech criticism of non-profits, and people who end up hurt by that are people in need.

[philipallstar]

> What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here.

In the UK, poor people can afford food that's sold at a profit. They're given free money.