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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Paywalled, but the taster paragraph gives a strong hint:

> Near the end of 2006 Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, announced a plan to give the state's “neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world of work and dignity.” He signed a $1.16-billion contract with a consortium of companies, including IBM, that would automate and privatize eligibility processes for Indiana's welfare programs.

- Means testing frequently makes things worse, regardless of "algorithm"

- If you want to relieve poverty, don't give huge amounts of money to multinational mediocre consulting firms

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The same goes for foreign aid. There is definitely immediate help warranted in the case natural disasters, and the outbreaks of war, and some longer-term help when displaced people are unable to return to their homes. However, a lot of foreign aid ends up being cases where taxpayers fund questionable projects spearheaded by politicians and run by multinationals, consultants, and contractors with dismal results. The main cause I see is that the local population being helped often has poor or skewed representation as a stakeholder in the decision-making process such that the outcome becomes unhelpful or doomed.

They say 90-95% of the aid contribution generally ends everywhere but the actual people in need. Most go to management of those aid orgs. Somebody please explain to me why the heck most of them need to have huge offices/HQ in Geneva, one of the most expensive places to live in whole world, having huge apartments/houses for free etc. If you want to help like that, first thing I would expect is to be frugal. Rest goes to bribes, corrupt local politicians/gangsters and so on.

I only contribute to Amnesty International, but that's my personal choice (and they are in Geneva too...)

Yea, like over thirty billion a year to Israel no strings attached!

A lot of that comes back to the US as arms deals. The rest comes back to the US as "political lobbying."

I never got this point. Are you not then giving them arms for free? Are you not using the output of your country and redirecting it to another?

USAID is also used as a foreign policy tool to pressure poor countries to adopt pro US stances. Happened to us in ZA but I believe we refused to comply with DJT’s new requirements and now no longer benefit from USAID

I keep thinking eventually we'll run out of ancillary people to give gobs of money to and finally try giving it to the obvious...

We'll never run out of ancillary people who want to receive gobs of money.

The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim [to public welfare], will not always have the greatest success [to access it].

I think this is optimistic even. At some point one evolves into a society where what determines wealth is one's aptitude at obtaining social benefit. On the high end, say, a CEO of a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Airbus (or more disgustingly American Shipbuilding, which billed for ships it never built) and on the far end, say a veteran suffering from paranoia and PTSD that refuses to obtain government help for, understandable reasons.

I question that this was "designed to fight poverty". It looks much more like it was designed to give money to powerful corporations with the claim that it will fight poverty tacked on to make it politically palatable.

I'm reminded of https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/29/18027032/foxconn-wiscons... : a particularly egregious example of corporate subsidy.

Means-testing has been around since the 70s or so, and it basically produces crap incentives.

What works somewhat better is to condition cash payments on some simple and verifiable prosocial behavior, such as keeping your kids in school with passing grade.

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