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Comment by drilldrive | Hacker News Reader

Stories like this are why I cannot in good faith donate to large charities. There needs to be more details on the inner workings on these charities, and even if they are in good faith it seems that smaller (and likely religious) organizations do the work more efficiently.

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I've similar reservations but GiveWell [0] do some fine work in this area and I'd encourage you to at least check out their work. I'm not sure I agree with the religious part of your comment, on the basis that religious belief seems orthogonal to altruistic work.

[0] - https://www.givewell.org/

What makes GiveWell better than Red Cross? I apologize if this is a "lazy internet" question, but I really don't know how to tell the difference between one charity's marketing and another.

I'm currently reading William MacAskill's 'Doing Good Better' book, and to do a verry rough job of summarizing it boils down to an acts of whether the money donated to a given organization:

- Has the most effect on QALY (quality-adjusted life year) per dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

- Whether the organization can effectively handle money given to it (i.e. it actually can quickly scale use of it - UBI-esque things like GiveDirectly seemingly fall on the higher end of scalability but effectiveness may still be up for debate)

- Givewell (when one donates to them for the discretionary grantmaking option) tries to allocate money for grants over time for what they see as the most effective grant based on their research / current needs of the organizations seeking funding. See https://www.givewell.org/about/FAQ/discretionary-grantmaking for more info. Also intriguing is their 2018 giving spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EM0CCg9tvCCtEoY-QVAi...

This is my personal (and verry rough) take, honestly recommend reading the book - your local library probably has a copy in digital/audiobook formats. The book generally recommends against donating to disaster relief comparing the 2011 Japan earthquake to Haiti, though the point in that advice was largely that disasters in developed countries tend to attract more noise/news coverage than ones in other areas of the world.

If you're really lazy and just want to listen to some music in this vein, try https://lostboyevsky.bandcamp.com/album/existential-risk

Issues like distaster recovery should be handled by governments, not unaccountable private charities. The issue is that the U.S. has systematically destroyed Haiti's infrastructure for nearly a century and overthrown any leader that isn't a puppet regime.

It's because they had a successful slave revolt some hundreds of years ago. It's an interesting story, too long to tell.

Extremely worth researching.

This directly runs counter to the idea I was going to pitch.

Send in the troops and have the Core of Engineers actually build out infrastructure and cities to bring them up to modern code in a maintainable way. Also pull in some locals for education in how that stuff is done in the process and try to do knowledge transfer of "This is how you build civilization that does not get flattened by a hurricane."

Given the political history, I doubt that would go well. Is there a foreign military power with a similar skill set that could do this task?

Why does it need to be military? IIRC, Australia sent police, specialists as part of post Iraq war efforts.

US could send in fact send non military; engineers, etc, but it will viewed with local suspicion and may make things worst (assaults, sabotage by either side or third party). Even US is suspicious of foreigners building US infrastructure (ie Huawei).

When there's so much distrust of US by Haitians and US likewise doesn't trust Haitian government with funds, there are quasi government organisations such as UN: https://www.un.org/un70/en/content/70ways/index.html

Even they have had issues in Haiti.

Armies are portable civilisation.

If you task most civilian forces with going somewhere that has disaster level problems there will be blockers. Oh, we can't go there until they have: power, clean water, working telecoms, physical security, etc.

In contrast your military forces can, if necessary, bring everything. A US army deployment can make its own electrical power, make water safe, deploy radio communications, and of course it can provide its own physical security. It is not cheap, but it works.

Is there something like THW in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technisches_Hilfswerk

The only thing they don't do is the physical security.

We have FEMA, which is similar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Management...

They did a pretty shit job managing Hurricane Katrina though. Bush's political appointee to run FEMA had no relevant experience, and Trump now also has a variety of incompetents running various agencies.

The military is bigger, better funded, and most importantly, more competent. A lot of people in a disaster in the US, upon hearing that FEMA is coming, would rather wish it were the military (just based on track record).

Very much this. It's like with data-recovery. If things are extra-broken you don't try to fix the problem from within; you bring external order (A rescue disk, taking out the problem storage disk and mounting it to another system) and then fix the problem from a working host environment.

It’s not that they could not build a “civilization that doesn’t get flattened by a hurricane” . Let’s speak facts and not some semi 4chan baseless insults. Haiti’s slave revolt the only successful one in history saw African people pummel Napoleons French army, the British army and the Spanish army. From 1804-1825 there was a economic embargo on the country (similar to what we do to North Korea). It only stopped when Haitians agreed to pay French slave owners reparations for the money they lost and property (slaves and land ). “In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property. The modern equivalent of $21 billion was paid from Haiti to France.” So, French banks actually loaned Haiti money with very high interest to pay the French government and avoid sanctions thus very deliberately stifling the growth of the country almost haunting it altogether. Note also this was the colony that made the French more money than all 13 of its colonies put together. Therefore the predicament we have today is due to the pure wickedness and greed of the French coupled with natural disasters.

How many did Habitat for Humanity make? I would expect they have among the highest houses per donated dollars. Jimmy Carter, former U.S. President, founded habitat for humanity.

From what I can gather, it's not a simple answer as they do more there than just build houses. There's infrastructure upgrades and mortgage assistance and even work on who owns what piece of property. Some stats for FY18 from https://habitathaiti.org/ :

665 infrastructure projects

683 homes repaired

2139 jobs created

I've seen countless bad stories about small, local charities. I don't know that I'd favour them either.

It's about trust more than anything.

Stories like this are why I do not donate to charities at all.

It is just too hard to verify that my money isn't going to pad some dictator's pocket.

Not giving anything is no solution either, but we definitely need more accountability for charities. This is part of that, I guess, but we also need to know which charities are effective. I'm sure that information is around somewhere too.

It is a solution though.

> Not giving anything is no solution either

You can always pay taxes.

It's this problem all the way down. You cannot verify that the charity is doing things properly. The charity cannot verify that the subcontractor is doing things properly. The subcontractor cannot verify that his employees in the foreign country are doing their job properly and then finally even they cannot verify that the locals who they are helping are actually those who need it the most.

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