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Comment by xnyan | Hacker News Reader

There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed to support major parts of the world (2.7bln in quarantine) population to date, to say nothing of what they will need in the future. Governments are the only proven way of handling truly large scale issues like defense and national health.

Americans in particular depend on charities for services because domestic spending has been recklessly and cruelly slashed for at least the last 40 years. Depending on unaccountable and nebulous organizations and random billionaires for critical services is the opposite of personal freedom.

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Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?

If they're not, I will. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961062 but tldr: if altruistic people donate to (welfare-oriented) charity rather than lobbying for tax-supported welfare, they effectively subside non-altruistic people by exempting them from paying their share of welfare support.

What about a charity like Give Directly? It provides one-time large cash non-restricted grants to individuals in some of the world's poorest communities.

It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance. Giving a small 'leg up' can help communities get better faster.

> It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance.

Yes, obviously. I'm claiming that the people donating to (among others) Give Directly would be more effective at achieving their stated goals via political corruption than personal charity.

To be clear, I'm violently opposed to the sort of blind act-utilitarianesque consequentialism that would claim it's morally wrong to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action (and people who donate to Give Directly et al probably are helping, just less effectively than they could be), but as far as recommendations go, see above.

I see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption. You're claiming that it would be more effective at making the world a better place.

But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.

But then, what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?

Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life to focus on fixing corruption; or to even use their free time to do that; what is the problem with sharing a message that encourages people to do research (focusing on cost-effectiveness of charities) before giving money to charity?

> But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.

I am specifically not claiming that; I'm claiming that, in the case of public goods and services[0], donating money to fund those them directly is less effective (that is, strategicly wrong, a mistake presumably made in good faith) than spending that money to push government-funded public goods through the corrupt faux-democratic process.

> see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption

> what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?

I don't think I've made any claims about whether people should work and/or donate to end political corruption.

> Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life

Yes, obviously if they make enough money to pay for >1.00 person-years per year of whatever they're trying to accomplish, it's more effective to spend money rather than labor, and that 1.00 drops quickly if a full-time specialist would be more productive. I'm not making a distiction between donating money versus donating labor.

0: including no-strings-attached grants like Give Directly appears to do; I think basic income would be a better way to structure that, but that's not what I'm objecting to.

EDIT: actually, way back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960983

> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?

I'm recommending people not support (with money or otherwise) charities that provide public goods and services, because those (being public) should be paid for by the entire tax base, especially corporations, in favor of supporting efforts (whether recognized as charities or not) to force the government to do its job of providing public goods and services to its subjects.

Eg, if the government were to stop maintaining the roads, I would not recommend that people donate to a road repair charity; I would recommend that they put whatever pressure necessary on the government to do its damn job.

Thank you for the reply. We probably agree on more than what this discussion makes it seem.

I think the disagreement started with the your response to my question to someone else:

> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?

And your response

> If they're not, I will.

It looks like your position is a lot more nuanced than "stop giving money to charity" :)

Yes, I should have been a bit more explicit that I was only talking about charities that provide public goods and services, rather than "any kind of charity, in general".

And I wasn't expressing any moral position, just: given the goals that such charities seem to be pursuing (eg healthcare), their actions don't seem effective at actually accomplishing those goals. Basically, agreeing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960723 saying:

> There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed

Also, utilitarianism never claims something is "wrong" or "right" -- that's a spandrel from deontology. Utilitarianism is a claim about the ranking of actions: some actions are better than others.

We're not fighting to make the claim "doing X" is the ultimate and nothing is better -- with the world of nearly-infinite complexity and unbridgeable uncertainty, the best we can do is point out what seems, based on good evidence, as things to do that seem better than others.

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