What would be more interesting would be comparing it after including welfare/public education/healthcare/poverty rates etc.
Best case scenario would be where no charity is needed, am I wrong?
Best case scenario would be where no charity is needed, am I wrong?
On the other hand there is competition between nonprofits, plus they are often multinational.
I find it interesting that some of the most efficient government organizations (like World Food Programme) actually operate as charities (in the sense that everyone can donate to them).
> There are no examples in the history of the world of charity sufficiently providing for the needs of the poor at a national scale.
This is just false. Literally right now we have the case where food banks are filling in the gaps of the UK government at a national scale.
I'm not sure what you're comparing here. Are you saying governments are more efficient because they are bigger? Are you saying they are more efficient because they've filled a need more completely?
The first is non-sense and the second is more a function of size and power than efficiency. Efficiency is about benefit per dollar, and governments are really really bad a that, typically making up for how bad they are by simply throwing more dollars at the problem.
This is definitely not an ideological and dogmatic statement obscuring centuries of experience across hundreds of government systems, oh no-no-no. Government is bad at everything, get it?
That is, I can be 100% efficient with my donation to charity by just...giving $20 to a homeless person. Oh look, 100% of my donation went to someone in need. A charity can be 90% efficient by collecting and distributing donations citywide; it's more widespread, and donations are less centralized, but there's cost in paying people to actually do the legwork. A government is doing stuff nationwide, distributing unequally based on need (measured in a flawed way, yes, but still requiring measurement, since it's politically untenable to do simple things), and is less efficient still. But that's...to be expected.
You see the same thing in private sector; the larger a company is, the less efficiently it runs. Walmart is the largest private employer; no one is claiming it's a well oiled machine of efficiencies comparable to a lean startup. Necessarily; it's just like with technology, the more distributed the system is, the less efficient it is. Saying that governments are inefficient and just throw money at the problem is like saying distributed systems are inefficient and just throw compute at the problem. While true, it nevertheless is still the only way to solve many problems at that scale, and comparing the 'inefficiencies' of hardware of, say, Google, to the hardware for local search on my home PC, isn't particularly meaningful rhetoric.
Unlike the government, no one's forcing people to shop at walmart, and if they were loosing efficiency (charging higher due to Admin costs) people are more than welcome to move to any alternative that suits them best
All of this after leading with seeming disagreement. I'm a little lost.
Maybe I should clarify, especially if English isn't your first language, saying something "isn't comparable" doesn't mean you literally can't compare them, but that doing so is unhelpful and misleading.
Comparing government's and private charities' efficiency at delivering help is a perfectly rational comparison to make when deciding which things should or should not be delivered by the government. The government's efficiency is always a concern when talking about it taking on new responsibilities.
If government efficiency was moot, why not have them handle delivery/allocation of all basic goods? We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run, and private industry is better as producing and distributing food because.... efficiency.
Feels like an arbitrary distinction to what I said. "Efficiency" is an axis that doesn't make sense when the scale and scope are massively different, for all the reasons mentioned above.
>> We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run
So many issues with this. First, your claim is "Efficiency is about benefit per dollar, and governments are really really bad a(t) that"; you make a claim about all governments. Cherry picking data points is not helping that claim; you have to show that government is never, and can never, be more efficient than private industry. I'm pointing out why even trying to make the comparison at national scale is difficult. Second, where has this example occurred? Again, I think your choice of data points is telling.
Food is actually a super interesting example where, again, the scale of the operation doesn't really make for direct comparison. Grocery stores are obviously the way consumers get access to food, but their stock happens via multiple wholesale distributors, who themselves are middle men between multiple suppliers. That is, while Ralphs/Kroger/King Soupers/etc may be as near a nationwide grocery store in the US as I'm aware of, they're stocked by Sysco, US Foods, etc (who are carrying multiple, sometimes even competing, brands), as well as sometimes specific distributors for a large enough company (Coke may have their own, for instance), and who transport product between warehouses using separate longhaul trucking companies, etc etc. There is a LOT of inefficiency involved in that, a lot of middle men collecting along the way, and as we saw during the pandemic, a lot of places the supply chain can break down. And you're comparing it to...what? Russia during peak communism? The closest the US has had is when the government got involved during WWII with rationing, and that actually worked really well, given the shortages we had.
Let's try going the other way, and scaling government down. I too will cherry pick some data - municipal broadband. Oh, wow, now we have something way more efficient than 'the free market', even without tax subsidies, in every market it exists in; so much so that the only way private industry can compete is via legislation to prevent municipal broadband from expanding.
There are plenty of inefficiencies in businesses too. I don't understand how anyone who has ever worked for a small or medium-sized company can complain about government waste. Almost every job I've had has been just riddled with ludicrous inefficiencies.
> plus they operate like monopolies.
Every philanthropist has a monopoly on the use of their funds.
At least with tax-supported government programs, voters have representation on how those funds are used.
And there are lots of them, not operating all under one central control, so they are likely to help local needs, compete in other spaces, and spread the effects.
> At least with tax-supported government programs, voters have representation on how those funds are used.
And then those funds are mostly sent to a big few items taxpayers hear about and not so much to any other needs.
Voters also have representation on how charity funds are spent, since voters are the people making donations. If anything, this means your funds target what you want instead of what others want you to spend on.
So I think charity will always have a role, both financially and socially.
Funding for basic educational standards and a minimal social safety net is already a huge spending commitment for even the most successful governments, and it's not clear if "welfare" can expand beyond that.
Why would you say that? By that logic a charitable institution has no one with a stake in it's long-term success. It's only goal is preserving itself and capturing more resources from donors. There's nothing about governments which makes them inherently incapable of hiring motivated staff.
In my experience, government workers, be they school teachers, nurses, librarians, or community workers are often some of most highly motivated workers I have met.
> it's not clear if "welfare" can expand beyond that.
It is clear if you believe that such funding is available from philanthropic sources. It's just a question of who we wish to give control of those resources to.
Of course it has: pissed-off voters. Mismanaged government-funded institutions such as DMVs or social security systems are a regular troublemaker for politicians.
Perhaps the constant demonizing of public services by private interests, (who btw often rely on government contracts to function), and certain politicians bought by these interests could be a contributing factor in why not?
But let me hear about how private healthcare and broadband is killing it please.
(I have Comcast, so it's not like I've even got the "best", but I'd way rather deal with Comcast or Blue Cross than any government agency...)
Let me put it this way: Comcast is the only reason why a lot of the US doesn't have gigabit internet at cheap prices.
It's a vicious circle, but not an inevitable one. There are plenty of examples of well-functioning government departments, and in some countries there is no significant difference between the performance of publicly run institutions and their private counterparts (although there is of course plenty of variance within both of those groups).
Charity in the form of "one rich guy writes a check because he felt like it" is too dependent on the capricious whims and priorities of a handful of rich people.