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Comment by marojejian | Hacker News Reader

archive: https://archive.is/BnBFT paper cited: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34583

>it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information.

>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.

While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points:

1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective.

Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.

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We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets.

Based on stats from IFAD [1]:

> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.

Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.

That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.

[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...

The challenge is distributional. Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful, so at a certain point more money does not result in less poverty.

But also we need to do more for ending poverty!

That is why organizations such as Heifer International:

https://www.heifer.org/

which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.

> Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful

It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain.

Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.

I think you are overly focused on how things are done in the US, where it is thankfully quite rare to outright starve.

In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.

Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same.

And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.

It's less inefficient bureacracy (although it is definitely that) and more culturally-normal corruption.

> In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy.

Where in Africa is this common?

Best source I could find: https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/AWSR_2025

Yeah, quickly browsing this source it looks like Gaza is the primary location where aid workers are in danger (by a long shot. 181 killed in a year). Followed by Sudan, which is in an active civil war (60 aid workers killed).

That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.

The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.

There are quite a few in non-war zones - e.g. Nigeria has 47 just being killed or kidnapped by armed gangs in the country as they seem to have really taken defunding the police to heart. I wouldn't call that pretty tame.

No, that 47 number is for all incidents in Nigeria.

The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.

> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.

Saying “in Africa” makes it sound like this is common in every location in Africa. This isn’t true.

OK that is true and I didn't mean to imply it was happening everywhere. Sorry to offend. At the same time, my point that "it's not always just bureaucracy" is sadly still quite true too.

A really good thing the UK charity commission does is to list the efficiency of charities - how much they spend to acquire their funds. Also the wages they pay.

I've checked it when giving funds to new charities.

Oxfam, for example, are quite inefficient - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...

How does that work mechanically? If I have a home to rent out, why don't I reduce prices to $19k to guarantee zero occupancy-related losses, and why doesn't somebody else out-compete me?

I always wondered "what if the Salvation Army had tanks?"

If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery?

Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources."

But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.

"…around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty."

That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?

I suspect a percentage of the 40% don't believe it's possible, or believe it would end up being 0.5% of their income to enrich a select few (as has seemed to happen with previous attempts to "save" entire countries).

Of course, the bigger question is what percent of that 40 actually want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another — be it that they hate the people who are currently poor and can’t envision it happening to them or their community or because they have some weird cognitive defect like the just world fallacy that causes them to believe this is a positive condition for the world to be in.

Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.

Another interesting question is what part of the 60% want extreme poverty to exist for one reason or another? Probably the same portion as of the 40%, just the reasons differ.

If they wanted it to persist, why would they give up a portion of their income to end it? Are you suggesting the 40% is just more honest than the 60?

Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.

> There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.

Poverty is a relative concept. Even among billionaires, there are poor billionaires that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.

I know a number of people who view basically any kind of aid as morally wrong, ultimately leading to the downfall of the people you're trying to help. Even with their own kids, once they're 18 they're on their own -- no help with college, no inheritance, no etc. They really believe that handouts create a situation worse than whatever ill they're solving.

Mind you, they still think poverty is bad, but they'd object to something like paying for basic infrastructure and be happy to create the modern-day equivalent of CCC camps to pay the poor people to build that infrastructure. That sort of thing.

Apparently 75% of the world's population believe in some kind of god. 60% is a low number as far as fantasy beliefs go.

Rich world respondent doesn’t mean Rich themselves. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, philanthropy takes a back seat. Half the population in the us is in debt, has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. I’d assume even 0.5% would be difficult to part ways with.

I'm sure the approval rate was even lower among the Actually Rich

> Half the population in the US ... has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck

No. The median American household net worth is $193k, and of that, $8k in checkings/savings accounts. 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses (this excludes non-cash savings, and obviously an even greater percentage have cash savings that would cover 1-2 months of expenses, which is still not paycheck-to-paycheck).

None of these stats (including the person you're replying to) are directly comparable.

- Median net worth is $193k, of which $185k is in their home. Suppose a $10k emergency crops up. Well...you're fucked. If you're lucky you can take out a loan against the accrued value relatively quickly, but otherwise you're taking a 10% haircut having to sell quickly, another 10% in transaction fees, and another $10k in the sudden move/storage/renting/loss-of-work/etc situation you found yourself in liquidating your home to cover an extortionist colonoscopy+lawyer pricing or something. You're _fine_, but when minor road bumps can cause $45k setbacks ($55k if we count the $10k expense this depended on) you're not not living paycheck to paycheck.

- You can't compare the median savings to the median net worth. They're not the same person, and the cross-terms can take almost any distribution.

- The 54% stat is based on self-reported vibes and is pretty blatantly wrong. The median household also has $5200 in unavoidable (without delinquency, losing your home, etc) expenses, which doesn't jive very well with $8k in savings somehow lasting 3 months (assuming the cross terms I complained about aren't too terribly distributed). You would expect 2+ paychecks of stability (which, incidentally, is also the usual prompt for "paycheck-to-paycheck" stability -- not whether it takes one paycheck to be screwed but two), but then you're hosed.

And so on.

You're _right_; the median US household won't go broke missing a paycheck; but 2-3 paychecks is enough to cause major problems at the 50th percentile, give or take friends and family stepping in to soften the blow.

You can quibble with the details but ultimately GP is wrong; the median American isn’t broke or living paycheck to paycheck — which were the claims made — and it isn’t close.

I'm not even sure I believe that. Try raising taxes by 0.5% and see how ok people are with it. Doesn't matter what it's for.

60% lied out of habit when asked the question, 40% didn't bother lying.

>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.

If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.

When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly).

There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.

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