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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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