Book review: How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
This book makes plausible and somewhat thought-provoking claims about how an altruist ought to spend money to provide the most benefit to the needy. It concludes that high priorities should include control of HIV, malaria, malnutrition, and trade barriers.
It appears to come close to being a good book. It addresses fairly good questions about important issues. Unfortunately, it has been simplified for readability to such an extent as to prevent it from accomplishing much. Its arguments aren’t sufficiently detailed or backed by references for me to evaluate them. So they were probably intended to be accepted as a result of the authors’ authority. But their credentials leave plenty of room for doubt about how much deference their authority deserves.
So I’m left unsatisfied, and highly uncertain whether I ought to read the more detailed version of this book (Global Crises, Global Solutions).
effective altruism
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Marginal Revolution summarizes an idea of Robin Hanson about how to overcome the problem of poor information regarding who is worthy of what charity (which I agree is a serious problem).
Unfortunately, I doubt it will work, because it suffers from very similar information problems as direct charity does. It requires donors to have good information about what a prototypical worthy recipient looks like (but having this information seems like a large part of the problem we are trying to solve), or else be able to hire someone who has better information about that than the donor (but Robin provides some strong reasons to doubt that is possible in his more recent paper He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune).
I can imagine (but am unconvinced) that donors can describe the appropriate criteria for worthiness, and that the main information problem is distinguishing honest claims of meeting those criteria from dishonest claims. But the charity angels scheme rewards people for failing to distinguish honest claims, which makes me doubt that the giving that this scheme would encourage has much to do with truly worthy causes.
The “Tell Off A Jerk” variant on this theme seems closer to a workable idea, but it risks producing flame wars where people polarize into groups each of which uses charitable donations to encourage retaliation for the other group’s rude attempts at deterring jerkdom.