Barring occasional emergencies, the ONLY aid any community needs is less meddling.
1) Restrict the expedient profiteering that keeps countries dependent (the distributed costs outweigh the concentrated profits).
(If you left it up to increasingly narrow capitalists, they'd recommend we all reduce the tremendous, redundant cost of 8 Billion independent "livers." Think how much metabolic overhead we'd "save" if everyone shared a dialysis machine once a week! Doh! They don't comprehend the concept of minimal configuration that still provides distributed resiliency. Less is more only until it isn't.)
2) Reduce the dependency (USA didn't need aid in 1776, it needed protection; ditto for all poor nations today)
3) Poor countries need better government. (See Singapore.) Barring occasional emergencies, if you provide anything else you are a co-dependent (on your own neighbors back home).
I think it'd be good at a meta level to implement measurement protocols in the future to ensure that we are measuring the impact of the aid we give to make sure it's actually accomplishing the goals set out and to focus our aid on a few key targets where there will be long term sustained impact and where a relationship is truly strategic (ex. DRC due to Cobalt holdings, Panama due to port access). Other than that I think focusing on projects that support key American industries (ex. robotics, nuclear) that we want to develop domestically and see as a key long term export that would also be net beneficial to the foreign country would be good. For example, X country in Sub-Saharan Africa experiences chronic brownouts from an ailing grid, making energy expensive and forcing citizens to constantly revert to expensive diesel generators. Under previous admins, I imagine there would be a few different types of projects like capacity building (e.g. sending U.S. experts to tell X country how to set up a grid), financing for local industry, and support for the development of renewables. Under the new regime, we would work backwards from demand signals we want to send to critical U.S. industries, like small modular nuclear reactors, and find projects that fit (as presumably there will be many more funding opportunities than dollars available to allocate) and fund those directly, leveraging American expertise and growing demand for key domestic exports.
While I share Leif Smith's general stance, one thing that might be worth introducing is comparing interventions to just doing cash transfers (GiveDirectly has done a good amount of research on this). Most development aid ends up with a worse ROI, so it's a good floor to use (especially if you "have to" spend the money for legal/budgetary/whatever reasons, it's a relatively easy thing to scale up/down each year so you have no excuse to fund anything worse).
I think "give money" is a great baseline. There are likely some public health oriented programs that would pass cost/benefit analysis. What else do you think might outperform "give money" or "malaria nets"?
I'm very skeptical in general. If there was a reliable path to development by spending funds, the question becomes why no one can do it as a profitable business such that it requires funds to be poured in with no promise of a return. For things that are just meant to improve consumption, the answer is easy: you're not getting an ROI because you're effectively doing transfer payments with more-or-less deniability and efficiency. Which is why cash is hard to beat.
Even for malaria nets, a bunch of them are being put to secondary use (mostly for fishing), because of the inflexibility of in-kind aid. Also at this point giving everyone doses of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine (or the older RTS,S) is probably cheaper than more nets (it's about 1.5x to 2x the cost, but is more durable and reliable).
That one might be a good angle: Treatment development is hard and exposed to political risk, especially for diseases that don't exist in the US and so effectively lose their most reliably lucrative market (everyone else price-controls or just flat-out ignores patents when convenient). So setting money aside in a prize fund to be doled out for successfully distributing X-people's worth of doses for a treatment/vaccine of the most common diseases (with a focus on ones that kill at young ages or make the victim unable to be self-sufficient economically) might be a good move (prizes are sometime suggested as a way to ameliorate the consequences of imposing price controls on drugs in the US, for which it would probably be insufficient, but for countries where price controls are already the norm, then maybe it's a second-best solution).
Long run economic growth depends on institutions, and I don't believe the US has institutional memory of how to grow from a poor country to a rich one, as that almost entirely happened before anyone alive today was born, under a set of policies the US has largely repudiated and considers outside the Overton Window.
You could have programs to get young politicians involved in visiting countries that have achieved long-term economic growth but it's unlikely to be a real bottleneck (the Hondurans that came up with the ZEDE amendments visited foreign SEZs of their own initiative, all the difficulty is in getting laws passed and kept on the books).
FWIW my understanding is that while some small portion of people use bednets for secondary purposes like fishing, they are still extremely useful and cost effective. I also am a fan of giving folks cash to spend it how they want (I think most people are rational actors and know what will be in their long term best interest) but I don't think it's particularly politically palatable for a US gov program to hand over cash directly to individuals in a foreign nation.
I was using the fishing example not as a strict negative, but as an obvious example of divergence between needs and what's being supplied. We're supplying so many malaria nets to some places that some nets get diverted for better purposes, and the signal doesn't make it back and result in production adjustments (the provision of actual fishing nets with normal-sized holes and no insecticide, or starting to reroute those malaria nets somewhere they're still needed for their intended purpose), because the whole process is a miniature command economy without prices to coordinate people.
> but I don't think it's particularly politically palatable for a US gov program to hand over cash directly to individuals in a foreign nation.
I agree, but then if the actually chosen alternative in light of this voter preference is funding lots of programs that obfuscate the transfer, including some which are worse than cash, then this is just accepting inefficiency as the cost of hiding what's really going on from the voters. Which is morally objectionable on both efficiency and democratic accountability grounds.
I don't accept the premise that governments should engage in foreign aid. But they should make it easy and advantageous for their citizens and private organizations to provide aid. Three source of ideas:
Thanks Leif. Great recs and I am amenable to that view. But I don't think it's a realistic outcome. US Foreign Assistance is partially about "help" and partially about geopolitics.
Given that "nothing" isn't what will replace USAID, I'd also love to hear your ideas for a bureau that at least tried to do no harm and ideally did some things that passed a sensible cost benefit analysis.
I appreciate the work, because if we don't replace USAID, then the appropriations will flow into a vacuum.
What can we do to support competitive governance in developing countries? Could we have tiered donations - more money flows to countries that allow Special Economic Zones, less to those who don't? If they don't, they only get Give Directly (which is the right default)?
I think the Sustainable Development Alliance (https://sdzalliance.org/) is dormant, but it's a valuable idea.
Barring occasional emergencies, the ONLY aid any community needs is less meddling.
1) Restrict the expedient profiteering that keeps countries dependent (the distributed costs outweigh the concentrated profits).
(If you left it up to increasingly narrow capitalists, they'd recommend we all reduce the tremendous, redundant cost of 8 Billion independent "livers." Think how much metabolic overhead we'd "save" if everyone shared a dialysis machine once a week! Doh! They don't comprehend the concept of minimal configuration that still provides distributed resiliency. Less is more only until it isn't.)
2) Reduce the dependency (USA didn't need aid in 1776, it needed protection; ditto for all poor nations today)
3) Poor countries need better government. (See Singapore.) Barring occasional emergencies, if you provide anything else you are a co-dependent (on your own neighbors back home).
I think it'd be good at a meta level to implement measurement protocols in the future to ensure that we are measuring the impact of the aid we give to make sure it's actually accomplishing the goals set out and to focus our aid on a few key targets where there will be long term sustained impact and where a relationship is truly strategic (ex. DRC due to Cobalt holdings, Panama due to port access). Other than that I think focusing on projects that support key American industries (ex. robotics, nuclear) that we want to develop domestically and see as a key long term export that would also be net beneficial to the foreign country would be good. For example, X country in Sub-Saharan Africa experiences chronic brownouts from an ailing grid, making energy expensive and forcing citizens to constantly revert to expensive diesel generators. Under previous admins, I imagine there would be a few different types of projects like capacity building (e.g. sending U.S. experts to tell X country how to set up a grid), financing for local industry, and support for the development of renewables. Under the new regime, we would work backwards from demand signals we want to send to critical U.S. industries, like small modular nuclear reactors, and find projects that fit (as presumably there will be many more funding opportunities than dollars available to allocate) and fund those directly, leveraging American expertise and growing demand for key domestic exports.
While I share Leif Smith's general stance, one thing that might be worth introducing is comparing interventions to just doing cash transfers (GiveDirectly has done a good amount of research on this). Most development aid ends up with a worse ROI, so it's a good floor to use (especially if you "have to" spend the money for legal/budgetary/whatever reasons, it's a relatively easy thing to scale up/down each year so you have no excuse to fund anything worse).
I think "give money" is a great baseline. There are likely some public health oriented programs that would pass cost/benefit analysis. What else do you think might outperform "give money" or "malaria nets"?
I'm very skeptical in general. If there was a reliable path to development by spending funds, the question becomes why no one can do it as a profitable business such that it requires funds to be poured in with no promise of a return. For things that are just meant to improve consumption, the answer is easy: you're not getting an ROI because you're effectively doing transfer payments with more-or-less deniability and efficiency. Which is why cash is hard to beat.
Even for malaria nets, a bunch of them are being put to secondary use (mostly for fishing), because of the inflexibility of in-kind aid. Also at this point giving everyone doses of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine (or the older RTS,S) is probably cheaper than more nets (it's about 1.5x to 2x the cost, but is more durable and reliable).
That one might be a good angle: Treatment development is hard and exposed to political risk, especially for diseases that don't exist in the US and so effectively lose their most reliably lucrative market (everyone else price-controls or just flat-out ignores patents when convenient). So setting money aside in a prize fund to be doled out for successfully distributing X-people's worth of doses for a treatment/vaccine of the most common diseases (with a focus on ones that kill at young ages or make the victim unable to be self-sufficient economically) might be a good move (prizes are sometime suggested as a way to ameliorate the consequences of imposing price controls on drugs in the US, for which it would probably be insufficient, but for countries where price controls are already the norm, then maybe it's a second-best solution).
Long run economic growth depends on institutions, and I don't believe the US has institutional memory of how to grow from a poor country to a rich one, as that almost entirely happened before anyone alive today was born, under a set of policies the US has largely repudiated and considers outside the Overton Window.
You could have programs to get young politicians involved in visiting countries that have achieved long-term economic growth but it's unlikely to be a real bottleneck (the Hondurans that came up with the ZEDE amendments visited foreign SEZs of their own initiative, all the difficulty is in getting laws passed and kept on the books).
FWIW my understanding is that while some small portion of people use bednets for secondary purposes like fishing, they are still extremely useful and cost effective. I also am a fan of giving folks cash to spend it how they want (I think most people are rational actors and know what will be in their long term best interest) but I don't think it's particularly politically palatable for a US gov program to hand over cash directly to individuals in a foreign nation.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/25/24047975/malaria-mosquito-bednets-prevention-fishing-marc-andreessen
I was using the fishing example not as a strict negative, but as an obvious example of divergence between needs and what's being supplied. We're supplying so many malaria nets to some places that some nets get diverted for better purposes, and the signal doesn't make it back and result in production adjustments (the provision of actual fishing nets with normal-sized holes and no insecticide, or starting to reroute those malaria nets somewhere they're still needed for their intended purpose), because the whole process is a miniature command economy without prices to coordinate people.
> but I don't think it's particularly politically palatable for a US gov program to hand over cash directly to individuals in a foreign nation.
I agree, but then if the actually chosen alternative in light of this voter preference is funding lots of programs that obfuscate the transfer, including some which are worse than cash, then this is just accepting inefficiency as the cost of hiding what's really going on from the voters. Which is morally objectionable on both efficiency and democratic accountability grounds.
I don't accept the premise that governments should engage in foreign aid. But they should make it easy and advantageous for their citizens and private organizations to provide aid. Three source of ideas:
"Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo
"Dissent on Development" by Peter Bauer
Anything on Africa by Magatte Wade
Thanks Leif. Great recs and I am amenable to that view. But I don't think it's a realistic outcome. US Foreign Assistance is partially about "help" and partially about geopolitics.
Given that "nothing" isn't what will replace USAID, I'd also love to hear your ideas for a bureau that at least tried to do no harm and ideally did some things that passed a sensible cost benefit analysis.
That's right. However, this point of view suggests an ideal to bear in mind when constructing new policy.
I appreciate the work, because if we don't replace USAID, then the appropriations will flow into a vacuum.
What can we do to support competitive governance in developing countries? Could we have tiered donations - more money flows to countries that allow Special Economic Zones, less to those who don't? If they don't, they only get Give Directly (which is the right default)?
I think the Sustainable Development Alliance (https://sdzalliance.org/) is dormant, but it's a valuable idea.