Poverty Kills

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/povertykills

by ph0rque • 17 years ago

36 65 17 years ago

TomOfTTB• 17 years ago

To me, this idea couldn't be more wrong headed. In my experience it is rationality that solves most problems.

Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems.

Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.

kgrin• 17 years ago

And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Of course, that's a small-scale, contrived example, but there are plenty of areas in public policy where many or most people's behavior isn't rational.

Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards.

Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about.

Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being).

The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.

anamax2• 17 years ago

> And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens.

Yup, it does. What of it? What makes you think that giving him the fish helps?

You can spend all your resources on problems that can't be fixed, and accomplish nothing, or you can spend them on problems that can be fixed and actually accomplish something.

It's unclear why you prefer the former.

rw2• 17 years ago

"Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality."

What if it is just embedded historical rationality? cf. evolutionary psychology.

jibiki2• 17 years ago

In this particular case, the appeal to emotion leads to incorrect conclusions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law

helveticaman• 17 years ago

I think it is rational in the sense that it is counting something. That always leads somewhere.

aaronsw9• 17 years ago

How is this emotionalism? I'm writing about people who are trying to take a rationalist, cold-hearted look at death and do something about it.

TheElder• 17 years ago

Poverty is the natural state for humans, not the wealthy prosperous state that most Westerners live in. What those in the west created is an aberration. People, like the author of this article wonder, why are people poor? Why is there poverty? The deeper question to ask is, why was wealth ever created? And what do we do to encourage it everywhere?

fatdog789• 17 years ago

Poverty is only natural when the local human population exceeds the local resources available to sustain it. For most of human history, poverty was not the natural state of human existence; indeed, given the frequency and scale of wars (prior to the Geneva conventions, when war was between populations and not just armies), poverty was very rare until the 19th century.

bokonist9• 17 years ago

I'm surprised this has so many up votes because it is so factually incorrect. In 1690 Gregory King made an made a primitive economic census of the English population. Out of a population of 5.5 million, 1.3 million were "cottagers and paupers", and 2.7 were in the lowest class "Vagrants; as Gipsies, Theives, Beggers, &c." (source, The World we have lost by Peter Laslett)

It's should also be noted that average heights were about 4 inches shorter than the height of a modern American. Not having good enough nutrition to reach a full height seems like a pretty sure sign of poverty to me.

They did not so much have the crowded slums that are typical of modern poverty. People would die of disease before cities could reach such densities. But relative to us, people were impoverished in terms of health, nutrition, or material comfort.

EDIT:

One more point. Overall violent death rates ( including war and homicide) in 16th-19th century Britain were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pages 128-129.

paulsmith• 17 years ago

Actually, wars against populations and not just between armies began to disappear as a consequence of the end of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th Century. Until that point, armies were largely expected to be self-funding, so they would take resources from local towns (and destroy those of their opposition). Due to the utter exhaustion on all sides at the end of the war, and the cost of supporting large standing armies, a number of military reforms came about, including making armies smaller and more professional, and making non-combatant populations (more or less) off-limits. This is largely were we get the concept of a "civilian" -- someone who has allegiance to a nation but is not directly involved in the fighting of its wars.

fallentimes• 17 years ago

Your comment reminded me of this quote:

"We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can." -Tyler Cowen

andreyf4• 17 years ago

the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited

Considering what some rhetoricians label as "wealth redistribution", this is flat-out wrong. Consider socialized education, medicine, or early childhood education - all have shown to have strong impacts on social mobility, and hence, wealth creation.

This might be too subtle for a slogan, but it isn't rocket science, either: systems of smart wealth redistribution are absolutely necessary, although not sufficient, for maximum wealth creation. Also necessary, off the top of my head: social pressure for parents to be responsible, and a "path to prosperity" with which individuals can identify.

tome• 17 years ago

Money is fungible. Looks, friends, sex, and even kidneys, are not.

andreyf4• 17 years ago

People are poor because they are never given the opportunity to create wealth. I create wealth because my parents and various nations' tax payers paid for me to dick around doing just about anything I wanted for the first 22 years of my life, and kindly encouraged me to learn something useful in the process. People are poor because they don't have that opportunity/encouragement.

fnid• 17 years ago

I used to believe this so I did some tests. I gave opportunities to people at what many would consider the lowest levels of society. I found that even with those opportunities, they continued to treat others with a lack of respect. The kind of lack of respect that makes people not want to help them or even be around them.

I even rent-to-owned a house to a family with 5 kids. This family would never have had the opportunity to own a house had I not given them that opportunity. They didn't have a high school diploma, no credit. Judgements against them. Criminal history. So I thought, "If they have the opportunity, will they take it to improve their life? If they have the opportunity to buy and own a home, will they make the most of it?"

They destroyed the house. They caused more damage than they paid in rent.

It isn't the lack of opportunity. I thought it was, but it isn't. Opportunities are external motivators. It takes internal motivation to succeed. You can't provide that to someone. They have to create it within themselves. It's the people who have that internal motivation who find opportunities and make the most of them.

bokonist9• 17 years ago

Anti-poverty policy (especially foreign aid) over the past five decades has consisted mainly of giving away food, healthcare, etc. For a while, this decreased death rates substantially in the third world. But the problem was that when the death rates decreased, we simply got more and more poor people.

Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again:

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/wri... )

Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get … rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. … and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050.

The difference in fertility rates between the classes is astounding ( source http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php )

-------------------Poorest-5th--|--Middle-5th--|--Top 5th

Bangladesh------4.6---------------3.3--------------2.2

Brazil----------------4.8---------------2.1--------------0.7

South Africa--------4.8---------------2.7-------------1.9

Recently I was in Rio de Janeiro. Slums push out for miles and miles. They grow bigger every year. Meanwhile the pretty old 19th century buildings slowly rot away.

When poorest 5th have 4 or 5 kids, the result is going to be even more poverty the next generation. No amount of foreign aid can alter this logic, the aid will simply fall into a bottomless well.

In theory, aid could go more towards "teaching a man to fish". But the reality is that I cannot think of a single historical example of a group of one nation/culture/ethnicity achieving economic development via the charity of another nation/ethnicity. If someone knows of an example, I'd be interested to hear it.

All cases of economic development I know have either a) come from within (Deng in China, the Meiji Restoration, etc) or b) come from colonialism ( examples range from Roman Gaul to Hong Kong to parts of Africa before decolonialism )

derefr4• 17 years ago

Bothers me to say it, but "trade based" eugenics might fix this—it might be possible to genetically engineer the crops we send as aid, so that they decrease fertility when consumed over a lifetime. It wouldn't have to be complete sterility, just just enough to bring the rate of successful procreation down to a 2.0 on average. The hard part (that is, the part that I can't think of an ethical means of studying) would be making sure that the infertility/impotence occurs only at the point of conception, and doesn't affect growing foetuses or developing children or hormone production in adults.

EDIT: To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? When changing the social structure is impossible (without destroying the culture that informs it), you have to resort to a technical solution, no matter how distasteful it may be to imagine. The cultures affected most by overpopulation won't use condoms and birth control, won't listen to those that proselytize them, and won't let those that would listen anywhere near the educators. Just making a trade agreement such as "you may only have two children if you take this aid crop" won't work, because once they have the food, they'll go ahead and have the kids anyway (or more likely, just won't know how to not have the kids, whether you require it or not.) An agreement of "you must allow sexual health educators to talk to your people in exchange for the aid" might be closer, but again, nothing's making them take the advice to heart. What's so important about fertility that makes it override concerns about people's actual happiness over their lifetime? We're not talking about killing living people (or even living cells), we're talking about making sperm not attach to eggs.

And I apologize that this has turned into a definitively-non-HN comment; it was originally—humans can be "hacked" just as well as anything else, you know—but it seems people use the arrows to express their ethical opinion, which is something I've never seen before, so I decided to defend my own ethical stance, rather than just being objective and technical like most positively-seen discussions here are.

anamax2• 17 years ago

> To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion?

The suggestion is actually quite progressive, in the political sense, which should lead to upvotes.

cwan6• 17 years ago

This is a horrifying suggestion. An individual donor at an aid agency meeting said something similar where a cost effective healthcare alternative was being developed in sub-Saharan Africa. His question was "what if you're successful? won't having more people damage the environment?"

The rest of us in the room were stunned - this man explicitly valued the environment over human life. You make a similar mistake in attempting to smite a symptom. Poverty is never caused by the lack of resources - or the related overblown fears of overpopulation (look up why oil is often called the Devil's excrement where it's discovered particularly in the developing world). It's bad governments - prior and/or current. High birth rates drop dramatically after a society industrializes.

What makes the suggestion repulsive (as much as it is unequivocally absurd) is that instead trying to alleviate suffering and addressing the root causes of absolute poverty, you're effectively starving and forcing deeply impoverished people who are in no position to deny food to accept sterilization.

If you're reading HN, you've already hit a genetic jackpot having the opportunities that most of the world will never have. Not only would this be a slippery slope (if you accept forced sterilizations for the "greater good", why not deny needed medical drugs and treatments or worse?), it's an unnecessary slope. So instead of trying to provide the poor with economic opportunities you'd provide them with sterility?

gjm11• 17 years ago

What's wrong with the suggestion? Well, here's one thing: The instant anyone in those countries discovers what you're doing, I expect one of two things will happen. Either (1) they will completely stop accepting your aid, in which case whatever good you were hoping it would do is right out of the window, or (2) you will suddenly find a whole lot more terrorists looking to do a lot of damage in rich countries.

More simply, you might just like to imagine how you'd feel if the roles were reversed. So, e.g., let's suppose that the Chinese government said: "All these Westerners are relying on our services to make lots of super-cheap goods. Why don't we put something in the plastic that makes them less fertile? It's for their own good." And let's suppose that you have been trying to have children for a few years and failing (or some close friend or relation has been) when you discover this. How do you feel?

A few other obvious things that I hope you missed: (1) Different people are fertile to different extents, and if you lower the average fertility you're most likely making lots of people completely infertile. (2) Your measures are going to affect the extra-specially poor disproportionately. To make a whole country's average fertility go down to replacement level, it may have to reduce the fertility of those people much more drastically. Down to zero, perhaps. (3) Having children is really, really important to a lot of people. You may think that's irrational; you may even be right; but that's how it is, and that's why you'd most likely get the effects I described above. (4) Having to make a choice between two horrible alternatives -- e.g., starving versus sterilization (see #2 for why it might really be pretty much exactly that choice) is, for many people, substantially worse than the better of those two alternatives. (See, e.g., "Sophie's Choice".)

aaronsw9• 17 years ago

Look at what happens in cultures where they regularly eat crops which decrease fertility. The fuck like rabbits, having sex with anyone and everyone without any cultural inhibitions like shame or marriage, starting at puberty, so they can get their birth rates back up.

The only proven way to get birth rates down is to get death rates down; cultures will do whatever it takes to reproduce themselves -- the solution is to make reproduction easier, so they no longer have to err on the side of caution.

akkartik2• 17 years ago

Book recommendation: "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux (I created notes on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations) It changed how I look at the world. Population control really is the #1 problem.

cwan6• 17 years ago

If population control is the #1 problem/solution why do population rates decline following industrialization? Population growth is a symptom - not a cause of poverty.

An alternative view to the malthusians: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

Though from a policy/historical perspective with a bit more utility - Against the Dead Hand, by Brink Lindsey: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Dead-Hand-Uncertain-Capitalism...

And also - "The Invisible Hand of Population Control: The tragedy of the commons meets economic freedom" : http://www.reason.com/news/show/134136.html

aaronsw9• 17 years ago

Does everyone here get their facts from political columnists and movie directors? Poor people have more kids because their kids are more likely to die. It's the same reason people before the industrial revolution had more kids: it's how you keep the species from dying out. Look up "the demographic transition": as the death rate in developing countries falls, birth rates also fall.

I personally don't think we can help other countries develop by giving them charity and I don't think I said that. I think we can help them develop by stopping our policies of stealing from them. Right now we saddle them up with debt, have large companies steal their natural resources, force them to adopt trade policies that prevent industrialization, and domestic policies that prevent them from educating their people. Let's stop doing that.

jibiki2• 17 years ago

> force them to adopt trade policies that prevent industrialization, and domestic policies that prevent them from educating their people.

I feel rather naive, as I have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing I can think of is NAFTA, and I've heard that had the opposite effect (damaging the Mexican agricultural sector.)

bokonist9• 17 years ago

Clearly there is much more to birth rates than death rates. El Salvador has a higher life expectancy than Russia, yet twice as high fertility rates. That's case when you compare most Latin American countries to the Eastern European countries.

Or we can go back further, to pre-industrial England. The families with the highest incomes (and much lower death rates) had higher fertility rates. Pre-industrial practiced population control to prevent complete demographic disaster (there were strict taboos on extra-marital sex, and young people were limited as to when they could marry by what the community could support). If you actually read the Kevin Myers piece, who as actually been to Ethiopia, you'll see that the Ethiopians do not practice the same kind of control, hence their birth rates are almost twice that of even pre-industrial England.

yummyfajitas4• 17 years ago

A black man in Harlem is 4.11 times as likely to die in a given year as the average American male.

This fact brings to mind an anecdote illustrating the fact that people have no clue about relative risks.

While jogging, I passed by a protest near Harlem Hospital. Signs mentioned this death rate disparity. I asked someone what the protest was about, and was told that they wanted more funding for the hospital.

Most of the protesters were sitting on lawn chairs, smoking, and eating fast food. Many were obese, few were of healthy weight. They didn't seem to realize that running in circles around the hospital would do far more to reduce the disparity in death rates than any amount of funding.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

I'll see your anecdote and raise you a couple of years of experience.

I've worked as an ER nurse for 15 years in over 30 hospitals in 5 states. A lot of that work was contract work in hospitals in poor neighborhoods that had a lot of trouble staffing their departments. I now work in a very, very nice upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

Absolutly, unequivocally I can say that if you're sick and want the best medical care, go to the hospital in the neighborhood where the rich people live. The difference in care is night and day. Well to do hospitals have patients with private insurance that pay a lot more than Medicare or public health insurance. They also tend to expect more from their medical care, and are usually a lot more educated and can be more proactive in their care.

One ER that I worked at in Chicago, I drove past a funeral home. And almost every single shift, there was a group of kids standing on the street corner outside of the funeral home "tipping a forty" for a friend that had just died.

I've worked in ER's that were so overcrowded, that when a patient died, we'd have to shove the body into a dirty utility room to make room for patients we could still help. That would * never * fly in a rich hospital.

In poor neighborhoods, people are used to dying young. They are used to the crappy care that's given them, and yes, they tend to have a lot more lifestyle diseases.

But, why do they have more lifestyle disease? In Silicon Valley, I can go to my local farmers market, and I can afford to spend money on organic produce. When I didn't have a car, and lived on the edge of the ghetto in Chicago, it was really easy to get my calories at McDonald's down the street or get crap food at the 7-11 down the block instead of walking 12 blocks each way to the grocery store.

Poverty does kill, for many reasons. Please dont just chalk it up to "they should stop eating crap and get some excercise."

cwan6• 17 years ago

I suspect you're right that you do get better care from hospitals in better neighborhoods and that there are differing expectations, but other factors may have much larger effects that have little or anything to do with social advantage.

From a recent article on infant mortality: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0823ch... "African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame. That's entirely plausible until you notice another racial/ethnic gap: Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality, they do better than whites. Social disadvantage doesn't explain very much."

azanar• 17 years ago

Scratch all that stuff that defines the where and the why, and just focus on the what. You eat produce: fruits and veggies. That alone is likely why you are much less likely to develop a lifestyle disease than those who chow down McD's. The fact that it is local farmers or organic produce is at best trivial, and likely is statistical noise comparatively.

I realize, searching around in the HN history, that this is a matter of identity for some people; I have no intention of starting another pro-con propaganda war regarding organic food in yet another thread. But can we at least concede that produce, regardless of its source and classification, is significantly better than a Big Mac and fries?

The last thing we need is for people to decide that, because they can't afford the high class choice in food -- which organics are -- they might as well not bother at all, because someone is going to heckle them for not caring about their health enough. Enough people, especially in neighborhoods like the ones we are discussing, can't decide that organic food is better for them than conventional food. The added cost may drive them into eating sufficiently little they start suffering from malnutrition. The McD's food might do that too, but if you're going to end up in poor health either way...

aaronsw9• 17 years ago

The main reason poor people tend to suffer from obesity is because it's much more expensive to buy organic vegetables than it is to buy some McDonald's. (Organic food stores don't even tend to open in poor neighborhoods.) Running around in circles burns very few additional calories; certainly not enough to deal with this fact.

yummyfajitas4• 17 years ago

If the poor are obese, they are already spending more on food than they need to be. They could simply purchase fewer big macs, right?

But I really don't buy this theory. If it were true, it would imply that graduate students should be fat too (which they usually are not). The fact is, big macs are cheaper than most other foods per calorie. They are not cheaper per meal.

Incidentally, Harlem has plenty of produce (organic and non). But (based on my anecdotal observations) it's mainly purchased by the yuppies.

hughprime• 17 years ago

A meal at McDonald's winds up costing, what, six or seven bucks? That's quite a lot by home-cooking standards. You can easily put together a nutritious meal at home for that kind of money (grilled chicken + rice + fresh vegetables, frinstance). Don't get me started on the alleged nutritional benefits of so-called "organic" vegetables over the cheap-ass vegetables you can buy at my local ghetto Safeway.

Poor people are fat for the same reason they're poor: they have a lack of self-control and are not very good at making decisions.

Or if that sounds cruel, an alternative formulation: some people lack self-control and aren't very good at making decisions, and they tend to wind up being both fat and poor.

lupin_sansei• 17 years ago

Poverty doesn't kill. Nature kills you. Wealth just reduces the effect nature has on you (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare etc).

We've known about the solution to poverty since the 18th century (free trade - aka capitalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations but the solution isn't popular among intellectuals, despite the correlation of free trade and per capita GDP (admittedly crude but one the more objective measures available).

http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/2...

http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimage...

http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05...

The current state of the third world was caused by the UK and others encouraging places like Africa and India to follow the socialist model in the post collonial era after World War 2.

The extent to which former collonies have prospered is the extent to which they ignored that advice (Singapore, India since 1990 etc) http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

eru• 17 years ago

I agree. Though poverty can kill in at least one more way than not sheltering you from nature, somewhat more directly.

Social status is a positional good. I.e. relative affluence counts more than absolute affluence. High status people have better health etc than low status people. This seems to be at least partly a psychologic effect.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

I believe Aaron has an account here. If so, I'd love for him to read this comment, and anyone who generally supports his ideas to read this comment, because I think it could change lives.

I read this piece by him:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall

Short summary: A speaker tells a story about an evil king. The king gets 10 hostages, and you, and asks you to decide, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can die in their place. What do you choose?" When asked, most people choose to sacrifice themselves.

Same scenario. Evil king, 10 hostages. But now the king asks, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can give me all your money and live in poverty for the rest of your life. Which do you choose?" And the people asked think, and it seems reasonable to choose the poverty alternative. Certainly, it's better than dying, and they already agreed to die to save the people.

Then it talks about children dying in Africa, and how with just a little bit of money you could save those people. The speaker concludes, "Thus if you decide to go on with the life you were probably planning to lead, you will be letting 10 people die rather than give up your flat-screen television and your cocktail parties. And that is more than gluttony, it is murder."

Now there's a major, major, major flaw with this line of thinking, which is also in "Poverty Kills" and many pieces along those lines. It's the assumption that there are no choices besides the "evil king" and "dying/sacrificing for the rest".

Never was this more clear than my travels in the back provinces of China. I climbed Mount Emeishan in China, and the locals farm the mountain and live quite poorly. By selling food and crafts on the side of the road to visitors (mostly Chinese, didn't see any foreigners besides me) - by selling, they got the money they needed to buy tools, medicine, and so on. I got to eat some local food, and bought a wooden sword for my then-kid brother. The sword cost basically nothing except a few hours, and the money from that could buy weeks worth of medicine or seasons worth of clothing, and so on.

This money went to the heads of households and most industrious people on Emeishan, who in turn would help their relatives and so forth. The Communist Chinese government couldn't begin to do half the job feeding and providing medicine to these people that free trade did. It was never more clear to me - honestly working for money and spending it on things I wanted helped other people. It helped the people who paid me to for them (I freelance/contract work, I haven't been salaried ever). It helped the people who I bought food and crafts from. Everyone won.

So back to the "evil king" - what if instead of giving in for the hostages right now, you came back later, kicked in the door with your sword, and assassinated the evil murderous king? That's the third option.

There's more choices than "give up your money in taxes/charity or bad outcomes happen". I almost built an international school in China with my girlfriend. I still might go build schools someday. If I do, they'll run for a profit. The teachers will be paid more than they would at another job (or else they wouldn't come work for us). The parents will value it (or else they wouldn't send their kids there). The administrators of the school will be paid. The kids will learn better, speak more fluent English, and increase trade between China and English speaking countries. That'll bring more money to China, and lower the expenses of all English speaking people abroad who can afford the Chinese goods.

If there were more taxes, and I had less of my own money to fund a school, it wouldn't be possible. The Chinese government is not run by people as driven, intelligent, and empathetic as my girlfriend. If they took her money, and the American government took my money, then we couldn't build a school, and instead you'd have schools like Sichuan and the United States currently have. Quality - not so much.

Charity has its place. I've run charity events and donate to charities. I tend to support St. Jude's Children Hospital in North America and Great Ormond Street in London. A friend is getting a therapy dog program started in Tokyo, I pledged some money for that and volunteered for the auction.

But there's greater options. Really now, governments have proven themselves incompetent many times over. And nonprofits, God bless them, frequently have people drawing way over market salaries and making themselves rich, while working at a job with less pressure, lower expectations, and very little accountability. If you look at the statistics, nonprofits are depressingly ineffective and do very little towards succeeding in their missions and improving the world.

There's a third option. It's improving the world honestly, getting compensated for it, and paying people who improve your life in return. That system has built almost everything of value on the planet. I reject the "evil king or your life" dichotomy; it is false; there are other options.

Aaron's a hell of a writer, and I hope he reads this. I know political views can be like religions - but I try not to make mine. I've studied all sorts of history and sciences and commerce and all manner of things. The results look like charity/government (and especially taxes) underperform the rather cold and heartless market in any long term time horizon. Now, these aren't fashionable viewpoints in many intellectual circles, but we all ought to consider them - is the end good is our objective, then even unfashionable opinions against our circles' worldviews must be considered.

If anyone knows Aaron, would they kindly point him to this comment? He seems like an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful guy, and I really hope there's something I've written in here that's valuable to him.

aaronsw9• 17 years ago

You can just email me, you know. I check my email. I argue for killing the king in my latest piece on this subject: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/savealife

Poverty Kills

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