Charity bro

First off the bat, I'm no hater of folks who find theirselves in undesireable situations per sé. I've ran a successful charity campaign on this very platform in my day, but have come to regret it now that I'm older and wiser. I've linked everything relevant down below, go and see for yourself. Secondly, before voting either way in my poll, please read the post, or at least the tl;dr tidbit at the bottom. Now, to make my case:

Guys, I've come to the conclusion in my ponderings, that charity might not be all its chalked up to be. It may even be cringe. I mean on the surface, sure, it does seem like giving money, food and other resources and infrastructure to the needy is a laudable and admirable thing. And indeed it is, at least in the short term. The immediate effect that such actions have is positive, absolutely, but what my post is concerned about here are the detrementally negative long term effects of such actions.
First we must consider what charity is thought to be, and why people deem it necessary to the point of using public funds to similar ends. Charity can commonly be defined as the voluntary donation of one's own resources for the benefit of those in need. Seems rational, but the conditions of those helped never seem to improve beyond the immediate. To understand why this is, I think it's fundemental to first understand what it means to be needy. Personally I can think of a few scenarios where the conditions of an individual or a group would attract charity, namely different forms of crises like large scale conflicts and natural disaster, and economic factors like poverty and lack of economic freedom. In this post I want to focus in more on the economic factors, namely poverty, because I think those are the circumstances where we most often see the systematic structures that prevent wealth creation take place. Now we've arrived at a crucial point; what is poverty? Simply put, it's the condition in which one doesn't have the economic means to support his own or his household's basic wellbeing. This is the point where i'll cut off the definiton rabbithole, as I deem this level sufficient to understand the point I'm going to make.
So, again, to give a starving man a loaf of bread is an admirable act of charity, obviously. The problem is not individual acts of kindness, but large scale systematisation of charity targeted at a population. Wealth, the cure to poverty (yes, I will just impose that's the case), doesn't come from handouts, but must instead be supported by a societal mechanism, the economy. In an economy where supply of the most basic needs is solved by the charitable actions of outsider agents, the target populus of this "help" will not and cannot develop ways of solving these problems on their own. Imagine a town in which all housing, food and basic needs is provided to the townfolk automatically, like magic, some garden of eden type ****. What would be the point in such a town for anyone to put their own resources and effort to producing anything the magical provider already provides? It's not like they can find a benefit from it by helping others or themselves to these scarce resources as that need is already fulfilled. And if they can't find solutions to the basic problems in an economy there's really no way they can build a more complex economy to solve other needs, especially those outside their domain. By what signal would this populus even find ways to do do genuine exchange with the outside world? They produce nothing of their own the outside would find beneficial, and giving them money to do foreign exchange wouldn't change a thing since they still can't make their own money without exports rendering the whole system unsupportable and completely dependant on handouts.
I recon a much more effective way of doing charity to an economically suffering populus would be to purchase goods from them at a slightly inflated price. In such a way they are capable of deciding which activities build their economies in ways that generate revenue independantly of handouts. One efficient form of said "bonus pay", if you will, is private investment. Companies building factories and other forms of production in such countries would supply them with jobs that benefit both the domestic workers and the foreign investors and consumers. Sure, it may seem immoral to "export jobs" to countries suffering from poverty, taking production jobs from their countries of origin and giving them to foreigners, but I wager everybody is better off arranging things this way in the long run. The other perspective in which this may seem immoral is that the companies in this arrangement are "taking advantage" of cheap labor, but as I've established before, the poverty ridden populus is much better off developing a functioning economy than importing on a well meaning foreigner's dime. The effects of such an arrangement aren't immediate and therefore don't fulfill the charity giver's need to feel like they're helping.
"But what if we just funded charities that fund and help build infrastructure to help the impoverished nations to develop their economies?" Yeah, again, on the surface this seems like a great idea, but it runs into some issues. Imagine yourself as the head of such a project for some charity organisation. You're tasked with figuring out whether to build a well to bring water to a village, or to build infrastructure that brings them electricity. What steps do you take to figure out which solution wastes fewer of the well meaning charitable peoples generously donated, but limited resources? You must perform a cost-benefit-calculation of some sort, but without a functioning economy in the area, you can't determine which need is more urgent to these villagers. Not only that, but you can't even begin to calculate the cost of building either of the projects, since you lack relevant information about the resources, such as scarcity and if they're needed more acutely elsewhere. To factor in whether to build the well of electric lines, you need to take into account each individual's preferences and needs on which is more important, which materials are more or less abundant, which form of labour is more acutely needed elsewhere, and a million other factors. This type of calculation isn't hard for the charity planner to perform, but simply impossible. However, if the villagers were acting within a functioning market, the decision would be easy. Just pick the cheaper option. Built into the price of each option in total is factored in all of the relevant information about the resources needed, their scarcity, their demand, their profitability. It only makes sense, the resources will go toward the ends in which they produce the greatest amount of wealth, because thats where someone is willing to pay the most for them.
The bottom line here is that charity done outside a special event like a conflict or natural disaster is only a form of institutionalised helplessness, that we'd all be better off without. Or at least it should be carried out in drastically different ways than just lazy and gay handouts.

TL;DR: The effects of charitable action on impoverished populations are counterproductive in unexpected ways, though seemingly successful at first glance. The immediate effects are obvious and positive, give money to someone who needs it and they will buy what they need. But then what? They are in no better of a position, the can has just been kicked down the road. A true solution to the issue requires systems that create wealth and wellbeing within the population that requires charitable action, and that is impossible to do via central planning (big charities) due to lack of a free economy in the target population to guide resources to their most productive ends. Not to mention a too high of a level in infrastructure is impossible to keep up for an undeveloped economy, eventually leading up to them returning to square one. Money should flow into economies from abroad through exports, not handouts. Handouts have an overall negative long term effect.

There are a million and one other points about this that I had in my head but for the life of me I can't remember them right now, I might respond to this thread and expand on my thoughts on the issue, but that's all for now. I'd like to hear what you think about all this, please leave a response and vote on my little poll! Maybe I'll be active here again idk

a little post scriptum: lol i just remembered a couple topics regarding this, namely taxpayer funded foreign aid, tariffs, "but we extracted their resources", and a few other ones too, but i cant be bothered to add them to this rn, maybe later idk
ps2:also sorry this is mega ramble-y i didnt formulate this at all i just wrote
ps3: oh wow i had no filter 9 years ago my apologies if you find me potty-mouthing on the internet through these links hahaha

Links to my epic charity campaign from years past:
The iconic track charity bro by noob: https://www.freeriderhd.com/t/261407-charity-bro
Evidence of my overwhelming generosity:

 

woah really eye-opening perspective there. do you want the poor to starve you *******?

 

I’m confused

 

Tell me whats confusing to you about this and maybe I can clarify it a little. I understand that the way it’s written here is a little all over the place.

 

That was a lot for my high ass to read, but I think I get what you’re saying. But I think charity is great it makes me feel good. Charity is almost never about helping others in the way I think you mean, at least in my eyes. It’s about making yourself feel good, and look good to others. It also helps people. I don’t think they should be coddled and given a golden tit to suck from but a little boost here and there I’m sure goes a long way

 

in some ways im an early career 'expert' on just this - im a phd student studying an extremely poor part of the world in an adjacent field (not naming where or what as i work in a very niche space, genuine possibility of being doxxed given what ive shared on here before). ive worked in adjacent spaces to foreign aid for multiple years now, and have read much on this topic and heard much about this topic from people living in this region. ive interacted with foreign aid workers from my own country as well as from others. im going to reply to this thread as it seems genuine and i think can be educational. ill pick out parts as i go and give responses

it may seem this way due to a variety of reasons - selection bias, frequency illusion, negative reporting penetrating best through social/traditional media etc etc - but conditions are relatively and consistently improved by foreign aid (ill come back to this after). a brief search returns this exact result. this source is hardly perfect (4 years outdated, isnt a report or similarly academic source, comes from the world bank which although is a stringent source of information, has its own biases), but illustrates the point relatively well (even though it does highlight relevant limitations to researching global poverty) - extreme poverty has fallen by a huge amount in the past 70 years, and international development, foreign aid and foreign direct investment is a huge part of this alongside capitalism, free markets and democratic institutions (source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/estimates-global-poverty-wwii-fall-berlin-wall). there's also this fantastic peer-reviewed meta analysis published in a Q2 journal by mahembe and odhiambo, which is open access and id highly recommend you take a look at. i could only have a quick scan through the article, but they found "foreign aid has a positive impact on poverty, as reported by the majority of studies in both the non-momentary and monetary measures of poverty groups. This means that in general, foreign aid reduces poverty, irrespective of the type of poverty measures used." (source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2019.1625741#abstract)
coming back to relative improvements in conditions, to you or me, conditions may still seem absolutely terrible. it's pretty fair, i mean the world bank's definition of extreme poverty is living under $2.15 per day, which is obscene for us. idk about you, but even as a phd student making well under my country's minimum wage, i comfortably make over $100AUD per day. but the relative improvements to quality of life in the poorest of countries provided in no small part by development, foreign aid etc cannot be understated. take for example, something as simple as a village getting electric lamps installed on the streets and in homes. to you this may seem kind of silly, what good are lamps for helping poverty? but the outcome is that women are safer from gendered violence travelling between households, opening up options for them to work late in the day. violence in general drops. women can do household chores at night, men can do household chores at night, etc etc. it is improvements like this, that may not sound like they matter much at first blush, that make a huge difference over time.

funnily enough, the question 'what is poverty' is very close to the fundamental question of my phd research. your definition is a fine one, and indeed you recognise there's a huge rabbithole you can go down here. i just want to highlight (even if you are cognisant of this) that poverty seen in this way is inherently euro-centric and capitalistic. there's no inherent issue with this, just that people from different parts of the world see this issue in very different ways. many communities care little for wealth accumulation, but instead for things like happiness, leisure time, freedom etc. in which case, this definition is null and void. in many ways id consider 'poverty' as ontologically empty, it can mean extremely different things to many different people dependent on your gender, background, country of birth etc etc etc. it is socially constructed and fluid, even if institutions and states act as though it isnt

this to me reads like a fundamental misunderstanding of what foreign aid today looks like, which is fair. at one point in time, countries and institutions famously just threw money at problems and would experience these outcomes. i would argue, however, that foreign aid looks less and less like this. im going to use my own country as an example. let's look at australia's development programs in south east asia from DFAT (whose offices ive visited before and whose execs ive interacted with too!): https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/southeast-asia/development-cooperation. there we see programs that:
- scholarships for students of these countries to take advantage of our world-class education system, letting them take back knowledge and skills to their country
- clean energy and telecomms reform, and transport infrastructure improvement. this is done through partnering 109 aus organisations with 64 SEA counterpartr agencies to "engage in direct technical and policy exchanges to advance priority infrastructure issues in the region." this has led to cheaper transport costs, higher renewable energy storage capacity, and unlocked millions of dollars of spending in new projects in these countries made possible only by this program
- climate resilience program where we train experts in SEA about transnational crime, water security, resource security and much more
- investing in women's education, which is a classically proven way to alleviate poverty
this is just one set of examples from one part of the world. you can find much, much more in the pacific for example, where australia spends the most on foreign aid in this region in the world

this is a fair point. for example, corruption is a massive problem in many developing countries around the world, and is a massive driver of inequality, poverty etc. the average person clearly cannot solve this. foreign aid also cannot solve this directly. state sovereignty prevents outsiders from fixing such issues unilaterally. but corruption also plagues traditional trade and foreign direct investment. this is not a problem solely related to foreign aid. on the contrary, however, id argue corruption can be indirectly solved (or at least, weakened) by foreign aid. empowering the average citizen to stand up to corruption is the only real way outsiders can help a country overcome this issue, and the best form of empowerment is education. education is a fundamental part of foreign aid, whereas education has little involvement in something like trade. ergo, id argue still that foreign aid can overcome systemic economic issues from bottom-up, although it may take multiple generations to do so

there are many issues with this argument. the first is that countries and (especially) companies will never purchase goods at an inflated price for the sake of being a good global citizen. if you buy, let's say, wheat at an inflated price, then try and sell it in the domestic market for a much higher price than local wheat, no one is going to buy it. countries would essentially be throwing money away for the love of the game, when instead - through foreign aid - they could target outcomes, industries, populations etc they and their constituents care for the most (ie, women's education). on the other hand, if countries just bought things at a higher price from developing states in the vague hopes they use that money well, it more likely than not will not be used for development outcomes. corruption is a huge issue in many poor places around the world, by ceding control of how development money is spending, states are just burning cash
the private investment approach already kind of exists with foreign direct investment, which i personally prefer as states are at least beholden to voters and international law and norms, while companies are beholden first to shareholders and thus profit. im not sure if youre familiar with this at all, but recommend digging into more. ofc private investment also exists in the way you describe, but the ethics are very questionable and outcomes can often be worse after private companies get involved. papua new guinea is a great example of the severe downsides of mining, deep-sea mining and logging companies getting unfettered access to resources in exchange for money. here's just one source, but you can find hundreds on this issue: "It acknowledged that mining dominated the national economy but had not delivered broad-based development and recognised deep failures in how social impacts were understood and managed. Its core message was clear: social impacts could not be left to company discretion. They required stronger state capacity and coordination across the mining lifecycle." (source: https://devpolicy.org/whos-monitoring-the-social-impacts-of-pngs-mining-industry/)

this is kind of a bizarre take imo. it's no secret NGOs, IGOs, charities, states etc have wasted money especially in foreign aid, but theyre not just blindly guessing what a community needs (even if, historically, the ways in which theyve 'discovered' what a community most needs is flawed and ultimately wrong), and it isnt impossible to deduce just because a country's economy is poorly managed or inefficient. here's a very common approach: a mixed-method study is done prior to funding allocation to figure out what best fits a community's needs. an econometric analysis is done alongside qualitative survey of the local population. combined, officials then have a pretty solid foundation by which to make a decision off of. it's not impossible to find out what a community needs if such an approach is employed, and increasingly such approaches are used

to me your take feels like that coming from someone with an economics or finance or business background. the focus is very-much on the market, on trade liberalisation etc. this is not inherently bad, but is very outdated (this was the prevailing view of international development decades ago). poverty is a multidimensional issue that cannot be solved purely by economics. this is a core tenet of economics - humans are not rational creatures, and do not act or spend in such a way. money and numbers thus cannot ever be the core solution to such a human, imperfect, subjective and fluid problem. foreign aid and international development is flawed, but i think is strongly the best approach we have come up with so far. improvements to poverty and the human condition under foreign aid are incalculable, especially when you consider how little foreign aid is funded by governments, and how often it is the first type of funding cut (for example, foreign aid in australia does not even make up 1% of our budget source: https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/co...development-assistance-budget-summary-2025-26). it's such a cheap way for countries to improve their own conditions too - better developed countries create more wealth for everyone, are less likely to be security risks, are less likely to kick off a global pandemic... it just makes the most amount of sense wholistically

 

Idk about foreign aid but I work for a charity in the heritage sector and let me just tell you stakeholders pots growing is just as prevelant here compared to anywhere else and that the safety of the people and conservation of the site is not the primary objective no matter what you are told.

 

yeah ts too long ima stick to making terrible ghosts thanks