Welp! The scenario zalzane described doesn't actually occur very much and that was my problem.
Bill Gates, USAID, or nearly any non-profit would refuse to just give money or free things to people anymore. It's all money for projects or loans (microfinance, like giving a farmer money for tools, has become incredibly widespread over the last 20 years).
Problems with a Cold War term like "third world" aside, corruption and graft are not a reason to not donate money to aid organizations in an emergency or on an ongoing basis. It's just a reason to target your money better and I'm glad that was said by a few posters.
Ah, that's good to hear. I thought microfinance became widespread much more recently than that.
It's just hard to believe things are hunky-dory when you see tons of ads for bullshit like Christian Children's Fund on the boob tube (nothing against Christian generosity, it's a bad charity, at least as they present it in the ads), and read of
shenanigans like this all the time. A few years ago my local newspaper had a scathing investigative piece on charities based nearby whose bigwigs were paying themselves handsomely.
Charities are immediately dubious because they claim to help people. Yet at worst, you entrust money to a middleman who pockets it or wastes it, with neither provider nor middleman considering the supposed recipient of the charity. You can contrast this with for-profit corporations, which legitimately claim to provide good products and services in exchange for money, despite their methods being unethical (or amoral) most of the time. You can trust a corporation to do whatever it takes to make a buck. With charities it's up in the air.
There's nothing systematically optimizing charities to do what they're meant to. Some do, some don't. Nothing forces under ones that don't.
How do you make average Joes and Janes cautious about what they give to without putting them off donating altogether? You gotta have some kind of contingency as our society slides from high- to low-trust.
Ending poverty has a lot more to it than just developing nations, because, erm... there's a fuckload of poor people in developed nations too. It's just that we have more substantial safety nets (food stamps, community action agencies, unemployment insurance, etc.) than other, less well-to-do nations.
True. However, most safety nets in developed countries reduce people to strictly economic terms, so lie somewhere between inadequate and nefarious.
please rate this burn. your feedback is valuable!
Woulda been a wicked sick burn except I did get my degree and all I have to show for it is a fat paper about Chinese aid in Africa :/
LOL I regret going to uni. Might as well give my degree to high schoolers as top-tier roach paper.
Hope you at least don't shoulder massive debt.
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