Sorry- accidentally pressed “send”. Counter-intuitive stuff happens because politics is complicated, foreign aid is just one small part of foreign affairs, and/or there are short or long term objectives that make it make sense in the long run.
Pakistan in this case, It amazes me that they are willing for a large part of their population to live in poverty so that they can have a bomb
That’s always been my biggest problem with a lot of foreign aid; the notion that these nations will spend their money on armaments and other relatively frivolous stuff in lieu of doing things that (I’d think) most Western countries would consider fundamental infrastructural and public health improvements. Their priorities seem far out of whack to me.
Case in point- WTF is India doing with aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and the like, when some colossal percentage of their population doesn’t even have access to toilets and have to shit out in the open? That seems nearly criminally irresponsible to me, and more irresponsible for Western nations to continue to give them aid without requiring them to fix such problems. Closer to home, Mexico isn’t a poor country when compared to the rest of the world. And they have a lot of industry, etc… but never have managed to get their shit together to have drinkable water. Yet they have a military budget of 11.6 billion US dollars… to fight drug lords and Guatemala. :rolleyes: If they diverted say… 4 billion a year, how long would it take them to modernize their water and sewer systems? And we still keep giving them foreign aid.
What, like the US Congress :dubious:
Well, the so-called 'weird stuff" is still happening. After the 2010 earthquake, billions in “aid” poured into Haiti-and an emerging class of “NGO” crooks showed up to steal most of it. the funniest/saddest thing was the results-they built a model town to house homeless people-only it was too far away from the city (and jobs), so nobody wanted to live there-then thieves moved in and dismantled the houses…$50 million down the drain. Then there was a 12 story luxury hotel built…which sits empty. The point is, all of this largess is dispensed by people who want as big a “cut” for themselves as possible-whether or not it serves the interests of the poor is irrelevant.
:dubious:
Pakistan’s poverty rate is 12.4% in 2011, compared with something like 60% at independence from the UK in 1947. In that time the population has more then doubled. Still big.
The cost of the main infrastructure for nuclear weapons was actually quite modest, about$150 million in 1992 dollars.
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case in point- WTF is India doing with aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and the like, when some colossal percentage of their population doesn’t even have access to toilets and have to shit out in the open? That seems nearly criminally irresponsible to me, and more irresponsible for Western nations to continue to give them aid without requiring them to fix such problems. Closer to home, Mexico isn’t a poor country when compared to the rest of the world. And they have a lot of industry, etc… but never have managed to get their shit together to have drinkable water. Yet they have a military budget of 11.6 billion US dollars… to fight drug lords and Guatemala. If they diverted say… 4 billion a year, how long would it take them to modernize their water and sewer systems? And we still keep giving them foreign aid.
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India military expenditure as % of GDP; 2.4
Mexico: 0.59%
United States: 4.35%/
As for diverting 4 billion away from their military budget, what will happen is not that they will suddenly have monies for social services, what it will mean is that many soldiers and retired soldiers will suddenly have reduced or no pay and pensions. I somehow don’t think that it will make Mexico a safer place.
Repeat after me, a country’s budget is not like a household budget,
There are a bunch of misconceptions in the case that you have picked.
The first misconception is quite generally applicable, the idea that national security is somehow less important to the well-being of people than toilets. As Syria is demonstrating these days, it isn’t, and is quite likely more important, not to mention that India is impoverished to such great extent at least in part because of its legacy as a colonised country, which, in turn, happened because the region wasn’t secure enough militarily.
The second misconception is that if you switched out military spending and threw that money at sanitation, you would fix the problem. This is again simply not true. Many of India’s governance structures and institutions don’t function very efficiently. Throwing more money at it(which btw is being done) is not a solutionto the problem
As I’ve said before, the many SDMB threads on low adoption of bidet sprays in the US show that getting people to change to a superior toilet system isn’t as easy as you may think at first 
The third misconception is that aid donors to India, on the basis of that aid, have much leverage in what India does. India received aid to the order of 3 billion dollars (much of which would have been in the form of loans) in 2014. In 2014-15, the size of the Indian economy was estimated at 2.1 trillion dollars, putting the aid at approximately 0.15% of the economy.
As to the question of the thread itself, I generally find myself in agreement with the views of Bill Easterly, economics professor at NYU, who is largely skeptical of the postive impact of aid. From the wiki
So what? Our water’s drinkable, and we don’t shit outside in the street.
Tell that to Flint, Michigan.
If only the left understood this to be true about most free products and services.
Governance and corruption is tricky. Corruption is a coping device for weak governments. When you cannot control your remote regions, you outsource it to local warlords. When you cannot collect enough taxes to adequately pay civil servants, you allow them to supplement their salary with bribes. WHen you cannot get the people behind you, you rely on patronage politics to keep things moving.
So the answer to corruption is not “just be less corrupt”. It’s to have governments that they can do things like control their territory, raise taxes and provide government services, and operate according to meritocracy rather than patronage. That’s how developed countries keep developing sustainably. And you can’t do these things with a weak government.
I’m not sure who this is addressed to, nor what exact point you’re making, but one (IMO accurate) criticism of aid money is precisely that it fosters corruption and props up patronage politics.
Welfare Mama is cutting up her food stamps to make a fishing net?
Much of US wealth is based on Americas past exploitation of slaves. Many of Africa’s problems are the result of European colonialism.
The West owes at least some help to Developing Nations.
If the West stopped sending help, tens of millions of people will lose their lives from hunger. That is genocide.
No. Just that which is freely given is quite often not treated with respect.
You should have stopped while you were ahead at least a little. Cutting aid may be helpful in the long term, hurtful in the short term or have any combination of effects both positive and negative but it certainly isn’t genocide. Genocide doesn’t simply mean a situation in which lots of people die through circumstance.
If millions people in Sub Saharan Africa will die due to the denial of humanitarian help that would be causing deaths of these people. I hope it does not happen.
“Millions” of people are not going to starve if aid suddenly disappears. Relatively few places are in famine conditions at any given time. What is likely to happen is:
- More states will fail, some spectacularly, creating untold human misery. Additionally, failed states will create terrorist havens, refugee streams and other security issues with global implications.
- China will play a more prominent role globally, as they become the dominant foreign power in Africa. Radical ideologies will also find fertile ground as people look to connect themselves globally.
- Deforestation, desertification, poaching and environmental degradation of all types will ramp up, leading to extinctions and the permanent destruction of once fertile land. This, in turn, will lead to more conflict, famine, and natural disaster as people eek out a living on less and less productive land.
- Infectious disease will rise as health systems fail. In the meantime, new zoonotic diseases are likely to emerge as humans cut deeper and deeper into the rainforest. Drug-resistant strains of existing diseases (malaria, TB, etc.) will also emerge as the counterfeit medicine business gains strength. These diseases are likely to spread globally, especially if health surveillance systems go unfunded.
- Progress against HIV will begin to reverse. Beyond the misery and lost productivity this causes, we may see new and worrying types of drug resistance which, again, can spread globally.
- Reverses in health, education, and other relevant areas will slow economic growth. This will have a global impact as a billion-person market that is currently booming goes in to decline.
The pattern here is that all of these things affect us directly. Africa’s well-being has a direct impact on our ability to stay safe, prosperous and healthy.