Discussion about this post

User's avatar
JA's avatar

The premise that we are living in an era of unprecedented crisis seems... implausible, to say the least. It seems even stranger to extrapolate these trends into the future.

1. We aren't living in a particularly violent time. Global deaths from armed conflict are much, much lower than in the 1970s-80s. (This isn't captured by the questionable "number of armed conflicts" statistic cited by the author.) We're experiencing a small blip from an extremely low trough in about 2010, and there's no reason not to expect reversion downward, as in previous blips. (Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars?time=1958..latest).

2. The idea that the humanitarian impact of natural disasters is higher than in the past is also doubtful. Despite the increased incidence of disasters, improvements in technology to protect people from disasters have more than compensated for the higher risk. (See again: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#:~:text=In%20most%20years%2C%20the%20death,tens%20to%20hundreds%20of%20thousands.)

3. Using aid organizations' "required" amounts of funding as an estimate of the scale of the crisis suffers from obvious drawbacks. These figures will grow along with economic growth due to both increases in costs and increases in donors' perceived wealth. These numbers may indicate a plausible amount that aid organizations expect they *can* raise rather than what they actually "need". (Note that the fraction of required funding received is actually pretty stable!)

Expand full comment
John from FL's avatar

The countries you mention are poor. They've been poor since I was a young child, being told to finish my vegetables because "children in Africa are starving". And organizations like Oxfam, Save the Children and the UN Agencies have been taking in money and distributing aid for decades.

Are those NGOs advocating, pursuing or even going so far as to distribute aid on the basis of which countries are pursuing policies that will make them resilient to conflicts or climate change (the ever-present bugaboo)? Representative government, the rule of law, market economies, low corruption and respect for private property are the proven path to becoming rich enough to not need aid every time the weather doesn't cooperate.

Forgive me of my hard heart if the same superficial appeals I've been hearing for decades don't move me very much.

Expand full comment
186 more comments...

No posts