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).
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!)
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.
I don't disagree with this but I think more reliable funding mechanisms need to be linked to some serious reforms at the major aid agencies, particularly the World Food Programme.
WFP has raised enormous amounts of money off the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan by describing it as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis", which isn't consistent with the detailed monitoring done by the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). It's also not consistent with the evidence on the ground: I live in Kabul and although this is a poor country, people aren't dying of starvation. (I suspect WFP thinks hungry Afghans are an easier sell to donors than hungry Africans.)
There are also serious questions about how WFP spends its budget in Afghanistan. They claim to be providing food aid to a large fraction of the population, but there's some evidence from survey data that they've greatly exaggerated the number of households they reach. All that money has to be going somewhere..
This article strikes me as pretty remarkably tone deaf. The basic message is "this policy is politically unpopular but our funding 'requirements' are continually spiraling upwards, pay up!".
I think what may be effective is centering donor concerns. I don't know what those are but I could imagine demonstrating that foreign aid fosters so much economic growth that even donor countries get richer, or foreign aid is a very cost effective way of combating illegal immigration and terrorism. I know there's like two lines about that at the end but with no evidence.
Is there any sort of limiting principle here as to how much money you’re expecting from donor countries? Cause I’m not hearing it in “Our costs have increased tenfold and will continue to indefinitely, now pay up”.
I'm okay with humanitarian aid, so long as it doesn't get used to fund the construction of terror tunnels and the expansion of the arsenal of terror organizations.
Wow harsh comment section. I think this is a really important issue and thank you for highlighting this year’s Global Humanitarian Review and the historic shortfall in humanitarian appeals funded in 2023. The chart indicates that prior years about 50% or more of appeals were funded and in 2023 it was about 1/3, with the absolute amount funded less than that in 2022. And there does seems to be evidence that conflict-related violence has been increasing if you look more broadly than formal interstate armed conflict (see the charts at the Upsalla Conflict Data Program), as well as a recognized El Niño impact on droughts.
I’m hoping as the morning goes on there will be comments other than skepticism. For example is there something that needs to be done to this funding mechanism? El Niño at least seems foreseeable, are annual appeals the best approach? Or if there is a general skepticism of the self reporting nature of the funding appeals, is there a an objective third party assessment of those appeals and would that help?
I enjoyed the post and think it is covering an important set of observations. There are a lot of good responses poking at the obvious holes in this piece's arguments, many of which I agree with, but here's another:
"We can’t innovate ourselves out of this."
Almost inevitably, when I read a sentence like this, it turns out to hinge entirely on the chosen definitions of "we" and "this." The aid organizations can't innovate their way out of having funding gaps to meet immediate humanitarian needs, that's true. But I'm not in that "we," and neither is the author. And if you instead asked, "What would it mean for the world to innovate it's way out of the problem of so many people suffering due to natural and man-made disasters?", well, it isn't easy to *do,* but it's easy to see the shape of what it might look like if we wanted to do it. It looks like a world of cheap, reliable, abundant clean energy, cheap desalination and other water technology, better institutions and infrastructure in the world's currently-poor countries, maybe cheap robotics and controlled environment agriculture that can make food production more stable and abundant. None of these problems are unsolvable, just hard. All of them are the kinds of things we're *already* trying to do and scale up in developed countries as a response to climate change, and the normal processes of economic development should then bring them to the rest of the world over time.
Note: There's a good chance solving them would look like the unmet need numbers in these graphs going *up* as the world refocuses it's efforts on harder problems in more expensive regions.
Thanks for all the engagement, everyone! I've covered the UN since 2005. I'd be glad to take a few questions about this piece or anything related to the United Nations.
Foreign aid is like climate change, but more so - an important topic that political elites care much more about addressing than the median voter does. This post spent a lot of words ignoring the basic political economy problem underlying funding foreign aid, while being oddly incurious about whether or not disaster relief is the best use of limited foreign aid dollars (how does it compare to vaccination programs or vitamin A supplementation, for example?).
All of which is to say, this post really needed an editor to ask some critical questions of it.
"As of last month, aid agencies required $46.1 billion to assist 184.1 million people. Thus far, they’ve received only about $4.4 billion toward that total, leaving over $40 billion in unmet requirements."
If the aid agencies received an extra $40 billion, how would they even be able to spend that kind of money, lets alone spend it effectively? They need to hire people who will make effective plans to purchase equipment and food. They would need effective plans to get the food to those that need it, using the newly purchased equipment that needs to get to where it needs to go. Organised and trained militaries would struggle with this. Aid agencies would struggle harder.
I don't want to be a cynic about this -- we should err on the side of being overly generous -- but this post raises more questions than it answers and is ultimately unconvincing.
The need for humanitarian assistance has gone up 600% in just 11 years? Has the world become *that* different in just over a decade? Goldberg just waves his hand at that -- it's conflicts and climate change -- and explains no further. (I note that the chart with # of conflicts -- a very poor metric -- shows just a 50% increase since 2012 after a quarter century lull -- and why is that?) If we as readers want to be motivated to think more about this, we need a much deeper dive into exactly what has been happening in this short period of time and what that portends for the future. You can't just basically stipulate that this is an exploding crisis without giving far more context. I mean, his own chart shows that humanitarian assistance has gone up four or five times in the same time period, which is actually pretty impressive but *why* has this need grown so much?
Sometimes before you can pound the table and say "we need to do more" you have to do your due diligence to explain better to your audience as to why. This post falls short of the mark.
Also WTF is a climate disaster and how do we know they are increasing?!? This kind of sloppy appeal to global warming to justify whatever kind of claim about decline you want to make is not only unscientific it's part of the reason we still have so many climate change doubters.
All the IPCC tells us is that global warming is likely to increase the occurance of heavy precipitation, extreme high temps, hurricanes (medium confidence) [1]. But (other than high temps) it's hard to say we even see those signals with high statistical significance in the yearly averages yet, calling any particular event a climate disaster doesn't even make sense.
And no it's not ok to just equate climate change harms with everything getting worse. For instance, if climate change causes people to migrate maybe they move places less affected by acute disasters. Climate change isn't just a stand in for whatever bad shit you want to argue is going to happen and treating it like that needs to be called out as unscientific.
--
1: Also droughts in some areas but not clear if that means overall.
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!)
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.
I don't disagree with this but I think more reliable funding mechanisms need to be linked to some serious reforms at the major aid agencies, particularly the World Food Programme.
WFP has raised enormous amounts of money off the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan by describing it as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis", which isn't consistent with the detailed monitoring done by the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). It's also not consistent with the evidence on the ground: I live in Kabul and although this is a poor country, people aren't dying of starvation. (I suspect WFP thinks hungry Afghans are an easier sell to donors than hungry Africans.)
There are also serious questions about how WFP spends its budget in Afghanistan. They claim to be providing food aid to a large fraction of the population, but there's some evidence from survey data that they've greatly exaggerated the number of households they reach. All that money has to be going somewhere..
This article strikes me as pretty remarkably tone deaf. The basic message is "this policy is politically unpopular but our funding 'requirements' are continually spiraling upwards, pay up!".
I think what may be effective is centering donor concerns. I don't know what those are but I could imagine demonstrating that foreign aid fosters so much economic growth that even donor countries get richer, or foreign aid is a very cost effective way of combating illegal immigration and terrorism. I know there's like two lines about that at the end but with no evidence.
Is there any sort of limiting principle here as to how much money you’re expecting from donor countries? Cause I’m not hearing it in “Our costs have increased tenfold and will continue to indefinitely, now pay up”.
I'm okay with humanitarian aid, so long as it doesn't get used to fund the construction of terror tunnels and the expansion of the arsenal of terror organizations.
Wow harsh comment section. I think this is a really important issue and thank you for highlighting this year’s Global Humanitarian Review and the historic shortfall in humanitarian appeals funded in 2023. The chart indicates that prior years about 50% or more of appeals were funded and in 2023 it was about 1/3, with the absolute amount funded less than that in 2022. And there does seems to be evidence that conflict-related violence has been increasing if you look more broadly than formal interstate armed conflict (see the charts at the Upsalla Conflict Data Program), as well as a recognized El Niño impact on droughts.
I’m hoping as the morning goes on there will be comments other than skepticism. For example is there something that needs to be done to this funding mechanism? El Niño at least seems foreseeable, are annual appeals the best approach? Or if there is a general skepticism of the self reporting nature of the funding appeals, is there a an objective third party assessment of those appeals and would that help?
I enjoyed the post and think it is covering an important set of observations. There are a lot of good responses poking at the obvious holes in this piece's arguments, many of which I agree with, but here's another:
"We can’t innovate ourselves out of this."
Almost inevitably, when I read a sentence like this, it turns out to hinge entirely on the chosen definitions of "we" and "this." The aid organizations can't innovate their way out of having funding gaps to meet immediate humanitarian needs, that's true. But I'm not in that "we," and neither is the author. And if you instead asked, "What would it mean for the world to innovate it's way out of the problem of so many people suffering due to natural and man-made disasters?", well, it isn't easy to *do,* but it's easy to see the shape of what it might look like if we wanted to do it. It looks like a world of cheap, reliable, abundant clean energy, cheap desalination and other water technology, better institutions and infrastructure in the world's currently-poor countries, maybe cheap robotics and controlled environment agriculture that can make food production more stable and abundant. None of these problems are unsolvable, just hard. All of them are the kinds of things we're *already* trying to do and scale up in developed countries as a response to climate change, and the normal processes of economic development should then bring them to the rest of the world over time.
Note: There's a good chance solving them would look like the unmet need numbers in these graphs going *up* as the world refocuses it's efforts on harder problems in more expensive regions.
Thanks for all the engagement, everyone! I've covered the UN since 2005. I'd be glad to take a few questions about this piece or anything related to the United Nations.
Is this another example of cost disease?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
Foreign aid is like climate change, but more so - an important topic that political elites care much more about addressing than the median voter does. This post spent a lot of words ignoring the basic political economy problem underlying funding foreign aid, while being oddly incurious about whether or not disaster relief is the best use of limited foreign aid dollars (how does it compare to vaccination programs or vitamin A supplementation, for example?).
All of which is to say, this post really needed an editor to ask some critical questions of it.
“We all know that climate related disasters have been steadily growing and can only be expected to increase in the years ahead.”
- citation needed
"As of last month, aid agencies required $46.1 billion to assist 184.1 million people. Thus far, they’ve received only about $4.4 billion toward that total, leaving over $40 billion in unmet requirements."
If the aid agencies received an extra $40 billion, how would they even be able to spend that kind of money, lets alone spend it effectively? They need to hire people who will make effective plans to purchase equipment and food. They would need effective plans to get the food to those that need it, using the newly purchased equipment that needs to get to where it needs to go. Organised and trained militaries would struggle with this. Aid agencies would struggle harder.
This just in: guy wants more money
I don't want to be a cynic about this -- we should err on the side of being overly generous -- but this post raises more questions than it answers and is ultimately unconvincing.
The need for humanitarian assistance has gone up 600% in just 11 years? Has the world become *that* different in just over a decade? Goldberg just waves his hand at that -- it's conflicts and climate change -- and explains no further. (I note that the chart with # of conflicts -- a very poor metric -- shows just a 50% increase since 2012 after a quarter century lull -- and why is that?) If we as readers want to be motivated to think more about this, we need a much deeper dive into exactly what has been happening in this short period of time and what that portends for the future. You can't just basically stipulate that this is an exploding crisis without giving far more context. I mean, his own chart shows that humanitarian assistance has gone up four or five times in the same time period, which is actually pretty impressive but *why* has this need grown so much?
Sometimes before you can pound the table and say "we need to do more" you have to do your due diligence to explain better to your audience as to why. This post falls short of the mark.
Also WTF is a climate disaster and how do we know they are increasing?!? This kind of sloppy appeal to global warming to justify whatever kind of claim about decline you want to make is not only unscientific it's part of the reason we still have so many climate change doubters.
All the IPCC tells us is that global warming is likely to increase the occurance of heavy precipitation, extreme high temps, hurricanes (medium confidence) [1]. But (other than high temps) it's hard to say we even see those signals with high statistical significance in the yearly averages yet, calling any particular event a climate disaster doesn't even make sense.
And no it's not ok to just equate climate change harms with everything getting worse. For instance, if climate change causes people to migrate maybe they move places less affected by acute disasters. Climate change isn't just a stand in for whatever bad shit you want to argue is going to happen and treating it like that needs to be called out as unscientific.
--
1: Also droughts in some areas but not clear if that means overall.