Mark, thanks for this article. I am finding the comments section here a bit odd. I think it is reasonable to quibble with the exact rates of increase in need but I think that there is a lot of lived experience that would suggest that the world is less stable and able to provide basic needs in many places that it was a few decades ago. The huge influx of migrants willing to risk trafficking and deadly crossings has increased so much that it has become a major political hot button issues in the US and all of Europe.
I also think the idea that a government in a poor nation can reasonably be expected to provide needs in a major crisis or that citizens themselves should be able just figure out how to build refugee camp without assistance or material aid is amazing. We live in a wealthy country with relatively well funded government at multiple layers but we still see Red Cross appeals to our citizens whenever there is a major natural disaster and huge influx of NGO assistance to that area in addition to our governmental response. It is surprising that governments with less capacity would need more help. Obviously one would hope that we would also spend foreign aid helping governments to create more resiliancy and capacity but that seem like a pipe dream in a situation where they can't keep their own people from starving in the midst of a crisis.
I think we can think of societies as having a bit of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If a significant portion their people don't have shelter, food, and emergency medical care, expecting then to tackle longer term issues like education, development, improved civil structures seems incredibly unlikely.
I know that most Americans don't support more foreign aid but they also grossly overestimate what we are providing. If we gave them a percentage of the budget that would meet these needs I don't think there would be nearly as much push back as asking if they want to increase aid from their imagined higher percentage. I think this would be especially true if we linked it to a need to increase world stability to avoid migration crisis. (Not my top motivation but apparently salient for many.)
Reality check is that given or demographics we will need to start allowing more immigration from the global south to meet needs for child care and elder care and maintain our workforce. Everyone else here appears more concerned than me that these be skilled workers but we can't expect a huge bank of skilled workers with positive associations with the United States if we let increasing parts of the globe fall into such chaos that their people can eat or provide any stability necessary for health and education.
This is an excellent piece. Puts so much in perspective. The stacked bar chart from Our World in Data on number of armed conflicts worldwide is especially helpful. Can anyone tell me how to find the specific examples behind the data displayed in that chart?
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.
An adjacent related YouTube video on the topic of why Africa has largely remained poor by the wonderful people at Economics Explained. Also super recommend the long form podcast episode on which this video was based from. Very enlightening.
I personally worked on flood mitigation and water resources management in Zambia & Mozambique for the World Bank in 2011-2015. These issues were well known.
The problem is that the governments, even when handed massive sums of money, cannot build & maintain the infrastructure needed to solve these problems.
Then there are massive floods and calls for more humanitarian aid.
After aggressively dismantling institutions of religion and colonialism in the West, it's hardly surprising that nations are increasingly parochial. Media fragmentation and the social media insulation also reduce the the scope of many people's perceived moral responsibility.
Institutions are essential for stable outcomes and addressing root causes. Any external enforcement of institutions is colonialism and on of many forms. Effectively the cost of killing colonialism is that many nations are saddled with failed institutions and despots. If the pitch is that we are morally accountable for the negative outcomes but morally forbidden to improve institutions, I'm feeling an awful lot like the sucker in this deal.
I don't really get this - is there a form of colonialism, either direct, real colonialism, or soft-through-NGOs-puppet-states colonialism, that would actually solve problems of governance. in poorly run countries? I mean, I guess if Pakistan, Ethiopia and. Haiti invited Sweden to run their country that **might** work, but that doesn't feel realistic in any world.
I think if you have the United States security responsibilities in Haiti, you'd immediately improve well-being. Security is a precondition for property rights and business investment.
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.
Same problem as Saturday's guest post: treats the political economy as a stumbling block for a problem that is 95% solved when the opposite is the case: most rich countries have powerful parties whose electoral appeal is that bureaucrats are stealing the (local) people's money to give to weird foreigners. Does the name "Donald Trump" mean anything to you? How about Marine Le Pen? Geert Wilders? Giorgia Meloni?
Yes, they're the political beneficiaries of the largest swell in displaced people since WW2, and the backlash that occurred. Politicians will contend with these problems somehow, whether it is in the time and manner of their choosing, or not. They shouldn't take a pennywise-pound-foolish approach to not boosting aid to deal with acute humanitarian crises.
I take from this a slightly different take than some of the skeptical voices below. My big beef with aid distribution is the percentage of aid given to known crises in the rich world compared to non-known ones. Unfortunately we likely know more about crises in comparatively rich countries than comparatively poor ones.
My thought we be that the UN should run this organization as a general insurance fund. Every country should pay a portion, and. then the aid agency should come hat in hand when there's a shortfall, but ALSO save any unused annual funs for a rainy day.
At a broader level, I find the idea of the "amount of humanitarian need" a really puzzling concept. I mean you can always spend more to help people more right [1]? And do we only count people who have been suddenly made worse off and not those who face chronic issues?
And, more generally, why do you specifically want to have a bucket of money for disaster/war/etc relief rather than just doing using money to do the most good per dollar? Like why doesn't this just fall under general 'charity'?
I mean, I think there are strong geo-political reasons to support Ukraine's resistance but is it better to use money to help people displaced by that conflict than to buy bed nets in sub-saharan Africa? I dunno. Maybe. People are loss averse but it doesn't seem different in kind.
---
1: Kinda the same way a city's 10 year housing needs is confused -- the more you build the lower prices get and the more people move in.
I have a number of issues with your claim of increasing amounts of armed conflict.
0) This statistic is heavily vulnerable to meaningless changes in how we choose to divide up conflicts. For instance, do we regard Israeli conflict with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas as 3 conflicts or one or two.
As I understand that the number of states has been increasing across the 20th century this alone is going to create a bias in the data (what would have been 1 conflict now counts as many).
2) A better data set to look at is deaths in armed conflicts. Even over the same period you examine it's hard to see any clear trend -- and that's not even taking into account the fact that the Ukraine conflict alone is responsible for a large chunk https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts
3) In the longer term our **decreasing** tolerance for atrocities likely inflates the number of conflicts. After all, the classic way to end a conflict was to just use extreme violence to force a surrender. In that sense it may be true there is greater need for aid -- the recipients are still alive.
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.
"This post spent a lot of words ignoring the basic political economy problem underlying funding foreign aid"
I've slowly concluded that this phrase really hits the nail on the head. Clearly, Goldberg thinks the funding mechanisms we had in place in 2005 worked. Why don't they work now? Just because more money is needed? But then why did they fail to scale up?
If dealing acute humanitarian disasters isn't great from a popularist perspective, I would argue that allowing them to fester and dealing with refugee crises also isn't exactly great. Sure, public health stuff might have more long-term impact on growth, but eating right and exercising is no substitute for having access to an emergency room.
Frankly, the money that we're talking about is a tiny fraction of rich world GDP. Expanding the pie would make everyone better off, even if we focus on effectiveness.
Well, that's a problem for the next administration to deal with :)
In all seriousness though, I don't disagree with you, there are both instrumental and moral arguments for spending more on foreign aid that I find quite compelling. This doesn't change the fact that foreign aid has terrible polling, and political elites can only defy voters to a certain extent before they get punished for it.
Voters systemically overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid. I'm generally not a fan of, "it won't make a political difference," but I think that generally applies here. Cutting aid from 1% of the budget to 0.5% is small potatoes. Anyone who thinks that it isn't massively overrates the cost of aid to begin with. Effectiveness should be a top priority, but whatever support you gain from budget cuts is probably swamped by increasing the odds of a future migrant crisis.
Mark, thanks for this article. I am finding the comments section here a bit odd. I think it is reasonable to quibble with the exact rates of increase in need but I think that there is a lot of lived experience that would suggest that the world is less stable and able to provide basic needs in many places that it was a few decades ago. The huge influx of migrants willing to risk trafficking and deadly crossings has increased so much that it has become a major political hot button issues in the US and all of Europe.
I also think the idea that a government in a poor nation can reasonably be expected to provide needs in a major crisis or that citizens themselves should be able just figure out how to build refugee camp without assistance or material aid is amazing. We live in a wealthy country with relatively well funded government at multiple layers but we still see Red Cross appeals to our citizens whenever there is a major natural disaster and huge influx of NGO assistance to that area in addition to our governmental response. It is surprising that governments with less capacity would need more help. Obviously one would hope that we would also spend foreign aid helping governments to create more resiliancy and capacity but that seem like a pipe dream in a situation where they can't keep their own people from starving in the midst of a crisis.
I think we can think of societies as having a bit of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If a significant portion their people don't have shelter, food, and emergency medical care, expecting then to tackle longer term issues like education, development, improved civil structures seems incredibly unlikely.
I know that most Americans don't support more foreign aid but they also grossly overestimate what we are providing. If we gave them a percentage of the budget that would meet these needs I don't think there would be nearly as much push back as asking if they want to increase aid from their imagined higher percentage. I think this would be especially true if we linked it to a need to increase world stability to avoid migration crisis. (Not my top motivation but apparently salient for many.)
Reality check is that given or demographics we will need to start allowing more immigration from the global south to meet needs for child care and elder care and maintain our workforce. Everyone else here appears more concerned than me that these be skilled workers but we can't expect a huge bank of skilled workers with positive associations with the United States if we let increasing parts of the globe fall into such chaos that their people can eat or provide any stability necessary for health and education.
This is an excellent piece. Puts so much in perspective. The stacked bar chart from Our World in Data on number of armed conflicts worldwide is especially helpful. Can anyone tell me how to find the specific examples behind the data displayed in that chart?
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.
I'm bookmarking this comments section for the next time someone claims that female guest writers on this site just get criticism because of sexism.
😂
An adjacent related YouTube video on the topic of why Africa has largely remained poor by the wonderful people at Economics Explained. Also super recommend the long form podcast episode on which this video was based from. Very enlightening.
https://youtu.be/1k8TXQWVsoI?si=GDOQVFnb676O3P_o
I personally worked on flood mitigation and water resources management in Zambia & Mozambique for the World Bank in 2011-2015. These issues were well known.
The problem is that the governments, even when handed massive sums of money, cannot build & maintain the infrastructure needed to solve these problems.
Then there are massive floods and calls for more humanitarian aid.
After aggressively dismantling institutions of religion and colonialism in the West, it's hardly surprising that nations are increasingly parochial. Media fragmentation and the social media insulation also reduce the the scope of many people's perceived moral responsibility.
Institutions are essential for stable outcomes and addressing root causes. Any external enforcement of institutions is colonialism and on of many forms. Effectively the cost of killing colonialism is that many nations are saddled with failed institutions and despots. If the pitch is that we are morally accountable for the negative outcomes but morally forbidden to improve institutions, I'm feeling an awful lot like the sucker in this deal.
I don't really get this - is there a form of colonialism, either direct, real colonialism, or soft-through-NGOs-puppet-states colonialism, that would actually solve problems of governance. in poorly run countries? I mean, I guess if Pakistan, Ethiopia and. Haiti invited Sweden to run their country that **might** work, but that doesn't feel realistic in any world.
I think if you have the United States security responsibilities in Haiti, you'd immediately improve well-being. Security is a precondition for property rights and business investment.
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.
On the one hand, I agree with the general idea that agencies that help starving people should get the funding they need.
On the other hand, I’m old enough to have seen this cycle repeated many times and I have to wonder if there is better way.
Same problem as Saturday's guest post: treats the political economy as a stumbling block for a problem that is 95% solved when the opposite is the case: most rich countries have powerful parties whose electoral appeal is that bureaucrats are stealing the (local) people's money to give to weird foreigners. Does the name "Donald Trump" mean anything to you? How about Marine Le Pen? Geert Wilders? Giorgia Meloni?
Yes, they're the political beneficiaries of the largest swell in displaced people since WW2, and the backlash that occurred. Politicians will contend with these problems somehow, whether it is in the time and manner of their choosing, or not. They shouldn't take a pennywise-pound-foolish approach to not boosting aid to deal with acute humanitarian crises.
I take from this a slightly different take than some of the skeptical voices below. My big beef with aid distribution is the percentage of aid given to known crises in the rich world compared to non-known ones. Unfortunately we likely know more about crises in comparatively rich countries than comparatively poor ones.
My thought we be that the UN should run this organization as a general insurance fund. Every country should pay a portion, and. then the aid agency should come hat in hand when there's a shortfall, but ALSO save any unused annual funs for a rainy day.
My 2 cents.
At a broader level, I find the idea of the "amount of humanitarian need" a really puzzling concept. I mean you can always spend more to help people more right [1]? And do we only count people who have been suddenly made worse off and not those who face chronic issues?
And, more generally, why do you specifically want to have a bucket of money for disaster/war/etc relief rather than just doing using money to do the most good per dollar? Like why doesn't this just fall under general 'charity'?
I mean, I think there are strong geo-political reasons to support Ukraine's resistance but is it better to use money to help people displaced by that conflict than to buy bed nets in sub-saharan Africa? I dunno. Maybe. People are loss averse but it doesn't seem different in kind.
---
1: Kinda the same way a city's 10 year housing needs is confused -- the more you build the lower prices get and the more people move in.
I have a number of issues with your claim of increasing amounts of armed conflict.
0) This statistic is heavily vulnerable to meaningless changes in how we choose to divide up conflicts. For instance, do we regard Israeli conflict with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas as 3 conflicts or one or two.
As I understand that the number of states has been increasing across the 20th century this alone is going to create a bias in the data (what would have been 1 conflict now counts as many).
1) The same source gives a very different picture on its summary of wars rather than armed conflict even though that also includes non-state conflicts, extrastate, interstate etc conflicts: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-wars-correlates-of-war?time=1963..latest
2) A better data set to look at is deaths in armed conflicts. Even over the same period you examine it's hard to see any clear trend -- and that's not even taking into account the fact that the Ukraine conflict alone is responsible for a large chunk https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts
3) In the longer term our **decreasing** tolerance for atrocities likely inflates the number of conflicts. After all, the classic way to end a conflict was to just use extreme violence to force a surrender. In that sense it may be true there is greater need for aid -- the recipients are still alive.
This was an eye opening piece... Thanks for the info Mark.
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.
"This post spent a lot of words ignoring the basic political economy problem underlying funding foreign aid"
I've slowly concluded that this phrase really hits the nail on the head. Clearly, Goldberg thinks the funding mechanisms we had in place in 2005 worked. Why don't they work now? Just because more money is needed? But then why did they fail to scale up?
If dealing acute humanitarian disasters isn't great from a popularist perspective, I would argue that allowing them to fester and dealing with refugee crises also isn't exactly great. Sure, public health stuff might have more long-term impact on growth, but eating right and exercising is no substitute for having access to an emergency room.
Frankly, the money that we're talking about is a tiny fraction of rich world GDP. Expanding the pie would make everyone better off, even if we focus on effectiveness.
Well, that's a problem for the next administration to deal with :)
In all seriousness though, I don't disagree with you, there are both instrumental and moral arguments for spending more on foreign aid that I find quite compelling. This doesn't change the fact that foreign aid has terrible polling, and political elites can only defy voters to a certain extent before they get punished for it.
Voters systemically overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid. I'm generally not a fan of, "it won't make a political difference," but I think that generally applies here. Cutting aid from 1% of the budget to 0.5% is small potatoes. Anyone who thinks that it isn't massively overrates the cost of aid to begin with. Effectiveness should be a top priority, but whatever support you gain from budget cuts is probably swamped by increasing the odds of a future migrant crisis.