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!)
Obviously, in the long run the world is far safer and we have a better technological capacity to protect against disasters and ensuing humanitarian crises.
But as the author notes, climate change and an increasingly destabilized international order is leading to more crisis in the coming decades.
Just because things are better than the past, that doesn’t mean it’s not morally important to do better now. Similar theme to the anti-doomscrolling piece last week
I'm not so sure about this. Of course it's always important to do better now, even if we're just seeing a blip that will eventually mean-revert to the long-term downwards trend.
This isn't what the article argues, however. The author seems to view the current moment as a harbinger of a complete reversal in the trends of the past decades. (Hence the extrapolation to "1 billion" people in need of humanitarian aid.)
If someone asked me to bet on whether the severity of humanitarian crises would be greater in 2024 or 2044, I'd bet money on 2024.
The 2024 vs 2044 example is a really good question, and I think it's dependent on a bunch of hypotheticals that we just don't know! Ie. the trends of interstate conflict, our technological capacity to alleviate hunger and illness, and how climate change bears out (although a lot of models have it worsening later in the 21st century).
Putting that aside though, I think the core of this piece is that we're underfunding humanitarian crisis. And with the scale of crisis undeniably increasing (which is in part, I imagine, due to population growth of vulnerable areas) it's important for wealthier countries to act.
His chart shows a 400-500% increase in humanitarian assistance in the past ~12 years. We're "underfunding" because of a stipulated 600% increase over the same time period. Given JA's excellent comments, I'm suspicious of that 600% figure and therefore I'm not convinced that we're really underfunding anything.
And yes, as wealthy countries we should act. But we already increased assistance over 400%!
I edited the comment, because you're right, the Ukraine funding issue is generally understood from a military funding perspective. But I was referring to this sentence in the piece: "The big exception are conflicts or disasters that directly impact the core interests of major donors. For example, the 2022 Ukraine “flash appeal” was overfunded by about $300 million."
Still, what that point is generally getting at that (and I think many in the SB commentariat will sympathize with this), is that humanitarian catastrophes like Palestine and Ukraine generally get more attention than the epic drought in South Africa. And that is a problem.
This is true, and it's human nature. The Red Cross gets way too much money in the wake of a natural disaster, and then uses some of that money to fund other less visible causes.
And even if one could perfectly demonstrate there is zero coming risk to global order, it makes a good deal of sense that a much richer society will have rising expectations of what it means to help the truly destitute.
Sure, but if that's the argument then why make the claim about increasing conflict? Either it's an important part of the argument or it's not.
I mean, I'm all for increasing the amount of charity funded by all means (private or government) but the article seems to ask us to adopt a model where there is some objectively right 'needed' level of assistance that we are failing to meet which seems fundamentally confused.
It seems entirely reasonable to suggest we're in for more geopolitical instability. I don't know for certain, because predictions are hard, but I cut him some slack on that and generally agree with commentators focused more on "what itemized stuff does the 40 billion cover" than disputing the marketing.
Also it's reasonable to suggest we are in for more geopolitical instability in the same sense it's reasonable to suggest we are in for less. Pick the trends you like and extend them to get the outcome you want.
I guess I have the opposite take. I don't really need any convincing that more money would do more good in that fund than wherever else it's going -- because of the logarithmic nature of utility and loss aversion they'd have to be really really bad with it not to be a net utility plus.
That seems so obvious to me I guess I took the controversial point to be that there was some appropriate level at which it should be funded rather than just more money = better (within reason) like most decently effective charity.
I mean the article wasn't titled: it's good to be charitable.
That's interesting. I'm sure the additional money would have some net utility plus for someone, but there's plenty of spending that has a net utility plus for someone. It's a very reasonable question of opportunity cost. I do need some convincing on the money because state budgets are finite, so I think it's a reasonable follow-up question for a high level argument.
By contrast, I consider the fact that there are an enormous number of poor humans who aren't going anywhere soon to be very potent, whether climate change will or won't cause flooding in X region. It's interesting our parameters for reading an essay differ, but we do agree simply stating "be charitable" would get us less curious about the details; charity is a widely agreed upon virtue.
If there actually are more crises in the coming decades (as compared to what?), I’m not convinced that the biggest drivers will be climate change or the theory of an increasingly destabilized international order. All the usual sources of human conflict that have been around for centuries are still very much with us.
One thing I would add is population dynamics, especially the fact that most every wealthy country is near or below replacement rate while most poor countries are still growing. We are already seeing immigration and population movements as a source of conflict and that will probably continue.
Also, the number of extremely poor people has cratered. Governments like India and China have plenty of state capacity to feed their people during regional famines, China has enough foreign exchange to buy vast amounts of grain if need be, and those two countries account for 40% of the world’s population.
I think it’s perfectly fair to say a) humanitarian disasters are less prevalent than 50 years ago and b) humanitarian disasters are more costly than 15 years ago in part due to climate change which was not on anyone’s radar 50 years ago outside a few scientists at universities and as it turns out Exxon.
This reminds me a lot of the rising crime discourse (and drop) last 4 years. Crime really did spike from 2017 to 2021 (and again is now falling). Even accounting for this spike crime is way lower than 40 years ago. And I think the fact that crime is falling is actually relevant here. Because the question is policy response. The author is really just saying “hey. There really is a spike in humanitarian crises. Maybe a temporary spike. Could use a little extra money this year”. Notice the author didn’t call for anything like boots on the ground or American troops. Just like last few years. The probably correct policy response was “hey. Beat cops are probably good. And actual ‘defund the police’ is dumb”. Not “let’s bring back all the stupidest elements of ‘tough on crime’ and oh yeah, cops are superheroes who should never be questioned”.
Was climate change not on broader radar 50 years ago? Because I certainly remember learning about it in elementary school nearly 40 years ago, when learning about the next issue after the ozone hole.
Relevant passage "In 1988, global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer became increasingly prominent in the international public debate and political agenda"
I definitely wouldn't take this UN report as gospel. I'm sure there were a number of schools (like yours) in America and across the globe where the issue was being discussed. But it's I think a reasonable guide as to when this issue became a more front and center part of political discourse and likely part of educational curriculums more generally.
I think maybe a relevant similar example is AIDS. If I had to choose a year when AIDS became more widely part of the public consciousness, I'd probably say 1985 when Rock Hudson announced he was HIV positive. https://www.cdc.gov/museum/online/story-of-cdc/aids/index.html
But it was clearly something at least some people were ringing the alarm bells about before 1985. The infamous press conference where Reagan's press secretary basically laughed about AIDS was in 1982. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids. The question came up at a press conference because there was clearly at least some cohort of people in America and the world at large who knew this was a burgeoning problem that needed to be addressed.
1988 is about the year I’m thinking. But I was thinking that if it’s prominent in public debate then, then it must have been on a lot of radars beyond just scientists a decade earlier.
But the web as we know it wasn't really invented until 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. And it wasn't really until 1993-1994 that internet usage became something more widely available to average Americans with AOL dial up. Here's a pretty great (and now kind of famous) clip from Today Show in 1994. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
My point about all this is both global warming and internet may be examples of the "331 million people problem" (closer to 250 in 1988-1990) or "Twitter is not real life". There was undoubtedly thousands, if not millions of people who worked at universities, or worked in silicon valley or worked in a variety of cutting edge companies who knew and maybe even used something we call the internet prior the early 90s. But as that Today show clip shows, before 1994, we'd say the majority of Americans probably had no idea what the internet even was.
I think the same is going on with global warming. Prior to 1988, various schools (including apparently elementary schools), companies, orgs were likely talking about Global Warming as an issue. And this group of people likely constituted thousands if not millions of people. But it wasn't until 1988 that it truly became an issue you're average person would have heard of.
Personally I first heard about climate change as a threat from then-Senator Al Gore, because he happened to vacation in the same place as my family, and he did a talk in the community center there, in maybe 1989 or so, about a book he had started writing (which eventually came out as "Earth in the Balance").
The other big thing I remember, with global warming emerging as an issue in the public mind is James Burke's "After the Warming" series on PBS, I think also around 1989.
Yeah, I think the piece is a little misleading on the question of "requirements".
Aid appeals failing to hit their fundraising targets is not a new phenomenon. It's what always happens (except when the money is for white people in Ukraine, apparently). The agencies know this and they allow for it when they size their requests.
Anytime an aid appeal of this kind hits it's target (in Ukraine or not) someone fucked up. More money is always more helpful and in this context you don't get any bonus donations by saying you met a target.
You're using the wrong data for armed conflict. That one only counts 'conventional wars', and you can see that the rise in conflict presented in the post isn't attributed to conventional war. This shows the death rate from all armed conflict https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type
Looks like 2022 (latest year) is a spike, but the baseline for the last decade is higher than for the years recorded before that (if you exclude the Rwandan genocide).
The problems the author highlights are symptomatic of a richer society with a larger breadth to potentially provide more funding and a larger, more mature aid complex that is both larger in size and ambition.
If global GDP doubled, the problems highlighted would be even larger, not less because there'd be a larger capacity to help and a larger network of dedicated people with bigger asks.
In a resource constrained world, there are limits on the asks, even if needs are much higher. Pointing to past requests--which are self-limiting to some extent--brings the author to the wrong conclusion about the state of the world imo.
Just looking at the graph I wondered about this...the jump since 2012 is really, really, really step. While I am completely onboard that climate change is and will continue to be a problem, a graph showing the need to increase from 9 billion in 2012 to 57 billion in 2024 is one of those graphs that, on the face of things, appears to be BS. Not saying that anyone is lying, just that it is one of those graphs that strains credulity when you work with numbers.
My guess is that the definitions of what is "needed" has changed and the true need per se. You just do not see that kind of percentage increase over time without it being some methodological issue (or something huge like a meteor hitting the Earth).
If you zoom out even further, the jump is even greater. In 2006, for example, the total requirements were about $6 billion. 2011-2012-2013 was a huge jump from years' prior, mostly because of Syria, which was a massive displacement crisis. Then from 2015-2020, you had the start of the Yemen civil war (on top of the Syria crisis). And also you had really terrible successive droughts in the horn of africa. And also the regional fall out from Libya's dissolution, which included a new war in Mali. And also the Rohingya displacement crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh, and also conflict in the DRC. And now from 2020-2024, you have all of the above, plus a civil war in Ethiopia, plus flooding in pakistan, plus another drought and near famine in Somalia, plus another major crisis in DRC, plus Afghanistan and now Gaza.
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.
The largest single factor reducing the number of hungry people in the world has been economic growth in China, which doesn't meet any of the criteria you mention.
Obviously they stopped making things worse for themselves when they abandoned Marxism, but I don't think you can describe China as a country with strong property rights or the rule of law, never mind representative government.
I would argue that China moved towards many of those things, even if they don't meet a definition of them that we'd recognize. Their movement from a state-economy to a market economy as one example. And "private property" does exist there to a greater extent than in the 70's, though with the caveat that the CCP can still take it if they want.
Perhaps I should have qualified my statement with "movement towards" those things, rather than as a destination in themselves.
I'm skeptical of the representative government part, maybe because I lived for several years in Ethiopia.
This used to be a one-party state which had one of Africa's fastest growing economies, in spite of policies that were quite bureaucratic and interventionist (a residue of the communist period, as in China). After 2018 a new regime came in that decided to introduce free speech and democracy, and the country collapsed into civil war.
I think "state capacity, well deployed" is probably the key ingredient, more than the specific points you mentioned.
Not entirely. There was a lot of resentment beforehand among the ethnic groups that were excluded from political power and by 2018 the country was becoming ungovernable, which led to the change of regime. (Although I'd note that living standards for the politically disenfranchised groups were also rising, before they decided to blow everything up.)
"Free speech" online--i.e., ethnic hate speech on Facebook--was definitely a contributing factor to the violence, although you can argue that the regime might not have been able to censor it very effectively even if it had tried. This has actually turned into a big mess for Meta:
China is indeed poor, compared to what you would predict if you naively observed other things than institutions. That just a small move toward capitalism unleashed prosperity is evidence capitalism works, not that capitalism isn’t responsible.
Agreed. But I guess I was pushing back against the idea that "capitalism" means a cookie-cutter set of institutions duplicating those that exist in the West.
The Chinese form of (semi-)capitalism isn't perfect but it does work fairly well. That's a good thing, because the evidence that Western institutions can easily be transplanted to other societies is pretty weak. Did I mention I live in Afghanistan?
"’capitalism’ means a cookie-cutter set of institutions duplicating those that exist in the West”
Capitalism is property rights. China’s success is due to dramatically increasing protection of property rights and dramatically decreasing central planning.
All those countries pursued highly interventionist industrial policies, and to some extent they still do. (China certainly does, even though the policies no longer work.)
There was plenty of wasteful investment even when the interventionism seemed more successful, but I'm not sure *laissez-faire* would have produced faster GDP growth if it had been tried. I don't want to go Full Noah Smith but I think the jury is still out on that question.
I don't think Xi Jinping has abandoned Marxism, he keeps citing it all the time in major speeches. This is probably in part due to Marxism being pure "help me create the wallet inspector dictatorship to alleviate the inequality of wallets" as much as any of Xi's personal ideological convictions, but "abandoned Marxism" is not an accurate summary of what the leaders of China keep explicitly saying.
Tragically we can't easily restore Dengist thought to power. Dengism was too indistinguishable from national pragmatism, so once they never democratized after the Russian experiment failed, it simply became a justification for the unfortunate path China is on. As Deng Xiaoping's son said, "my father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot."
It's true that the Chinese state enjoys making references to Marx, but the level of substantive engagement with Marxism is pretty minimal, beyond accepting his premise that history is driven by material conditions (which is broadly accepted in the West as well, minus a few idealistic neo-Hegelian liberals).
You can see evidence of this in their rehabilitation of Confucius and attempts to 'reconcile' him with Marx, which is sort of a transparently laughable enterprise. But they just care about Marx as a figure and an aesthetic vibe moreso than a source of governing ideology.
Well I think it is genuinely true that Marxism is making life harder for the Chinese in the sense that they have a large single-party state with an interest in debt-financed state projects and that's downstream of real views about state socialism. I agree Marxism often takes the form of general nationalism and dictatorship in practice rather than the "export the revolution" variety. But it's literally true the USSR followed Marxism, created a single party state incapable of cutting military spending, starved the rest of their economy with the single party national security complex, and then collapsed the moment this teetering system was reformed. That's not just a vibe; that's a political economy problem.
When you were being told “children in Africa are starving”, it was almost certainly about Ethiopia, Somalia, or Sudan, given that those regions had several famines in the past 50 years. West Africa has also had a few. I don’t believe that Mozambique, Malawi, or Zambia has had a significant famine in many decades.
I think we can distinguish between "What is the best long term strategy for countries to avoid famines or humanitarian disasters" vs. "What can be done right now to help the most vulnerable victims of an immediate crises". Even if humanitarian aid isn't going to bring booming economic growth or reform a broken political system, it can at least right now feed a child that may be on the brink of starvation. That to me is enough of a reason to increase aid even if it can't do anything to prevent that same person from perhaps needing aid in one year's time or 10 years time.
I'm completely for not blithely giving away aid that may exacerbate an already dire situation. I'm aware that in the 80s a lot of the money raised by events like Live Aid actually ended up in the hands of warlords which only extended a variety of conflicts. But I'm going to give some benefit of the doubt here to the author that he's not asking aid being increased in ways that only fill the coffers of bad actors.
I feel like we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes a lot of these terrible situations won't be solved with humanitarian aid. And maybe there is a case to be made that the US government or some other organization should put some sort of pressure on these countries to reform their government/economic policies to be liberalize industries, respect property law and implement reforms that may lead to real sustained economic growth. But in the meantime, I don't think it's unreasonable that at the same time we increase aid to victims who need immediate attention right now.
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..
I worked for the UN Development Programme a while back. It is hands down the least efficient organization I’ve ever worked for, including the US government, academia, and several nonprofits. They were plugging away at programs with absolutely zero evidence of efficacy, and carefully crafting a narrative and cherry-picking numbers to make our work seem more effective than it was. There *are* some useful programs, but a ton of the resources get set on fire.
What is UNDP's specific mandate? I have no idea and I don't think anyone else does either.
(Incidentally UNDP had a contract during the war to handle salary payments for Afghan police officers, taking a 7 percent fee. That project brought in a large share of their global revenue and funded a lot of programming outside Afghanistan. It might have been worthwhile if it had solved the problem of "ghost cops" and people not getting paid on time, but as far as I know it didn't.)
It’s supposed to do systemic development projects - rule of law, agriculture, infrastructure, governance - rather than responding to immediate humanitarian crises. I worked on the rule of law side, and some of the tech assistance (e.g., systems to track court cases and when people are supposed to be released from prison) was effective and helpful.
What I don't get is why it's such a grab bag. Why can FAO not take the lead on agriculture, multilateral development banks on infrastructure, etc.? I think the diffuseness of the mandate must be counterproductive.
Cold and rainy, house poorly insulated. Limited club scene, my Persian still sucks...
I guess the most relevant answer is that Afghanistan is in bad shape but not as bad as described in the press. The economy is stagnant, women have had most of their rights taken away and everyone wants to leave the country, but there's no famine or genocide except in the minds of certain activists and journalists.
Half the attention I got when I started tweeting came from pointing out that things which were said to be happening, or said to be important, were actually either not happening or not important.
It does seem like the Taliban, for all their medieval views, take governance more seriously. I do worry about the Hazara. Last time I was in Afghanistan, many years ago now, they were getting targeted.
Much respect to you for being there, what do you do there?
I'm trying to generate some income for myself with a project in the electric power sector, and possibly also do some humanitarian work with drug rehabilitation centers (if you want to know why that's a worthy cause, check out the al-Jazeera documentary that came out last year).
I no longer know a lot of Hazaras (I did when I worked here during the war, but now most of my contacts are Pashtuns) but they're certainly less happy with the situation than other Afghans. They place a lot of emphasis on education, not just for women but in general, so having this type of otherworldly, ultra-religious Pashtun regime imposed on them feels incredibly oppressive.
To be fair: the problem during the war was just the opposite. Pashtun men felt marginalized by a sort of "NGO/activist discourse" that was very disproportionately led by educated, secular Hazara women, and from their point of view the current situation means things are less unbalanced. That's not the whole truth but it's an aspect of the truth that doesn't come through very well in Western media coverage.
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.
Not every post is a political strategy post and it’s kind of lazy to read everything through that lens. I say this as someone who cares a lot about the strategy side of things—it’s important to have people who think out a proposal first, then evaluate the popularity of it second.
That's fair but in this case I think relatively little insight was provided by the proposal. I don't think anyone views people suffering extreme poverty as good. As addressed by John's comment this article didn't make a compelling case that foreign aid was the best way of solving that problem, and it also didn't provide insight on how to mobilise resources to fund the solution, be it foreign aid or something else.
When people are starving, there are more pressing questions than how to squeeze better productivity out of them. We grow so much corn, we burn it for fuel. Now if people are hungry and their populations are still increasing because they refuse to use contraceptives, I can see valid reasons for letting Malthusian constraints operate. But when war causes dislocations, just feed the refugees.
Another angle: we know from Matt’s political strategy posts that it can be politically toxic to advocate too much for the interests of people overseas. Since politics here is so polarized I think it’s worth discussing how we could advance action on the author’s concerns without political blowback (i.e. appealing only to cosmopolitan concerns does not seem like a good strategy). A few ideas: (1) supporting these countries helps us counter our geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, and could help us stop China from expanding its overseas bases. (2) we need to provide greater support for these countries or we’ll pay the price in huge flows of refugees showing up at our borders. I believe there are lot of good humanitarian reasons to care about the authors concerns, but we should care enough to make arguments that might be poltically expedient.
The problem with this piece is that the efficacy issue is completely ignored. It's absolutely legitimate to say that more money should be donated for foreign aid, but surely the best way to motivate donors is to show some progress in addressing (very serious) concerns about the effectiveness of current aid institutions. There's nothing here at all about that.
There was at least some nodding to that in that the organizations have managed to reduce some redundant servicing by having different organizations handle different things (latrines vs. food distribution), and by doing cellphone payments
Fair enough. But even though those are steps that are likely to improve efficiency, the more basic problem is that there's hardly any outcome measurement. If program efficacy were tracked more closely it would be an incentive to put those kinds of measures in place, assuming they work.
I think there's a lot that could be done with simple transparency, and the US is in a position to demand it as the largest single donor. So why does Congress not require the World Food Programme to publish its accounts? (The authorizing language for US support to WFP in last year's State Department appropriations bill was a single sentence, with no conditions at all.)
“I refuse to help people in desperate need unless someone can prove that doing so will make me better off personally “ is not a great moral framework, tbh.
We should help people because it’s the right thing to do. Golden Rule and all that.
Frankly, $46 billion is a rounding error of rich country gdp. You can talk about aid efficiency, but conflict and refugee flows did spike in the last decade. Dealing with that has political costs, but frankly, ignoring these issues until millions of people show up as migrants has much higher political costs.
This is an important concern. Armed conflict, natural disasters, drug gangs and economic dislocation are driving migration from affected countries ever higher. These and many other countries are losing ground in terms of wealth, development and democratic institutions. Meanwhile, the most advanced nations are aging rapidly and will need ever greater numbers of immigrants to sustain their standard of living.
It is in the interests of the wealthy, most developed countries to help the poorest ones to avoid famine, improve access to food, encourage literacy and education and move away from anti-democratic internal power structures. The standing of Western nations, particularly the US, has suffered badly from the legacy of colonialism and economic exploitation, creating a gap that Russia and China have moved into to our detriment.
Of course it makes sense to avoid having food, medicines and basic goods be stolen or diverted but placing myriad conditions on aid not only delays the relief people need but reinforces the widely held view that America only helps other countries only if and for so long as it advances US geopolitical and economic interests to do so. As a result, we don’t even get credit for the help we do give.
We can afford more, much much more. It would be wise to be generous. And right.
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.
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.
The Paani competition in India encourages villages to build water retention structures (mostly just digging ditches with bobcats) to capture monsoon rains and hold them as groundwater in aquifers through the dry season. This helps local trees and plants grow, which supports biodiversity. And it helps control flooding, and does not impact fish like a dam would. And farmers can use the groundwater for irrigation. That is what it looks like to innovate your way out of a famine caused by climate change. I don't know anything about the climate of Mozambique, but it sure would be great if they could do the same thing.
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?
Anyone other than Matt usually gets a very skeptical take in the comments, and even more so if they frame things in a way that doesn’t specifically center verifiability or effectiveness.
When it's a woman writer, the critiquing is blamed on sexism.
But I think what you said is pretty clearly true. You could compare today's post reception with the one on GiveWell to verify.
Whether that's the way a comment section "should be" is an entirely different question, but I think you're accurately describing the unifying critique of guest writers (and even Matt's writing when he doesn't center those things).
We may be skeptical of guest posts, but that's because, a few exceptions aside, they've been well bellow Matt's rather high standard. Matt seems to me a better writer than editor. I wish he got a higher quality line up of guest writers.
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.
And we define a lot more things as "crises" these days. The Irish Potato Famine was looked at as a "well, shit, sucks for them, good luck immigrating to America!" sort of thing back when it happened. Today, a more restrictionist America and the postwar global consensus on decolonization, national sovereignty, and war crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing*, all mean that we don't "solve" crises the way prewar societies would have -- heck, we don't even regard the old "solutions" as morally VALID anymore!
* As opposed to, say, older war crimes like perfidy (pretending to surrender). The thing with ethnic cleansing in particular is that population transfers used to be considered just realigning facts-on-the-ground with whatever the political goals of some postwar agreement might have been; whereas today, population transfers are considered tantamount to ethnic cleansing, and a brutal crime against people who have a right to stay wherever the heck they live right now. That ends up limiting international options, and also means that rulers who might once have just pushed a "problem" into a bordering country are now constrained, and thus might take more drastic actions like simply starving out a disfavored population. IE, the "rules-based order" creates more minor crises in the name of preventing brutal ethnic cleansings.
I agree... it's just Maslow's Hierarchy, isn't it?
Technological progress leads to further specialization in most arenas; humanitarianism is no different. The richer we get, the more things we consider "crises", precisely because the world is rich enough to countenance fixing them rather than ignoring them.
There wasn't much that 19th-century Europe could do about the potato famine without starving themselves in the process; the global agricultural economy was barely keeping up with the population. Modern America produces so much damned corn that we turn massive amounts of it into fuel and still have plenty left over.
The trope about famines that I was taught as a 90's kid is even truer today: Famines are no longer primarily the results of crop failures or natural disasters, but rather _political_ failures.
So, as we push back the frontier of humanitarian crisis, the frontier of what we consider for that category ALSO pushes forward ahead of it. Even accepting that climate change is driving a higher baseline of droughts etc than the 90's norm, it's also just true that crisis funding will ALWAYS seem to lag behind as a mere fraction of what the most progressive folks out there consider "crises".
It's too bad that most of them are too Group-Brained to understand that kind of dynamic. Narrow-minded focus on one's personal crusades is wonderful for individual motivation and almost universally counterproductive at anything else.
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.
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.
"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?
Do you really need a citation for the claim that climate change-related harms have increased and will continue to increase as the climate continues to change?
I think you mean another dismissive phrase than ‘critical thinking’. The point that human-caused climate change is real doesn’t need a citation, but the article made an unsupported very specific claim and should provide some form of citation.
Look if you’re not able to connect the dots between “climate change is happening” and “climate change related natural disasters will increase” without it being spelled out for you that’s fine
Milan, the specific claim is that climate change has already causally increased the rate of natural disasters. I am sincerely unaware of a body of evidence or expert consensus proving that link. Moreover, as a writer, to handwave that claim by saying “We all know” is uninspired.
If you’re going to make the argument, make the argument.
I think we do need it spelled out - if development happens faster than climate change (as it has been in recent decades) then we might expect the impacts of climate change on the poor to decrease.
Natural disasters occur when there is very unusual weather — a large standard deviation. Climate change occurs when there is a different average weather — a new mean. A priori, it is not at all obvious that an increased mean will effect an increased standard deviation. Indeed, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14335 finds increased variability in Asia, but less variability in the Atlantic. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4286-0 finds less variation in precipitation overall. AIUI, the scientific consensus over the past decade has generally been that yes, the mean and standard deviation will both increase, but at least a link to a secondary source making the argument should have been included.
I can be convinced that climate change-related disasters have increased. But it's a larger claim to say that between that and the increased number of conflicts, that it necessarily makes sense that the need for humanitarian aid has gone up several fold in just a decade.
Perhaps that between climate, conflict, cost-disease (and maybe inflation--the graph was unclear) that this increase in scale makes sense. Or perhaps there are other contributing factors. But the piece would be stronger if it justified this better.
Here's a good example because I'm most familiar with the hurricane research. The first sentence is "A town-flattening hurricane in Florida." But there's currently no established link between hurricane frequency and / or intensity in the Atlantic and climate change. Even forecasting forward - no one knows what's going to happen ... mostly because the South Pacific is cooling (i.e., trend towards La Nina) and no one knows why and it's a major input into Atlantic hurricane predictions.
TL;DR - for hurricanes we don't have A leads to B but that didn't stop this NPR writer from leading with it or like every other writer I read covering hurricanes.
Milan isn't your job about voter persuasion and messaging in some way? If so, you're kind of reminding me of the guy in Office Space who ends up yelling at the layoff consultants "But I have people skills!"
In one sense, no; you're no longer a SB intern, you're just one of us plebes who comment here 😊
In another sense, I would like to think that all/most of us paid SB commenters care about effecting political change, not just bitching online about political stuff we don't like, and in that sense, yes, every time we post on SB all of us are "on the job" of Winning Hearts And Minds, so to speak.
I sometimes make jokes of dubious quality, but I never intentionally insult or mock other commenters, and if I do come across as doing so, I apologize. If someone says something egregious and I call them out on it, I aim for a "more in sorrow than anger/come on, you can be better than this" tone rather than a "you contemptible POS" tone.
I think that it's growing, but is it growing at a rate 600% over 10 years?
(Also that graph with OHCA appeal funding vs requirements--is it inflation-adjusted? Is it not inflation adjusted? 2024 dollars? Whenever graphs like this showing $ over time, this should be clarified. Otherwise, it's impossible to know how to interpret it).
My issue was more with the framing of “we all know…”. Pretty lazy writing there.
As noted elsewhere, the more important factor is the humanitarian impact of those disasters, which has been decreasing. I’d also add that he’s missing proof of the ROI of increased aid. This column missed the mark overall.
My best guess for why "we all know" is that whatever climate change does to total livability around the world, whenever _your_ local environment changes temperature, it's almost certainly hard on the plants there.
Even if the world gets better for plant growth overall (which I've heard claimed - more land in arable zones) it takes time to get the newly arable land ready for that, and meanwhile the older stuff is having issues.
If you consider that a climate-related disaster I think that one has enough of a solid mechanism behind it.
For weather patterns, could be:
1) A richer world makes them look worse because the $$ value went up.
2) A more populated world makes them look worse because no matter whether climate causes it or not, there are more people near a disaster.
3) [CLIMATE RELATED] - Changing weather patterns have decreased disasters in some areas and increased them in others - since people avoided settling in disaster prone areas before, the moving of disasters has caused them more. (I'm unsure about this because we have plenty of coastal settlements in the US that have always had to deal with disasters) This is where I'd want a really good citation.
4) [CLIMATE RELATED] - Warmer ocean temperatures have increased the likelihood/strength of hurricanes. But... it's also possible it just moves them to a different part of the season. I'd want a good citation here as well.
I don't think you need a citation for, "Climate change has made them worse." In the same sense that you don't need a citation for, "not removing dead growth in forests makes forest fires worse." If you want to quantify them(even as mildly as "markedly worse" or "substantially worse"), thenI think it is absolutely fair to request a citation.
On average, total annual precipitation has increased over land areas in the United States and worldwide (see Figures 1 and 2). Since 1901, global precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.04 inches per decade, while precipitation in the contiguous 48 states has increased at a rate of 0.20 inches per decade.Nov 1, 2023
"Wildfire statistics help illustrate past U.S. wildfire activity.
Nationwide data compiled by the National Interagency
Coordination Center (NICC) indicate that the number of
annual wildfires is variable but has decreased slightly over
the last 30 years. The number of acres affected annually,
while also variable, generally has increased (see Figure 1).
Since 2000, an annual average of 70,025 wildfires have
burned an annual average of 7.0 million acres. The acreage
figure is more than double the average annual acreage
burned in the 1990s (3.3 million acres), although a greater
number of fires occurred annually in the 1990s on average
(78,600). "
Now, this sure seems to indicate things are getting worse, but WITHOUT A CITATION it's hard to say that "fewer wildfires" counteracts/fails to counteract "bigger wildfires"
I'm happy to TAKE this as a citation, at least as it pertains to the U.S. but please note that given that # of wildfires have been decreasing, it wasn't entirely unnecessary to check.
"Based on this global decline, your study has been used by some to argue that climate change has not made fires worse or even to deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Does your study provide any evidence to support these views?
Not at all. The decline in global average area burned has indeed been misused to support false claims numerous times. There is strong evidence that the increase in fire activity we are seeing in many forested regions is indeed linked to climate change. Even the decrease in fire in tropical savannas that we just mentioned does not mean that climate change is not having an impact there too; actually, quite the opposite. This reduction has been in part attributed to conversion of savanna to agricultural land but, also, to shifting rainfall patterns that reduce the overall flammability of grasslands."
_The decline in global average burned_
The increased rainfall in some areas DOES seem to have reduced the global average burned.
My takeaway from this quick research:
1) U.S. has increased rainfall. This plus probably people being better about not starting fires(citation needed) has decreased wildfire incidence, but overall wildfire EFFECT is up, probably largely due to climate change.
2) Savannah land has increased rainfall, this has contributed to a global decline in acres burned.
3) More forests are being burned that previously weren't. This probably isn't great, especially since even if that means some of that savannah will turn into forests later, it takes time to do that, so we're losing forestland in the short-term due to climate change faster than we're getting it.
Forrest fires was about leaving dead wood scattered around your forests. That has nothing to do with rainfall. Climate change makes the energy available to hurricanes increase (hence the analogy). It also causes other weather effects to shift to locations less prepared for them. Even if you made a case that the overall number (or dollar value) of events was less under climate change, it would still be true that climate change "made them worse."
But hurricanes are a great example. Just looking at the energy available - due to warmer water - doesn't tell nearly the full story about hurricane frequency and intensity. It's a simple, reductive, 7th grade level analysis. Not to repeat my post upthread - but one of the biggest mystery's right now in climate science is why we're trending to La Nina (i.e., a cooling South Pacific) when every single model is predicting warming waters.
I am okay with this. This seems like a nuanced response. A request for "citations" anytime someone makes a statement is usually the opposite. Would a citation be deemed adequate if it stated that the (mean, median, worst) weather event became (more intense, more fatal, more expensive, frequent.....)?
"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!)
Obviously, in the long run the world is far safer and we have a better technological capacity to protect against disasters and ensuing humanitarian crises.
But as the author notes, climate change and an increasingly destabilized international order is leading to more crisis in the coming decades.
Just because things are better than the past, that doesn’t mean it’s not morally important to do better now. Similar theme to the anti-doomscrolling piece last week
I'm not so sure about this. Of course it's always important to do better now, even if we're just seeing a blip that will eventually mean-revert to the long-term downwards trend.
This isn't what the article argues, however. The author seems to view the current moment as a harbinger of a complete reversal in the trends of the past decades. (Hence the extrapolation to "1 billion" people in need of humanitarian aid.)
If someone asked me to bet on whether the severity of humanitarian crises would be greater in 2024 or 2044, I'd bet money on 2024.
The 2024 vs 2044 example is a really good question, and I think it's dependent on a bunch of hypotheticals that we just don't know! Ie. the trends of interstate conflict, our technological capacity to alleviate hunger and illness, and how climate change bears out (although a lot of models have it worsening later in the 21st century).
Putting that aside though, I think the core of this piece is that we're underfunding humanitarian crisis. And with the scale of crisis undeniably increasing (which is in part, I imagine, due to population growth of vulnerable areas) it's important for wealthier countries to act.
His chart shows a 400-500% increase in humanitarian assistance in the past ~12 years. We're "underfunding" because of a stipulated 600% increase over the same time period. Given JA's excellent comments, I'm suspicious of that 600% figure and therefore I'm not convinced that we're really underfunding anything.
And yes, as wealthy countries we should act. But we already increased assistance over 400%!
To both paraphrase and steal an idea that I just read elsewhere in the comments (Peter Gerdes) - how are we defining what "fully funded" looks like?
Overpaying Ukraine? Where did that come from? (Not saying you’re wrong but there is a war on …)
I edited the comment, because you're right, the Ukraine funding issue is generally understood from a military funding perspective. But I was referring to this sentence in the piece: "The big exception are conflicts or disasters that directly impact the core interests of major donors. For example, the 2022 Ukraine “flash appeal” was overfunded by about $300 million."
Still, what that point is generally getting at that (and I think many in the SB commentariat will sympathize with this), is that humanitarian catastrophes like Palestine and Ukraine generally get more attention than the epic drought in South Africa. And that is a problem.
This is true, and it's human nature. The Red Cross gets way too much money in the wake of a natural disaster, and then uses some of that money to fund other less visible causes.
Having worked on Horn of Africa and great lakes issues between 1990 and 1999, I absolutely agree
And even if one could perfectly demonstrate there is zero coming risk to global order, it makes a good deal of sense that a much richer society will have rising expectations of what it means to help the truly destitute.
Sure, but if that's the argument then why make the claim about increasing conflict? Either it's an important part of the argument or it's not.
I mean, I'm all for increasing the amount of charity funded by all means (private or government) but the article seems to ask us to adopt a model where there is some objectively right 'needed' level of assistance that we are failing to meet which seems fundamentally confused.
It seems entirely reasonable to suggest we're in for more geopolitical instability. I don't know for certain, because predictions are hard, but I cut him some slack on that and generally agree with commentators focused more on "what itemized stuff does the 40 billion cover" than disputing the marketing.
Also it's reasonable to suggest we are in for more geopolitical instability in the same sense it's reasonable to suggest we are in for less. Pick the trends you like and extend them to get the outcome you want.
I guess I have the opposite take. I don't really need any convincing that more money would do more good in that fund than wherever else it's going -- because of the logarithmic nature of utility and loss aversion they'd have to be really really bad with it not to be a net utility plus.
That seems so obvious to me I guess I took the controversial point to be that there was some appropriate level at which it should be funded rather than just more money = better (within reason) like most decently effective charity.
I mean the article wasn't titled: it's good to be charitable.
That's interesting. I'm sure the additional money would have some net utility plus for someone, but there's plenty of spending that has a net utility plus for someone. It's a very reasonable question of opportunity cost. I do need some convincing on the money because state budgets are finite, so I think it's a reasonable follow-up question for a high level argument.
By contrast, I consider the fact that there are an enormous number of poor humans who aren't going anywhere soon to be very potent, whether climate change will or won't cause flooding in X region. It's interesting our parameters for reading an essay differ, but we do agree simply stating "be charitable" would get us less curious about the details; charity is a widely agreed upon virtue.
If there actually are more crises in the coming decades (as compared to what?), I’m not convinced that the biggest drivers will be climate change or the theory of an increasingly destabilized international order. All the usual sources of human conflict that have been around for centuries are still very much with us.
One thing I would add is population dynamics, especially the fact that most every wealthy country is near or below replacement rate while most poor countries are still growing. We are already seeing immigration and population movements as a source of conflict and that will probably continue.
Also, the number of extremely poor people has cratered. Governments like India and China have plenty of state capacity to feed their people during regional famines, China has enough foreign exchange to buy vast amounts of grain if need be, and those two countries account for 40% of the world’s population.
I think it’s perfectly fair to say a) humanitarian disasters are less prevalent than 50 years ago and b) humanitarian disasters are more costly than 15 years ago in part due to climate change which was not on anyone’s radar 50 years ago outside a few scientists at universities and as it turns out Exxon.
This reminds me a lot of the rising crime discourse (and drop) last 4 years. Crime really did spike from 2017 to 2021 (and again is now falling). Even accounting for this spike crime is way lower than 40 years ago. And I think the fact that crime is falling is actually relevant here. Because the question is policy response. The author is really just saying “hey. There really is a spike in humanitarian crises. Maybe a temporary spike. Could use a little extra money this year”. Notice the author didn’t call for anything like boots on the ground or American troops. Just like last few years. The probably correct policy response was “hey. Beat cops are probably good. And actual ‘defund the police’ is dumb”. Not “let’s bring back all the stupidest elements of ‘tough on crime’ and oh yeah, cops are superheroes who should never be questioned”.
Was climate change not on broader radar 50 years ago? Because I certainly remember learning about it in elementary school nearly 40 years ago, when learning about the next issue after the ozone hole.
I actually think you may have been hearing about global warming as an existential issue well before most people. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/stockholm-kyoto-brief-history-climate-change#:~:text=In%201988%2C%20global%20warming%20and,public%20debate%20and%20political%20agenda.
Relevant passage "In 1988, global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer became increasingly prominent in the international public debate and political agenda"
I definitely wouldn't take this UN report as gospel. I'm sure there were a number of schools (like yours) in America and across the globe where the issue was being discussed. But it's I think a reasonable guide as to when this issue became a more front and center part of political discourse and likely part of educational curriculums more generally.
I think maybe a relevant similar example is AIDS. If I had to choose a year when AIDS became more widely part of the public consciousness, I'd probably say 1985 when Rock Hudson announced he was HIV positive. https://www.cdc.gov/museum/online/story-of-cdc/aids/index.html
But it was clearly something at least some people were ringing the alarm bells about before 1985. The infamous press conference where Reagan's press secretary basically laughed about AIDS was in 1982. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids. The question came up at a press conference because there was clearly at least some cohort of people in America and the world at large who knew this was a burgeoning problem that needed to be addressed.
1988 is about the year I’m thinking. But I was thinking that if it’s prominent in public debate then, then it must have been on a lot of radars beyond just scientists a decade earlier.
So based on this article., it really does seem like it was June, 1988 when this issue really became part of front and center national conversation. https://theconversation.com/30-years-ago-global-warming-became-front-page-news-and-both-republicans-and-democrats-took-it-seriously-97658
I said earlier that a good comparison might be AIDS but maybe a better comparison is the internet. Some early version of the internet has existed since the late 60s. According to this article, the internet as we know it was basically invented in 1983*. https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml#:~:text=In%20response%20to%20this%2C%20other,to%20communicate%20with%20each%20other.
But the web as we know it wasn't really invented until 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. And it wasn't really until 1993-1994 that internet usage became something more widely available to average Americans with AOL dial up. Here's a pretty great (and now kind of famous) clip from Today Show in 1994. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
My point about all this is both global warming and internet may be examples of the "331 million people problem" (closer to 250 in 1988-1990) or "Twitter is not real life". There was undoubtedly thousands, if not millions of people who worked at universities, or worked in silicon valley or worked in a variety of cutting edge companies who knew and maybe even used something we call the internet prior the early 90s. But as that Today show clip shows, before 1994, we'd say the majority of Americans probably had no idea what the internet even was.
I think the same is going on with global warming. Prior to 1988, various schools (including apparently elementary schools), companies, orgs were likely talking about Global Warming as an issue. And this group of people likely constituted thousands if not millions of people. But it wasn't until 1988 that it truly became an issue you're average person would have heard of.
Personally I first heard about climate change as a threat from then-Senator Al Gore, because he happened to vacation in the same place as my family, and he did a talk in the community center there, in maybe 1989 or so, about a book he had started writing (which eventually came out as "Earth in the Balance").
The other big thing I remember, with global warming emerging as an issue in the public mind is James Burke's "After the Warming" series on PBS, I think also around 1989.
Yeah, I think the piece is a little misleading on the question of "requirements".
Aid appeals failing to hit their fundraising targets is not a new phenomenon. It's what always happens (except when the money is for white people in Ukraine, apparently). The agencies know this and they allow for it when they size their requests.
Anytime an aid appeal of this kind hits it's target (in Ukraine or not) someone fucked up. More money is always more helpful and in this context you don't get any bonus donations by saying you met a target.
You're using the wrong data for armed conflict. That one only counts 'conventional wars', and you can see that the rise in conflict presented in the post isn't attributed to conventional war. This shows the death rate from all armed conflict https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type
Looks like 2022 (latest year) is a spike, but the baseline for the last decade is higher than for the years recorded before that (if you exclude the Rwandan genocide).
The problems the author highlights are symptomatic of a richer society with a larger breadth to potentially provide more funding and a larger, more mature aid complex that is both larger in size and ambition.
If global GDP doubled, the problems highlighted would be even larger, not less because there'd be a larger capacity to help and a larger network of dedicated people with bigger asks.
In a resource constrained world, there are limits on the asks, even if needs are much higher. Pointing to past requests--which are self-limiting to some extent--brings the author to the wrong conclusion about the state of the world imo.
Just looking at the graph I wondered about this...the jump since 2012 is really, really, really step. While I am completely onboard that climate change is and will continue to be a problem, a graph showing the need to increase from 9 billion in 2012 to 57 billion in 2024 is one of those graphs that, on the face of things, appears to be BS. Not saying that anyone is lying, just that it is one of those graphs that strains credulity when you work with numbers.
My guess is that the definitions of what is "needed" has changed and the true need per se. You just do not see that kind of percentage increase over time without it being some methodological issue (or something huge like a meteor hitting the Earth).
If you zoom out even further, the jump is even greater. In 2006, for example, the total requirements were about $6 billion. 2011-2012-2013 was a huge jump from years' prior, mostly because of Syria, which was a massive displacement crisis. Then from 2015-2020, you had the start of the Yemen civil war (on top of the Syria crisis). And also you had really terrible successive droughts in the horn of africa. And also the regional fall out from Libya's dissolution, which included a new war in Mali. And also the Rohingya displacement crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh, and also conflict in the DRC. And now from 2020-2024, you have all of the above, plus a civil war in Ethiopia, plus flooding in pakistan, plus another drought and near famine in Somalia, plus another major crisis in DRC, plus Afghanistan and now Gaza.
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.
The largest single factor reducing the number of hungry people in the world has been economic growth in China, which doesn't meet any of the criteria you mention.
Obviously they stopped making things worse for themselves when they abandoned Marxism, but I don't think you can describe China as a country with strong property rights or the rule of law, never mind representative government.
A fair critique, Jeff.
I would argue that China moved towards many of those things, even if they don't meet a definition of them that we'd recognize. Their movement from a state-economy to a market economy as one example. And "private property" does exist there to a greater extent than in the 70's, though with the caveat that the CCP can still take it if they want.
Perhaps I should have qualified my statement with "movement towards" those things, rather than as a destination in themselves.
I'm skeptical of the representative government part, maybe because I lived for several years in Ethiopia.
This used to be a one-party state which had one of Africa's fastest growing economies, in spite of policies that were quite bureaucratic and interventionist (a residue of the communist period, as in China). After 2018 a new regime came in that decided to introduce free speech and democracy, and the country collapsed into civil war.
I think "state capacity, well deployed" is probably the key ingredient, more than the specific points you mentioned.
Are you saying free speech and / or democracy caused the civil war?
Not entirely. There was a lot of resentment beforehand among the ethnic groups that were excluded from political power and by 2018 the country was becoming ungovernable, which led to the change of regime. (Although I'd note that living standards for the politically disenfranchised groups were also rising, before they decided to blow everything up.)
"Free speech" online--i.e., ethnic hate speech on Facebook--was definitely a contributing factor to the violence, although you can argue that the regime might not have been able to censor it very effectively even if it had tried. This has actually turned into a big mess for Meta:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/25/business/ethiopia-violence-facebook-papers-cmd-intl/index.html
I have read a few of your comments on this thread, and now I am wondering what you do and if you could write a guest column!
China is indeed poor, compared to what you would predict if you naively observed other things than institutions. That just a small move toward capitalism unleashed prosperity is evidence capitalism works, not that capitalism isn’t responsible.
Agreed. But I guess I was pushing back against the idea that "capitalism" means a cookie-cutter set of institutions duplicating those that exist in the West.
The Chinese form of (semi-)capitalism isn't perfect but it does work fairly well. That's a good thing, because the evidence that Western institutions can easily be transplanted to other societies is pretty weak. Did I mention I live in Afghanistan?
"’capitalism’ means a cookie-cutter set of institutions duplicating those that exist in the West”
Capitalism is property rights. China’s success is due to dramatically increasing protection of property rights and dramatically decreasing central planning.
China is not radically different from South Korea, Taiwan or Japan. I don’t see why China couldn’t manage a free market.
All those countries pursued highly interventionist industrial policies, and to some extent they still do. (China certainly does, even though the policies no longer work.)
There was plenty of wasteful investment even when the interventionism seemed more successful, but I'm not sure *laissez-faire* would have produced faster GDP growth if it had been tried. I don't want to go Full Noah Smith but I think the jury is still out on that question.
what do you mean when you say the Chinese policies no longer work?
It seems like they've done a great job building up a dominant green energy sector, and they're still in the early stages of it paying off.
I don't think Xi Jinping has abandoned Marxism, he keeps citing it all the time in major speeches. This is probably in part due to Marxism being pure "help me create the wallet inspector dictatorship to alleviate the inequality of wallets" as much as any of Xi's personal ideological convictions, but "abandoned Marxism" is not an accurate summary of what the leaders of China keep explicitly saying.
Tragically we can't easily restore Dengist thought to power. Dengism was too indistinguishable from national pragmatism, so once they never democratized after the Russian experiment failed, it simply became a justification for the unfortunate path China is on. As Deng Xiaoping's son said, "my father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot."
It's true that the Chinese state enjoys making references to Marx, but the level of substantive engagement with Marxism is pretty minimal, beyond accepting his premise that history is driven by material conditions (which is broadly accepted in the West as well, minus a few idealistic neo-Hegelian liberals).
You can see evidence of this in their rehabilitation of Confucius and attempts to 'reconcile' him with Marx, which is sort of a transparently laughable enterprise. But they just care about Marx as a figure and an aesthetic vibe moreso than a source of governing ideology.
Well I think it is genuinely true that Marxism is making life harder for the Chinese in the sense that they have a large single-party state with an interest in debt-financed state projects and that's downstream of real views about state socialism. I agree Marxism often takes the form of general nationalism and dictatorship in practice rather than the "export the revolution" variety. But it's literally true the USSR followed Marxism, created a single party state incapable of cutting military spending, starved the rest of their economy with the single party national security complex, and then collapsed the moment this teetering system was reformed. That's not just a vibe; that's a political economy problem.
When you were being told “children in Africa are starving”, it was almost certainly about Ethiopia, Somalia, or Sudan, given that those regions had several famines in the past 50 years. West Africa has also had a few. I don’t believe that Mozambique, Malawi, or Zambia has had a significant famine in many decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
I think we can distinguish between "What is the best long term strategy for countries to avoid famines or humanitarian disasters" vs. "What can be done right now to help the most vulnerable victims of an immediate crises". Even if humanitarian aid isn't going to bring booming economic growth or reform a broken political system, it can at least right now feed a child that may be on the brink of starvation. That to me is enough of a reason to increase aid even if it can't do anything to prevent that same person from perhaps needing aid in one year's time or 10 years time.
I'm completely for not blithely giving away aid that may exacerbate an already dire situation. I'm aware that in the 80s a lot of the money raised by events like Live Aid actually ended up in the hands of warlords which only extended a variety of conflicts. But I'm going to give some benefit of the doubt here to the author that he's not asking aid being increased in ways that only fill the coffers of bad actors.
I feel like we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes a lot of these terrible situations won't be solved with humanitarian aid. And maybe there is a case to be made that the US government or some other organization should put some sort of pressure on these countries to reform their government/economic policies to be liberalize industries, respect property law and implement reforms that may lead to real sustained economic growth. But in the meantime, I don't think it's unreasonable that at the same time we increase aid to victims who need immediate attention right now.
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..
Thanks for this very interesting perspective.
I worked for the UN Development Programme a while back. It is hands down the least efficient organization I’ve ever worked for, including the US government, academia, and several nonprofits. They were plugging away at programs with absolutely zero evidence of efficacy, and carefully crafting a narrative and cherry-picking numbers to make our work seem more effective than it was. There *are* some useful programs, but a ton of the resources get set on fire.
What is UNDP's specific mandate? I have no idea and I don't think anyone else does either.
(Incidentally UNDP had a contract during the war to handle salary payments for Afghan police officers, taking a 7 percent fee. That project brought in a large share of their global revenue and funded a lot of programming outside Afghanistan. It might have been worthwhile if it had solved the problem of "ghost cops" and people not getting paid on time, but as far as I know it didn't.)
It’s supposed to do systemic development projects - rule of law, agriculture, infrastructure, governance - rather than responding to immediate humanitarian crises. I worked on the rule of law side, and some of the tech assistance (e.g., systems to track court cases and when people are supposed to be released from prison) was effective and helpful.
What I don't get is why it's such a grab bag. Why can FAO not take the lead on agriculture, multilateral development banks on infrastructure, etc.? I think the diffuseness of the mandate must be counterproductive.
How is Kabul these days?
Cold and rainy, house poorly insulated. Limited club scene, my Persian still sucks...
I guess the most relevant answer is that Afghanistan is in bad shape but not as bad as described in the press. The economy is stagnant, women have had most of their rights taken away and everyone wants to leave the country, but there's no famine or genocide except in the minds of certain activists and journalists.
Half the attention I got when I started tweeting came from pointing out that things which were said to be happening, or said to be important, were actually either not happening or not important.
It does seem like the Taliban, for all their medieval views, take governance more seriously. I do worry about the Hazara. Last time I was in Afghanistan, many years ago now, they were getting targeted.
Much respect to you for being there, what do you do there?
I'm trying to generate some income for myself with a project in the electric power sector, and possibly also do some humanitarian work with drug rehabilitation centers (if you want to know why that's a worthy cause, check out the al-Jazeera documentary that came out last year).
I no longer know a lot of Hazaras (I did when I worked here during the war, but now most of my contacts are Pashtuns) but they're certainly less happy with the situation than other Afghans. They place a lot of emphasis on education, not just for women but in general, so having this type of otherworldly, ultra-religious Pashtun regime imposed on them feels incredibly oppressive.
To be fair: the problem during the war was just the opposite. Pashtun men felt marginalized by a sort of "NGO/activist discourse" that was very disproportionately led by educated, secular Hazara women, and from their point of view the current situation means things are less unbalanced. That's not the whole truth but it's an aspect of the truth that doesn't come through very well in Western media coverage.
Sounds interesting! Good luck and stay safe!
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.
Not every post is a political strategy post and it’s kind of lazy to read everything through that lens. I say this as someone who cares a lot about the strategy side of things—it’s important to have people who think out a proposal first, then evaluate the popularity of it second.
That's fair but in this case I think relatively little insight was provided by the proposal. I don't think anyone views people suffering extreme poverty as good. As addressed by John's comment this article didn't make a compelling case that foreign aid was the best way of solving that problem, and it also didn't provide insight on how to mobilise resources to fund the solution, be it foreign aid or something else.
When people are starving, there are more pressing questions than how to squeeze better productivity out of them. We grow so much corn, we burn it for fuel. Now if people are hungry and their populations are still increasing because they refuse to use contraceptives, I can see valid reasons for letting Malthusian constraints operate. But when war causes dislocations, just feed the refugees.
Another angle: we know from Matt’s political strategy posts that it can be politically toxic to advocate too much for the interests of people overseas. Since politics here is so polarized I think it’s worth discussing how we could advance action on the author’s concerns without political blowback (i.e. appealing only to cosmopolitan concerns does not seem like a good strategy). A few ideas: (1) supporting these countries helps us counter our geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, and could help us stop China from expanding its overseas bases. (2) we need to provide greater support for these countries or we’ll pay the price in huge flows of refugees showing up at our borders. I believe there are lot of good humanitarian reasons to care about the authors concerns, but we should care enough to make arguments that might be poltically expedient.
The problem with this piece is that the efficacy issue is completely ignored. It's absolutely legitimate to say that more money should be donated for foreign aid, but surely the best way to motivate donors is to show some progress in addressing (very serious) concerns about the effectiveness of current aid institutions. There's nothing here at all about that.
There was at least some nodding to that in that the organizations have managed to reduce some redundant servicing by having different organizations handle different things (latrines vs. food distribution), and by doing cellphone payments
Fair enough. But even though those are steps that are likely to improve efficiency, the more basic problem is that there's hardly any outcome measurement. If program efficacy were tracked more closely it would be an incentive to put those kinds of measures in place, assuming they work.
I think there's a lot that could be done with simple transparency, and the US is in a position to demand it as the largest single donor. So why does Congress not require the World Food Programme to publish its accounts? (The authorizing language for US support to WFP in last year's State Department appropriations bill was a single sentence, with no conditions at all.)
“I refuse to help people in desperate need unless someone can prove that doing so will make me better off personally “ is not a great moral framework, tbh.
We should help people because it’s the right thing to do. Golden Rule and all that.
I agree but it can help make the difference between "we'll pay 40% of what you ask, to help the most desperate and we'll pay 80% of what you ask"
I agree but we must operate in the world as it is not the one our morality would like to exist.
Frankly, $46 billion is a rounding error of rich country gdp. You can talk about aid efficiency, but conflict and refugee flows did spike in the last decade. Dealing with that has political costs, but frankly, ignoring these issues until millions of people show up as migrants has much higher political costs.
This is an important concern. Armed conflict, natural disasters, drug gangs and economic dislocation are driving migration from affected countries ever higher. These and many other countries are losing ground in terms of wealth, development and democratic institutions. Meanwhile, the most advanced nations are aging rapidly and will need ever greater numbers of immigrants to sustain their standard of living.
It is in the interests of the wealthy, most developed countries to help the poorest ones to avoid famine, improve access to food, encourage literacy and education and move away from anti-democratic internal power structures. The standing of Western nations, particularly the US, has suffered badly from the legacy of colonialism and economic exploitation, creating a gap that Russia and China have moved into to our detriment.
Of course it makes sense to avoid having food, medicines and basic goods be stolen or diverted but placing myriad conditions on aid not only delays the relief people need but reinforces the widely held view that America only helps other countries only if and for so long as it advances US geopolitical and economic interests to do so. As a result, we don’t even get credit for the help we do give.
We can afford more, much much more. It would be wise to be generous. And right.
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.
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.
The Paani competition in India encourages villages to build water retention structures (mostly just digging ditches with bobcats) to capture monsoon rains and hold them as groundwater in aquifers through the dry season. This helps local trees and plants grow, which supports biodiversity. And it helps control flooding, and does not impact fish like a dam would. And farmers can use the groundwater for irrigation. That is what it looks like to innovate your way out of a famine caused by climate change. I don't know anything about the climate of Mozambique, but it sure would be great if they could do the same thing.
This is an excellent example of adaption and resilience through innovation!
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?
Today's comment section is one of the most disheartening I've read (and I've subscribed for a long time).
Anyone other than Matt usually gets a very skeptical take in the comments, and even more so if they frame things in a way that doesn’t specifically center verifiability or effectiveness.
When it's a woman writer, the critiquing is blamed on sexism.
But I think what you said is pretty clearly true. You could compare today's post reception with the one on GiveWell to verify.
Whether that's the way a comment section "should be" is an entirely different question, but I think you're accurately describing the unifying critique of guest writers (and even Matt's writing when he doesn't center those things).
You just beat me to it. It's like having a substitute teacher back in the fifth grade. They're in for a tough time.
This is the only one I can remember that seemed ~ universally liked. I think it helps that there was some legit, LOL humor thrown in.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/challenge-accepted-asshole/comments
We may be skeptical of guest posts, but that's because, a few exceptions aside, they've been well bellow Matt's rather high standard. Matt seems to me a better writer than editor. I wish he got a higher quality line up of guest writers.
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/
I think it's also a "diagnosis-driven" spiral. We're a lot more able to diagnose new crises.
Addendum:
And we define a lot more things as "crises" these days. The Irish Potato Famine was looked at as a "well, shit, sucks for them, good luck immigrating to America!" sort of thing back when it happened. Today, a more restrictionist America and the postwar global consensus on decolonization, national sovereignty, and war crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing*, all mean that we don't "solve" crises the way prewar societies would have -- heck, we don't even regard the old "solutions" as morally VALID anymore!
* As opposed to, say, older war crimes like perfidy (pretending to surrender). The thing with ethnic cleansing in particular is that population transfers used to be considered just realigning facts-on-the-ground with whatever the political goals of some postwar agreement might have been; whereas today, population transfers are considered tantamount to ethnic cleansing, and a brutal crime against people who have a right to stay wherever the heck they live right now. That ends up limiting international options, and also means that rulers who might once have just pushed a "problem" into a bordering country are now constrained, and thus might take more drastic actions like simply starving out a disfavored population. IE, the "rules-based order" creates more minor crises in the name of preventing brutal ethnic cleansings.
Otoh, the world is much much richer than 180 years ago. We can afford to be more generous.
I agree... it's just Maslow's Hierarchy, isn't it?
Technological progress leads to further specialization in most arenas; humanitarianism is no different. The richer we get, the more things we consider "crises", precisely because the world is rich enough to countenance fixing them rather than ignoring them.
There wasn't much that 19th-century Europe could do about the potato famine without starving themselves in the process; the global agricultural economy was barely keeping up with the population. Modern America produces so much damned corn that we turn massive amounts of it into fuel and still have plenty left over.
The trope about famines that I was taught as a 90's kid is even truer today: Famines are no longer primarily the results of crop failures or natural disasters, but rather _political_ failures.
So, as we push back the frontier of humanitarian crisis, the frontier of what we consider for that category ALSO pushes forward ahead of it. Even accepting that climate change is driving a higher baseline of droughts etc than the 90's norm, it's also just true that crisis funding will ALWAYS seem to lag behind as a mere fraction of what the most progressive folks out there consider "crises".
It's too bad that most of them are too Group-Brained to understand that kind of dynamic. Narrow-minded focus on one's personal crusades is wonderful for individual motivation and almost universally counterproductive at anything else.
I was thinking this too.
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.
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.
"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?
“We all know that climate related disasters have been steadily growing and can only be expected to increase in the years ahead.”
- citation needed
Do you really need a citation for the claim that climate change-related harms have increased and will continue to increase as the climate continues to change?
Yes.
Critical thinking skills are not doing so well I guess
I think you mean another dismissive phrase than ‘critical thinking’. The point that human-caused climate change is real doesn’t need a citation, but the article made an unsupported very specific claim and should provide some form of citation.
Heretic! Don't question the tenets of the faith.
Look if you’re not able to connect the dots between “climate change is happening” and “climate change related natural disasters will increase” without it being spelled out for you that’s fine
Milan, the specific claim is that climate change has already causally increased the rate of natural disasters. I am sincerely unaware of a body of evidence or expert consensus proving that link. Moreover, as a writer, to handwave that claim by saying “We all know” is uninspired.
If you’re going to make the argument, make the argument.
I think we do need it spelled out - if development happens faster than climate change (as it has been in recent decades) then we might expect the impacts of climate change on the poor to decrease.
Natural disasters occur when there is very unusual weather — a large standard deviation. Climate change occurs when there is a different average weather — a new mean. A priori, it is not at all obvious that an increased mean will effect an increased standard deviation. Indeed, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14335 finds increased variability in Asia, but less variability in the Atlantic. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4286-0 finds less variation in precipitation overall. AIUI, the scientific consensus over the past decade has generally been that yes, the mean and standard deviation will both increase, but at least a link to a secondary source making the argument should have been included.
I’m with you on climate change, but your reply is needlessly snarky. You could just post a link and help persuade the commenter.
I can be convinced that climate change-related disasters have increased. But it's a larger claim to say that between that and the increased number of conflicts, that it necessarily makes sense that the need for humanitarian aid has gone up several fold in just a decade.
Perhaps that between climate, conflict, cost-disease (and maybe inflation--the graph was unclear) that this increase in scale makes sense. Or perhaps there are other contributing factors. But the piece would be stronger if it justified this better.
I don't have a link, just the ability to use my brain and figure out that if A leads to B and B leads to C and A is increasing then so is C
Here's a good example because I'm most familiar with the hurricane research. The first sentence is "A town-flattening hurricane in Florida." But there's currently no established link between hurricane frequency and / or intensity in the Atlantic and climate change. Even forecasting forward - no one knows what's going to happen ... mostly because the South Pacific is cooling (i.e., trend towards La Nina) and no one knows why and it's a major input into Atlantic hurricane predictions.
TL;DR - for hurricanes we don't have A leads to B but that didn't stop this NPR writer from leading with it or like every other writer I read covering hurricanes.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/10/1147986096/extreme-weather-fueled-by-climate-change-cost-the-u-s-165-billion-in-2022
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/04/a-mystery-in-the-pacific-is-complicating-climate-projections/
Presumably they disagree on either A->B or B->C or are hoping for a citation there.
Milan isn't your job about voter persuasion and messaging in some way? If so, you're kind of reminding me of the guy in Office Space who ends up yelling at the layoff consultants "But I have people skills!"
But am I on the job here?
In one sense, no; you're no longer a SB intern, you're just one of us plebes who comment here 😊
In another sense, I would like to think that all/most of us paid SB commenters care about effecting political change, not just bitching online about political stuff we don't like, and in that sense, yes, every time we post on SB all of us are "on the job" of Winning Hearts And Minds, so to speak.
I sometimes make jokes of dubious quality, but I never intentionally insult or mock other commenters, and if I do come across as doing so, I apologize. If someone says something egregious and I call them out on it, I aim for a "more in sorrow than anger/come on, you can be better than this" tone rather than a "you contemptible POS" tone.
I think that it's growing, but is it growing at a rate 600% over 10 years?
(Also that graph with OHCA appeal funding vs requirements--is it inflation-adjusted? Is it not inflation adjusted? 2024 dollars? Whenever graphs like this showing $ over time, this should be clarified. Otherwise, it's impossible to know how to interpret it).
My issue was more with the framing of “we all know…”. Pretty lazy writing there.
As noted elsewhere, the more important factor is the humanitarian impact of those disasters, which has been decreasing. I’d also add that he’s missing proof of the ROI of increased aid. This column missed the mark overall.
My best guess for why "we all know" is that whatever climate change does to total livability around the world, whenever _your_ local environment changes temperature, it's almost certainly hard on the plants there.
Even if the world gets better for plant growth overall (which I've heard claimed - more land in arable zones) it takes time to get the newly arable land ready for that, and meanwhile the older stuff is having issues.
If you consider that a climate-related disaster I think that one has enough of a solid mechanism behind it.
For weather patterns, could be:
1) A richer world makes them look worse because the $$ value went up.
2) A more populated world makes them look worse because no matter whether climate causes it or not, there are more people near a disaster.
3) [CLIMATE RELATED] - Changing weather patterns have decreased disasters in some areas and increased them in others - since people avoided settling in disaster prone areas before, the moving of disasters has caused them more. (I'm unsure about this because we have plenty of coastal settlements in the US that have always had to deal with disasters) This is where I'd want a really good citation.
4) [CLIMATE RELATED] - Warmer ocean temperatures have increased the likelihood/strength of hurricanes. But... it's also possible it just moves them to a different part of the season. I'd want a good citation here as well.
I don't think you need a citation for, "Climate change has made them worse." In the same sense that you don't need a citation for, "not removing dead growth in forests makes forest fires worse." If you want to quantify them(even as mildly as "markedly worse" or "substantially worse"), thenI think it is absolutely fair to request a citation.
On the contrary, this is EXACTLY where you need a citation:
What if you've caused forest fires in other areas to decline due to increased rainfall there?
EPA: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-precipitation#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20total%20annual%20precipitation,of%200.20%20inches%20per%20decade.
On average, total annual precipitation has increased over land areas in the United States and worldwide (see Figures 1 and 2). Since 1901, global precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.04 inches per decade, while precipitation in the contiguous 48 states has increased at a rate of 0.20 inches per decade.Nov 1, 2023
Different source: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf
"Wildfire statistics help illustrate past U.S. wildfire activity.
Nationwide data compiled by the National Interagency
Coordination Center (NICC) indicate that the number of
annual wildfires is variable but has decreased slightly over
the last 30 years. The number of acres affected annually,
while also variable, generally has increased (see Figure 1).
Since 2000, an annual average of 70,025 wildfires have
burned an annual average of 7.0 million acres. The acreage
figure is more than double the average annual acreage
burned in the 1990s (3.3 million acres), although a greater
number of fires occurred annually in the 1990s on average
(78,600). "
Now, this sure seems to indicate things are getting worse, but WITHOUT A CITATION it's hard to say that "fewer wildfires" counteracts/fails to counteract "bigger wildfires"
I'm happy to TAKE this as a citation, at least as it pertains to the U.S. but please note that given that # of wildfires have been decreasing, it wasn't entirely unnecessary to check.
As for worldwide:
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2020/10/global-trends-wildfire/
"Based on this global decline, your study has been used by some to argue that climate change has not made fires worse or even to deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Does your study provide any evidence to support these views?
Not at all. The decline in global average area burned has indeed been misused to support false claims numerous times. There is strong evidence that the increase in fire activity we are seeing in many forested regions is indeed linked to climate change. Even the decrease in fire in tropical savannas that we just mentioned does not mean that climate change is not having an impact there too; actually, quite the opposite. This reduction has been in part attributed to conversion of savanna to agricultural land but, also, to shifting rainfall patterns that reduce the overall flammability of grasslands."
_The decline in global average burned_
The increased rainfall in some areas DOES seem to have reduced the global average burned.
My takeaway from this quick research:
1) U.S. has increased rainfall. This plus probably people being better about not starting fires(citation needed) has decreased wildfire incidence, but overall wildfire EFFECT is up, probably largely due to climate change.
2) Savannah land has increased rainfall, this has contributed to a global decline in acres burned.
3) More forests are being burned that previously weren't. This probably isn't great, especially since even if that means some of that savannah will turn into forests later, it takes time to do that, so we're losing forestland in the short-term due to climate change faster than we're getting it.
Forrest fires was about leaving dead wood scattered around your forests. That has nothing to do with rainfall. Climate change makes the energy available to hurricanes increase (hence the analogy). It also causes other weather effects to shift to locations less prepared for them. Even if you made a case that the overall number (or dollar value) of events was less under climate change, it would still be true that climate change "made them worse."
But hurricanes are a great example. Just looking at the energy available - due to warmer water - doesn't tell nearly the full story about hurricane frequency and intensity. It's a simple, reductive, 7th grade level analysis. Not to repeat my post upthread - but one of the biggest mystery's right now in climate science is why we're trending to La Nina (i.e., a cooling South Pacific) when every single model is predicting warming waters.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/04/a-mystery-in-the-pacific-is-complicating-climate-projections/
I am okay with this. This seems like a nuanced response. A request for "citations" anytime someone makes a statement is usually the opposite. Would a citation be deemed adequate if it stated that the (mean, median, worst) weather event became (more intense, more fatal, more expensive, frequent.....)?
"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.