This study brings to light a hidden problem of countries and individuals dependent on foreign aid. There should’ve been plans in place to reduce foreign aid dependency over time. Yes provide aid as needed & appropriate, but work out what it’ll take for the country to not need it and try to get there.. Otherwise a sudden halt of aid can lead to, well, exactly this.
It seems from the outside there was just “money from the sky” from USAID. Without strings attached you’d expect systems to organize to grab free money and countries become dependent..
Is there something I don’t know?
Foreign aid has always been a double edged sword when it comes to self-reliance and lasting change
Abstracting a bit more, it’s also not really any different than aristocratic, monarchical, and even feudal patronage systems where your fortune and standing was directly linked to how close you could get to the monarch/center of power. In fact, I see the west devolving towards such patronage systems as power and wealth keeps concentrating. All across the board you see every more sycophancy as people grovel for benefits.
How do you know that the people and countries dependent on this aid were also not working on making themselves less dependent? Are you aware that poverty is decreasing world wide and many countries have successfully developed over the last several decades? How do you know that USAID did not accelerate this processes by helping take care of vulnerable people, so the less vulnerable would have more resources to develop faster?
Worse yet, at the cost and expense of people who are damaged by being forced to support this system against their will.
I propose that everyone that supports things like USAID be able to willingly and freely sign up to have their taxes increased by whatever proportional amount is necessary to fund it every year. We need to move to a voluntarist system for anything but the tightest core functions of government.
It is a win-win, USAID continues and people get to feel good about themselves, while others are not damaged by being forced to support it against their will.
The actual true cost to the people for the additional debt is hard to measure and likely hits a different generation that the people who created most of USAID. Instead of saying people payed 0.1% to fund USAID you should say they made at least that much additional debt every year. You could not spend 0.1% more than you earn over the course of like 60 years but USAID did that for everyone.
Also lets be real here, no one in their right mind would donate to USAID. There are near unlimited way to donate money for good causes and very specific ones, where you can see results. If your goal is to have your money be efficiently used to help people you would never give it to the government. Any other organization that isn't straight up a scam, will be more efficient than the gov.
This would be a reasonable topic to discuss, if only these cuts to USAID didn't resulted in supplies decaying in warehouses. This means no cost was cut and no expense was averted: just waste. Those desperately depending on these supplies to survive simply didn't.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-aid-cuts-leave-food-million...
It's like preaching people in food lines about the need to pull themselves by the bootstraps, and depriving from their next meal.
But maybe you are right, there should have been a way for people who want to pay for the delivery and security of that aid out of their own pockets. It could have been a voluntary sign up of whatever the cost would have been, added as a proportional tax at the end of the year, anywhere from 1%-100% of net worth.
A sudden halt in funding for any project, domestic or otherwise, is catastrophic to that project.
While I don’t disagree with your point, it’s also not really the crux of the problem.
Also it’s a lot easier said than done asking recipients of aid to become self sufficient. In a lot of cases the problems are either poverty, which means aid would still be needed to fund any “self sufficient” services, or that the foreign governments really are more corrupt than Trump. The end result often means people flee from their country and then Trump supporters start moaning about immigration. Ultimately you have to pay the price either way.
My personal opinion is that we should be paying too. In many cases you can trace these issues back to exploitation lead by the 1st world. So you could reasonably argue that we owe them this aid. But even if you don’t want to do it for reasons of morality, supporting developing countries still helps with the immigration “problem” in the long run.
Yes. Software power. We are talking about the TANSTAAFL land. All those countries are full of corporations sending profits without paying fair royalties or taxes, which are paid back in the US.
Foreign aid is not a thing governments dole out due to the kindness of their hearts.
More often than not its purpose is to curry military, economic or political favor with the recipient country.
More often than not a lot of it is skimmed off the top once it arrives.
The US loves to buy allies - reciprocity may come in the form of the country in question agreeing to a military base, or a trade deal. It can be as specific as "You will allow these specific US megacorps to do business in your country unhindered." This stuff isn't really secret at all, hang out at AmCham meetings overseas and you will hear all about it.
The folks back home, though, are generally unaware.
I don't support the death of 300k people either (which currently is not a real thing, it is in a model created by an academic). But the American public has every right to form opinions about whether this money is well spent and express them at the ballot box.
As an expat who has seen how a bit of the sausage is made overseas with this money, just shutting down USAID overnight was pretty reckless but I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of it was spent in ways that the average US taxpayer would be enraged by. This is a country with $36T of debt we're talking about, my main concern is I don't think Trump and Musk will go far enough.
> but work out what it’ll take for the country to not need it and try to get there..
Many African countries are overrun by Russian wagnerites, who protect local war lords and take control of natural resources. Part of the program is to ensure ongoing chaos and prevent local development.
Some other African countries are burried by Chinese debt, their "development" agenda is set by China with focus on extracting natural resources.
So that is why health, democracy, rule of law and state building is not on the agenda. Thus children die.
The USA has/had an organized administration, laws, police, hospitals etc. But if Americans in comfort even then bow their head for a weird mix of criminals and sectarians, what magic agency would you expect from a population living from health crisis to health crisis in extreme poverty?
> it would test the limits of credulity to think that previous US administrations
> did not use USAID to extract concessions from African countries for decades prior.
The correct strings to attach would be those which pushes towards a democratic rule of law, which would eventually enable the affected society to self-sustain them. Now you can already hear the bots coming out of the woods: "who is the west to tell countries what is right/WOKE!/ western colonialism" etc.
We should never take advantage of a country in need. Our philosophy is win-win.
> Russia, who prefers making deals with a single person on the other side (ie a dictator)
The war in the west is not about Trump, nor about transgenders, but about the mind of normal citizens. How much of this criminal mindset has been normalized already?
I agree, at this point it does seem like there was enormous fraud at USAID and some very bad behavior. I can only deduce that the reason why it stayed hidden for so long was that, politically, if not economically, everyone with something to lose was benefiting.
I moved to Africa to get a better understanding of this and related questions. What is the actual situation of developing countries? What does it take to make things better? What can I do as an individual with no resources other than the income I get from work?
I am still at the beginning. I have only been here for two years. What I have learned so far is very limited but my observations so far suggest that:
The exploitation of natural resources (oil, gold, minerals, etc) need to be done in a way that the money flows back into the countries. The countries then can/should invest that money into the improvement of local infrastructure (health care, better roads, trains, water, electricity where it is still missing...)
Education needs to be done in a way that doesn't disrupt local culture. Currently schools are based on colonial models, and I don't feel they are a good fit. Children are forced to live away from home in boarding schools and get a western style education that ignores or changes their culture. Poor families can't send their children to school because they live off their farm and can't even get the money to pay for the school uniform or the materials.
On the other hand, just giving them those things creates exactly that dependency that we don't want. What is needed is an education system that remote villages and nomadic tribes can implement on their own without being forced to send their children away and change their lifestyle just to be able to afford the costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNDAEC is a potential example of how that could look like.
What can I do as an individual? I am still figuring that out. My approach is to try to hire local junior developers to work on my projects. I am not paying them a western salary. That may sound unfair and exploitative, but with the average income being so low, western salaries would only create a few rich people and depend on trickle-down-economics to make that money work. I feel that instead giving multiple people a decent local salary would accomplish more. On top of that, a single local salary can be funded easily from anyone working in IT in developed countries. You don't need to run a business to be able to do that. Besides that I am also trying to sponsor a few children to help them pay for school. This is not a big project. The families are friends I made along the way, and it's more of a boost for a few kids down on their luck. Kids who lost one parent or both and are living with relatives who are struggling to feed their own kids.
There is a lot that I am still missing. And I don't even know if the things I am doing so far are right or effective. Only time will tell.
Btw, I am looking for work. If you want to support my efforts, please reach out.
Even with the best such plan, pulling the plug without warning would be catastrophic.
We're already seeing more incidents of Tuberculosis in the US. As a reminder to everyone, Tuberculosis requires 6+ months of antibiotics to treat. It can cause brain lesions.
Why are journos so dishonest?
It is apparent from how you said that, that you are being dishonest.
If they did not know each other from college or growing up, the NGO associated people seek out journalists for that kind of reason and journalists are often flattered by the attention, aka lobbying, and drawn in. It’s a really corrupted system that only further encourages that kind of behavior because it is the very nature of that system today that any new entrants come into.
Basically none of the transparency efforts of the mid aughts seem to have really made any kind of real impact on the corruption of the system either. I’m not sure if it’s just correlation, but it almost feels like the transparency efforts only gave false senses of confidence, not to mention that many of the transparency initiatives are also corrupted, receiving their funding also from the NGO complex and also being drawn into the complex itself. It’s an inherently incestuous system like the MIC or the judicial system.
No. The whole complex is to blame here, the scientists didn't do some rigorous open ended work. All of the scientists of course already believed that foreign aid is effective and beneficial (it is generally neither, especially not in the way it is actually practiced, where you dump random things into some poor place of the world and then leave) and are now gathering evidence to support that position so that articles like this can be written.
It is of course somewhat hilarious to claim 300k deaths without being able to point to a single actual death. All of this pseudo debate exists to mask the actual question under contention. Given the enormous amounts of resources the west has poured into the poorest places on earth, when do we see the positive results? The only measurable result is that over time only more and more is needed, which of course simultaneously undermines the premise of foreign aid and paradoxically makes it more important.
The impact of aid programs is well studied. Here is one of hundreds or thousands of studies showing a measurable positive impact in terms of lives saved: https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/assessi...
The supply of foreign aid is usually not determined by need but by willingness of the donor countries. So when foreign aid makes progress against one disease or crisis, the money is redirected to the next most pressing issue. This doesn't mean it is useless or is not solving problems.
It is true as a philosophical point that sometimes, an attempt to solve a problem backfires and even worsens the problem. But it is also true that an attempt to solve a problem sometimes solves the problem. You've offered no evidence that foreign aid is ineffective or backfires in any way, just a handwaving story, against the hard quantitative evidence I linked in my comment above.
We will be feeling the consequences for years to come.
When the war in Ukraine started I heard Africa was relying on imports for food up to 85%.
There are no word to describe how horrifying this is. To this day I still cannot believe it. 50% would sound intolerable to me.
My question is: do we have reliable data on this ? flow of food to and within Africa?
Also, if this is true, how can we deny the absolute failure of the West but also Russian and Chinese development efforts in Africa over the last 50+ years. I do understand that wars can disrupt those efforts but the whole continent is not constantly at war.
The instability of the continent is a feature, not a bug.
I don't think people conceptualize just how many resources Africa as a continent has and how willing they are to provide those resources to the West at an extreme discount.
The soft imperialism employed in Africa is a major piece of why the West is wealthy. It's not like we're giving food to destabilized and resource-rich countries out of the goodness of our heart.
This is more or less delusional.
The US won't default on any debt (worst case, money printer go brrrr).
The cuts so far amount to fuckall, even across many years.
And then the proposed budgets increases deficits far beyond any savings Doge actually managed to find (if their cuts were even actually more effective than the inspectors general that were terminated).
USA already are doing that, and have been for a long time, so "worst case" is already here. What do you think happens when things gets even worse than now?
And never forget that if you think some children are starving, you can always send them your money and save them. Nobody is stopping you.
perihelions•1d ago