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Why only consider within-country inequality (and, yes, I realize that the answer is 'because it's partly a publicity stunt, and humans are biased and parochial'
by eutectic 9y ago
Why only consider within-country inequality (and, yes, I realize that the answer is 'because it's partly a publicity stunt, and humans are biased and parochial')?
The average American is incomparable wealthy compared to the average African, and you can on average save a life for only a few $thousand to one of Givewell's top recommended charities.
- jquery 9y agoIt's a stunt to prove socialism is great. What it actually demonstrated is that charity works great. Charity is not socialism.
- GunlogAlm 9y agoAh, the old "private charity will solve all our problems" meme.
- jquery 9y agoPeople stopped starving to death when capitalism created enough wealth that we joke about First World Problems. Socialism doesn’t stop people from starving, look at Venezuela. Look at China’s history.
- geofft 9y agoIf charity works great, why doesn't government-mandated charity work even better? There are a lot of things, like civil defense and firefighting and road building, that historically started working more reliably when they became government-run instead of depending on volunteers or private industry. What makes charity different?
- jquery 9y agoBecause socialism has been proven to fail, over and over and over. Roads are not socialism. Roads have not destroyed societies like Venezuela or Cuba. Socialism is when the government decides private property is illegitimate and it fails every time it’s tried. Some amount of socialism may not kill the host but it’s a thing to be feared and wielded carefully not lauded.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoBanana and cotton plantations are capitalism. The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.
- jquery 9y ago> Banana and cotton plantations are capitalism and? I never said capitalism didn't require any guardrails. Stop straw-manning other people. > The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide. Why is Japan wealthy? South Korea? European countries? Is this the social justice theory of economics? There's not much evidence for that theory. It's pretty clear that capitalism (with appropriate guardrails and the rule of law) is wildly more successful than its alternatives. I think you're trying to argue that capitalism is beside the point and it's war and oppression that creates wealth. That's obviously nonsense.
- alphonsegaston 9y agoYou’re right - war and oppression are tools used by Capitalists to secure and grow their wealth. Japan, South Korea, and side swathes of Europe are wealthy because of their positions as client states in the American Capitalist Imperium.
- Strilanc 9y agoThe Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [1] strikes again. 1: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
- emmelaich 9y agoExcellent read, thanks. Worth reading through the comments on that article too. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
- hactually 9y agoThat was a fantastic read, thank you for sharing. It's incredible how humans do this. Doing something for some people and is better than the status quo but instead we lambast them for not doing even more.
- Zhyl 9y agoIs it mandated that every top level comment on HN has to be some kind of cynical, nit-picky whining? Lighten up. This is incredible.
- jessaustin 9y agoIs it mandated..? Actually, it's an emergent phenomenon!
- FLGMwt 9y agoI have a feeling that it's a smarmy communication for legitimate legal concerns. That doesn't make the relativism any less legitimate but, :shrug:
- adwf 9y agoBecause people have a natural tendency to give when they have plenty. A poor person can spare little, a comfortably off person can spare more. If you really want to increase the charitable givings of a population, decreasing wealth disparity and making more people feel comfortable about their finances (ie. redistributing wealth), is a pragmatic way to do it. The more I have, the more I give. The more the general population has, the more they will give. Everyone ultimately has to focus on themselves in hard times. Want to increase charitable givings? Make it easy to be charitable.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoThat has nothing to do with a choice to give money to cah customers vs the global poorest.
- notatoad 9y agoyes, why do something good when you could do something else? they found a good thing to do. The fact that there are other good things they could have done doesn't make this less good.
- topmonk 9y agoThe poorest countries all have something in common, which is overpopulation. It seems as if the poorest have enough offspring so that they are always on the edge of starvation. I wonder if by giving them additional money, so they can have more kids, and even cause a greater strain on the local environment, have we actually done a good thing? If there is an overpopulation of deer, we don't put big buckets of feed in the forest to support them. But for the human animal, that is exactly what we do. I know this is a taboo subject, but I think that we may be creating more misery by giving charity, then by doing nothing.
- strangecasts 9y agoEducation and better healthcare are correlated with lower birthrates. Charity is very much better than doing nothing.
- topmonk 9y agoIt can't be that simple...
- whack 9y agoYour comment actually got me thinking... By what metric have you decided that a country is overpopulated? Using the absolute population size? If so, is America far more "overpopulated" compared to every other developed nation? If China were to split up into 20 sovereign nations, would it suddenly stop being overpopulated? Or perhaps you're using population density? If so, Taiwan, South-Korea and Netherlands must be absolute cesspools to live in, since they all have population densities higher than India's. Or more likely, you think that a country is overpopulated because it has a lot of poor people? If so, that sounds like a mighty fine circular reasoning. "Why is XYZ so poor? Because they are overpopulated." "What makes you say they are overpopulated? Because they are so poor."
- topmonk 9y agoAlright, maybe you're right about that. But, what about the rest of it? Do you agree that people breed themselves to the natural edge of starvation? Would it be better to give them the means to have even more kids, perpetuating the cycle, or let them be?