After Charles Kenny agreed with me that public-health aid should be run through governments rather than non-governmental organizations acting largely independently, I had a simple question for him. If I want to give money to a public-health charity, what’s the best way of making sure that my money is being spent in alignment with the…
Unfucking the world
Month: September 2017
Trump hasn’t hurt Puerto Rico. Yet.
Puerto Rico, today, is in the worst crisis that America has seen in living memory. Millions of Americans on the island are struggling desperately with no electricity, few public services, and severe shortages of food, potable water, medicine, and shelter. It’s a humanitarian disaster, and it’s being woefully undercovered by a news media more interested…
Invisible effects, invisible causes
I spent Tuesday at a fascinating conference* in Silicon Valley, which came complete with roughly the level of inchoate enthusiasm about things like blockchain technology that you might expect. (Note to techno-utopians: No, bitcoin is not obviously helpful in Venezuela right now. Even if everybody in the country had a bitcoin wallet, they still couldn’t…
Food waste: The world’s biggest market failure
What would you say if I were to tell you that you could make the world a better place by spending an extra $1,500 a year at the grocery store? Perhaps you would say that, for all that you believed in the cause, you really didn’t have $1,500 to spend supporting it. Which is fair…
The real reason to divest from sin stocks
Matt Levine really likes the Cliff Asness take on socially responsible investing. Which, in short, says that if virtuous people avoid a stock, then the price of that stock will fall, thereby increasing the returns reaped by the people who aren’t virtuous and who buy it. Asness claims that if the stock price doesn’t fall,…
We need a Give Directly option in Houston
Giving cash to the needy is the simplest and most effective form of charity – one which has stood the test of millennia. Gussied up as “unconditional cash transfers,” it’s now changing the world of development and philanthropy, and being embraced by the likes of the International Rescue Committee and many others. As anybody with…