Reddit Reddit reviews Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

We found 21 Reddit comments about Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
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21 Reddit comments about Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa:

u/anokaycanadianguy · 19 pointsr/pics

Hello,

I know what you're saying, foreign aid DOES HELP people. It does, I am not arguing that at all.

Those free houses, and free pumps and cans of food helps people and hell it probably saves many lives.

I don't argue that.

But you said that you benefited from foreign aid, have you ever stopped and wondered "how much does foreign aid cost?" "what are the side effects of foreign aid?" "in the long run, does foreign aid really help a country?"

They saved your life, foreign aid did...but at what cost?

I recently read a book Dead aid and there are many many many more books on the subject from many authors from many different walks of life. I highly suggest you give this stuff a chance.

How much is the life of one little boy worth? save one boy from hunger and the effect is 10 little boys within the next generation dying of hunger...where is the sense of that?



have you ever wondered what foreign aid is? where it goes? who receives it? accountability?

u/stackedmidgets · 8 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

A lot of those people are being fed by misguided food aid programs. Populations in Africa in particular (where birth rates are the highest in the world) are pushed beyond the carrying capacity of the local economies by perpetual food socialism. It's sort of like the opposite of the Ukrainian famine: instead of too little food, it's too much food, signalling abundance when the local conditions are actually those of severe poverty.

For more on this, books like Dead Aid and the White Man's Burden are great at explaining this phenomenon.

>I've heard of people advocating an "Ideal and stable population size" but I can't see how this would be implemented without the state. So basically, What do you think will happen in the future with regards to the growth of population and the demand it will cause?

This is complicated. One one hand, the people guided by Harvardprincetonyale dogma believe that it's their secular-sacred duty to feed the poor in Africa and to provide advice on how to manage and finance their affairs through the network of international financial institutions, NGOs, and UN-affiliated groups.

On the other, because central planning has a lot of trouble providing for growing populations (it's another variable to account for), they want to control that population growth at least somewhat. The same population growth that exceeds the capacity for those societies to provide for the new people caused by the foreign subsidies creates a problem that the same inept bureaucracy to manage through the promotion of population control programs.

There's no real way to 'solve' this problem in a clean manner. Billions of people are unfortunately reliant on the Harvardprincetonyale Axis of Ultimate Goodness for their continued survival.

Market signals provide critical information to people about whether to expand their families or to not expand them. When those market signals become distorted, people may either fail to produce sufficient children to maintain the prosperity of the society, or they may produce too many for the existing social structure to support to a general level of satisfaction.

The Soviet-Harvard delusion is that by providing food and by suppressing large-scale warfare, 'development' will proceed apace. What has resulted is that populations have exploded beyond the capacity of local economies to provide for them, and the same provision of welfare-food has empowered various dictatorial entities while preventing the emergence of local markets to help genuine society to flourish. Meanwhile, religiously-motivated armies threaten to break up some of the largest states (like Nigeria).

Unfortunately in their attempts to do good, the Axis of Ultimate Goodness has created a fragile series of powderkeg-countries where long-suppressed conflicts threaten to explode into horrific global warfare (see: Egypt). Modern humans in many parts of the world (including the developed world) have been cut off from accurate market information for a very long time, leading to distorted patterns of societal development that are ill-adapted to real conditions in the world.

My speculation that's not a prophecy at all is that three factors will prevent these population projections from being achieved:

  1. The US will be incapable of maintaining its global hegemony. Other states, to the extent that the nation-state structure survives at all, will need to provide for their own security. Suppressing warfare between groups, like the US has done after WWII, is like artificially suppressing forest fires. It leads to more severe fires than nature herself could ever permit. The mass death from these wars will check the unending growth in population.
  2. Extracting fossil fuels will continue to require more intensive technological development to achieve. Nationally owned resource companies running off of expropriated reserves and expropriated technology will not be able to compete with private firms (see: Venelolololzuela).
  3. Antibiotic resistance is becoming a more significant problem, and no solution has yet been developed, nor is one obviously on the verge of occurring. Mankind's most efficient predators will eventually climb their way back up the food chain. Whatever solution will be devised for this will probably be more technologically intensive, expensive, and probably customized to particular genetic patterns, at least in the beginning.

    These projections rest on a lot of ridiculous assumptions and naive math models. They're best understood at pitches for more funding. "If we don't get another billion dollars to promote condom usage, we're gonna have a big problem!" The problems are much more significant, severe, and inherently political in nature.

    Population growth is neither a problem nor an unmitigated boon. It's just another factor for humans to calibrate with their desires and real conditions on Earth and within societies. Distorting price signals prevents humans from coordinating with one another in an effective way. The larger the society becomes, the more important that accurate market signals are to its continued functioning.
u/speaktodragons · 4 pointsr/AskReddit

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology

Dead Aid Wikipedia

The true size of Africa

I think we really need to get away from helping Africa in regards to helping the countries of Africa. As per link to the size of Africa one can see its *ucking huge. However I would rather that we the US would spend more time cultivating our relationships within our own region instead which is more close to home than the middle east.

Example: Syria should be a problem handled by the Europeans and not by us and we should be doing more in regards to Mexico. Getting involved in Mexico not by military intervention but reaching a conclusion in regarding the legalization of marijuana. I am pretty sure if marijuana was legal in Mexico, Mexicans would have less of a reason to work in the US.

Edit: I didn't explain my links. I read "Mastering the Machine" I thought it was a good read in regards too is the aid to Africa actually working or is it making it worse. Dead aid was published just a couple of years ago and makes the same point. Historically I don't think any country on this planet was improved by charity. Look at Haiti it was a wreck before the earthquake how many millions were sent?

u/MoHammadMoProblems · 3 pointsr/worldnews
u/FivePoppedCollarCool · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

More money isn't going to do anything.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html

http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2010/04/16/cah-hurts-africa/

http://www.globalenvision.org/2009/04/20/foreign-aid-helping-or-hurting-africa

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

Aid is actually hurting Africa because it makes Africans reliant on Aid. People no longer want to work to enrich their own lives. The cultural roles in many African countries have switched and work is even seen as a girly activity. So people literally just sit all day and do nothing because that's what "men" do.

tl;dr: More money is not going to fix Africa's problems and pull people out of poverty.

u/whosawiddlepuppy · 2 pointsr/AskSocialScience

For starters, it may seem counterintuitive but all of the money, aid and especially food developed countries send to Africa actually makes the problem worse because it depresses their domestic economies. (Unlike how things are often projected in those tear-jerking commercials from aid organizations, African countries do have economies -- Nigeria, for example, has the one of the largest movie industries in the world.)

Economist Dambisa Moyo explains this problem better than I ever could in Dead Aid, highly recommended read

u/WaltMink · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

(1) Africa is fucked up mainly because of 30+ years of war among Marxist/Socialist governments. http://www.amazon.com/The-Shadow-Sun-Ryszard-Kapuscinski/dp/0679779078

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Americanism-Jean-Francois-Revel/dp/159403060X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343531715&sr=1-1&keywords=revel+anti-americanism



(2) in general, aid is a waste of money because it does little or nothing to fix underlying structural/social problems that prevent Africans from caring for themselves.

http://www.dambisamoyo.com/books-and-publications/book/dead-aid/

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

(3) IMHO, aid is often subtly racist and paternalistic, with an underlying message of those-darkies-can't-do-it-without-us. many Americans would prefer poor black people living off handouts than wealthy black capitalists creating their own wealth.

u/duns_utahan · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Because it doesn't work. That is to say, foreign aid has not helped developing nations develop, and foreign aid tends to make the problems worse.

Read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

and visit the author's website:

http://www.dambisamoyo.com/books/?book=dead-aid

u/doug · 2 pointsr/worldnews

There's a pretty good read on this called Dead Aid.

u/recon455 · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Read Dead Aid. Bono is not helping Africa.

u/Pirates_Smile · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Well having spent some time over in the areas (North and South Africa), Africa is honestly one of the most maleficent places I have ever had the displeasure to be in. So much unwarranted hatred and misaligned belief. Gotta love a civilization of today that accepts the likes of Mugabe and Blahyi with open, loving arms. AIDS is running rampant throughout the country with Billions of AID dollars lining the pockets of the Warlords who own the biggest guns at the moment. Africa is a never-ending funnel of despair. Good read for those who really want to get caught up

And here

And your odds are even worse if you're a child - Here

So my answer to the question is about the humanity thing, not the skin color thing.

Plus This is a great documentary to watch NSFL Especially Fergal Keane's interview.

And another great documentary [here]
(http://youtu.be/-nqDTxQVSlk)


So yeah, by my personal experiences from that part of the world I stick by my original answer. Don't agree with me, go there, live there and formulate your own insights and paradigm on the matter?

Lastly this was a family: a small boy, small girl, a mother or some grand parents (NSFL)

and it STILL continues today.

u/OnIowa · 1 pointr/IAmA

Do you know anything about this book?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374139563

u/kenlubin · 1 pointr/todayilearned

I think the basis of Hubbell's argument is the experience in Food Aid to Africa.

Aid organizations bought food in the Western world (mostly from the United States), and gave it away to starving people in Africa during droughts and times of political turmoil.

The result was that African farmers could no longer compete with free food: local farms collapsed, local economies collapsed, and the food shortages actually became worse.

Additionally, since aid was often distributed through local governments, their dictatorships and corruption became more entrenched.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374139563

u/berwood · 1 pointr/AskReddit

As far as the continent of Africa is concerned, there are some books on thge subject: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346529409&sr=1-1&keywords=african+aid

Foreign aid (from the U.S.) won't cease as long as other countries have stuff we want. I forget who said it and what the exact context was, but there's a saying: "A nation has no friends, only interests."

u/YouthInRevolt · 1 pointr/worldnews

"Dambisa Moyo - Dead Aid" was great if you haven't read it yet

u/Rebar4Life · 1 pointr/AskReddit

There are more modern financial reasons as well. See Dead Aid.

u/Jdf121 · 1 pointr/todayilearned

But it would be the best choice for timeframe to stop people from dying in the short term, while working to fix the structural barriers.

Read the book Dead Aid. Great info on this topic.