Charity - stop it. now.
rzwitserloot posted in politics on February 1st, 2007

Here’s an article on a village in Kenya where just about every girl, from 10 and up, has at least one child already.

And it’s not just Kenya; most of the african nations (and pretty much all of the ones considered ‘poor’) have a culture which is totally incapable of stemming their flow of newborns. This has two major effects:

• 1. AIDS and especially other STDs are rampant, and
• 2. The population dynamic exceeds capacity.

I’ll explain that second one in a minute, but just so that you know where this is going: If you save one human in such a country, you kill another, period. Cure malaria? 5 years down the line there will be a bloody civil war. Build a water pump? Every life saved by it advances the clock on the next massive famine, epidemic, war, or dictatorial killing spree.

Whoa.

I better back that up. To start with, I’ll explain that population dynamics thing. Imagine, for a moment, a country with no high rise buildings, but with enough population to cover every inch of the land with human. Obviously, that can’t possibly work. What would happen in such a country? Well, people are going to die. This death can come in many forms; from AIDS, to starvation, to starting wars with other countries, to civil war, to engendering a dictator that kills off massive amounts of the population just to keep it in check. It doesn’t really matter how you twist or turn it; people are going to die.

That’s a nasty realization. Now, obviously, I exaggerate when I say that every square inch of this hypothetical country has a human on it, but, for any given country’s economic power, there’s only so many humans that can be supported by it. At some point, a country crosses the line - and people will die, one way or another. It has to happen.

How’s this work in e.g. europe or america? It’s really quite simple: Population growth is checked. Every tiny increase in economic power isn’t instantly filled up by another population boom; far from it, in fact. Lots of countries in Europe have stagnating population, in fact.

Lots of cultures in Africa have their opinions and ideas about sex completely screwed up. These are the people that think that having unprotected sex with a virgin cures AIDS, while condoms cause it. These are also the people that badger europeans all day long and give you tons of trouble unless you travel as a married couple (I know plenty of backpacking boy and girlfriends that buy fake wedding rings when heading into the depths of africa and some other generally poor countries, just to stop the whining, leering, and frankly, the chance of rape) - yet at the same time have the largest prostitution industries per capita of the world. This isn’t a slight against those countries; europe and america until very recently had the exact same fucked up mentality, and large parts of the population still do.

But it needs to change. It has to change. It’s one of the factors that are causing such countries to produce more babies than it can economically handle.

Making the economy better doesn’t help at all - the population growth is so huge that it can more than easily keep up with economic growth; once the kettle boils over, nature must balance the problem and usually the way it happends is devastating for the world and for the country: War, Famine, Murdering dictator, Epidemic, or just an enormous death rate, by way of general poor health and boatloads of crime. Take war for example: the country probably gets bombed back to the stone age. Kiss your economic growth g’bye along with the nice roads, bridges, etcetera. Even a dictator is a bad deal (stifles economic growth considerably, and a dictator that fears a coupe d’etat doesn’t usually worry much about such mundane things as spending money to keep the road system in order), economically.

There are a number of factors that contribute to the endless population boom syndrome. They need to fixed, and only these things need to be fixed. Any other aid is money thrown down the drain moving that country ever closer to its own personal armageddon. You’re actively hurting these people by spending your money. You really should be punched in the face. STOP IT.

The factors:

• culture - abortion and anti-contraceptives are okay. Rape is not okay. Reports of rape are to be taken seriously. sex ed is to be taken seriously. Preaching the virtue of waiting until marriage is a fine way to get a significant part of the male population (the ones with very poor impulse control) to start raping.
• financial stability - if there’s no bank you can trust, the only way you can secure a pension and other aspects of ’social security’ is by having a boatload of kids and relying on family ties. You can’t forego the kids and use the money thus saved to build up a future, because the next dictator might take it all away soon enough. This is also true with children, but it’s a lot simpler and you spread your chances.

These aren’t simple factors to fix. For example, there is overwhelming historical and contemporary evidence that poor people tend to be more religious. It seems reasonable to assume that being poor makes it easier to accept religion, possibly as a means to ease your troubles. Unfortunately, the major religions of the world (read: the abrahmic religions) have their head firmly inserted up their ass in regards to sexual culture. So, to fix the vicious cycle of poverty, you need to break through religion, which is best done by… moving a country out of poverty. Bad case of chicken and egg. Those attempts to hand out goodies in exchange for getting a vasectomy seem to be a promising route. Morally a bit shaky, but compared to the alternative (of war, famine, murderous dictator, or epidemic), it wins by miles.

Financial Stability seems easier to tackle: Western countries can run banks and guarantee stability. If a dictator threatens to seize assets, there need to be UN statutes in place that FORCE military intervention, even if only to keep the banks running. More importantly, western countries must offer ways of financial ability and stop pulling the rug out from other african export products. This means letting go of the massive subsidies on products.

Here’s a good idea: Give all your charity to rich western farmers, and then lobby the governments to completely and utterly stop subsidising such things whilst dropping all tariffs for import. That’ll be a fraction of the cost of what gets spent on charity (by individuals and governments alike), there’s more than enough left to buy everyone in the west hurt by the lack of economic protection an extremely royal salary for sitting on their ass, and it gives real economic incentive for growth, instead of handing out presents to those people who manage to play the political game the best (usually very shitty dictators).

Unfortunately, while financial stability is possible, the western world seems completely unphased by it: Charity overwhelmingly doesn’t go to any attempts to sort this out.

I want a charity that spends every last dime on handing out condoms, giving away money in exchange for getting your pipes snipped, and another charity that runs reliable banks and spends the money on hiring a tonne of mercenaries to protect them. THOSE would be worth spending millions on.

Friendly warning to friends and family: If you’ve given money to charity, unless you can make a very well supported case that it’ll reduce the population pressure in a country that needs it, don’t tell me or risk me getting mad and ruining your feel-good buzz.

UPDATE: Re-reading this article I think I under-represented the problem of how incredibly ineffective (insofar as going backwards) a ‘gift giving’ system is (which is what charity usually amounts to). The world just wasn’t meant to work this way. Fortunately, I just found an article that explains the problem with a use case: The story of the free waterpump. Note by the way, that the next village down the road is getting jealous…

UPDATE 2: Yet another article that precisely explains why the holy grail of all plans for making this world a better place lie in birth control: The cause of 95% of all wars is too many youths.