Very cool, if true

http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/

Inspired by the poll and post here.

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buymeaclue.livejournal.com

Answered "willing to" for (slightly lower than) values of "currently am." Answering for values of "would like to" would have produced a slightly more flattering number. But mostly I am just an evil selfish, etc. I have a tentative plan to become less selfish in the near future, but I don't think that counts for now.

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The truth is that I have to answer 'as much as I can afford.' Because I really believe in charitable giving, but some months are just not, well, easy because I'm also a frivolous girly who will overspend on books and clothes.

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Totally.

I frivol happily myself - and thus have less money to spend on helping others.

As

ciphergoth points out on the other thread, he could have saved several children from death by parasitic worms with the money spent on a bun this morning. If you think too much about that you're likely to go crazy.

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interactiveleaf.livejournal.com

There's also the issue that starvation is, globally, not a problem caused by Too Little Food, it's a problem caused by lack of allocation of resources or politics; more money isn't necessarily going to fix those problems.

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ciphergoth.livejournal.com

You can still hope to address those problems by spending money on them, for example by giving to campaigning organisations!

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autopope.livejournal.com

The important point to note with the £10M question is the diminishing marginal utility of money. The first million is life-changing (buys a house and a basic pension); the next four million is also life changing but to a lesser extent (gives you a private income and a decent pension, pays off housing and pension for all your first-degree relatives), and the final five million is pretty much pointless -- unless you're into really conspicuous consumption (drop a couple of mil on a house or a yacht, go gambling in Monaco).

It's a lot easier to sign away 25% or 50% of a £10M windfall than it is to sign away that proportion of a £1M windfall, let alone your regular pay packet (to which income you have adjusted your lifestyle).

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Totally agree.

I only said 10% to starving children because I'd also want to give money to a variety of other places. I'd still keep a large chunk for myself though. Because I'm an evil, greedy bastard.

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That was my reasoning too.

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palmer1984.livejournal.com

I don't like the bias in the first question - since my income is v. low I can't afford to give away much, but I don't think that makes me as selfish as someone who earns £60,000 and only gives away a small percentage.

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That's why the second question is there - to remove that bias.

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purpletigron.livejournal.com

We should notionally allocate a fixed yearly sum to personal subsistence - say the global average 'GDP' per capita at purchasing power parity, currently around USA$10,500 apparently: (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#Econ)?

Edited Date: 2009-02-25 03:58 pm (UTC)

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star-tourmaline.livejournal.com

Doesn't the first one depend on income (and, indeed, balance sheet)? I'm struggling with it a bit because I have no income. Would have a different answer in different circumstances.

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redshira.livejournal.com

I kind of lumped all sorts of stuff into that "helping starving people" category, though; for example, I'd give a few million to the organisation-whose-name-I-can't-remember who really really need £8million over the next few years to try and stop all the bees dying, because no bees = all of us starve.

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I have opinions on this likely to get me flamed.

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Most people do. They're a lot less altrustic than they think they are.

Hence the last check box...

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I used to be a lot more altruistic, until 7 years ago a drunk tried to attack me. Last time I have any kindly feelings towards unfortunates!

Also. I have given money to the BHF. I used some of their research in a chapter, and donated.

I used to work for a charity, which unfortunately have reduced my faith in organisations.

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broin.livejournal.com

Was it the waste? I'm working in a charity. It's... offputting.

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anton-p-nym.livejournal.com

My "zero" is a rounding error thing; I already give about $100/year to the local Food Bank. It's not that I won't give, it's that I really can't give much without risking ending up on the taking end and mucking it up for everybody.

My 5% on the prize winnings is because I wouldn't restrict my charitable contributions to starvation; decent education ranks pretty high on my list, too, as does basic preventative health care measures (including clean water and innoculations). Frankly, I think UNICEF (or something similar) would get the bulk of my charitable attentions.

-- Steve'd also want to leave some winnings aside for the memorial bronze colossus in his image; c'mon, you know you would too.

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Playing devil's advocate for a mo.....

What if a population is incapable of sustaining itself. Should it should be allowed to decrease naturally and thus we shouldn't give to charity to try to prop up unsustainable population levels? I.e. if you can't afford / can't source enough food, to feed your kids then you shouldn't have had them in the first place and shouldn't expect anyone else to help you out.

If I donate part of my income, am I only making things worse by sustaining / expanding (if they then have kids too) an ever-increasing overpopulation problem?

Is not donating at that point selfish or practical on a global scale?

I'm not saying that's my personal viewpoint but this article on the impact of overpopulation on the environment got me pondering applying the same issues to charity. There are (or most likely soon will be) too many people. Is not giving for the sake of the planet rather than the individual the ultimate selfless act?

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There's enough food to feed everyone, easily.

It's just not evenly distributed.

Also, you're dividing the world into "us" and "them" - an inherently selfish thing to do. If you're fine with that...

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drdoug.livejournal.com

I'm not so sure that's true any more. Last time I looked about 5y ago we'd just had the first year where total calorie ouput was - just - less than total requirement. Be interested if you dig out figs with the Long Dry affecting Ozzie output, EU floods,, biofuels, and population nudging 7bn.

Capacity is still high enough, but we'd need to eat less, and less meat. Trend is all wrong there tho' with the BRIC protein shock. But I've not seen good data so don't know how big these have got.

(The main point stands tho' - most starvation is about other factors.)

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anton-p-nym.livejournal.com

Paul Erlich has much to answer for.

For consideration, most famines around the world have nothing to do with overpopulation; they're results of political disruptions in the flow of food, sometimes exacerbated by bad luck with weather. Indeed many famines in the past century were deliberate attempts at "weaponising" hunger, notably in Ethiopia and Somalia. (And the Ukraine in the '30s.) So witholding food aid in many cases isn't "letting nature restore the balance", it's playing into the hands of warlords.

Add in that agriculture is so fruitful now (though perhaps not in a petroleum-poor future, though that's arguable) that major agricultural nations pay subsidies to growers so that they don't go broke; the US has price supports, France direct subsidies, Canada rations production of many food products to prevent gluts. There's no shortage of food on the planet, just uneven rates of production.

-- Steve can't agree that giving food aid is a cruel prolongation of the problem of overpopulation.

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Didn't a large chunk of the aid money for Ethiopia in the 80s end up in the government coffers, paying for guns and whisky? Isn't giving then playing into the hands of the warlords?

Agriculture is plentiful at the moment, yes, but we can't fit all of the population in areas where the food is and to get all the food to areas where the food-poor populations are will require an ever-increasing drain on other resources (petroleum, etc). Additionally, by sustaining a starving population, you're contributing to an increase in that population, requiring more sustenance until you reach an over-population point anyway.

Yes, there is lots of food on the planet at the moment, but a sustainable population is not necessarily the same as the maximum population that the food alone could support and whilst it may be the humane thing to do, aspiring to that maximum population may not be the sensible thing for the species.

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anton-p-nym.livejournal.com

If you extend your argument, though, then it becomes far more merciful to bomb the starving and end their misery more quickly and cheaply than sending assistance. (Albeit slightly pricier than doing nothing, admittedly.) And the only assistance the warlords would get from that would be the salvage value of unexploded ordnance... well, that and having their dirty work done for them, but doing nothing also works for them the same way.

Once you start considering Tough Decisions™ you start running into very strange logic.

Your argument is also predicated on a continual increase in population until it reaches its Malthusian maximum, whereas we've seen a dramatic drop in growth in Westernised countries (indeed, below replacement rate) after the post-war Baby Boom. Prosperity (and condoms/The Pill) may be better for limiting population growth than the politics of famine.

-- Steve will also remind folks that very few (if any) predictions made in Ehrlich's [i]The Population Bomb[/i] actually paid out; in scientific terms, the theory's a bust.

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Putting the warlords aside for a moment as they seem to be in a win/win situation, I would argue that the cold hard logic is not that strange if you treat it purely as a mathematical exercise in supply, demand, resource consumption and population. Add the moral and emotional viewpoints back in and it gets a lot more complicated :)

I agree with your point about contraception though and I would say that that's the solution. Giving to a charity to feed the starving will decrease the infant mortality rate and increase the average life expectation in the affected area. Unless you change the mentality, education and availability of contraception too, you will just increase the number of people reliant on aid to survive, placing an increasing burden on resources.

Change the mentality of those people so that they don't believe they have to have ten kids to get two to adulthood and, as I said in another comment, you decrease the resources consumed and make the population more sustainable - possibly even self-sustaining in that area eventually. Feed starving people and you create more starving people. Change how the population thinks and breeds and you can create sustainability.

Andy has said that he didn't intend his original question to mean simply averting starvation in the short term but that's precisely what a lot of charities do. Even those working on longer term projects (e.g. clean water in Africa, etc) will still just create an environment that can sustain a few more before the local population outgrows it again and starts to starve.

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I have to agree with this.

I would much rather give to a charity whereby I knew they were doing something useful and semi-permanent like putting in a well, or developing agriculture.

I don't think throwing food at people solves anything. They need contraception information, education and skills.

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I said "to help starving people", not "throw food at people". I'm assuming the money goes towards projects to reduce both short and long-term starvatin.

Also, see the two other replies to the comment.

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ciphergoth.livejournal.com

I'd spend the money on politics, not directly on the poor. I took your question to include that option.

Edited Date: 2009-02-25 05:49 pm (UTC)

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That was my intention. Some people seem to have read it as "hand cash directly to the poor." which was not my intention at all.

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Edit the post? (not the poll, since you can't)

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

I'm keen on less people in the world, and yes, I am prepared for that to perhaps mean and mine - though obviously I'd rather it wasn't :-).

I hate crowds, I hate too many people, so any not-drastically-destabilising population reductions can be seen as desirable from that point of view.

Of course stick real starving people in front of me and I suspect I'd be moved to try to sort it out if I at all could (and by longer term strategies rather than short term fixes).

Is I recall, the evidence is that if you remove the worry that your kids will die off young and give access to decent contraception (especially if it can be of the long term and 'hidden' i.e. female controlled) and education then birth rates plummet. So I suppose patience is the key...

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I was just saying to

is_not_well that if you put a starving kid in front of me, then yes, I'd feed it, but, as in my reply to

anton_p_nym above, at that point you've resolved the geographic issues of person needing food and the food itself being in different places so that person is then sustainable.

Totally agree with the comment on infant mortality, education and contraception. Improve the chances that two kids will survive to adulthood from two born rather than two survivors from 10 born and you drastically reduce the resources consumed to get two more adults.

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johncoxon.livejournal.com

I get £60/week student loan and am going to be roughly £25k in debt at the end of my degree, so I'm answering "0%, but more when I, y'know, have a job and stuff".

And also, what about people who aren't starving but are suffering? People who have terminal illnesses? There's no option for me to say "Well, I'd prefer to patronise Children in Need/Stonewall/Everyman/the BHF". Not every charitable action has to end in helping the starving people, and if it did you'd be massively discriminating against people who are also very vulnerable!

As such, I'm going to refrain from filling it out.

Edited Date: 2009-02-25 04:54 pm (UTC)

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marrog.livejournal.com

I would currently actually commit less than 5% in the first instance - I figured out that my planned outgoing (have been meaning to set up a monthly standing order for a bit) works out to about 2% of my monthly income, but given how low that monthly income is it's about as much as I can afford without it affecting me in any way, and see below re: evil selfish person.

The 5% to the second is because I have it worked out roughly how much I need left over to live off interest after the initial big spends, and I have other giveaway priorities such as family and friends and so on which get bigger as the amount of money gets bigger, and a half a million is about what's left out of ten, I'd guess.

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rosamicula.livejournal.com

I would need to know which people and why they were starving. Then I'd think about it.

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broin.livejournal.com

What sort of things would matter?

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pickwick.livejournal.com

My caveat would be that my answers apply to generic "people starving to death in Africa"; if it were people I loved or, to a lesser extent, people I knew, then the percentage suddenly shoots straight up to "everything that's left after the roof over my head and my own food, and as much as is needed of my credit card funds".

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randomchris.livejournal.com

As someone else above said, it depends on who's starving and, more importantly, why they're starving; if it's because of overpopulation, and the result of them not starving will be to have more children who will then starve because there are too many people for the (slightly increased) resources, then giving aid to them will actually have increased the amount of human suffering in the world, which is entirely pointless.

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seph-hazard.livejournal.com

I do see the point you're making, but...ouch. It is merely an accident of geography that makes you the one who is coldly calculating this rather than the one who doesn't give a fuck on account of how you're about to die from malnutrition.

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That's a very compassionate - and correct - thought, but if it's pointless, it's pointless, isn't it?

You're potentially treating a symptom, not the cause.

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I'm assuming 10 million pounds as 10 million aussie dollars. Sorry, I don't care for conversions and assuming you don't either ;)

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