How "Big Ideas" Are Actually Hurting International Development

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 22, 2014 @10:10PM from the we-can-cure-cancer-if-everyone-in-the-world-jumps-at-the-same-time dept.

schnell writes: The New Republic is running a fascinating article that analyzes the changing state of foreign development. Tech entrepreneurs and celebrities are increasingly realizing the inefficiencies of the old charitable NGO-based model of foreign aid, and shifting their support to "disruptive" new ideas that have been demonstrated in small experiments to deliver disproportionately beneficial results. But multiple studies now show that "game changing" ideas that prove revolutionary in limited studies fail to prove effective at scale, and are limited by a simple and disappointing fact: no matter how revolutionary your idea is, whether it works or not is wholly dependent on 1.) the local culture and circumstances, and 2.) who is implementing the program.

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Re:Why giving ? by guises · 2014-11-23 02:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

There's some kind of cognitive disconnect here.

Question: "Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries?"
Answer: "China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody" "Tens of millions of people perished"

Question: "they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?"
Answer: "Tens of millions of people perished"

Look, the survival of the country doesn't mean shit. Countries are just organizational tools. The aid has the objective of improving the lives of the people, not the country, and it does work - it has been rigorously demonstrated to work when it's done a certain way under certain conditions. All that the article is trying to do is point out that those conditions are very idiosyncratic and that aid organizations need to take that under consideration.