Comment by qcnguy
4 days ago
I was/am confused by this part then: "The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc)". But as you say, they aren't accountable to the poor or minorities really.
In a world with unlimited time and resources, obviously we'd want to do both soup kitchens and other anti-poverty initiatives, but opportunity costs are real. There's limited resources, time and attention to go around. The people spending money on soup kitchens aren't spending money on other things.
In most societies there's a lot of low hanging fruit for reducing (absolute) poverty. Lots of things we know work well to create wealth and reduce poverty get ignored. For example, maybe if taxes were lower fewer soup kitchens would get funded, but fewer people would find themselves needing them to begin with - a win. We know that small state libertarianism creates wealth, so initiatives to address poverty often end up creating the issues they're trying to solve.
Given that, if you have three people and limited time/money, is it better to run a soup kitchen or lobby against poverty-creating government policies? You can't necessarily do both.
Substitute "run education schemes" for lobbying if you prefer. Same tradeoffs apply.
> I was/am confused by this part then: "The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc)". But as you say, they aren't accountable to the poor or minorities really.
That's fair. I wrote the post quickly, wanted to avoid words like 'stakeholder' and ended up inadvertently overloading the word 'accountable'. What I meant to say is that a soup kitchen is effectively in a monopoly position vis-à-vis its 'customers', its 'customers' are largely powerless against it, and that creates bad incentives. Trying to engineer clever business structures for the soup kitchen does not remove said incentives.
> (tail)
I am very sympathetic to both libertarianism and soup kitchens, so I'm going to be a somewhat idiosyncratic defender of the latter, but I think the moral hazard argument against charity is a relatively weak one. In reality, people in need of aid divide largely into two groups: (a) people in temporary straits, often through external factors (e.g. fleeing an abusive relationship with nothing but the shirts on their backs), and (b) people with persistent mental health issues. Neither are really groups who would benefit from education on how not to be poor - it would be patronising to the former and wasted on the latter. There is widespread societal consensus that people in situations such as the above probably shouldn't starve to death, which I would posit is a good thing.