"If national identity can be strengthened, and the salience of racial identities weakened, Americans wouldn’t have to define their place in American society by the circumstances of their birth." Right!
Practically speaking, most Americans are mutts; our individual backgrounds are a mix of cultures, races, religions, etc. So America is not a country of white people, it is a country of mutts. Seen this way, whiteness is inadequate to express what it is to be American.
When muttness replaces whiteness in the American imagination, the Melting Pot will be achieved.
As a Canadian, I would LOVE if you do indeed write a longer post on the economic situation in my country. It’s certainly depressing that it has become like it is because it will affect us in the long term.
Looking forward to it! One suggestion would be to take a look at Philip Smith's substack. He's an economist with a long career at Statistics Canada and Finance Canada. For example, here's a careful decomposition of factors affecting GDP per capita: https://philip635.substack.com/p/accounting-for-the-decline-of-canadas
Equating one, possible, wildly inappropriate nurse’s comment with “Canada encourages MAID for the disabled” is unworthy clickbait. It was on X, so I know the whole “when in Rome thing” applies, but sheesh!
"In its place we hired a bunch of expensive outside consultants whose goal was maximizing their own payouts from the government, rather than providing high-quality infrastructure for the citizenry at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer." A Reagan area memory: I was an engineer in the Facilities branch of the the USPS. In the mid eighties we did much if the design for repair and alterations in house using professional architects and engineers. Most were USPS employees with a few in house contract personnel. One week, the General Manager returned from a Washington conference with an evangelical glow in his eyes. Now the "new" idea was that government should not be in the business of competing with the private sector. We should hire consultants to do "studies"? design and construction management work with our office merely contracting for and managing their work. That philosophy gradually spread like a disease throughout the USPS. We all know how that turned out.
"Investment in residential structures accounts for twice the share of GDP in Canada (6%) than in the U.S. (3%)" comes as rather a surprise. Construction appears to be very expensive in Canada; see also "Businesses in Canada invest more in nonresidential structures". The RBC Economics report did not go into detail on why residential structures are so expensive - unionized labor costs? Stranded capital associated with permitting and certifications?
Good point. Yeah, it's not explicit from the RBC Economics report (Also not clear what timescale they are averaging over). I _might_ have read too much into the phrasing "residential structures" rather than "residential properties". (Assuming that, like the US, the _mean_ residential land to improvements ratio in Canada is pretty high; bear in mind that Canada IIRC is more urbanized than the US based on metrics like mean horizontal distance to nearest neighbor).
Thanks for expanding on Hanania's insight. I've sensed that the excitement generated by the Harris campaign is repairing the fractures of race/gender identity politics. We're all in this together, not because of who we are -- and not, like MAGA, because of who we hate -- but because of what we share. There's a feeling of locking arms and moving forward (Hope 2.0?) that is generating respect and overcoming resentment across racial and cultural divides.
"I've sensed that the excitement generated by the Harris campaign is repairing the fractures of race/gender identity politics"
So, the very people who caused the "fractures of race/gender identity politics" are generating excitement by repairing what they broke in the first place, led by Kamala "Jussie Smollett was a modern day lynching" Harris?
Sorry, not excited by campaign slogan "it's OK to be white as long as you vote for me."
To be honest, I was not initially excited by Harris, but I have been excited by the excitement her candidacy has generated. Sure, you can point to things she said in the past (as you can with all politicians), but she has created a moment or the moment has created her in a way that is overwhelmingly positive, unifying and forward looking. Perhaps it presages a "we can't go back" (her actual slogan) turning point for the extremes of identity politics as well.
The media blitz does nothing for me, but that's just me. Imo, we've gone from two bad options to two bad options. And if lefties want to back down on identitarian division until the election, ok, but it will be back with a vengeance the day after.
I don't think so. The identitarian divisiveness got a huge boost from Trump being president and it being a way to "resist" him. It started to die away only after Biden got elected.
It hasn't gone anywhere and it won't. Look at the UK. No Trump there, but the country is now being torn apart by riots caused by decades of left wing governments that have been systematically anti-white the whole time. Europe is not much different.
The divisiveness is inherent to what the left is now. It's the core of the whole movement.
“Furthermore, Intel’s suspension of a dividend signals that it’s planning to invest its earnings in its own business, rather than returning cash to shareholders. Paying dividends is what companies do when they don’t have ways to profitably reinvest the money; this is why growth stocks don’t tend to pay dividends. This is just Corporate Finance 101.”
Generally speaking, when you cut or suspend dividend, the first investors to bail are big, conservative institutional investors such as pension funds, banks, certain mutual funds, etc. I don’t think these entities come under the rubric of short-termism. They like steady, predictable income that a dividend provides.
I’m a long-term investor. And for this reason I think subsiding INTL so it’s first step into the fab business is leading edge, 3nm chip manufacturing, located in the worst possible area (fresh-water and hydroelectric shortages over the long term). Chip manufacturing is another, very unforgiving world compared to chip design. You must run 24/7 with yields at or above 98% to be competitive with and as dependable as TSMC. This is like giving a bicycle manufacturer money to build Formula 1 racing cars. And putting a chip fab in Phoenix will derive much higher cooling cost when compared to a chip fab in the Rustbelt, where more jobs are needed and additional housing development for chip fab employees and ancillary vendor businesses won’t tax fresh water resources.
A major reason why governments rely so heavily on consultants is that it’s politically impossible to pay government employees “serious” salaries. According to online information, a U.S. district attorney in Manhattan makes $166,000 a year. Alvin Bragg apparently makes perhaps as much as $219,000 a year. A senior partner in any major New York law firm will probably make close to $1 million a year, and “stars” surely do much better. Furthermore, your examples of effective government employees in action are less than overwhelming. Giving high-quality government employees substantial credit for the massive growth of the U.S. economy from WWII to the mid 1970s and blaming their departure for the “stagflation” that followed strikes me as, well, unsupported by the data. Furthermore, “proving” that BART’s efficiency in replacing its rail cars was due to “BART’s decision to have its own highly experienced staff do more of the engineering work in house” by quoting, well, BART, reminds me of the philosopher Wittgenstein’s remark that if you read a shocking headline in a newspaper, you wouldn’t pick up a copy of the same edition of the same paper to “confirm” it.
What’s going on with Canada? I was under the impression that one of their biggest problems in recent years has been a *lack* of construction. At least, that’s what housing prices in the major cities suggests to me.
But now you’re saying they’re doing *too much* construction, and they should be doing something “more productive” instead? It may be that construction work is itself low productivity growth, but it seems that it should be a major help in speeding up productivity growth in other sectors by allowing people to move to cities and allowing businesses to use better facilities.
Noah points out that public-private partnerships have been corrupt and wasteful in transit projects and in social services in San Francisco. Maybe this is because lavish funding given out via bureaucratic discretion attracts schemers and unscrupulous people to become recipients and allocators of the money. Maybe this is also a problem inherent in industrial policy.
The adoption industry is infamous for profit making. This has been true for decades. Likewise, organ harvesting and surrogacy in Third World countries.
attracts schemers and unscrupulous people to become recipients and allocators of the money. You mean, if the government leaves a big plate full of money out on the porch at night, the skunks move in to feast off it? No way.
Canada TFP: Why not try the boring, better regulation stuff (= state capacity) stuff first. Give it a couple of decades to work before the Industrial policy.
Question: How do we jibe lots of residential construction with what has been reported (not here, true enough) NIMBYish policies that prevent growth in high productivity areas like Vancouver?
I thought I read (maybe on Noah's substack?) that a tribe in Vancouver is going to build a rather massive residential project on their land, in great part because they are not as burdened by government regs?
I think the non-profit corruption cases generally fit with the outside emphasis on progressive virtue signaling over results. There’s been this kind of anti-rationalism on the far left where all that really matters is that you say the right things and are therefore a “good person,” so long as that’s true then whatever bad outcomes may happen are because life is hard, and that’s not your fault. Couple that with a default worldview that for-profit business is inherently evil and that non-profits are inherently good, and we get an environment where people can honestly believe that throwing inspirational parties is as important as giving out grants or providing services.
Of course the earlier reganite version of this is the equally wrong inverse, that government is inherently bad and businesses inherently good therefore outsourcing everything is some kind of obvious moral imperative even when it doesn’t turn out to work.
I think it's inherently impossible to make professional charities work. Local giving to people you know can work, maybe, but anything larger scale than that will rapidly become corrupted. Charitable givers don't get anything concrete in return (except a signal of their virtue!) so how could they judge the quality of an organization's work? For companies we test the quality of whatever we received, there is a network of reviewers, there are warranties, there is consumer protection law, there are price signals, there are competitors who are looking for mistakes (but also, truth in advertising laws that stop them just making things up), there is the stock market, contract law. A whole evolved web of systems that push companies in the direction of efficiency and quality.
Grant recipients have none of that, whether charities or NGOs or academic researchers. People give, the money disappears, and nobody has any way to find out why or what happened. There are a very few attempts to systematically appraise what works in charity, like the EAs, but as the Charity Navigator/GLAAD case shows none of these are reliable.
So we have entire scientific journals being wiped out because it turned out everything they published was fraud. Corporate America poured money into BLM to appease leftist executives and workers, and the money was all embezzled. The UN turns out to be funding Hamas. Miliband's refugee charity pays him millions all funded by the taxpayers, and he lays off employees. Bill Gates funds Neil Ferguson's epidemiological models that have never worked and never will, whilst honestly believing he's funding cutting edge science. He's been scammed, but what do you expect if someone announces they're going to give all their money away? Scammers gravitate to such people like wasps to honey.
Canada actually has the advantage of having a value added tax system at the Federal level and in many key provinces like Ontario and Quebec that doesn't tax business inputs like most US state sales and use taxes. Thus you don't have this issue in Canada of the government constantly having to give sales and use tax exemptions to important industries like data centers as US states are constantly doing.
To be clear most countries including Mexico other than the US have value added taxes but still I consider it an important competitive advantage for Canada.
Chinese/East Asian TFP: Aren't pretty high level of saving/investment necessary in order to absorb the technology that raised TFP? Is this part of the old "global saving glut/secular stagnation debate?"
Right, this is what Klenow pointed out with the alternate growth accounting framework. TFP and capital investment go hand in hand, so it's difficult to separate them out causally.
"San Francisco nonprofits are both corrupt and ineffectual"
Could you perhaps modify this with "some?"
Your bulldog focus on the failures of SOME San Francisco nonprofits tend to create a prejudice against nonprofits in general. If we focus on only criminal males, we get a worse feeling about a whole gender.
Charity Navigator has identified hundreds of terrific nonprofits. I have a prejudice because my own sister found the two nonprofits that did great work and never paid her a living wage. She is spending her retirement as a free consultant to those who wish to found new nonprofits.
I'd say the problem is systemic enough where it can't be seen as just a few bad apples. More of these are going to keep coming to light, because the incentive system itself is broken.
"David Miliband has been handed an annual pay package of more than $1.25million (£1million) by an aid charity heavily funded by British taxpayers – although it is cutting jobs and programmes after plunging into the red.
The ex-Labour Foreign Secretary's salary from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) – given at least £33million last year by the Government to alleviate poverty and assist refugees – is disclosed in data sent to US tax authorities.
It reveals that Mr Miliband – who hit out at 'immoral' fat-cats during his failed bid for the Labour leadership – collected $1,253,728 in 2022 as president and chief executive: almost six times more than Sir Keir Starmer is paid to run the country.
The problem is inherent to the nature of charity and grant-funded organizations. They breed corruption and there's no way to fix it, because the sort of people who give them money aren't doing it to get something specific. They are doing it to be seen to give money. In that environment, where nobody is checking what they got for their money, abuse of funds becomes routine.
That's a gigantic leap. The Ford Foundation and Bill Gates and the Carter Foundation (eradicated guinea worm in Africa) don't care if they're if they are having an impact?
Bill Gates "cares" in the abstract, as much as one guy focusing part time on it can care. But it's clearly secondary, he is much more concerned with having rehabilitated his reputation in the wake of the 90s anti-trust trials. Did he ever think much about, say, malaria, before then? There's no evidence he ever did. His Foundation funds a grab bag of whatever random issues were considered important by the great and the good at the time he set things up. At Microsoft he was famous for doing incredibly in-depth review meetings with his product managers, yelling at them for not having a grip on the details. Read anything about Gates and his philanthrophy, and what shines through is Gates' total disinterest and lack of grip on the details. That's one reason he's so easily scammed.
And then we have the people around him. None of them care in the slightest. This isn't only my opinion, Warren Buffett agrees. Lacking a large enough foundation to dispose of his wealth he started giving huge sums to the Gates Foundation but clearly has major regrets. He's said that after he dies the donations will stop, because the Foundation's overheads and waste are far too high (read: people like Miliband are living the high life on Foundation coin, Gates either doesn't notice or doesn't care or both, and Buffett doesn't want to embarrass his friend whilst he's alive). Instead Buffett plans for his kids to take over the giving after he's gone.
Those, like you, who want to smear an entire group in the absence of a A thorough investigation, deserve to be persecuted on the basis of insufficient evidence themselves.
Maybe, but I think none of the people running those charities were actually "classical" scammers or con artists before. I mean, Miliband definitely wasn't.
I think the vast majority of politicians have a big chunk of the scammer in them. One of their main tasks is to persuade people they're a better buy than they actually are.
In the United States we have a concept of a safety net., a basic level of care for citizens. Historically, this has been provided by nonprofits and government, but the ultimate responsibility is believed to belong to the government therefore government financing of nonprofits. Some nonprofits do all their own fundraising, but this takes time and energy from their main mission.
Are there homeless people on the streets of your city? Do they look like they are grifting successfully? They're certainly not asking the government for help just begging on the sidewalk!
No. Trying to make the point that there are actual people out there who really need help. How are you going to help them?
There is plenty of government waste and graft that is completely unrelated to nonprofit charities. I'd also be happy if you personally went and fixed that.
Those two links support your point that Charity Navigator made a big mistake with GLAAD. They do not support the idea that Charity Navigator is making mistakes in its other recommendations.
What makes you think their opinion is worth anything at all, though? Anyone can that they are expert in something (charity quality in this case). That doesn't mean anything. They have a high profile example of their scores being worthless, so you should assume all their scores are worthless until proven otherwise.
I have a long-time association with four charities that I have many reasons to believe are highly effective and have high scores. So, my conclusion is that some scores are useless. Until the issue is investigated systematically, I think a rational person will not take a categorical stance.
When I lived in Palo Alto in the 1980s, I worked in the Financial District of San Francisco. I walked to the train station and rode the old CalTrain into South San Francisco, where each express train was met by a Financial District shuttle bus. I loved those old CalTrain cars. The window sills were six inches deep! And when I took the night train home, I could sit in the upper deck and watch lights of various towns go by, as well as the headlights on the distant freeways. For a mere $72.00/month (this included a “bus stamp,” which entitled you to ride on any bus or streetcar in San Francisco. What a deal! There’s nothing like a soothing train ride to work, and you’re out of the stress and danger of traffic on the expressways: sound of the concrete surf.
"If national identity can be strengthened, and the salience of racial identities weakened, Americans wouldn’t have to define their place in American society by the circumstances of their birth." Right!
Practically speaking, most Americans are mutts; our individual backgrounds are a mix of cultures, races, religions, etc. So America is not a country of white people, it is a country of mutts. Seen this way, whiteness is inadequate to express what it is to be American.
When muttness replaces whiteness in the American imagination, the Melting Pot will be achieved.
As a Canadian, I would LOVE if you do indeed write a longer post on the economic situation in my country. It’s certainly depressing that it has become like it is because it will affect us in the long term.
I will!!
Looking forward to it! One suggestion would be to take a look at Philip Smith's substack. He's an economist with a long career at Statistics Canada and Finance Canada. For example, here's a careful decomposition of factors affecting GDP per capita: https://philip635.substack.com/p/accounting-for-the-decline-of-canadas
Really value most of your insights, you’re my only paid Substack, but please try to resist lazy generalizations:
https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1822336561058583003?s=46&t=ek9B1fpOnowpYtFvS7a10Q
Equating one, possible, wildly inappropriate nurse’s comment with “Canada encourages MAID for the disabled” is unworthy clickbait. It was on X, so I know the whole “when in Rome thing” applies, but sheesh!
Signed,
A Canadian physician
Sounds like you Canucklers could use more Milei and less Truddie.
Sane, down the centre, is what I’d like to see. It’s not exciting. It’s bland, and oh how I wish we were not so bludgeoned by the far sides.
"Sane, down the centre, is what I’d like to see."
I'd like to be 30 years younger and (much) better looking. I figure we have the same chance of getting what we'd like.
Fellow Canuck and subscriber here. Appreciate the insight.
"In its place we hired a bunch of expensive outside consultants whose goal was maximizing their own payouts from the government, rather than providing high-quality infrastructure for the citizenry at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer." A Reagan area memory: I was an engineer in the Facilities branch of the the USPS. In the mid eighties we did much if the design for repair and alterations in house using professional architects and engineers. Most were USPS employees with a few in house contract personnel. One week, the General Manager returned from a Washington conference with an evangelical glow in his eyes. Now the "new" idea was that government should not be in the business of competing with the private sector. We should hire consultants to do "studies"? design and construction management work with our office merely contracting for and managing their work. That philosophy gradually spread like a disease throughout the USPS. We all know how that turned out.
"Investment in residential structures accounts for twice the share of GDP in Canada (6%) than in the U.S. (3%)" comes as rather a surprise. Construction appears to be very expensive in Canada; see also "Businesses in Canada invest more in nonresidential structures". The RBC Economics report did not go into detail on why residential structures are so expensive - unionized labor costs? Stranded capital associated with permitting and certifications?
Is this just construction or also investors buying up existing properties?
Good point. Yeah, it's not explicit from the RBC Economics report (Also not clear what timescale they are averaging over). I _might_ have read too much into the phrasing "residential structures" rather than "residential properties". (Assuming that, like the US, the _mean_ residential land to improvements ratio in Canada is pretty high; bear in mind that Canada IIRC is more urbanized than the US based on metrics like mean horizontal distance to nearest neighbor).
Good point about “structures”. That makes me think construction and renovation.
Thanks for expanding on Hanania's insight. I've sensed that the excitement generated by the Harris campaign is repairing the fractures of race/gender identity politics. We're all in this together, not because of who we are -- and not, like MAGA, because of who we hate -- but because of what we share. There's a feeling of locking arms and moving forward (Hope 2.0?) that is generating respect and overcoming resentment across racial and cultural divides.
"I've sensed that the excitement generated by the Harris campaign is repairing the fractures of race/gender identity politics"
So, the very people who caused the "fractures of race/gender identity politics" are generating excitement by repairing what they broke in the first place, led by Kamala "Jussie Smollett was a modern day lynching" Harris?
Sorry, not excited by campaign slogan "it's OK to be white as long as you vote for me."
To be honest, I was not initially excited by Harris, but I have been excited by the excitement her candidacy has generated. Sure, you can point to things she said in the past (as you can with all politicians), but she has created a moment or the moment has created her in a way that is overwhelmingly positive, unifying and forward looking. Perhaps it presages a "we can't go back" (her actual slogan) turning point for the extremes of identity politics as well.
The media blitz does nothing for me, but that's just me. Imo, we've gone from two bad options to two bad options. And if lefties want to back down on identitarian division until the election, ok, but it will be back with a vengeance the day after.
I don't think so. The identitarian divisiveness got a huge boost from Trump being president and it being a way to "resist" him. It started to die away only after Biden got elected.
It hasn't gone anywhere and it won't. Look at the UK. No Trump there, but the country is now being torn apart by riots caused by decades of left wing governments that have been systematically anti-white the whole time. Europe is not much different.
The divisiveness is inherent to what the left is now. It's the core of the whole movement.
The rioters and the instigators are far right.
They have agency, too.
Maybe. Maybe not. We'll find out.
“Furthermore, Intel’s suspension of a dividend signals that it’s planning to invest its earnings in its own business, rather than returning cash to shareholders. Paying dividends is what companies do when they don’t have ways to profitably reinvest the money; this is why growth stocks don’t tend to pay dividends. This is just Corporate Finance 101.”
Generally speaking, when you cut or suspend dividend, the first investors to bail are big, conservative institutional investors such as pension funds, banks, certain mutual funds, etc. I don’t think these entities come under the rubric of short-termism. They like steady, predictable income that a dividend provides.
I’m a long-term investor. And for this reason I think subsiding INTL so it’s first step into the fab business is leading edge, 3nm chip manufacturing, located in the worst possible area (fresh-water and hydroelectric shortages over the long term). Chip manufacturing is another, very unforgiving world compared to chip design. You must run 24/7 with yields at or above 98% to be competitive with and as dependable as TSMC. This is like giving a bicycle manufacturer money to build Formula 1 racing cars. And putting a chip fab in Phoenix will derive much higher cooling cost when compared to a chip fab in the Rustbelt, where more jobs are needed and additional housing development for chip fab employees and ancillary vendor businesses won’t tax fresh water resources.
John, in the case of the Japanese automakers and Kia, their origins are in bicycle manufacturing. :)
(The learning curve is more like climbing Mount Everest over decades.)
A major reason why governments rely so heavily on consultants is that it’s politically impossible to pay government employees “serious” salaries. According to online information, a U.S. district attorney in Manhattan makes $166,000 a year. Alvin Bragg apparently makes perhaps as much as $219,000 a year. A senior partner in any major New York law firm will probably make close to $1 million a year, and “stars” surely do much better. Furthermore, your examples of effective government employees in action are less than overwhelming. Giving high-quality government employees substantial credit for the massive growth of the U.S. economy from WWII to the mid 1970s and blaming their departure for the “stagflation” that followed strikes me as, well, unsupported by the data. Furthermore, “proving” that BART’s efficiency in replacing its rail cars was due to “BART’s decision to have its own highly experienced staff do more of the engineering work in house” by quoting, well, BART, reminds me of the philosopher Wittgenstein’s remark that if you read a shocking headline in a newspaper, you wouldn’t pick up a copy of the same edition of the same paper to “confirm” it.
That’s why he said it was politically untenable to do that.
What’s going on with Canada? I was under the impression that one of their biggest problems in recent years has been a *lack* of construction. At least, that’s what housing prices in the major cities suggests to me.
But now you’re saying they’re doing *too much* construction, and they should be doing something “more productive” instead? It may be that construction work is itself low productivity growth, but it seems that it should be a major help in speeding up productivity growth in other sectors by allowing people to move to cities and allowing businesses to use better facilities.
I agree!
Noah points out that public-private partnerships have been corrupt and wasteful in transit projects and in social services in San Francisco. Maybe this is because lavish funding given out via bureaucratic discretion attracts schemers and unscrupulous people to become recipients and allocators of the money. Maybe this is also a problem inherent in industrial policy.
Operation Warp Speed was a public-private partnership.
The entire U.S. Military is a public-private partnership.
The railroads and the interstate highway system were public-private partnerships.
DARPA is a public-private partnership.
Maybe waving our hands and saying "Public-private partnerships are bad" is not a good generalization.
Maybe government officials tend to be easier marks than banks and investors.
Timely article of an excellent example:
https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/adoptions-africa-orphans-investigation-malawi-carney-d32a0495?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Sorry is paywalled, but you can use the paywall reader site if you do not subscribe
The adoption industry is infamous for profit making. This has been true for decades. Likewise, organ harvesting and surrogacy in Third World countries.
attracts schemers and unscrupulous people to become recipients and allocators of the money. You mean, if the government leaves a big plate full of money out on the porch at night, the skunks move in to feast off it? No way.
Canada TFP: Why not try the boring, better regulation stuff (= state capacity) stuff first. Give it a couple of decades to work before the Industrial policy.
Question: How do we jibe lots of residential construction with what has been reported (not here, true enough) NIMBYish policies that prevent growth in high productivity areas like Vancouver?
I thought I read (maybe on Noah's substack?) that a tribe in Vancouver is going to build a rather massive residential project on their land, in great part because they are not as burdened by government regs?
More absolute starts but lower relative to demand.
https://betterdwelling.com/canadas-immigration-plan-is-not-viable-in-any-version-of-reality-bmo/
I think the non-profit corruption cases generally fit with the outside emphasis on progressive virtue signaling over results. There’s been this kind of anti-rationalism on the far left where all that really matters is that you say the right things and are therefore a “good person,” so long as that’s true then whatever bad outcomes may happen are because life is hard, and that’s not your fault. Couple that with a default worldview that for-profit business is inherently evil and that non-profits are inherently good, and we get an environment where people can honestly believe that throwing inspirational parties is as important as giving out grants or providing services.
Of course the earlier reganite version of this is the equally wrong inverse, that government is inherently bad and businesses inherently good therefore outsourcing everything is some kind of obvious moral imperative even when it doesn’t turn out to work.
We need to get a lot more outcome-centric.
I think it's inherently impossible to make professional charities work. Local giving to people you know can work, maybe, but anything larger scale than that will rapidly become corrupted. Charitable givers don't get anything concrete in return (except a signal of their virtue!) so how could they judge the quality of an organization's work? For companies we test the quality of whatever we received, there is a network of reviewers, there are warranties, there is consumer protection law, there are price signals, there are competitors who are looking for mistakes (but also, truth in advertising laws that stop them just making things up), there is the stock market, contract law. A whole evolved web of systems that push companies in the direction of efficiency and quality.
Grant recipients have none of that, whether charities or NGOs or academic researchers. People give, the money disappears, and nobody has any way to find out why or what happened. There are a very few attempts to systematically appraise what works in charity, like the EAs, but as the Charity Navigator/GLAAD case shows none of these are reliable.
So we have entire scientific journals being wiped out because it turned out everything they published was fraud. Corporate America poured money into BLM to appease leftist executives and workers, and the money was all embezzled. The UN turns out to be funding Hamas. Miliband's refugee charity pays him millions all funded by the taxpayers, and he lays off employees. Bill Gates funds Neil Ferguson's epidemiological models that have never worked and never will, whilst honestly believing he's funding cutting edge science. He's been scammed, but what do you expect if someone announces they're going to give all their money away? Scammers gravitate to such people like wasps to honey.
None of this is fixable. It just can't be done.
"But nearly a third of that money was spent on just two Juneteenth parties…that cost more than $700,000 to produce. "
Well ... at least they know how to party ...
Note: They didn't say whether the parties were *good*...
Canada actually has the advantage of having a value added tax system at the Federal level and in many key provinces like Ontario and Quebec that doesn't tax business inputs like most US state sales and use taxes. Thus you don't have this issue in Canada of the government constantly having to give sales and use tax exemptions to important industries like data centers as US states are constantly doing.
To be clear most countries including Mexico other than the US have value added taxes but still I consider it an important competitive advantage for Canada.
Too bad the rate was ever reduced. So short-sighted.
Chinese/East Asian TFP: Aren't pretty high level of saving/investment necessary in order to absorb the technology that raised TFP? Is this part of the old "global saving glut/secular stagnation debate?"
Right, this is what Klenow pointed out with the alternate growth accounting framework. TFP and capital investment go hand in hand, so it's difficult to separate them out causally.
"San Francisco nonprofits are both corrupt and ineffectual"
Could you perhaps modify this with "some?"
Your bulldog focus on the failures of SOME San Francisco nonprofits tend to create a prejudice against nonprofits in general. If we focus on only criminal males, we get a worse feeling about a whole gender.
Charity Navigator has identified hundreds of terrific nonprofits. I have a prejudice because my own sister found the two nonprofits that did great work and never paid her a living wage. She is spending her retirement as a free consultant to those who wish to found new nonprofits.
I'd say the problem is systemic enough where it can't be seen as just a few bad apples. More of these are going to keep coming to light, because the incentive system itself is broken.
Probably. But you need a lot more evidence. The exclusive focus on San Francisco does not strengthen the argument.
From today's newspapers in the UK:
"David Miliband has been handed an annual pay package of more than $1.25million (£1million) by an aid charity heavily funded by British taxpayers – although it is cutting jobs and programmes after plunging into the red.
The ex-Labour Foreign Secretary's salary from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) – given at least £33million last year by the Government to alleviate poverty and assist refugees – is disclosed in data sent to US tax authorities.
It reveals that Mr Miliband – who hit out at 'immoral' fat-cats during his failed bid for the Labour leadership – collected $1,253,728 in 2022 as president and chief executive: almost six times more than Sir Keir Starmer is paid to run the country.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13706035/David-Miliband-handed-1-million-pay-package-aid-charity-heavily-funded-British-taxpayers-huge-sum-six-times-Sir-Keir-Starmer-paid-run-country.html
Or if you want one from the US that's not San Francisco:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2162671/black-lives-matter-leader-accused-of-siphoning-off-10-million/
Or just review the rate of fraud in academia.
The problem is inherent to the nature of charity and grant-funded organizations. They breed corruption and there's no way to fix it, because the sort of people who give them money aren't doing it to get something specific. They are doing it to be seen to give money. In that environment, where nobody is checking what they got for their money, abuse of funds becomes routine.
"They are doing it to be seen to give money."
That's a gigantic leap. The Ford Foundation and Bill Gates and the Carter Foundation (eradicated guinea worm in Africa) don't care if they're if they are having an impact?
Bill Gates "cares" in the abstract, as much as one guy focusing part time on it can care. But it's clearly secondary, he is much more concerned with having rehabilitated his reputation in the wake of the 90s anti-trust trials. Did he ever think much about, say, malaria, before then? There's no evidence he ever did. His Foundation funds a grab bag of whatever random issues were considered important by the great and the good at the time he set things up. At Microsoft he was famous for doing incredibly in-depth review meetings with his product managers, yelling at them for not having a grip on the details. Read anything about Gates and his philanthrophy, and what shines through is Gates' total disinterest and lack of grip on the details. That's one reason he's so easily scammed.
And then we have the people around him. None of them care in the slightest. This isn't only my opinion, Warren Buffett agrees. Lacking a large enough foundation to dispose of his wealth he started giving huge sums to the Gates Foundation but clearly has major regrets. He's said that after he dies the donations will stop, because the Foundation's overheads and waste are far too high (read: people like Miliband are living the high life on Foundation coin, Gates either doesn't notice or doesn't care or both, and Buffett doesn't want to embarrass his friend whilst he's alive). Instead Buffett plans for his kids to take over the giving after he's gone.
Those, like you, who want to smear an entire group in the absence of a A thorough investigation, deserve to be persecuted on the basis of insufficient evidence themselves.
I think the lesson we need to learn is that SOME scammers have moved on from their old cons to a new source of unearned income.
Maybe, but I think none of the people running those charities were actually "classical" scammers or con artists before. I mean, Miliband definitely wasn't.
I think the vast majority of politicians have a big chunk of the scammer in them. One of their main tasks is to persuade people they're a better buy than they actually are.
Why should they get funded by the taxpayers? If they want to raise money on the streets or through other campaigns, that’s fine with me.
In the United States we have a concept of a safety net., a basic level of care for citizens. Historically, this has been provided by nonprofits and government, but the ultimate responsibility is believed to belong to the government therefore government financing of nonprofits. Some nonprofits do all their own fundraising, but this takes time and energy from their main mission.
We have enough safety nets. What we need less of is grifters stealing taxpayer money to fund their personal piggy banks.
Are there homeless people on the streets of your city? Do they look like they are grifting successfully? They're certainly not asking the government for help just begging on the sidewalk!
Are they running non-profits and stealing taxpayer money? Try to spend a few minutes thinking before typing.
No. Trying to make the point that there are actual people out there who really need help. How are you going to help them?
There is plenty of government waste and graft that is completely unrelated to nonprofit charities. I'd also be happy if you personally went and fixed that.
“ Charity Navigator has identified hundreds of terrific nonprofits.”
Didn’t GLAAD have a 100% rating on Charity Navigator all the while spending (among other things) $500k a week on Swiss ski chalets?
Have you never made a single mistake in your whole entire life? I'll take Charity Navigator’s opinion over my own limited outlook.
I’m thinking Charity Navigator may consist of a series of easily gamed metrics.
I'm thinking neither of us knows enough to be sure.
We have a data point indicating it may be true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/business/glaad-ceo-spending.html
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/133384027
Those two links support your point that Charity Navigator made a big mistake with GLAAD. They do not support the idea that Charity Navigator is making mistakes in its other recommendations.
What makes you think their opinion is worth anything at all, though? Anyone can that they are expert in something (charity quality in this case). That doesn't mean anything. They have a high profile example of their scores being worthless, so you should assume all their scores are worthless until proven otherwise.
I have a long-time association with four charities that I have many reasons to believe are highly effective and have high scores. So, my conclusion is that some scores are useless. Until the issue is investigated systematically, I think a rational person will not take a categorical stance.
When I lived in Palo Alto in the 1980s, I worked in the Financial District of San Francisco. I walked to the train station and rode the old CalTrain into South San Francisco, where each express train was met by a Financial District shuttle bus. I loved those old CalTrain cars. The window sills were six inches deep! And when I took the night train home, I could sit in the upper deck and watch lights of various towns go by, as well as the headlights on the distant freeways. For a mere $72.00/month (this included a “bus stamp,” which entitled you to ride on any bus or streetcar in San Francisco. What a deal! There’s nothing like a soothing train ride to work, and you’re out of the stress and danger of traffic on the expressways: sound of the concrete surf.