The U.S. Great Foreign Aid Experiment
Human suffering should be no barrier to a good experiment.
The common refrain has been that foreign aid is bad. It’s bureaucratic, top-down, inefficient, promotes corruption and dependence, and does not get to where it’s needed. A recent, novel addition to those complaints is that aid does not return sufficient economic value to the donor. Now, thanks to the US government’s dramatic shift in foreign aid, we have a natural experiment to test the hypothesis: no more counterfactual models, economic pontification, and ivory tower theorising. We’re going to get the data!
There is nothing surgical about the US Government cuts to aid, nor are they simply recalibration. They have declared ideological war against the world’s most vulnerable, and we will count the consequences in human lives.
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2 周Daniel Reidpath thank you for this powerful piece. While the numbers will start to illustrate the consequences very soon, I wonder (and worry) about what the global health and political impacts will look like in 5 years