This was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing it. This reflects a lot of my own views, especially the parts about RCT evidence in Development being weaker than is deserved (given the medicine halo) and the challenges in estimating costs (and how much that matters). Whenever I dig in for teaching or research I nearly always leave with more uncertainty, which is a bit of a scary feeling.

My claiming it's uncontentious is based on working in this research area and  talking to lots of researchers about it. When asked, most say they're less worried about charity than ODA causing these sort of governance issues. Now I get that your question is "why?" and my answer here is more tentative, because I don't know what is going on in their heads.

I do think "size of flow" is a big part of it. I'd guess "large flow" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for governance issues, and absent something like a big GiveDirectly UBI-type thing the size of charity flows is often not that large compared to e.g. recipient government budgets.

In terms of the theory, I honestly just think our theory is pretty weak. We've often expected flows to cause harm when it looks like they didn't. I don't want to say theory isn't important here, but I think we should be at least as cautious about theory as we are about empirics (very). Maybe it's worth pointing out that my title was that we don't have good evidence for harm, which I strongly stand by, not that we have good evidence that these flows are benign (we don't). This is just a very hard area to study.

Fair. I struggle with how to incorporate animals into the capabilities approach, and while I appreciate Martha Nussbaum turning her attention here I was also wary of list-based approaches so it doesn't help me too much.

I think this is one of those posts where the question is ultimately more valuable than the answer. And to be clear that isn't a criticism and I upvoted the post. I appreciate posts that push people to think about important questions, even if our best guess answers are not currently very compelling.

I strongly agree with your main point on uncertainty, and I'll defer to you on the (lack of) consensus among happiness researchers on the question of whether or not life is getting better for humans given their paradigm.

However, I think one can easily ground out the statement "There’s compelling evidence that life has gotten better for humans recently" in ways that do not involve subjective wellbeing and if one does so then the statement is quite defensible.

Totally agree that it's a fascinating case. Thanks for this!

Happy to recommend her work highly.

Good question. It’s worth recalling that Sam and Finn’s JDE actually finds small positive (significant) effects of aid on many governance outcomes. I’m not sure I actually believe that those positive effects exist, but it’s important to see that my claims above don’t hinge on over interpreting (imprecise) nulls. Also I realize you know this, but for others it’s good to remember that classical measurement error in the DV will increase noise but will not introduce bias.

The article in footnote 3 is also an example of other work I (in the interest of brevity) didn’t summarize but have read that lends support to my claims re: aid and governance by testing one mechanism thought to link aid and governance in proper experiments (this is another related one based on qualitative work: https://rdcu.be/b4aTu), so my claims don’t rest purely on country-year panels. If some people DM me and say that they want a longer summary covering this stuff, I might try to find the time to do it.

That is correct. I think it is pretty uncontentious to say that the people who study this in general worry less about these private charity-type interventions than they do about ODA.

Fair.

I used the term to mean ODA, as did all of the authors that I cited. Basically, this would capture grants and concessional (below market rate) loans that are aimed at promoting economic development or welfare (so not military aid). From a donor's POV, it includes money that it gives to multilateral organizations like the WB that then pass the grant on as well as classic bilateral money. From the recipient's POV, it includes money from bilateral donors and from multilaterals. It does not include non-concessional loans or private charity. Money can be ODA even if the government doesn't administer the aid. This is sometimes called "bypass aid." ODA would also include things like project aid (money for a specific project, e.g. to build a road) or programme aid aimed at sectors or general budget support.

I hope that helps!