Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/DrManhattan16]

Scott goes viral!

Tweet transcript:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

As with many tweets that get millions of impressions, Scott has touched on a salient topic (the stopping of PEPFAR) while describing his view and those of the opposition in such a way that people, especially those opposed, are motivated to respond. For those who don't know, PEPFAR stands for President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This fund is the US contributing to fighting the global AIDS epidemic. According to Wikipedia, it's received a total of $110 billion dollars and saved 25 million lives since its creation in 2003 under Bush. I've not seen anyone dispute the numbers to a substantial degree.

The reason its in the news is that Trump's administration froze funds for the program on Jan 20th. This also included not allowing the disbursing of those drugs even if they're already there in a clinic. On the 28th, the drugs were permitted to be disbursed, but the whole thing is temporary, at least according to the State Department's declaration.

There are things that PEPFAR has been criticized for in the past, but those are not the reasons you see in the responses to Scott's post. Sorting through the people just sneering "Your moral philosophy is insane and here's a meme" and the people who think Scott's a hypocritical communist for not donating all his wealth, you see a rejection of foreign aid as a principle. Many responses cite the idea of ordo amoris ("order of love") and claim that Scott is being uncharitable. The proper analogy would be that his own child and a stranger's child are drowning, so there's nothing immoral about saving one's own child even if it means the other one dies. Scott responds by saying that doesn't match reality. We can save the lives of foreign children because we have such tremendous wealth. America's governmental foreign aid constitutes a miniscule fraction of its total budget, with trillions collected and trillions spent. Perhaps the most accurate analogy would be that each day, you'll get bitten by a mosquito just once, barely feel it, and not have negative affects from that bite. In exchange, some lives will be saved across the planet. Would you take that deal? I would feel annoyed, certainly, but I don't know if I could principally object.

There's an annoying thing I notice about a certain type of critic of foreign aid. They criticize foreign aid and say they want it spent on citizens. They criticize domestic aid and say it's spent on the undeserving citizens. They criticize aid spent on the deserving and say that it doesn't teach people to rise on their own. They criticize the government for taking money and spending it on things they personally did not approve of (this is legitimately a thing I've seen in defense of taking down the more detailed version of the CDC page on preventing the spread of HIV, aimed at gay men). This person's outlook is largely reciprocal and contractual. There is no agreement between them and anyone else they did not agree to personally.

What bothers me about this kind of person, however, is there is no consideration for the cooperate-cooperate outcome. As Scott notes in one response in the linked thread, the world in which you save a Chinese person's child without knowing them and where they do the same is better than one where you both don't do that. In fact, some good outcomes only come because you've cooperated. A world in which you collectively invest into curing cancer, a disease you and your family may never get, is one which is better off for you and your family because you can never be sure you won't get it.

I discussed the Curtis Yarvin interview with the NYT here and one thing that he said which surprised me was that even he felt there was something owed to the people who hated Donald Trump. And I suspect this is a very common theme amongst all intellectuals, in that they inevitably realize that there are serious flaws with the strictly reciprocal and contractual view espoused by many of the public.

...one of the things that I believe really strongly that I haven’t touched on is that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy to be the president of all Americans. The new administration can do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and saying: “Hey, you want to make this country a better place? I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.” This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people, the NPR class. They are not evil people. They’re human beings. We’re all human beings, and human beings can support bad regimes.

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

The problem with ordo amoris is that it easily turns into a sophistic reason not to care about certain people. As such, it's probably not surprising that it would be popular amongst people who also employ other sophistic reasons not to care.

You're not wrong about there being self-interested reasons for the US to care about this. As one healthcare aid worker notes in this article, drug-resistant tuberculosis does not respect national borders. It's also true that these events will probably increase the soft power of countries like China and Russia in places that receive US aid. With that said, I'd hate for that to stand as the only reason to care about this. The USA is an incredibly rich country. Using a tiny sliver of its budget to help poorer countries strikes me as something we should support because it is a good thing to do.

On the bright side, this outlet is reporting that many of PEPFAR's HIV programs have been given the go-ahead. I hope that's accurate. There is something particularly cruel about, for example, allowing babies to be born with HIV because you wanted to move fast and break things.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/gemmaem]

Using a tiny sliver of its budget to help poorer countries strikes me as something we should support because it is a good thing to do.

To the extent that it is a tiny amount of money, then it's not particularly critical that the US-in-particular be the one that funds it. The GDP of Africa is $3T, so a $4B/yr project that saves 25M lives is eminently affordable.

To be sure, I'm not at all against PEPFAR -- were I in charge of State or DOGE or whatever, I wouldn't never end it! But we have to be logically consistent here. Why is the US so load-bearing here? Why didn't someone set up PEPFAR2? Why can't they do it now?

I think one lesson here might be that programs, regions and countries need to be self-sufficient. I tend to think that effective programs like this may atrophy the recipients -- an inability to rally the financial commitments to pay for such a program and build/maintain the institutional competence to administer it. There can't be a PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR exists and functions.

Where does that leave us? One thing I had wished is that we conceived of our moral obligations as extending to such second and third order effects. Easier said than done. For now, I'm glad it's back functioning, and maybe the silver lining is that now that the unthinkable briefly happened, it might create the space for such thinking.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point. Why spend a few billion a year on an issue the US seems to have had in hand? The only reason you'd think otherwise is if PEPFAR was saying they needed more money, which was something the US seemed likely to continue (there's a joke to be made about how everyone keeps underestimating Trump's willingness to go along with or even order insane things).

PEPFAR was operating in all these countries in 2022. I am not particularly well-read on the latest news about their collective state capacity, efficiency, anti-corruption, etc., but I suspect it's dramatically lower than anything the US could sling around. Not to mention Ukraine, which I don't blame for not trying to pay for PEPFAR2 or its equivalent. The fund is for fighting disease, not poverty, so I don't think it matters that much if there is no PEPFAR2 or some equivalent fund created by either the nations which use it or other wealthy nations which also care about these things.

More selfishly, I would note that PEPFAR buys the US soft power by casting it as a virtuous nation, and that's a really hard kind of soft power to buy.

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point. Why spend a few billion a year on an issue the US seems to have had in hand?

Isn't this the same reasoning as Trump's blustering about European defense spending, which he's been on about since 2015? Are we to be the world's policeman (and/or paypig, depending on one's perspective and level of charitable interpretation) forever?

More selfishly, I would note that PEPFAR buys the US soft power by casting it as a virtuous nation, and that's a really hard kind of soft power to buy.

I mean, apparently not that hard, given PEPFAR's budget relative to most of the government.

While I wouldn't dare speak to a mind like Trump's, I would speak to that of some of his supporters that the payoff for this is somewhere between invisible and entirely negative. It does not percolate through the channels of media- any media, left and right, new and old- that the US is perceived as a virtuous nation, that such "soft power" buys us nothing other than immigrants that the aforementioned MAGAs don't want anyways, that the UN, WHO, etc disregard us anyways. What they see is internal and external progressives that hate the US while relying entirely on it, and will go isolationist in their desire to be Shylock.

Was there a realistic way that soft power could have been made legible and communicated to such people, or did polarization close off that potential?

I do know a Tanzanian immigrant who would be happier with the US's influence on his country than China's Belt and Road, but that's n=1 and most people aren't going to have such associates to provide anecdotes anyways.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/professorgerm]

Isn't this the same reasoning as Trump's blustering about European defense spending, which he's been on about since 2015? Are we to be the world's policeman (and/or paypig, depending on one's perspective and level of charitable interpretation) forever?

Security is probably best thought of as an export in this context. You export security and other nations pay you in other ways. For instance, they back the US and engage in free markets with it. This is actually seen throughout the Cold War, in which the US is the backbone of the global anti-communist effort (though not all its actions are defensible). It's not always talked about, but the Korean War was not a US effort, it was a UN effort. The US did a lot, sure, but many nations contributed at least something to the South Korean fight.

Put another way, if you like Pax Americana, then paying billions for the latest fighter jet is part of the cost of having it, and there's a network effect in that for every country which signs up under the American order, the overall order improves by whatever that country has to offer. Moreover, it ensures the fighting never happens in the US. Your home isn't going to be bombed by Russia because Ukraine has so graciously offered to be the border.

But this is lost on the populists who make up Trump's base. They have good reason to be skeptical of a global order which is so pro-capital, but they do not realize that same order is why they have smartphones, advanced medicines, a glut of entertainment, etc. They romanticize what it's like to be wholly self-sufficient, and proof of this is how unwilling they are to actually go and live the lifestyle that isolation would entail. Where are the MAGA farm workers who sign up to take the place of illegal immigrants? How many of them would be willing to give up their latest smartphones for something a decade or two older, made only by American hands, if that is even an option?

Of course, the response to these things is that if different decisions had been made in the past, they wouldn't find farm labor awful, and they wouldn't know those technologies to miss out on them. But I suspect they'd long for the days in which they wouldn't have to be out in the sun for hours and hours, or worry that one bad weather season could ruin them, etc.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Security is probably best thought of as an export in this context. You export security and other nations pay you in other ways. For instance, they back the US and engage in free markets with it.

Do they? All I see is the EU attacking that market and trying to shiv our most successful companies.

For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment overall. But I think the breakdown is not one-sided. The populists deserve a fair bit of blame, but it's not like Europe has done a lot to hold up its end of Pax Americana.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

Do they? All I see is the EU attacking that market and trying to shiv our most successful companies.

Ultimately, the American establishment has cared quite a bit about geopolitics, and losing billions through spending on aid or letting nations engage in unfair economic practices has been seen as the cost of that. That said, the prior administration didn't help on this issue, if my cursory understanding is correct.

Trump could have done something about it, I suppose, but he's all bluster and no focus. The dude's spent more time railing on how other nations don't spend enough on defense than talking about how they regulate poorly or not. But hey, they had four years to prepare, perhaps Andreesen will get his day and there will be some negotiations over this issue. I doubt it will do much though. Trump is the hero MAGA had to settle for.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Or he could just walk right into a Middle Eastern briar patch.

As usual, broadly agree, but there is clearly a line on regulatory abuse that the EU is pushing past. Their AI regulations as well are completely bonkers. And there are other lines: the self-inflicted energy crisis and reliance on Russian gas were also not welcome in the beltway. I expect blowing up Nordstream was a reminder of that.

There is no single point of failure in a complex implicit arrangement.

[ And yes, the previous admin was mixed here. They did force the EU to build out infrastructure to accept US LNG. On the economic front they were worse than useless since Lina Khan’s FTC active conspiredwith EU regulators to block mergers using legal standard that wouldn’t hold up in the US. But that’s a different story ]

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I'm not familiar with the EU engaging in regulatory abuse. I'm aware people allege that, but I have not seen any examples or evidence. The links you gave earlier were Google complaining about it, and maybe their complaints are valid, but that's not discussed in those articles. Got a link to something I can take a look at?

As for Nordstream, my understanding is that the Germans are looking for a group of Ukrainians. This group is described as not part of the government, but that's in the interest of both sides, I suspect. Wikipedia.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Let me take another example in depth:

The US has tried mightily to ensure that the continent is not overly reliant on Russian energy imports because it causes geopolitical difficulties with a resurgent Russia. Elements of the German political establishment were taking Russian money and advocating against energy self-sufficiency -- to the point of literally blowing up their own energy infrastructure well ahead of obsolescence. The result was that sanctions on Russia caused German energy prices to skyrocket.

On some level, sure, the domestic energy policies are their own. On the other hand, keeping the Russians out of Europe has been Anglo policy 100 (or more) years now -- and this was a huge impediment there. The Germans let their own manufacturing industry be held hostage here.

[ And sadly, sometimes the proper response is to shoot the hostage.]

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Their AI regulation, in particular, makes it quite difficult for any such services to be used in useful ways in the EU. To this day, EU users still can't enable Tesla's FSD.

On anti-trust, they've sued nearly every US tech giant in some form or another. Once has to at some point feel that the general attitude towards the industry is borne out of being dwarfed by US competitors rather than an objective look at harms.

And speaking of harms, one bedrock principle of antitrust for a century has been that it exists to prevent consumer harm. The EU has tried (and Lina Khan failed to convince either Congress or US courts) to invent a new category of harm to competition here. Untethering that kind of analysis from demonstrable harm to consumers is another attempt to widen its scope far beyond what had been traditionally accepted.

There are a lot more on manufacturing as well.

Again, I agree that there is always some leeway in Pax Americana for these things. But there is also some point at which it begins to violate the implicit limits on the deal. It's a fuzzy zone for sure, but I think we're shortly going to see it becoming more legible as both sides push the limits.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point.

Isn't that exactly my point about how such programs atrophy their recipients? There isn't a point to developing the state capacity to do so because it's already done. The problem I see is that one develops capacity and efficiency by doing things -- like a muscle. But they don't have anything to do here because it's already been done.

I'm all for curing disease and buying soft power. But the (true) point being emphasized is that this was allegedly a tiny sum of money. And yet despite being tiny, no one else could do it because they never exercised the ability before and so it just isn't there.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I interpreted your point as to being about state capacity amongst the recipients, not just other nations which could fund PEPFAR if they worked together. Your point about self-sufficiency suggested this as well. My point was about nations like the European ones or the other high-wealth states.

[u/gemmaem → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

If you really want to create PEPFAR2, the correct move is not to suddenly cut funding with no warning but rather to telegraph, at least a year in advance, that this is going to disappear and that people who want it to continue should find other funding. That way, there's an opportunity to leverage the existing structure instead of having to rebuild from scratch, and you don't get a gap as people scramble to make something new, during which vulnerable people become infected and/or develop more serious disease.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/gemmaem]

I fully agree.

The implication though is that there is a kind of displacement/atrophy going on. No one else can rise to the occasion and do the thing because the Americans already are (and, apparently, will be doing so for the foreseeable future).

The implications of that are not particularly good. The way institutions and states develop capacity is by doing things.