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[Frumple]

Depends on what you mean by better, and how you're describing selfishness. It's not really selfishness that makes it difficult for us to emphasize with people outside our in-group, nor is selfishness entirely a bad thing. Bit is usually seen as pretty necessary to live. Ninja'd by MSH and all that.

What always strikes me as the biggest roadblock is figuring out how to convince people to extend their in-group to our entire species instead of just whatever local portion of it they're stuck in. It's just not something the human brain is very good at, really, and there's pretty major social and, honestly, practical forces providing resistance to the concept on top of that. Worldwide communication is a good start, though, for all of its inefficencies in enabling that sort of thing. We're closer than we were two centuries ago, though there's far from any guarantee anything along those lines will actually pan out.

[Mrhappyface]

I meant developing a hive mentality. That would be quite scary.

[Ancre]

It's also that foreign aid is not as simple as "jumping in the river to save a drowning kid".

For example, hunger. Giving food away for free to a country to help the hungry people there tends to make the country dependent on foreign aid - because by giving food for free, you've made yourself unbeatable competition to the local farmers, and you're slowly putting them out of business. Giving food away at a set price brings the same problem - you're pressing on the farmers' margin (the weakest part of the food chain, in a way) even as you make food affordable to a larger part of the population.

Besides, solving hunger (and many other problems) requires not goodwill from rich people, but political and structural changes. Develop farming, make water and electricity and sewage accessible, give everyone access to a job, etc. Which is the poor countries' responsibility. The best thing we can do is removing as much foreign pressure on them as possible (debt issues, etc) so they can do the changes they need to do - and it's not the rich citizen's role, it's the politic's role. Do we really want rich people to meddle with politics ? After all, they can. But I don't think anybody will agree that it's a good thing, however noble their intentions.

So yeah. The best thing you can do to help people is not to give away stuff (even if that too helps, and can be needed in certain situations, such as helping Haiti after the earthquake) but invest in their country.

[Mrhappyface]

That sounds like what the Chinese are doing in Africa.

[Mech#4]

@Mrhappyface: I remember seeing part of a program about a month ago that was focusing on chicken farming in Africa between local produce and a farm run by a chinese man.
Quality of the produce aside (How much of it was truth, and how much was 'they're foreigners so not to be trusted') the purpose seemed to be to present competition within the area to encourage the local farms to outdo the foreign run industry.

Whether it was working, or whether people were seeing it as an insurmountable challange and thus giving up, well... I didn't watch that far. The program seemed to focus more on quality and the treatment of the chickens more then whether it was working as intended or not.

[RedKing]

That sounds like what the Chinese are doing in Africa.

Yes and no. I recently had the opportunity to speak with some community leaders from Chad and Benin, and from what they described it's much more like how the West operated in Africa 100-150 years ago. The Chinese will negotiate for mineral rights or to build a manufacturing plant, then import their entire operation. Instead of hiring locals to do the work, they bring in their own workforce, build their own housing compound, and bring in their own merchants to operate restaurants and commisaries and such. They even bring in Chinese prostitutes. As a result, the net effect on the local economy is very small and limited to infrastructure upgrades, like improving the airport and the main road into town. Beyond that, it's all very insular, and when the minerals are gone and the Chinese pack up and leave, the locals will be more or less in the same boat they were in before.

One of the comments that I thought was fascinating was that even in cases where the Chinese company doesn't build a housing compound, the locals prefer Westerners, because we take up more space (i.e. rent more rooms). As I was told, "Americans and Europeans rent 1-2 people to an apartment, but the Chinese will share many people in one apartment to avoid paying."

[Frumple]

Besides, solving hunger (and many other problems) requires not goodwill from rich people, but political and structural changes. Develop farming, make water and electricity and sewage accessible, give everyone access to a job, etc. Which is the poor countries' responsibility.

Yeah, that's pretty much my point as to the outside the monkeysphere thing. Not my in-group, not my problem. Other peoples in-groups should deal with their own problems. Nevermind the suffering involved, et al, or that the net influence on our species qua species is negative. Nationalism/regionalism isn't exactly a moral stance. Not necessarily immoral, but anything that dehumanizes (even mildly, by doing things such as separating responsibility) sections of our species walks a really fine line, albeit a very natural one.

Which isn't a positive thing, mind, that it's natural. It's a flaw in our species we need workarounds for, sooner or later. Or at least better workarounds than we currently have.

The best thing we can do is removing as much foreign pressure on them as possible (debt issues, etc) so they can do the changes they need to do - and it's not the rich citizen's role, it's the politic's role. Do we really want rich people to meddle with politics ? After all, they can. But I don't think anybody will agree that it's a good thing, however noble their intentions.

That's almost a hilarious statement, honestly. It's not a can, it's a do. Name me a politician above the absolute local level (and even then, outside larger population centers) that is not raking in over 200k or better a year, and I'll be able to name you several dozen more that are. There is a near absolute stranglehold by the wealthy on first world politics. Which, yeah, causes some pretty damn notable problems at times.

As for foreign pressures, that depends pretty heavily on the situation. When the governing power of the area is artificially causing things like starvation or infrastructure degeneration in order to maintain power, keeping outside influences out isn't going to help anything. At the same time, when it's outside influence causing the destabilization, well...

And, of course, that's the whole artificial in-group delineation thing, too. Until we as a species starts seeing ourselves as we as a species, there will necessarily be problems, for the simple reason that we're building our systems off a fundamentally flawed axiom. No "nation" exists in a vacuum, no matter how hard they try to close the (imaginary) borders.

So yeah. The best thing you can do to help people is not to give away stuff (even if that too helps, and can be needed in certain situations, such as helping Haiti after the earthquake) but invest in their country.

I'd mostly agree with this, though. Problem being that you have to figure out a way to encourage investment that isn't sickeningly exploitative (which generally does more harm than good, on the net), which there currently isn't really incentive to do. Better thing would be not to invest, but simply improve the infrastructure, bloody gratis until the area can support itself, then engage in fair (Fair, dammit.) trade from there. Level the playing field, and then see where it goes from there. If we wanted to actually help, anyway.

Chances of that happening in the current climate are precisely zero, of course, if not somehow negative. The dominate powers have no reason to surrender that dominance, after all, and sympathy for something beyond the in-group isn't really sufficient reason for humans in aggregate.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

They even bring in Chinese prostitutes.

Not as absurd as one might think, given that HIV/AIDS is most prevalent in Africa. The last thing the PRC wants is infected workers coming back to China, especially since they seem determined to deny the general populace information on STDs, for some reason. (The Great Firewall will knock you offline if you search for anything involving it, as it was told to me.)

[Mr. Palau]

I just keep the guilt away safe in my knowledge that A) I don't really care about people outside of my country who are suffering, since they are then not part of any social group I belong to, so I have no connection to them whatsoever.

Ah, but that's where you are wrong. Humanity as a whole is a social group, even more so since the advents of international travel and globalization. We, the humans of Earth, are all on the same slowly sinking ship, and refusing to bail out the mess hall because you work in navigation just means we'll all drown eventually. You are connected to every other human alive through trade and the biosphere of this planet, both of which consist of inherently interdependent parts. National borders are arbitrary political lines with only as much meaning as you chose to place onto them. It's like arguing that you don't care if California falls into the ocean because you live in New York, of course it'll effect you.

And B) If I feed them, they would just reproduce to the point where there would be more starving children, since they wouldn't have access to birth control (which would cost a lot more money).

Wrong again. Fertility naturally decreases with the decrease of hardship. When people die before they're 40, disease is rampant, and 90% of the nation's population farms for survival, having lots of children to make your own burden easier and lots of sex to keep from just killing yourself to escape your situation is a normal response. We have seen that if an area can establish itself and reach even a moderate level of development it will result in the birth rate quickly tapering off as having 10 children becomes an economic burden rather than a benefit and birth control becomes commonplace. As for expensive, no. There are plenty of cheap birth control methods, the problem in most undeveloped areas is cutting through religion and traditionalist views of children enough to get people to use them in the first place.

A) While it is true that the maitenance of the Earth's biosphere is everyone's problem, trade isn't a way to make me care about people in other countries. It is a reason to co-operate but only to the extent that my co-operation would allow me to gain in some way, and thus help my country. Thus alliaviating the suffering of people in my country, aswell to the Earth's biosphere. What you are giving are reasons why I should engage with other groups, not reasons to care about them. Also trade and global warming as a reason for helping Africa are bad reasons. I don't need to care about them, because I hardly trade with them, and thier deaths would result in less carbon emmissions than if they had been allowed to live, so I might as well let them die.

B)Short term solution only. It is true that as Africa developed it's birth rate would likley decrease. That would merely result in the situation we ssee in Europe and America, where many groups with differing cultural values have differing birth rates. For example, white people in America have a birth rate bellow 2.1, which is the rate needed to maintain a population at it's current numbers. Whereas have Hispanics have a much higher birth rate (can't find it right now, was around 3-5), so in the long run they will begin to make up more and more of the population. In Europe birth rates are also bellow the replacement rate (2.1), so the same thing will happen there, with whatever groups having a brith rate higher than 2.1 will inceasingly make up more and more of the population.

In short, birth control only prevents pregnancies occuring by accident, you can still decide to get pregnant. What you will see is groups that decide to get pregnant will make up more and more of the population, and those groups will eventually be selected, naturally selected, until they have a birth rate higher than their environment can sustian. Although the ultimate return to an exponential birth rate will take a long time, groups will continually be selected for increased fertility rates.

Oh and Frumple the "Monkey sphere" is really a tribe of people you can actually emphasize with is 150 people (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26dunbar.html). And there are increasingly tigher circles of people, your best friends, your good friends, your friends, your acquaintances. As best as I can remember from another NYT article is they number, 5,25,50,150, with the 5,25,and 50 counting toward the 150.

Anyone outside of that group, you don't really care about. You might feel small tinglings of good will and compassion, but compared to what you would feel if they were in thsoe groups, it is incredibly small.

[RedKing]

They even bring in Chinese prostitutes.

Not as absurd as one might think, given that HIV/AIDS is most prevalent in Africa. The last thing the PRC wants is infected workers coming back to China, especially since they seem determined to deny the general populace information on STDs, for some reason. (The Great Firewall will knock you offline if you search for anything involving it, as it was told to me.)

I didn't find it absurd at all. There's also the cultural factor that as hard up as some of these guys might get, they're still going to be averse to sub-Saharan prostitutes. I'm not saying they're racist....but they're racist. In a pinch, they'd be fine with Thai or Burmese or Russian hookers, or even Indian. But going black is way beyond the comfort threshold for most of them.

[Mr. Palau]

They even bring in Chinese prostitutes.

Not as absurd as one might think, given that HIV/AIDS is most prevalent in Africa. The last thing the PRC wants is infected workers coming back to China, especially since they seem determined to deny the general populace information on STDs, for some reason. (The Great Firewall will knock you offline if you search for anything involving it, as it was told to me.)

I didn't find it absurd at all. There's also the cultural factor that as hard up as some of these guys might get, they're still going to be averse to sub-Saharan prostitutes. I'm not saying they're racist....but they're racist. In a pinch, they'd be fine with Thai or Burmese or Russian hookers, or even Indian. But going black is way beyond the comfort threshold for most of them.

Wait, why Indians but not people who are just a shade or two darker than some indians? And Russians?

[kaijyuu]

I dunno; what man doesn't like exotic women?

[Lagslayer]

Welcome to the uncanny valley.

[Frumple]

Welcome to the uncanny valley.

Spoiler: There are no words (click to show/hide)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

A) While it is true that the maitenance of the Earth's biosphere is everyone's problem, trade isn't a way to make me care about people in other countries. It is a reason to co-operate but only to the extent that my co-operation would allow me to gain in some way, and thus help my country. Thus alliaviating the suffering of people in my country, aswell to the Earth's biosphere. What you are giving are reasons why I should engage with other groups, not reasons to care about them.

You do not understand trade. Trade is not solely for the benefit of one side. If you are attempting to trade with that mindset you'll never make a deal. Humans trade with other humans with the goal of mutual benefit. It is possible that one side may benefit more than the other, or that one might face backlash from the deal, but those are usually unintended consequences of chance, not bringing intentional harm to one side so that the other may benefit.

Engaging with other groups is closer to caring about them than you might think. Humans are more often than not empathetic towards other humans, sometimes even if they mean not to be. Social connections can form without any party intending to form them.

Also trade and global warming as a reason for helping Africa are bad reasons. I don't need to care about them, because I hardly trade with them, and thier deaths would result in less carbon emmissions than if they had been allowed to live, so I might as well let them die.

You might not trade with them directly, but the corporations whom you buy your products from probably do.

You may be a psychopath if you really want to let them die to reduce carbon emissions. These are people we are talking about here. What if it were you?

B)Short term solution only. It is true that as Africa developed it's birth rate would likley decrease. That would merely result in the situation we ssee in Europe and America, where many groups with differing cultural values have differing birth rates. For example, white people in America have a birth rate bellow 2.1, which is the rate needed to maintain a population at it's current numbers. Whereas have Hispanics have a much higher birth rate (can't find it right now, was around 3-5), so in the long run they will begin to make up more and more of the population. In Europe birth rates are also bellow the replacement rate (2.1), so the same thing will happen there, with whatever groups having a brith rate higher than 2.1 will inceasingly make up more and more of the population.

Annnnddd.....what? Is that a problem? Do you not like Hispanics? Hell, if you want to prevent different cultures from "overrunning" yours you should be begging to help them develop since it'll crash their birth rate.

In short, birth control only prevents pregnancies occuring by accident, you can still decide to get pregnant. What you will see is groups that decide to get pregnant will make up more and more of the population, and those groups will eventually be selected, naturally selected, until they have a birth rate higher than their environment can sustian. Although the ultimate return to an exponential birth rate will take a long time, groups will continually be selected for increased fertility rates.

You do not understand population growth. All humans once had the kind of birth rates that we see today in places like Central Africa. It isn't a genetic thing to not have a dozen children, it's a cultural and economic one. That's part of the change that industrialization brought to the world.

A group of people will, for the most part, only have lots of children if it's beneficial, which it isn't once the area they live in is modernized.

I dunno; what man doesn't like exotic women?

It's not exactly wrong to have a racial preference in whom one is attracted to so long as it doesn't extend beyond that, although personally I don't quite get why anyone would.