There are a number of high-profile public debates about the value of overseas aid (example). These debates generally have intelligent people and arguments on both sides, and they rightly give many people the sense that “Does aid work?” is a complex question with no simple answer.
However, we believe these debates are sometimes misinterpreted, causing unnecessary confusion and concern. Specifically, people sometimes ask questions along the lines of: “Since many well-informed people believe that aid does more harm than good, should I believe that GiveWell’s top charities are even helping?”
We believe that the most prominent people known as “aid critics” do not give significant arguments against the sorts of activities our top charities focus on, particularly with respect to health interventions. Instead, their critiques tend to focus on the harms of government-to-government aid, particularly when it is not effectively targeting those most in need and not effectively focusing on interventions with strong track records.
While we seek out and acknowledge the possible downsides of our top charities’ work (example), we don’t see a serious case to be made that the harms outweigh the benefits. Going through each potential harm and discussing how it relates to our top charities could make for a lengthy writeup (note that we address many potential harms in our research FAQ); this post has the simpler goal of discussing the people best known as “aid critics” and establishing that they provide few (if any) arguments against the sort of work our top charities carry out.
We focus on the three people we believe are best known as aid critics: Bill Easterly, Angus Deaton and Dambisa Moyo.