Life in General

Global Fund appeal

John Quiggin175 Comments

As promised, this is the post for my second “cash for comment” appeal. I’ll be giving $1 per comment, once again, up to a limit of $1000 (last time there were about 500 comments). I plan to donate the proceeds to Medecins Sans Frontieres, and express a preference for projects related to the The Global Fund to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria . These diseases kill over 6 million people each year, and the numbers are growing. Of course, cosponsors are welcome to nominate their own preferred charity.

As before, I’m also hoping for cosponsors, who agree to put in 5,10, 20 or 50 cents up to whatever limit seems appropriate. When the appeal is done, I’ll email to tell you how much you’ve promised. You then send the donation to MSF or your preferred alternative. If you can advise me when you’ve done it (and if you want, send a copy of the receipt) that’s great, but this entire appeal is being done on the basis of trust. I’ve already had one offer of 10c per comment, which I hope to confirm soon.

As regards your comments, anything you want to say is fine (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please), and it doesn’t have to be more than a word or two. But I’d be interested in discussion on the issues raised by exercises of this kind, for example, priorities in aid, the role of private philanthropy vs governments, NGOs, business and so on.

I’ll just mention that I’m financing my contribution partly from the payment I got for a review of Lomborg’s book, Global Crises, Global Solutions, coming out of the Copenhagen Consensus. Although I had some severe criticisms of that exercise, there were some important positives as well, and the assessment of health initiatives was largely consistent with the priorities identified by the Global Fund. So it seems appropriate to allocate the proceeds to a high-priority good cause.

The appeal will continue until 6pm Sunday Queensland time. I’ve got a few things on over the weekend, but I’ll try to post some updates.

Update 11pm Friday The appeal has barely begun and already cosponsors have promised 80 cents a comment, in addition to my $1. That’s a target of $1800. So please, spread the word.

Update Saturday 4pm I expected to get more comments than last time and fewer cosponsors, having already leaned on the generosity of my regular readers. In fact, it’s been pretty much the reverse. Comments have been a bit slow coming on, but the support from cosponsors has been truly impressive. Roughly in order

An anonymous regular reader has offered 50c per comment
Ken Harwood has offered 20c
Jonathan Lundell has offered 10c
Harry Clarke has offered 20c
Mister z has offered 10c
rdb has offered 10c
Emma has offered up to $100 (not sure what rate)
matthew Klugman has offered 10c

If my arithmetic is right, that’s a total pledge of $2.30 a comment. Given that it looks pretty unlikely that the upper limit is going to be reached, I’ll pitch in another 70c, and bring it up to $3. Is this a bargain, or what?

Update 2pm Sunday We’ve just passed 150 comments, so the amount raised is over $500, which is not bad, although there’s a lot more than this still on the table. Let’s hope we can make at least 200 by 6 pm (four hours to go).

Additional cosponsors

Peter Fuller offers 20 cents per comment – up to 500 ($100)
Bill Gardner offers 0.25 / comment, up to A$100.
Caitlin offers $50 if we reach 500

I forgot to mention in the earlier update that Jack Strocchi has offered 10c, subject to the requirement that I should say something nice about Bill Gates and his charitable efforts. Sooner done than said!

Appeal ended 6pm Sunday A total of 156 comments and a bit over $500 raised. Not as successful as last time, but a good effort nonetheless. Tomorrow, I’ll be getting in touch with the many generous cosponsors to tell them how much they’ve promised. Thanks very much to them, and to everyone who took the time to comment and think a little a bit about the issues. Thanks also to Tim Blair, Mark Bahnisch, Claire from Anggargoon(?) and others who linked. My Trackbacks aren’t working properly so there may be others I’ve missed.

fn1. At my absolute discretion, I’ll delete bots, spammers, repetitive commenters etc. If you don’t trust me to act fairly in this respect, or any other, don’t participate.

175 thoughts on “Global Fund appeal”

  8. OK, I’m in for a dime. MSF is my choice as well, though I’m inclined to leave the project choice to them.

  9. Aha! “…costs some other guy a dollar”.

    Is there some way of fighting this externality?

    More seriously (though only just), here’s a long term solution to all these problems. Put the meiotic driving gene into the human Y chromosome and release it.

  11. Good stuff … without being uncivil, perhaps a bit of controversy might generate a few more comments? A few choice words about global warming, evolution, HSC English, Tintin … these seem to draw in the punters.

  13. My offer 20 cents a comment up to 500. MSF fine.

    I hope private contributions don’t crowd-out public and it is worthwhile to think of mechanisms that ensure this.

    And how to give aid? You obviously don’t want it to feed the corrupt. But the corrupt may want to run things so you run into nationalism etc.

    I pose an academic problem that I hope does not trivialise the clear purpose of the current appeal. You have a tsunami-type disaster that creates excess demands in some commodity and capital markets. You can allow prices to increase which imposes hardship or add to supply, using aid, in a subset of the troubled markets. Which do you choose?

    Obviously satisfy urgent consumption needs first (food, clothing, temporary shelter) but after this what next? Can you read anything from the shortages that tell you what will best work or must you rely on the ‘priorities’ of aid bureaucrats. Certainly you don’t want to inhibit market forces that will improve things. Can you promote market processes by providing information thereby perhaps even avoiding the need for bureaucrats?

    This exercise does not make humanitarian sense in a community facing catastrophic disease risks, which is the direction of MSF, but makes sense more generally in thinking about emergency development aid.

    Finally, what role has self-interested ‘materialist guilt’ in aid-giving? Does this matter? I am thinking about critiques of ‘conspicuous compassion’. It is inevitable the way John has set this up (no criticism, I think it is a good idea) that we flaunt ‘compassion’.

  14. A very nice idea and a good choice of recipient. Wouldn’t it be nice if Governments actually delivered on the aid “pledges” they so often make.

  16. Dave is right. The best way to keep this going is a flame war. JQ’s refusal to accept the compelling evidence supporting evolutionary psychology comes to mind.

  18. Here’s my money comment. I’ll use it to point out that the sidebar link to John & Belle looks funny (at least in my browser): “John Holbo & #038; Belle Waring”. I never thought of John as much of a #038 guy, personally.

  20. I also regret that although I matched John last time, but unfortunately as I’m not working at the moment til I finish my PhD and living off my (diminishing) savings I can’t afford to this time. But I’d encourage others to.

  24. I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood the pledges where someone offers to pay a certain amount for every lap someone swims or every comment someone writes, but I’ll participate anyway.

  25. a worthy cause indeed, though like Kenny I’ve always been a mite confused about ‘walk-a-thons’, ‘book-a-thons’ and the like. Also I’d love to hear some people’s comments on government vs private charitable giving.

    I read on a blog somewhere that governments will always stuff up the giving, corruption and all that, and it’s better for them to give tax breaks to people who can then give that money. I don’t agree with that, I’d love to see my government give more, but can almost see the logic behind it.

  28. Good work, Captain. As with cigarette advertising, the question is whether this exercise is increasing charitable donation in the aggregate or just competing for market share. I wonder if your co-sponsors haven’t donated less to the Wheelies and Spastic Centre than they otherwise would have, since your tsunami apppeal.

  30. I posted this at ozpolitics

    Shouldn’t employment be “calculated by a broader measure than the standard ABS labour force survey definition, and including allowance for persons working noticeably shorter hours than they would wish and persons not actively looking for work, but who are anxious to join the workforce, including early retirees�.

    Therefore isn’t 5.1% employment questionable?

    Mr Palmer replied with

    Vee

    You are confusing the use of a statistic as a measure with the use of a statistic as an indicator. Economists often use statistics as indicators and not as measures. Users of this statistic are fully aware of its limitations as a measure (of the sort you mention). Nonetheless they find it a useful shorthand indicator of labour market conditions (albeit, one that needs to be interpreted in the light of other statistics and anecdotal information).

    The critical issue is that this unemployment statistic has been trending downwards and this indicates (but does not accurately measure) a downward trend in unemployment in the economy. Its utility as an indicator comes from the statistic being collected in exactly the same manner month on month. So while this statistic may be a poor measure, as comparative indicator of change over time it is extremely useful.

    Thought I’d verify the accuracy of these comments as it sounds like doublespeak to me

  31. I was never a fan of doublespeak. However, I do like the term duckspeak. It basically meant to quack like a duck. It can be used as a both a positive and a negative thing. And the blogging world is full of it.

  35. let’s do this! JQ as I mentioned to you via email I’m in for 10c a comment (ie AUD 100)… if I get the job I interviewed for yesterday at Oxfam GB I might even be able to up that… wish me luck!

  41. A propos related topics of discussion, I posted something along these lines back when I was participating in Blogathon ’03 collecting funds for Planned Parenthood. One of my contributors made the observation that none of the suggested charities of Blogathon ’03 had anything to do with arts and culture. Has anyone ever seen a blog donation appeal for those types of charities?

  42. I pinged this site (successfully according to the server) when I noticed that the trackback url had appeared. But it hasn’t appeared in comments. I then tried to post the url for the Troppo post in html code, but encountered a server error.

    End of technical report.

  44. Thanks for doing this. Doctors Without Borders is indeed a worthy organization. Nice to see that the blogosphere can be used to hurl donations as well as invective.

  47. A wonderful deed, a worthy cause, and a great organization. I donate to them monthly through my office (it comes straight out of my paycheck), and it’s the only cash I’m happy to see fly away!

  49. 10c a comment.
    Has anyone looked at donating dividend income? Telstra’s 13c/share would be $65 half-yearly for the 500 shares many people bought – direct deposit should be cheaper than the merchant fee on credit card donations – unless the banks waive that for charities. If the ATO accepted the registry dividend advice as the receipt, the charity could avoid the costs of raising a physical receipt.
    I though you were giving this one a bit more warning.

  50. Good work Pr Q. I support, with utilitarian exceptions, the humanitarian goal of conserving and extending of human life. Better plumbing and water-borne disease control is the most cost-effective way of furthering this goal.
    Put me down for 10c a comment, with the proviso that Pr Q must say something nice about Bill Gates & his company since this agency is doing more work in this field than anyone else.

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