“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR

I would say that FDR's observation applies as much to Africa or any other country as it does to America.

Not to say all aid it bad, but the world has been pretty indiscriminate in how it doles out aid to Africa and done a terrible job of observing second and third order effects and consequences that undermine the benefits of aid.

The irony of FDR saying that, while having been responsible for creating an American welfare state that suffers from precisely the same pathology.

This is one of the reasons I like to share this quote. Even the godfather of the welfare state was aware of the negative consequences of sustained welfare. That's an order of magnitude greater awareness of the unintended consequences of these policies that people pushing these policies today understand. It's good to show them that even their welfare state idol was aware that welfare is not some unassailable panacea.

As with the significant downsides accompanying most welfare programs, their proponents tend to operate on the kind of knee jerk, surface level compassion that mostly serves to their own benefit. Aid that doesn't serve to primarily "help those to help themselves" tends to rob populations of agency, purpose, and competency.

That is why ive always been an advocate for tools as aid. Give someone a shirt, the local tailor loses out and the people become reliant on free shirts. Give them food, local farmers suffer and grow less food. But if you give them a loom? They produce and sell more shirts and fabric than ever before for cheap. Give a farmer a tractor, he farms more and produces more food and prospers from it. And there are so many other tools that could do so much. Send a lathe and a mill, now you can make your own machine parts, you can even make another lathe and mill, and perhaps a tool and die industry starts out giving jobs and produces all the other tools the locals need to survive. Need power? Well tools can build a windmill, or a generator. Need water? Tools can build you a well pump, or repair the old broken pump. Need transportation? Tools maintain your old modes of transport and builds new forms of transport. Low on materials for your tool projects? You can build mining drills, rails, mine carts, rock crushers, ore separators, ect.

Without tools, you can't build but the most basic shit out of scavenged trash. With tools, you can make scavenged trash into a goldmine of necessary materials. Industrialization is a story of building out a catalog of tools from your previous generation of tools, over and over and over again until you have every tool that everybody else has.

Hans Rosling rebuts this, especially in Factfulness.*

If you look at population trends in countries worldwide, populations routinely level out only after improving underlying economic and health conditions.

When infant mortality is high and children are an economic necessity, parents compensate by having many kids. When a country gets better healthcare and better economic opportunities, there's an initial generation of population explosion as more kids suddenly survive childhood, but then the population immediately plateaus and begins to recede.

The epidemiological studies and population data is overwhelming that the simple model Malthus used fails to explain human behavior.

* Also in some videos online:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnexjTCBksw

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

But to put in a closing plug for Factfulness, it's one of the best simple and accessible primers how to avoid major cognitive biases, and also teaches a lot about the current state of the world.

Well if France for example start stoping their illegal exploitation of natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa it would be great and no need for aids.

AREVA is milking Niger for years to power their Nuclear infrastructure, manipulating their corrupted government and leaving their people to absolute poverty is sickening, not speaking about Mali and their illegal gold mines.