I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but their post today made me a new level of angry:

Commenters correctly point out that there’s a difference between regranting to other charities and “pocketing the money”.

USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities. Cowen/Rubio’s claim that “only 12% goes [directly] to recipients” is false, because 0% goes directly to recipients, because USAID is not set up in a way where this even makes sense. All USAID money goes through other charities. The 12% number seems to be the amount that goes through foreign organizations (including charities, charitable government programs, and charitably-minded forprofits), with the other 88% going through charities based in the US.

There are various reasons why USAID works with more US nonprofits than local nonprofits. These include fears that local nonprofits would be corrupt or inefficient, compliance issues, and Congressional mandates (for example, some programs involving food are required to source it from US farmers and US companies). Before the Trump cuts, USAID was working on ways to find and use more local partners, but this was a slow and difficult process. The same people who cry corruption when USAID works through US charities would definitely cry corruption if they worked through a foreign charity that turned out to be less than scrupulously honest. How many staff do you think it takes to prove that a hospital in Burkina Faso where nobody speaks English is definitely on the level? Is it really efficient for USAID to have all of these staff in house, for every hospital, for every cause area?

The organizations that accept USAID money take an overhead averaging ~30%1, then pass the rest onto recipients, or to even smaller, even more local organizations that take smaller overheads and pass it on to recipients. Overheads pay for salaries, facilities, compliance costs, and audits to make sure the money is reaching its intended targets. You will never have (and would not want) an overhead of zero.

Maybe Cowen thinks that 30% is too high an overhead? I asked o3 to estimate the overhead for the Mercatus Center, the libertarian charity that Cowen runs. It said that it was hard to give an apples-to-apples number because much of the administrative work that would be counted under “overhead” in other charities is covered by George Mason University. But it estimated that if the federal government gives a dollar of research funding to Mercatus, about 40% would go to combined university and Mercatus overhead - higher than the average USAID charity.

Or maybe he’s spooked by the admittedly-weird-and-incestuous world of charities that regrant money to other charities? I normally wouldn’t begrudge someone for being unnerved by this. But Cowen is the director of a charity that regrants money to other charities! Here is a typical cohort of Mercatus regrant recipients, including the Council of Christian Colleges, the NC Leadership Forum, and “Vibecamp LLC”.

(disclosure: I also take funders’ money and regrant it to other charities, although I would gouge my own eyes out with a spoon before giving it to Vibecamp)

Cowen and I both do regranting because it works, and because it’s really hard to have high-level charitable priorities without it. If I have $1 million or $1 billion and want to cure cancer, I may not personally have the right skill set to be a cancer researcher, or to found a cancer research lab, or to figure out which cancer research labs are good and need the most money. I might only know and trust someone in an organization that specializes in figuring out which cancer labs are good and connecting them to funders. Maybe I don’t even know that, and I only know and trust somebody who knows and trusts that person. These are things that sound silly to the uninitiated, but can quickly become your whole career once you start dabbling in charity.

USAID programs like PEPFAR have saved millions of lives, which suggests USAID does a pretty good job of deciding who to trust with their money. The Trump administration is trying to turn Americans against these programs by pretending that the money gets “pocketed” by intermediaries. This is a lie. PEPFAR is well-audited and the audits find between 0-2% unexplained expenses, which is lower than the average domestic US government program.

Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage2. Others go over budget or accomplish less than hoped, because charity is hard. But the overall track record is outstanding, outright fraud is rare, and the cringe is less common than you think (because Rubio and Trump falsely attributed many cringe programs to USAID that it never funded at all).

Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people (see my father’s story of his time in this world here) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.

Part of the joy of owning your own blog is getting to make absolutely sure that you never unintentionally give one iota of aid or comfort to these lies or anything remotely associated with them. If Cowen means something else, I think he should clarify it better. Otherwise, I think he should edit his post to make it less misleading.

Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.

The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.

Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.

Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.1

Rather than rescue this with appeals to age or some other variable making these deaths not count, I think we should think of it as a bias, fueled by two things. First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see2. Second, controversy sells. We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines, all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn’t let you feel superior to anyone - just really sad.

This is the same point I try to make in my writings on charity. A million lives is a statistic, but some random annoying controversial thing that captures the public interest is alive and salient - it’s easier to remember a story about a charity that turned out to be corrupt, or offensive, or just cringe, compared to the one that saved 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 lives. Even the people who do remember the 10,000 lives have to fight to avoid both-sidesing it - “Well, this charity saved 10,000 lives, but that charity said something cringe on Twitter, so overall it’s kind of a wash”. In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”

I freely admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar. I’m not recommending you do anything differently, just remarking how weird it is that this doesn’t automatically come up more of its own accord.

An attempt by DOGE to assign a team to the independent Government Accountability Office was rejected Friday. The GAO is part of the legislative branch and not subject to DOGE's request.

(Image credit: Bonnie Cash)

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the growing Gen Z gender divide. Women are becoming more liberal and less religious, while men are becoming more conservative and more religious. Last week, Vox ran an article about this, suggesting that the increased religiosity among young men is a driving factor in their rightward turn.

It’s a theory. I guess. But I’d argue it’s the opposite. Men are becoming more conservative because they’re mad at feminism, and subsequently becoming more religious as a result. Conservatism, for the most part, requires religion and makes very little sense without it. Social conservatism in particular.

The fact is, young men are currently in thrall to a variety of hyper-religious influencers who promise them that religion can make the patriarchy great again. Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Nick Fuentes are trad Caths (Catholics who like to pretend Vatican II never happened), Charlie Kirk and Joel Webbon are Evangelicals, Andrew Tate is Muslim. I’m not sure what flavor of religious Tim Pool is, but he’s previously tweeted that “It should be illegal not to believe in God,” so …

These influencers are not just making young men more misogynistic or more racist — although they are, Blanche, they are! — they’re also making them more religious.

It’s a thing that’s been going on for years. Many of the men who had initially made a name for themselves as debauched “pick-up artists” started becoming devout religious fundamentalists right around the time women started pushing back against rape culture and feminism started another wave. The more angry men have become about women, the more they’ve turned to men who tell them that God wants them to be in charge of everything and for women to get back in the kitchen.

It’s not rocket science. Nothing makes people more conservative (and thus religious) than having a group of people to hate based on their immutable characteristics.

On the other side of the coin, women — save for those who want to become tradwives themselves — are going to be less interested in a belief system that wants to subjugate them. I’m not saying all religions seek to subjugate women, though it does seem like a fairly common denominator, especially right now.

It’s what I say all of the time: People love you for the way you make them feel about themselves, and they gravitate towards things and people that tell them the story they want to hear about themselves. If you’re a man and you’re feeling bad, and you think things would have been better for you at a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant — which, fair, eliminating competition from half the population would give most people an edge in life — then you’re going to gravitate towards a belief system that tells you it’s the “natural order” for your wife to be subservient to you.

Because it’s really not just that men are becoming more religious in general — they’re not out here becoming Methodists or Episcopalians — they’re specifically gravitating towards fundamentalist churches that espouse a patriarchal view of the world. It’s a view that now allows them to proudly and openly say that they do not think men and women are equal, that they don’t think women should be in the workplace, that they think we should stay home and have babies instead. It’s a lot easier to say abhorrent things if you think God is standing behind you, giving you a big thumbs up.

This is not without precedent. In the 1940s, you had women going to work because of WWII. In the 1950s, you had the rise of evangelicalism and a nationwide cultural push to get them out of there and back to the kitchen.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you had the women’s rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement. One minute later, you had born-again Christians realizing that it was God, actually, who needed to ban interracial relationships at Bob Jones University. It’s also when Protestants decided they were anti-abortion, too, whereas it had previously just been “a Catholic” thing. In the 1990s, there was increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, Rodney King, a new Black Power movement, and third wave feminism. Then, in the 2000s, you got purity rings and purity balls and people demanding Creationism be taught in schools.

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It’s been a while since I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, but it’s the same idea. It’s just hitting particularly hard this time, due to social media and our lack of a shared popular culture. Part of the reason the fundamentalist nonsense calmed down after a while was because people made fun of it. After all, who wanted to be the Church Lady? But now there’s nothing that everyone watches or listens to, and the Right has been working hard at trying to make its own culture. It has not gone well, obviously, but they’re certainly trying.

How long will this last? Hard to say. Longer than before, probably. I will say that, homophobic as they are, I think the lack of women going along with them might be a problem at some point.

It’s pretty hard to be a patriarch all on your own.