When it was announced in October that local online “newspaper” Crosscut had received another $400,000 in grants from the Gates Foundation, bringing their total up to a cool half million, some celebrated the news as the future of journalism, while others fretted over the ethical and free speech implications of journalists relying on wealthy patrons for their livelihood. But recently, a more troubling concern has weighed heavily on my mind, namely: how many children must die to give the likes of Ted van Dyk a media platform?
Recently scanning the Gates Foundation’s own overview of its malaria prevention and eradication initiatives, I was shocked to learn that more than one million people a year still die from malaria worldwide, 85 percent of them under the age of five. That’s over 850,000 young children dying each year, all due to a tiny insect most folks here in the US consider a mere itchy nuisance.
Yet according to the United Nations, most of these deaths could be avoided, if only the malarial regions of the world weren’t short about 250 million insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets. Nets that only cost about $10 each to manufacture and deliver.
And so while I don’t really begrudge giving David Brewster and Skip Berger and Chris Vance a public platform (well, maybe Vance), I can’t help but wonder: how many more children could the Gates Foundation have saved had they put that $500,000 into mosquito nets rather than into propping up a forum for old Seattle white guys to tell not-quite-so-old Seattle white guys what they’re doing wrong?
Um, 50,000 actually. That’s how many children will die to keep Crosscut going for another year or two. Not that I’m counting or anything.
Man, that must be quite a heavy burden for Brewster and his gang to bear. Here’s hoping they live up to it.
By that measure, the Gates Foundation would be better off buying desks for African kids to use at school than for local schools.
But … many of the major malarial treatment advances have been brought about due to research locally, here in Seattle.
You have to ask yourself, why should they be the only ones trying to get rid of Malaria. Or even TB. When, in point of fact, most people in Africa have 2 or 3 infections, not just one. One of which is HIV/AIDS.
(and for those like Fnarf that want to pretend, go watch The Constant Gardener, it’s a great film, shows both sides of the decisions involved, and a great story at the same time)
You can’t just toss unlimited money at a problem like malaria and kill it. There are little things like 1) Limited manufacturing capacity 2) Governmental inability to deliver said nets 3) Insufficient education on the usage of these nets 4) And so on. I’m sure that if the Gates Foundation could just write a check and eliminate all malaria, they would.
Philanthropy isn’t a zero-sum game, and diseases aren’t that simple. Crosscut isn’t killing anyone. You should be embarrassed to have said something like that. Maybe you’re being facetious, but in that case, you should be embarrassed to be this unfunny.
That’s some bad math. 50,000 nets does not mean 50,000 lives saved. What is the infection rate? What is the fatality rate? What is the efficacy rate? Are the nets used as intended?
Wow! So, is my ethical burden then to read it ever so much more thoroughly, thus improving the cost/benefit ratio incrementally? Or should I rather resolve to henceforth abstain from reading, to avoid complicity.
I’m already using a Mac, so I’m already only marginally complicit…
This kind of math always bothers me. How much money goes into the National Endowment for the Arts? How about NPR? How much money are all the toys in Toys for Tots worth? How much money does The Stranger make? How many children have you killed in a year of latte runs?
I can appreciate wanting to spend money wisely and measuring the benefits, but the sad truth is that any spending on culture, entertainment and the arts will always lose in that ecuation. It seems to me that this is hand-wringing that never sees its full consequences. Would you support a total defunding of all non-survival related charity/donation spending?
I guess you’re being tongue-in-cheek here, but you’re making the mistake of thinking that $50,000 towards Crosscut means the Foundation will give $50,000 less towards mosquito nets than they had planned. It doesn’t work that way.
(I don’t care one way or another about Crosscut – I don’t read it)
I’m with #2.
Look, we ALL could do better. The $4 Starbucks, the magazines, the drinks, the everyone. Everyone should do better.
Also, what @5 said. If I donate $100 to the ACLU, does that mean I’m responsible for 10 malaria deaths?
So, every $10 of your discretionary funds not spent on buying and shipping mosquito nets to Africa is money spent killing children, Goldy? How many kids have you slaughtered over the years, then?
I’ve noticed that people only ever make this kind of arguement when they’re talking about someone else’s money. Unless you yourself have donated every single penny that went beyond your most basic survival needs, STFU.
I am so mad about not getting this joke that I have given my malaria to fourteen children just now. And it’s your fault, Goldy. YOUR FAULT!
Why does it come as no surprise that Will’s knowledge of diseases in Africa comes from a movie adaptation of a e Carré novel?
*le
A bad joke is as bad as a bad argument. As #2 said, it’s one or the other.
An essay on the ethics of not giving up all of the money one has, after basic living expenses are met, appeared in the NYT a while ago, now to see if I can find it.
Distributing “free” mosquito nets causes more African deaths, not fewer.
Buying nets made in China and distributing them via aid groups puts local African netmakers out of business, and then in a year or two when the nets are torn or otherwise damaged and need to be replaced there’s no one to do that. The aid groups have moved on to the next photogenic catastrophe. Maybe delivering food supplies to the people who used to work at the net factory but were made unemployed by the aid.
A huge portion of the aid money also goes to maintain something very close to a Western standard of living for the aid workers, who have their own generators, trucks, food supplies, security, and so on.
The ways in which Western aid perpetuates and frequently CAUSES various horrors in Africa, including disease, starvation, and massacres, has been explored in numerous books recently, such as “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo, “The White Man’s Burden” by William Easterly, and “Does Foreign Aid Really Work?” by Roger Riddell. There are endless accounts of aid workers working for the butchers in Rwanda and Congo, and of atrocities like widespread limb-chopping being performed specifically to attract the attention of foreign aid groups.
What is needed to stop malaria in its tracks is AFRICAN economic development, with Western assistance, so that they can make their own nets, among other things.
Here we go, The Singer Solution to World Poverty by none other than Peter Singer. And when I said it appeared ‘a while ago’, I really meant a decade ago.
@16 Stephen Lewis’s Massey lectures (collected as “Race Against Time”) is perhaps the best exposition on the link between underdevelopment, corruption (both local and in international aid) and disease in Africa. It is a devastating critique.
@16 but then how will the Tea Party members of Congress keep on with America’s destruction of Africa’s textile industry?
See, you’re throwing Americans out of work again …
@18, aid doesn’t have to be corrupt to be harmful. What African states need more than anything is security and the rule of law; public institutions that work. Frequently they do not today; in most countries the purpose of government is simply to disperse cash to members of one’s own tribe, while in others it cannot even do that. The only power structure in countries like DR Congo, particularly in the remoter areas, is the interplay between armed rebel groups and the aid groups that feed them and the people they displace.
Oh God! Another post from this insufferable windbag!
@20 gee, well, let’s dial back the clock to around 500 AD then.
There were slave runs in Africa before Spain/England/etc got involved, mostly due to Arab “merchants”.
And who do you think destroyed effective leadership in the first place as they transitioned out of colonialism – we did.
And by we, I mean not just Europe but America. And Russia.
@22, that’s funny, I thought we were talking about the efficacy of aid and malaria nets, not “a few random unconnected and unrelated half-thoughts Will overheard somewhere but didn’t really understand”.
In your case, “we” means “me and my brother here, the block of wood”.
@23, if you had read the article WiS had published in New Zealand, intimately familiar to the sheep farmers just south of Rotorua, then you would see the relevance of his statements here.
About half way down Goldy, the hypocrite, Horsesass.org web page is a spot where Goldy is actively encouraging the senseless deaths of children by soliciting Donations with a preset amount of $100, that’s 10 nets, Goldy.
I am not super thrilled with Ted’s politics, but, where the fuck do you get off bitching about anybody soliciting donations. All of the Ha donations could have just as easily gone to a better place.
You shit.
Every time I eat a bean a kitten dies.
i think the real point is lost here…Grandpa Crosscut sucks…
@27, I think Goldy failed to make the real point. then Bitching about donations by a guy fucking begging for money a few months ago is stupid. “how many children must die” kind of heads in a direction nowhere near the journalistic value of the crap Ted writes.
Dying children, not really comedy material.
Man… some folks here need to try to be a little less concrete.
I just spent $200, or 20 African children (as I now refer to $10 bills as an African child) on rockband. And I am enjoying every moment of my purchase. Fuck you Africa.
“Goldy” is really just a made-up vicious parody of a stereotypical Seattle “progressive” media-Jew.
even more than that, the nets are large enough for an entire family (most families in afflicted areas share the same bed) so that number goes up substantially when you factor that in
False dichotomy. It is unreasonable to say that the option presented was either funding Crosscut or funding malaria protection.
Fortunately very few children had to die to allow Horsesass to keep afloat, given the derth of financial contributions made to it.
You’re a real horse’s ass sometimes, Goldy, you know that?
I think the point Goldy was making was that the Gates Foundation could have found better use for their money than Crosscut. Who could honestly disagree with that?