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Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.
Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.
Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.
However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.
(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)
Is that true? On my phone right now but I’m pretty sure the absolute number of Native Americans in the US is higher than any time in the pre-Columbian era. And were they really better off back then when murder and torture were commonplace ? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely debatable.
In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.
In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.
2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).
Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.
Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.
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