So I'm ignoring the rest as much too simplistic but I wanted to highlight this. You are telling me that people should review their purchasing habits to effect change while accepting this is unlikely to succeed across enough people to have a meaningful impact leaving it to the charitable few who you suggest are less effective than those changing their purchasing decisions.

From that page How many of these do you think will be registered charities?

So far all I have seen is you belittling people who do charity because it can't resolve the fiscal policy of oil companies, retroactively return the money the Iraq war costed or solve the issues around conflict minerals.

But good luck solving those problems from your couch. I'm sure you'll put all those people who do all that useless charity to shame. After all, they are all only doing it to alleviate their own excess.

Your argument basically hinges on an implicit claim that you are smarter than people in general. I'm not sure I see that as true when your "big proof" about the uselessness of charity is that supporting a local soup kitchen won't do much about conflict minerals.

kind of grunching but here is my 2c on charity vs. solving root problems:

Some of you may have heard this little anecdote but I like it:

Being motivated by compassion to help where there is an immediate need is vital. Of course there is a place for solving the big root issues but most of us don't have influence to facilitate large scale change. Knowing our inability to affect real change can be debilitating and ultimately paralyzing. For me personally I find being compassionate when I can a better solution than simply doing nothing.

It's not like you to miss a point so badly, what's going on?

I'm not belittling anyone, I'm not saying charity is useless, change can be affected without even leaving the house, no one is expecting money to be 'returned' (). Read the thread properly.

I don't know, why is it relevant? Suppose they were all charities. It's makes me sad to think that all those people are devoting so much time and effort, and money, to deal with the consequences of consumerism in the West.

Must. Have. Latest. Shiny. Gadget. uh...



Yes, it is simple, does that mean you should ignore it?

I didn't say that is unlikely to succeed. What I actually said was that it's unlikely to come about but if you don't understand why that is then you simply haven't really grasped what I'm suggesting, why we need to do it, and why it's easy to describe but difficult to achieve in practice.

A great example of the type of problem I'm discussing. One man, throwing a few stranded starfish back into the sea, in a world with an estimated 217,490 miles of coastline, and two daily tides. It might make him and few starfish feel better, but ultimately his efforts are futile and aren't solving the problem.

You are wrong, it's actually us that have the power and influence to change it because that power, that comes through having money, comes from us in the first place. You choose who you give your money to, so choose not to give it to companies that cause and sustain the suffering. Choose instead to give it to companies that behave ethically. As for political corruption, because that is part of many of the problems we face, if we can't stop politicians from being bribed by businesses, then we can choose which businesses are doing the bribing. We have more influence than you imagine but there needs to be a change in attitudes for it to happen.

Because it highlights the contradiction in suggesting that we should alter our purchasing decisions while denying the effectiveness of those organisations helping to inform them.


There's a difference between simple and simplistic.

I'm not sure what the distinction between succeed and come about is.

I understand that it's difficult to achieve in practice and I can agree that it's desirable, but because I also think you are unlikely to achieve those aims, at least in the short term, I look at what options we have to deal with the needs of the most vulnerable at home and abroad. In many cases there are organisations doing work which is necessary, which does address causes and goes far beyond the sticking plaster you consider charity to be.

I didn't respond above when you suggested that I don't know what you know about charity, well I know as much as you've stated in this thread and I know that what you've stated in this thread is inaccurate and poorly informed.

This is like me arguing that it's a waste of money treating the effects of smoking, and you replying that doctors are doing good and what do I actually know about medicine and how it's administred anyway? I know next to nothing about medicine, does that mean I can't see that smoking is a huge drain on NHS resources and the problem isn't that cigarettes are unhealthy, it's that people want to smoke them? By changing that behaviour (and I'm aware that hospitals attempt to do this but it's a severely limited and ineffective effort), we could simply remove the problem. Simple concept that can be applied to many of the problems that charities deal with, but difficult to actually achieve.

Do you remember when when I said that some charity work is useful for raising awareness of issues in the same way that Recycling is useful for raising awareness of waste management issues? There's no contradiction in what I'm saying. Charities can be effective in raising awareness AND we need to change our buying habits and attitudes and stop supporting the kind of activities that result in the need for charity.

Why are there homeless people in the UK when we can afford £30 Billion to fight a war over oil? What needs to change is our attitudes and priorities toward what we spend money on and why, then we wouldn't need homeless charities any more.

Yes there is and the distinction did pass me by on the first read, my bad. So, now I would say that what I'm saying is not simplistic, but simple, and sometimes simple solutions can dramatically affect complex issues.

Take Google as an example. They want to serve up good quality websites to their own users, but they can't control how people make websites. Or can they? What they did was reward websites that are built in a way that they approve of, with high rankings, which in turn means good traffic from Google for webmasters. By creating an environment which resulted in what they wanted, they massively influenced how websites are built, without ever once building a website, issuing specific rules or trying to boss people around. They achieved it by changing how we think and they influenced a massively complex issue with a very simple idea/concept.

What I'm saying, and what organizations like Fair phone are saying, is that with a simple idea, we could massively improve conditions for many people globally, permanently. Buy less and think more about what you buy. Where is it coming from, what is happening in the supply chain, who is making this thing and how and where? What impacts is it having? If it's cheap, why is it cheap, who is really paying the cost if you're not? Were the minerals in that circuit board mined by children in the Congo? Did those prawns come from a farm in Vietnam where people are treated badly? etc etc.

If enough people cared enough, we could instigate massive change, without even leaving the house.

Simply that if it came about, I think it would succeed, but I don't actually expect it come about (unless, as I said, the issue is forced on us). Our buying habits and our values regarding status and possessions are deeply ingrained.

Just because I think that charity work is mostly a sticking plaster doesn't meant that I think sticking plasters aren't doing something useful.

No. Homelessness is not a problem that is solved by throwing money at it.

It's one thing to say it's a problem. It's another thing to offer useless solutions and pretend like you're actually doing something.

Talking about conflict minerals as a problem is fine. Saying that the solution is to just change consumer attitudes so that they don't upgrade their phones as often is useless and ignorant.

Ironically, it sounds like you're talking about yourself. "I bought one fair phone. I'm part of the solution."

If you're not part of the solution

Ok, so charity is not useless. It's just hasn't stopped the Iraq war, made the oil companies more ethical or stopped conflict minerals from causing strife.

Well good then. The guy who volunteered at the soup kitchen hasn't resolved any of these things, he merely stopped a guy from being hungry and in pain.

Your couch-solution however, also completely failed to stop the Iraq war, didn't make the oil companies more ethical and just as much conflict minerals were dug out of the ground.



So in terms of doing good. Charity-guy won.

Have a nice day.

I'm not really sure I want to wade into this discussion, but I disagree with Mightyboosh's starting premise: I think the consumerism he is decrying is probably on balance a good thing.

The basic argument would be that consumerism leads to higher GDP worldwide, and that higher GDP is correlated with other positive outcomes for the countries involved (for example, higher average lifespan, higher education, higher reported happiness, more gender equality, etc). Thus, we have some reason to think stronger GDP growth is causally connected to these positive outcomes and so insofar as we care about achieving them we should support those things, such as consumerism, that causes more growth.

+1

That remains to be seen. High GDP as we see now in our western countries has a huge price. Look for example to the pacific garbage belt for an example. How the situation would have been if 7 billion people had consumed in an identical manner nobody knows, but I'm guessing it would have been very, very, very nasty.

My argument is not one of environmentalism however, this is merely one example of prices we pay for consumerism.

If i give up my oil i wont be ale to get to work or heat my house and ill become a charity case....

It's not so much an evil circle as it is evil hopscotch.

This is correct. You could build a house for everyone in the country and there will still be homelessness, for various reasons I could expand on.

If the competition was 'who's 'good' had the most visible and immediate impact' then yes, charity guy wins hands down.

Has that got something to do with what I'm talking about?

Money helps but it's not just providing the housing it's providing the types of services often required by people who find themselves on the streets. Alcohol and drug treatments and support services. Halfway house accomodation, hostels and even sleeping bags.

Fact it a lot of these services are provided by non profits because they are able to get the bodies on the ground albeit with, largely reduced, government funding.

And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this (although I have reservations about 'bubble' economic systems that are sustained by contrived spending). My argument isn't as simple as 'consumerism is bad, look what it does' so I don't think you've correctly interpreted my starting premise. Not your fault, obv.

I'll have a go at stating it as a very simplified syllogism and see where that goes, this is just a starting point:

P1) Many people in the world experience suffering, or have significantly decreased quality of life, due to the direct and indirect impacts of some types Western Consumerism which is sustained by certain consumer habits/attitudes. (E.g. conflict minerals)
P2) Some charities devote their efforts to dealing with the consequences of these impacts.
C) If we could change these consumer habits/attitudes, we may be able to alleviate or completely remove those impacts and thereby remove the need for those charities.

(I'll extend this a bit to cover what myself and Dereds have been discussing, which is whether or not charities are a meaningful response to these issues)

P3) Since many of the problems are caused by non-local factors, such as consumer demand, charities working 'on the ground' cannot solve the problem, they can only deal with the consequences.
C2) (From P3) Charity work is not the solution to some of the problems.

This is an example of dealing with the consequences, rather than solving the problem.

I realise that we may never have a society where no one at all is homeless, but it certainly doesn't need to be as bad as it is now and private individuals shouldn't have to create charities to deal with the few homeless that we would still have.

I believe that education is the answer to most of the problems we face as a species and it's a part of the solution to this problem too, education not just of the people who end up homeless to prevent it happening in the first place, but also of the members of the society in which it is happening to improve how it is managed.

And here's a classic example of Booshian overstatement, and then backing off, which will undoubtedly be followed by claims that you've been saying the same thing the entire time.