We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.
In the specific case of Japan, there's all the more reason not to donate money. Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it. On top of that, it's still extremely unclear how or where organizations like globalgiving intend on spending the money that they're currently raising for Japan — so far we're just told that the money "will help survivors and victims get necessary services," which is basically code for "we have no idea what we're going to do with the money, but we'll probably think of something."
Reader thoughts?
