First-World Problems...

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a dentist chair, minding my own business, when the dentist walked in, looked at me, and said, "Oh, you're doing Movember?"

What the fvck is "Movember," I asked. It's been around since 2003, and I had never heard of it until two weeks ago! My beard and moustache was a coincidence, not a fundraising hook. Once a year I grow one for a few weeks or a few months, depending on my mood and how badly I trim it.

Movember Foundation is a charity focused on "Men's Health," which I assume means donating to research into the various diseases that are specific to men. I looked into them and they are not a top-rated charity with CharityWatch or CharityNavigator," but that doesn't necessarily mean they are wasteful.

Why is this a First-World-Problem? Well, we have tens of thousands of charities in America, many doing wonderful work. But the ones dedicated to research into disease -- biomedical research -- are chaotic. A rational way to divvy up the billions of dollars that Americans donate would be to base it on total deaths, death rate, rate of progression. You know: something linked to logic. But a lot of the dollars that we Americans give -- and we are incredibly generous -- go to popular diseases or ones that tug on our heart strings. Does that make fiscal and scientific sense? Nope! Is there any way to change it? Nope!

My guess is that there is an ocean of money available for important research; probably enough to fund most (maybe all) of it. But the only way to improve the seemingly random distribution of America's largess is with a top-down approach, and there is not chance in hell that I or any sentient being would support that in light of the catastrophic failures of exactly the elites who would run the distribution from the top.

I'll take Americans and their emotional and irrational giving any day of the week over the diktats of some Ivy League asshole in a fancy office in D.C.

posted by CBD at 02:00 PM

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