Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you're saying that when a charity provides bed nets, it causes individuals to make the irrational and sub-optimal choice of using a bed net without purchasing it. If your choice is between buying a bed net, or taking one that is available for free, the rational and optimal choice for you, if we only consider that choice itself, is to take the free one. Isn't that obvious? But this is a first-order effect, and I'm t…
The idea that people in sub-Saharan Africa don't know how how to create things through work because they were given so much seems crazy to me. I was given a roof over my head, free education, food, security, and medical care by my parents and I didn't have to do anything for that. I never saw our house being built, nor food being grown, or took a class in economics(by 18 I took several later). By 18 I still understoo…
You're quite correct that many people (including me, and apparently you as well) are able to understand wealth creation even though they were given a lot of wealth for free. So it's not always true that giving things to people makes them unable to understand how to create wealth through work.
But your example and mine are different from the sub-Saharan Africa example in an important way: we were children. The stuff we were given was stuff we could not reasonably have earned or traded for for ourselves. A child is not (yet) able to create enough wealth to pay for all the food, or shelter, or education he needs. That's why children are raised by parents, who can create the wealth needed to provide those things, until the children grow up and are able to do it for themselves. And if the parents are smart (mine were, and it sounds like yours were too), they will gradually introduce the children to the idea that all that wealth has to be earned somehow. My parents made me take summer jobs as soon as I was old enough to do so legally. (Even before that, they made me do household chores to earn my allowance.) So children, if they're being raised properly, aren't really taught that everything is spontaneously created.
The sub-Saharan Africans certainly do a lot of things for themselves, that's true. But it seems to me that, unlike (properly raised) children, there are things they do not do for themselves, that they reasonably could. Why? More on this below.
> All of the evidence I've seen shows that communities given free nets do better than ones that pay a nominal fee.
Bear in mind, again, that I'm talking about second order effects. I have already admitted that, to first order, if the choice is between paying for bed nets and getting them for free, it's obviously rational to get them for free. The evidence you describe supports that.
But the evidence you describe does not answer a deeper question: why do any of these communities need charity at all? If they do know how to create things through work, why can't they make their own bed nets? Or make something else that they can trade for them at a net profit? Why do they need to have these things given to them?
This is the second order effect I'm talking about. These people don't seem (to me) to have any idea how to generalize their ability to do some particular things that create wealth, in order to create more wealth that would obviously benefit them. They are, it seems, able to maintain their houses, knit their clothes, and grow food; but they can't figure out how to make bed nets (or something they can trade for them), even though the benefit to them in malaria prevention is obvious and huge? The only solution is to have bed nets given to them?
This disconnect is what makes me suspect that the provision of things like bed nets by charity has affected these people's mindset. They don't seem to view wealth creation as a general thing; they seem to think that they can only create some kinds of wealth, while other kinds of wealth (like bed nets) can only be provided to them by others.