Review
In an ideal world where people are all competent on the same axis, I would just subsample something similar to across my candidates.
Why assume we live in a fantasy land?
But there should be some way to select people on their potential, that does not only account for personal connections (that are a good way, but fail in scenarios where merit is not very well defined), and CVs.
You assume that personal connections shouldn't matter in your conclusion but you never looked into whether or not they matter for the effectiveness of what the people are supposed to do.
This is shallow and sounds to me like listing applause lights instead of really engaging with the issue at hand.
ChristianKI, I will try to explain better the points you raised:
I am not an expert, so the following is based more on cynicism than empirical data, please take it with a grain of salt. My current best guess is that:
UN is a huge, mostly dysfunctional bureaucracy. It probably does some good, but to achieve that good it probably spends 100x more resources than would be necessary.
(I suspect it mostly takes credit for what less known organizations do. If one day Effective Altruists succeed to cure malaria in Africa, UN will probably announce it as their own success. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that today UN already has a department dedicated to cure malaria, which spends millions of dollars on having its employees fly around the world in airplanes, give speeches on the necessity of fighting malaria, and produce some paperwork. When malaria is gone, UN will declare that it was these people's heroic effort that has achieved it, and to the average person this will sound completely credible.)
People do internships at UN either because they are preparing for their future jobs as bureaucrats in some huge dysfunctional bureaucracy, or as a form of advertising -- being associated with UN looks cool on your CV, ask Greta Thunberg or Sri Chinmoy.
Basically, your model is: "UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them."
My model is: "Some ambitious people use the association with UN to achieve their own political goal. They are quite happy to do it for free."
People working in UN are not selected for their passion to end war and hunger. They are selected for their political connections and skills. If they seem to you like a modern aristocracy, that's because indeed they are.
The guy was not one of the brightest people, neither he was kind. He came from privilege, and nevertheless he was there trying to solve world hunger.
There are millions of people in the world who have a wish to end world hunger. The plebeians among them will never see this wish translated into an actual paying job -- not unless they deliver some extraordinary results.
The guy you describe is trained to have one of these jobs, regardless of his abilities or results. If he wants it, he will probably get it. The fact that he actually cares is... nice, but optional.
Ben Todd at 80K published an old (2014) exploratory career profile on being a program manager in international orgs "like the World Bank, World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund and United Nations", and notes that
We recommend this career if it is a better fit for you than our other recommended careers.
These positions may offer the opportunity to influence substantial budgets, since these organisations govern huge pools of aid money and international regulation. Typically in these organisations the average budget spent on programs per employee is on the order of US$1-10 million.1 Since it’s difficult to give workers the right incentives and the work is difficult, we think it’s likely that additional intelligent, rational and altruistic people can have a substantial impact through improving the efficiency of how these funds are spent. However, we’re highly uncertain about the expected size of the influence.
These organisations are highly influential over important global challenges, so you’ll be working with highly influential people, which increases our assessment of advocacy potential and career capital. The high prestige of these positions also contributes to our higher rating of their career capital.
On the other hand, reading Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan a few years back, detailing his experience as program coordinator for the Oil-for-Food programme, greatly soured my then cautiously net-positive view of the UN.
My friend once participated in a disaster relief in some country that was hit by tsunami. If I remember it correctly, he described the relief process as many less-known organizations actually doing something in the territory (building shelters for people who lost their homes, organizing food distribution), and a few expensive UN "coordinators" who took numbers from them and put them into their Excel sheets.
But I have no idea how much should I trust this, and how typical this is for disaster relief programs.
(One detail I remember is how important is to distribute all the foreign aid across the country, because most organizations that bring it, will simply drop the entire cargo in one port in the capital city, and consider their work done.)
My model for the UN is
Basically, your model is: "UN wants the best people. To achieve that goal, it should pay them."
and my model for the (typical) UN interns
UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.
I guess when you say
My model is: "Some ambitious people use the association with UN to achieve their own political goal. They are quite happy to do it for free."
and your following text, this invalidates my first point. Though somehow, if I assume on the long run p(working at UN or other organisation|internship at UN) > p(working at UN or other organisation|no internship at UN), then perhaps I should have noticed that my premise of UN was probably false :)
I am sure these people are ambitious. My main point was that the sample selection of UN interns is not a good idea if you want to solve the problems UN says wants to solve, as you have already written. But I guess all of this is already acknowledged in EA-like spaces.
Your comment was quite detailed and clear, a part of this point...
deliver some extraordinary results.
Understanding this might perhaps help towards finding solutions (that are not of the kind lets break up the UN).
I have no idea whether organizations like UN can be made more effective or not. I don't want to claim dogmatically that they can't be, but I can't imagine a way they could.
So if I wanted to achieve X, I would try to achieve it some way outside of UN, as if UN does not exist at all.
Maybe someone who studies history of large organizations could tell us whether and how large organizations can be fixed. I don't have that kind of expertise.
My assumption is that once organization is what it is, it gets filled mostly with people who are happy about the fact that it is what it is. Those people would resist a change. They could be overcome by a much stronger force from outside, but who exactly is this force compared to UN?
Seems to me that the greatest threat to UN is that another organization will appear, doing the things that UN originally wanted to do, and as it becomes generally known, the resources will gradually be diverted from UN to the new organization. But that is a process that would take decades, so the people who are happy with UN being what it is can still assume to get decent salaries until they retire, no need to panic.
Disclaimer: I am outside of the world of international organisations. I am a scientific researcher at university. I am writing this post to open a discussion.
UN is an international organisation with the following main goals:
Here a more concrete list of examples of what UN wants to achieve. For example, I am all in reducing social inequalities within and across countries.
Working at such an international organisation such as UN can therefore facilitate achieving these goals. To achieve these goals we probably need competent people. As the world is complex you also want a sample of people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. To be safe, UN tries to attract the best talent offering jobs with good salaries, compared to average civil service jobs, perks, and prestige. As any job, there are problems. Nevertheless UN jobs can be a really good opportunity.
UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.
Given the above points, there are a lot of incentives in becoming a UN intern.
On the other hand, if UN has the incentive to attract the best competent people for the future, and be really a good representation of the world population then it has to lure in the greatest number of people.
One very successful way to attract people is financially supporting internships.
This UN page says UN interns are not paid, and "living expenses must be borne by either the interns or their sponsoring institutions".
According to this 2018 report 83% of UN interns are unpaid. It is six years old. The situation might be different today.[1]
Let's assume that currently the different UN agencies flip a fair coin to fund you. Does this guarantee a fairer representation of the world population? Not. But it might higher the chance of encouraging more people to apply.
Here is speculative. Usually the people I have met that seek, train, and get these jobs include people with three European surnames (but also humans will tend to seek paths taken by family members), or from privileged backgrounds.[2]
Then, they are the ones that have higher chances getting jobs at other organisations, advancing their careers, maybe landing a UN or some other nice job with good salary and perks.
Situation: at UN and affiliated organisations we have the most privileged people trying to solve world problems and seek diplomatic solutions.
Why is literally these people that know how to solve e.g. hunger, or war conflicts? And how can I be convinced that it is privileged people that are going to solve world problems?
Let's assume many of them are competent. Would you get a surgery from a competent physician, or from a passionate competent physician that wants to alleviate human suffering?
This situations sounds to me a lot similar to the European aristocracy. A group of people thinking that they know the solution of the problems of the socio-economically struggling people believing the know better.
And what I am afraid of is ending up with a power preserving structure with personal incentives that are not aligned with solving world problems. People that want to maintain exclusivity without incentives in solving world problems, because anyway there is a lack of empathy to the struggling.
Here is a list
Finally. What am I advocating and wish organisations like the UN implemented?
I would like an organisation like UN to have a fair representation of people, from the poor to the rich.
By fair I mean a representative subsample of the population probability density function (pdf).
And I also think merely increasing funding will not solve the problem of unfair representation at UN.
You want more applicants. Way more applicants.
Assume I have a population of people, poor and rich, with some pdf of being rich or poor. Now, assume I have a large enough number of similar job openings. My goal is to have a fairer representation in my . It does not have to be perfect (this is indeed an example that does not account for many factors, e.g. human behaviour, assumes lots of similar jobs, and so on).
Assume the following: I only fully fund of the jobs. Assume this affects the probability that an applicant may apply with some probability , depending on how rich they are , and the percentage of jobs (basically in this case ).
First question. Did UN think about an optimal ? For example, if 80% of people do not have money, and 20% have enough money, you may be ok in funding only 80%.
Second question. How to choose applicants? In an ideal world where people are all competent on the same axis, I would just subsample something similar to across my candidates. So, had UN thought hard about this subsampling process? Maybe in the beginning it does not have to be optimal (actually I think some sub-optimality is fine). But there should be some way to select people on their potential, that does not only account for personal connections (that are a good way, but fail in scenarios where merit is not very well defined), and CVs. This already happens in places like ENS (though one might argue that most of the people that get in there are good because of better training opportunity as kids).
One of the goals of writing this post is to challenge myself in debating with others, change my point of view, and learning how to write better. So, I would really appreciate public or private honest feedback.
Note that from the 2018 report,
But it seems there is a rule: "that interns are not eligible to apply for, or be appointed to, positions at the professional level for a period of [two to] six months following the end of their internship.", see page 55 of the report.
I wonder if this rule is more for agencies not paying the interns. Not clear to me.
Some of the people that have done internships at these places themselves confirmed that them and most of the interns are quite financially comfortable. No matter their country of origin (e.g. Africa or Asia), they can lead very nice lives in the most expensive European capitals.
Personal story. Someone close to me used to give private lessons to the kids of a FAO diplomat. They had free housing in a very expensive neighbourhood, free schooling at private institutes, and budgets for several things. For example, the private lessons were funded by one of these budgets. The guy was not one of the brightest people, neither he was kind. He came from privilege, and nevertheless he was there trying to solve world hunger.