Comment by bandrami

Having had a career mostly in non-profits and NGOs (on the tech side of them), holy crap does this ring uncomfortably true. There are a few exceptions (de-mining NGOs actually do remove land mines rather than placing new ones, etc.) but the temptation for a whole lot of them to just become permanent fixtures of the problem can be overwhelming. It's how you get situations like where San Francisco spends what amounts to $28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness", and it get absolutely devoured by a giant NGO-industrial complex.