Category Archives: Charity

Generous Lust

By Robin Hanson · May 1, 2009 9:00 pm · Comments (17)

I've been pondering this 2007 JPSP article, summarized by the Economist:

They divided a bunch of volunteers into two groups. Those in one were put into what the researchers hoped would be a “romantic mindset” by being shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex. … The unlucky members of the other group were shown pictures of buildings …

The participants were then asked … to imagine they had $5,000 in the bank. They could spend part or all of it on various luxury items such as a new car, a dinner party at a restaurant or a holiday in Europe. They were also asked what fraction of a hypothetical 60 hours of leisure time during the course of a month they would devote to volunteer work. …

In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money. Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away. … Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works. Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off. …

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Another Call to End Aid to Africa

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · April 3, 2009 2:55 pm · Comments (39)

Dambisa Moyo, an African economist, has joined her voice to the other African economists [e.g. James Shikwati] calling for a full halt to Western aid.  Her book is called Dead Aid and it asserts a direct cause-and-effect relationship between $1 trillion of aid and the rise in African poverty rates from 11% to 66%.

Though it's an easy enough signal to fake, I find it noteworthy that Moyo – in this interview at least – repeatedly pleads for some attention to "logic and evidence":

"I think the whole aid model is couched in pity.  I don’t want to cast aspersions as to where that pity comes from.  But I do think it’s based on pity because based on logic and evidence, it is very clear that aid does not work.  And yet if you speak to some of the biggest supporters of aid, whether they are academics or policy makers or celebrities, their whole rationale for giving more aid to Africa is not couched in logic or evidence; it’s based largely on emotion and pity."

I was just trying to think of when was the last time I heard a Western politician – or even a mainstream Western economist in any public venue – draw an outright battle line between logic and pity.  Oh, there are plenty of demagogues who claim the evidence is on their side, but they won't be so outright condemning of emotion – it's not a winning tactic.  Even I avoid drawing a battle line so stark.

Moyo says she's gotten a better reception in Africa than in the West.  Maybe you need to see your whole continent wrecked by emotion and pity before "logic and evidence" start to sound appealing.

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Christmas Signaling

By Robin Hanson · December 17, 2008 11:15 pm · Comments (49)

Why don't we give each other cash for Christmas?  Your employer pays you cash instead of grocery carts full of stuff because you know what you want better than they do; why doesn't that go for gifts as well?

The usual answer is your Christmas gift is a signal, not just of your willingness to sacrifice cash for them, but also of how well you know them, to know what they want.  But if so then why do we often make and distribute Christmas wish lists?   Doesn't handing our free answer sheets defeat the purpose of testing them on how well they know us?

One answer might be that the gift receiver is like a teacher leaking answers to students to raise her teacher rating – maybe the gift receiver cares more that third parties think her gift givers know her well, than that they actually know her well.  But in this case wouldn't she be trying to hide the fact that she passed around a wish list?  If everyone who sees her get a gift was shown the wish list, who could she be fooling?

Could it all be an elaborate show so that she can honestly tell other folks that she got things she wanted?  But if so wouldn't she be terribly embarrassed if they learned she gave out a wish list?  That just doesn't ring true to me; what else could be going on?

Added: Registering for wedding gifts is a clearer puzzle; all are fully aware of the list, the list is very specific, and recipients don't save on shopping time/trouble, as they had to pick out the gifts. 

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Singularity Summit 2008

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · September 8, 2008 7:26 pm · Comments (4)

FYI all:  The Singularity Summit 2008 is coming up, 9am-5pm October 25th, 2008 in San Jose, CA.  This is run by my host organization, the Singularity Institute.  Speakers this year include Vernor Vinge, Marvin Minsky, the CTO of Intel, and the chair of the X Prize Foundation.

Before anyone posts any angry comments: yes, the registration costs actual money this year.  The Singularity Institute has run free events before, and will run free events in the future.  But while past Singularity Summits have been media successes, they haven’t been fundraising successes up to this point.  So Tyler Emerson et. al. are trying it a little differently.  TANSTAAFL.

Lots of speakers talking for short periods this year.  I’m intrigued by that format.  We’ll see how it goes.

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Future Altruism, Not

By Robin Hanson · August 11, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (13)

In the laboratory dictator game, you give subjects a pile of money and ask them if they want to give some of it to anonymous other subjects.  In the lab people do give away some money, a lot more than if you had handed money to someone on the street.  People give less if the experiment is double-blind, if there is social distance between the giver and recipient, and according to a new study, if payments are received more than a week after the decision:

We experimentally study the effect of time on altruism. By postponing payments in a standard Dictator game, subjects allocate a future payment between themselves and others. Since both the payoffs of the Dictator and the Receiver are delayed until the same time, standard intertemporal utility maximization would predict that waiting time should not affect the Dictator’s choice. In this respect, we observe that Dictators’ decisions are not affected, as long as the time interval between the decision and payment is not large [2-6 days, median gift 15%]. On the other hand, for large time gaps [10-22 days, median gift 0%], subjects become more self-interested.

I fear this is more bad news about our altruism toward the very distant future. 

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World Welfare State

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (43)

At at the city, state, or national levels we sometimes "help the poor" via initiatives to "develop" this or that region, but what we mostly have is "welfare" benefits that go directly to individuals.  After all, development funds have a poor track record, and are often diverted by corrupt officials, while direct benefits are the prototype of charity to help those less fortunate than ourselves.  At the international level, however, we mostly have "development aid", even though its track record is just as bad there.  Why don’t we give more benefits directly to the world’s poor? 

We do not need a strong world government to have a world welfare state – we just need those who want to help the poor to form to a common fund with a common system for distributing benefits.  Some minimal requirements, such as a world ID card, would be made on nations who wanted to let their citizens to get world welfare.  And a special level of international disgust could be reserved for nations that refused to let locals to get world welfare.  Yes this wouldn’t be easy, but why does no one even try? 

With a world welfare system donors would have to more directly face their choice between welfare at home and abroad.  Why don’t we first ensure everyone in the world at least gets a dollar a day, before we make sure locals don’t suffer with only basic cable channels? 

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Nephew Versus Nepal Charity

By Robin Hanson · February 19, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (25)

If you had a poor but promising nephew, you might promise to pay his way through college.  You would place some limits on his activities – you probably wouldn’t pay for a semester off to train for Halo championships.  And you might insist he maintain a minimum GPA.  But you probably wouldn’t interfere much in his choice of college or major.  And when you give to your children in your will, you rarely place restrictions on how they can spend what you give them. 

But when we help poor people in far away lands (like Nepal), we almost never just give people money with few strings attached.  We instead fund projects, run mostly by outsiders, to do things for them.  We build them dams, roads, hospitals, bed nets, laptops, irrigation ditches, and so on.  For poor people in our own nation, we act somewhere in between these two extremes.

When we give, why do we interfere so much more with distant poor, and interfere so little with those close to us? 

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The Greatest Gift, The Best Exercise

By Robin Hanson · December 21, 2007 6:00 am · Comments (43)

In this generous season, consider the greatest gift we regularly and personally give (even if we do not intend it as such): sex.  Back in 2005, Tyler Cowen pondered Michael Vassar’s pregnant observation: "there is an inexplicable shortage of sex."  This remains, I think, one of the most neglected questions in social science.  We should devote far more effort to diagnosing and fixing this problem.  To inspire more precious gift-giving, let us review the health benefits of sex [as of 2003]:

Saving yourself" before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoedown or the big bakeoff … there’s no evidence it sharpens your competitive edge. The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it’s harmless when practiced in moderation.

In one of the most credible studies … tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. … Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. … In a 2001 follow-on … by having sex three or more times a week, men reduced their risk of heart attack or stroke by half.

Sex, if nothing else, is exercise. A vigorous bout burns some 200 calories–about the same as running 15 minutes on a treadmill or playing a spirited game of squash. … Sex also boosts production of testosterone, which leads to stronger bones and muscles. …

A 2002 study of 293 women … reported that sexually active participants whose male partners did not use condoms were less subject to depression than those whose partners did. One theory of causality: Prostoglandin, a hormone found only in semen, may be absorbed in the female genital tract. …

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“Can’t Say No” Spending

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · October 17, 2007 10:08 pm · Comments (27)

The remarkable observation that medical spending has zero net marginal effect is shocking, but not completely unprecedented.

According to Spiegel in "Too Much of a Good Thing: Choking on Aid Money in Africa", the Washington Center for Global Development calculated that it would require $3,521 of marginal development aid invested, per person, in order to increase per capita yearly income by $3.65 (one penny per day).

The Kenyan economist James Shikwati is even more pessimistic in "For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!":  The net effect of Western aid to Africa is actively destructive (even when it isn’t stolen to prop up corrupt regimes), a chaotic flux of money and goods that destroys local industry.

What does aid to Africa have in common with healthcare spending? Besides, of course, that it’s heartbreaking to just say no -

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Food Vs. Sex Charity

By Robin Hanson · August 8, 2007 6:00 am · Comments (90)

Scott Aaronson asks a great question: 

Consider two men, A and B. Man A steals food because he’s starving to death, while Man B commits a rape because no woman will agree to have sex with him.  From a Darwinian perspective, the two cases seem exactly analogous. In both we have a man on the brink of genetic oblivion, who commandeers something that isn’t his in order to give his genes a chance of survival. And yet the two men strike just about everyone — including me — as inhabiting completely different moral universes. The first man earns only our pity. We ask: what was wrong with the society this poor fellow inhabited, such that he had no choice but to steal? The second man earns our withering contempt.

One problem with the question is that in our society giving enough sex to satisfy is expensive, while giving enough food to satisfy is cheap.  So it might help to imagine a society where the person who lost the food was also in some, though less, danger of starving.   

But even then food and sex seem to be treated differently.  When we give food aid we don’t just give rice and beans to keep folks from starving; we give them enough to have a moderately tasty diet.   We do nothing remotely similar for sex.

To me the obvious answer is that our concern about inequality is not very general – compared to inequality in access to food, humans are just not that concerned about sexual inequality, especially for men.  Presumably for our ancestors, the gene pool of a tribe could benefit from equalizing food in ways that it could not benefit by equalizing sex. 

Added: Riffing off this post, Scott rewords his question:  Why do we, as a society, provide food stamps for the hungry but not sex stamps for the celibate?

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