Tag Archives: Charity

Info Cuts Charity

By Robin Hanson · December 9, 2011 9:00 pm · Comments (24)

Our culture tends to celebrate the smart, creative, and well-informed. So we tend to be blind to common criticisms of such folks. A few days ago I pointed out that creative folk tend to cheat more. Today I’ll point out that the well-informed tend to donate less to charity:

The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali, the team found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa — the ones who were essentially given more to think about — were less likely to give. …

Daniel Oppenheimer … found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely efficient. …

According to [John] List, thinking about all the people you’re not helping when you donate  …  makes the act of giving a lot less satisfying. (more; HT  Reihan Salam)

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Why Weak Charity Rules?

By Robin Hanson · October 31, 2011 9:30 pm · Comments (28)

In April I posted on “trailer for David Alvarado’s slick-looking new [3D] film on longevity.” There’s now a new trailer:

The Methuselah Generation; The Science of Living Forever from David Anthony Alvarado on Vimeo.

They are using Kickstarter to solicit funds from folks like you to help them finish the film. The film looks nice, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. But alas I can’t in good conscience say that this is my best guess for the charity that, per dollar contributed, does the most good for the world.

It is interesting that they use an innovative way to solicit donations. Why is there so much more innovation in charity funding than in business funding? Here’s a related question: why do Alvarado and company ask for donors, but not investors, for their film? The film might make money, and if it does, why not offer to give some of that back?

The explanation in both cases is probably that regulatory hurdles are far larger for investors. Regulations set far higher standards for people who can ask for your money, if there is a suggestion that you might get some of it money back later. But why? Shouldn’t it be even more important that your money be spend well, if you won’t ever get any of it back?

This regulatory asymmetry seems to me to be an implicit recognition that we mainly donate to charity to signal our good intentions and loyalties, and that we don’t actually care much what happens to the money we donate.

If you invest money hoping to get it back and more, then you are furious if it is badly managed, perhaps stolen, and want stronger regulations to stop that from ever happening again. But if you donate money and the funds are mismanaged, perhaps stolen, so that your good intentions aren’t realized, well you aren’t actually so mad about that. You don’t as furiously demand stronger regulations. Because you already got most of what you wanted: a chance to show everyone how much you care.

Added 20Nov: David asks folks to vote for his project here.

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(Fem) Sex Is Selfish

By Robin Hanson · October 8, 2011 8:00 pm · Comments (24)

Based on a previous study … that elicited … personal accounts of sexual motivations … Meston, a sexual psychophysiologist, and Buss, an evolutionary psychologist compiled a list of 237 distinct [sex] motivations … In researching the [2009] book [Why Women Have Sex] they asked over one thousand women to give a description of actual sexual encounters associated with any of these 237 reasons, mostly via online survey. These reasons are discussed in relation to the underlying motivations they point to and the likely evolutionary benefits they gave our ancestral mothers.(more)

The book Why Women Have Sex has many fascinating tidbits, and provoked many thoughts in me. For example, I noticed that the vast majority of the female sex motives discussed in the book are selfish, i.e., primarily intended to benefit oneself, as opposed to one’s partner. For example, even pity sex seems mainly selfish:

Here is how one woman described sex as a way of boosting her self-confidence:

I had sex with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them. These guys were virgins and I felt bad that they had never had sex before so I had sex with them. I felt like I was doing them a big favor that no one else had over done. I felt power over them, like they were weaklings under me and I was in control. It boosted my confidence to be the teacher in the situation and made me feel more desirable.

The main altruistic sex motive is a part of “love”:

Of the more than two hundred reasons given for having sex, love [#5, to express my love, #9, I was in love] and emotional closeness [#12] were ranked in the top twelve for women. …

According to the well-known … “triangular theory of love,” love consists of the distinct components of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy is the experienced of warmth toward another person that arises from feelings of closeness and connectedness. It involves the desire to give and receive emotional support and to share one’s innermost thoughts and experiences. … Here is how one woman in our study experienced this [intimacy] dimension of love:

I fell that sex can be one of many physical expressions of love, though sex is not always an expression of love. When I make love with my husband, it is an intimacy, trust, and exposure of myself that I share only with him … because I love him. Sex can be a way of fulfilling my husband’s needs (physical, emotional, psychological) that can’t be achieved any other way and [it] lets him know that I love him and vice versa. …

Passion … refers to intense romantic feelings and sexual desire for another person, … “a hot intense emotion” characterized by an intense longing for union with another. …

Commitment … requires decision-making. … The long-term decision involves a willingness to maintain the relationship through thick and thin. Many women talked about how commitment was an essential component of love for them. In fact, some said that they used having sex as a way to try to ensure commitment from a partner they felt loved them.

So, out of the of 237 female reasons for sex, love is in #5,9. “Please my partner” is #11 (its #10 for men). On love, only one of its three parts, intimacy, has an clearly altruistic component. Six desired effects of intimacy are mentioned: experiencing warmth, giving support, receiving support, sharing experiences, showing love, and being shown love. Of these, only one, giving support or meeting needs, seems clearly altruistic (though even this could be selfish). So one of the six desired effects of one of the three parts of love, mentioned twice in the top ten reasons for sex, seems altruistic. Direct clear altruism is #11. Not nothing, but not a lot either.

People often complain that economists assume selfishness too often, and point to intense close relationships as clear evidence of altruism. But if even in this case our motives seem overwhelmingly selfish, economists’s usual approximation looks pretty good.

FYI, here are the top 15 female sex reasons, from that original survey:

1. I was attracted to the person
2. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure
3. It feels good
4. I wanted to show my affection to the person
5. I wanted to express my love for the person
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release
7. I was ‘‘horny’’
8. It’s fun
9. I realized I was in love
10. I was ‘‘in the heat of the moment’’
11. I wanted to please my partner
12. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy)
13. I wanted the pure pleasure
14. I wanted to achieve an orgasm
15. It’s exciting, adventurous

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Charity And Temptation

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2011 9:35 pm · Comments (19)

Bryan Caplan responded to John Marsh:

Nearly two-thirds of poor children … reside in [single-parent] homes. … “If poor mothers married the fathers of their children nearly three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.”

In a world of cheap, reliable contraception, any woman can easily avoid single motherhood with near-certainty. Simply use birth control until you find and marry a reliable man. Avoiding single motherhood, to be blunt, is a choice.

Bryan further commented:

b. Sex with birth control, unlike abstinence, does not lead to chronic burning lust.
c. Potentially poor women who delay child-bearing have a high chance of finding a reliable man before becoming infertile.

Karl Smith took issue:

Baby lust is quite real, almost certainly genetically determined and probably explains a fair fraction of the differences in outcome among women. … Potentially poor women [do not] have a high chance of finding a reliable man before becoming infertile. … There is a serious dearth of reliable men. .. Bryan’s prescription of promiscuous birth-controlled sex lowers a women’s rank in the marriage market. … My natural assumption [is] that poor single mothers are engaging in utility maximizing behavior. This implies that the alternatives to being a poor single mother are worse and that people accept this fate because they have low endowments in the marriage market.

Let me first make two points:

  1. The reliability of men is only an issue because we have weakened the commitment of marriage. Most farmer societies made marriage into a strong commitment, and encouraged young women to hold out for it. This led to an equilibrium where most women, even poor ones, married, so that most kids had two parents. Men now choose to be unreliable more often because we have greatly lowered its penalties.
  2. Even with weak marriage it is possible to identify reliable poor men. If you can’t tell, ask your parents, grandparents, or their siblings. But the hypergamous mating preferences of women typically lead them to prefer other men, especially in a relatively rich society like ours.

What to do? First, why not offer the option of a strong marriage commitment? More women would end up with reliable husbands if couples could choose between strong marriage, weak marriage, or no marriage. But surely even with this option, many women in our rich society would still choose single parenthood, and the relative poverty it implies. What then?

Now Bryan is clearly right — this is in fact a choice. But Karl is also right — it is a choice made in the face of relatively strong desires. The key question is: how weak do temptations have to be to make the choices they influence unworthy of charity? We feel only weak inclinations to help people who choose poverty, and could easily have chosen otherwise. But we feel much stronger inclinations to help folks who could have avoided poverty only via quite unusual levels of self-control and determination. Where in this spectrum does the temptation to single parenthood lie?

Given forager sharing norms, forager fathers only needed to reliably help kids for a few years. But farmers, who shared less, had to set a higher self-control bar for charity eligibility. A farmer could quickly starve by being too generous with neighboring charity cases. Now that we are richer, we can be more indulgent, but it seems to me an open question whether we should. I tend to agree with Bryan that very poor foreigners seem more deserving of aid that self-indulgent not-so-poor natives.

Added 5p: Karl Smith responds:

Central to Byran and somewhat shockingly to me – Robin’s – thinking is whether or not the single parents deserve charity.
On Facebook I think Robin framed the question as “how weak do temptations have to be before they make people less deserving of charity”
My clear answer would be that there is no level so low. Human suffering is bad. Reductions in human suffering are good.
Why humans are suffering is of concern to us in knowing when our interventions might be productive but it doesn’t affect whether they are warranted.

If we commit ahead of time to making our help contingent on certain behavior, that can have good effects in inducing such behavior. This is probably the origin of our intuitions that certain behaviors make folks less worthy of help.

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Let Us Give To Future

By Robin Hanson · September 19, 2011 6:30 pm · Comments (23)

18 months ago I wondered:

Franklin … [left] £1000 each to Philadelphia and Boston in his will to be invested for 200 years. … by 1990 the funds had grown to 2.3, 5M$. … Why has Franklin’s example inspired no copy-cats?

Thanks to Gwern, I now know of several copy-cats, mostly failures (quotes below). This confirms that many are willing to donate to distant future folks, but are prevented by law, largely from fears that donor funds will eventually dominate the economy. Alas, as these are the likely consequences of allowing donations to the distant future:

1) The fraction of world income saved would increase, relative to consuming not-donated resources immediately. This effect starts small but increases with time, until savings become a large fraction of world income, after which diminishing returns kicks in.

2) While funds are in saving mode, world consumption would be smaller at first, relative to immediately consuming donor resources, but then after a while it would be higher, though it might eventually fall to zero difference. When such funds switch from saving to paying out, or when thieves steal from them, the consumption of thieves and specified beneficiaries would rise.

3) As investment became a large fraction of world income, interest rates would fall, and the market would take a longer term view of the future consequences of current actions.

4) Some would change their behavior in order to qualify for benefits, according to the conditions specified by the original donors and the agents they authorize to later interpret them.

These changes seem good overall, especially if, as I estimate, the future will have many folks in need. Not only would donors actually get to do what they want with their resources, but policy-makers usually lament that savings rates are too low, and interest rates too high, leading us to neglect distant future consequences of our actions. The added consumption given to future folk is mostly stuff that would not exist if not for their donations, so it is hard to begrudge them giving to whom they wish. Our evolved instincts to resist domination makes less sense here, as “dominating” donors are long dead, influencing the world only via largely-altruistic explicit visible instructions.

Note that once physical, if not economic, immortality is feasible (i.e., paying enough lets you survive indefinitely), then original donors can stay around to manage their growing funds. Those promised quotes:

Continue reading "Let Us Give To Future" »

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On Fudge Factors

By Robin Hanson · August 24, 2011 5:20 pm · Comments (12)

Most people base most of their judgements on intuition, rather than explicit calculations. Some people do base judgements on explicit calculations, and take such calculations at face value. But many others, especially on social questions, use calculations that include case-specific fudge factors which can be adjusted to ensure that calculations agree with case-specific intuitions. While this might estimate well when intuitions are far more informative than explicit calculations, this often seems to be done to achieve a hypocritical appearance of calculation-based decisions, while actually allowing intuitions to dominate.

As I shall explain below, Holden Karnofsky illustrates this preference for fudge factors: Continue reading "On Fudge Factors" »

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Why Non-Profits?

By Robin Hanson · July 6, 2011 11:50 am · Comments (39)

Arnold Kling questioned the value of non-profits:

A profit-seeking enterprise is more accountable, in that a profit-seeking business must satisfy consumers or else go out of business. Hence, it must provide something of value to its customers. On the other hand, if a non-profit fails to provide any benefit to its customers, it still might be able to obtain grants from the government or from donors.

Fabio Rojas responded:

Non-profits provide services that are not sustainable in a for-profit format. … The customers simply can’t pay for what might benefit them and “we” (the donors) have decided that these people need the service. The non-profit format is a way to handle donations to third parties in an organized and semi-public fashion. … Examples include services to poor children (e.g., Boys and Girls Clubs), women (e.g., battered women’s shelters) and immigrants (e.g., many religious groups donate time and services to poor immigrants). My intuition is that it would be hard for a profit oriented institution to help battered women or poor children. …

It’s signaling. Not only in the Hanson “I do this because I care” sense, but as a commitment to a specific issue. The people who run the local church organization for recent Mexican migrants have to show that they won’t bail in order to give shareholders a slightly higher return. Rather, by making their organization non-profit, they show an allegiance to a specific type of person, not their wallet.

Fabio suggests that the main function of non-profits is as intermediaries between those who want to donate and the deserving recipients they want to help. But the obvious question here is: why can’t non-profits give these deserving recipients vouchers for service at for-profit firms? Why do non-profits need to provide the services themselves? Remember that 51% of non-profit revenue goes to medical orgs like hospitals, and 14% to schools — vouchers are quite feasible for both of these kinds of services.

Admittedly, in some cases there are strong complementarities between the task of deciding who is a deserving recipient and actually providing services. This applies, for example, to service coordinators such as social workers, who evaluate aid candidates and suggest relevant services to them. But why must the services that coordinators coordinate be provided by non-profits?

Now there might be good reasons for customers to sometimes choose non-profit service providers. Such a choice might assure customers that advice being given is not overly influenced by profit motives. But this reason should apply to many sorts of customers all across the economy – there is no obvious reason to expect a correlation between people donors consider deserving of help and people who buy trustworthiness by buying from non-profits.

So why don’t the non-profits that donors use to distribute help usually give vouchers to recipients, vouchers valid at either non-profit or for-profit service providers? Once one has decided who needs what sort of help, why does it matter what kind or organizations provide that help?

I suspect that what is going on here is that non-profit donors and employees both dislike the idea of letting money to go for-profit firms, regardless of how much that might benefit aid recipients. They affiliate with non-profits in order to gain an image of “doing good” and substantial affiliations with for-profits in that process taints that image.

Added 5p: Several commenters pointed out that many prefer to volunteer time, and without money mediating between their time donation and the cause. That is, they don’t just want to work at whatever makes the most money and have that money used for the cause – they want to personally spend their time on the cause. This also seems to fit my basic theory – that the more money and profit are involved in the process, the more that taints the do-gooding image of their donation.

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The Great “Charity” Storm

By Robin Hanson · July 5, 2011 8:30 pm · Comments (16)

Around 1800 in England and Russia, the three main do-gooder activities were medicine, school, and alms (= food/shelter for the weak, such as the old or crippled). Today the three spending categories of medicine, school, and alms make up ~40% of US GDP, a far larger fraction than in 1800. Why the vast increase?

My explanation: we long ago evolved strong feelings of respect for these activities, but modern context changes have allowed out-of-equilibrium exploitation of such feelings. Details:

1. Foragers who personally taught kids, cared for sick folks, and gave food/shelter to weak folks, credibly signaled their loyalty to allies, at least when such needy were allies. Weak group selection helped encourage such aid as ways to signal loyalty, in place of other possible loyalty signals. Humans eventually evolved deep feelings of respect for such activities.

2. Farmers inherited such feelings, and thus also gave social credit to those who donated money instead of time to promote these three classic charities. Rich farmer elites felt this more strongly, as they had more forager style attitudes. As such donations were less observable than forager help, farmer donors had weaker incentives to help. Also, the indirection often resulted in money being spend badly.

3. Industry era folk also inherited such feelings, strengthened by wealth. Voters today get social credit for supporting tax-funded activities that look similar to the three classic charities: medicine, school, alms — even though one can fake such signals without having the loyalty that such signals are seen as showing. That is, votes supporting spending taxes on medicine, school and alms are interpreted as showing loyal “caring” for one’s community, even though most of this spending is on typical voters, not those in special need, and even though one person’s vote doesn’t change outcomes. And even if a vote did change outcomes, paying via taxes doesn’t sacrifice personal income relative to local rivals, making this signal mostly “cheap talk.” Indirection continues to hurt effectiveness. All this creates a perfect storm of vast voter support for tax-funded medicine, school, and alms. So we can all feel fantastic about how caring we all are. Yeah us.

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Hail War And Peace

By Robin Hanson · July 4, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (15)

War And Peace is my favorite novel ever. In contrast to the modern style of appearing only to describe events and leaving interpretations to the reader, Tolstoy interprets openly and heavily. And oh what wonderfully insightful interpreting! He usually describe several levels, including what people say, what they think, and what they are doing without realizing. I see homo hypocritus played out in great detail. Here is a section on agency failures in charity:

[Count] Pierre … sent for all his stewards to the head office and .. told them that steps would be taken immediately to free his serfs- and that till then they were not to be overburdened with labor, women while nursing their babies were not to be sent to work, assistance was to be given to the serfs, punishments were to be admonitory and not corporal, and hospitals, asylums, and schools were to be established on all the estates. Some of the stewards … listened with alarm, supposing these words to mean that the young count was displeased with their management and embezzlement of money …

He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But he felt that this did not forward matters at all. … Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled him to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only tried to pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The steward for his part tried to pretend to the count that he considered these consultations very valuable for the proprietor and troublesome to himself. …

The chief steward, who considered the young count’s attempts almost insane – unprofitable to himself, to the count, and to the serfs – made some concessions. Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as impracticable, he arranged for the erection of large buildings- schools, hospitals, and asylums- on all the estates before the master arrived. …

On all his estates Pierre saw with his own eyes brick buildings erected or in course of erection, all on one plan, for hospitals, schools, and almshouses, which were soon to be opened. Everywhere he saw the stewards’ accounts, according to which the serfs’ manorial labor had been diminished, and heard the touching thanks of deputations of serfs in their full-skirted blue coats.

What Pierre did not know was … that since the nursing mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they did still harder work on their own land. He did not know that the priest who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and that the pupils’ parents wept at having to let him take their children and secured their release by heavy payments. He did not know that the brick buildings, built to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial labor was thus increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that where the steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs’ payments had been diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased by a half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his estates and quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left Petersburg. …

The steward promised to do all in his power to carry out the count’s wishes, seeing clearly that not only would the count never be able to find out whether all measures had been taken, … but would probably never even inquire and would never know that the newly erected buildings were standing empty and that the serfs continued to give in money and work all that other people’s serfs gave – that is to say, all that could be got out of them. (more)

Note that even in such a different world (1806 Russia), the three classic “good deeds” were medicine, education, and poverty assistance. This suggests modern liberal obsessions with such areas are not a local historical accident.

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Choose: Help Or Show Concern

By Robin Hanson · March 15, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (56)

The Post has now given more media attention to damaged Japan nuke plants than to the entire rest of the earthquake, tsunami, etc. event.  I suspect lots of media worldwide act similarly. Yet, the tsunami was vastly more harmful. As MIT’s Josef Oehmen explains, there is very little chance that many will suffer much radiation harm.

There was and will not be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors. By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

In fact, the nuke media scare will itself cause far more harm!

Although radiation escaping from a nuclear power plant catastrophe can increase the risk of many cancers and other health problems, stress, anxiety and fear ended up in many ways being much greater long-term threats to health and well-being after Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents, experts said Monday.

“The psychological effects were the biggest health effects of all — by far.” … “After almost every radiological emergency, anyone or anything seen as or perceived as associated with the emergency came to be seen by others as tainted or something to be feared and even the object of discrimination.” … [After] a much less severe nuclear accident in 1999 in Tokaimura, Japan, … people in other parts of Japan refused to buy products from that region, and travelers were turned away from hotels and asked not to use public baths and swimming pools. … Studies of more than 80,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts have found that … only about 500 [cancer] cases could be attributed to the radiation exposure the people experienced. (more)

Now the media nuke emphasis does make business sense, since most ordinary folks I know seem quite eager to show each other their deep concern about those nuke plants. What sort of heartless person would not furrow their brow and express worry about those folks at risk? Some say this just shows nuke plants should not be built in earthquake zones.

Here is yet another example of where people tend to choose showing concern over actually helping. Shrugging your shoulders and saying this is no big deal, that would help. Loudly expressing deep “concern,” on the other hand, hurts.

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