Tag Archives: Charity

Open Border Cost <10%

By Robin Hanson · February 3, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (53)

The simplest most reliable way to help the world’s poor a lot would be for rich nations to accept more poor immigrants. While doing so would lower the price of many goods and services that poor immigrants provide, it should also lower the wages of natives who compete for similar jobs.  If rich nations completely opened their borders, how big might this reduction be?  It seems that even if 90% of the workforce were immigrants, average native wages wouldn’t fall by more than ~10%.  From a new NBER immigration lit review:

Their survey of the earlier literature found that a 10% increase in the immigrant share of the labor force reduced native wages by about 1%. Recent meta-surveys … found comparable, small effects across many studies. … The large majority of studies suggest that immigration does not exert significant effects on native labor market outcomes. Even large, sudden inflows of immigrants were not found to reduce native wages or employment significantly. Effects that do exist tend to be relatively small and concentrated among natives or past immigrants that are close substitutes. … Research on the role of immigrants in the labor market mostly yields consistent findings across countries and experiences: recent migrants have lower earnings than natives, there is partial convergence with duration of stay, displacement effects tend to be small, the most affected groups are close substitutes, etc. (more)

That seems to me a reasonable price to pay for such huge assistance to the world’s poor.

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Indirect Charity

By Robin Hanson · February 1, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (22)

Listening to a recent talk on African development by Karol Boudreaux, I noted that in general we here have two very different channels of influence on them there:

  • Direct – For some things we do, our main declared purpose is to influence them. Eg., World Bank, USAID, or GiveWell.
  • Indirect – Many things we do for other purposes also end up influencing them. Most such policies can be adjusted slightly to better help or hurt them there. For example, governments have policies on trade, immigration, war, and terrorism. Businesses choose where to open branches, where to buy supplies, whether to make job tasks easier to outsource, and how easily products can convert to foreign use. Individuals choose where to live and work, where to travel, and what products to buy.

When we do relatively little overall to help them, but have many interactions with them, it is probably more cost-effective to help them indirectly, by adjusting our other interactions. For example, lowering import tarriffs and immigration restrictions would helps Africans at a far low cost to us than most direct donations. Yet direct donation activities usually get far more attention in most discussions of what we here can do for them there. Why?

Obviously direct help is eaiser to explain and understand, and this should bias our efforts to some degree. But the idea of adjusting indirect policies isn’t that hard to explain – I think most folks get it after a brief explanation.  Yes, sometimes it can be hard to tell whether more of something helps or hurts them. But there are many others where the sign of the effect is pretty clear.

A better explanation is that it is too easy for observers to attribute your indirect policy adjustments to non-altruism motives. Your support for more open immigration could be attributed to your free market or cosmopolitan inclinations, and your consuming African music could be attributed to music tastes. Your opening a new branch of your business in Africa might be attributed to your greedy exploitation. Your donations to Oxfam, in contrast, are harder to attribute to non-charity motivations.

Now some do try to market consumer items as good ways to show your charity to them there.  Fair trade coffee is an example.  But it requires the “helpful” items to have close “less helpful” substitutes, so your paying extra can be interpreted clearly as charity, and not as preferring one kind of product to another.  In which case your extra payments for the “helpful” versions become much like direct charity payments.

Related personal examples are giving presents to friends and family at birthdays and holidays. The cheapest way to help such folks is to just be a little nicer to them during the rest of the year. But such behavior is easy to attribute to selfishness. If we go out to eat with them, for example, maybe that is just because we enjoy their company. So to send clearer loyalty signals, we go out of our way to take actions that are personally costly, like giving presents.

When spending any given amount to help others, you have a choice:

  1. Actually help a lot, but be mostly unable to take social credit for your help, or
  2. Help a lot less, but do so clearly and visibly, so you can take social credit.

You know what most folks do. Are you really much different?

Added: Katja had a related post exactly one year earlier.

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Best Decade Ever

By Robin Hanson · January 26, 2011 11:15 am · Comments (27)

Not only was the last decade the best of my life, it was best for the world:

A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50 percent in real terms, despite the Great Recession. Moreover, growth has been particularly high in countries with large numbers of poor people. India and China, of course, but also Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Uganda, Mozambique and Uzbekistan – nine countries that were collectively home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s poor in 2005 – are all experiencing phenomenal economic advances. ..

We updated the World Bank’s official $1.25-a-day figures to reveal how the global poverty landscape has changed. … We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship, as the total number of the world’s poor fell to 878 million people. Never before in history have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period. …. The emerging markets of Asia are recording the greatest successes; the two regional giants, China and India, are likely to account for three-quarters of the global reduction between 2005 and 2015. … With few exceptions, however, those who care about global development have been slow to catch on to this story. We hear far more about the 64 million people held back in poverty because of the Great Recession than we do about the hundreds of millions who escaped impoverishment over the past six years. (more)

The greatest surprise, however, is the one taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1980 and 2005, the region’s poverty rate had consistently hovered above 50 percent. Given the continent’s high population growth, its number of poor rose steadily. The current period is different. For the first time, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate has fallen below 50 percent. The total number of poor people in the region is falling too. (more)

Doesn’t sound much like stagnation to me.

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Be A Charity Angel

By Robin Hanson · January 24, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (27)

I’ve overheard many folks lately discussing what sort of charity most deserves their money. They consider the plans of various charities, and try to analyze the chances that such plans will lead to good outcomes. Most folks I’ve heard have been favoring various intellectual charities, where the money goes mostly to pay intellectuals to develop and communicate ideas. And most of these folks also seem to spend lots of time consuming intellectual ideas. They read a lot, and have many opinions about what previous ideas were interesting and useful.

Such folks would do well to review the advantages of prizes over grants, and consider becoming charity angels. Let me explain.

Consider a donor who seeks to encourage or induce some sort of result in the world. With a grant, such a donor must decide ahead of time who seems to have a promising ability and approach. But with a prize, a donor need only decide after the fact who seems to have achieved a lot. Once potential awardees see a pattern of achievements being rewarded by prizes after the fact, they will gain an added incentive to achieve, an incentive roughly proportional to the prize amounts being offered. And the prize process avoids much of the added waste of grant proposals, review, search, etc. (Promising potential winners who are strapped for cash might obtain resources by selling their future prize rights in capital markets.)

Since it is much easier to evaluate what has worked than what will work, folks who read a lot of intellectual work and who are inclined to support future intellectual work via charity should consider making a habit of just giving money to those who have already accomplished something noteworthy. Most intellectuals have some resources at their disposal and look for promising future directions on which to spend such resources. Your awards for previous achievements should increase the incentive to all intellectuals to achieve similarly praiseworthy results in the future. This will better target your goals because you can better judge what past work has promoted your goals than which future people and approaches might do so.

Of course you may have other goals for your charity than encouraging a result in the world.  You may, for example, want to signal your personality and allegiance by donating to a familiar brand name that others will recognize.  You may want to affiliate with a high status organization and with high status others who donate to the same cause.  You may want to more directly affiliate with the doers who are the recipients of your donations, and to put yourself in a dominance role of control over them, and to take credit later for having believed in them when others did not. You may also prefer to affiliate with new and upcoming doers rather than old and past their prime doers. And you may want to signal your confidence in your judgements about promising people and approaches. For all of these other purposes, grants are probably your better bet today.  Which is of course why there are so few prizes.

But if you think yourself one of the rare exceptions, whose primary purpose is to actually encourage changes in the world, consider just finding a person who you think has already made a substantial contribution to your cause, and just writing them a check. (And maybe encourage him or her to periodically post summaries of donations received.) No further complication is required. (Should you think I deserve such an honor, a donate button is now available on this page. :) )

Added 11a: If you think risk-aversion creates diminishing returns in donations, i.e., that there’s less to gain by giving more to someone who’s already got a lot, then focus on neglected prior doers – those who have received too little attention and reward for their good accomplishments.

Added 12a: If you think some promising intellectuals lack resources, then buy shares in their future prize winnings.  If you think there are insufficient prizes in some area, then by all means create such prizes.  Just don’t confuse rewarding past intellectual accomplishments with investing to gain future financial returns.

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Lift Up Your Eyes

By Robin Hanson · January 4, 2011 3:15 pm · Comments (36)

People keep asking me why I’m not horrified by a future of trillions of ems living at near subsistence wages. I’ve explained that “poor folks do smile“, that poor lives usually have plenty of joy and satisfaction, even if less than in rich lives. Most lives in poor societies are well worth living. But for many, such abstract words ring hollow – what they may need is to really see such lives for themselves.  I haven’t seen it yet, but the new movie Lift Up seems promising for this purpose:

The old man wanted them to find joy, even in the sadness that accompanies death. … An 82-minute documentary called “Lift Up,” had its debut at the Haitian Embassy in Washington last month. Jean and Muse hope that, in its depiction of Haitians rejoicing despite the devastation dealt to their nation and their lives, the film evokes the spirit of their grandfather’s request. …

The brothers hope the film will introduce U.S. viewers to another side of Haiti, one that goes beyond the poverty, violence and suffering so often depicted in mass media. Growing up in Port-au-Prince, they saw the dark side of humanity but also reveled in warm households filled with extended family, days spent playing outside with packs of friends and a rich tradition of passing stories from one generation to the next. …

Over five days, the filmmakers captured scene after scene of children playing and people smiling as they remembered lost loved ones. “I didn’t see any of the negative things I had always heard about,” Knowlton said. “I only saw people coming together.” (more)

Added 8p: The world’s five happiest nations are: Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, El Savador, Puerto Rico. Far more people the world over, even in poor nations, call themselves ’Very happy’ or ‘Quite happy’ than ‘Not very happy’ or ‘Not at all happy’.

2. Mexico
3. Venezuela
4. El Salvador
5. Puerto R
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Tug-O-War Is Not Charity

By Robin Hanson · November 24, 2010 9:45 am · Comments (23)

Arnold Kling:

Ezra Klein thinks that political organizations are worthwhile charities.

If you donate money to a food bank, it can provide only as much food as your money can buy. If you donate it to a nonprofit that specializes in food policy issues, it can persuade legislators to pass a new program – or reform an existing one – that can do much more than any single food bank.

So he winds up giving his money to support a think tank whose employees are somewhere around the 95th percentile of the income distribution, in the hope that they will help tilt the rent-seeking in Washington in a direction that he likes. … It is actually sort of sad for a policy wonk to settle on the idea of making donations to an organization of policy wonks.

If public policy is a point in a high dimensional space, then every policy change has two components: a partisan and a non-partisan change. Partisan changes are along standard partisan axes, where people are lined up in a tug-o-war on different sides pulling in different directions. Non partisan changes, in contrast, are not seen as a win for one side relative to others. Technically, partisan changes project total changes into the partisan subspace.

Assuming all parties think they seek good, partisan changes can only be good if some parties are right while others are wrong about what is good. In contrast, you can be right about a non-partisan change without others being wrong. Since the total space has a far larger dimension that the partisan space, there is a huge scope for searching in that larger space for changes that all sides could see as good. And donations to encourage such efforts can indeed consistently produce large social gains relative to their costs.

Donations to change policy within the partisan subspace, however, only achieve good when they happen to be on the right side of partisan disagreements. Averaged over the disagreeing parties, such donations cannot on average achieve good unless there is a correlation between between donations, or donation effectiveness, and which sides are right.  Even if you think you are right at the moment on your particular partisan policy opinions, you can’t think it good on average to encourage partisan donations, unless you think donations tend overall to go to the good or more donation-effective sides.

Unfortunately most thinktank efforts go into pushing for their sides within the partisan subspace, because that is what most donors care about. For example, Ezra’s two concrete policy examples, of “the need for food banks and homeless shelters and social services” and “repeal the 2010 health-care reform legislation,” are both clearly partisan.

Humans clearly tend to be overconfident about politics. Since you are human, that tendency is a likely cause of your confidence in your political opinions. If your politics were about doing good with policy, you should correct for that overconfidence, and that correction would on average move folks to have little interest in partisan pushes.  Of course if your politics is not about policy, but about showing loyalty, how clever or informed you are, etc., well then go right ahead and be partisan. But don’t tell me that is generally beneficial charity.

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Why Are Rich Stingy?

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 1:00 am · Comments (14)

A month ago I suggested that left vs. right political attitudes roughly correspond to forager vs. farmer attitudes:

We acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth.

Today I should acknowledge some apparently conflicting data:

Data are from 31 nations and 66,777 individual respondents … In poor countries, but not in rich, most believe that family needs legitimate higher pay. Within countries—particularly English-speaking ones—low SES groups endorse family needs, but high SES groups reject them. (more)

Across 4 studies, lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion. (more)

Two kinds of processes should interact here, and may work at cross-purposes. While on the one hand humans may be programmed to develop different attitudes when rich, on the other hand some attitudes may be more effective than others at creating wealth. While my forager-farmer hypothesis suggests that humans naturally return to more-forager-like egalitarian attitudes when rich, observed correlations between wealth and egalitarian attitudes should also be influenced whether egalitarian attitudes assist or hinder the accumulation of wealth.

So the above data showing that rich people and nations tend to be less egalitarian could still be consistent with my forager-farmer hypothesis if forager-style egalitarian attitudes tend on average to hinder the creation and accumulation of wealth, relative to farmer-style attitudes. And if this tendency is stronger than the other wealth causing attitudes tendency I postulate. For example, perhaps egalitarian envy discourages entrepreneurial risk, or prevents more efficient ventures from displacing less efficient ones.

Added 10a: Another response is to just consider this to be part of the “main exceptions” clause of my claim – a way in which we do not move to forager ways when rich, because it is central to what makes us rich.

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Pity The Sex Starved

By Robin Hanson · October 25, 2010 8:00 am · Comments (85)

Imaging smelling good food you know that you cannot eat.  This is probably a pleasant experience, if you’ve had enough other good food to eat lately.  But it might be a painful experience if you were starving, or had long been living on a bland diet of rice and beans.

Similarly, being around attractive sexy people is often a pleasant experience, but probably feels quite different when it is clear to all that you have zero chance of attracting them, and if you feel severely deprived of satisfying sex.  And while our society is rich enough that few starve for food anymore, wealth is much less able to prevent sexual starvation.

So our society has far more sex-starved than food-starved folks.  Yet it is far more acceptable to publicly lament the plight of the food starved than the sex starved.  Signaling compassion is not about helping the needy.

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Pink Politics

By Robin Hanson · October 24, 2010 12:15 pm · Comments (53)

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s lots of pink on display this month, especially in things that aren’t usually pink.  The pink reflects a campaign to “raise awareness about breast cancer”, and I’ve been pondering what about it bugs me the most.

On the surface there’s the fact that it seems women tend to test for breast cancer too often, so that encouraging more testing does net harm. And cancer research has been one of the least productive areas of medical research in recent decades, so donations there may also do very little good. So “doing something” about breast cancer seems one of the least useful causes around.

But I think I’m more bothered by the campaign being less about doing something and more about “awareness”, which translates mostly into social pressure to get other folks to show pink, buying pink products, wearing pink clothes, etc. Much of the money donated goes not to tests or research but to paying celebrities to make more publicity.

Now this social pressure couldn’t really work if it weren’t pretty widely known that showing pink is associated with the breast cancer, which seems at odds with the claim that there is a lack of awareness of breast cancer. Even more at odds is the fact that pink campaigns rarely offer concrete arguments that theirs is an especially worthy cause; it is just assumed that listeners pretty much agree. Really, what fraction of folks don’t know breasts can get cancer, tests might detect it, and academics research it?

But on further reflection, what bothers me most is the underlying politics. Imagine a campaign for exercise awareness. Lack of exercise causes far more harm than breast cancer, and there must also remain a few folks who are not fully aware of this. Yet there would be very little interest in a color campaign for exercise awareness. Same for get-enough-sleep awareness. So why is breast cancer different?

Yes there’s the implicit sex angle in talking about breasts, but you could have a “have sex to get exercise” campaign, or make sexual innuendo about beds in a sleep campaign. And a campaign about testicular cancer wouldn’t be nearly as popular. So this isn’t mainly about sexual innuendo.

One obvious difference is that being anti-breast-cancer is framed as being pro-women. Thus one can insinuate that folks who resist social pressures to support the campaign are anti-women. Since folks fear seeming anti-women much more than seeming anti-health, a breast-cancer campaign can tap into far more social pressure than can an exercise or sleep campaign.

Think pink gets much of its energy by offering a way for folks to be indirectly political; one can seem pro-women, and insinuate that others are anti-women, while only ever explicitly talking about health and medicine. AIDS awareness gets a similar political punch; one can talk only health, yet insinuate that others are anti-gay. Much of medicine is not about health, but about showing that you care, in this case caring about the right political groups.

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Rah Old Indian IVF Moms

By Robin Hanson · August 14, 2010 7:10 pm · Comments (37)

Thursday the Post lamented the fact that India (population 1.2 billion) is growing twice as fast as China (population 1.3 billion), and may soon have by far world’s most in vitro fertilizations, perhaps 600,000 a year (~2% of India births), costing about $2500 each.

The Post reserved its strongest disapproval (between the lines, but still pretty clear) for the fact that many Indian IVF moms are 60 and 70 years old, and so are taking on bigger health risks. Supposedly regulation is needed to keep such women from succumbing to “cultural pressures.” Apparently, since Post reporters know no colleagues who would consider taking such an action, they conclude that elderly Indian IVF moms must be suffering from some horrible patriarchy. (No further evidence of illicit pressure is given.)

This seems to me cultural arrogance of the worst sort. Yes, new people induce some negative externalities, such as congestion. But overall economists’ best estimate is that new people give others a net benefit, especially via increased innovation. Thus creating (and raising) a new person is an incredibly altruistic act. The new person gets to have a life, and the rest of the world gains as well.

Yes, creating more people may reduce per-capita wealth in the short run, but if [most] everyone benefits, what’s wrong with that?  Yes, a high enough mom health risk could make this a net bad deal. But the Post quotes a 60% baby success rate, and I’ll bet mom mortality is below 6%, which means there’s at least a ten to one life gain ratio. And the gain ratio must be far larger in quality-adjusted life years.

These Indian women are not taking advantage of some overly-generous health insurance loophole – they are paying cash from their own pockets to give life to a new person. And they are not acting on some strange perverted desires – they are expressing an extremely basic, ancient, and revered desire, the desire to mother a child. Who are US elites to tell elderly Indians that their altruistic gift is not worth the cost? Shouldn’t we be subsidizing such altruism, instead of discouraging it?

This seems a lot like the phenomena of “Looking Too Good“:

Unselfish members (those who gave much toward the provision of the good but then used little of the good) were also targets for expulsion from the group. … Social comparison tends to induce feelings of inter-personal competition. People feel driven to outdo the group member who is setting the standard. … Removal of this person would eliminate that competitive standard.

If we praised poor elderly Indian IVF moms, that would implicitly criticize rich Western women who refuse to have even one kid even when young and healthy. Rather than raise our altruism standards, we’d rather exclude these women from the group of reasonable altruists. Quotes from that Post article: Continue reading "Rah Old Indian IVF Moms" »

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