Nephew Versus Nepal Charity
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?
This is a good point:
is there a relationship between
* the amount of money that parents put into their children's education, and their average level of interference?
* the amount of money *the parents have*, and the amount they put into their children's education relative to that, and their average level of interference?
* Whether the parents that 'help' are Old Money vs. New Money. Old Money may, for example, have a long-established tradition of a certain kind of education -- whereas New Money may be more open to new ideas...or something completely different.
I know someone who got a year of tuition paid for(by a lower-middle class familiy), but who had to change his major, and another friend who had a solid 1%er family with no end of strings attached. Granted: it's anecdotal evidence, so no one should believe it per se, but it seems like there's going to be some factors like these at play.
John, I'm talking about real people today.
The entail critique is more legitimate than you think in that the US at least doesn't recognize entailments beyond one generation (and I think the same is true of GB today).
We don't really know how many real people today would put such things in their wills if they were enforceable. But many real people certainly *did* so back when it was.