March 2000 Archives
On giving to charity
Steven Landsburg, the "armchair economist", wrote a piece on the internet about how everybody should give all their charitable contributions to one charity. Read it, and then read my reply:Steven --
You're right, your theory on giving to charities is certainly thought-provoking. But I think it's also disingenuous, and not just for the obvious reason that charitable giving is patently not a purely selfless act. (Charitable contributions would be much lower if it were.)
I think the big flaw in your argument is the presumption that charitable giving is zero-sum: that, in your mathematical terminology, delta x + delta y + delta z must be constant. I have absolutely no idea where you get this premise from; it certainly doesn't correspond to anybody I know. "starving children and cancer research are surely conflicting values," you write, "because every dollar you give to one is a dollar you didn't give to the other."
This is simply false. Every dollar I spend on rent, every dollar I put into my retirement plan, every dollar I spend on a cup of coffee in the morning is a dollar I didn't give to starving children, but that doesn't make starving children and morning coffee conflicting values.
I, and others, are great fans of public radio, and do give money to our local NPR stations. But I would be surprised if one in a thousand of us thought that NPR was the most deserving place for our money. (Think of those starving children again.) And no matter how much money we give to starving children, even in aggregate, we NPR donors are never going to ameliorate the situation of starving children so much that NPR will become more deserving than the kids. So if we all took your advice, none of us would ever give any money to NPR. And we don't want that, because it would mean NPR going off the air.
Well, I can see you say, in that case your giving to NPR is not truly a charitable gift -- you're doing it in your own self-interest, because you want to be able to continue to listen to Morning Edition. What I say to that is that yes, my gift to NPR is self-serving, but that doesn't mean it's not charitable.
Charitable giving is a complex thing, and I really don't think it can be reduced to mathematical formulae, at least not formulae as simple as the ones you put forward. The fact is that most people find it easier to give $50 to three charities than to give $150 to one. That might be economically irrational, but it's true.
Let me give you one last thought experiment. Let's say for the sake of argument that you're right, and that charitable giving is zero-sum. Let's say I'm going to give $1000 to charity this year. And let's say I've decided that the best place for that money to go is cancer research. Now because of time value of money considerations, I should really give all the money to cancer research at the beginning of the year, so I do.
And then there's a huge earthquake in Honduras, and it's dreadful, and people are starving and suffering there to such a degree that it becomes obvious to me that their plight puts them higher up the scale than the cancer research charity. What now? Either you're right, charitable giving is zero-sum, and I give them nothing. This is obviously a bad outcome both for them and for me, as I'm unhappy that the most deserving people didn't get my $1000. Or else you're wrong, and charitable giving is not zero-sum, and I find $500 somewhere and send them off. I do hope that you're wrong.
Posted by Felix at 12:38 EST | Comments (0)
Notes on campaign finance
Aditya Chakrabortty was kind enough to draw my attention to a piece in the Washington Post about George W Bush's money situation.The numbers are mind-blowingly scary, it's true. George Bush has already spent $64 million, not counting the millions of dollars his supporters have spent running ads they paid for themselves. He's getting another $67 million in federal funds, still has $6 million in the bank, and wants to raise another $20 million before the Republican convention in the summer, and will probably continue with fund-raising to some degree all the way to November. Let's be conservative and say $150 million total.
Now I know that children, felons, green card holders, etc. can't vote, and turnout is dreadfully low in presidential elections, but let's put all that to one side and say that the population of the USA is 270 million. We're still talking more than 55 cents per person. Remember, this is just one candidate. Add in the Gore campaign, plus what McCain and Bradley spent, plus all the House and Senate campaigns (especially the New York Senate campaign, which is going to break all manner of fund-raising records) and you're talking insane total expenditure.
(I know you're all getting sick of these comparisons, but bear with me one more time: Ken Livingstone wants less than half a million quid for his campaign, to reach 8 million Londoners; in US money, that's still less than a dime per person.)
What I can never understand is why so many people give so much money to these campaigns. I mean, I'm a Gore fan, but I can't imagine giving him money; and the prospect of anybody at all dipping into their pockets to donate to the Hillary campaign just boggles my mind. (I'd vote Rudy if I had the vote in New York: it would get him out of City Hall a year early, give Mark Green the incumbency, which he needs to get the mayoralty, and elect a Senator who would certainly stand up for New York City even as he could do very little harm on a national scale. Senators have much less power than the mayor of New York, and in any case Rudy is very liberal on abortion, gays, immigration, etc.)
But I'm also a fan of the First Amendment, and I believe that no campaign-finance law will really be able to work. Just as those Texans spent their own money on their own ads and therefore weren't official donors to the Bush campaign, people will always have to be allowed to do their own thing.
What worries me is that US politics will eventually spill over into the UK. We've already gone presidential, first with Blair and now with Ken -- politics of personality and all that; now we're moving on to the "give me money!" stage. It's only a matter of time until politicians start buying ads on television.
Posted by Felix at 12:47 EST | Comments (0)
Notes on jaundice
When I was growing up, I used to get extremely excited whenever a letter arrived for me in the mail. Just as I could never understand why grown-ups didn't just eat Mars bars the whole time, I couldn't comprehend how they weren't overjoyed at the reams of colourful envelopes which would pour through the mailbox on a regular basis.I have to say that I still do take a kind of perverse pleasure in receiving junk mail; I think it's the same part of my psyche which loves watching the home shopping channels on the television. But I know that according to received wisdom, I'm part of the exception, not the rule. We all hate junk mail, right?
It's interesting that a large part of the American population actually seems to like receiving junk mail. They tick the boxes asking to be put on to mailing lists, not the ones asking to be taken off. But you don't really hear these people talking about it in polite company. It's one of those views, like homophobia, say, or a fondness for the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, which many more people hold than admit to.
But it's weird, isn't it. Jaundice is meant to be a bad thing, right? We're all meant to be increasingly proud of our post-ironic status, but a childish (ie, genuine) love for junk mail is still shameful. And there I was, proclaiming my hatred of chain hotels long before I actually hated them.
Then I flew back to New York from Belize, and was informed by the check-in person that because the flight was delayed I would have to spend the night in Dallas. I know there was a time when I would have secretly loved the idea of an airline putting me up in a hotel for a night, but this time I really shuddered at the thought. All I wanted to do was to get home to my bed.
So what's going on here? On the one hand, I am honestly getting in touch (or touchingly getting honest, or something) with my post-ironic love for Britney and QVC, yet on the other hand I actually felt good that I wanted something noble like Home rather than something fake like an airport hotel.
I think there are maybe two possible explanations here. The first is that I felt good because my feelings had finally fallen into line with my expressed opinions; I didn't need to feel like I was lying any more when I said I hated airport hotels.
The second is that disapproval of jaundice applies only to jaundice about real things, and not about fake things. So jaundice about airport hotels or junk mail or Mars bars is fine. Even things like trendy New York bars are fake enough that it's cool to be jaundiced about them.
But the question then arises: What is real? What is the set of things such that jaundice towards them is a bad thing? I mean, calling someone jaundiced is still pejorative, right? But give me specific examples! I'm beginning to think that jaundice is one of those bugaboos which everybody hates but which doesn't really exist. What do you think?
Posted by Felix at 12:51 EST | Comments (0)
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