> It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone
Listen to yourself. This isn't normal, but on markets, it is.
> The "moral notion of value" is a nonsensical concept
No, it's the fundamental concept. Economic value should aspire to approximate it if we want the market to be a force for collective good. To the extent that economic value fails to approximate moral value, the economy fails to serve our collective interests.
In CS terms: greedy algorithms fail hard in predictable ways.
> [So why don't you give more through GiveWell?]
Because I'm stuck in a system that's designed to punish me for doing so above and beyond the intrinsic cost of providing for the kid. Here's a counter-proposal: I'd absolutely sign up for a wealth-proportional share of a tax for ending world hunger. I'm not poor, even by HN standards, so this isn't cheating, but the fact that this formulation of the solution wasn't obvious to you demonstrates how thoroughly you've been trained to see the world through the circus-house lens of wealth-weighted utility, and just how perversely that lens distorts the world.
>>It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone
>Listen to yourself. This isn't normal, but on markets, it is.
If you treat starving kids as important then you will have more starving kids. If you treat starving kids as unimportant or undesirable you will try your best to prevent them from being created in the first place.
The vast majority of necessary policies that you need to change in the relevant countries have absolutely nothing to do with individual charity. A lot of what is needed is simple infrastructure projects. People waste their time acquiring water on foot instead of getting a water truck delivery. You can drive a water truck for 600 miles and it's still more economical than walking. The problem is often that there are no roads suitable for 20 ton trucks. You'll get stuck on the dirt roads so no delivery happens at all.
People think of complicated solutions like drone delivery of medicine because the government fails to maintain or set up basic infrastructure. It all boils down to government corruption and people's desire to work around it. It's not going to work out.
> If you treat starving kids as important then you will have more starving kids
If you care about cancer patients you will have more cancer patients? This is nonsense because you framed it wrong. Caring about [something] isn't necessarily about perpetuating or creating more [something], it's about solving (on of) the problem(s) behind it. And this can have solid economic value. On top of it you can have a layer of humanity where you do something purely for the the well being of another.
To the point, "caring about starving kids" means "caring about solving starvation". This has plenty of implications, not the least of which are that you developed tech that can be applied elsewhere, or that you just created a new market where the participants have a chance of actually paying because they have a chance at a disposable income. You "created" new valuable members of society capable of producing and consuming your products or services.
The reason starving kids don't pull that much attention is that "solving" starvation has a shaky business case, far from guaranteed success, and very unclear timeline. Things most businesses shy away from.
Why do you think Facebook is investing in internet in India or Africa? It's not because they care about people with no internet so by your reasoning they'll create more people with no internet. It's because they are untapped markets that need to be brought up just to the point where they become profitable. You have to spend money to make money. So far the case for solving world hunger has that threshold too high for today's "make money now" stock price driven business models.
Let me be honest: promises you make that take effect when highly unlikely events transpire do not convince me of your intentions. They are fairly typical of most proponents of this variant of "morality", since after all, their behaviour contradicts their stated intentions.
Ah, since $1000 will save a life, and you believe that giving $1000 will not make a significant difference, then one must logically conclude that it is untrue that saving a life is making a significant difference. From there, it does not take very much to conclude that human lives are not significant to you either.
Or you could opt not to be super pedantic just to score points against me.
When it comes to ridding the world of severe poverty, donating enough to help one person is not _________. If you object to the term "significant", then go ahead and pick a better term.
I don't object to the term. I think any thing that fills in the gap that implies value will lead to the same conclusion. I don't think that's surprising since the evidence is really strong in favour of that conclusion: arbitrary human life has very little value. It is certainly true that almost all individuals behave in a manner consistent with this being true, at least.
I personally believe it is nearer zero, but it is clearly less valuable than whatever value most individuals ascribe to ten hundred dollar bills.
The value depends on context. The punishment for hurting someone is much higher than the amount it takes to help someone. And spending a thousand dollars to help an anonymous person, who is in a sea of people not getting help, and will fall back into that sea soon enough, feels like tossing it into a black hole when the donation is all by itself. But if there's enough donations together, they feel more meaningful.
You're measuring value in just about the weakest possible context.
People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem.
More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term.
If everyone just takes turns pushing a boulder up a mountain eventually you'll put in more effort than if everyone pushes at once, and have almost none of the results. Sometimes being even 99% there is not enough.
> More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever".
exactly! my suffering as an individual is simply not significant enough to motivate you.
> If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term.
I'd be especially pissed if he refused to pull my tooth on the grounds that other people would still suffer from toothaches.
> If everyone just takes turns pushing a boulder up a mountain eventually you'll put in more effort than if everyone pushes at once, and have almost none of the results. Sometimes being even 99% there is not enough.
If few people are willing to pay the cost of an incremental solution then how are we proposing to convince them that the much greater cost of a large scale solution is worth it?
Defensible if spending is appropriately directed or directed to savings/investments with that intended goal, but getting the Forester Touring vs the Forester Premium? That's 3 kids and it's hard to make the case that this argument applies.
I too have seen the Facebook chain letter about how we could end world poverty for only $XX billion. But yes, let's definitely not fund malaria relief in the meantime.
Besides the unwarranted and unhelpful snark, you also took the weaker interpretation of my comment so you can defend your point of view. Neither are good signs for your argument.
I said "less value" not "no value". In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations. Even if the total is the same, the fact that it just trickled in and it lacked coordination can only hurt. I even gave an example, perhaps a better one would have been that you can't cross a canyon in 2 steps. And you won't effectively put out a big fire no matter how many cups of water you individually dump on it.
Fittingly even the example you chose is bad simply because "malaria relief" still involves quite the coordinated effort, not the least financial, not individual people independently sending small help to a single other person.
Value is subjective, you're just expressing the preference that there is less value to you.
> In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations.
Only in the aggregate if less help is delivered. If the same amount of help gets there then the value is potentially the same, or more (or less).
> Even if the total is the same, the fact that it just trickled in and it lacked coordination can only hurt.
This is not true, the individual nature allows for more flexibility in meeting everyone's actual needs. "one size fits all" usually doesn't.
> And you won't effectively put out a big fire no matter how many cups of water you individually dump on it.
This is an inapt metaphor, probably because its physically false.
> Fittingly even the example you chose is bad simply because "malaria relief" still involves quite the coordinated effort, not the least financial, not individual people independently sending small help to a single other person.
Actually there are people sending malaria nets over there, the coordination problems you speak of are already solved.
You're the one using ridiculous examples: dentists, boulders, canyons, rolling rocks up hills, pouring water on fires.
The original topic was that various charities are saving lives in measurable ways, yet most people make excuses not to contribute, preferring to spend their money on additional luxuries for themselves.
Thank you for providing excellent examples of those excuses.
Listen to yourself. This isn't normal, but on markets, it is.
> The "moral notion of value" is a nonsensical concept
No, it's the fundamental concept. Economic value should aspire to approximate it if we want the market to be a force for collective good. To the extent that economic value fails to approximate moral value, the economy fails to serve our collective interests.
In CS terms: greedy algorithms fail hard in predictable ways.
> [So why don't you give more through GiveWell?]
Because I'm stuck in a system that's designed to punish me for doing so above and beyond the intrinsic cost of providing for the kid. Here's a counter-proposal: I'd absolutely sign up for a wealth-proportional share of a tax for ending world hunger. I'm not poor, even by HN standards, so this isn't cheating, but the fact that this formulation of the solution wasn't obvious to you demonstrates how thoroughly you've been trained to see the world through the circus-house lens of wealth-weighted utility, and just how perversely that lens distorts the world.