Fun with Singer

I'd talked with Peter Singer back in September at the Christchurch WORD festival. Our conversation is now up! I've embedded the audio below, but use the link if it doesn't work. I really enjoyed the event. A few of the highlights:

• Around the 10 minute mark, I noted the push-back from parts of the NZ NGO community against measurement and testing effectiveness and asked whether that were just a NZ thing. Singer talked about the practical difficulties of measuring effectiveness and the importance of getting the donors onside. NZ's problem's been a bit different: good chunks of the government are on-side, and they're a big donor.


• At around the 17 minute mark, I proposed setting up a register of effective charities, and shifting their tax treatment such that donors would get a full dollar tax credit for each dollar so-donated rather than just the $0.33. He liked the idea in principle. I like the implication that we shift to letting people direct their donations rather than having the government do it. Singer liked the implication that we would be doing more to help poor people in poor places rather than focusing on relatively poor people in New Zealand who are, globally, relatively rich. 


• At the 21 minute mark, I followed on more directly: if we could cut funding from New Zealand public health so that the least effective third of what it does were eliminated, with the money going instead to preventing blindness and repairing fistulas in the third world, should we do that? He said he'd push the button to divert those resources. I would too.


• At the 33 minute mark, I asked Singer about the utility of false beliefs. New Zealand's churches seemed able and willing to step up to help New Zealand take on more refugees than anybody else, really. Altruistic atheists just don't seem to be able to get that kind of coordination. Singer said that there is obviously some utility of that sort, but you need to take it up a level and weigh it against the disutility you get on other parts of the bundle. I think that was a bit of a cop-out because it's easy to specify as thought experiment cases where there are net increases in utility. I pressed him a bit: if I enjoy utility from false beliefs, is that ok? He reckoned it ok so long as it didn't have spillover costs. Into the experience machine we go.


• At the 39 minute mark, I had my absolute most fun. As best I can tell, free range lamb raised in New Zealand loves having had the chance to exist. Lambs are joyful. They play and frolic and have a bad day at the end, but I'd sooner get to have that existence than no existence. Then, if those who care about animal ethics all flip to vegetarianism rather than eating free-range Canterbury lamb, they do substantial harm. Demand for ethically raised meat drops, so the supply of it drops, and the balance is tipped toward factory farming. By the 42 minute mark, we got to the nub of it. And Singer saw exactly where I was going to push things and so pre-empted it by just laying it out and agreeing. If we take his position on potential children's utility and the ethics of aborting one that would have a less-good life in favour of a later one who would have a better life, then potential beings' utility counts. And once that happens, the lives of potential joyful lambs matter too. Said Singer: 

  "I think that there is a defensible argument for saying that if the purchase of Canterbury lamb is a necessary condition for lambs to have what is for 99% of their existence a really good life and even the bad days are not like a day of being tortured for 24 hours... I do think that that ... would be a defensible diet."

I had a ridiculous amount of fun. Later, at dinner, I had the lamb. He didn't.

Other people got Singer to sign their copies of his book. I got this instead:

Huge huge thanks to the Christchurch WORD festival for letting me have this much fun.

Doing the most good we can

I really rather like my piece in this week's National Business Review ($). I there discuss Peter Singer, effective altruism, Wellington's hordes of bucket-wielding sidewalk charity collectors, and outcome-based funding of NGO service delivery.

A snippet:

It is hard to resist Professor Singer’s call for more effective altruism. Whatever your charitable preferences and wherever you most want to help, doing the most good you can toward your chosen ends requires being careful about where you give. It also poses a challenge for the charitable sectors. The government has been increasingly insistent on outcome-based performance measures in its contracting for services and some charities seem uncomfortable with the rigorous evaluation that such measures require.

It is not easy to measure the good that you can do. But organisations chafing at performance-based contracting with the public sector should not sit back and hope the fad passes by.

As more private donors start watching the kinds of evaluation being provided by places such as Give Well and demand better measures of the good their dollars do, charities wanting to keep those donors will have to keep up. It might get harder to rely on the bucket brigades.

A pre-pub is here. But you should subscribe. There's great stuff in this week's issue from Matthew Hooton on Seymour and ACT and Hosking on international tax issues. And they've provided the country's best coverage of the ongoing saga of earthquake building standards.

Marital optimisation

If the experimentalists stuck me in a lab playing standard dictator and trust games with Susan, here's the play:

• Dictator Game: I am strictly indifferent as to how much I send her or she sends me.
• Trust Game: I send her everything and am strictly indifferent as to how much she sends back; I expect she'd send me everything in the sender role and expect she'd prefer a split as a signal of caring but otherwise wouldn't much worry about it as it all winds up in the same place.

I do not understand the drawing of strong conclusions about couples from how much they send in the dictator game. Either I, or Sue, might choose amounts just based on amusement. And similarly in the recipient role in the trust game. Even if the stakes are very large relative to income, we jointly decide how things get spent afterwards. If the stakes are small, money in her pocket is money that isn't spent out of the joint account later, and vice-versa.

Carolina Castilla has a paper out in the May AER running trust and dictator games with spouses in India, with stakes of up to 80% of daily household income. Receivers send back a bit over half of what they receive; when playing as dictator, they send back half. Senders send over a bit over half. There's lots of proposed explanations for the less-than-optimal sending, none of which are the obvious "Maybe they don't trust the experimenter to actually triple the money or not to pocket some of what's in the envelope." 

The main interesting finding (in the ungated and more extensive working paper) is that in households where the man spends a lot on tobacco, the wife sends over less money - potentially indicating problems in household bargaining. And, in households where the wife handles the kids' education expenses, the husband sends over more - presumably saving him the trouble of handing her a bigger share after the experiment to pay the school bills. None of that makes it into the the AER version, presumably because there are rather a few just-so stories floating around. 

The World Bank's Development Blog discusses the paper, lauding the generally higher trust exhibited by married partners as compared to stranger partnerings. Where we don't know how well the subjects trust the experimenters in countries with no small issues with corruption, trust in the experimenter might limit the extent to which within-couple trust can be exhibited in the experiment. 

Refugees and the economy

Richard Meadows at the Press asked me whether I'd seen any reports on the costs and benefits of accepting more refugees. I've not seen any real cost-benefit assessments, though I have seen indications that, in US data, huge numbers of refugees had zero effect on local labour markets - David Card's work on the Marial boatlift.

I've copied below what I sent Richard; his final piece covers it very well though in shorter form.

“What it costs” depends so much on policy choices that it’s hard to give a straight answer. The government’s citing $80k per refugee, but I don’t know what that’s based on. If you’ve seen a source on it, I’d appreciate hearing about it. You could imagine that the total amount spent on somebody over several years, including, say, welfare payments at the start, any job training, education for the average number of kids, health services and the like all bundled up together over a few years could tally up to $80k, but I’d need to see the workings. I’d also be curious to know their estimates on the employment rates of those refugees over time and their earnings.

One somewhat pernicious feature of a progressive tax structure combined with WFF credits is that the average taxpayer pays very little on net to the Crown after you account for the value of WFF credits and in-kind benefits provided by the government. On the one hand that means that richer people that nobody much likes wind up paying for most things, but it also means that unless an incoming migrant is able to get quickly into the higher earning echelons, folks inclined to see others as a cost to the state would conclude that the migrants are a cost to the state. Do you blame the refugee for that or should you blame the tax structure?

Here are things I do know:

• American work shows that even huge numbers of refugees don’t wind up depressing wages in the local labour market. See David Card’s work on the Marial boatlift, in which over a hundred thousand Cuban refugees showed up in Miami over a few months in 1980. It was a 7% increase in the local labour force; no negative effects on local wages.
• Canada solves the problem of supporting refugees by encouraging community groups and private citizens to sponsor them. The sponsors agree to provide care, lodging, settlement assistance and support for 12 months, or until the refugee is self-sufficient, whichever is first. The sponsors provide a whole pile of additional support. See 2.6 here. The government gives financial support up to about $10k for refugees that aren’t privately sponsored; German support is a bit above that. But note that those are cash transfers and wouldn’t include things like the costs of education and health care that could be included in the NZ figure.

There’s a separate question of whether we do best by supporting refugees here or by sending cash to help them in Europe or elsewhere. Airplane tickets aren’t free, and it can be harder to get established in a place where there are fewer people from the same community. Do we do better by sending cash instead? Maybe. But then we get into the much broader question of where that kind of money can do most good. Suppose that the government’s right that settlement support is $80k. For $80k, NZ would strongly improve someone’s life relative to what it was in Syria, or relative to what it might be like in some refugee camp on Europe’s borders. But $80k would also buy life-changing surgery for over 170 women in the third-world. How should we weigh such things? If we’re motivated by a desire to do good, is this the best good we can do? If there’s no way that the community could be rallied to support 170 women’s life-changing surgery in the same way that it could be to support one refugee, then the latter could be worth doing. None of this stuff is easy.

I’m not sure that’s particularly helpful. It’s not an easy problem, and I can’t point to well-established cost studies for New Zealand. I also worry about ‘costs to settle versus economic benefits to current New Zealanders’ calculations as they miss out on the benefits provided to the refugee who gets a shot at a new and better life. All of that should be in a mix in a proper net benefit assessment so it could be reasonably compared to other good and beneficial things that we can do, either privately or through the government.

Since then, I saw Peter Singer's estimate that accommodating a refugee in Jordan costs 3000 Euros per year. Do we do better in supporting 15 refugees in Jordan or supporting one here? I hit on these issues in more depth in The Initiative's forthcoming Insights newsletter. It'll be out on Friday, so subscribe if you haven't yet.

Land use policy and the good we can do

Let's put a few things together.

First, Peter Singer argues that effective altruists should, in most cases, aim to earn as much as possible so that they can give it away to charities that are proven effective in saving and improving lives.

Second, high human capital types are best able to do this when in locations complementary to their human capital. High earners do best when able to live near downtown.

Third, land use policy has made it ridiculously expensive to live close to the downtown of most major cities. Restrictions preventing densification downtown and preventing mid-rises and townhouses in the inner suburbs work to capitalise the productivity benefits of living downtown into land prices, building wealth for those who happened to be there early on. In other words, living downtown so you can earn more mostly gets eaten up by the cost of living downtown. Effective altruists then are less effective than they otherwise could be.

Fourth, land use policies will particularly affect those committed to effective altruism. Those who are committed to minimalistic lifestyles and smaller apartment living will have a tougher time where land use regulations mandate minimum apartment sizes and minimum amenities that some of these altruists would prefer to forgo in order to give more to effective causes.

Finally, one of the most effective national policies for improving global well-being is vastly more open immigration policy. Giving a thousand dollars to a poor person in Africa is incredibly effective. Letting that person move to a place where they can live a better life is even better still. But getting increases in immigration, let alone in refugee numbers, immediately hits onto the "but they'll take our precious scarce houses" constraint.

Conclusion: liberalising land use policies is one of the most effective humanitarian measures a government can put in place. It's a metapolicy allowing other things to work better. Effective altruists can be more effective. We could accommodate more immigrants and refugees. We could make housing costs less burdensome for the domestic poor, reducing pressure to provide them transfers rather than providing transfers to those in greater need abroad. Blocking such liberalisation, because of your particularistic concern for your neighbourhood's character, is the opposite of what humanitarians should do.

Corollary [self-interest watch, though]: Effective altruists might consider supporting organisations helping to liberalise land use policy.*

This will be among the things I plan on discussing with Singer on Monday.

* And here's another good one.

Effective Altruism

I'll be chairing a discussion with Peter Singer in Christchurch in September. If you're anywhere in the neighbourhood, by which I mean within a 3-hour flight, you should attend.

I have never loved and hated and been changed by a book as much as Singer's Practical Ethics. I threw it across the room more often than any other. Actually, I think it's the only book I've ever hurled against the wall. But his arguments are almost impossible to resist.

The morning that I got the call from the Christchurch Festival inviting me to this, I'd walked in to work with Eleanor, then aged 4. On the way, that morning, I'd explained trolley problems to her - as you do with your four year old. She proved a very strict utilitarian. She then went on to propose ever differing bundles of who might be on which rail lines and whether you'd pull the switch - she was basically running hypothetical choice experiments to find out my marginal willingness to pay across options. Most of the options involved kitties of varying cuteness against family members, so it was all pretty easy for me. Then I got the call asking to come in to talk with Peter Singer. It was a great day.

I'll be discussing Singer's latest work on effective altruism. I'm really looking forward to it. Hit the link at the top to register and get tickets.

ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM


How can we do the most good? Peter Singer, often described as the world’s most influential living philosopher, presents a challenging new movement in the search for an ethical life. Effective altruism requires a rigorously unsentimental view of charitable giving, urging that a substantial proportion of our money or time should be donated to the organisations that will do the most good with those resources, rather than to those that tug the heartstrings. Chaired by Eric Crampton.
Peter Singer is the author of more than 20 books, including the groundbreaking work on ethics, Animal Liberation, The Ethics of What We Eat, The Life You Can Save, and his latest, The Most Good You Can Do. He teaches philosophy at Princeton and Melbourne Universities.
Eric Crampton is Head of Research with The New Zealand Initiative in Wellington and Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Canterbury. He blogs at Offsetting Behaviour.

Another fun bit: the Christchurch festival folks invited me, in part, because I'd blogged on the ridiculousness of charity races some time ago.

Microeconomist Club has rules

First rule of Microeconomist Club: commit yourself to methodological individualism and respect the world's rich diversity of utility functions. Consider that others' actions may be inspired by the optimisation of a utility function the likes of which is beyond your ken.

Second rule of Microeconomist Club: cast into the outer darkness those doing violence to the first rule.

Swarthmore historian Timothy Burke would perhaps have fewer complaints about 'neoliberal' economics if there were greater adherence to the rules of Microeconomist Club. Burke despairs that public health discourse has put such focus on social cost arguments:

Or maybe the math works out and yes, I should try to live a little longer and be injured somewhat less…in order to avoid costing society some slightly higher amount for my careor some fraction of lost productivity. And here we have arrived deep in the belly of the neoliberal whale, just in time to watch the experts and technocrats hand out machetes to we, the swallowed. If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

We are offered a thousand reasons to complain of other people’s behavior (and to excoriate and loath our own) on the grounds that it will cost us too much. That we should talk about what is good and bad, right and wrong, mostly in terms of the selfish consequences, or at best, in terms of the kind of closeted idea of a collective interest that neoliberalism dare not directly speak of–sort of the nation, sort of the economy, sort of the community, but really none of those directly or clearly.

The large majority of purported social costs tallied in health measures are really the costs individuals impose upon themselves. It has never been 'neoliberal' economics to force people to internalise costs that are already internal. It's just bad economics that ought be cast into the outer darkness.

Burke continues:

For another reason, because it’s harder to just keep hammering at some change in an inflexible and unreflective way. When I was in seventh grade, I once screwed up my courage to tell my intelligent, sensitive, very queer, 50-something chainsmoking English teacher that he should stop smoking. He winced, teared up a bit, thanked me for caring, and said, “But darling boy, I think it would hurt me worse at my age to try and stop”. Which at seventh grade I was not prepared to understand, but now I can. When we care about others, we also know that there are reasons why they ride motorcycles without helmets or serve chicken nuggets three times a week, reasons that are profoundly built into their specific humanity or are at the least not really worth the harm and cost of the persistent harassment that might push a change in habit.

Which is another reason the technocrat avoids this mode of argument. Because to see people in this way is to be seen. If it’s about the empirical evidence and the abstract costs of acting or not acting, the expert can stay invisible and outside. But when we sit down to persuade through love or affection, we are naked and vulnerable ourselves. Our bodies and habits are as seen as those we are looking upon. The worst of all worlds is the person who borrows the grandiose certainty and intensity of public health and imports its rhetoric into more intimate kinds of observing and commenting upon others. [emphasis added]

I'd go further than this. I have some insight into the utility functions of the people I love, but even there my simulations often err. I have a partial and limited understanding of the utility functions of other acquaintances and friends. I can imagine being able to persuade a close friend that some chosen course of action is not the best way of achieving his ends as he sees them - being able to imagine the ends, understanding the constraints, and weighing appropriately the chances that I just had simply misspecified the utility function. I couldn't imagine doing the same for a stranger unless he asked me for advice while specifying the desired ends.

But the State cannot see our diverse ends. I can imagine a particularly good social worker perhaps having some useful advice for beneficiaries in that worker's case file. But it's not the place of the State to persuade with love and affection. We rightly laugh at corporate ad campaigns purporting that some logo loves us. Pity the fool who believes those ones, right? But how is it more plausible that the State can love us or that we can love each other through the State?

Burke gets the bolded bit above entirely right. As individuals, we have some limited insight into the utility functions of our friends and loved ones, and into the constraints they face. We can tailor our advice or admonitions accordingly, and refrain where we can see the costs of change as being in excess of the benefits while trying to account for the costs and benefits as they are viewed by the target of our affections. The state cannot do that. It simply cannot tell what comprises the good life for each of us given the diverse set of "good things" and the myriad ways of trading them off against each other at the margin.

And while voluntary organisations can harness altruistic love for charitable purpose, it's awfully hard to channel that impulse through State bureaus: bureaus predicated on love fail where you can't be sure that you've hired staff that are always motivated by it and will continue to be so after extended contact with clients; the tick-box process rules that act as substitute make it hard for those actually motivated by love to achieve much.

Altruism and government

On the three days a week I'm an anarchist, I'm sometimes asked what would become of the poor or those in severe hardship if the state weren't there to protect them.

Without the State, the homeless could be fed:

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park.

Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan "Keith" McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry is a co-founder of the international Food Not Bombs movement, which began in the early 1980s.

The group lost a court battle in April, clearing the way for the city to enforce the ordinance. It requires groups to obtain a permit and limits each group to two permits per year for each park within a 2-mile radius of City Hall.

Arrest papers state that Cross, Markeson and McHenry helped feed 40 people Wednesday night. The ordinance applies to feedings of more than 25 people.

And tornado victims could be helped:

Mike Haege owns a tree-trimming business in Hastings, Minnesota. After a tornado hit northern Minneapolis, he decided to help out. On May 23, the day after the tornado, he signed up as a volunteer and brought some equipment to help people without insurance to dig out from the damage. Mike and his fellow volunteers removed fallen or damaged trees from driveways and doorways, all free of charge. He probably made a lot of friends that day.

Regulators were not among them. While he is licensed to work in many Minneapolis-area cities, he isn’t licensed in Minneapolis proper. So they kicked him out of the city.

HT: @MitchellHall on the first, @TPCarney on the second.

Afternoon roundup

• Stephen Franks on preemptive habitat destruction in New Zealand: be careful about planting native trees!


• Esquire on the merits of drug legalization

  One cop straight out of The Wire crunches the numbers with Esquire.com's political columnist to discover that America's prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico's — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care. So why not repeal our drug laws? Because cops are making money off them, too.



• There's only so much altruism to go round, so careful how you spend it!

  Consumer choices not only reflect price and quality preferences but also social and moral values as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products. Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, we find that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of them lead to markedly different behavioral consequences. In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products. Together, the studies show that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and ethical behaviors in directions and domains other than previously thought.



• "Fat taxes" on soft drinks: might folks substitute away to other high-calorie drinks? Turns out, yes!

  Childhood and adolescent obesity is associated with serious lifetime health consequences and has seen a recent rapid increase in prevalence. Soft drink consumption has also expanded rapidly, so much so that soft drinks are currently the largest single contributors to energy intake. In this paper, we investigate the potential for soft drink taxes to combat rising levels of adolescent obesity through a reduction in consumption. Our results, based on state soft drink sales and excise tax information between 1988 and 2006 and the National Health Examination and Nutrition Survey, suggest that soft drink taxation, as currently practiced in the United States, leads to a moderate reduction in soft drink consumption by children and adolescents. However, we show that this reduction in soda consumption is completely offset by increases in consumption of other high calorie drinks.

  I've only given the full paper a cursory glance as yet, but it's well above expectations for a public health piece.