This is stealing people’s houses. It’s a degree of damage which it’s hard to imagine being covered by charity.
Is it really? I suppose this depends on how many houses any individual is responsible for and how much money they capture per house. I guess that second part is the real issue—any individual who would be giving to charity probably only captures a fraction of what they earn for their firm.
But if you could capture the whole value of a predatory mortgage and convert it into developing world lives saved, it’s not hard to imagine the numbers adding up. (One American family goes bankrupt and 20 Malawian children who otherwise would have don’t die in childhood? On the face of it that looks like a pretty positive net outcome.)
If you can do outsized damage significantly beyond what you can capture as income though, then I suppose it gets a bit tougher to justify.
(One American family goes bankrupt and 20 Malawian children who otherwise would have don’t die in childhood? On the face of it that looks like a pretty positive net outcome.)
If we’re talking about donations on the scale of the activities that went into the mortgage crisis, I think you’d start to suffer seriously diminishing returns.
Even if you didn’t, there are other problems you’d run into, such as the limited ability of the Malawian (or other impoverished African) society and economy to accommodate such a sudden spike in children surviving to adulthood. The lives that you save from extermination at the hands of malaria or other preventable causes are probably mostly going to be relatively lousy or short due to other causes, pending much further investment.
As I understood it, the hypothetical was a single individual deciding to work in finance and donate a large portion of their income to efficient charity. In that case I don’t think the diminishing returns are so much of an issue.
I would worry more about negative flow-through effects of a decline in trust and basic decency in society. I think those are much more clear than flow-through effects of positive giving. I’m not sure if this outweighs the 20-to-1 ratio.
Is it really? I suppose this depends on how many houses any individual is responsible for and how much money they capture per house. I guess that second part is the real issue—any individual who would be giving to charity probably only captures a fraction of what they earn for their firm.
But if you could capture the whole value of a predatory mortgage and convert it into developing world lives saved, it’s not hard to imagine the numbers adding up. (One American family goes bankrupt and 20 Malawian children who otherwise would have don’t die in childhood? On the face of it that looks like a pretty positive net outcome.)
If you can do outsized damage significantly beyond what you can capture as income though, then I suppose it gets a bit tougher to justify.
If we’re talking about donations on the scale of the activities that went into the mortgage crisis, I think you’d start to suffer seriously diminishing returns.
Even if you didn’t, there are other problems you’d run into, such as the limited ability of the Malawian (or other impoverished African) society and economy to accommodate such a sudden spike in children surviving to adulthood. The lives that you save from extermination at the hands of malaria or other preventable causes are probably mostly going to be relatively lousy or short due to other causes, pending much further investment.
As I understood it, the hypothetical was a single individual deciding to work in finance and donate a large portion of their income to efficient charity. In that case I don’t think the diminishing returns are so much of an issue.
I would worry more about negative flow-through effects of a decline in trust and basic decency in society. I think those are much more clear than flow-through effects of positive giving. I’m not sure if this outweighs the 20-to-1 ratio.