This site is so much fun, because I find all the ideas that I’ve always liked, and some more besides that are just as good.
I’ll disagree on one point. Time is a much more common utilon of giving, and I believe in fact was used in some utopian communes as a unit of contribution and extraction from a common pot. I think people often depreciate giving money for a couple of reasons. First, because of the orders of magnitude difference in ability to pay. Gates and Buffet can give more than the accumulated net worth of a number of towns, and not even notice the loss. Therefore they “only gave money”—meaning it was no skin off their nose. If you gave your life savings, no one would say “you only gave money”. That demonstrates a mental bias most people have when they think about charity—they’re thinking primarily about a judgment on the people doing the giving, not about what the giving achieves. It’s about being good, not achieving good. That’s the second reason.
Further, even money is not a utilon of achievement, but again, just a givilon, a unit of giving, of input. You gave money. It’s all about you. Some organization received money. How much of that money actually went to the intended recipient? Probably none. At best, someone at the organization spent the money, and your intended recipient got some goods and services.
But what did he get? This probably explains some of our lack of motivation for giving. There’s no idea of any particular concrete thing delivered to a particular human being. Our sense of value and accomplishment really isn’t pinged by looking at a number we put on a check. I don’t think there was a lot of evolutionary fitness derived from that skill on the savannah. If they’d actually allocate your dollars, to a specific purchase. tell you about it, and keep track of it for you, it would probably be more motivating, as you could see an accumulation of actual objects and supplies that you purchased for people. You’d see a growing achievement over time.
I made just the original point, about giving money instead of time, with a Peace Corps type roommate gal when I was in graduate school. Why don’t you go to work on Wall Street, and send all that filthy lucre to Africa to feed the starving? No, she thought it was better for her to go herself.
Me being in grad school, and something of an intellectual bully, I persisted. How does that make sense? You’d feed more people. Blah blah blah. Why not send money? Why do you have to go? Why? Why? Why? Eventually she broke down and said “because then I wouldn’t have the experience of doing it.” She was, of course, immediately appalled once it came out of her mouth.
Oh well, if it’s about your experience of helping the poor, and not actually helping them, then by all means, you should take that trip instead. So sorry. I didn’t understand at first. I thought it was about getting them fed, not about you getting to personally ladle out the food.
Like I said, I can be a bully about these kinds of things. I don’t think I was making any friends that day, but I do admit to enjoying myself.
She might also have had the more benign motivation of wanting to learn more about the world, so that she can help more effectively for the rest of her life.
It occurs to me that the help people give to their friends and family isn’t counted as charity, and it seems to me that it ought to count for something, even if it’s less formalized and less apt to help people outside a particular social network than official charity.
In the same spirit, I think that what people do for themselves should be part of the GDP.
Sort of like a capital investment in knowledge for the sake of improved performance down the road? That would have been perfectly rational. That could have been her motivation, but I don’t think it was. Given the story, doesn’t that sound like a rationalization to you?
You mean helping the people you actually care about “ought to count for something”? What a strange idea. Your own happiness should count for something too? Who knew?
As for counting what you do for yourself as part of GDP, maybe we should just stop mistaking GDP for an indicator of gross production of value? Governments like GDP, because it records transactions that they are interested in—what they might tax, and what they spend. And it counts every dollar they spend of other people’s money, or money they create out of thin air, the same as a dollar that people earn and spend for themselves. That’s a cute little sleight of thought.
This site is so much fun, because I find all the ideas that I’ve always liked, and some more besides that are just as good.
I’ll disagree on one point. Time is a much more common utilon of giving, and I believe in fact was used in some utopian communes as a unit of contribution and extraction from a common pot. I think people often depreciate giving money for a couple of reasons. First, because of the orders of magnitude difference in ability to pay. Gates and Buffet can give more than the accumulated net worth of a number of towns, and not even notice the loss. Therefore they “only gave money”—meaning it was no skin off their nose. If you gave your life savings, no one would say “you only gave money”. That demonstrates a mental bias most people have when they think about charity—they’re thinking primarily about a judgment on the people doing the giving, not about what the giving achieves. It’s about being good, not achieving good. That’s the second reason.
Further, even money is not a utilon of achievement, but again, just a givilon, a unit of giving, of input. You gave money. It’s all about you. Some organization received money. How much of that money actually went to the intended recipient? Probably none. At best, someone at the organization spent the money, and your intended recipient got some goods and services.
But what did he get? This probably explains some of our lack of motivation for giving. There’s no idea of any particular concrete thing delivered to a particular human being. Our sense of value and accomplishment really isn’t pinged by looking at a number we put on a check. I don’t think there was a lot of evolutionary fitness derived from that skill on the savannah. If they’d actually allocate your dollars, to a specific purchase. tell you about it, and keep track of it for you, it would probably be more motivating, as you could see an accumulation of actual objects and supplies that you purchased for people. You’d see a growing achievement over time.
I made just the original point, about giving money instead of time, with a Peace Corps type roommate gal when I was in graduate school. Why don’t you go to work on Wall Street, and send all that filthy lucre to Africa to feed the starving? No, she thought it was better for her to go herself.
Me being in grad school, and something of an intellectual bully, I persisted. How does that make sense? You’d feed more people. Blah blah blah. Why not send money? Why do you have to go? Why? Why? Why? Eventually she broke down and said “because then I wouldn’t have the experience of doing it.” She was, of course, immediately appalled once it came out of her mouth.
Oh well, if it’s about your experience of helping the poor, and not actually helping them, then by all means, you should take that trip instead. So sorry. I didn’t understand at first. I thought it was about getting them fed, not about you getting to personally ladle out the food.
Like I said, I can be a bully about these kinds of things. I don’t think I was making any friends that day, but I do admit to enjoying myself.
She might also have had the more benign motivation of wanting to learn more about the world, so that she can help more effectively for the rest of her life.
It occurs to me that the help people give to their friends and family isn’t counted as charity, and it seems to me that it ought to count for something, even if it’s less formalized and less apt to help people outside a particular social network than official charity.
In the same spirit, I think that what people do for themselves should be part of the GDP.
Sort of like a capital investment in knowledge for the sake of improved performance down the road? That would have been perfectly rational. That could have been her motivation, but I don’t think it was. Given the story, doesn’t that sound like a rationalization to you?
You mean helping the people you actually care about “ought to count for something”? What a strange idea. Your own happiness should count for something too? Who knew?
As for counting what you do for yourself as part of GDP, maybe we should just stop mistaking GDP for an indicator of gross production of value? Governments like GDP, because it records transactions that they are interested in—what they might tax, and what they spend. And it counts every dollar they spend of other people’s money, or money they create out of thin air, the same as a dollar that people earn and spend for themselves. That’s a cute little sleight of thought.