Nice. Steven Landsburg once wrote something similar (I think in The Armchair Economist) about how it is wasteful to bend down to pick up a $50 bill off the sidewalk, because the money is a pure transfer and the effort of bending down is a pure social loss.
The problem is that I pretty clearly don’t value a random person having the $4 as much as me having it, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of my income I keep, and the part of it that I give away (which is pretty substantial but the Peter Singer argument is always working on me that it should be higher) I give away to really poor people abroad, not to random Americans.
Nice. Steven Landsburg once wrote something similar (I think in The Armchair Economist) about how it is wasteful to bend down to pick up a $50 bill off the sidewalk, because the money is a pure transfer and the effort of bending down is a pure social loss.
The problem is that I pretty clearly don’t value a random person having the $4 as much as me having it, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of my income I keep, and the part of it that I give away (which is pretty substantial but the Peter Singer argument is always working on me that it should be higher) I give away to really poor people abroad, not to random Americans.