Assuming I now have a correct understanding, I can restate my objection as, if anti-poverty is a public good, why hasn’t it followed the trend of other public goods, and shifted from informal private provision to formal government or internationally-coordinated provision?
Most redistribution is provided formally by governments and it may be the single most common topic of political debate. I’m not even sure this is evidence one way or the other though—why would you expect people not to signal virtue by advocating for policies? (Isn’t that a key part of your story?)
Relatedly, how does “we don’t want the government to enforce X so that we can signal our virtue by doing X” even work? Advocating for “make everyone do X” signals the same kind of virtue as doing X, advocating against seems to send the opposite signal, and surely the signaling considerations are just as dominant for advocacy as for the object-level decision? I think I often can’t really engage with the virtue signaling account because I don’t understand it at the level of precision that would be needed to actually make a prediction about anything.
Domestically, are you asking: “why do people donate so much more to charity than to other public goods”? I don’t think any of the competing theories really say much about that until we get way more specific about them and what makes a situation good for signaling virtue vs. what makes public goods easy to coordinate about in various ways vs. etc. (and also get way more into the quantitative data about other apparent public goods which are supported by donations).
(Overall this doesn’t seem like a particularly useful line of discussion to me so I’m likely to drop it. Most useful for me would probably be a description of the virtue signaling account that makes sense to me.)
Advocating for “make everyone do X” signals the same kind of virtue as doing X, advocating against seems to send the opposite signal, and surely the signaling considerations are just as dominant for advocacy as for the object-level decision?
Advocating for it sends a virtue signal, but voting for it doesn’t (due to secret ballots) so people vote their real values (or closer to their real values, which do not weigh anti-poverty as highly as they say in public, or as highly as their publicly revealed preferences as indicated by donations etc.). (See “preference falsification”.) (I realize that I’m changing/refining the explanation a bit.) Actually I’m not sure this makes sense either, so I’ll just retract this and say that intuitively it seems like the puzzle has to do with virtue signalling but I’m not sure what the right model is.
Domestically, are you asking: “why do people donate so much more to charity than to other public goods”? I don’t think any of the competing theories really say much about that until we get way more specific about them and what makes a situation good for signaling virtue vs. what makes public goods easy to coordinate about in various ways vs. etc. (and also get way more into the quantitative data about other apparent public goods which are supported by donations).
Even if you’re right that the virtue signaling explanation doesn’t work (I agree that a more precise account would be nice), it seems like the “public goods” account of anti-poverty charity at least still has a puzzle here, especially in the global setting (i.e., why is there so little effort to create binding agreements on foreign aid when there is plenty of effort on other global public goods)?
Most redistribution is provided formally by governments and it may be the single most common topic of political debate. I’m not even sure this is evidence one way or the other though—why would you expect people not to signal virtue by advocating for policies? (Isn’t that a key part of your story?)
Relatedly, how does “we don’t want the government to enforce X so that we can signal our virtue by doing X” even work? Advocating for “make everyone do X” signals the same kind of virtue as doing X, advocating against seems to send the opposite signal, and surely the signaling considerations are just as dominant for advocacy as for the object-level decision? I think I often can’t really engage with the virtue signaling account because I don’t understand it at the level of precision that would be needed to actually make a prediction about anything.
Domestically, are you asking: “why do people donate so much more to charity than to other public goods”? I don’t think any of the competing theories really say much about that until we get way more specific about them and what makes a situation good for signaling virtue vs. what makes public goods easy to coordinate about in various ways vs. etc. (and also get way more into the quantitative data about other apparent public goods which are supported by donations).
(Overall this doesn’t seem like a particularly useful line of discussion to me so I’m likely to drop it. Most useful for me would probably be a description of the virtue signaling account that makes sense to me.)
Advocating for it sends a virtue signal, but voting for it doesn’t (due to secret ballots) so people vote their real values (or closer to their real values, which do not weigh anti-poverty as highly as they say in public, or as highly as their publicly revealed preferences as indicated by donations etc.). (See “preference falsification”.) (I realize that I’m changing/refining the explanation a bit.)Actually I’m not sure this makes sense either, so I’ll just retract this and say that intuitively it seems like the puzzle has to do with virtue signalling but I’m not sure what the right model is.Even if you’re right that the virtue signaling explanation doesn’t work (I agree that a more precise account would be nice), it seems like the “public goods” account of anti-poverty charity at least still has a puzzle here, especially in the global setting (i.e., why is there so little effort to create binding agreements on foreign aid when there is plenty of effort on other global public goods)?