I’m more interested in what I initially perceived your title as suggesting...
What if, by continually helping children in ponds, you in the long-run incentivize people leaving children in your ponds? This sounds obscure at analogy-level, but consider...
Donating shoes/bicycles/etc. to developing nations is a bad idea, because it disrupts and destroys the local economy shoe-production. There simply isn’t enough regional demand, factoring in the large donations, to develop the proper economics of scale. I have no literature on this, but a well-thought out philantropist friend has noted this concept to me many times.
On a macro-scale, i have an even “meaner” comment… I am personally in favor of moderate immigration, but consider: If immigration is freely allowed, then many with medical, engineering or similar degrees will move from troubled areas to Europe or the United States. With even more immigration, anybody remotely resourceful will move from, say Syria. It creates very low barriers to exit, meaning easier capitulation to negative forces.
It creates brain-drain, easy capitulation and less people to rebuild the country—at least rebuilding based on college-education level standards of nation-building, which may be corrupt but at least functional.
As a last example, what if you considered two countries. One with extremely altruistic climate goals and one that did not care. One cares, the other can freeload, abusing “the commons”—this usually leads to moral indignation, then war—which is an inferior result for all.
___
What if—instead of helping children in ponds ad infinitum, you took a step back and invested in institution-building in your local community—things that are “your responsibility” and that cannot be off-loaded to you if you act too altruistically. You will both reap the benefits of local status, local improvements, and knowing that you are not incentivizing negative game-theory outcomes? You may have a lower first-order utility effect, but you can be less worried about extremely damaging second,third,fourth order effects.
I’m not knowledgable about this… so if anybody can explain to me why my line of reasoning is (in general) wrong, I’d be very inclined to hear it.
I will try to move from the specific, to the general:
Specific:
Shoes: The problem is, as my friend explained to three things:
That shoes/bicylces/engines/etc. is not a consistently donated good across time. Interest waxes and wanes. That means an unsteady supply of “free goods”.
It also doesn’t allow the country to progress in up-skilling manufacturing, as many Asian countries have done. I forget the model name, but the one where they move from raw materials, to manufacturing, to low-level electronics, etc. - its hard to simply move from rural farmer to semiconductor engineering—for various reasons ranging from income to sustain education, etc.
It destroys what capacity already existed. If people and businesses invest in capacity for building bicycles, then get hit with a 3-year surge of bicycles (than then disappear) - you have to rebuild and reacquire the expertise.
Brain-drain: From an ethical standpoint, I think the paradigm you are approaching from is wrong. This is not about normative duties, but about pragmatism.
It is easier for a native to enter local government.
It is difficult and time consuming to integrate new peoples into countries—for both host and immigrant.
It is GREAT for me that engineers, doctors and judges are coming to my country. It is not so great for the originator country. It is not about “sending somebody back to deal with it”—but about investigating the second-order effects on millions of people, when deciding to help thousands of people. Put in another way: If we presume that only the educated elite gets to leave, is it a good idea “to let them in” from a pure utilitarian perspective, cosnidering their country-men? Its not about individual rights, because then we would have to discuss a very deep topic of, to what degree people have a right to the land that their forefathers lived on, which I think is not the purpose of my argument here.
Climate:
Many wars have been worsened, started or instigated by access to freshwater resources. The united nations keeps a list of “water conflicts”—if i’m not mistaken—but googling the term will lead to plenty of examples.
Status:
There is no such thing as global status for, say, donating $5000 to a community shelter. Nobody will care, if you decide to donate to another country, county or even city. You do have a point on “letting locals freeload”—but at least you will have proportionally larger personal benefits, despite the freeloaders, than from donating to a community shelter the town over.
General:
Still, I get that each point is not complete or has individual shortcomings—I am only trying to demonstrate a general point. The general point is this:
“What if supporting some altruistic purpose simply lets other people ignore the issue and pocket the change, leaving net gain at 0?” (i.e. ambitious climate plans letting others relax).
“What if supporting some altruistic purpose inadvertently worsened everything”
And my general solution is:
“Keep things simple and local, as to avoid interacting with things you have no insight into, and to minimize unruly second-order global effects”.