That reminds me that another prediction your model makes is that larger countries should spend more on ODA (which BTW excludes military aid), but this is false
The consideration in this post would help explain why smaller countries spend more than you would expect on a naive view (where ODA just satisfies the impartial preferences of the voting population in a simple consequentialist way). It seems like there is some confusion here, but I still don’t feel like it’s very important.
I think there was an (additional?) earlier miscommunication or error regarding the “factions within someone’s brain”:
When talking about the weight of altruistic preferences, I (like you) am generally more into models like “X% of my resources are controlled by an altruistic faction” rather than “I have X exchange rate between my welfare and the welfare of others.” (For a given individual at a given time we can move between these freely, so it doesn’t matter for any of the discussion in the OP.)
When I say that “resources controlled by altruistic factions” doesn’t explain everything, I mean that you still need to have some additional hypothesis like “donations are like contributions to public goods.” I don’t think those two hypotheses are substitutes, and you probably need both (or some other alternative to “donations are like contributions to public goods,” like some fleshed out version of “nothing is altruistic after all” which seems to be your preference but which I’m withholding judgment on until it’s fleshed out.)
In the OP, I agree that “and especially their compromises between altruistic and selfish ends” was either wrong or unclear. I really meant the kind of tension that I described in the immediately following bullet point, where people appear to make very different tradeoffs between altruistic and selfish values in different contexts.
The consideration in this post would help explain why smaller countries spend more than you would expect on a naive view (where ODA just satisfies the impartial preferences of the voting population in a simple consequentialist way). It seems like there is some confusion here, but I still don’t feel like it’s very important.
I don’t understand this paragraph at all, but the rest of your comment makes more sense, and here’s my current attempt to build an alternative model:
[Edit: I’ve moved the description of the model to somewhere more visible. Please followup there.]
This model can probably be refined even more, but let me know if it is unclear or wrong as far as it goes, or if there’s anything puzzling you see that is still not explained by it.
The consideration in this post would help explain why smaller countries spend more than you would expect on a naive view (where ODA just satisfies the impartial preferences of the voting population in a simple consequentialist way). It seems like there is some confusion here, but I still don’t feel like it’s very important.
I think there was an (additional?) earlier miscommunication or error regarding the “factions within someone’s brain”:
When talking about the weight of altruistic preferences, I (like you) am generally more into models like “X% of my resources are controlled by an altruistic faction” rather than “I have X exchange rate between my welfare and the welfare of others.” (For a given individual at a given time we can move between these freely, so it doesn’t matter for any of the discussion in the OP.)
When I say that “resources controlled by altruistic factions” doesn’t explain everything, I mean that you still need to have some additional hypothesis like “donations are like contributions to public goods.” I don’t think those two hypotheses are substitutes, and you probably need both (or some other alternative to “donations are like contributions to public goods,” like some fleshed out version of “nothing is altruistic after all” which seems to be your preference but which I’m withholding judgment on until it’s fleshed out.)
In the OP, I agree that “and especially their compromises between altruistic and selfish ends” was either wrong or unclear. I really meant the kind of tension that I described in the immediately following bullet point, where people appear to make very different tradeoffs between altruistic and selfish values in different contexts.
I don’t understand this paragraph at all, but the rest of your comment makes more sense, and here’s my current attempt to build an alternative model:
[Edit: I’ve moved the description of the model to somewhere more visible. Please followup there.]
This model can probably be refined even more, but let me know if it is unclear or wrong as far as it goes, or if there’s anything puzzling you see that is still not explained by it.