Thanks, this really helps me understand your position. I think I was confused because when I think of “public goods” I just think “government action or diplomats signing treaties” whereas you think “also, private donations driven by for example rhetoric about doing your part, feelings of guilt”.
The latter didn’t occur to me because in my daily life almost all normal public goods (such as parks) are provided by the government, and examples of public goods provided by private donations are marginal at best. All I can think of are PTAs and political donations (neither of which fit the category of public goods that well). I guess you must be thinking back to a time when governments were smaller/weaker, and lots of public goods were driven by private donations, e.g., sometimes neighbors got together and built a park by themselves?
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?
Here’s my explanation (which may be totally wrong as I’ve only thought about it for a few hours). Some things are true public goods where people care about the underlying objective facts, and others are valued more as virtue signaling opportunities, and the latter are the ones that don’t shift or don’t fully shift towards formal/public/coordinated provisioning. Consider food banks and soup kitchens. It wouldn’t be hugely costly for governments to just provide full food security for everyone so why don’t they do that? Perhaps people would rather have the opportunity to virtue signal by donating to or volunteering at food banks? Or consider foreign aid. It doesn’t seem impossible (see below) for governments to negotiate a binding treaty for some target level of foreign aid. Why is there not even any visible effort to do that? Well, if they did that they could no longer use foreign aid as a virtue signal (because they’d be doing it to satisfy the treaty rather than out of the goodness of their hearts).
Here are some examples of what kind of international coordination, or at least effort at coordination, is possible, for normal public goods:
I don’t know much about this, but oecd.org describes a 0.7% target for ODA and claims that
the 0.7% target served as a reference for 2005 political commitments to increase ODA from the EU, the G8 Gleneagles Summit and the UN World Summit
and
DAC members generally accepted the 0.7% target for ODA, at least as a long-term objective, with some notable exceptions: Switzerland – not a member of the United Nations until 2002 – did not adopt the target, and the United States stated that it did not subscribe to specific targets or timetables, although it supported the more general aims of the Resolution.
At face value it seems like like 0.7%/year is considerably larger than the investments in any of the other efforts at international coordination you mention (and uptake seems comparable).
(The Montreal Protocol seems like a weird case in that the gains are so large—I’ve been told that the gains were large enough for the US that unilateral participation was basically justifiable. Copyright agreements don’t seem like public goods provision. I don’t think countries are meeting their Paris agreement obligations any better than they are meeting their 0.7%/year ODA targets, and enforcement seems just as non-existent.)
Looking at https://data.oecd.org/oda/net-oda.htm it appears that foreign aid as %GNI for DAC countries has actually gone down since 1960, and I don’t see any correlation with any of the (non-enforced) agreements signed about the 0.7% target. It just looks like countries do ODA for reasons completely unrelated to the target/agreements.
Copyright agreements don’t seem like public goods provision.
Information goods are a form of public goods, and they are provided (in large part) because governments enforce copyrights. Each individual government has incentive to not respect copyright of other countries (so its citizens can free-ride on other countries’ production of information goods) so international coordination is required to obtain cross-border enforcement. Does this make it clear that it’s pretty analogous to public goods funded directly by governments?
Looking at https://data.oecd.org/oda/net-oda.htm it appears that foreign aid as %GNI for DAC countries has actually gone down since 1960, and I don’t see any correlation with any of the (non-enforced) agreements signed about the 0.7% target. It just looks like countries do ODA for reasons completely unrelated to the target/agreements.
Do you think the story is different for the climate change agreements? I guess the temporal trend is different, but I think the actual causal story from agreements to outcomes is equally unclear (I don’t think the agreements have much causal role) and enforcement seems similarly non-existent.
Information goods are a form of public goods, and they are provided (in large part) because governments enforce copyrights.
Copyright enforcement seems more like trade. I will require my citizens to pay you for your information, if you require your citizens to pay me for my information.
You can analogize copyright enforcement to a public good if you want, but the actual dynamics of provision and cost-benefit analyses seem quite different. For example, signing up to a bilateral copyright agreement is a good deal between peer states (if copyright agreements ever are)---you’ve protected your citizens copyright to the same extent you’ve lost the ability to infringe on others. The same is not true of a public good, where bilateral agreement is almost the same as unilateral action.
At any rate, I actually don’t think almost anything from the OP hinges on this disagreement (though it seems like an instructive difference in background views about the international order). We are just debating whether the lack of international agreements on foreign aid implies that people don’t much care about the humanitarian impacts of aid, with me claiming that international coordination is generally weak with rare exceptions and so it’s not much evidence.
There is plenty of other evidence though. E.g. when considering the US you don’t really need to invoke international agreements. The US represents >20% of gross world product, so US unilateral action is nearly as good as international action. US government aid is mostly military aid which has no real pretension of humanitarian motivation, and I assume US private transfers to developing countries are mostly remittances. So I certainly agree that people in the US don’t care to spend to very much on aid.
The US represents >20% of gross world product, so US unilateral action is nearly as good as international action.
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 United States (US) is the largest donor country, with official development assistance (ODA) at US$34.3 billion in 2018. Relative to economic size, however, ODA is low, at 0.17% of gross national income (GNI). This ranks the US 22nd out of the 29 donor country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
According to the chart I linked earlier, the countries with highest ODA as %GNI are UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden, all at around 0.9 %GNI.
This seems like a pretty fatal blow? Or at least you have to add some explanation why the last paragraph of section 1 makes a seemingly false prediction about the world...
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.
According to the chart I linked earlier, the countries with highest ODA as %GNI are UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden, all at around 0.9 %GNI.
Given random variation between countries, we shouldn’t be surprised to find smaller countries on the top of such a list: (i) because there are more small countries than big countries, and (ii) because smaller countries are likely to be more internally homogenous, which means that e.g. the average inclination to give away money among the countries’ population is likely to differ more from the global average.
I guessed that I’d find small countries at the bottom of the list, too. But then I actually looked, and found Thailand, Taiwan, Russia, and Romania on the bottom, two of which are big, and all of which are larger than UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden. I don’t know what’s up with that, though part of the explanation might be that a bunch of poor, small countries are grouped as a single big “DAC-countries”-category. Edit: This last sentence is false, see Wei_Dai’s comment (“DAC-countries” are apparently rich countries, rather than poor, and each of them are reported separately in the list). Seems like a lot of poor countries aren’t included in the list at all.
I don’t know what’s up with that, though part of the explanation might be that a bunch of poor, small countries are grouped as a single big “DAC-countries”-category.
No, DAC-countries are reported separately in that chart as well as in aggregate:
The DAC has 24 members: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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)?
Thanks, this really helps me understand your position. I think I was confused because when I think of “public goods” I just think “government action or diplomats signing treaties” whereas you think “also, private donations driven by for example rhetoric about doing your part, feelings of guilt”.
The latter didn’t occur to me because in my daily life almost all normal public goods (such as parks) are provided by the government, and examples of public goods provided by private donations are marginal at best. All I can think of are PTAs and political donations (neither of which fit the category of public goods that well). I guess you must be thinking back to a time when governments were smaller/weaker, and lots of public goods were driven by private donations, e.g., sometimes neighbors got together and built a park by themselves?
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?
Here’s my explanation (which may be totally wrong as I’ve only thought about it for a few hours). Some things are true public goods where people care about the underlying objective facts, and others are valued more as virtue signaling opportunities, and the latter are the ones that don’t shift or don’t fully shift towards formal/public/coordinated provisioning. Consider food banks and soup kitchens. It wouldn’t be hugely costly for governments to just provide full food security for everyone so why don’t they do that? Perhaps people would rather have the opportunity to virtue signal by donating to or volunteering at food banks? Or consider foreign aid. It doesn’t seem impossible (see below) for governments to negotiate a binding treaty for some target level of foreign aid. Why is there not even any visible effort to do that? Well, if they did that they could no longer use foreign aid as a virtue signal (because they’d be doing it to satisfy the treaty rather than out of the goodness of their hearts).
Here are some examples of what kind of international coordination, or at least effort at coordination, is possible, for normal public goods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_copyright_agreements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change
I don’t know much about this, but oecd.org describes a 0.7% target for ODA and claims that
and
At face value it seems like like 0.7%/year is considerably larger than the investments in any of the other efforts at international coordination you mention (and uptake seems comparable).
(The Montreal Protocol seems like a weird case in that the gains are so large—I’ve been told that the gains were large enough for the US that unilateral participation was basically justifiable. Copyright agreements don’t seem like public goods provision. I don’t think countries are meeting their Paris agreement obligations any better than they are meeting their 0.7%/year ODA targets, and enforcement seems just as non-existent.)
Looking at https://data.oecd.org/oda/net-oda.htm it appears that foreign aid as %GNI for DAC countries has actually gone down since 1960, and I don’t see any correlation with any of the (non-enforced) agreements signed about the 0.7% target. It just looks like countries do ODA for reasons completely unrelated to the target/agreements.
Information goods are a form of public goods, and they are provided (in large part) because governments enforce copyrights. Each individual government has incentive to not respect copyright of other countries (so its citizens can free-ride on other countries’ production of information goods) so international coordination is required to obtain cross-border enforcement. Does this make it clear that it’s pretty analogous to public goods funded directly by governments?
Do you think the story is different for the climate change agreements? I guess the temporal trend is different, but I think the actual causal story from agreements to outcomes is equally unclear (I don’t think the agreements have much causal role) and enforcement seems similarly non-existent.
Copyright enforcement seems more like trade. I will require my citizens to pay you for your information, if you require your citizens to pay me for my information.
You can analogize copyright enforcement to a public good if you want, but the actual dynamics of provision and cost-benefit analyses seem quite different. For example, signing up to a bilateral copyright agreement is a good deal between peer states (if copyright agreements ever are)---you’ve protected your citizens copyright to the same extent you’ve lost the ability to infringe on others. The same is not true of a public good, where bilateral agreement is almost the same as unilateral action.
At any rate, I actually don’t think almost anything from the OP hinges on this disagreement (though it seems like an instructive difference in background views about the international order). We are just debating whether the lack of international agreements on foreign aid implies that people don’t much care about the humanitarian impacts of aid, with me claiming that international coordination is generally weak with rare exceptions and so it’s not much evidence.
There is plenty of other evidence though. E.g. when considering the US you don’t really need to invoke international agreements. The US represents >20% of gross world product, so US unilateral action is nearly as good as international action. US government aid is mostly military aid which has no real pretension of humanitarian motivation, and I assume US private transfers to developing countries are mostly remittances. So I certainly agree that people in the US don’t care to spend to very much on aid.
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:
According to the chart I linked earlier, the countries with highest ODA as %GNI are UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden, all at around 0.9 %GNI.
This seems like a pretty fatal blow? Or at least you have to add some explanation why the last paragraph of section 1 makes a seemingly false prediction about the world...
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.
Given random variation between countries, we shouldn’t be surprised to find smaller countries on the top of such a list: (i) because there are more small countries than big countries, and (ii) because smaller countries are likely to be more internally homogenous, which means that e.g. the average inclination to give away money among the countries’ population is likely to differ more from the global average.
I guessed that I’d find small countries at the bottom of the list, too. But then I actually looked, and found Thailand, Taiwan, Russia, and Romania on the bottom, two of which are big, and all of which are larger than UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden. I don’t know what’s up with that, though part of the explanation might be that a bunch of poor, small countries are grouped as a single big “DAC-countries”-category. Edit: This last sentence is false, see Wei_Dai’s comment (“DAC-countries” are apparently rich countries, rather than poor, and each of them are reported separately in the list). Seems like a lot of poor countries aren’t included in the list at all.
No, DAC-countries are reported separately in that chart as well as in aggregate:
BTW, please see my latest comment on this topic if you haven’t already.
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)?