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.
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.