Moral public goods

It occurs to me that viewing global poverty through the lens of public goods makes it clearer that global-poverty-related charity donations are not about terminally valuing a world without extreme poverty (because if it was, there would be more efforts than we actually see at coordination/cooperation to collectively produce the public good), but is rather about being seen (if only by oneself) as a good person or a moral nation (in which case it would make a lot more sense to unilaterally contribute).

This seems totally wrong. The use of coercive force is an active ingredient in the state feeding the hungry, as it is with other public good provision.

I feel like you've come up with an example where people are just barely charitable enough that they support redistribution, but not charitable enough that they would ever give a gift themselves. This is a counterexample to Friedman's claim, but it's not obvious that it's real.

That is, suppose altruism is distributed unevenly among the population; then it likely will be the case that whenever the median opinion is in support of redistribution (like food stamps, say) then the right quartile (i.e. the people most interested in redistribution) could fund it themselves.

And historically we have many examples of this, with voluntary clubs and organizations as the coercion-free method of public good provision. Perhaps no individual person wants to solve hunger on their own, but they are interested in a kickstarter to solve hunger or being a dues-paying member to the Anti-Hunger Society.

(And Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy, while being not totally relevant, is nevertheless an important part of the story when it comes to public good provision and what's required for it.)

This argument supports both foreign aid and domestic redistribution, but the foreign aid component may require international coordination.

I don't think I've ever heard of any efforts to coordinate internationally on foreign aid. (ETA: I forgot about the World Bank, and didn't know about the 0.7% target that Lanrian mentions. See this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] for my current views.) How do you explain that, when there is plenty of efforts to coordinate on other things like pollution, infectious diseases, weapons proliferation, arms control?

But I think you’ll understand most people’s altruism better if you think about it as part of a collective action or public goods provision problem. People want to e.g. see a world free from extreme poverty, and they are (sometimes) willing to chip in a small part of that vision for the same reason that they are willing to chip in to the local public park—even though the actual consequence of their donation is too small for them to care much about it.

I don't understand the new model that you're proposing here. If people want to see a world free from extreme poverty and view that as a public good provision problem, shouldn't they advocate for or work towards international coordination on achieving that? (Given international coordination on other issues, this clearly isn't an impossible goal.) Why are they unilaterally chipping in small amounts towards reducing poverty in a piecemeal fashion?

Consequentialism is a really bad model for most people’s altruistic behavior, and especially their compromises between altruistic and selfish ends.

I've been modeling this as people having moral uncertainty which are modeled as factions within someone's brain, where the altruist faction has control over some (typically small) fraction of their budget.

The framing of "nobles" and "peasants" distracts me from your question; it implies connotations that you might want to clarify or endorse, or change your terminology.

Real-life nobles don't produce 10,000x value; they extract value from peasants, by force of arms and law and custom. It makes no sense to redistribute wealth by taxing everyone's income if the nobles get their income by taxing the peasants; just stop the nobles from extracting so much value.

Some of the modern super-rich do generate disproportionately high value, e.g. from high-risk bets they made to build innovative companies. But most of their income still comes from capital and owning the tools of production and all that (citation required). And this influences the moral calculus for a lot of people. The reason for taking some of their property (income) is not just that most people want to do it or that someone else would enjoy it much more, it's that it shouldn't be theirs to begin with.

A terminology of "nobles" and "peasants" implies to me the idea that most all of the nobles' (the modern rich) income is extracted from from the peasants (everyone else), enabled by the same state that then taxes them. Did you intend or endorse this view? If not, or if you think it's irrelevant to the thought experiment, do you think the framing of "nobles" and "peasants" distracts from the issue? It does for me.

If I didn't make a calculation error, the nobles in general recommend up to a 100*max(0, 1 - (the factor by which peasants outnumber nobles)/(the factor by which each noble is richer than each peasant))% tax (which is also equivalent to 100*max(0, 2-1/(the fraction of total wealth collectively owned by the nobles))%). With the numbers given in the post, this produces 100*max(0, 1 - 1000/10000)% = 90%. But for example with a billion times as many peasants as nobles, and each noble a billion times richer than each peasant, the nobles collectively recommend no tax. When I query my intuitions though, these two situations don't feel different. I like the symmetry in "Each noble cares about as much about themselves as they do about all peasants put together", and I'm wondering if there's some way to preserve that while making the tax percentage match my intuitions better.

Great post!

Consequentialism is a really bad model for most people’s altruistic behavior, and especially their compromises between altruistic and selfish ends. To model someone as a thoroughgoing consequentialist, you have two bad options:

1. They care about themselves >10 million times as much as other people. [...]
2. They care about themselves <1% as much as everyone else in the whole world put together. [...]

It seems to me that "consequentialism" here refers to total utilitarianism rather than consequentialism in general.

Potentially relevant new paper:

The logic of universalization guides moral judgment

To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say: “What if everybody did that?” In other words, even if a single person’s behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and report comparable patterns of judgment in children. We conclude that alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.

Scott Alexander makes a similar point in his post Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, arguing that the main reason why people do not donate much more money to politics and charity is because there is a public goods problem and lack of a coordinating mechanism: "People just can’t coordinate. If everyone who cared about homelessness donated $100 to the problem, homelessness would be solved. Nobody does this, because they know that nobody else is going to do it, and their $100 is just going to feel like a tiny drop in the ocean that doesn’t change anything."

Thanks, this is interesting. I'm trying to understand your ideas. Please let me know if I represent them correctly.

It seems to me that at the start, you're saying:

1. People often have strong selfish preferences and weak altruistic preferences.

2. There are many situations where people could gain more utility through engaging in moral agreements or moral trade - where everyone promises to take some altruistic action conditional on everyone else doing the same. That is because the altruistic utility they gain more than makes up for the selfish utility they lose.

These claims in themselves seem compatible with "altruism being about consequentialism".

To conclude that that's not the case, it seems that one has to add something like the following point. I'm not sure whether that's actually what you mean, but in any case, it seems like a reasonable idea.

3. Fairness considerations loom large in our intuitive moral psychology: we feel very strongly about the principle that everyone should do and have their fair share, hate being suckers, are willing to altruistically punish free-riders, etc.

It's known from dictator game studies, prisoner's dilemma studies, tragedies of the common, and similar research that people have such fairness-oriented dispositions (though there may be disagreements about details). They help us solve collective action problems, and make us provide for public goods.

So in those experiments, people aren't always choosing the action that would maximise their selfish interests in a one-off game. Instead they choose, e.g. to punish free-riders, even at a selfish cost.

Similarly, when people are trying to satisfy their altruistic interests (which is what you discuss), they aren't choosing the actions that, at least on the face of it (setting indirect effects of norm-setting, etc, aside), maximally satisfy their altruistic interests. Instead they take considerations of fairness and norms into account - e.g. they may contribute in contexts where others are contributing, but not in contexts where others aren't. In that sense, they aren't (act)-consequentialists, but rather do their fair share of worthwhile projects/slot into norms they find appropriate, etc.

If welfare is logarithmic in income, you can get huge utility by giving a dollar to someone who has almost no money. I think that's what makes the numbers work out in your example, and at the same time makes it unrealistic.

I think you're right that redistribution can make sense. Pretty weird that people will still argue against any notion of government-facilitated redistribution: We can explicitly write out hypothetical utility functions and starting bundles and show that redistribution can be preferred by everyone. Even if a person thinks that no one should be coerced, they shouldn't be against a mechanism that redistributes if and only if everyone benefits, even if they think that status quo is currently sufficient for Pareto optimality (since this fact might not hold in the future, as your example shows).

I think this argument supports levels of redistribution like 50% (or 30% or 70% or whatever)...

It favours redistribution, but it doesn't give you the mechanism by which it should occur. I'm not sure what the numbers you're referring to are representing (i.e. 50%, 30%, 70%). Let's say it's the top-level tax rate. Then, ideally, you should decide which exact number and show that it's better than any of the alternatives. I don't think this is possible. It's better to pick a mechanism that picks your numbers for you: [EA · GW]

For example, rather than select a price for rice out of thin air, you could let a Pareto-efficient market determine that number (if you consider the goal of Pareto efficiency to be aligned). Note that markets have different prices for the exact same good at the same time (due to things like transportation costs), so having a goal for a universal rice price is the wrong approach from the outset. If a single number is the right approach, arbitrary numeric goals are not aligned when the goal’s specified range does not contain the ideal value. And even if you pick the right number upon the system’s implementation, the ideal value might move out of the range at a later time. 

There are other redistributive mechanisms. You mention quadratic funding. Another example, if I donate a dollar, everyone else in my tax bracket has to pay the same proportion of income divided by 1000. I think these are both weak proposals because they don't satisfy persuasive goals, but I'm just saying that there's lots of different ways to redistribute. Once we think that there should be a redistributive mechanism, the problem is figuring out which possible mechanism has the strongest supporting argument.

So what goals should the mechanism satisfy? Pareto optimality probably. Non-coercion possibly (though you say "if the most selfish people lose out a little bit, [it's not so bad]", and I lean that way too). Note that Pareto optimality can be achieved even if not all steps are Pareto improvements, i.e. you can have a coercive Pareto-optimal solution. (It might also be that Pareto optimality and non-coercion are incompatible with each other.) These goals probably aren't sufficient to uniquely specify our desired system, so I think there should be other goals, otherwise your choice between the several systems that satisfy the goalset is an arbitrary one (i.e. not well justified). But I'm not sure what those other goals should be.

Consequentialism is a really bad model for most people’s altruistic behavior

Sure, but consequentialism is a class of moral theories, not an empirical model of human behaviour. A lot of people try to come up with moral theories that justify their immoral choices (such as saving a family member instead of 100 strangers). It's not hypocritical to say "Total Consequentialism is the correct moral theory" and then not behave like a perfect consequentialist, unless you also claim to be a perfect consequentialist or you criticise others for not being perfect consequentialists.

I think before accepting the conclusions I would like to see some sensitivity analysis around the assumption of the two representative agents that underlie the model.

The first part of this turned seemed like mostly politics - oversimple and flat-out non-real example being used to justify a policy without any nuance or sense. Point 1 is just unsupported and hard to argue for or against, other than by saying your example is wrong and doesn't justify any specific type or level of redistribution, and you haven't specified even what "redistribution" means, especially in a dynamic equilibrium where wealth and income are related but distinct.

Point 2 is completely missing the fundamental question of what people want - Friedman's point that if people actually were self-aligned that they care about feeding specific poor people rather than getting a new iPhone, they'd do it. Instead, they want abstract poor people to get fed, and only if they can force others to do so (along with themselves, in many cases, but rarely just unilaterally). You don't address this disparity.

Point 3 is actually a reasonable start to laying out the fundamental puzzle of large-group behaviors. I'll say that I am a consequentialist, and that I consider myself somewhat altruistic, but not an Altruist with a capital A. And I'm in the first group: I consider myself many orders of magnitude more important (to me) than very distant strangers. Not zero, but for some of 'em, more than tens of millions of times more important. For some, much less discount, maybe half as import for very close friends and relatives.

Other people have a declining marginal utility for me, and for a given level of resources, it CAN go negative. There are almost 8 billion of them currently, and I think that's probably more than I prefer while we're still at today's tech level and limited to one planet. I don't know if concentrations of resources are necessary to large-scale endeavors, but I suspect it, and I don't worry too much about it.

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