Self-Interest vs. Altruism
I was approached by a young person on the street the other day with
the stereotypical clipboard and that "hungry but not yet hungry
enough to work at McDonald's" look in his eye. He suggested I
sponsor a child in some far flung country. Millions of children go
without food and healthcare all over the world, he said. Of course,
trying to "do unto others", I gave his pitch a respectful listen
and when he paused, informed him that I would not become such a
sponsor. I thanked him for the opportunity and, after a couple more
attempts to disengage, went on my way.
I consider myself a generous person. I tip >= 20%. I regularly
pass out money to the homeless. I donate money to about 5 charities
every year. Hell, one of my ex- business partners still owes me
~$30k; but I figure he needs it more than I do, given his penchant
for limosines, fancy food, and his heart condition.
So, this leads me to try to resolve the apparent contradiction. Why
do I consider myself generous when I won't give, like $0.50 a week,
to some starving kid halfway across the globe?
My conclusion is that I am locally altruistic and globally
self-interested. I don't like bureaucracy. So, if the actual person
who needs (or merely wants) my charity asks me himself, then I tend
to give it. If some bureaucrat or agent asks me on behalf of
someone else, I tend to keep my money. (After all, if those
starving people have an agent, they can't be that poor. I'd love to
have an agent go out and market my services or advertise my
plights. ;-)
The same is true of the businesses I patronize (funny word
"patronize", when talking in the context of fair trade). I try not
to shop at Home Depot or buy Anheuser-Busch beers. I try to buy
from small businesses and drink beer produced by small
breweries.
So, having settled on that rationale, the issue was again stirred
up by
this article.
Now, to provide a little more background, I managed to read
this book, which extolls the benefits of liberalization and
financial infrastructure. The only interesting objection I have to
the gist of that book is that globalism is efficient if and only if
the price of energy is low. Moving goods and electrons across
enormous distances is only efficient when energy is cheap. Hence,
various types of globalism, e.g. spreading assembly over long
distances, are wasteful when energy becomes scarce. Some types of
globalism, investment and borrowing, might remain efficient, of
course.
I've long had a philosophical objection to globalism in that if we
outsource all our work, then we'll forget how to make things, which
abstracts us away from the act of making things, which turns us
into ignorant ivory tower types. But, that flaw in globalism is
nowhere near as critical as its dependence on cheap energy.
Putting the three issues together: 1) local altruism, global
self-interest, 2) self-interest built the USA (from the
article), and 3) globalism requires cheap energy, it should be
quite clear that the balance between altruistic versus
self-interested behavior should track closely with exploitative
versus exploratory distributed processing.
When resources are plenty, it makes sense to spread out and explore
the whole territory. Each individual or small cluster can, at
least, survive on whatever they find because resources are plenty,
even if the individual or small cluster is inefficient and wastes a
lot. But when resources become scarce, it makes more sense to move
into an exploitative mode and spend serious effort maximizing the
efficiency for processing what few resources remain.
Now that the USA has squandered much of its resources (selling it
to foreign interests, printing massive amounts of money, selling
off drilling rights, extracting all the nutrient from the soil,
over-fishing the coasts, trading blue- for white-collar skills,
pushing out wildlife by filling every nook and cranny with humans,
etc), it is time for the USA to shift from an exploratory mode to
an exploitative mode. And that means a shift from mostly
self-interested, libertarian behavior to a more altruistic
conservative behavior.
When and if we find a new frontier rich with resources like the
"new world" was, then we can afford to switch back into exploratory
mode and individualism and self-interest will again dominate, as
well it should.
But for this stage in the development of the USA, working for and
encouraging others to work for the common good is the right
approach, the exploitative approach. We need to squeeze the maximum
benefit from each unit of resource left available to us.
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