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.