Inflation in Iraq

Thanks to the blog Opit (whom I believe has new digs over at Opera) for this one – he posted it in response to the post about malnutrition in Africa.

From Yahoo, originally from the Inter-Press news service (who also have article running at the moment that details 2007 being the worst year yet for Iraq):

The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive.

The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008.

…

the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of “insufficient funds and spiralling inflation.”

The cuts, which are to be introduced in the beginning of 2008, have drawn widespread criticism. The Iraqi government is unable to supply the rations with several billion dollars at its disposal, whereas Saddam Hussein was able to maintain the programme with less than a billion dollars.

“In 2007, we asked for 3.2 billion dollars for rationing basic foodstuffs,” Mohammed Hanoun, Iraq’s chief of staff for the ministry of trade told al-Jazeera. “But since the prices of imported foodstuff doubled in the past year, we requested 7.2 billion dollars for this year. That request was denied.”

The trade ministry is now preparing to slash the list of subsidised items by half to five basic food items, “namely flour, sugar, rice, oil, and infant milk,” Hanoun said.

The imminent move will affect nearly 10 million people who depend on the rationing system. But it has already caused outrage in Baquba, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

“The monthly food ration was the only help from the government,” local grocer Ibrahim al-Ageely told IPS. “It was of great benefit for the families. The food ration consisted of two kilos of rice, sugar, soap, tea, detergent, wheat flour, lentils, chick-peas, and other items for every individual.”

Another grocer said the food ration was the “life of all Iraqis; every month, Iraqis wait in queues to receive their food rations.”

According to an Oxfam International report released in July this year, “60 percent (of Iraqis) currently have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 percent in 2004.”

Bugger. I think I’ve made this point with regard to the Chinese government, previously: people will accept non/un/anti-democratic (or otherwise dysfunctional) government, provided that they can at least eat, live in a house, pursue their own happiness as best they can. Take that away, and people start wondering, openly, why you’re the government. In the backs of our minds, we never properly forget that we invented government.

Which would make it suck for the Iraq government. Like any other government, they’re dealing with inflation that is predominantly exogenous – they can only buy what they can afford with the money they had. The fact that Hussein managed to feed people (under wildly different circumstances) will also not help (no, all the shit Hussein also did to them does no matter, because what you and I think is irrelevant to a man who can’t feed his family. That’s just the way it is, and you’re welcome to call a jobless man with hungry children stupid and irrational and ungrateful. In fact, I dare you).

I’d also be interested to see how the US responds to this, both from their administration responsibility perspective (increase aid? Ask for more foreign support? We already saw Africa’s experience with inflation, yesterday), and from the perspective of military occupation (since this problem will also, to some extent (a) affect the costs of the US mission in Iraq, and (b) affect the angriness of the people faced by the US mission in Iraq. Especially if Iraqis decide to blame that mission for the inflation).

Africa aid wiped out by rising cost of oil

In case you missed this one today.

The rising cost of oil has wiped out the benefits many African countries were expecting from western aid and debt relief over the past three years, new research from the International Energy Agency has shown.

…

Africa enjoyed a surge in western engagement during the UK’s presidency of the Group of Eight leading industrialised countries, culminating in a commitment by world leaders to a broad package of debt relief and increased aid at the 2005 Gleneagles summit in Scotland. But since then oil prices have steadily risen towards $100 a barrel.

Surveying 13 non-oil-producing African countries, including South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Senegal, the IEA found that the increase in the cost of oil bought by the countries since 2004 was equivalent to 3 per cent of combined GDP.

This was more than the sum of debt relief and aid received over the past three years by the countries, which have a combined population of 270m, of whom 104m live on less than $1 a day.

The IEA’s warning comes as Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade said “crippling” oil prices threatened to provoke “unrest and violence” in Africa.

Score.

Gender quotas in Norway quite the success

From yeterday’s Guardian:

Almost a quarter of Norway’s companies have failed to comply with a controversial law requiring them to increase the proportion of women on their boards to 40%, according to government figures. If they do not promote more women, they could be shut down.

Norway’s 487 public limited companies, including 175 firms listed on the Oslo stock exchange, have until the end of the year on Monday to implement a 2003 act that requires firms to boost the number of female directors.

…

The quota law was the brainchild of an unlikely feminist: a 52-year-old Conservative trade and industry secretary and former businessman, Ansgar Gabrielsen, who served in a previous cabinet. Gabrielsen’s focus was less about gender equality and more about “the fact that diversity is a value in itself, that it creates wealth.

“I could not see why, after 25-30 years of having an equal ratio of women and men in universities and with having so many educated women with experience, there were so few of them on boards,” he said.

“From my time in the business world, I saw how board members were picked: they come from the same small circle of people. They go hunting and fishing together. They’re buddies.”

Very interesting. One rarely sees the argument in favour of a quota explained so clearly. They aren’t standard: quotas for minority places in Universities, for example, can run in real trouble as move farther down the table of University prestige – mostly because the discrimination begins at birth. By the time everyone is 18 or 19, it’s a bit late to force Universities (or the workplace) to fix things. For women in the workforce, though, Gabrielsen makes an excellent argument: why be like Australia, with women effectively taxed out of the workplace while we suffer a shortage of skilled labour?

I think the argument that diversity creates wealth, while the status quo merely secures it (for the status quo) is incredibly sound. Just look at politics in the US – 97ish percent incumbency rates in the Senate, a current White House administration that began with a Boys’ Club extending back to Nixon. Who could seriously argue that this is fostering the greatest level of innovation and creativity in solving the country’s problems? A little diversity in any government wouldn’t hurt (getting women and minorities through preselection/primaries, of course, is another matter).

Move Beijing to … somewhere else

While my wife and her friend watch seriously weird-ass Russian Winnie-the-Pooh clips (their laptop is turned away from me. I read the books. Everything else was a crime against A. A. Milne). China Dialogue has a truly fascinating article up at the moment. Originally from FTChinese.com.

China really should consider moving the capital away from Beijing. Any nation, particularly a major power, should choose a location for its capital that allows growth and can respond to challenges. The historical advantages that led Beijing to become China’s capital no longer exist, and the location’s disadvantages are becoming ever more apparent.

Yes, the article is an argument that Beijing will not hold as China’s capital (like I said – fascinating). Why move?

First: the location is no longer strategic:

Modern communications and transportation mean there is no need for today’s “emperors” to stay within easy reach of the borders. Ever since the Opium Wars, China’s military threats have come from the east, not the north. The Mongols were pacified, the Soviet Union collapsed and we are on friendly terms with Russia. Keeping the capital in Beijing does not keep us closer to our allies.

Second: the location is not proximate to the clean water that a city of 20m people needs:

Quenching Beijing’s thirst has already meant tapping the Hai River and water from neighbouring provinces. Now the Han River is to be diverted for a huge project transferring water from the south to the north. The impact of this project on the lower reaches of the Han River should not be underestimated. It will not necessarily solve water problems in the north, but it may well destroy the environment in the south. Beijing may have moved the Shougang steel plant for the sake of its air quality, but it continues to develop water-intensive industry. Why not move the industry and resources where there is more water?

Third: Beijing cannot handle the growth:

The centre of power in any country will gather resources towards itself and that will attract people from elsewhere – at home and abroad – to come seek their fortunes. They have every right to do so, and this should not be restricted, but inevitably the pressures on the city are increased … Leaving Beijing as the capital may be the biggest possible mistake.

Their conclusion:

If China were to select a new capital, the ideal location would be a small- or medium-sized city, with undeveloped land for construction, around the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Such a geographic location would have high environmental capacity and land for government buildings – unlike an already developed city.

Now, to the issues not addressed. I ran through the urbanisation issues back during the Summer. Specifically, I discussed the wonderful book, Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis. In it, he uses (2003) UN HABITAT data to estimate urban slum populations. Guess who wins? China. With 193.8m people and a proportion (urban population that can be categorised as ’slum’) of 37%. This isn’t the highest proportion (Ethiopa and Chad rode that in with – no kidding – 99.4%), but it is definitely the greatest number. Using the same data, Beijing had – then – a little over 10m people. So build that sort of population growth into the slums as well, and figure out that magnitude.

So to the issue not addressed. If Beijing packs up and moves, will it take those people with it? Some, sure. And many more will re-migrate – but many, many millions will not. Who will care, then, for the resource-poor, slum-laden, destitute Beijing that is no longer the capital of China?

The second issue is the resource use. This (a) will involve a fucking tonne of bad-for-the-environment trucking, shipping, cement, contstruction, steel – you name it; (b) the relocation itself will (i) be expensive, financially and environmentally, and (ii) subsume a lot of public money that will be lost to human, social and environmental capital investment.

Yes, I realise I sound like a (profane) misery-guts. I can’t help it. I just can’t help it. This argument, while – as I said – fascinating, strikes as the urban planning equivalent of loosening one’s belt a few notches, as the solution to obesity. China should, sustainably, channel the resources required into Beijing, constrain urban sprawl/density, deal with urban migration, etc. etc. Yeah – I’m glad it’s not my problem, don’t get me wrong. It’s a wicked problem and I’d be an old man fast if I had to worry about fixing it. What an interesting debate this could become, though.

New York City: curb your damn UPS trucks

Walking downtown to meet the missus today. This was just in Little Italy, but I went via Prince St/Broadway to go to Best Buy. This is only to explain how I came to be at this intersection (click for the large version):

The corner of Spring and Crosby, to get coffee (there’s a Starbucks franchise under the scaffolding). Now to the problem. Sadly, this picture was not taken this afternoon because, this afternoon, the part of Crosby St directly in front of this street view contained the following. On our left, two UPS trucks: one right on the corner (nearer to the corner than where you currently also see a truck), one directly behind it (parked, curbside, on deliveries). On our right, a third freaking UPS truck, also parked curbside. Between these was another truck, trying to get any sort of visibility whatsover – i.e. sticking its idiot front out into the traffic on Spring Street itself. Unbelievable.

Back in 1986, the New York Times had a story about UPS owing the city USD1.2m in fines (story behind the wall). More recently (thank you, Lexis Nexis) the Washington Times reminds us that the practice hasn’t changed (also behind a wall):

… records obtained through the DMV’s Office of General Counsel showed that on a typical day earlier this year, UPS owed $28,755 on 471 open tickets.

That’s second only to its competitor FedEx Corp., which had 493 open tickets for $30,630. Each company had more than 100 vehicles ticketed. The only other company with more than $10,000 in open tickets was Verizon, owing $10,430 on 289 tickets.

A UPS spokesman said the company encourages its drivers not to get tickets, but added the tickets are sometimes an unavoidable cost of doing business.

“We train our drivers to try to avoid tickets, but we have to provide service to our customers,” said spokesman Malcolm Berkley.

Mr. Berkley also said UPS has enrolled in parking-adjudication programs in other cities such as San Francisco and New York City. “It’s a vehicle that allows us to manage the tickets we do receive,” he said.

It’s commonly-known that UPS treats parking fines as an ordinary cost of doing business as UPS. Back in 2006 the NY Daily News covered the complaint specifically with regard to this city:

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly blasted a city policy that allows FedEx, UPS and other delivery companies to defy parking rules without punishment – while average New Yorkers get socked with tickets.

Kelly said guidelines that permit delivery giants to clog streets by double parking without punishment for up to three hours should be reined in.

“Does that make sense? Is that common sense living in this 8.1 million-population city?” Kelly asked the City Council.

“You can double-park and unload a commercial vehicle for three hours and that’s considered expeditious parking.”

Kelly’s words resonated on the city’s crowded streets, where many New Yorkers slammed the three-hour grace period crafted by the city Finance Department.

“They park out here all day,” said Manhattan handyman Mike Pau, pointing to trucks double-parked along 47th St. near Fifth Ave. “It’s like their office.”

Kelly said the grace period should be shrunk to 30 minutes – and only if there are no legit spots nearby.

The delivery outfits get the grace period on top of another city perk that allows them to avoid paying full price for all their parking tickets. Since July 2004, City Hall has offered companies a chance to pay reduced fines in exchange for dropping their right to go before a judge.

“It’s not fair,” said Mark Carbone, 55, a precious-metal buyer. “I’m here two minutes and I get a ticket.”

But jeweler Leon Garadet, 25, saw wisdom in the perks. “They deliver millions of dollars of merchandise,” he said. “It’s important for the economy.”

That last line is ridiculous: M. Garadet might be reminded that everybody living and working in New York City is responsible for billions of dollars of merchandise – but they all get their cars towed or clamped. So what we have here is the twin system: preventive taxation for ordinary individuals (or small businesses), but mere revenue-raising off the backs of bigger companies like UPS and FedEx.

Seriously, though, the situation this afternoon was just moronic. For a start, why can’t UPS figure out how to use only one truck for deliveries in a single set of city blocks in lower Manhattan? Thus, the question: how to figure out a system by which to make UPS bloody-well behave? The administrators at/of Long Beach figured out that day-trippers were treating the parking fine as an ordinary cost of the day at the beach – so they jacked up the fines (significantly).

Would the same work with UPS? No. The costs would simply be passed along to consumers (more than not), while businesses would hammer the City over the policies. The Washington Times article, for example, specifically discusses the use of fleet-adjudication programmes to pay fines in toto, per month. Escalation? Good luck towing a UPS truck (and, probably, sorting out the lawsuits from people who needed the things that had been inside). Same for clamping them.

My plan!

Part 1: a stated hierarchy of violations. The one I saw this afternoon, for example: Class 1. Random double-parking can be, say, Class 3. Doing so in narrow mid-town cross-streets can be Class 2. You get the idea. If you’re the third UPS truck and you block up a street by parking next to two others, you should absolutely be hammered for it.

Part 2: Come the end of the month, businesses should attract a progressive rate of taxation on parking violations, case-mix-adjusted. UPS pay fines at an increasing marginal rate, the more violations they collect. If UPS breach pre-specified thresholds (too many overall, too many Class 1’s, etc.) they cop real punishment: punitive levels of taxation, limits to the number of trucks they can operate in the city. Something.

That’s my plan. If UPS wants to treat every street like a potential parking-space, fine – but we can, very easily, produce the incentives required to at least have them do it in a manner that minimises our inconvenience or endangerment.

Unintended humour

Now, I’m fairly Peter Singer, 12 Monkeys animal-rightsish. You could, with some success, round most of my morals up into Bad Things Shouldn’t Happen To Children Or Animals. I hate zoos.

So it is that I don’t usually react well to stories about “monstrous” sharks, tigers, etc. “attacking” people. If, say, some French guys came, kidnapped you, took you back to France and locked you up, I’m pretty sure that you’d try to escape. If you went camping, I’m pretty sure that you’d build a fire. It’s called being a human. When sharks “attack”, they’re just being sharks. If we’re going to share their water, we need to accept that.

So it comes to the story about the tiger escaping from a zoo in San Francisco. I’ve ignored it up until this, in today’s Huffington Post:

“Human involvement”? You mean, say, taking a tiger out of tiger-world and putting the tiger in the middle of San Francisco? Yeah – I’m pretty sure human involvement goes a bloody long way towards explaining the tragic death of an innocent teenager. He belonged in the city. A tiger doesn’t.

HIV testing, opting out, public health and civil liberties

Here’s an interesting question: should pregnant US mothers have more access to civil liberties than me? My wife mentioned this story:

New Jersey will require all pregnant women to be tested for HIV unless they opt out under legislation signed into law today by Richard Codey, the Senate president serving as acting governor while Jon Corzine is on vacation.

…

Codey, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate, said it is modeled after recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a 2006 report, the CDC estimated that the rate of transmission during childbirth might be reduced to less than 2 percent from about 25 percent with a combination of universal screening, preventative drugs, Cesarean delivery and avoidance of breast feeding.

The number of children in the U.S. reported with AIDS attributed to HIV transmission during childbirth declined to 48 in 2004 from a peak of 945 in 1992, primarily because of the identification of infected pregnant women and the effectiveness of preventative drugs in reducing mother-to-child transmission, according to the CDC report.

Although she probably read it elsewhere (my wife is not a Bloomberg reader, as far as I’m aware).

My first reaction was to ponder the legislation-ness of it all – as opposed to something more English, which would be offering financial incentives to GPs/hospitals who perform X% of tests on their pregnant mothers. Trust me – it’s a sure thing. Although I haven’t (and, in all likelihood, won’t) read the legislation itself, this just seemed like non-funded command and control. The news articles I’ve seen have yet to mention how the initiative is to be funded, beyond saying things like “health care providers will …”. I’ve seen the shunting back-and-forth of bills between providers and my insurance company, from my medical tests for my spouse’s visa: nobody wants to pay for this stuff.

Which leads to the question. Pregnant mothers have the right to opt-out. This is better than opting-in, because it means more women “submit” to the test, hence more tests, more cases identified and, critically, more cases prevented. This is a public health issue, after all: HIV is a communicable disease. It’s used to keep immigrants out, and I have to get tested as a matter of course, when applying for my residency. Only I didn’t get to opt out.

Now, I’m not American: I don’t get the Bill of Rights automatically (necessarily) – that’s fine. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), for example though, specifically identified the opt-out clause as a criticial civil liberties issue, without which they would not have supported New Jersey’s initiative. My question is, why? Given that this is a public health issue, do ‘we’ not have as much right to prevent HIV-positive children being born into the US (and, remember, this is not a Eugenic issue: if the mother is identified, she can still have a child, it’s just that we have the opportunity to prevent transmission of the disease to the newborn) as we reserve to prevent HIV-positive people immigrating into the US?

And that’s the question. I’m not suggesting that pregnant women be forced to have HIV tests; nor am I arguing that immigrants be allowed to opt-out. I’m just suggesting that a double-standard exists here, where I don’t believe it should (or, at least, stand un-addressed by the debate).

The “healthy retiree” bias just became stronger

The “healthy retiree” bias runs thus – particularly in the US: if you’re healthy, you’re more likely to retire; if you are not healthy, you are more likely to need employer-provided medical insurance, so you are less likely to retire (Michael Moore’s Sicko had at least one such example). This is, necessarily, confounded by income (i.e. if you can afford to self-insure, the problem goes away, but health and wealth are concordant goods).

So to the news! They are discussing, over at the Wall Street Journal, the ruling, by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that employer synchronisation of retiree health benefits with Medicare is not unjust discrimination according to age:

Employers who provide retiree health benefits generally “coordinate” those benefits with Medicare by supplementing the government healthcare or by offering retirees a “bridge” benefit to cover health expenses after employees retire until they become Medicare-eligible. Until the 2000 interpretation, employers believed that the ADEA permitted them to coordinate any retiree health benefits they provided with Medicare without having to ensure that the benefits received by Medicare-eligible retirees were the same as those received by younger retirees.

To correct the problem, the new regulation provides an exemption for ADEA coverage for this common and longstanding employer practice. The Commission voted to approve this regulation on April 22, 2004, but the AARP sued the EEOC in early 2005 to prevent its publication. After several years of litigation, the EEOC emerged victorious as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the rule was “a reasonable, necessary and proper exercise of [EEOC’s] authority.”

EEOC Legal Counsel Reed Russell said, “Our rule makes clear that it is lawful for employers to continue to provide retirees with the health benefits they currently receive. Contrary to what some interest groups have erroneously asserted, the rule will not require any cuts to retiree benefits.”

I imagine the rule will not – it will, however, allow those cuts, as well as allowing more (or all of any new) money to flow to new retirees – read Baby Boomers. Is this age-discrimination? Yes – and the EEOC as much as admits it. Over at the WSJ:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found in favor of the federal government. But, the court added, “we recognize with some dismay that the proposed exemption may allow employers to reduce health benefits to retirees over the age of 65 while maintaining greater benefits for younger retirees.”

Although one can (and no doubt several did) make the argument that, as far as equity goes, there’s no reason why two discrete(ish) sets of retirees should receive equal compensation, when the Boomer set probably contributed more, while they worked.

So why exclude this practice from coverage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)? Because if the complaint was upheld the employers would probably have dropped the whole thing for everyone, where they could. Does the Federal government want a world in which Boomers retire, with only the Federal government to pay for their care? Of course not. They’d have to put our tax dollars to some kind of practical use in terms of American human and social capital. Can’t have that.

Once again, though, we see more patchwork palliatives for the actual problem – escalating health care costs. I’m sure messing about with the COBRA laws is next.

Measurement and malnutrition (and media)

Reading the IHT on my phone over lunch:

Child malnutrition rates have increased sharply in Darfur, even though it is home to the world’s largest aid operation, according to a new United Nations report.

The report showed that 16.1 percent of children affected by the conflict in Darfur, a vast, turbulent region in western Sudan, are acutely malnourished, compared with 12.9 percent last year. For the first time since 2004, the malnutrition rate, a gauge of the population’s overall distress, has crossed what UN officials consider to be the emergency threshold.

Just as important, the increase has occurred despite the efforts of more than 12,000 relief workers in Darfur, drawing from an annual aid budget of about a billion dollars. Aid officials said they were concerned that even with all these resources, the situation for the people in Darfur seemed to be getting worse.

Annoyingly, I cannot find the freakin’ report. Which is more than somewhat annoying. Google is letting me down. Also, it seems Somalia feels like it has missed the media cycle (joining the world media club – alumni including Kashmir, Bosnia, the West Bank, Uganda, the Congo, Tibet …).

However. Back to the story.

The report seems to confirm what aid officials in Darfur have been saying for months: that the increasingly chaotic security situation, both inside the enormous camps of displaced people and in the desiccated rural areas that are very difficult to reach even in the best of times, has gotten to the point that it is hampering the delivery of much-needed emergency food. The report said there was an “urgent need to improve security conditions.”

…

The new UN report was based on information collected in August and September from thousands of Darfurians affected by the conflict, including those living in squalid camps (the United Nations estimates roughly 2.2 million people have been displaced by fighting). The report cited “consistently poor infant and young child feeding practices” and a “deterioration in the overall food security situation.”

The report also showed that the percentage of Darfurians growing their own crops had decreased this year compared with last. The people surveyed said that insecurity and a lack of access to their farms were the main reasons, though Sudanese officials have hypothesized that some Darfurians may have simply grown dependent on food aid and chosen to stop farming.

Malnutrition was highest among young children, between 6 months and 29 months old, and in the North Darfur state, which is sparsely populated and very dry.

The statistics part – and this is why I wanted to find the report – has to do with the numbers because, as I began reading the story, an alternate/confounding explanation entered my head. What if (a) with more refugees, more people may be leaving? Healthier people, probably, make it out – leaving sicker people behind. Hence, up go the malnutrition rates, but not the numbers; or (b) the mortality rates for those kids are inversely related – meaning fewer kids are dying, but the next category up is living with malnutrition. Up go the numbers and the rates, but they represent kids that don’t die anymore.

Hence my desire to see the report (I think it’s the millenium goals one, also viewable here – for which it is not worth my while to pay USD20 for the statistical compendium, for one blog post). I want to see the numbers.

I’m not arguing that Darfur is full of rainbows and blue helmets, or anything, mind: this is just my statistics eye opening. I should be very surprised indeed if there’s anything at all redeeming in the numbers. The Econometrician part of my brain would also dearly like to start quantifying the money and the health outcomes. Which I choose to believe does not mean that I’m completely messed-up. Opinions differ.

HowTo: Altruism and the “Warm Glow” effect

Being that ’tis the season and all. I’ll put Indigenous health outcomes work aside for the moment. Wait. Those two weren’t related.

Also, this really should be properly referenced, but odds are that I won’t bother.

Why do we ‘give’? Where does altruism come from? We’ve certainly had the Smithian perspective punched into our brains since before we learned to love Billy Bragg (not you? Oh):

… man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old cloaths which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old cloaths which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, cloaths, or lodging, as he has occasion.

Adam Smith manages the issue reasonably well. The trouble is our interpretation of benevolence. People do things out of self-interest, by which law most altruism is irrational. Some is not: giving to charity in times of national (or other crises) are self-interested in a social capital, fabric-of-society kind of way. It can preserve markets, prevent the spread of disease, etc. When a mining company builds a hospital in South Africa it is not benevolence, per se, but an attempt to keep its workforce healthy enough to work.

Some altruism – a lot of altruism – however, does not qualify thus. It is just … irrational. How is it in my self-interest, then, to keep dollars in my pockets, when I’m in the city, to give to people who ask for them? I’m not religious – there is no theological trope guiding my Samaritanism (although the morality is functionally the same – something that will come up later) – I get nothing from it.

In fact this is not the case. I could experience the “warm glow effect” each time – that is, the warm glow of having done something nice for my fellow person (or animal, or tree – I’m a freakin’ hippy, after all). The same effect has been attributed to the receipt of gifts (i.e. why do we feel gratitude for things we don’t want? Because it’s the thought that counts, not the practical utility generated by the good or service given). The warm glow effect is/can be why we donate to charity, or give blood, or pay a quarter for lemonade that you just know is going to taste way too sour and, paradoxically, way too sweet. I say it can be why we act charitably: the warm glow may be merely the effect of the act, but what happens if it also becomes the motivation for the act? If we pursue the warm glow effect, of course, we are no longer altruistic.

Caveat. I’ll insert, here, early work into ‘impure altruism’. Suppose a hat was passed and you saw every one of your peers give – would you? Of course, whether you felt like it or not. That is impure altruism: no warm glow, just the avoidance of cold stares and an empty feeling inside as your peers think you’re a dick. Jon Elster described it as not an absence of self-interest, but a need to be perceived to be motivated by something other than self-interest.

So interesting is this problem, in fact, that Elsevier has dedicated an entire of their Handbooks series to it: The Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism. We can use Jon Elster’s contibution to build upon the understanding started with Smith. He demonstrates, in this chapter, that many things can mimic altruism.

Interest can mimic altruism. He argues more generally that prudence can mimic morality (just as my morality, from above, can mimic Samaritanism): (i) we may ‘do the right thing’ because we understand that, ultimately, it is in our interests (giving blood, donating to hurricane relief); (ii) we may ‘do the right thing’ because in a social exchange of kindnesses, more kindnesses may flow back to us (Kolm’s reciprocity. Any Corporation pursuing goodwill is an example).

An extension of part (i) is pursued in Ythier’s chapter from the same handbook: the economic theory of gift-giving. In certain social constructs, the interdependence of utilities will mean that altruism is, again, hard to pick: I will do things for my wife, as a rule. Do I do these things because my welfare loss (of, say, mere money) is compensated for by the welfare gain I experience from the gain in my wife’s welfare? Elster calls this “other-regarding self-interest” – it is not altruism. Do I do these things even though I suffer a net welfare loss? That would be altruism. Do I do these things without regard for my net welfare at all? That is also altruism. Here’s a final kick: do I do these things because I just don’t think about such things, all that much? That’s not altruism. Per se: I do such things for many people. And animals, and trees, etc. My guess is that I have a little difference engine hard-wired into my brain that says, if someone needs something, they will probably benefit from the resource more than me, so I give it up. I don’t even get that much of a warm glow. I just don’t think that much about it. Is being a soft touch altruism?

Passion can mimic altruism. This too is impure altruism. From Elster’s chapter:

The desire to be well thought of by others, independently of their capacity to confer material rewards or punishments, can be a powerful mechanism for mimicking motives that one does not really feel. Equally strong, perhaps stronger, is the desire not to be badly thought of. These desires are linked to the emotions of pride and shame that guide a large part of human behavior.

In what he calls the transmutation of motivations, Elster identifies the question of altruism: is it possible and knowable? So many motivations can produce acts that are attributable to altruism, and often precisely because they will generate that conflation:

Let me conclude by reconsidering the person who drops money into the collection box of an empty church. What might his motivation be? One possibility is that he is trying to buy salvation. Various theologians tell us that this aim is unattainable, since salvation is essentially a byproduct of actions undertaken for other reasons [Elster (1983b, Chapter II)]. Yet many believers have tried to attain it, some by donating money and others by choosing martyrdom. Another possibility is that he is trying to gratify the inner audience, not only by his donation but by the apparently virtuous choice of a place for giving where he cannot be observed. A third possibility is that he wants to help others in need, that the collection box was simply a convenient vehicle for the donation, and that he would have chosen it even had others been present to observe him. Until the day scientists can conduct brain scans at a distance, we shall not know.

So, in the end, I have tricked you. There is no “How To” of altruism. It either is, or it isn’t, and you will almost never truly be able to infer whether or not it was. Sure, when you observe someone (maybe me) give a bum 2 dollars, it could be. You might, however, be seeing a guy trying to impress a girl. You might be seeing a guy hoping to get into heaven (not understanding that that isn’t how it works – if heaven is his motiviation. At least as far as I understand it). If you see someone give money to a pan-handler on the train, it might be altruism. It might be a guy trying to impress the rest of the train. It might be a guy trying to not be scorned by the others on the train. It might be a guy trying to get the pan-handler the hell out of his carriage. It might be a guy who’s son ran away, who gives money away in the hopes that it makes some karmic difference. None of these are altruism, and you’ll never pick those people apart from the guy who does it because he genuinely wants the pan-handler to have a better day than yesterday.

In general what you observe is, sadly (or not – remember: whatever the motivation, if the act is the same, with the same outcome, who cares? Beggars cannot be choosers. If I have a church to build, do I really have the time to care about why a person is donating the money?), not altruism. Politicians, corporate goodwill, Big Oil and their ‘green’ agendas. You name it, I can cynic it into not making you smile anymore. And I’m probably right. Cynicism is a natural reaction that we have to people mis-representing their motivations, and we do this because there is a hierarchicy of motivations in society – and their has been since the Ancient Greeks. If you do something out of Pride, but pretend that it is Altruism, it is because Altruism is noble. Cynicism is just the way that we try to filter bullshit.

During the course of my Eco 1 class, our textbook contains a discussion of the Tsunami from 2 years ago. At the time, Americans (for example – it’s an American text, after all) gave for days. The generosity was tremendous. The result? For the subsequent year, American and other charities found that they received less. American households (and, by extension, others) have a budget; they have a sense for the limits of net welfare gain or limited welfare loss that they’re achieving with their charity, and they do not give beyond that.

The key is that altruism is never irrational. Even within the idea of the bounded rationality of people, generally, altruism (pure or impure) is a rational thing, according to the utility functions that you cannot observe. If you’re still interested, I recommend Altruists.org – specifically, their references page. It is naive and optimistic, frankly, but nobody was ever truly the worse for that.