This blog is no more,it has ceased to be...

Blog Closed

This blog is closing effective from today April 4th. Current posts will be available here for the next few weeks and we will update here when it is being taken down fully. However, this is the last post and we will not be maintaining comment sections or links on the blog. This is a good time to do this as I will be moving academic departments and, even though I will still be heavily involved in projects ongoing in the Institute, it would be difficult to run a blog under the Geary label and messy to hand over. I emailed all the other people who have contributed multiple posts here over the last couple of years and this came out as the best solution. We will definitely all continue to post and talk about economics in different venues. Martin Ryan was responsible for an awful lot of the very good information that drove the blog. I know a lot of people are grateful to him for his work on this. Thanks very much to everyone for reading and I hope people who are interested in the topics here will continue to keep in touch with me and the other contributors to the blog.

Blog

My role in the Institute will be changing in the next few months as I am changing departments, and while I still will be involved with Geary, my posts will have a different emphasis, so I have set up my own page and twitter account. I will crosspost for the next little while.

Singer - The life you can save

Spent some of this morning with Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save". A really interesting and provocative book posing the ethical question as to how much money people should give to others in need. He argues that those who can have a compelling moral obligation to tithe part of their income to organisations who are genuinely saving the lives of poor people. He argues that this obligation is as pressing as the obligation to rescue a child who is in danger of drowning if you are walking past.

He uses the vignette (due to Peter Unger) of the man who sees a child playing on a train track who is oblivious to an oncoming train. The man is too far away to catch the child's attention. However, he can flick a switch to get the train to divert down a sidetrack. Unfortunately his prized sports car is down this side-track. The man has cared for this car for a long time and was eventually going to sell it to partly fund his retirement. There is noone else around and presumably no cameras. Nobody is going to know if he doesn't flick the switch. He decides not to and the child presumably is obliterated by the ongoing train. Singer argues that not giving money to aid organisations that have demonstrated their effectiveness is equivalent to not throwing the switch. He spends some time arguing against common ideas about the ineffectiveness of philantrophy,arguing that is now possible without substantial effort to locate agencies that are saving lives. He then turns to the question of human nature and why it is that we do not give. He cites studies from Harbaugh and others showing that giving actually improves well-being and draws from the literature of Vohs and others arguing that money itself may distort the expression of people's preferences through priming them to think differently about issues than if they thought about them as pure resource allocation problems. He draws from behavioural economics to suggest that inertia may be a key force and argues for the use of more effective marketing and also the use of default options, whereby company employees would be opted into donations to effective aid organisations and given the option to opt-out.

This book certainly made me think fresh about an issue I have thought about since I was a small child. In some sense, it is most profound and compelling question of them all, as to our duty in a world where there is avoidable suffering.

Unanticipated Interpersonal and Societal Consequences of Choice

Thanks to Clare for pointing me to this paper forthcoming in Psychological Science by Savani, Stevens and Markus. Abstract below.

Abstract
Choice makes North Americans feel more in control, free, and independent, and thus has many positive consequences for individuals’ motivation and well-being. We report five studies that uncover novel consequences of choice for public policy and
interpersonal judgments. Studies 1-3 found that activating the concept of choice decreases support for policies promoting intergroup equality (e.g., affirmative action) and societal benefits (e.g., reducing environmental pollution), but increases support for policies promoting individual rights (e.g., legalizing drugs). Studies 4 and 5 found that activating the concept of choice increases victim-blaming and decreases empathy for disadvantaged others. Study 5 found that choice does not decrease Indians’ empathy for disadvantaged individuals, indicating that these effects of choice are culture specific. This research suggest that the well-known positive consequences of choice for individuals can be accompanied by an array of previously unexamined and potentially negative consequences for others and for society.