Red Cross

Empathy is not enough

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 14 JDN 2460325

A review of Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

The title Against Empathy is clearly intentionally provocative, to the point of being obnoxious: How can you be against empathy? But the book really does largely hew toward the conclusion that empathy, far from being an unalloyed good as we may imagine it to be, is overall harmful and detrimental to society.

Bloom defines empathy narrowly, but sensibly, as the capacity to feel other people’s emotions automatically—to feel hurt when you see someone hurt, afraid when you see someone afraid. He argues surprisingly well that this capacity isn’t really such a great thing after all, because it often makes us help small numbers of people who are like us rather than large numbers of people who are different from us.

But something about the book rubs me the wrong way all throughout, and I think I finally put my finger on it:

If empathy is bad… compared to what?

Compared to some theoretical ideal of perfect compassion where we love all sentient beings in the universe equally and act only according to maxims that would yield the greatest benefit for all, okay, maybe empathy is bad.

But that is an impossible ideal. No human being has ever approached it. Even our greatest humanitarians are not like that.

Indeed, one thing has clearly characterized the very best human beings, and that is empathy. Every one of them has been highly empathetic.

The case for empathy gets even stronger if you consider the other extreme: What are human beings like when they lack empathy? Why, those people are psychopaths, and they are responsible for the majority of violent crimes and nearly all the most terrible atrocities.

Empirically, if you look at humans as we actually are, it really seems like this function is monotonic: More empathy makes people behave better. Less empathy makes them behave worse.

Yet Bloom does have a point, nevertheless.

There are real-world cases where empathy seems to have done more harm than good.

I think his best examples come from analysis of charitable donations. Most people barely give anything to charity, which we might think of as a lack of empathy. But a lot of people do give to a great deal to charity—yet the charities they give to and the gifts they give are often woefully inefficient.

Let’s even set aside cases like the Salvation Army, where the charity is actively detrimental to society due to the distortions of ideology. The Salvation Army is in fact trying to do good—they’re just starting from a fundamentally evil outlook on the universe. (And if that sounds harsh to you? Take a look at what they say about people like me.)

No, let’s consider charities that are well-intentioned, and not blinded by fanatical ideology, who really are trying to work toward good things. Most of them are just… really bad at it.

The most cost-effective charities, like the ones GiveWell gives top ratings to, can save a life for about $3,000-5,000, or about $150 to $250 per QALY.

But a typical charity is far, far less efficient than that. It’s difficult to get good figures on it, but I think it would be generous to say that a typical charity is as efficient as the standard cost-effectiveness threshold used in US healthcare, which is $50,000 per QALY. That’s already two hundred times less efficient.

And many charities appear to be even below that, where their marginal dollars don’t really seem to have any appreciable benefit in terms of QALY. Maybe $1 million per QALY—spend enough, and they’d get a QALY eventually.

Other times, people give gifts to good charities, but the gifts they give are useless—the Red Cross is frequently inundated with clothing and toys that it has absolutely no use for. (Please, please, I implore you: Give them money. They can buy what they need. And they know what they need a lot better than you do.)

Why do people give to charities that don’t really seem to accomplish anything? Because they see ads that tug on their heartstrings, or get solicited donations directly by people on the street or door-to-door canvassers. In other words, empathy.

Why do people give clothing and toys to the Red Cross after a disaster, instead of just writing a check or sending a credit card payment? Because they can see those crying faces in their minds, and they know that if they were a crying child, they’d want a toy to comfort them, not some boring, useless check. In other words, empathy.

Empathy is what you’re feeling when you see those Sarah McLachlan ads with sad puppies in them, designed to make you want to give money to the ASPCA.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t give to the ASPCA. Actually animal welfare advocacy is one of those issues where cost-effectiveness is really hard to assess—like political donations, and for much the same reason. If we actually managed to tilt policy so that factory farming were banned, the direct impact on billions of animals spared that suffering—while indubitably enormous—might actually be less important, morally, than the impact on public health and climate change from people eating less meat. I don’t know what multiplier to apply to a cow’s suffering to convert her QALY into mine. But I do know that the world currently eats far too much meat, and it’s cooking the planet along with the cows. Meat accounts for 60% of food-related greenhouse gases, and 35% of all greenhouse gases.

But I am saying that if you give to the ASPCA, it should be because you support their advocacy against factory farming—not because you saw pictures of very sad puppies.

And empathy, unfortunately, doesn’t really work that way.

When you get right down to it, what Paul Bloom is really opposing is scope neglect, which is something I’ve written about before.

We just aren’t capable of genuinely feeling the pain of a million people, or a thousand, or probably even a hundred. (Maybe we can do a hundred; that’s under our Dunbar number, after all.) So when confronted with global problems that affect millions of people, our empathy system just kind of overloads and shuts down.

ERROR: OVERFLOW IN EMPATHY SYSTEM. ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE?

But when confronted with one suffering person—or five, or ten, or twenty—we can actually feel empathy for them. We can look at their crying face and we may share their tears.

Charities know this; that’s why Sarah McLachlan does those ASPCA ads. And if that makes people donate to good causes, that’s a good thing. (If it makes them donate to the Salvation Army, that’s a different story.)

The problem is, it really doesn’t tell us what causes are best to donate to. Almost any cause is going to alleviate some suffering of someone, somewhere; but there’s an enormous difference between $250 per QALY, $50,000per QALY, and $1 million per QALY. Your $50 donation would add either two and a half months, eight hours, or just over 26 minutes of joy to someone else’s life, respectively. (In the latter case, it may literally be better—morally—for you to go out to lunch or buy a video game.)

To really know the best places to give to, you simply can’t rely on your feelings of empathy toward the victims. You need to do research—you need to do math. (Or someone does, anyway; you can also trust GiveWell to do it for you.)

Paul Bloom is right about this. Empathy doesn’t solve this problem. Empathy is not enough.

But where I think he loses me is in suggesting that we don’t need empathy at all—that we could somehow simply dispense with it. His offer is to replace it with an even-handed, universal-minded utilitarian compassion, a caring for all beings in the universe that values all their interests evenly.

That sounds awfully appealing—other than the fact that it’s obviously impossible.

Maybe it’s something we can all aspire to. Maybe it’s something we as a civilization can someday change ourselves to become capable of feeling, in some distant transhuman future. Maybe even, sometimes, at our very best moments, we can even approximate it.

But as a realistic guide for how most people should live their lives? It’s a non-starter.

In the real world, people with little or no empathy are terrible. They don’t replace it with compassion; they replace it with selfishness, greed, and impulsivity.

Indeed, in the real world, empathy and compassion seem to go hand-in-hand: The greatest humanitarians do seem like they better approximate that universal caring (though of course they never truly achieve it). But they are also invariably people of extremely high empathy.

And so, Dr. Bloom, I offer you a new title, perhaps not as catchy or striking—perhaps it would even have sold fewer books. But I think it captures the correct part of your thesis much better:

Empathy is not enough.

What if the charitable deduction were larger?

PNRJ development economics, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 3 JDN 2458791

Right now, the charitable tax deduction is really not all that significant. It makes donating to charity cheaper, but you still always end up with less money after donating than you had before. It might cause you to donate more than you otherwise would have, but you’ll still only give to a charity you already care about.

This is because the tax deduction applies to your income, rather than your taxes directly. So if you make $100,000 and donate $10,000, you pay taxes as if your income were $90,000. Say your tax rate is 25%; then you go from paying $25,000 and keeping $75,000 to paying $22,500 and keeping $67,500. The more you donate, the less money you will have to keep.

Many people don’t seem to understand this; they seem to think that rich people can actually get richer by donating to charity. That can’t be done in our current tax system, or at least not legally. (There are fraudulent ways to do so; but there are fraudulent ways to do lots of things.) Part of the confusion may be related to the fact that people don’t seem to understand how tax brackets work; they worry about being “pushed into a higher tax bracket” as though this could somehow reduce their after-tax income, but that doesn’t happen. That isn’t how tax brackets work.

Some welfare programs work that way—for instance, seeing your income rise high enough to lose Medicaid eligibility can be bad enough that you would prefer to have less income—but taxes themselves do not.

The graph below shows the actual average tax rate (red) and marginal tax rate (purple) of the current US federal income tax:

Average_tax_rate
From that graph alone, you might think that going to a higher tax bracket could result in lower after-tax income. But the next graph, of before-tax (blue) and after-tax (green) income shows otherwise:

After_tax_income

All that tax deductions can do is reduce your taxable income. Thus the tax deduction benefits you if you were already donating, but never leaves you richer than you would have been without donating at all.

For example, if you have an income of $700,000, you would pay $223,000 in taxes and keep $477,000 in after-tax income. If you instead donate $100,000, your adjusted gross income will be reduced to $600,000, you will only pay $186,000 in taxes, and you will keep $414,000 in after-tax income. If there were no tax deduction, you would still have to pay $223,000 in taxes, and your after-tax income would be only $377,000. So you do benefit from the tax deduction; but there is no amount of donation which will actually increase your after-tax income to above $477,000.

But we wouldn’t have to do it this way. We could instead apply the deduction as a tax credit, which would make the effect of the deduction far larger.

Several years back, Miles Kimball (an economist who formerly worked at Michigan, now at UC Boulder) proposed a quite clever change to the tax system:

My proposal is to raise marginal tax rates above about $75,000 per person–or $150,000 per couple–by 10% (a dime on every extra dollar), but offer a 100% tax credit for public contributions up to the entire amount of the tax surcharge.

Kimball’s argument for the policy is mainly that this would make a tax increase more palatable, by giving people more control over where their money goes. This is surely true, and a worthwhile endeavor.

But the even larger benefit might come from the increased charitable donations. If we limited the tax credit to particularly high-impact charities, we would increase the donations to those charities. Whereas in the current system you get the same deduction regardless of where you give your money, even though we know that some charities are literally hundreds of times as cost-effective as others.

In fact, we might not even want to limit the tax credit to that 10% surcharge. If people want to donate more than 10% of their income to high-impact charities, perhaps we should let them. This would mean that the federal deficit could actually increase under this policy, but if so, there would have to be so much money donated that we’d most likely end world hunger. That’s a tradeoff I’m quite willing to make.

In principle, we could even introduce a tax credit that is greater than 100%—say for instance you get a 120% donation for the top-rated charities. This is not mathematically inconsistent, though it is surely a very bad idea. In that case, it absolutely would be possible to end up with more money than you started with, and the richer you are, the more you could get. There would effectively be a positive return on charitable donations, with the money paid for from the government budget. Bill Gates for instance could pay $10 billion a year to charity and the government would not only pay for it, but also have to give him an extra $2 billion. So even for the best charities—which probably are actually a good deal more cost-effective than the US government—we should cap the tax credit at 100%.

Obvious choices for high-impact charities include UNICEF, the Red Cross, GiveDirectly, and the Malaria Consortium. We would need some sort of criteria to decide which charities should get the benefits; I’m thinking we could have some sort of panel of experts who rate charities based on their cost-effectiveness.

It wouldn’t have to be all-or-nothing, either; charities with good but not top ratings could get an increased deduction but not a 100% deduction. The expert panel could rate charities on a scale from 0 to 10, and then anything above 5 gets an (X-5)*10% tax credit.

In effect, the current policy says, “If you give to charity, you don’t have to pay taxes on the money you gave; but all of your other taxes still apply.” The new policy would say, “You can give to a top-impact charity instead of paying taxes.”

Americans hate taxes and already give a lot to charity, but most of those donations are to relatively ineffective charities. This policy could incentivize people to give more or at least give to better places, probably without hurting the government budget—and if it does hurt the government budget, the benefits will be well worth the cost.