Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
The charity tax
The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.5 for an in-state charity and $1.4 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower utility of the potential donors.
via Marginal Revolution: The charity tax.
We hate not doing/giving, but we don’t have enough resources to be very generous. This produces guilt. This guilt lowers our self-image. I think this is the mechanism.
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Because there is no reason to stay ignorant for so long
This falsehood … that poor people are out reproducing rich people … is important and interesting in a number of ways. For one thing, it exposes people’s race-based biases and fears. The anger that is expressed at me when I suggest that this is a falsehood is second only to the anger that results from my stance on gun control.1 I find that fascinating. Another, related reason this is interesting is because it exposes people’s ability to maintain their strongly held beliefs and to base those beliefs on the most tenuous or unrelated information. For instance, people are sure that poor people have more babies than rich people because it is well known that the fertility rate in Nigeria is through the roof and over the top, but that White American Middle Classers are reproducing at a rate that is lower than replacement. However, this comparison is wrong for so many reasons that a rational person hearing the argument must surely feel sorry for the person making it.
via The poor and the dark skinned have more babies than the rich and the light skinned : Greg Laden’s Blog.
Philippines
The Philippines’ stalwart consumers saved the economy from the recessions that plagued its more export-dependent neighbors. Remittances proved surprisingly resilient despite the global economic slowdown as Filipino laborers, especially professional or skilled workers, continued to find strong demand overseas. This was partly due to the government’s diligence in forging new hiring agreements with several countries. Unperturbed remittance growth shielded domestic demand from high unemployment rates at home, which is obscured by the country’s very loose definition of employment. In the meantime, however, dependence on external demand for Filipino labor denotes a lack of progress in developing the local economy. Apart from land grabs by Persian Gulf countries, the Philippines has attracted little foreign investment of the kind needed to create jobs and lift Filipinos out of the poverty that afflicts a third of the country’s 90 million people. (For more, see Philippines 2009 Growth Outlook: A Recession-less Bright Spot in Asia?)
via RGE – Are There Bright Spots Amid the Global Recession?.