Altruism in governance: Insight from randomized training
Sultan Mehmood (New Economic School), Shaheen Naseer (Lahore School of Economics) and Daniel L. Chen (Toulouse School of Economics)
GPI Working Paper No. 7 - 2022, published in the Toulouse School of Economics Working Paper series and in the Journal of Development Economics
Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments in policy scenarios. Overall, our results underscore that the utility of empathy can be a parsimonious foundation for the formation of prosociality, even impacting the behavior of adults in the field.
Other working papers
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A decision theory is fanatical if it says that, for any sure thing of getting some finite amount of value, it would always be better to almost certainly get nothing while having some tiny probability (no matter how small) of getting sufficiently more finite value. Fanaticism is extremely counterintuitive; common sense requires a more moderate view. However, a recent slew of arguments purport to vindicate it, claiming that moderate alternatives to fanaticism are sometimes similarly counterintuitive, face a powerful continuum argument…
Choosing the future: Markets, ethics and rapprochement in social discounting – Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Geoffrey Heal (Columbia University)
This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. …
Economic inequality and the long-term future – Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen) and Daan Juijn (CE Delft)
Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects…