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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rooting Hard for Overpriced M&Ms - Less Wrong
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Okay, I've got it. You're a selflessly devoted altruist, and you know that money in your hands doesn't matter any more than money elsewhere - but with a $1 bill, you could generate gains from trade and thereby make the whole world a slightly better place!
Nice. Steven Landsburg once wrote something similar (I think in The Armchair Economist) about how it is wasteful to bend down to pick up a $50 bill off the sidewalk, because the money is a pure transfer and the effort of bending down is a pure social loss.
The problem is that I pretty clearly don't value a random person having the $4 as much as me having it, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of my income I keep, and the part of it that I give away (which is pretty substantial but the Peter Singer argument is always working on me that it should be higher) I give away to really poor people abroad, not to random Americans.