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Strange7 comments on Stupid Questions September 2015 - Less Wrong
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It's an investment.
When you have some asset that you don't immediately need, and somebody else would be able to make better use of it, renting it out or giving it away enriches the whole system. Then you get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits. Your quality of life is better when you live somewhere with reliable electricity, uncensored internet, and trivial access to potable water, right? A fancy car isn't much fun without fuel or decent roads.
Helping somebody on an altruistic basis is just another transfer of resources toward where they'll be used more efficiently. It's less directly profitable to the donor than sale or rent, but reduced transaction costs and targeting explicitly based on need means the net societal benefit can be greater.
Maximizing overall QALYs may be, in itself, a less efficient way to improve the society you live in than slanting toward helping your immediate social circle, municipality, or nation, but it's easier for everyone to agree on, and every dollar or man-hour spent on arguments is one less to spend on getting the actual work done. Besides, we live in a world where more of the mercury contaminating fish in Lake Michigan comes from industry in China than from local sources. You never know whose problems might land in your back yard, so just go ahead and solve all of them.
All that social stuff, instinctive empathy and cultural expectations alike, is secondary. It developed so people can do the right thing without needing to understand why it's the right thing.
The "uncensored internet" part is going to be hard for places like UK and Australia, but anyway, you seem to be arguing that it is the propensity for charity (or altruism) which drives economic progress. Charitable populations live in rich systems and uncharitable ones continue to wallow in poverty. That's an... interesting viewpoint. Are you sure you thought it through?
That doesn't seem to be true at all.
Do you? Or you are so unfocused you solve none of them?
"Let's help everyone equally, or in proportion to their needs or something" is easier to agree on than "let's devote the entire GDP of Russia to my personal enjoyment, and maybe my friends and allies in proportion to their loyalty." With the former, people quibble over definitions and in-groups and details of implementation; the latter, even Putin dares not propose openly.
I'm not claiming that propensity to charity or altruism causes, or even particularly correlates with, economic development. I'm just saying that economic development is good, and that it's marginally better for the world economy when some excess food goes to a human who'll eat it, rather than sitting in some warehouse until it rots, even (perhaps especially) if the human in question can't afford to buy food at the going market rate. When rational people see something being squandered, they prefer to throw that resource into charity, where it will do some good, rather than preserve the wasteful status quo.
You start with the especially vast, horrific problems which can be sorted out cheaply, like scurvy and polio and malaria, then proceed to more complicated, less severe stuff as returns begin to diminish. That's the whole idea of evaluating medical interventions in terms of dollars-per-QALY, isn't it?
No need to propose it openly and Putin does it openly enough -- and still gets 80%+ approval ratings :-/
So you are not insisting on the "get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits" claim?
As a general claim, that's complicated. The main problems go by the name of "moral hazard" and "instilling dependency" and they are not just theoretical. I don't have links at hand, but I believe it was shown that, for example, massive shipments of used clothing from the West into Africa ("rather than throwing it into trash give it to someone who can use it") basically decimated the local clothing industry.
I am not saying "never give anything to anyone", I'm saying that the situation is much more complicated than you make it look like and it's not hard to do more harm than good by giving out free goods.
Your last point strikes me as a truism and distraction. The question is what motivates overall QALY maximization. Parent's point was that resources should be used where they can most effectively increase QALY, and that possibly comes down to both intrinsic motivation (I don't need it, they need it, it just fits nicely) and extrinsic motivation (direct reward through hard-wired empathy and social reward through philanthropy meme).