The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Another activity that isn’t celebrated as charity is what Robin has called “marginal charity.”65 Here the idea is to nudge our personal decisions just slightly (marginally) in the direction that’s beneficial to others. Normally we try to optimize for our own private gain. When a property development firm is planning to build a new apartment complex, for example, they’ll crunch a few numbers to determine the most profitable height for the building—10 stories, say. But what’s optimal for the developer isn’t necessarily optimal for the neighborhood. Regulations, for example, might make it difficult to get building permits, which can result in housing shortages. So if the developer built 11 stories instead of 10, it would reduce their profit by only a tiny amount, but it would add a bunch of new apartments to the neighborhood. In terms of providing value to others, marginal charity is extremely efficient. It does a substantial amount of good for others at very little cost to oneself. (In other words, it has an incredible ROD.) But at the same time, marginal charity utterly fails as a way to advertise good qualities.