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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Simler
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November 20 - December 9, 2018
In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.”
All else being equal, we prefer our associates—whether friends, lovers, or leaders—to be well off.
Those who are struggling to survive don’t make ideal allies.
No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society.
In some situations, it borders on antisocial to be overly concerned with the welfare of distant strangers.
Original research generates private information about which charities are worthy, but in order to signal how prosocial we are, we need to donate to charities that are publicly known to be worthy.
Because spontaneous giving demonstrates how little choice we have in the matter, how it’s simply part of our character to help the people in front of us.61
“The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”
If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.
We therefore use charity, in part, as a means to advertise some of our good qualities, in particular our wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion.
helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation.
There’s something suspect about wanting to help people who are too remote in space or time.
there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy.
why students go to school and why employers value educated workers.
bartenders with a high school diploma make 61 percent more, and those with a college diploma make an additional 62 percent, relative to their less credentialed peers. For waiters, these gains are 135 percent and 47 percent, and for security guards, they are 60 percent and 29 percent.
words, the value of education isn’t just about learning; it’s also about credentialing.
This works because students who do better in school, over the long run, tend to have greater work potential.
In other words, educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better. Instead, a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.
The traditional view of education is that it raises a student’s value via improvement—by taking in rough, raw material and making it more attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers.
Caplan, for example, estimates that signaling is responsible for up to 80 percent of the total value of education.
the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.).
if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well.
While most fifth graders are strict egalitarians, and prefer to divide things up equally, by late adolescence, most children have switched to a more meritocratic ethos, preferring to divide things up in proportion to individual achievements.34
These sponsors include spouses, parents, employers, and national governments. Each party is hoping to earn a bit of loyalty from the patient in exchange for helping to provide care. In other words, medicine is, in part, an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.”
The dangers of being abandoned when ill—both material and political dangers—explain why sick people are happy to be supported, and why others are eager to provide support.
“See how I help my friends when they’re down? If you’re my friend, I’ll do the same for you.”
by helping people in need, we demonstrate our value as an ally.
what these historical remedies lacked in scientific rigor, they more than made up for through elaborate demonstrations of caring and support from respected, high-status specialists.
Our seemingly “personal” medical decisions are, in fact, quite public and even political.
All these studies found that patients treated in higher-spending places were no healthier than other patients.
There’s a simple and surprisingly well-accepted answer to this question: most published medical research is wrong.
The problem is that marginal medical treatments are just as likely to do harm as good.
Patients and their families are often dismissive of simple cheap remedies, like “relax, eat better, and get more sleep and exercise.” Instead they prefer expensive, technically complicated medical care—gadgets, rare substances, and complex procedures, ideally provided by “the best doctor in town.”
In contrast, when using something as a gift, you need your audience to see widely accepted signs of your gift’s quality, in order to maximize the social credit you get for giving it. Observers can’t appreciate quality that they can’t see.
When something functions as a gift, it’s often considered rude and ungrateful to question its quality.
Skeptical attitudes toward medicine seem to be a mild social taboo today (as readers may notice if they discuss this chapter with friends or relatives). Many people are quite uncomfortable with questioning the value of modern medicine. They’d rather just trust their doctors and hope for the best.
“More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.”50
Everyone wants to be the hero offering an emergency cure, but few people want to be the nag telling us to change our diets, sleep and exercise more, and fix the air quality in our big cities—even though these nagging interventions promise much larger (and more cost-effective) health improvements.
In contrast, most studies that look similarly at how much medicine people consume fail to find any significant effects. Yet it is medicine, and not these other effects, that gets the lion’s share of public attention regarding health.
Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less,16 donate and volunteer more,17 have more social connections,18 get and stay married more,19 and have more kids.20 They also live longer,21 earn more money,22 experience less depression,23 and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.24 These are only correlations, yes, which exist to some extent because healthier, better-adjusted people choose to join religions. Still, it’s hard to square the data with the notion that religions are, by and large, harmful to their members. If religions are delusions,
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Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods.
The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39
Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.
religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.44
“people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”50
Here’s how it works. When you attend a sermon, you’re doing more than passively acquiring information. You’re also implicitly endorsing the sermon’s message as well as the preacher’s leadership, the value of the community, and the legitimacy of the entire institution. Simply by attending, you’re letting everyone else know that you support the church and agree to be held to its standards.
If that were the main point of a sermon, you could just as well listen from home, for example, on a podcast.
sermons generate common knowledge of the community’s norms.
If an individual congregant later fails to show compassion, ignorance won’t be an excuse, and everyone else will hold that person accountable. This mutual accountability is what keeps religious communities so cohesive and cooperative.
Thus, by attending a sermon, you’re learning not just what “God” or the preacher thinks, but also what the rest of your congregation is willing to accept.
