Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [48]
But why?
Economists have traditionally assumed that the typical person makes rational decisions in line with his own self-interest. So why should this rational fellow—Homo economicus, he is usually called—give away some of his hard-earned cash to someone he doesn’t know in a place he can’t pronounce in return for nothing more than a warm, fuzzy glow?
Building on Gary Becker’s work, a new generation of economists decided it was time to understand altruism in the world at large. But how? How can we know whether an act is altruistic or self-serving? If you help rebuild a neighbor’s barn, is it because you’re a moral person or because you know your own barn might burn down someday? When a donor gives millions to his alma mater, is it because he cares about the pursuit of knowledge or because he gets his name plastered on the football stadium?
Sorting out such things in the real world is extremely hard. While it is easy to observe actions—or, in the Kitty Genovese case, inaction—it is much harder to understand the intentions behind an action.
Is it possible to use natural experiments, like the ACLU-prison scenario, to measure altruism? You might consider, for instance, looking at a series of calamities to see how much charitable contribution they produce. But with so many variables, it would be hard to tease out the altruism from everything else. A crippling earthquake in China is not the same as a scorching drought in Africa, which is not the same as a devastating hurricane in New Orleans. Each disaster has its own sort of “appeal”—and, just as important, donations are heavily influenced by media coverage. One recent academic study found that a given disaster received an 18 percent spike in charitable aid for each seven-hundred-word newspaper article and a 13 percent spike for every sixty seconds of TV news coverage. (Anyone hoping to raise money for a Third World disaster had better hope it happens on a slow news day.) And such disasters are by their nature anomalies—especially noisy ones, like shark attacks—that probably don’t have much to say about our baseline altruism.
In time, those renegade economists took a different approach: since altruism is so hard to measure in the real world, why not peel away all the real world’s inherent complexities by bringing the subject into the laboratory?
Laboratory experiments are of course a pillar of the physical sciences and have been since Galileo Galilei rolled a bronze ball down a length of wooden molding to test his theory of acceleration. Galileo believed—correctly, as it turned out—that a small creation like his could lead to a better understanding of the greatest creations known to humankind: the earth’s forces, the order of the skies, the workings of human life itself.
More than three centuries later, the physicist Richard Feynman reasserted the primacy of this belief. “The test of all knowledge is experiment,” he said. “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth.’” The electricity you use, the cholesterol drug you swallow, the page or screen or speaker from which you are consuming these very words—they are all the product of a great deal of experimentation.
Economists, however, have never been as reliant on the lab. Most of the problems they traditionally worry about—the effect of tax increases, for instance, or the causes of inflation—are difficult to capture there. But if the lab could unravel the scientific mysteries of the universe, surely it could help figure out something as benign as altruism.
These new experiments typically took the form of a game, run by college professors and played by their students. This path had been paved by the beautiful mind of John Nash and other economists who,