I’m broadly sympathetic to this view, though I think another possibility is that people want to maximise personal impact, in a particular sense, and that this leads to optimising for felt personal impact more than actually optimising for amount of overall good produced.
For example, in the context of charitable donations, people seem to strongly prefer that their donation specifically goes to impact producing things rather than overhead that ‘merely’ supports impact producing things and that someone else’s donation goes to cover the overhead. (Gneezy et al, 2014) But, of course, in principle, these scenarios are exactly functionally equivalent.
In the direct work case, I imagine that this kind of intrinsic preference for specifically personal impact, a bias towards over-estimating the importance of impact which an individual themselves brings about and signalling/status considerations/extraneous motivations may all play a role.
I’m broadly sympathetic to this view, though I think another possibility is that people want to maximise personal impact, in a particular sense, and that this leads to optimising for felt personal impact more than actually optimising for amount of overall good produced.
For example, in the context of charitable donations, people seem to strongly prefer that their donation specifically goes to impact producing things rather than overhead that ‘merely’ supports impact producing things and that someone else’s donation goes to cover the overhead. (Gneezy et al, 2014) But, of course, in principle, these scenarios are exactly functionally equivalent.
In the direct work case, I imagine that this kind of intrinsic preference for specifically personal impact, a bias towards over-estimating the importance of impact which an individual themselves brings about and signalling/status considerations/extraneous motivations may all play a role.