Friedman’s argument comes in chapter 9 of his Capitalism and Freedom, and is based on the idea that private attempts at relieving poverty involve what he called “neighborhood effects” or positive externalities. Such externalities, Friedman argues, mean that private charity will be undersupplied by voluntary action.
[W]e might all of us be willing to contribute to the relief of poverty, provided everyone else did. We might not be willing to contribute the same amount without such assurance.
For what it’s worth, we might also want to consider harms of democracy. With democracy that better represents voters, we might expect higher taxes and therefore less money for the Gates Foundation and the Open Philanthropy Project, and it may or may not be worth that loss.
Also, you need to be signed into Google to open the links; it might be better to replace them with the original links.
Great post! The results aren’t super surprising, but it’s nice to see them anyway. Has there been much empirical evidence on this before?
Milton Friedman argued for welfare on similar grounds:
Paul Christiano also wrote a blog post titled Moral public goods.
For what it’s worth, we might also want to consider harms of democracy. With democracy that better represents voters, we might expect higher taxes and therefore less money for the Gates Foundation and the Open Philanthropy Project, and it may or may not be worth that loss.
Also, you need to be signed into Google to open the links; it might be better to replace them with the original links.
Links should be fixed! Thanks for pointing this out.