I think whether or not B1G1 is effective depends on what you care about. It’s clearly not the most effective way to, say, give shoes to people without shoes, since its creating an inefficiency by tying the supply of free shoes to the demand for shoes from wealthy people. And this is to say nothing of whether or not giving shoes to people without shoes is an effective use of money relative to the alternatives.
But, maybe B1G1 is effective in making people more altruistic, and is an effective intervention for creating the conditions under which people will give more effectively. Intuitively I doubt it and expect it fails on this measure because of effects like people feeling their good doing responsibility is discharged by their purchase and so may feel they less owe others more altruism because they already bought $X of “good” goods, thus decreasing their giving on the margin. But I’m not an expert here so I could very well be wrong.
The difficulty is that B1G1 potentially has many effects to consider other than just the direct good done via giving, although that we even need consider those effects is itself evidence in my eyes that it’s not effective since we don’t, for example, think much about how people giving money to AMF will influence their charitable thoughts since we already feel pretty good about the outcomes of the donations.
I think whether or not B1G1 is effective depends on what you care about. It’s clearly not the most effective way to, say, give shoes to people without shoes, since its creating an inefficiency by tying the supply of free shoes to the demand for shoes from wealthy people. And this is to say nothing of whether or not giving shoes to people without shoes is an effective use of money relative to the alternatives.
But, maybe B1G1 is effective in making people more altruistic, and is an effective intervention for creating the conditions under which people will give more effectively. Intuitively I doubt it and expect it fails on this measure because of effects like people feeling their good doing responsibility is discharged by their purchase and so may feel they less owe others more altruism because they already bought $X of “good” goods, thus decreasing their giving on the margin. But I’m not an expert here so I could very well be wrong.
The difficulty is that B1G1 potentially has many effects to consider other than just the direct good done via giving, although that we even need consider those effects is itself evidence in my eyes that it’s not effective since we don’t, for example, think much about how people giving money to AMF will influence their charitable thoughts since we already feel pretty good about the outcomes of the donations.