Stakes, Seriousness, and Success

Can you have altruism when you do not give up anything? The context is a nominally "conservationist" group who are seeking to push through paths to connect a series of greenspaces and parks. The actual objective is to increase park utilization rather than conservation, but that is a separate argument.

What has intrigued me has been the motivation of this external group. Are they pursuing this for money, for fame, for altruistic purposes? They would argue that it is for altruistic purposes, for the greater good. However, none of them live in the neighborhoods that will be affected by this change in park usage. These changes are likely to affect all sorts of material circumstances including trash in the parks, traffic in the neighborhoods, property values, personal security, etc.

People in the neighborhood are almost uniformly opposed to the initiative. But, in thinking this through from a logical perspective, I have stumbled upon this question: No matter how nice the end goal might be, can you truly be acting altruistically if you have nothing material at stake? If you don't have anything at stake, ought you to be involved at all?

From that speculation it was just a short cognitive hop to the litany of policies and programs which have been pursued, virtually all of which have had respectable, if not even admirable, goals. Head Start is a poster child of this type of thinking. Help poor children by attempting to level the playing field by enriching their learning environment so that they are able to start school not so far behind their wealthier peers. A great goal. But thirty years of effort and measurement of results indicates that it has not made any difference. We keep spending the billions because we like the goal, even though we know we aren't achieving the goal. Virtually all of these type of feel-good initiatives are sponsored by individuals who do not have anything at risk in the outcome, have little direct knowledge of the circumstances of the problem and virtually all of these programs fail, sooner or later.

None of these thoughts are particularly original, other than perhaps in the sequencing of them.

So perhaps the lesson to be learned is that no initiatives ought to be undertaken unless the sponsors have something materially at stake in the outcome. If that were the conclusion, then we would be back at the age-old adage "the gods help those who help themselves", a heuristic stretching all the way back 2,500 years ago to the Greeks.

Sometimes it seems as if each generation has to learn and then to relearn the accumulated wisdom of the best before being able to make its own contribution to the future.

In the meantime, we also have a reinforcement of the learned pattern of sociological activities - if people don't have anything at stake, they usually aren't serious about it. If they aren't serious, they usually don't succeed.