Let’s think about two axes here. On the x axis, put altruism (the weight my assessment of your utility has in my utility function) and on the y axis, put respect (if I assess your situation using my utility function, respect = 0, if I assess your situation using what I think is your utility function, put respect =1, and interpolate between these two).

It seems obvious why altruism decreases with distance/dissimilarity. I would submit that respect is more subtle.
1) Proximity decreases respect, as I may suffer alleged externalities (real, pecuniary, or psychic) from your choices, so I have a selfish motive to override your preferences.
2) Proximity also increases respect, because your internal emotional life becomes more real and vivid to me, instead of a highly abstracted model.

So the utility function looks like this:

where big U is total utility for the individual, little u is his Robinson Crusoe utility, little v is the other person’s utility, x is the individual’s consumption and y is the other person’s consumption. According to Mike D, the parameter’s of that utility function behave like this:

There has to be some experiment, natural or otherwise, that would let us estimate these parameters and see how they vary with social distance.

An implication of Wilkinson’s theory is that intergenerational mobility should decrease over time. Wilkinson claims intergenerational mobility has decreased. It hasn’t (estimates from Lee and Salon 2009):

The “intergenerational elasticity” (the percentage kids’ incomes raise for every percentage increase in parents’ income) has stayed about the same over the last couple of decades. Other studies get contradictory answers and few find a statistically significant trend.

Which suggests the answer to the question posed in the title is: none of the above.

UPDATE: On rewatching, I see that Wilkenson isn’t trying to explain increasing inequality as I first thought, he’s trying to explain non-existent decreases in mobility.

All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.

These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head.

Transparency would kill off AGW denialism, too.

“Quits” are voluntary separations from jobs and folks do that because they’re leaving the work force (e.g. retiring) or because they found another job. Now look at quit rates over the last couple of years:

Quits have declined by about 40% compared to normal times. From here, about 50% of quits are retirements. If the retirement rate has stayed the same, then quits due to job changes went from 1.1% to about 0.5%. This suggests the number of “job seekers” among the employed has gone down by at least half.

How many job seekers are there right now? Supposing all unemployed workers are “job seekers” then the total number is about 20 million people. In normal times, that number is about… 21 or 22 million people (unemployed plus 10% of the working population). By this measure, the job market now is less congested than usual!

Making the assumptions that I made above, I constructed a “job seekers” per job opening time series:

If you assume none of the currently employed workers are “job seekers” then the graph above looks like the one put up by EPI. If you assume 20% of the currently employed are “job seekers” then even the up-tick seen in the later part of the time series goes away.

Why does this matter? Well, if there was no revolution, only evolution, to modern industrial society, you need an underlying evolutionary mechanism. Clark favors genes-based stories, but most other folks are more comfortable with culture-based stories. In either case, its hard to look at Clark’s data and pick a year before 1900 that would look like a revolution in efficiency.

If you’ve read a couple or all of these posts, leave a comment to let him know how great they are.

If not, drop whatever you’re doing and get reading.

I’m definitely a jerk if I don’t have other’s outcomes in my utility function. I’m a paternalist if I have other people’s consumption in my utility function, not their utility.

This is why a paternalist can give you healthcare instead of cash because your consumption of healthcare matters to him more than your happiness/contentedness/life satisfaction/etc.

Interestingly, most folks are jerks with respect to foreigners, they’re paternalist with respect to other anonymous citizens and they’re neither with respect to their close friends and family. I can’t find reason in this mix of preferences.

UPDATE: No injuries. No damage. No power outages. They’re not even letting the kids out of school.

Atlantic Food Channel contributor Jerry Baldwin, co-founder of Starbucks and the company’s first roaster and buyer, agrees. He now owns Peet’s Coffee and Tea, and he says the relatively low-altitude Haitian coffee doesn’t have the taste his company seeks. Still, he suggests that coffee drinkers who want to help Haiti donate to long-term agriculture projects.

I emailed Peet’s after the earthquake to ask about Haitian coffee. They said the distribution network isn’t there yet and the quality is low. I simple-mindedly suggested Peet’s throw money at the problem, perhaps funded by customer donations. Peet’s representative Ginny replied (Technoserve is an NGO Peet’s works with that has a very small team in Haiti working with farmers):

I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to think that eventually Technoserve or another similar NGO might help Haitian growers start producing really high quality beans, and that Peet’s might be a part of this, just as we have been in East Africa. But our main contribution in this kind of endeavor is expertise, not money. Jerry Baldwin, who bought Peet’s from Alfred Peet many years ago, and our buyers Jim Reynolds, Doug Welsh, and Shirin Moayyad have all lent their coffee expertise to growers all over the world (not just those served by Technoserve). And a Peet’s employee left Peet’s about a year ago to go work for Technoserve full time – his many years at Peet’s as a coffee and tea trainer helped to give him the expertise that Technoserve looks for.

So the issue is not simply money. Producing coffee of the very high quality that Peet’s looks for can take years. When I started with Peet’s 11 years ago, the only East African country producing coffee of the quality Peet’s looks for was Kenya. Now we are buying from Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi, and Tanzania. But this certainly didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t just money that made it happen. Issues that have to be addressed include proper care of the land, the soil, and the coffee trees themselves, selective picking of the coffee cherries, proper processing techniques, etc. It’s a long process of education, training, and feedback from experts.

She suggested to me that I take a look at Technoserve (which looks to be legit). Here’s their reply to my email to them about “my” idea to work in Haiti:

While I certainly like your idea and we do work in Haiti, we do not have the capacity or funding at the moment to certify farmers to sell to Peet’s Coffee. We do hope to have the capacity to do this in the future.

Incidentally, the Haiti – Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprises (HIFIVE) team that TechnoServe is a part of does some work involving coffee. We assist small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or associations that could include coffee producers or coffee traders. With only a three-person team, however, we do not have the capacity to work with farmers directly as we do in other countries and other programs. Therefore, I am afraid that our partnership with Peet’s Coffee in other countries could not apply to our work in Haiti.

In the Atlantic article, someone is quoted as saying Haitian coffee is a “cause” coffee not a “quality” coffee. If the long-run recovery of Haiti concerns you, supporting groups like TechnoServe might be the way to go.

I think it means “very good!” or “you’re so smart and good looking!”, but sometimes I think it may mean “please continue doing that because its not annoying at all!” or “you’re really good at Wii Super Mario!”.