When Do We Help Others?
A homeless woman was struggling to walk along the sidewalk. “Do need a ride?” She hesitated. After a moment, she agreed. She knew the way and would tell me how to get there. We drove in awkward silence. I offered to buy her McDonalds, and she ordered $25 of food from the drive-thru. Fair enough, she actually ate it all. Her turn-by-turn instructions were decisive, but I started to doubt her orientation. Soon, when we were “almost” there, she asked if we could pull into the CVS. She handed me $20 and asked if I could buy her a $30 prepaid phone. She’d buy minutes when she got more money. Alright, I bought her the phone and some minutes. “Almost there” stretched into another half hour of turn-by-turn instructions and a few loops back. It had gotten dark. I pushed a little harder, where are we going?? We’re there! She directed me to the far end of a hotel’s parking lot. We had driven an hour to exactly nowhere, 10 minutes from where we started, and still she was barely willing to speak to me. Strident, commanding even, no name given. But clearly, she had nowhere to go. She set up her phone and called the surrounding hotels to ask if she could sit in their lobby for a few hours. No. I Googled nearby homeless shelters, but she wasn’t interested. Eventually, I offered to rent her a hotel room for one night. She registered as Ms. I wasn’t willing to send her off to in the middle of the night to…nowhere. I couldn’t accept that non-conclusion. After 3 hours, I found myself down $200 and wiping down the seats of my car.
I’ve been thinking about this experience for three weeks; it felt surreal. I was sort of bullied. Ms called me this week (I’d left my phone number). Could I give her a ride? Where to? She’d tell me when I came. I said I needed to know where we would be going. She gave a nearby city. No, I’m not doing that again.
I feel unsettled. All week, Jesus’ words have been rattling around my head, “I was hungry, and you gave me no food, I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.” This blog post is an attempt to understand the dynamic of this interaction (and maybe to justify myself a little). Why do I refuse to help this homeless lady anymore?
The working definition I use for love is caring about the wellbeing (or “utility”) of another person. I love Ms, but there are degrees of love. I love myself and my kids more than I love Ms since our happiness matters more to me than hers. When Jesus says, “there is no greater love than to give one’s life for a friend,” it fits with a sliding scale definition of love.
Economic theory assumes we’re all pursuing something called utility, and the circumstances or rules for how we gain utility is our utility function. I love another person when I include their utility in my utility function.
Thus, helping someone I love is no different from helping myself; both are ways to gain utility. But as always, if doing this constructive thing also inconveniences me, I’ll do a cost-benefit analysis. Whether I’m willing to help another person depends on (1) how much I believe the person is helped by my action, (2) how much I love them, and (3) what it costs me.
Typically, it’s assumed people know their own utility function. However, helping others introduces a gap between the “true” utility function and perceived utility functions, since we may disagree about what’s good for the person.
Returning to my interaction with Ms, I’m glad I bought her food and a phone; I’m a little salty about driving her in a giant circle and paying for her hotel. That’s my cost-benefit analysis.
I gave Ms a bit of power over me when I allowed her into my car. Yes, power in a physical sense that she could have abused my car, but mostly the power she gained was mental. (One might call it a lack of spine on my part.) She’s sympathetic, so I tolerated a lot of weirdness. Not having told me her destination, it became unthinkable to kick her out on the side of the road since we were perpetually “almost there.” Once she was in my car/custody, my sense of decency couldn’t allow her to spend the night on the sidewalk.
Now, I’m unwilling to pick Ms up again.
Generally, transient people are scary to us. The reasons are game theoretic. How much more erratic are your interactions when you’re confident about never meeting the counterparty again? That’s why we say, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Similarly, we say, “if a person is not nice to the waitress, they are not a nice person.” People with nothing to lose are also scary. Having maintained a reputable position in life suggests a narrow range of behavior.
Next, I don’t trust that Ms knows what’s good for her. I suspect she is addicted drugs. Ms’ perception of her utility function is different from my perception of it. Thus, whatever help I would offer (and she would accept) only extends to the overlap between what she wants and what I want for her. Like food and a phone. If she asks for a ride to a nearby city without explaining why, I assume she doesn’t really need the ride, and it’s a pretext to repeat our 3-hour drive from a few weeks ago. If she asks for cash, I don’t trust her to spend it well.
So, the reasons I won’t pick Ms up again are:
- I only love her a little.
- The help I give her seems inefficient in terms of the cost to me.
- The costs of engaging with her are unpredictable and out of my control.
- I’m afraid my help might enable her to stay on the street instead changing her life in the ways I think she should.
- My self-imagined responsibility to help only kicks in once she’s physically in front of me. Avoiding her avoids a self-image problem.
Contrast to the wildly popular “support a child” programs like Compassion International or Save the Children. They’ve resolved my objections to helping Ms again. The program’s high efficiency is certified by Charity Navigator [2]; the costs of engagement are exclusively monetary and extremely controllable [3]; and the recipients seem like the “virtuous poor.” I don’t worry that my help will backfire toward behavior I dislike [4]. Even if I only love those children a little [1], it seems like a good deal. And realistically, I only sign up when a child’s picture is shoved in front of my face, confronting my self-image [5].
I’m not proud of the paragraphs above. I aspire to spend more time and effort helping people with less than me, even if homelessness isn’t my explicit focus. For my visions of helping others to happen, I need to work on improving the value proposition sketched out above. Items 1, 3, and 5 need prayer; items 2, 3, and 4 need careful design.