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Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity. I think I have a duty to help people much poorer than me, and I give 10 percent of my salary to charities that I think are effective at preventing early death due to poverty. I also live in a city with a lot of visible homelessness, and am often solicited for money. My brain says that this is not an effective way to help people; the people asking might not be the neediest among the homeless in my city, and the people I’m sending malaria bednets and pills to are even needier. At the same time, I feel callous simply ignoring all these requests. What should I do? Dear Would-Be Optimizer, Nine times out of ten, when someone’s got an ethical dilemma, I think it’s because a couple of their core values are conflicting with each other. But you’re that tenth case. I say that because I don’t actually believe your question represents a battle royale between two different values. I think there’s one core value here — helping people — and one strategy that’s masquerading as a value. That strategy is optimization. I can tell from your phrasing that you’re really into it. You don’t just want to help people — you want to help people as effectively as possible. Since extreme poverty is concentrated in developing countries, and since your dollar goes much further there than it would in your home country, your optimizing impulse is telling you to send your charity money abroad.  Optimization started as a technique for solving certain math problems, but our society has elevated it to the status of a value — arguably one of the dominant values in the Western world. It’s been on the rise since the 1700s, when utilitarian thinkers seeded the idea that both economics and ethics should focus on maximizing utility (meaning, happiness or satisfaction): Just calculate how much utility each action would produce, and choose the one that produces the most. You can see this logic everywhere in modern life — from work culture, with its emphasis on productivity hacks and agile workflows, to wellness culture, with its emphasis on achieving perfect health and optimal sleep. The mandate to “Live your best life!” is turbocharged by Silicon Valley, which urges us to quantify every aspect of ourselves with Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings, because the more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you.  Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! Optimization definitely has its place, including in the world of charity. Some charitable organizations are much more effective than others trying to achieve the same goal. All things being equal, we don’t want to blow all our money on the wildly ineffective ones. Effective altruists, members of the utilitarian-flavored social movement that aims to do the most good possible, are fond of noting that the most effective charities out there actually produce 100 times more benefit than the average ones. Why not get the biggest bang for your buck?  The problem is that we’ve stretched optimization beyond its optimal limits. We try to apply it to everything. But not every domain in life can be optimized, at least not without compromising on some of our values.  In your case, you’re trying to optimize how much you help others, and you believe that means focusing on the neediest. But “neediest” according to what definition of needy? You could assume that financial need is the only type that counts, so you should focus first on lifting everyone out of extreme poverty, and only then help people in less dire straits. But are you sure that only the brute poverty level matters? Consider an insight from the Jewish tradition. The ancient rabbis were exquisitely sensitive to the psychological needs of poor people, and they argued that these needs should also be taken into account. So they decreed that you shouldn’t only give poor people enough money to survive on — they need to have more than that so they themselves can give charity to others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “On the face of it, the rule is absurd. Why give X enough money so that he can give to Y? Giving to Y directly is more logical and efficient. What the rabbis understood, however, is that giving is an essential part of human dignity.”  The rabbis also figured that those who used to be well-off but who fell into poverty might feel an especially acute sense of shame. So they suggested helping these people save face by offering them not just bare necessities, but also — when possible — some of the nicer things that graced their former lifestyles. In the Talmud, we hear about one rabbi who gave a newly poor person a fancy meal, and another who acted as the person’s servant for a day! Clearly, the ancient rabbis weren’t only aiming to alleviate poverty. They were also alleviating the shame that can accompany it. The point is that there are many ways to help people and, because they’re so different, they don’t submit to direct comparison. Comparing poverty and shame is comparing apples to oranges; one can be measured in dollars, but the other can’t. Likewise, how can you ever hope to compare preventing malaria with alleviating depression? Saving lives versus improving them? Or saving the life of a kid versus saving the life of an adult?  Yet if you want to optimize, you need to be able to run an apples-to-apples comparison — to calculate how much good different things do in a single currency, so you can pick the best option. But because helping people isn’t reducible to one thing — it’s lots of incommensurable things, and how to rank them depends on each person’s subjective philosophical assumptions — trying to optimize in this domain will mean you have to artificially simplify the problem. You have to pretend there’s no such thing as oranges, only apples. And when you try to do that, an unfortunate thing happens. You end up rushing past all the unhoused people in your city and, as you put it, you “feel callous simply ignoring all these requests.” Ignoring these human beings comes at a cost, not only to them, but to you. It has a damaging effect on your moral conscience, which feels moved to help but is being told not to. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Even some leaders in effective altruism and the adjacent rationalist community recognize this as a problem and advise people not to shut up that part of themselves. Rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example, says it’s okay to donate some money to causes that make us feel warm and fuzzy but that aren’t producing maximum utility. His advice is to “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” — meaning, devote one pot of money to pet causes and another (much bigger) pot of money to the most cost-effective charities. You can, he says, get your warm fuzzies by volunteering at a soup kitchen and “let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons.”  I would also suggest diversifying your giving portfolio, but it’s not because I think you need to “validate” the warm fuzzies. Instead, it’s because of another value: integrity.  When 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams talked about integrity, he meant it in the literal sense of the word, which has to do with a person’s wholeness (think of related words like “integration”). He argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments.  For example, a mother has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, wrecking her wholeness — her integrity.  It sounds like that’s what you’re feeling when you pass a person experiencing homelessness and ignore them. Ignoring them makes you feel bad because it alienates you from the part of you that is moved by this person’s suffering — that sees the orange but is being told there are only apples. That core part of you is no less valuable than the optimizing part, which you liken to your “brain.” It’s not dumber or more irrational. It’s the part that cares deeply about helping people, and without it, the optimizing part would have nothing to optimize!  So rather than trying to override it, I would encourage you to honor your wish to help in all its fullness. You won’t be able to run a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s okay. Different types of help are useful in their own way and you can divvy up your budget between them, even though there’s no perfect formula to spit out the “optimal” allocations.  Diversifying your giving portfolio might look something like this. You keep a small amount of cash or gift cards on you, which you hand out to unhoused people you encounter directly. You put aside a larger amount to donate to a local or national charity with a strong track record. And you devote another amount to a highly effective charity abroad.  You might feel annoyed that there’s no universal mathematical formula that can tell you the best thing to do. If so, I get it. I want the magic formula too! But I know that desire is distinct from the core value here. Don’t let optimization eat the real value you hold dear.  Bonus: What I’m reading I recently read Optimal Illusions, a book by mathematician Coco Krumme that traces the roots of optimization’s overreach. As she puts it, “Over the past century, optimization has made an impressive epistemic land grab.”  When torn between competing moral theories, does it make sense to diversify your donations in proportion to how much you believe in each theory? Some philosophers argue against that view, but Michael Plant and coauthors defend it in this new paper. This gorgeously written essay by anthropologist Manvir Singh introduced me to the term “cooperating without looking” (or, because it’s a New Yorker essay, “coöperating without looking”). This “tendency to willfully ignore costs and benefits when helping others” — to help without calculating what you’ll gain from the altruistic act — is “a key feature of both romantic love and principled behavior.” When we help this way, people trust us more. 

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Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyListen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher.Donald Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025 blueprint by the Heritage Foundation during the presidential debate against Kamala Harris.“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon swooped in to give Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, the perfect reason to veto a valuable bill. The proposed Arizona Starter Homes Act sought to legalize smaller dwellings to address the affordability crisis straining the fast-growing state. After the state legislature had already passed the bill, a regional Navy official wrote a letter to Hobbs opposing it. The intervention seemed bizarre, as I noted in an article at the time. But now we know what happened: The U.S. military was doing a favor for a NIMBY local government—in this case, the city of Glendale, a Phoenix suburb that is also home to Luke Air Force Base.The episode reveals something important about how the nation’s current housing crisis came about: The shortage of homes is the result of thousands of decisions that barely anyone is paying attention to—and that in many cases happen outside public view.After the Arizona bill’s demise, Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat who has pushed for federal action on housing-supply policies, reached out to the Pentagon for an explanation. In a response letter that Garcia shared with The Atlantic, William A. LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, revealed that Glendale had tipped the military off to the bill. Ryan Lee, the city’s intergovernmental-programs director, confirmed to me over the phone that he’d played that role but declined to answer further questions.[Read: Why your house was so expensive]The bare facts here are infuriating: The democratically elected representatives of the people of Arizona were able to come together with a commonsense solution to the nation’s most pressing economic problem, and a staff member at a mid-size city was able to call in the military to provide the governor cover to veto? Without so much as a public vote?Garcia surmised that what the Department of Defense did is part of a larger pattern. “My guess is, for far too long, large organizations like DOD have engaged in these types of efforts—sometimes public and other times maybe not,” he told me. “And folks never really find out about it.”One prominent supporter of the starter-homes bill, State Representative Analise Ortiz, whose district includes parts of Glendale and Phoenix, told me she hadn’t been aware of Glendale’s decision to involve the military but wasn’t surprised: “Cities across the state were doing everything in their power to try to stop the Starter Homes Act.”Ortiz was skeptical about Glendale’s motivations in enlisting the Department of Defense to gain the governor’s veto. “This is not the way we typically go about creating policy,” she said. “Typically, if a city is looking at a bill and wants to get all perspectives, they will think of that in the weeks that it takes for a bill to get through the legislature. If there was a genuine concern here, it should have been raised much earlier in the legislative process, and the fact that it was not raised until the 11th hour—it seems to me like it was solely a tactic to get the bill vetoed.”The Biden administration has been vocal about its concern for housing affordability and has specifically praised state and local actions like those in the now-dead Arizona bill. In the weeks following Hobbs’s veto of the Arizona law, at least one senior administration official contacted the Defense Department to inquire how it got involved and why it intervened against official Biden policy. The conversation, according to a source who requested anonymity to speak freely about discussions within the administration, revealed that the Defense Department had simply not even registered that local land-use fights were important to federal officials, and ended with the mutual understanding that future similar engagements would require a discussion.Housing politics is local is a familiar refrain, but one that national leaders have become less and less able to hide behind. After pandemic-induced inflation led to widespread dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, federal policy makers realized that rising shelter costs (rents and mortgages) needed to be addressed, lest voters take their frustration out on their elected officials. After all, if voters are going to blame you for it, there’s no point complaining that it’s actually someone else’s job.[Read: The next generation of NIMBYs ]At the least, federal officials should stop enabling NIMBYism at the state or local level. “I think it’s important for them to be put on notice,” Garcia argued. “I don’t think the DOD should be engaged in stopping housing developments across the country. This is a national priority.”

Abu Sayed stood with his arms outstretched, holding nothing but a stick, when Bangladeshi police fired their shotguns. A video from July shows the 25-year-old student facing a wall of officers in riot gear. Tear gas has cleared out the other protesters, but Sayed stays, baring his chest as police shoot warning rounds at his feet. More shots ring out; he staggers, then falls to the hot cement. He died before reaching a hospital.Sayed’s killing galvanized the Bangladeshi people, marking the moment when “everything started to fall apart” for the government, Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi political scientist at Illinois State University, told me. The protests multiplied, led by a group of students that came to be known as the Anti-Discrimination Movement. Within days, state authorities imposed a national curfew and cut off telecommunications in the country. Within two weeks, police and paramilitary forces had killed hundreds of demonstrators. Within a month, protesters marched on the capital, forcing the nation’s leader, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, to resign and flee to India. In her stead, a makeshift government has emerged, run in part by the same students who toppled the old one.The proximate cause of the protests was the reinstatement of a government-job quota that massively favored members of the ruling party, the Awami League. Like many working-class students in Bangladesh, Sayed went to college in hopes of finding work in the civil service. His parents and siblings scrounged money for his tuition, betting that his postgraduate employment would provide for them in return. But in June, the supreme court of Bangladesh reinstalled the quota, reversing a decision from 2018, and slashing his chances. Sayed was one of 400,000 graduates in his year competing for a mere 3,000 jobs. They weren’t the only ones upset by the quota; the government’s apparent favoritism inspired Bangladeshis of all professions, classes, and ages to protest.[Read: The angst behind China’s ‘lying flat’ youth]For much of her 15-year reign, Hasina and the Awami League relied on the quota to stock the government with loyalists and shore up her rule. Bangladesh first instituted the system after its liberation from Pakistani forces in 1971, setting aside one-third of its civil-service jobs for the descendants of those who fought in the war for independence. (Hasina was the most obvious beneficiary; her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence movement. Challenging the quota meant, in one sense, challenging Hasina’s right to rule.) Because the Awami League was associated with the war effort, the quota disproportionately benefited students affiliated with the party. As protests intensified following the court’s decision in June, the government’s response grew more draconian. Hasina deployed the nation’s Border Guard—a paramilitary group that typically patrols the country’s frontiers with India and Myanmar—and implemented a shoot-on-sight order for anyone who violated the curfew. Demonstrations turned violent. Tanks roamed city streets. Authorities beat and killed scores of unarmed students. Aid groups have reported that dozens of children died, too, including a 6-year-old girl struck by a stray bullet while playing on the roof of her apartment building.The government’s brutality proved to be a strategic misstep. Instead of subduing the protesters, repression strengthened their numbers. “Ten thousand were suppressed, and 20,000 showed up,” Mahfuz Anam, the editor of the leading national newspaper, The Daily Star, told me. “Twenty thousand dispersed, and 100,000 showed up.” On August 3, student organizers demanded Hasina’s resignation. Two days later, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis marched on her official residence as she escaped in a helicopter.The students quickly installed an interim government and named Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and critic of Hasina, as its head. Backed by an advisory board that includes student leaders, he’s indicated that he has much larger ambitions than simply stewarding Bangladesh through to a new election. Earlier this month, Yunus announced the creation of several commissions focused on reforming institutions including the judiciary, electoral system, and police.“After 15 years of autocracy, the entire body of the country is rotten,” Shafqat Munir, a Bangladeshi security expert, told me. “Limb by limb, the interim government will have to repair the country.” How much Yunus will be able to accomplish remains unclear, but he appears determined to unwind Hasina’s legacy. If he has any success, the students who ousted her will play a key part.On a humid evening in late August, I stood with Ashrefa Khatun, a student leader in the Anti-Discrimination Movement, amid towers of water bottles and donated clothes. Days earlier, flash flooding had overrun a city in southeast Bangladesh, and Khatun—the daughter of a rickshaw puller and garment worker—was suddenly coordinating national relief efforts. She is one of many students who have taken on roles such as policing traffic, protecting sites of worship, cleaning streets, and, more recently, responding to natural disasters.[Read: Bangladesh really is a climate success story]Khatun attributes the success of the Anti-Discrimination Movement to savvy organizing. Students across multiple universities used social media to recruit one another and arrange demonstrations, including highway blockades. They circulated memes—many derived from Marvel movies—tallying each day’s wins and losses. When the government shut down the internet in response to its Gen Z adversaries, the students switched to offline texting apps, such as Bridgefy, that allowed them to continue communicating during the blackout. Nazifa Hannat, an undergraduate who helped coordinate across the schools, told me that even students enrolled in private universities—like she is—felt compelled to join the movement, despite the fact that their superior job prospects insulated them from the effects of the quota. “For us, it wasn’t about the quotas,” she told me. “We started to protest injustice.” When private-university students joined the movement en masse, street protests grew too large for the government to manage. More and more, it resorted to violence. Khatun quickly discovered the importance of recruiting female students: Police, she found, were less likely to use violence when enough women attended a demonstration.In addition to social media, the movement embraced an older mode of protest—public art. Near the University of Dhaka, the largest public university in the country, I approached a group of students painting a work that read LIVE FREE in English, Bangla, and sign language. One of the artists was Quazi Islam, the president of a student club that promotes disability awareness. He told me that propaganda from the Awami League and its student wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League, once dominated campus walls, whereas “we had to get permission from proctors or the BCL students to put something up.” Now, he told me, he is “reclaiming the walls that belong to the students and the country.”The art began appearing as early as June and serves today as a record of the summer’s events. A wall in the university’s amphitheater displays a quote from a widely viewed video in which a police officer tells his commander, “When I shoot one, only one dies. The rest don’t scatter.” A spray-painted message on a pillar reads The Z in Gen Z stands for zero chance of defeat. Several murals show Abu Sayed facing a bullet.Many of the student protesters already had firsthand experience with repression. In 2018, an unlicensed bus driver ran over two high-school students on their way home from school, sparking national outrage. Students campaigned for better road safety, but members of the BCL forced them back into their homes. That wasn’t the end of the campaign, though; the students adapted, relying on digital organizing. Many of today’s student leaders are those same schoolchildren from six years ago—including Khatun. The road-safety movement is what inspired her to apply to university in the first place.Hasina and the Awami League tried every trick they could to subdue the protests. There is no easy way to explain how students persevered and overthrew a 15-year-old regime in less than 60 days. But their achievement offers a clear lesson: Despotism is often more brittle than it seems.