Artificial causality

Our physical world is all about cause and effect, reminiscent of Newton's laws of motion. Even outside of physics this principle seems to hold: If you stub your toe, it hurts. If you eat food, your body gets nurished. But within human society, the link between cause and effect can become far more distant. In many cases, it even feels artificial. ie. Without people making up their minds about how they will behave/react to certain things, there would be no cause/effect relationship. For example, if someone is doing a fundraiser and says "For every mile I run, do you agree to donate a dollar?", the cause/effect relationship between their running and money materializing in their bank account is very artificial. It is artificial in that, in our natural world, running down the street does not usually cause electronic bank transactions!

But "artificial" is a cold word, especially when we're talking about harnessing human will to do good things. So let's drop the term and keep talking about the idea.

What I'm wondering about is how people/society can use this idea in their daily lives to accomplish good things. More specifically, how can we use it to accomplish good things that don't normally happen / aren't normally the "effect" of the natural world?

Here's one off the wall idea: North American's often feel guilty about their consumption. Well, maybe we should, since we use 10x as much water as other countries, many times as much electricity, etc. But what motivates us to use less? If I use a little bit less water this month, it isn't directly benefiting someone in the third world. So why do I care?

What if we decided that we would figure out what our monthly water consumption was, and then for every 10,000 litres of water that we saved, our family would purchase a well in a third world country for other less fortunate people to have clean water? Or what if we figured out what our average food bill was, and for every dollar we saved by wasting less food, eating out less often, and buying no name foods, we would donate that same amount to programs that feed hungry people in other countries. If we decided to live this way, we'd have created a direct cause and effect between our lifestyle and the needs of other people.