If I earn some money and give it to (what I take to be) an effective charity, then as far as my charitable activity is concerned it more or less doesn’t matter whether my money-earning has added value to the world or merely transferred resources from someone else to me—because I am giving the money to an effective charity and they probably wouldn’t have.
Put differently: If you believe that donating to effective charities does much, much more good to the world than almost anything else one could do with the money, then most likely the dominant effect of any transaction that yields more money for donating to such charities is the charitable effect, and other things like gains from trade are negligible.
So, long-term investment. It may or may not do the world any other good, but at least it has the effect of transferring money from elsewhere to your fund, and from there to an effective charity. If your choice of effective charity is good, this should improve the world considerably via what the charity does, and in comparison it may scarcely matter what other effects there are.
(Some people think the EA idea that some charities are super-effective is all wrong, and some of those people think that investing in almost any company is better because businesses improve the world. If they’re right, then of course the most important effects of that long-term investment will be those of whatever it’s invested in. But if they’re right then you shouldn’t be thinking about investing to give to effective charities in the first place.)
So, this is an important point and one which is I think particularly relevant to short-term investing. I’ve added a link in the OP to a summary of the debate regarding whether short-term investing is good from an EA perspective.
However, I think when you talk about long-term investing as I am in this post, the situation is different. There are opportunities for effective charity now, but we don’t really know whether they will still exist centuries from now. There is also the issue of how to identify these opportunities long after you are dead, though I suppose you can pick some EA institution to give the money to and hope that they are still around by then (and that their values haven’t drifted in a bad direction).
To whatever extent you’re in doubt about the future existence of big effective-charity opportunities and the ability of future EAs to find them, you should be skeptical about long-term investment for the sake of EA donation.
This may be a strong reason to give sooner rather than later; if you expect the state of the world’s most-in-need people to improve drastically over (say) the next 50 years, as it seems like they have over the last 50 years, then a given sum 50 years from now may do them a lot less good than it would now—perhaps enough to make up for the expected growth if you invest the money now.
How big a deal this is is likely to depend on what sort of thing you consider most effective. E.g., if you’re concerned about global poverty and expect existing efforts to improve that a lot over 50 years, probably better to give sooner; if you’re concerned about AI safety and expect it to be 100 years before there’s anything to worry about, maybe invest (or maybe not—you might decide that early foundational work is super-important); etc.
But if what you’re contemplating is investment just for the sake of putting more money into businesses, because business growth is good, then I think most people wouldn’t see that as a variety of EA (though they might be wrong not to) and my guess is that most people thinking about “long-term investments to help the future” have in mind an invest-now-to-give-later model rather than an invest-now-for-the-sake-of-investment model. E.g., Robin Hanson’s blog post that you link to is all about whether the most effective way to address global warming is to invest now in order to use the proceeds to fight global warming later.
So, I think I might have been anchoring too much on Robin’s original post where he says “Usually the best way to help far future folk is to invest now to give them resources they can spend as they wish”, suggesting that it doesn’t matter too much how you spend the money at the end. So in this post I was trying to explore the possibility of an investment-for-the-sake-of-business-growth model, but maybe that was the wrong thing to focus on. Maybe I’ll have to study the investment-to-give-later model in more detail and see what I think of it.
OK, but what about the following argument: Even if effective-charity opportunities decline over time, maybe we can expect that the minimal value of doing something stupid with our money will stay roughly constant. So that the graph of good done relative to time horizon of investment may be V-shaped: decreasing as the effective-charity opportunities go away at first, but then increasing again once they are all gone and so that the effect of declining opportunities doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe if we wait long enough then the right end of the V will be higher than the left end?
If I earn some money and give it to (what I take to be) an effective charity, then as far as my charitable activity is concerned it more or less doesn’t matter whether my money-earning has added value to the world or merely transferred resources from someone else to me—because I am giving the money to an effective charity and they probably wouldn’t have.
Put differently: If you believe that donating to effective charities does much, much more good to the world than almost anything else one could do with the money, then most likely the dominant effect of any transaction that yields more money for donating to such charities is the charitable effect, and other things like gains from trade are negligible.
So, long-term investment. It may or may not do the world any other good, but at least it has the effect of transferring money from elsewhere to your fund, and from there to an effective charity. If your choice of effective charity is good, this should improve the world considerably via what the charity does, and in comparison it may scarcely matter what other effects there are.
(Some people think the EA idea that some charities are super-effective is all wrong, and some of those people think that investing in almost any company is better because businesses improve the world. If they’re right, then of course the most important effects of that long-term investment will be those of whatever it’s invested in. But if they’re right then you shouldn’t be thinking about investing to give to effective charities in the first place.)
So, this is an important point and one which is I think particularly relevant to short-term investing. I’ve added a link in the OP to a summary of the debate regarding whether short-term investing is good from an EA perspective.
However, I think when you talk about long-term investing as I am in this post, the situation is different. There are opportunities for effective charity now, but we don’t really know whether they will still exist centuries from now. There is also the issue of how to identify these opportunities long after you are dead, though I suppose you can pick some EA institution to give the money to and hope that they are still around by then (and that their values haven’t drifted in a bad direction).
To whatever extent you’re in doubt about the future existence of big effective-charity opportunities and the ability of future EAs to find them, you should be skeptical about long-term investment for the sake of EA donation.
This may be a strong reason to give sooner rather than later; if you expect the state of the world’s most-in-need people to improve drastically over (say) the next 50 years, as it seems like they have over the last 50 years, then a given sum 50 years from now may do them a lot less good than it would now—perhaps enough to make up for the expected growth if you invest the money now.
How big a deal this is is likely to depend on what sort of thing you consider most effective. E.g., if you’re concerned about global poverty and expect existing efforts to improve that a lot over 50 years, probably better to give sooner; if you’re concerned about AI safety and expect it to be 100 years before there’s anything to worry about, maybe invest (or maybe not—you might decide that early foundational work is super-important); etc.
But if what you’re contemplating is investment just for the sake of putting more money into businesses, because business growth is good, then I think most people wouldn’t see that as a variety of EA (though they might be wrong not to) and my guess is that most people thinking about “long-term investments to help the future” have in mind an invest-now-to-give-later model rather than an invest-now-for-the-sake-of-investment model. E.g., Robin Hanson’s blog post that you link to is all about whether the most effective way to address global warming is to invest now in order to use the proceeds to fight global warming later.
So, I think I might have been anchoring too much on Robin’s original post where he says “Usually the best way to help far future folk is to invest now to give them resources they can spend as they wish”, suggesting that it doesn’t matter too much how you spend the money at the end. So in this post I was trying to explore the possibility of an investment-for-the-sake-of-business-growth model, but maybe that was the wrong thing to focus on. Maybe I’ll have to study the investment-to-give-later model in more detail and see what I think of it.
OK, but what about the following argument: Even if effective-charity opportunities decline over time, maybe we can expect that the minimal value of doing something stupid with our money will stay roughly constant. So that the graph of good done relative to time horizon of investment may be V-shaped: decreasing as the effective-charity opportunities go away at first, but then increasing again once they are all gone and so that the effect of declining opportunities doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe if we wait long enough then the right end of the V will be higher than the left end?