I was recently talking to someone who had recently started thinking about effective altruism, and was trying to figure out how to work it into their life. They were established in their career, it paid well, and their background wasn’t obviously a good fit for direct work, so they were naturally considering earning to give. This prompts a question of how much to give.
“How much?” is a question people have struggled with for a very long time. Donating 10% of income has a long history, and it’s common for EAs to pledge to do this; donating 2.5% of wealth is also traditional. If you’re earning to give, however, you might want to give more: Julia and I have been giving 50%; Allan Saldanha has been giving 75% since 2019. How should one decide?
I was hoping there were good EA blog posts on this topic, but after spending a while with EA Forum search and Google I didn’t find any. Claude kept telling me I should check out Jeff Kaufman’s blog, but all I found was a rough post from 2011. So here’s an attempt that I think is better than my old post, but still not great.
While EAs talk a lot about principles, I think this is fundamentally a pragmatic question. I find the scale of the world’s problems overwhelming; no one has enough money to eliminate poverty, disease, or the risk we make ourselves extinct. This is not to say donations don’t matter—there are a lot of excellent options for making the world better—but there’s not going to be a point where I’m going to be satisfied and say “Good! That’s done now.” This gives a strong intellectual pull to donate to the point where donating another dollar would start to decrease my altruistic impact, by interfering in my work; burning out does not maximize your impact!
In the other direction, I’m not fully altruistic. I like some amount of comfort, there are fun things I want to do, and I want my family to have good lives. I’m willing to go pretty far in the altruism direction (I donate 50% and took a 75% pay cut to do more valuable work) but it’s a matter of balance.
Which means the main advice I have is to give yourself the information you need to make a balanced choice. I’d recommend making a few different budgets: how would your life look if you gave 5%? 10%? 20%? In figuring out where you’d cut it might be helpful to ignore the donation aspect: how would your budget change if your industry started doing poorly?
In some ways Julia and I had this easy: we got into these ideas when we were just starting out and living cheaply, while we could still be careful about which luxuries to adopt and maintain inexpensive tastes. It’s much harder to cut back! So another thing I’d recommend, especially if you haven’t yet reached peak earning years, is to plan to donate a disproportionately large fraction of pay increases. For example, 10% of your (inflation adjusted!) 2024 salary plus 50% of any amount over that.
Overall, the goal is to find a level where you feel good about your donations but are also still keeping enough to thrive. This is a very personal question, and people land in a bunch of different places. But wherever you do end up, I’m glad to be working with you.
But Doctor, I am Kaufman!