I can think of a whole lot of unlikely ways by which keeping your money and not donating it, or doing even worse things, increases the welfare of people around the world. For instance, maybe a society where people like myself are richer encourages people in other societies to improve their societies because they see how rich they could be, to a greater degree than if people in my own society are not as rich.
Or maybe when I keep my money rather than donating to charity, the average person in my society is incrementally richer, that incrementally reduces the population in my society (because of the demographic transition), and makes people in my society better off by an incremental amount that may still be quite a lot when summed over the whole society.
Maybe me being richer, and thus the United States being richer, incrementally increases the prestige of the US on an international level, incrementally discouraging North Korea from starting a war that kills millions of people.
Alternatively, maybe a war with North Korea is inevitable but if it starts sooner rather than later fewer people will be killed (since populations will be larger in the future) and the surviving descendants will have more man years of freedom. It is conceivable that I should prefer starting a war with North Korea to stopping malaria.
Maybe I could promote ideas and policies that make Bill Gates richer, on the grounds that making him richer also increases the amount he’ll donate through the Bill Gates foundation. It is even conceivable that doing this is more efficient than just giving money to the Bill Gates foundation directly, or convincing other people to do so.
Small effects multiplied by large populations, or small probabilities multiplied by large benefits, are very difficult to estimate and any estimates I can come up with have such large error bars that they are useless.
I should add that I think some of the ideas in the original post have this problem too. For instance, how would you calculate the magnitude of the effect by which saving infant lives encourages the demographic transition and thus reduces overpopulation?
I can think of a whole lot of unlikely ways by which keeping your money and not donating it, or doing even worse things, increases the welfare of people around the world. For instance, maybe a society where people like myself are richer encourages people in other societies to improve their societies because they see how rich they could be, to a greater degree than if people in my own society are not as rich.
Or maybe when I keep my money rather than donating to charity, the average person in my society is incrementally richer, that incrementally reduces the population in my society (because of the demographic transition), and makes people in my society better off by an incremental amount that may still be quite a lot when summed over the whole society.
Maybe me being richer, and thus the United States being richer, incrementally increases the prestige of the US on an international level, incrementally discouraging North Korea from starting a war that kills millions of people.
Alternatively, maybe a war with North Korea is inevitable but if it starts sooner rather than later fewer people will be killed (since populations will be larger in the future) and the surviving descendants will have more man years of freedom. It is conceivable that I should prefer starting a war with North Korea to stopping malaria.
Maybe I could promote ideas and policies that make Bill Gates richer, on the grounds that making him richer also increases the amount he’ll donate through the Bill Gates foundation. It is even conceivable that doing this is more efficient than just giving money to the Bill Gates foundation directly, or convincing other people to do so.
Have you tried to make rough order-of-magnitude estimates for the effectiveness of these approaches?
Small effects multiplied by large populations, or small probabilities multiplied by large benefits, are very difficult to estimate and any estimates I can come up with have such large error bars that they are useless.
I should add that I think some of the ideas in the original post have this problem too. For instance, how would you calculate the magnitude of the effect by which saving infant lives encourages the demographic transition and thus reduces overpopulation?