I don’t think “allowed” is the right way to think about it (and your quotation marks suggest that probably you don’t either). If you mean something like “what position do other reasonable people take?” or “what is the range of options that won’t make other people who think of themselves as EAs disapprove of me?”, I have no information on anyone else’s positions but my own is something like this:
If you are having difficulty feeding yourself healthily, paying for somewhere to live that isn’t falling down, etc., then feel free not to give anything.
Otherwise, I think it’s psychologically valuable to keep up the habit of giving something, even if it’s very little.
If you expect to be substantially better off in the future than you are now, there’s a lot to be said for optimizing lifetime income and aiming to give some fraction of that rather than feeling guilty about not giving a lot now. If hoarding some for now gives you more stability later, that’s probably better for everyone.
Once you’re reasonably comfortable financially, I think the traditional figure of 10% is a reasonable benchmark; you can answer the question “10% of what?” in various different ways, all somewhat defensible and leading to substantially varying levels of giving.
There are people who give quite a lot more. No one will think ill of you for not being one of them.
Thanks gjm, that’s a really helpful comment. (And yes, quotation marks indicate ’this is the word I can think of but it is not necessarily the right word.)
I think points number 1 and 3 are especially relevant for me right now, and I have found talking it through on here to be very helpful in defeating an entirely non-useful lingering sense of guilt for not giving more when I really can’t afford to, yet.
Seriously: I don’t have any very strong opinions on this, nor any reason to think that anyone should care what my opinions are. In my own family’s case, we save substantially more than we give (very crudely, about 50% of income versus about 10%) but I’m not at all sure that if I thought about it longer and harder I wouldn’t conclude that we should be weighting global welfare higher relative to our own financial security.
:-) Don’t mean to pick on you, but the impression I get from EAs on LW is that your free cash flow is supposed to go save the world and I got curious about the apparent/potential disconnect from the general meme that people are supposed to save more so as not to be a drag on the society if something happens to them or when they retire...
The idea that your free cash flow should all go to save the world is generally based on a pretty straightforward utilitarian calculation, and it seems pretty clear that the same calculation would put saving lives in poor countries ahead of the small adverse consequences of drawing more on one’s own country’s social safety net. So I don’t think there’s much “disconnect” there.
In practice, very few people are quite so heroically altruistic as to reduce themselves to (what locally passes for) poverty so as to give everything to help the global poor. I bet the few who are are already largely neglecting saving; the rest of us, I think, first decide how much we want to give away and then how we want to balance saving and consumption. So a tradeoff between saving and giving, as such, doesn’t arise.
For the avoidance of doubt, i very much don’t think of myself as any sort of heroic or expert altruist (effective or otherwise). My only role here is Some Guy Who Got Into A Thread About Effective Altruism :-).
Do you have a link? I’m just not sure that it’s that obvious that pumping my (hypothetical) money overseas is a utilitarian good if I end up costing my own society more than I give away (which is pretty likely—to use a US example, hypothetical-me might end up costing orders of magnitude more to treat in an emergency room when I get sick because I didn’t spend my own money on preventative healthcare).
Obviously the money hypothetical-I save the government isn’t automatically going to go to good causes, but by doing my bit to make the society poorer, am I reducing people’s overall tendency to have extra money to give away?
I dunno, probably need an economist and a lot of time to properly answer that question...
But, e.g., if you get old and sick and it costs $100k to cure you in the USA, then the utilitarian optimum is probably to let you die and send the money to save 20 or more lives in sub-Saharan Africa. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that you should endorse that policy; but if you bite the bullet that says you should send all your spare money to Oxfam or GiveDirectly or whoever, then I think you should probably also be biting the bullet that says you should be prepared to give up and die if you get sick and curing you would be too expensive.
On the other hand, if you’re young and get similarly sick, it might (on the same assumptions) be worth curing you so that you can carry on earning money and pumping it to the desperately needy. In which case it might indeed be worth spending some money first to stop that happening. But I’ll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income because of ill health isn’t terribly large.
I suggest that unless you’re seriously inclined to really heroic charitable giving, you would do better not to worry about such things, and take decent care of yourself as I’m sure you would rather do, and give generously without impoverishing yourself. Especially at present—if you don’t have a lot of money, the difference between heroism and ordinary giving is going to be pretty small. Once you’re in a better situation financially, you can reconsider how much of a hero you want to be.
But I’ll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income >because of ill health isn’t terribly large.
Well another complicating factor—in my particular case—is that with chronic and especially mental health conditions, it’s actually very difficult to separate ‘preventative healthcare’ from frivolous spending. A lot of the things someone with my mental health might buy and do to keep them sane doesn’t look like healthcare spending at all. A lot of things that it is considered normal and even laudable to sacrifice for one’s education or career, especially when the latter is just beginning, such as sufficient sleep and leisure time, non-work-related social contact, etc are actually things where an insufficiency over more than a week or so will worsen my condition.
So you end up with people with conditions like mine spending money on things like ordering out to save time and energy, hiring help with the housework, paying frequently for travel to see friends—and it’s not clear, even to the person whose life it is, how much of that is sanity preservation and how much is just nice to have (and how much, if any, is nice-to-have but you tricked yourself into believing it was sanity-preservation).
But that’s a far more complicated question that I’m not going to ask people here to even attempt to answer.
Oh, if you have an already-existing condition—whether “physical” or “mental”, whether obvious at a glance or subtle and hidden—then of course it’s far more likely that there’s stuff you need to spend to keep yourself functioning well. I don’t think any reasonable person, inside or outside the EA movement, would have any objection to that. Even from a pure bullet-biting maximize-cash-flow-to-Africa perspective, you almost certainly do better to keep yourself functioning rather than giving everything you can in the short term and collapsing in a heap.
[EDITED to add: If whoever downvoted this is reading, I’d be interested to know why. I’m wondering whether I accidentally said something terribly insensitive or something.]
I don’t think “allowed” is the right way to think about it (and your quotation marks suggest that probably you don’t either). If you mean something like “what position do other reasonable people take?” or “what is the range of options that won’t make other people who think of themselves as EAs disapprove of me?”, I have no information on anyone else’s positions but my own is something like this:
If you are having difficulty feeding yourself healthily, paying for somewhere to live that isn’t falling down, etc., then feel free not to give anything.
Otherwise, I think it’s psychologically valuable to keep up the habit of giving something, even if it’s very little.
If you expect to be substantially better off in the future than you are now, there’s a lot to be said for optimizing lifetime income and aiming to give some fraction of that rather than feeling guilty about not giving a lot now. If hoarding some for now gives you more stability later, that’s probably better for everyone.
Once you’re reasonably comfortable financially, I think the traditional figure of 10% is a reasonable benchmark; you can answer the question “10% of what?” in various different ways, all somewhat defensible and leading to substantially varying levels of giving.
There are people who give quite a lot more. No one will think ill of you for not being one of them.
Thanks gjm, that’s a really helpful comment. (And yes, quotation marks indicate ’this is the word I can think of but it is not necessarily the right word.)
I think points number 1 and 3 are especially relevant for me right now, and I have found talking it through on here to be very helpful in defeating an entirely non-useful lingering sense of guilt for not giving more when I really can’t afford to, yet.
How do you think saving (in the standard financial sense) and giving should be balanced?
Um. With careful consideration?
Seriously: I don’t have any very strong opinions on this, nor any reason to think that anyone should care what my opinions are. In my own family’s case, we save substantially more than we give (very crudely, about 50% of income versus about 10%) but I’m not at all sure that if I thought about it longer and harder I wouldn’t conclude that we should be weighting global welfare higher relative to our own financial security.
:-) Don’t mean to pick on you, but the impression I get from EAs on LW is that your free cash flow is supposed to go save the world and I got curious about the apparent/potential disconnect from the general meme that people are supposed to save more so as not to be a drag on the society if something happens to them or when they retire...
The idea that your free cash flow should all go to save the world is generally based on a pretty straightforward utilitarian calculation, and it seems pretty clear that the same calculation would put saving lives in poor countries ahead of the small adverse consequences of drawing more on one’s own country’s social safety net. So I don’t think there’s much “disconnect” there.
In practice, very few people are quite so heroically altruistic as to reduce themselves to (what locally passes for) poverty so as to give everything to help the global poor. I bet the few who are are already largely neglecting saving; the rest of us, I think, first decide how much we want to give away and then how we want to balance saving and consumption. So a tradeoff between saving and giving, as such, doesn’t arise.
For the avoidance of doubt, i very much don’t think of myself as any sort of heroic or expert altruist (effective or otherwise). My only role here is Some Guy Who Got Into A Thread About Effective Altruism :-).
Do you have a link? I’m just not sure that it’s that obvious that pumping my (hypothetical) money overseas is a utilitarian good if I end up costing my own society more than I give away (which is pretty likely—to use a US example, hypothetical-me might end up costing orders of magnitude more to treat in an emergency room when I get sick because I didn’t spend my own money on preventative healthcare).
Obviously the money hypothetical-I save the government isn’t automatically going to go to good causes, but by doing my bit to make the society poorer, am I reducing people’s overall tendency to have extra money to give away?
I dunno, probably need an economist and a lot of time to properly answer that question...
Nope. Just a lot of handwaving. Sorry.
But, e.g., if you get old and sick and it costs $100k to cure you in the USA, then the utilitarian optimum is probably to let you die and send the money to save 20 or more lives in sub-Saharan Africa. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that you should endorse that policy; but if you bite the bullet that says you should send all your spare money to Oxfam or GiveDirectly or whoever, then I think you should probably also be biting the bullet that says you should be prepared to give up and die if you get sick and curing you would be too expensive.
On the other hand, if you’re young and get similarly sick, it might (on the same assumptions) be worth curing you so that you can carry on earning money and pumping it to the desperately needy. In which case it might indeed be worth spending some money first to stop that happening. But I’ll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income because of ill health isn’t terribly large.
I suggest that unless you’re seriously inclined to really heroic charitable giving, you would do better not to worry about such things, and take decent care of yourself as I’m sure you would rather do, and give generously without impoverishing yourself. Especially at present—if you don’t have a lot of money, the difference between heroism and ordinary giving is going to be pretty small. Once you’re in a better situation financially, you can reconsider how much of a hero you want to be.
Well another complicating factor—in my particular case—is that with chronic and especially mental health conditions, it’s actually very difficult to separate ‘preventative healthcare’ from frivolous spending. A lot of the things someone with my mental health might buy and do to keep them sane doesn’t look like healthcare spending at all. A lot of things that it is considered normal and even laudable to sacrifice for one’s education or career, especially when the latter is just beginning, such as sufficient sleep and leisure time, non-work-related social contact, etc are actually things where an insufficiency over more than a week or so will worsen my condition.
So you end up with people with conditions like mine spending money on things like ordering out to save time and energy, hiring help with the housework, paying frequently for travel to see friends—and it’s not clear, even to the person whose life it is, how much of that is sanity preservation and how much is just nice to have (and how much, if any, is nice-to-have but you tricked yourself into believing it was sanity-preservation).
But that’s a far more complicated question that I’m not going to ask people here to even attempt to answer.
Oh, if you have an already-existing condition—whether “physical” or “mental”, whether obvious at a glance or subtle and hidden—then of course it’s far more likely that there’s stuff you need to spend to keep yourself functioning well. I don’t think any reasonable person, inside or outside the EA movement, would have any objection to that. Even from a pure bullet-biting maximize-cash-flow-to-Africa perspective, you almost certainly do better to keep yourself functioning rather than giving everything you can in the short term and collapsing in a heap.
[EDITED to add: If whoever downvoted this is reading, I’d be interested to know why. I’m wondering whether I accidentally said something terribly insensitive or something.]
I am not sure this is the case. Saving and giving are kinda fungible without any immediate impact on you—that’s got to be tempting...