I have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like ‘at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn’t have an emergency fund’. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don’t have a lot of resources to begin with?
You can ask, but why the answer would be anything else other than someone’s personal opinion?
It’s a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it’s a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
It’s a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it’s a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
No, but they might know things like the scale of diminishing returns in terms of spending money on yourself, or at what minimum level of wealth do an acceptable majority of people (in x culture or x country) report being satisfied with their lives?
They might have a personal anecdote about how they earn a million dollars a year and live in a ditch and have never been happier, and they might know the psychological reasoning why some people are happy to do that and some people aren’t.
I mean, yes, it’s true that their answer is not going to be everybody’s. But an attempt to answer the question seems very likely to turn up useful information that could help people make their own decisions.
I don’t have a link, but I suspect cutting this fine is not very valuable. That last $10k would be a lot to you, but that wouldn’t make it more than any other $10k to a charity. Instead, ask how you could come to have a vast amount of disposable income. Including whether it makes sense to spend some money toward that end. You may be able to get a very high rate of return investing in yourself.
Most of the EA stuff I’ve seen doesn’t appear to me to assume vast amounts of disposable income; merely enough to be willing to give some away. Then EA is about what to do with your charity budget, whether it’s large or small.
How you prioritize helping others versus helping yourself (and your family, if any) is a more or less orthogonal question.
(I might suggest, snarkily, that for someone who requires “vast amounts of disposable income” before being willing to give any away no term with “altruism” in it is very appropriate. But that wouldn’t be fair because e.g. your intention might be to secure yourself a reasonably comfortable life and then give away every penny you can earn beyond that, or something.)
That’s it, basically; it’s about how much of a buffer I’m ‘allowed’ to give myself on ‘reasonably comfortable’; I’m supporting myself and full-time student partner and not in permanent full-time employment so my instinct whenever I have a sniff of an excess is to hoard it against a bad month for getting work rather than do anything charitable with it (or it all goes on things we’ve put off replacing for monetary reasons, like shoes that are still wearable but worn out enough to no longer be waterproof).
I think Lumifer articulated better than I could what I really wanted to know the answer to, and while there may not be a general answer it does mean that I can at least go looking for things to read now my real question is clearer to me. So thanks!
There are two questions here. The first is how you trade off the value you place on your own welfare vs the value you place on the welfare of distant others. And the second is how having extra cash will benefit your mental health, energy levels, free time, etc. and whether by improving those attributes of yours you’ll increase the odds of doing more good for the world in the future.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore EA; I gave $20K to charity last year. But this year I’m saving all my money so my earning-to-give startup will have a bigger cash buffer. And I spend about $100/month on random stuff from Amazon that I think will make my life better (a weighted jump rope for exercising with, an acupressure mat for relaxing more effectively, nootropics, Larry Gonick’s cartoon guides to the history of the universe so I can relax & educate myself away from my computer, etc.)
So I guess the point I’m trying to make is you don’t even have to deal with the first values question if you decide that investing in yourself is a good investment from a long-run EA perspective. Don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish… your mental energy is limited and if you find wet feet at all stressful, it’s worth considering replacing your shoes even before personal welfare gets added in to the equation.
In other words, I personally am more optimistic about you spending all of your money on yourself and spending some of your time and energy on a credible plan for significantly increasing your future EA impact than I am about you donating spare cash to charity and not spending any time and energy and such a credible plan. (In general, I suspect that the potential EA impact of time and energy is underrated; this article gives a good explanation.)
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 have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like ‘at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn’t have an emergency fund’. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don’t have a lot of resources to begin with?
I don’t think there is a general answer to the question “How much should I consume?”
Is this a thing we should be asking if someone who is an expert on Effective Altruism and economics and similar could have a go at answering?
You can ask, but why the answer would be anything else other than someone’s personal opinion?
It’s a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it’s a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
It’s a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it’s a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
No, but they might know things like the scale of diminishing returns in terms of spending money on yourself, or at what minimum level of wealth do an acceptable majority of people (in x culture or x country) report being satisfied with their lives?
They might have a personal anecdote about how they earn a million dollars a year and live in a ditch and have never been happier, and they might know the psychological reasoning why some people are happy to do that and some people aren’t.
I mean, yes, it’s true that their answer is not going to be everybody’s. But an attempt to answer the question seems very likely to turn up useful information that could help people make their own decisions.
Putting money into an emergency fund here it can gather interest doesn’t mean that you can’t donate the same money 10 years from now.
I don’t have a link, but I suspect cutting this fine is not very valuable. That last $10k would be a lot to you, but that wouldn’t make it more than any other $10k to a charity. Instead, ask how you could come to have a vast amount of disposable income. Including whether it makes sense to spend some money toward that end. You may be able to get a very high rate of return investing in yourself.
to me EA is more about how to answer the question “how should I be charitable?” than “Should I be charitable and to what extent?”
Most of the EA stuff I’ve seen doesn’t appear to me to assume vast amounts of disposable income; merely enough to be willing to give some away. Then EA is about what to do with your charity budget, whether it’s large or small.
How you prioritize helping others versus helping yourself (and your family, if any) is a more or less orthogonal question.
(I might suggest, snarkily, that for someone who requires “vast amounts of disposable income” before being willing to give any away no term with “altruism” in it is very appropriate. But that wouldn’t be fair because e.g. your intention might be to secure yourself a reasonably comfortable life and then give away every penny you can earn beyond that, or something.)
That’s it, basically; it’s about how much of a buffer I’m ‘allowed’ to give myself on ‘reasonably comfortable’; I’m supporting myself and full-time student partner and not in permanent full-time employment so my instinct whenever I have a sniff of an excess is to hoard it against a bad month for getting work rather than do anything charitable with it (or it all goes on things we’ve put off replacing for monetary reasons, like shoes that are still wearable but worn out enough to no longer be waterproof).
I think Lumifer articulated better than I could what I really wanted to know the answer to, and while there may not be a general answer it does mean that I can at least go looking for things to read now my real question is clearer to me. So thanks!
There are two questions here. The first is how you trade off the value you place on your own welfare vs the value you place on the welfare of distant others. And the second is how having extra cash will benefit your mental health, energy levels, free time, etc. and whether by improving those attributes of yours you’ll increase the odds of doing more good for the world in the future.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore EA; I gave $20K to charity last year. But this year I’m saving all my money so my earning-to-give startup will have a bigger cash buffer. And I spend about $100/month on random stuff from Amazon that I think will make my life better (a weighted jump rope for exercising with, an acupressure mat for relaxing more effectively, nootropics, Larry Gonick’s cartoon guides to the history of the universe so I can relax & educate myself away from my computer, etc.)
So I guess the point I’m trying to make is you don’t even have to deal with the first values question if you decide that investing in yourself is a good investment from a long-run EA perspective. Don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish… your mental energy is limited and if you find wet feet at all stressful, it’s worth considering replacing your shoes even before personal welfare gets added in to the equation.
In other words, I personally am more optimistic about you spending all of your money on yourself and spending some of your time and energy on a credible plan for significantly increasing your future EA impact than I am about you donating spare cash to charity and not spending any time and energy and such a credible plan. (In general, I suspect that the potential EA impact of time and energy is underrated; this article gives a good explanation.)
Thanks for the link; very helpful and interesting.
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...