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.]
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.]