This argues that money is the unit of caring, and that professionals should give money rather than time to organizations (under the assumption that the division of labor with specialists doing what they do best is most efficient). The post does not preclude volunteering time, but sees it as a pleasure for the donor that should be bought with hard currency.
There is some validity to the thought that a highly paid professional will do more good by working an extra hour at their profession and donating the extra income, rather than volunteering to do something less skilled that someone could be hired to do more cheaply. The author misses a few points though: 1) Salaried professionals do not generally earn more by working longer hours, so volunteering time may provide working hours that would otherwise be wasted on unpaid effort for some corporation. 2) For many people in semi-skilled trades and low-level office work, the extra income from working longer (after taxes and other deductions) is less valuable than their direct labor (thanks in part to underpayment in those fields). 3) Working continuously on the same things can lead to burnout and a shortened career, hence to less total money to give—a change of pace can be valuable for maximizing the total value of a person’s labor.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately
This post suggests “I recommend that you purchase warm fuzzies and utilons separately. Not at the same time. Trying to do both at the same time just means that neither ends up done well. If status matters to you, purchase status separately too!”
I think that this post had the main point that my son was trying to make—that it is more efficient to buy the different benefits of charitable giving separately. The post identifies three benefits: warm fuzzies, status, and utility (though again it gives no real guidance in determining utility). I identified a few other reasons for giving in Why charitable giving, but the basic notion that the different benefits are separable and may be most efficiently purchased separately is probably a good one.
This post makes a good argument for giving 10% of income more or less continuously, rather than delaying donations to the “wealth-distributing years” as university development officers refer to the post-retirement time of life. They make a good argument for 10% being a reasonable target.
They do point out reasonable exceptions to the rule, but do not take into consideration reserves people should set aside for emergencies and for retirement (they are more focused on student debt and mortgages). For people like me, whose salaries are much larger than living expenses and who have good insurance and liquid investments for unexpected expenses, the 10% guideline is a good one, but for people with little in savings, it may be better for them to delay charitable giving until they have adequate reserves—it is not efficient to give money and then need to have others give to you in order to survive.
Their guideline for retired people is also unclear: “People who have retired or partially retired (which we roughly define as having started to draw a pension) can join Giving What We Can and remain members for as long as they continue to donate at least 10% of their spending money.” Their definition of spending money assumes an externally determined income (like a pension or annuity) rather than drawing down invested money. Once one reaches 70½, the required minimum distributions from tax-deferred retirement investments may provide a reasonable definition of income, but there should probably be also a wealth-based, and not just an income-based component.
Overall, I felt that this post made a better case for effective altruism than the “lesswrong” posts.
This post presents (and rejects) a utilitarian argument that animal rights are more worth funding than alleviating human suffering (because of the very much larger number of animals killed than humans). It presents a bit of a reductio ad absurdum for utilitarian arguments about charitable giving, and those utilitarian arguments are the main basis of the effective altruism movement.
Some of the discussion in the comments of the post is also interesting.
This article discusses some rather silly arguments about “existential risk”—the risk of human beings going extinct—and points out the absurdity of calculating expected values of extremely high value events with extremely low probabilities. Humans are extremely bad at dealing with very large and very small numbers, and our ability to estimate either large or small numbers is terrible. As a result, the expected value (the product the badly estimated high value and the badly estimated low probability) can be almost anything. Using this essentially arbitrary number as an input to a decision-making process is absurd.
This post argues against investing in politics, particularly for large-scale systemic change (man-vs-man instead of man-vs-nature problems). The basic argument is that people, even intelligent people, have been historically very bad at making or attempting large-scale changes (the disastrous communist states resulting from Marxism are brought up as an example, as is the eugenics movement). Focusing on smaller-scale incremental changes, where results are more predictable, is more likely to result in the desired net positive effect.
In some cases, I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a market inefficiency in morality. The general reason for this is that I’m utilitarian and most people aren’t. Most humans have revealed preferences to care more about people close to them in time and space and mind-shape, all of which I reject. So it’s totally plausible that given my values, the most important interventions are massively underfunded.
There’s good evidence for this. Most Americans happily (or unknowingly) torture and kill dozens of animals every year. The total spending on existential risk reduction is a tiny, tiny proportion of what it would be if the world cared about humans a thousand years in the future as much as we cared about humans now. And the ratio of spending on local versus international charities speaks for itself.
That’s the more polite reason that I believe that there’s an inefficient market in morality. The less polite version is that most people aren’t strategic or selfless, and their implicit main motivation in morality is demonstrating that they’re trustworthy and generous. I think it’s pretty obvious that very few people are actually trying to help others in a cause-neutral way. So I think it’s very likely that I can “beat the market”, as it were.
I’m not a pure utilitarian, and I do care more about people close to me physically, genetically, or in terms of what they value. I could probably cast my beliefs into the expected-value computations preferred by the effective altruism movement by assigning numeric values to different benefits for different people, but I’m not going to do that, because I don’t really accept the underlying utilitarian ethics. (Also, the numbers would argue against almost all the local charitable giving I do, unless you consider the life of child at risk of malaria to be much less than a week of theater summer camp for a kid whose parents can’t quite afford it.)
Like Buck, I find “So it’s totally plausible that given my values, the most important interventions are massively underfunded.” I end up, however with a different set of charitable investments, because I have different values and a different basis for figuring out how to spend my money. (Note: I still haven’t made up my mind what charities I’ll support this year, much less on an on-going basis, nor am I at complete odds with Buck—I’ll probably assign some portion of my giving to the sorts of charities Buck would support, but I’ll also be giving locally and to organizations that support culture and not just life.)
I noticed (after the fact) that the author of the post called out the same comment by Buck as particularly interesting.
Keep in mind that the “become a hedge fund manager” advice is based on the current situation where many charities have volunteers lining up to help while being strapped for cash.
In a world that already has many hedge fund managers channeling their money to the most effective charities but a lack of volunteers the most effective choice might be to volunteer.
If you imagine it as a market where the options all have some expected return, the rational thing is to invest in the cheapest item. This moves the price and the guy walking in the door behind you might look at the same market and see that the most effective choice is to invest in the next option which is now the cheapest.
I’m going to agree that I don’t buy arguments based on numbers of future people, I don’t believe in there being a moral incentive to maximize numbers of future people though future-suffering of people who have yet to exist I would attach some weight to. I don’t care if there could be a trillion people on earth, that’s not a goal in my mind but I do care if the grandkids of the current generation might live in misery.