Published on December 24, 2024 4:20 AM GMT
I was recently talking to someone who had recently started thinkingabout effective altruism, and was trying to figure out how to work itinto their life. They were established in their career, it paidwell, and their background wasn't obviously a good fit for directwork, so they were naturally considering earning togive. This prompts a question of how much to give.
"How much?" is a question people have struggled with for a very longtime. Donating 10% of income has a long history, and it'scommon for EAs to pledge to do this;donating 2.5% of wealth is also traditional. Ifyou're earning to give, however, you might want to give more: Juliaand I have been giving 50%; Allan Saldanhahas been giving 75%since2019. How should one decide?
I was hoping there were good EA blog posts on this topic, but afterspending a while with EA Forum search and Google I didn't find any.Claude kept tellingme I should check out Jeff Kaufman's blog, but all I found was arough post from 2011. Sohere's an attempt that I think is better than my old post, but stillnot great.
While EAs talk a lot about principles, I think this is fundamentally apragmatic question. I find the scale of the world's problemsoverwhelming; no one has enough money to eliminate poverty, disease,or the risk we make ourselves extinct. This is not to say donationsdon't matter—there are a lot of excellent options for making theworld better—but there's not going to be a point where I'm goingto be satisfied and say "Good! That's done now." This gives a strongintellectual pull to donate to the point where donating another dollarwould start to decrease my altruistic impact, by interfering in my work; burning out does notmaximize your impact!
In the other direction, I'm notfully altruistic. I like some amount of comfort, there are fun thingsI want to do, and I want my family to have good lives. I'm willing togo pretty far in the altruism direction (I donate 50% and took a 75% pay cut to domore valuable work) but it's a matter of balance.
Which means the main advice I have is to give yourself the informationyou need to make a balanced choice. I'd recommend making a fewdifferent budgets: how would your life look if you gave 5%? 10%?20%? In figuring out where you'd cut it might be helpful to ignorethe donation aspect: how would your budget change if your industrystarted doing poorly?
In some ways Julia and I had this easy: we got into these ideas whenwe were just starting out and livingcheaply, while we could still be careful about which luxuries toadopt and maintaininexpensive tastes. It's much harder to cut back! So anotherthing I'd recommend, especially if you haven't yet reached peakearning years, is to plan to donate a disproportionately largefraction of pay increases. For example, 10% of your (inflationadjusted!) 2024 salary plus 50% of any amount over that.
Overall, the goal is to find a level where you feel good about yourdonations but are also still keeping enough to thrive. This is a verypersonal question, and people land in a bunch of different places.But wherever you do end up, I'm glad to be working with you.
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