proportional giving is good because it’s a kind of giving that you can get a lot of people to do. Not for weird math reasons. I agree with what you’re saying given utilitarian calculations but I don’t think you’re doing the right calculation.
This is Less Wrong. We tend to be all about the weird math reasons! Seriously, I was doing utilitarian calculations not because I think they’re necessarily right but because they’re an example of something that might have given something like the desired result, while also being a kinda-plausible way of weighing one’s own interests against those of others.
I think when proposing charitable giving strategies there are a few things that need to be considered that are usually forgotten. First, and something that a lot of people in this thread have said, is the probability of adoption and persistence of a given method. I think trying to get 10 percent of people to give 50 percent of their money is less likely to work than trying to get 50 percent to give 10 percent. a popular and relatively easy charitable giving strategy can give you a lot of friends who also do it, whereas a very costly and difficult one will make you poorer than everyone you know. In terms of social incentives, I think being unable to go to as many fun activities or have as good houses as people you know could easily counteract the bonus of “I give more to charity than anyone I know” since those facts are salient and come up a lot.
Second: I really like capitalism. I think capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful force that collates and acts on huge amounts of distributed information about what people want and can do, and is better at allocating resources than anything else we’ve tried so far. I don’t think capitalism is perfect. Indeed, it’s somewhat like fire. It lets us do things we never could without it but also can punish us in ways that nothing else can. One of the ways capitalism can act is to foster long-term technological growth, and historically, a lot of technological growth seems to be incentivized by the very wealthy. I don’t know that there’s a good way to measure this phenomenon, but there are examples such as automobiles, cellphones, televisions, computers, etc. which seem like, without attracting the money of the wealthy, they never would’ve become as useful or ubiquitous. And I think condemning people for spending their wealth on “themselves” can have chilling effects on this sort of slow, costly innovation.
Third, or kind of a subset of the second, is that encouraging huge donations instead of huge investments might be anti-utilitarian in the longterm, since fundamentally selfish profit seeking investment is how we develop a lot of our infrastructure and gather a lot of our resources. EDIT- as an elaboration: capitalism is better at skin in the game and feedback than charity, such that big capitalist efforts more reliably give many people what is wanted than big charity efforts. giving a 100 people food for a month might keep them alive but what does that buy us compared to a hundred people getting hammers? unknown.
I don’t know and haven’t really tried to figure out proper ratios, but I don’t think “if you’re wealthy, you should give everything above what you need to live to charity” is either going to be very widespread or necessarily good.
Just in case I failed to make it clear, it is not my opinion that the calculation I described means that we should all give everything beyond what we need to charity, or that we should all give everything beyond some fixed threshold, or anything of that kind. I don’t think weighted utilitarianism is necessarily a good system, nor do I think it’s clear that (e.g.) motivational effects don’t make a big enough difference to invalidate that naive calculation completely.
proportional giving is good because it’s a kind of giving that you can get a lot of people to do. Not for weird math reasons. I agree with what you’re saying given utilitarian calculations but I don’t think you’re doing the right calculation.
This is Less Wrong. We tend to be all about the weird math reasons! Seriously, I was doing utilitarian calculations not because I think they’re necessarily right but because they’re an example of something that might have given something like the desired result, while also being a kinda-plausible way of weighing one’s own interests against those of others.
Can you expand on that? What do you think would be closer to the right calculation?
I think when proposing charitable giving strategies there are a few things that need to be considered that are usually forgotten. First, and something that a lot of people in this thread have said, is the probability of adoption and persistence of a given method. I think trying to get 10 percent of people to give 50 percent of their money is less likely to work than trying to get 50 percent to give 10 percent. a popular and relatively easy charitable giving strategy can give you a lot of friends who also do it, whereas a very costly and difficult one will make you poorer than everyone you know. In terms of social incentives, I think being unable to go to as many fun activities or have as good houses as people you know could easily counteract the bonus of “I give more to charity than anyone I know” since those facts are salient and come up a lot.
Second: I really like capitalism. I think capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful force that collates and acts on huge amounts of distributed information about what people want and can do, and is better at allocating resources than anything else we’ve tried so far. I don’t think capitalism is perfect. Indeed, it’s somewhat like fire. It lets us do things we never could without it but also can punish us in ways that nothing else can. One of the ways capitalism can act is to foster long-term technological growth, and historically, a lot of technological growth seems to be incentivized by the very wealthy. I don’t know that there’s a good way to measure this phenomenon, but there are examples such as automobiles, cellphones, televisions, computers, etc. which seem like, without attracting the money of the wealthy, they never would’ve become as useful or ubiquitous. And I think condemning people for spending their wealth on “themselves” can have chilling effects on this sort of slow, costly innovation.
Third, or kind of a subset of the second, is that encouraging huge donations instead of huge investments might be anti-utilitarian in the longterm, since fundamentally selfish profit seeking investment is how we develop a lot of our infrastructure and gather a lot of our resources. EDIT- as an elaboration: capitalism is better at skin in the game and feedback than charity, such that big capitalist efforts more reliably give many people what is wanted than big charity efforts. giving a 100 people food for a month might keep them alive but what does that buy us compared to a hundred people getting hammers? unknown.
I don’t know and haven’t really tried to figure out proper ratios, but I don’t think “if you’re wealthy, you should give everything above what you need to live to charity” is either going to be very widespread or necessarily good.
Just in case I failed to make it clear, it is not my opinion that the calculation I described means that we should all give everything beyond what we need to charity, or that we should all give everything beyond some fixed threshold, or anything of that kind. I don’t think weighted utilitarianism is necessarily a good system, nor do I think it’s clear that (e.g.) motivational effects don’t make a big enough difference to invalidate that naive calculation completely.