[Link] Caplan asks for help optimizing his will.
Bryan Caplan of Econlog asks his readers how to improve his will (given a few constraints) in light of the principles of optimal philanthropy. His current draft reads:
I give and bequeath to whatever charity is currently ranked #1 by GiveWell, the sum of $100,000 adjusted for inflation since 2013 using the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or 10% of the total value of my estate excluding our primary residence, whichever is smaller. If GiveWell no longer exists, I give and bequeath the same sum to another charity, selected by my wife and children, dedicated to helping the deserving poor in the Third World in a maximally cost-effective manner. I request that my wife and children consult my friends Robin Hanson, Alexander Tabarrok, Fabio Rojas, James Schneider, Michael Huemer, William Dickens, and Jason Brennan to help them select the most cost-effective charity with this mission. If possible, funding for this bequest should come from my tax-deferred 403(b) retirement accounts.
The full blog post can be found here.
Robin Hanson responds:
I fear “the Third World” might not be a robust reference, and that GiveWell will no longer exist. You might pick some “ex ante % chance that I’d have died by now”, such as 25%, and give the money away when you are at an age where you’ve suffered that % chance. This could ensure at 75% chance that you’ll give the money away yourself.
“Selected by my wife and children” sounds somewhat legally obscure to me. After all, there’s a nonzero probability that they’ll die before or together with him.
When I clicked through I thought somehow that Caplan was asking for help optimizing his “personal faculty by which he decides on and initiates action” which seemed like a strikingly self-effacing thing to do.
Now that I think about it, writing does seem to be involved in optimizing this faculty even for people who are alive and proud… but somehow it had not occurred to me until just now that other people’s last wills and testaments might be an interesting source of inspiration and guidance on what kinds of actions people’s faculties tend towards when they are really serious and have only this document to express what they feel to be their true external-world-targeting wishes...
So I’ve just spent 10 minutes googling around and I can find the text of last will and testament of stray famous people (like George Washinton’s) but I can’t seem to find an archive of them, much less anything like a statistical analysis of typical targets and allocation ratios. It might be that my google-fu is weak in the areas of jurisprudence/legalities or it might be that there really is a gap in human knowledge here? I’m not sure which.
If there is a gap this seems like a tragedy from the perspective of the study of human volition. I could imagine the gap arising from a simple lack of anyone ever having done the legwork to gather such things up or I could imagine the gap arising from privacy concerns that prevent distribution and archiving of most of them. If the latter, I think maybe an interesting clause that could be added to last will and testaments would be that they be published or otherwise transferred to an archive after a certain amount of time, for the sake of posterity and science :-)
I think the best way is to regularly update your will. Especially if you expect your estate to be over $1M excluding primary residence.
Well, you should update your will if your priorities change. For all else, you can specify what you want using “if then else” clauses. Considering the over $1M estate, I’d expect the majority of active LW’ers to currently or eventually (at the time of death) fall in this bracket.
EDIT: The following is a joke: (I’m active because of that expectation, don’t ruin it o.o)
Why do you expect LW activity to result in a large accumulation of liquid assets EDIT: Easily valued assets other than a primary residence? Is it that you expect it to be valuable to accumulate rather than spend, or is it because $1M of life insurance is affordable and has a favorable risk/reward?
I think Kawoomba is hoping that the ‘Rationalists win. Winning means making lots of money. Therefore, rationalists will make lots of money.’ argument is sound.
Except it’s more like ‘Rationalists win. Making lots of money is a form of winning. Therefore, rationalists will make lots of money.’
(It’s not only liquid assets if you only exclude the primary residence, per your comment.)
The LW demographics are skewed towards working in/seeking education for MINT fields (mathematics, informatics, natural sciences, and technics), high IQ and high-achiever status all, among other such factors.
That means that status as an active LW’er is strongly associated with factors which indicate a high earning potential, without necessarily positing any increase in earning potential based on the “insight porn” of internet forum procrastinating. There may be such a benefit as well, but I didn’t have it in mind when writing the grandparent. Could be just selection effects, especially if people are already set on their career paths once finding LW.
Finding the direction of a potential causal influence is always fun, but the correlation suffices, whichever way the cookie crumbles.
If you are active primarily because of a perceived correlation between being active and winning, you should care very much whether being active causes winning or if there is a common cause of winning and being active.
Noting your correction: you would need to have $100k in liquid assets and $1m in total assets (excluding a primary residence). That’s not nearly so hard, particularly if you are a sole proprietor in a moderately successful endeavor. It does mean that you risk leaving that endeavor with lots of capital equipment but no way of covering operating expenses.
I’m still confused as to why there’s an advantage to making the donation posthumously, unless it is intended to protect against an unforeseen change in personal status that makes the donation retroactively undesirable.
One consideration may be that it helps you “factor out” the whole charity issue from your daily life. You can buy an iPhone without feeling guilty about not donating the money to charity if you’ve precommitted to posthumous donation. You’ll just never have to think of it again, it’ll take care “of itself”. It may work for some.
If you live already having donated, you may feel bad about not donating more, whereas if the donation is by definition always in your future, you can always assuage yourself with “well, that’s why I will donate in my will”, and also, you can still harbor the option of keeping the money for your family, for whatever reason, after all. You can feel like a saint while it’s in your will, and it’ll cost you nothing if you turn scumbag, I mean, if there’s unforeseen cost with your grandchild’s college funding, and you go back on your pledge.
Also, see my edit.
Ah. Free fuzzies. In that case, requesting comments on it is status signalling among other things.
Doesn’t GiveWell recommend against giving all your money to their #1 charity? (See allocation recommendation in the upper right.)
Who’s to say that by the time Bryan dies, Robin and friends won’t be senile and unable to provide useful advice?
Good point.