Let’s be a bit more concrete here. If you devote approximately half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, that means something like this: you value saving 10000 Africans’ lives less than you value having a second yacht. I’m sure that second yacht is fun to have, but I think it’s reasonable to categorize something that you value less than 1/10000 of the increment from “one yacht” to “two yachts” as no more important than “nice”.
This is of course not a problem unique to billionaire playboys, but it’s maybe a more acute problem for them; a psychologically equivalent luxury for an ordinarily rich person might be a second house costing $1M, which corresponds to 1⁄100 as many African lives and likely brings a bigger gain in personal utility; one for an ordinarily not-so-rich person might be a second car costing $10k, another 100x fewer dead Africans and (at least for some—e.g., two-income families living in the US where getting around without a car can be a biiiig pain) a considerable gain in personal utility. There’s still something kinda indecent about valuing your second car more than a person’s life, but at least to my mind it’s substantially less indecent than valuing your second megayacht more than 10000 people’s lives.
Suppose I have a net worth of $1M and you have a net worth of $10B. Each of us chooses to devote half our resources to ending poverty and half to having fun. That means that I think $500k of fun-having is worth the same as $500k of poverty-ending, and you think $5B of fun-having is worth the same as $5B of poverty-ending. But $5B of poverty-ending is about 10,000 times more poverty-ending than $500k of poverty-ending—but $5B of fun-having is nowhere near 10,000 times more fun than $500k of fun-having. (I doubt it’s even 10x more.) So in this situation it is reasonable to say that you value poverty-ending much less, relative to fun-having, than I do.
Pedantic notes: I’m supposing that your second yacht costs you $100M and that you can save one African’s life for $10k; billionaires’ yachts are often more expensive and the best estimates I’ve heard for saving poor people’s lives are cheaper. Presumably if you focus on ending poverty rather than on e.g. preventing malaria then you think that’s a more efficient way of helping the global poor, which makes your luxury trade off against more lives. I am using “saving lives” as a shorthand; presumably what you actually care about is something more like time-discounted aggregate QALYs. Your billionaire playboy’s luxury purchase might be something other than a yacht. Offer void where prohibited by law. Slippery when wet.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, I strongly endorse devoting half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, if the alternative is putting it all into being a billionaire playboy. The good you can do that way is tremendous, and I’d take my hat off to you if I were wearing one. I just don’t think it’s right to describe that situation by saying that poverty is the most important thing to you.
Let’s be a bit more concrete here. If you devote approximately half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, that means something like this: you value saving 10000 Africans’ lives less than you value having a second yacht. I’m sure that second yacht is fun to have, but I think it’s reasonable to categorize something that you value less than 1/10000 of the increment from “one yacht” to “two yachts” as no more important than “nice”.
This is of course not a problem unique to billionaire playboys, but it’s maybe a more acute problem for them; a psychologically equivalent luxury for an ordinarily rich person might be a second house costing $1M, which corresponds to 1⁄100 as many African lives and likely brings a bigger gain in personal utility; one for an ordinarily not-so-rich person might be a second car costing $10k, another 100x fewer dead Africans and (at least for some—e.g., two-income families living in the US where getting around without a car can be a biiiig pain) a considerable gain in personal utility. There’s still something kinda indecent about valuing your second car more than a person’s life, but at least to my mind it’s substantially less indecent than valuing your second megayacht more than 10000 people’s lives.
Suppose I have a net worth of $1M and you have a net worth of $10B. Each of us chooses to devote half our resources to ending poverty and half to having fun. That means that I think $500k of fun-having is worth the same as $500k of poverty-ending, and you think $5B of fun-having is worth the same as $5B of poverty-ending. But $5B of poverty-ending is about 10,000 times more poverty-ending than $500k of poverty-ending—but $5B of fun-having is nowhere near 10,000 times more fun than $500k of fun-having. (I doubt it’s even 10x more.) So in this situation it is reasonable to say that you value poverty-ending much less, relative to fun-having, than I do.
Pedantic notes: I’m supposing that your second yacht costs you $100M and that you can save one African’s life for $10k; billionaires’ yachts are often more expensive and the best estimates I’ve heard for saving poor people’s lives are cheaper. Presumably if you focus on ending poverty rather than on e.g. preventing malaria then you think that’s a more efficient way of helping the global poor, which makes your luxury trade off against more lives. I am using “saving lives” as a shorthand; presumably what you actually care about is something more like time-discounted aggregate QALYs. Your billionaire playboy’s luxury purchase might be something other than a yacht. Offer void where prohibited by law. Slippery when wet.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, I strongly endorse devoting half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, if the alternative is putting it all into being a billionaire playboy. The good you can do that way is tremendous, and I’d take my hat off to you if I were wearing one. I just don’t think it’s right to describe that situation by saying that poverty is the most important thing to you.
Thank you, that’s what I would have said.