Category Archives: Charity

From the Comments: More Thoughts on Charity

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Had some thoughtful responses (blog comments, ) to my last post on giving. I tried to tackle them below. Very complicated questions so consider the below speculative…

Is your line of work more important than your giving? [John Danner via , Ryan Hill via comments]

First, I’ll just say that being in a “good” line of work is no reason not to give. Most Americans can afford to give 10% of their income to charity, and given that this can save the lives of real people, all of us should donate. So I don’t have a ton of sympathy for not giving because you determine your career choice gives you an out. Not that folks were making this argument, but it’s worth remember that “should you give?” is a question independent of “what should you do?”

That being said, one’s line of work is important. But I think it’s not as easy as one might suppose to determine what lines of work are more important than others. Some thoughts:

1. Much of the commentary I hear on this question greatly ignores the fact that the market prices a lot of contributions fairly well. As a starting point, it’s worth understand if people will pay for whatever it is you are producing. People who make a lot of money often provide societal value. So if you’re trying to figure out what to do, I’d start there.

2. Of course, this is not always the case. Jobs in areas with major positive externalities may be under compensated, especially if these jobs involved public good, merit goods, or technological innovation. I just think a lot of people convince themselves that their jobs fall in this category when they probably don’t.

3. If I had to come up with my best answer here, it would be to: (a) try and identify existential threats to humanity where (b) there are feasible solutions that humans can work on and (c) your skills provide a significant value-add over and above the current set of people working to develop and enact these solutions.

Should you count taxes as part of your giving? [Rob Reich via ]

I said it’s ok to count 10% of your taxes as charitable giving. I based this on the fact that roughly 10% of our taxes goes directly to support people living in poverty.

Rob said this shouldn’t count.

I’m not so sure. What if the government taxed me at 80% and gave 90% of this to the poor. Under this regime, I would not feel much of an obligation to give to charity.

So I’m not sure why I should’t incorporate tax based government transfers into my giving calculation.

Should you save now and give later? [Ryan Hill via comments]

Yes, with some sound investing you can increase you giving capacity. But we don’t know what problems will exist in the future, nor how much it will cost to solve these problems.

But right now we do know that many people are dying for reasons that can be solved for not a lot of money.

So long as a few hundred dollars can save someone’s life, it seems like we should be giving rather than investing.

Of course, if you have strong reasons to believe that in the future it will be cheaper to save someone’s life, then perhaps you should invest. I just haven’t seen evidence that this will be the case.

Is giving a cop out? [Ripper via comments]

See this . Basically, if you job and lifestyle are based on a tax regime that promotes income inequality, an economy that is based on environmental degradation, and so forth… well, who cares if you give a little bit of your income away after you make your money off this corrupt system?

First, I think it’s worth noting that global inequality is decreasing and global absolute wealth is rising. The world’s poor are significantly benefitting from the current global economic regime.

That being said, I’m very sympathetic with the environmental part of the argument. As such, working in this field (either in terms of policy change or technological innovation) may in fact be one of the best things you can do (if you can add real value). But this then just reverts back to the line of work question…

So, yes, do try and understand the system you’re a part of and perhaps helping maintain, but do so objectively. There are both incredibly good (rising global wealth) and bad (environmental degradation) parts of this system.

Give and work accordingly.

Do You Give Enough to Charity? Here’s How I Much I Give.

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Yesterday I wrote about Effective Altruists.

It’s one thing to judge the charitable giving of others, so today I’ll write about myself.

In doing so, I hope to make the issue of giving more relevant to a reader of this blog, as well as to increase accountability for me to give. So long as this blog is going, I’ll be public about what percentage of my income I’m giving to charity, as well as where I donate it.

This Dylan Matthews post is a good foray into individual giving. In reviewing Jeb Bush’s charitable giving, he writes:

Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 4.47.51 PM

So how am I doing?

I calculated my giving like this: (my giving to charities) + (10% of my taxes paid).

From what I gather, about 10% of our taxes goes to helping the poor, so I think it’s fair to count that as (forced) charitable giving. Others might disagree / view this as cheating. Perhaps.

All told:  6% of my earnings went to helping those less off.

Where did I give? 

100% of my charitable giving went to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI).

I made this donation because Give Well ranked it as a top charity.

I chose to give to deworming rather than the Against Malaria Foundation (another top rated charity) for no real rationale reason. I just picked it.

I choose not to fund Give Directly (another top rated charity) because my read on the evidence is that conditional cash transfers work better than direct cash transfers. Give Well has spent more time on this than I have, so I surely might be wrong, but I had questions about Give Well ranking unconditional cash transfers so highly.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Give Well is the end all be all of charitable giving. Many organizations are doing work that is difficult to measure in controlled experiments. But I don’t have a lot of time to evaluate these organizations, so I’d rather give to a place that has been vetted than one that has not.

If either Give Well or another charity evaluator began attempting to analyze the effectiveness of these types of organizations, I might shift my charity allocations.

I can do better

How much is enough? I surely won’t be able to answer that question in this post.

But I’d like to get it up to 10%.

In December, I’ll let you know if I do.

Hopefully if we’re all more transparent about how much we give, as well as where we give it, we can increase the amount and effectiveness of our collective giving.