5k people have pledged to give 10%+ of their income to effective charities | Hacker News Reader

5k people have pledged to give 10%+ of their income to effective charities

givingwhatwecan.org

56 pointslukefreeman54 comments

Drive-by commenters reacting to the title of this post with their personal opinions on charity would do well to learn more about the effective altruism movement's focus on evidence-based giving. The word "effective" in the title is doing a lot of work, and represents a huge amount of research and fact-checking done by effective altruism organizations.

Example: here's a massive report on global warming charity Cool Earth by Giving What We Can: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/

GiveWell's cost-effectiveness spreadsheet is a sight to behold as well: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effec...

I started donating 10% of my after-tax income about a year ago.

After hearing Will MacAskill talk about how he lives his life in accordance to his ethics he quickly became a personal hero of mine, and he certainly influenced me to start donating.

My tax-year-end donation in 2019 was at the time my biggest, as I'd completed my 1st year of full-time employment. Hovering on the donate button I definitely felt large reservations as my brain made all sorts of excuses not to send away thousands of dollars that were 'mine'. I felt that it would be helpful to document those reservations so that I could look back on them after years of donating, and I did so here: https://thundergolfer.com/charity/politics/effective-altruis...

After selling some of my stock compensation last month I doubled my previous largest donation, and the reservations were almost completely gone. It'd become obvious that my happiness depended not on that extra money but on all sorts of other non-monetary things, and my safety and health was also obviously protected enough without it.

If I 'napkin-math' the numbers and assume ~6% returns on investment and normal income growth for today's software engineers, over my life my donating will see my net-worth reduced by more than $5 million dollars. But as a young person contemplating today's crises and the crises of our near future I couldn't give less of a shit about being $5 million dollars richer.

Isn't it wiser to donate $5 mil after you've lived a full life? Giving away your future nest egg is quite a rash decision for a young person. Especially when that money will almost certainly end up mismanaged or end up in the pockets of cronies.

This is my hesitation. My wife and I debate about whether it is better to donate continuously or save up and donate most of it toward the end of our lives. My argument is that 1) if all human lives are equal in value, then we can help more total humans by letting investments compound 2) if we have some kind of unexpected emergency in life we will really wish we still had that money available. Her argument is that 1) we could die at any time and would not be around to see that the money is used how we like and 2) helping those in need earlier can also compound the benefits for their lives, which could potentially cause those people to then help others, and so on.

I’m not sure which way is “right”.

Why have ridge rules?

Her #2 is critical - people have needs now and you're in community with them now. Don't leave for tomorrow the good put before you to do today.

EAs have attempted to calculate how much better it is to donate to e.g. deworming today than to donate to the best cause in a few years. The implied interest rate is decently high.

> Especially when that money will almost certainly end up mismanaged or end up in the pockets of cronies.

This attitude is toxic. It is possible to find charities that fit your own definition of well-managed and it is worth it.

For sure, but I don't believe it's the majority.

>almost certainly end up mismanaged

Not so -- if you do your homework. My first donation is always of time rather money: A thorough, skeptical vetting of the organization itself. Start with reading the Form 990 (in USA). If the org makes its Form 990 hard to get, that's red flag #1.

No, it's not wiser. The charities to which I give have a clear and immediate need of funds to protect children from malaria and worms. It does not help those children if I wait 40 years before giving anything.

> Giving away your future nest egg is quite a rash decision for a young person.

There's risks involved, of course. But the risks are minuscule compared to the risk unfairly borne by others because they do not have the privilege of sophisticated healthcare systems, food, and clean drinking water.

I'm in my twenties and make more money than 99% of my fellow citizens. If I can not find a way to help children literally at severe risk of death before 5 years of age, who can?

A lot more than 5K people have pledged to give 10%+ of their income to effective charities -- magnitude on the order of hundreds of millions.

It's called "tithing":

“Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”-Mal. 3:10.

“We have found in our own home, as have thousands of others, that God’s blessing upon the nine-tenths, when we tithe, helps it to go farther than ten-tenths without His blessing.” -- Billy Graham

Here are the types of things tithes go to:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/november/where-e...

In some cases, tithing is earmarked only for "church ministries", in which case the sect generally also has an additional "offerings" category used for non-ministry outreach.

Like the Orthodox Church, Baptists distinguish between tithing and giving an "offering." The word "tithe" actually means the "tenth part of agricultural produce or personal income." Because of this, Baptists believe that members should leave 10 percent of their income for tithing to their church. This tithe is expected and not optional. An offering would be anything above that you give to the Baptist church that exceeds the 10 percent that makes up your tithe.

https://classroom.synonym.com/what-do-baptists-believe-about...

Something like 100 million Baptists, 20 million Adventists (Baptists who observe a 7th day Sabbath), and many others, consider tithing an obligation.

This is called "ineffective charities"

If it costs internet points to say that saving several hundred times more lives per dollar is better than not doing that, that's alright.

On the contrary, church managed charities are often among the more effective when ranked by global impact then measured as funds put to use versus overhead.

For instance:

"For every cent donated to ADRA Indonesia, 87% is used for programs that benefit children, families and the community 5% will be used for administration and 8% will be used again for fundraising. We always strive to keep overhead costs low and use the funds collected fully for those in need."

https://adraindonesia.org/donation/en/

Global 2018 annual report (not just Indonesia) is at 83.5% programs:

https://adra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Annual-Report-20...

Part of the reason is a global pool of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of readily available volunteers.

> measured as funds put to use versus overhead

This is generally a poor way to measure the 'effectiveness' of a charity. The amount of overhead is irrelevant; if a charity is doing 100x more good per dollar than the next best charity, you should donate to it regardless of how much the CEO earns.

See the report (p. 14) and look at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

ADRA has spent decades building, and continues to build, a flywheel.

https://adra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Annual-Report-20...

// Disclosure: I lived in Africa for a decade, observed and participated in work by multiple humanitarian organizations “on the ground”.

I am not religious, but my mother is. She tithes to the church, but also donates to other charities heavily as well - money, old clothes, furniture, you name it. She does it because she believes in it, but it’s also been quite a help some years with her taxes. I know that’s not the reason she does it, but depending upon your tax situation it can also help both you and the people you’re donating to.

I know a lot of people (and particularly in the science and tech world) like to bash on religion and religious people, but it absolutely has and continues to do a lot of good around the world as well.

Additionally, Freemasonry also requires similarly - if you are both a tithing Christian and a Freemason, such as myself, year by year; it adds up!

That is not be universally enforced for Freemasonry. It may be a jurisdictional thing.

Granted. It may be part of the specific Body I was Initiated into.

Just make sure you aren't tithing to the Kenneth Copeland Ministries or other "prosperity gospel" preachers. That money is going straight to their private jets.

I could be wrong though, it looks like they might be helping getting rid of COVID-19[1].

[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rFiDbB6hE).

And a significant portion of that ends up being spent trying to convert people, instead of helping them.

I took up my own 10% donation practice despite having left the baptist church because my leaving was a matter of principle, not a way of getting out of social responsibility. But let me tell you: having seen how that money gets used when it goes to the church, at least in the evangelical sphere, it is laughable to put it in the same category as real charities that actually work to improve real people's lives.

Every expenditure, every event, even the stuff that might otherwise fall under actual charity, all of it was to the end of converting people. All of it. They would talk about this explicitly: the primary purpose of painting that school, or handing out food to those disaster victims, was all about getting attention so people would become Christians. All of it. It was manipulative and shameful. That is not charity, much less "effective" charity.

Just curious: is it 10% before or after the tax?

As an orthodox jew, the concept of giving 10% of your money to charity is a biblical requirement known as Maaser.

Really happy to see the rest of the world joining in this.

Yes but this is focused on donating to effective charity, as a specific quantitative optimization problem.

> Really happy to see the rest of the world joining in this.

I don't mean to be accusatory, just curious, but to which charities and charitable endeavours does that 10% usually go? It looks like it's different to tithing as Maaser doesn't end up as money for the religious institution?

We are slowly but surely going back to the feudal times where charity is the only way to alleviate the lives of the common people.

Excellent point. People are very quick to praise charity, donations and volunteering, without realizing that having to rely on voluntary actions to keep the world spin is dangerous and morally unjust.

This is a good argument against EA donating: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effe...

I didn’t find the argument compelling. It was essentially “Donating to charity removes the urgency around removing the real problem: capitalism.” But whether or not capitalism is the problem is not decided. If it was decided, whether or not we could change it is not decided. If we could change it, whether or not the things we could change it to is better than capitalism is not decided.

I can donate to charity now and accomplish some good, rather than wait for some nebulous and uncertain future that may or may not be an improvement. The moral thing to do seems clear.

Forced “altruism” through taxation, and government “giving” without any personal, family and community support and mentorship — that can be strongly argued to be immoral.

The results seem to speak for themselves; see multigenerational community collapse (eg. inner cities), vs. children coming out of faith-run children’s homes, or in distressed families supported by faith communities.

Comparing community collapse situations to small charities who can choose their wards is just silly.

It is less silly, but also misses the point, to assume warehouse ghettos were sincere attempts to improve the lot of anyone. There have been moments, and the history of different efforts is varied, but most of these efforts were to ghettoize and sequester minorities, not improve conditions.

It amazes me the extent to which The Wire has become something from which people argue policy. I feel like a significant percentage of people's arguments come from fiction.

Conversely, people have long argued that accumulation of property is itself immoral.

Libertarianism (the original libertarianism, as founded by Dejacque, not right-wing libertarianism) was founded on wanting to go further than Proudhon's infamous "property is theft" - Dejacque argued that freedom is only possible if one rejects the very notion of accepting that some people have a right to restrict others from having their needs met by enforcing property rights and the like.

That either taxation or altruism is necessary is a failure of society and community in the first place.

EDIT: It's fascinating to see how unwilling people are to see a counter to the argument above of taxation being immoral. The idea of taxation as immoral is after all another fairly extreme fringe view.

I don’t disparage donating to charities. I think everyone should do what makes them “feel” the best in this regard. For some, it’s the innocence project, for others the local animal shelter.

Personally, I think the single largest contribution people can make is investing in R&D. Incremental improvements now can help generations later, and it grows exponentially. As such some things that are “good” are (which may be counter intuitive):

- investing in companies

- creating scholarships

- donating directly to research labs of interest

- contributing to open source

- filing patents

- donating time or body to research

I’ve given dramatically more than 10% of my life to advance research. Yet I don’t technically donate any income. I think it’s important people understand it’s not a zero sum game.

Example, I put tons of money into AMD when it was a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Why? Because we needed competition in the CPU space and I thought they could be viable. Those returns have gone into my kids college funds and donated to the EFF. I donated none of my earnings

How did you put money into AMD? Investing in their stock doesn’t meaningfully impact their likelihood of bankruptcy, as that capital isn’t going to the firm. Even buying bonds doesn’t mean much if you’re not part of the initial bond issuance.

I purchased stock, it’s Not entirely true stocks don’t meaningfully impact the company. Increasing the stock price means they can issue more and increase revenue. They can also take loans more easily as they could issue stock.

At the time I purchased stock was under $2

As someone who works for a large charitable organization (we do capacity building for others, I struggle with this kind effort.

1. I applaud more giving. It gives people agency in their communities, with their money, and it provides needed support.

2. I wish many of the things funded did not rely so heavily on individual giving. Some things should be taxed-based. It cannot be up to civil society to solve pernicious issues set aside by government and business.

3. Effective is hard. They acknowledge this but it is so values based. It can be a small project that builds trust so that a community can grow. So often effective can only be known by people deeply involved and over time. Some of the work the Colombian library system did after the paper-part of the peace process is a good example.

4. We have to have community led ways of defining effectiveness. This helps with local ownership and can mitigate philanthropic imperialism or any encoding of western and capitalist values that is so often present in giving of all kinds, not just individual.

5. Sports orgs are effective. They create networks for young people and improve health and related outcomes on every level. They create and infrastructure of connection, community activity, and health. And there is a fair amount of literature on this. They do not compare with a science-based NGO looking for a cure to a disease. I think the choice between them is less about effectiveness and more about the realm in which the giver wants to have an imapct.

6. Still. Please give. Find tools that help you.

I’m glad they’re doing this. We need all the altruism we can get in the world.

Though I do hope they know they’re joining a very old club, not starting a new one.

The focus on effective altruism (e.g. quantitative optimization of QALYs) is fairly novel and not very similar to religious tithing or other historical donation behaviors.

In fact, very sincerely, giving charitable donations to ineffective causes like religious organizations, youth sports, “the arts”, is actively harmful, because of the opportunity cost of omitting the same donation to more effective charities.

For example each dollar donated to local youth soccer is exactly one dollar’s worth of malaria net protection or waterborne parasite protection denied to people around the world. Zero hyperbole.

It’s especially bad for something like youth sports where there is virtually zero potential for a dollar invested in it today to create returns that more than offset the competing opportunity of spending the same dollar today on e.g. malaria nets.

There’s just no effect of marginal sports donation, for example like helping a kid develop who then goes to college and invents some humanitarian technology or something. The chained probabilities and risks just render that sort of donation as pure waste in today’s terms.

It would quite literally be better to put that money into economic purchases rather than donations instead of wasting it on subjectively preferred charities.

Which old club? Maybe people who tithe?

EA is big on evidence-based giving and has strong ties to modern utilitarian ethical ideas that Peter Singer most prominently promotes.

That's got to be pretty new, I think.

Does the word "charity" imply, that the funds are used for caring for humans?

If so, is there something similar, but instead of being for humans, being about nature preservation?

I know, that there are many organizations trying to save parts of nature and endangered species etc. But it would be great to have a movement like this caring about nature, not humans. Humans only as a by-product of saving nature. Personally I have become skeptical of saving humans in numbers anywhere and donate more to nature saving organizations.

It's not spelled out very well on the Giving What We Can website, but generally, effective altruism focuses on increasing disability-adjusted life-years for human beings.

There is some traction in the effective altruism movement though around animal welfare, generally following the philosophical lines of Peter Singer. https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/animal-welfa...

Relevant for some folks here: there's also the Founder's Pledge[0], a binding commitment for entrepreneurs to give some away a portion of their proceeds on liquidity. I've signed up.

[0] https://founderspledge.com/

Charities are scam organizations. After working for some of them as data analyst, I am glad to have left that field, I am even wondering if I rather not work for weapon/tobacco manufacturers . And the accounting books in these charities or donation publications? Just a joke..

What about funding basic research at universities or X-Prizes, for example?

https://www.xprize.org/

Often when we advance scientific or engineering knowledge, society benefits in many ways.

Do you think this is unilaterally true?

When you mix political power (depending of your positions, you might meet presidents, diplomats, terrorists or people that could barely survive for one more day) and money, you create a field full of frauds, favors, harassments and so on. I feel sorry for my ex-colleagues being exploited and in burnout as what they idealized was totally different than reality.

Which ones did you work for? I think we'd be better off knowing which ones were outright scams so we can avoid them.

Sam Harris has also joined, pledging 10% of the profits from the Waking Up app (backdated to when the app launched)! https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/j0mlqe/did_sam_h...

Millions of people already do this.

> 10% of their lifetime incomes

is a lot. People do donate, but it's not anywhere near 10% of income.

Normally giving away money to charities is great but in our artificial government-controlled economic environment, it just harms capitalism. I'm tired of this artificial top-down winner-takes-all selection.

At this stage, I'd rather be the lucky recipient of charity donations than a participating member of the economy. It's just easier and more meritocratic.

Everything the elites do seems to destroy the economy and destroy justice.

I highly recommend watching Anand Giridharadas on YouTube - He explains this effect very clearly.

I've read (and enjoyed) "Winners Take All" but I'm still having trouble understanding your argument. Could you explain what you mean by the "government-controlled economic environment" and how giving to charities "just harms capitalism." Thanks.

I recommend reading up on monetary policy and the Federal reserve (and watch videos) and you will understand what I mean and how it fits into Annand's description of the world (it compounds the problem). It's a lot worse than you think.

I recommend also doing your own research to verify all the facts. I had a hard time believing some of the facts presented but all checked out so far.

Hidden Secrets of Money: https://youtu.be/iFDe5kUUyT0?t=69

An interesting recent discussion I found which discusses the current state of the economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGsp45JbvnU

Actually the second one is eye-opening for anyone who wants to make sense of the current situation.

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