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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Well if you want to ultimately have the most charitable impact, "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" can actually do the most good. By an extraordinary magnitude.

If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years, and then $100 million in another 10 years, and then $1 billion after thirty years total... wouldn't it seem deeply wrong to give away the $1 million today, and throw away the opportunity to do $999 million of good in 30 years? Or from an equivalent perspective, to do $999 million of future harm in exchange for a mere $1 million of good today.

Obviously it depends on whether the money will grow, whether who you give to invests it themselves, it's a balancing of risk reward etc. But the idea that you always ought to give charitably now rather than invest and give later seems deeply flawed.

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In doing so, you're betting that _you_ can grow your money faster than organizations you give it to can make impact on their communities.

Helping people who need it _now_ rather than in ten years helps _them_ start contributing more effectively to their communities, or blunts negative effects of them _not_ having that help for the next ten years.

Sure, it's a bet you can make that you'll grow your money faster than it would have impact being put into the world --- but it's one that takes a certain amount of hubris.

Would be interesting to model this out, time value of money, time, etc.

What does it look like for someone fresh out of college to dive into making an impact vs waiting till they're 50, a billionaire? Use climate as an example, assume the problem is getting worse at 10% a year. With climate especially there are tipping points too, i.e. maybe there's a cliff at year 49 where it gets 200% worse.

What kind of challenges lend themselves to "get rich then give"? What kind of challenges lend themselves to "dive right in"?

> If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years

I think we have to look at where that other $9million comes from, because it's not just appearing in your pocket magically. When an asset grows 10x and production didn't grow 10x, that means the asset grew by draining smaller pools. The people you're waiting to help may be in the same pool as the ones being hurt in the meantime. Like...if I steal money from all of my neighbors and then give it back to them later, the amount I can give them is greater than what I could give before I took from them. But I bet they would rather me not take from them first just to give them back what was originally theirs.

The number of low income people in the U.S. excited about getting a "tax refund" sorta both belies and agrees with you

The basic problem with this model is that it guides you to forever procrastinate actually doing good. Sufficiently large fortunes can be sufficiently diversified that you’re basically guaranteed to keep growing your wealth so long as you keep reinvesting it. The good you can theoretically afford to do next year will always be greater than the good you can afford to do today – which means, under this model, that the “right choice” is to never do good today. That’s why this kind of simple utilitarianist thinking is a trap.

"never do good today" I like that framing. Wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon.

What would YC say?

"Do good early, do good often".

Lean philanthropy

Agile philanthropy

There's a good argument to diversify giving type too - as well as diversifying investment. Give some now, give some later. That way, you get the best of both worlds - impact now and greater impact later!

That seems to me like an overly consequentialist view of charitable giving (as is common among the "effective altruist" types). It's possible that billionaires have an obligation to give back to society as soon as possible, even if waiting to make more money would result in more total donations in the long run.

By that logic you should never give away money because your principal will never stop growing.

It's debatable, because to make that amount of money you will maybe do bad things. Or at least thing that made people unhappy.

Extreme scenario : one person makes all the people of the world work for him during his entire life. And then give his wealth when he dies.

More harm or good ?

> because to make that amount of money you will maybe do bad things.

someone making that kind of obscene wealth is almost certainly doing bad things to get it.

Many charitable causes are time sensitive. As you say though, it is a balance.

"You're starving? Come back in a year when we IPO and then I'll feed you"

I suggest going work on climate solutions. Every $1 of progress today will be worth $100,000 of impact within a decade. You're unlikely to capture that value personally of course, but that's not the point. Why take all the risk of needing to become a billionaire when you could have all the impact just by making hard career choices?

With what, good looks? There is no low hanging fruit in solving the climate situation. Whether the barriers are technological, economical or sociological, they will require massive resources and rabid tenacity to turn in the right direction. Resources that are much simpler to marshall with the agency that billions of dollars provide.

Try https://workonclimate.org/

Mathematically, sure. But ethically? Feels hypocritical the pirates of capitalism act the wolf and only later wish to rehabilitate and hang out with the sheep.

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