Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

"Just as there is only one best charity, there is only one best way to donate to that charity. Whether you volunteer versus donate money versus raise awareness is your own choice, but that choice has consequences. If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour to clean up litter, and end up with a hundred times more litter removed. If he went to the beach because he wanted the sunlight and the fresh air and the warm feeling of personally contributing to something, that's fine. If he actually wanted to help people by beautifying the beach, he's chosen an objectively wrong way to go about it. And if he wanted to help people, period, he's chosen a very wrong way to go about it, since that $1,000 could save two people from malaria. Unless the litter he removed is really worth more than two people's lives to him, he's erring even according to his own value system.

...and the same is true if his philanthropy leads him to work full-time at a nonprofit instead of going to law school to become a lawyer who makes $1,000 / hour in the first place. Unless it's one HELL of a nonprofit."

(and the comments)

But what if your personal value system includes wanting your day job---what you spend 40 hours/wk or more doing---to be directly implementing something you care about?

Sure, that's a selfish choice to some extent, but I think it's a reasonable one. Some people choose to live in one city over another just because they like it, or to work at Google rather than Wall Street because they like what they're building there more. Some people will pass up a job for one that pays 20% less, because it's building an exciting new app they want to help succeed. Wanting to work on a social-justice project just seems like a variation of that; it's quite common and natural for people to want their day job to be something they care about, if they have the option.

I think the argument as given also assumes that charities are currently operating optimally, and there's no room for improvement or disruption. If you applied the efficiency argument to startups in general, it would argue that you should work a well-paying job and pay other people to do startups. When would it ever be beneficial to do one yourself? Only if you think the market is not already efficient, and your personal intervention as a founder could change things more than working your current job and just funding startups would.

I think you're actually in agreement - if you can do more good via your day job than you could going out and doing manual labor, it's objectively better for the cause for you to do it via working more at your day job. It's just saying that it's silly for someone with a ton of leverage to abandon that leverage and volunteer as a manual laborer, rather than using the leverage to do a lot more good.

I agree that people who are capable of doing high level work should do so, but the comparison shouldn't be a high-powered lawyer vs. picking up trash, it should be: being a high powered lawyer vs. being a "high-powered leader" of a social movement. If Gandhi had decided to continue being a lawyer and donating his profits to charity, there's no way that all the cheap labor he could have hired would have added up to the kind of world-historical moment that his life did.

It's more of an encouragement to think about the choices you make than a blanket "don't go doing good directly" warning. Trash collecting for an hour is easy to value compared to an hour of legal overtime, but an hour of "high powered leading a social movement" is much more nebulous.

That benefit has to be offset by the harm. If he is getting that $1,000 to help a logging company gain the rights to clearcut old growth forest, then his additional hour may be net harm, even if he donates the $1000 to help clean up a beach.

At the big dollar amounts, are you going to be able to make the ethical choices to only choose cases that do not do net harm? Perhaps, but not guaranteed, and one "no" to one client can lose you a big client and cause trouble getting the next.

It's funny how many people don't grasp this concept. I've been chewed out before for working at a tech company, because 'obviously I could be doing more good in the peace corp'

Working in the Peace Corps could change your life and your perspective on the world in ways that working in corporate America probably won't.

It's all well and good to plan to work in a high paying job so that you can do good by donating some of the surplus you earn.

But being immersed in corporate culture and being surrounded by people who's aim is largely to make money, to look out for #1, and to value consumerism has a way of corrupting people with the best intentions.

Many start out wanting to make a difference, and wind up fretting over whether their next bonus will be enough to buy a timeshare in Cancun.

Well, the irony was that I was being actively condemned by a girl doing the same thing as me.

Thanks for the link to LW, those guys are frequently insightful.

Another thing to consider is consumer choice. Very few people donate as much as they can to charity.

I also think that "good" startups create a lot of social value by improving wealth - the bigger the pie the more to distribute.

One could get wrapped up in logic games all day. For my life, I prefer the general heuristic of "ABC" - "Alway Be Creating" as opposed to destroying or fighting over my share of the pie (which from an opportunity cost POV is actually destructive). This is just a personal preference of mine (and probably most people who read HN), BUT I also think it's prudent economics as someone who is generally creating useful stuff for those around them will be guaranteed compensation of one form or another (hourly wage, salary, startup equity, etc). The obvious exception to this is those who help the disadvantaged since they can't compensate you. And that's where donations (and for non-right-wing-libertarians, tax dollars) come into play.

It's a waste if one reads the above and not the paragraph following this one.

The Roman historian Sallust said of Cato "He preferred to be good, rather than to seem so". The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define "good" as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato's path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks.

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