Comment by willmacaskill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willmacaskill | Hacker News Reader

Matt is a friend of mine, and someone who got career advice from what ultimately became 80,000 Hours, a startup non-profit I cofounded. I'm really happy to see the positive response on here; we've advised a lot of people to 'earn to give' and some people... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career.

Anyone, if anyone feels inspired by the story and thinks they might want to do something similar, I'm always happy to provide advice (you can get my contact details on my website). Not just through finance; there are a ton of software engineers and entrepreneurs in the effective altruism community, and it's really a place where everyone's trying to help each other be more successful - because we'll all do more good that way. If you think you might want to get involved, or find out more, there's a pretty active facebook group where you can introduce yourself. https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/?ref=br_...

Happy also to take any questions on here.

Ah, you wrote the piece: http://qz.com/57254/to-save-the-world-dont-get-a-job-at-a-ch...

What did you think of Brook Allen's response: http://qz.com/57807/dont-come-to-wall-street-for-the-money-e...

His point was that the actual making of money might actually cause more harm (fraud, etc) than the good your donations would do. I don't agree; objectively weighing the harm with the benefits is possible, as other comments have pointed out.

Ben Todd, Will's co-founder, responded to Brook's response with: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/

I like their estimate #1. For earning to give in finance to be net-negative then finance would have to be causing net harm approximately equal to all the deaths in the world.

I and 80,000 Hours take really seriously the harm you might do through your work. I'd feel very uncomfortable to say the least to recommend that someone work in Big Tobacco in order to earn to give.

I don't think of finance like I think of big tobacco though, and the criticisms I hear of finance tend to fall into one of two camps (i) lumping all of finance into one category; (ii) not really understanding what finance does. There are some areas of finance that are morally dubious (creating ever-more-arcane financial instruments that people don't understand). And I'm sympathetic in general to the idea that a lot of finance is rent-seeking, in which case you want regulation to cut down on that. But you don't have to go into dodgy areas of finance. Matt primarily takes advantage of arbitrage opportunities; it's hard to see how that is fucking over the world.

And even on the Big Tobacco front: if you could go in and substantially change their policies for the better (even if you couldn't make them any way close to perfect), I'd think of that as a really honorable thing to do. The same goes in finance. If you do find yourself in a really dodgy situation, you can always be a whistleblower, and potentially do a lot of good that way.

Are there any good techniques for a programmer/small business owner to be able to deduct charitable contributions more than 50% of one's adjusted gross income?

> From http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organi... Generally, you may deduct up to 50 percent of your adjusted gross income, but 20 percent and 30 percent limitations apply in some cases.

To make things easy, use a donor-advised fund to meet your 50% of AGI. Thereafter, use retirement accounts. If you are a small business owner, check out SEP-IRAs.

Looking at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p542/ar02.html I see:

    Cash contributions:  A corporation must maintain a record
    of any contribution of cash, check, or other monetary
    contribution, regardless of the amount. The record can be
    a bank record, receipt, letter, or other written
    communication from the donee indicating the name of the
    organization, the date of the contribution, and the amount
    of the contribution. Keep the record of the contribution
    with the other corporate records. Do not attach the records
    to the corporation's return. For more information on cash
    contributions, see Publication 526.

So it looks like your small business could make the donation, which would then not be taxed. But I don't really know, you probably should ask a tax lawyer.

"... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career."

Well, it's at least worth having a discussion about.

If you are in a career where you honestly think damage is being done by your activities, you need to weigh that against whatever good is being done with the money you earn and give away.

What about the traders involved in the near-collapse of the global economy in 2007-2008? It would take a lot of very effective giving to make up for the damage caused.

From http://effective-altruism.com/ea/54/show_me_the_harm/:

"Finance is often taken to be the legal high earning career that’s most harmful to society. The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman and donated half of his earnings to Against Malaria Foundation, that would be about enough to save 100 lives per year (or more accurately, saving 4000 QALYs), plus likely have substantial positive flow-through effects. For Earning to Give at Goldman to be net harmful, the marginal employee would need to be causing the death of a hundred people each year. This would mean that Goldman Sachs employees are several orders of magnitude more deadly than American service people in Iraq.

Goldman has 32,000 employees. An upper bound for the harm caused by the marginal employee is thus the total harm caused divided by 32,000. For the harm to outweigh the good, Goldman would therefore have to be killing at least 3.2 million young people each year, or doing something else that is similarly harmful. That would mean that Goldman Sachs would need to be responsible for around 5% of all deaths in the world. Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs only makes up 22% of American investment banking, and 3% of the American financial industry - if the rest of finance is similarly bad, then it would imply that finance is doing something as bad as causing all the deaths in the world."

> "it would imply that finance is doing something as bad as causing all the deaths in the world"

It's within the realm of possibility methinks.

This is a false equivalence. Even assuming Goldman Sachs causes ongoing significant financial damage (something I'm not convinced of), you can't compare that directly to saving lives with an equivalent amount of money. Apples and oranges.

Actually, that is the entire purpose of the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Keep in mind, no one is really intrinsically concerned with the economy as an abstract concept. The things that we really care about are how this complex system affects real humans, and once we're talking about a change in quality of life for humans, we can compare them to saving lives via the QALY. It's the sort of process that's more statistical in nature, but you can get an idea whether you're doing more harm than good. The point above is that a back of the napkin calculation indicates that it is rather unlikely that someone working at Goldman Sachs is causing more harm than good if they donate half their income.

So if you killed the Goldman Sachs employee, stole $2 million of their savings, and donated half of that to Against Malaria Foundation, then you'd have saved a net 399 lives, and you'd be $1 million richer. Everyone's a winner!

I get the feeling that this particular accounting methodology is not used to justify actions against wealthy people.

There are a number of thought experiments along these lines that philosophers go back and forth on. The general consensus as far as what should be applied to society is that defensive rights trump utilitarian calculus, even when the calculus seems to come out in favor of violating those rights (in this case the employees right to life and property). Different people justify this in different ways.

> I get the feeling that this particular accounting methodology is not used to justify actions against wealthy people.

Keeping in mind that I would not use this methodology to justify violence or theft against anyone, I'm interested in knowing what actions you think I'm justifying against not-wealthy people that I should be applying to wealthy people as well.

The post above said, "to be net harmful, the marginal employee would need to be causing the death of a hundred people each year" and you accepted this as a "back of the napkin calculation". So it certainly appeared as though you were justifying violence, as long as you could pay the wergild (outsourced to Africa, as it's cheaper).

If violence isn't justified by this, and neither is theft, then I've no idea what actions it does justify. Why don't you tell me?

That is a very good point, and it made me realize that I was automatically translating the original statement to something other than what the literal words say. My internal translation of the statement that you quote would be "to be net harmful, the marginal employee would need to be causing [an equivalent level of harm expressed in QALYs as killing 100 people] per year", which is different in a subtle way. Specifically, it is possible to cause negative quality without committing a crime. So, someone could argue that the financial industry as a whole (and Goldman Sachs specifically) redistribute assets in such a way as to cause a net lowering in quality of life across all affected without committing any specific crimes in the process. I don't know enough to say whether this is the case, but it doesn't seem obviously wrong to me (that they cause some harm, not that they cause 100 deaths per year per employee level of harm. That seems way too high).

If someone were to use the original statement to say that it would be ok for the employee to kill 50 people and then save 100 in Africa, I would be against that, even if it were necessary to kill the 50 in order to raise the money to save the 100.

Does that help clarify?

It does. Though I'm not convinced that it's particularly useful to have such a concept as "an equivalent level of harm expressed in QALYs as killing 100 people" when it's not really that at all.

It still suggests that, something like a 70% retroactive tax on bonuses over $10,000 going back 5 years, would be a net good if the money was spent improving people's lives. Yet I think most people would find such a proposal objectionable, despite its legality.

Retroactive taxes are not legal.

> The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman

... then they wouldn't be earning $500,000. That figure is averaged out between a few people who make multi-millions and the masses on more ordinary numbers.

> The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman

They probably wouldn't be making the average salary of a Goldman Sachs employee, which is probably the arithmetic mean of salary of all current employees, and not the median or mode of new hires.

One of the arguments regarding this is that employment in the sort of higher level careers we're talking about is fairly inelastic, so if you don't take the job then it will go to the next best candidate who applied. The impact is less about the total damage/good done by your position than it is about the difference between you and the next person in line (or basically the average person in that industry). If you're the sort of person who is concerned with maximizing impact in this way you'll probably do at least a bit better on the margin, and any money that you earn to donate is pure benefit since that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

> If you are in a career where you honestly think damage is being done by your activities, you need to weigh that against whatever good is being done with the money you earn and give away.

Or, better, change job.

You lend somebody to buy a house, you end up losing your shirt and your job, and they end up going bankrupt...there are a lot of people who should have known better or were downright criminal in the crisis, but most of the actors just didn't know any better...It's hard to do good in your work and it's hard to do good by giving, more power to those who try...Thoreau has some interesting words...

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve....

As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution...But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will."

I agree it's important to think about; and that morally you can't just take benefits - harms = net good. It's reasonable at least to be more morally concerned about avoiding harm than about doing good. That said, I've never heard a plausible story about how someone like Matt is causing harm in his career (unlike he might be doing if he worked for tobacco companies, for example).

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