Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Life You Can Save suggests people earning 40 to 80 k$/year donate just 1 %, published by Vasco Grilo on August 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers.

Summary

The Life You Can Save (

TLYCS) suggests people earning 40 to 80 k$/year donate just 1 % of their net income, which I think is too low.

Would it even be good if some people in extreme poverty wanted to sign the

10% Pledge, and donated to the most cost-effective

animal welfare interventions?

Recommendations from The Life You Can Save

TLYCS has a

calculator to suggest the amount of annual donations based on the country of residence and annual pre-tax income. For people living in the United States earning:

Less than 40 k$/year, they "recommend giving whatever you feel you can afford without undue hardship".

40 to 80 k$/year, they "recommend" annual donations equal to 1 % of the annual pre-tax income.

TLYCS also

emphasises the idea of striving towards one's personal best in terms of effective donations. Which amount of annual donations should be recommended to increase annual donations to their ideal level is an empirical question. I do not have an answer for this, and here I mostly wanted to start a discussion. However, I think the above recommendations are not sufficiently ambitious. A pre-tax income of 40 k$/year in New York for someone single would be a post-tax income of 31.3 k$/year, which is:

31.0 (= 31.3/1.01) times the maximum annual consumption of someone in extreme poverty of 1.01 k$/year (=

2.15*

1.28*365.25).

More than what

95 % of the population earns.

1 % of the above post-tax income would be 0.857 $/d (= 0.01*31.3*10^3/365.25), which is 39.1 % (= 0.857/

2.19) of the cost of the classic McDonald's burger, or 68.6 % (= 0.857/((1 + 1.5)/2)) of the

cost of a beer.

I believe the ideal donations as a fraction of post-tax income increase with post-tax income, and personally currently donate everything above a target level of savings. At the same time, I like that the

10% Pledge from Giving What We Can (GWWC) involves donating at least 10 % of post-tax income regardless of how much one earns. Besides the

reasons given by GWWC:

Life satisfaction

increases roughly logarithmically with real gross domestic product (

real GDP), which suggests welfare may increase logarithmically with post-tax income. If so, decreasing post-tax income by 10 % would cause the same reduction in welfare regardless of the starting income. In practice, it is unclear to me whether there would be such a reduction in the context of donations.

If people with modest incomes donate at least 10 %, people with higher incomes will arguably be more motivated to do so.

Donations of people in extreme poverty

Would it even be good if some people in extreme poverty wanted to sign the 10% Pledge? It might help with spreading significant giving among people with higher incomes, who would have a hard time arguing they are not wealthy enough.

I guess some people in extreme poverty already donate at least 10 % of their net income via

tithing. Yet, it

is unclear to me if this giving is more/less cost-effective than their own marginal personal consumption, so I do not know whether it is beneficial/harmful. Would it be better if they donated to the most cost-effective

animal welfare interventions? From the most to least relevant:

I would argue the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the marginal personal consumption of people in extreme poverty:

I

estimated

corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, such as the ones supported by The Humane League (

THL), are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as

GiveWell's top charities (

at the margin).

My understanding is that GiveWell's top charities are 10 times as cost-effective as

GiveDirectly (

at the margin), which provide...