The Atheist's Tithe

I've heard of them, but I was not familiar with the details of what they asked you to pledge. I'm feeling slightly redundant now...

Have you guys ever been tempted to make it 50.1% so you can say it's a majority? ;) Or do you think it's better not to seem too extreme?

My(admittedly brief) Googling mentioned all of your income and roughly 2/3 of his being donated. I'll edit for accuracy.

Good idea. We've done a fair amount of outreach to various sceptics and atheist groups for Charity Science and various other groups have done that where they're based - including a GWWC group which did a Sunday Assembly. There's a .impact wiki page where people can share such activities.

Spending habits are extraordinarily social, though. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is, by all accounts, how humans actually think and act, in terms of competitive goods(e.g., houses in good school districts) status goods(e.g., driving a Cadillac), and personal consumption goods(e.g., trying to have as much fun on your vacation as your friends did on theirs).

If you focus competition on only personal spending, and let charity wither away, then even if everyone is actually charitable(and data says that the vast majority are), most won't donate significant sums, because they're too committed to spending competitively on consumption.

Also, LW is a pretty in-groupy sort of place. I have no objection to starting small. I think it could in principle be expanded - the fact that charity was all given to the same recipient in church tithes does not seem essential to the process - but even if we make it a social norm among us and try to expand it to our friends, we'd be doing good work.

Your argument seems to be roughly equivalent to this: "The term 'tithe' was originally applied to something more like tax than like charity. We pay quite a lot of tax. Some forms of charitable activity turn out to be harmful. Therefore it is not a good idea to give 10% of your income to charitable causes." But that last bit (which is, of course, the point) seems like a total non sequitur.

I see only two things in what you've written that come anywhere near arguing for the final inference. I don't think they're good arguments.

• "Wouldn't changes to government and taxation be a better service for society?" (My answer: They might be a very good thing, but I don't see how they funge against donation to charities.)
• "I fear that adding charity juts skews the existing systems and adds an additional element the effects of which nobody sufficiently understands." (This seems like a universal Argument Against Any Institution. Why is it any more reason to distrust charity than to distrust medical insurance, or banks, or marriage, or armies, or universities?)

I'm thinking more of the Christian tithe from a couple centuries ago than the Jewish tithe of a couple millennia ago. Socially expected, for the benefit of a charitable non-governmental organization(excepting the Papal States), used in principle for good works(albeit, with a much different definition of "good" than a modern effective altruist would use).

I'm not referring to extra donations. I'm referring to donations in general. I don't count taxes as donations, because they're pretty different creatures(voluntary vs mandatory, choice of target vs not, possibly effective vs government bureaucracy...).

Government does keep a basic safety net in place, albeit not efficiently or well. And yes, I most certainly have given up on improving it to any real extent. Government is a poor way of doing anything, which is why it should always be a backup plan. Anyone who worries about crowding out the government is simply looking at the world backwards.

Our modern taxes are significantly higher than historical income taxes. Currently e.g. < 20% for normal incomes in U.S. and < 30% in Germany (maybe higher income taxes are part of the explanation why Germans donate less? In total they apparently contribute more).

That's a common explanation. Another is that the US has a culture of giving to churches; Germany for its part has a church tax, which won't show up as charitable giving either.

Yup, that's a big part of it. The government crowds out private action pretty effectively after a while. It's amazing reading books about what private societies did in the 19th century - private libraries, private legal aid, all sorts of stuff. Don't see much of that now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index

Looking at the list of nations by "World Giving index" there does seem to be a decently strong relation between economic freedom and giving. The top countries include the USA, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, Denamrk and the Netherlands all of which have rather free economies by world standards. But the relationship seems cannot be that strong. The list also includes Myanmar, Triniad and Tobago, Bhutan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka which are not very free.

I cannot however see too much of a relation between government spending and giving. For some reason Norway was removed from the 2014 ranking but it was high on the 2013 ranking. And it along with many other nations with high amounts of spending are ranked highly.

Mr.Murphy would have a good laugh if your proposal ended up giving massive financial resources (and so, power) to churches in the US.

Er, Christians are already pressured pretty heavily by their churches to tithe, and churches have come up with numerous ways to make it easy and fun. I don't think atheists starting to also tithe maybe will change their incentives much.

1) Social pressure. Tell people "You ought to do X if you want to be a good person" actually works pretty well, if it comes at them from enough directions. Clearly, I cannot singlehandedly change the culture of a nation, but I can help.

2) Those are not professions associated with high levels of religiosity. And even in the US, less than a third of charitable donations are religious. http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/

Or perhaps they've done less good, thanks to the bureaucratic, informational and incentive disadvantages of state action.

Government programmes tend to crowd out charitable activity. Taxes tend to crowd out charitable giving, because discretionary income is lower than otherwise. We can't conclude merely from that whether the social effect is positive or negative. That would require an actual comparison of the effectiveness of the measures.

Perhaps, but quite frankly, I don't like the culture of dependency that "The government will take care of everything" fosters. Individuals should be expected to step up, and the government should be there as a safety net if they fall down. The government simply isn't effective enough to be the optimal front-line service provider for most things, and government has to worry about things like deadweight loss that the private sector doesn't.