Proportional Giving

It's the basis for Giving What We Can's Further Pledge. I know of a few other people who have taken it, either implicitly or explicitly.

Will MacAskill does, and I think many other CEA employees. I think Jeff Kaufman and Julia Wise do an ad-hoc thing but similar in that they mostly don't treat the percentage donated as relevant--they set their personal allowance based on making their best effort without taking into account how much they're currently earning. (I'm not 100% sure this is accurate though.) I don't know the giving habits of many other EtGers but I wouldn't be surprised if they used a broadly similar method to Jeff and Julia.

As kids grow older, they become more expensive because they increasingly demand more money.

The reason they demand more money is because money becomes more valuable to them as they age.

The reason money becomes more valuable to them as they age is because they can buy more utility per dollar.

(I don't know if this is true, I'm just explaining the argument).

Analogous to: People who like chocolate more eat more chocolate, people will spend more money when the store has a special sales deal, etc. Lower prices//higher benefits drive up demand.

Suppose that I weight my own utility such that I'm willing to buy utility at 10 utils per dollar. As gjm noted, this exchange rate should stay constant unless my utility weightings change. But suppose that there are a number of things that provide utility at this rate:

• playing video games
• drinking alcohol
• renting fancy cars
• owning a house
• having children

These things become available increasingly late in life, so my consumption would increase even though I spent money rationally (well, rationally_{weighted utilitarianism}) throughout.

Singer's proposal in that article isn't _quite_ that, though it may be that he just didn't think it through carefully enough (or deliberately simplified in an article intended for general consumption). He proposes that the fraction you give of your _total_ income should be, if you're in the top [10%, 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%], [10%, 15%, 25%, 33%], producing discontinuities at the boundaries of those groups. I suspect that if pressed on that point he'd be happy to go with something smoother.

If we didn't have a culturally accepted obligation for charity, we wouldn't give as much money to inefficient charities and religious institutions, and might be more willing to consent to a higher progressive tax.

And if people didn't naturally want to have sex, we might be more willing to consent to government-assigned reproduction!

voluntary regressive tax

How is it regressive? (I suppose if A has a policy of giving 10% of what you get after tax and B looks at A's giving as a fraction of income before tax then it'll look like a regressive policy. But you could equally say that if A gives 10% of income before tax, and B looks at giving as a fraction of income after tax, then proportional giving looks like a progressive policy.)

Many advocates of proportional giving would say that if you're poor then you shouldn't be feeling obliged to give at all, which would make the policy progressive overall.

but capital gains are exempt

I don't think it's fair to blame this on the idea of proportional giving.

If we didn't have a culturally accepted obligation for charity, we [...] might be more willing to consent to a higher progressive tax.

I suppose that's possible in theory. I gravely doubt it would actually happen in practice. (Perhaps if we were forbidden to give to charities privately, but that seems like an obviously really terrible idea.)

I think you won't find anything without a lot of assumptions and caveats; Any concave utility function will simply never lead to proportional giving.

But certainly, many people will scale up their own expectations of lifestyle along with their income until a pretty high point: that is, they'll try to tell you or at least behave as if they don't have a concave utility function, until they're well into the six figures (sometimes more). Since income changes are slow and tend to co-occur with many other life changes, this, along with psychological biases, complicate any earnest attempt to sit down and say "I'll be best off giving X portion of my income this year".

I think when proposing charitable giving strategies there are a few things that need to be considered that are usually forgotten. First, and something that a lot of people in this thread have said, is the probability of adoption and persistence of a given method. I think trying to get 10 percent of people to give 50 percent of their money is less likely to work than trying to get 50 percent to give 10 percent. a popular and relatively easy charitable giving strategy can give you a lot of friends who also do it, whereas a very costly and difficult one will make you poorer than everyone you know. In terms of social incentives, I think being unable to go to as many fun activities or have as good houses as people you know could easily counteract the bonus of "I give more to charity than anyone I know" since those facts are salient and come up a lot.

Second: I really like capitalism. I think capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful force that collates and acts on huge amounts of distributed information about what people want and can do, and is better at allocating resources than anything else we've tried so far. I don't think capitalism is perfect. Indeed, it's somewhat like fire. It lets us do things we never could without it but also can punish us in ways that nothing else can. One of the ways capitalism can act is to foster long-term technological growth, and historically, a lot of technological growth seems to be incentivized by the very wealthy. I don't know that there's a good way to measure this phenomenon, but there are examples such as automobiles, cellphones, televisions, computers, etc. which seem like, without attracting the money of the wealthy, they never would've become as useful or ubiquitous. And I think condemning people for spending their wealth on "themselves" can have chilling effects on this sort of slow, costly innovation.

Third, or kind of a subset of the second, is that encouraging huge donations instead of huge investments might be anti-utilitarian in the longterm, since fundamentally selfish profit seeking investment is how we develop a lot of our infrastructure and gather a lot of our resources. EDIT- as an elaboration: capitalism is better at skin in the game and feedback than charity, such that big capitalist efforts more reliably give many people what is wanted than big charity efforts. giving a 100 people food for a month might keep them alive but what does that buy us compared to a hundred people getting hammers? unknown.

I don't know and haven't really tried to figure out proper ratios, but I don't think "if you're wealthy, you should give everything above what you need to live to charity" is either going to be very widespread or necessarily good.

Erm, the monetary system is generally a pretty efficient way to get anything done. Things like division of labour and comparative advantage are pretty handy when it comes to charity too.

Developing fusion power. Defeating disease. Defeating death. Colonising space. AGI. And so on.

Oh... I meant what would a single individual spend the money on, what would be the incentive to get more money for oneself. In the society I was mentioning... the rest of the resources would have been redirected in activities related to the furthering of the human evolution.

There are models of education where you become a partner once you understand the concepts. Something like Peer Instruction. You could have as a tutor a person from the same generation, a person who just happens to understand the concepts that you are trying to learn better. I did this for my friends with programming back in college.