Phil Trammell has some good work on this topic, here and here.
Therefore, a patient philanthropist can typically do more good (from her perspective) by investing for the sake of future spending than by spending immediately. She should only begin spending under two circumstances. First, she should spend once she, and any other patient funders in an area she wishes to support, have grown wealthy enough relative to the area’s impatient funders that even the impatient are spending at less than the patient-optimal rate for the collective (patient plus impatient) budget. Second, she should spend if she finds a fleeting opportunity to achieve sufficiently outsized long-term impact: if the vegetable shop, as it were, is having a steep enough sale.
But altruistic actors currently disagree about whether there is such a fleeting opportunity right now, and thus whether the investment rate should be more like an inflation adjusted 2%[1] or like a 20%.
One could make a case for 0.2% as well if one thought that risk of expropriation &c was very low, but geopolitical & monetary instability is high enough that I don’t think that is the case.
Phil Trammell has some good work on this topic, here and here.
But altruistic actors currently disagree about whether there is such a fleeting opportunity right now, and thus whether the investment rate should be more like an inflation adjusted 2%[1] or like a 20%.
One could make a case for 0.2% as well if one thought that risk of expropriation &c was very low, but geopolitical & monetary instability is high enough that I don’t think that is the case.
Interesting! Thank you very much for the references.