I think GWWC would primarily explain the use of a flat percentage ask as based on something other than it being the fairest /â most philosophically sound ask in an ideal world.
We chose 10% of income for the đ¸10% Pledge because we think itâs a good balance of significant and achievable: It is both a significant proportion of oneâs income, in recognition of the importance of the worldâs problems and the need to take real action, while also remaining within reach of most people in wealthy countries.
Ten percent also carries with it a strong historical connection to the idea of tithing, a tradition in Judaism and Christianity of giving 10% of your income to charity or the church. Islam has a similar practice, Zakat, in which those who are able give between 2.5% and 20% of their wealth to those who are less well-off.
That said, 10% is just a minimum. Many of our members donate a lot more than their pledged amount, and other members pledge a higher starting percentage (contact us if youâd like to do this) or even take The Further Pledge â a pledge to give everything earned above a specified living allowance. And if 10% doesnât yet seem achievable, consider starting with a đšTrial Pledge (where you choose a custom amount of 1% or more and your own time commitment), or donate to effective charities without taking a pledge.
Tangentially, my own introduction to the EA 10% pledge was via Scott Alexanderâs old (2014) essay Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable, in particular this passage, albeit aimed at a very particular audience:
And Cliff Pervocracyâs concern of âEven if I do a lot of politics, am I still a bad person for not doing all the politics?â is superseded by âEven if I give a lot of charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? And then a bad person in an additional way, about 1% as large, for not doing all the politics as well?â
Thereâs no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity, then no one can stop you.
I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that ânot being perfectâ. I would prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that certain amount ten percent.
Why ten percent?
Itâs ten percent because thatâs the standard decreed by Giving What We Can and the effective altruist community. Why should we believe their standard? I think we should believe it because if we reject it in favor of âNo, you are a bad person unless you give all of it,â then everyone will just sit around feeling very guilty and doing nothing. But if we very clearly say âYou have discharged your moral duty if you give ten percent or more,â then many people will give ten percent or more. The most important thing is having a Schelling point, and ten percent is nice, round, divinely ordained, and â crucially â the Schelling point upon which we have already settled. It is an active Schelling point. If you give ten percent, you can have your name on a nice list and get access to a secret forum on the Giving What We Can site which is actually pretty boring.
Itâs ten percent because definitions were made for Man, not Man for definitions, and if we define âgood personâ in a way such that everyone is sitting around miserable because they canât reach an unobtainable standard, we are stupid definition-makers. If we are smart definition-makers, we will define it in whichever way which makes it the most effective tool to convince people to give at least that much.
Finally, itâs ten percent because if you believe in something like universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. Thatâs about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permamently save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in Year 2.
(by contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign, Twitter would break.)
Charity is in some sense the perfect unincentivized action. If you think the most important thing to do is to cure malaria, then a charitable donation is deliberately throwing the power of your brain and muscle behind the cause of curing malaria. If, as Iâve argued, the reason we canât solve world poverty and disease and so on is the capture of our financial resources by the undirected dance of incentives, then what better way to fight back than by saying âThanks but no thanks, Iâm taking this abstract representation of my resources and using it exactly how I think it should most be usedâ?
If you give 10% per year, you have done your part in making that world a reality.
Just to expand on this, GWWC say
Tangentially, my own introduction to the EA 10% pledge was via Scott Alexanderâs old (2014) essay Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable, in particular this passage, albeit aimed at a very particular audience: