That’s true, but it is pretty fat-tailed. These statistics don’t break down by wealth, but you’ve got about one-quarter of US charitable giving coming from foundations and corporations.
The individuals slice isn’t broken down. However, we can suspect that the ~ 30% of total contributions given to religious organizations came predominately from individuals, meaning that the concentration of non-religious charitable giving is probably higher than these numbers would suggest.
Thanks for the link. This shows that 3% of global wealth is in billionaires. Though richer people generally give a larger percent of their income, it’s not clear they give a larger percent of their wealth. This is because many people with near zero wealth still have significant income, and still donate to charity. So I would guess ~3% of donations from individuals/foundations would be from billionaires. Corporations you point out are 6% of the US total. It’s not clear to me how to classify this, but generously you could go with market capitalization. I would guess a minority of corporate donations would come from companies worth more than $1 billion. So that would mean something like 5% of donations coming from billion-dollar individuals/companies. Whereas EA might be 75%? But it would be great to get actual breakdowns on donations by income/wealth outside EA. Will makes the claim “it’s more or less inevitable that much or most funding in EA will come from a small handful of donors.” To me this implies under 10. But if EA became a mass movement like environmentalism, then I think this would not be true, at least for “most of funding coming from <10 donors.” If there were more than 10 donors giving the majority, I think people would be significantly less worried about centralization of funding in EA.
I think Will’s statement is mostly correct with the background of who the existing donors are. How much billionaires (and near-billionaires) donate as a percentage of their wealth in general is much less important to assessing his claim than what the specific billionaires and near-billionaires on board intend to donate.
Even for GiveWell, which has a significantly easier road to being a mass movement than most of EA/EA-adjacent work, over half of its revenue came from 18 donors out of 41,862 [p. 18 of https://files.givewell.org/files/metrics/GiveWell_Metrics_Report_2021.pdf] even before one considers that over half of its impact came from direct-to-charity grants from Open Phil not included in those numbers. Over half of the total donors were in the under-$1,000 bucket, so it’s not that small donors weren’t present.
Of course, the centralization of funding would be less pronounced in a true mass movement. But mass movements take a lot of time and energy to cultivate all those small/mid-size donors . . .
I agree that Will’s statement is correct for the near term. But Will also said that his vision is that, like science is the agreed way of getting to the truth, EA should be the agreed way of getting to the good. I think that would imply that EA has become a mass movement.
That’s true, but it is pretty fat-tailed. These statistics don’t break down by wealth, but you’ve got about one-quarter of US charitable giving coming from foundations and corporations.
The individuals slice isn’t broken down. However, we can suspect that the ~ 30% of total contributions given to religious organizations came predominately from individuals, meaning that the concentration of non-religious charitable giving is probably higher than these numbers would suggest.
Thanks for the link. This shows that 3% of global wealth is in billionaires. Though richer people generally give a larger percent of their income, it’s not clear they give a larger percent of their wealth. This is because many people with near zero wealth still have significant income, and still donate to charity. So I would guess ~3% of donations from individuals/foundations would be from billionaires. Corporations you point out are 6% of the US total. It’s not clear to me how to classify this, but generously you could go with market capitalization. I would guess a minority of corporate donations would come from companies worth more than $1 billion. So that would mean something like 5% of donations coming from billion-dollar individuals/companies. Whereas EA might be 75%? But it would be great to get actual breakdowns on donations by income/wealth outside EA. Will makes the claim “it’s more or less inevitable that much or most funding in EA will come from a small handful of donors.” To me this implies under 10. But if EA became a mass movement like environmentalism, then I think this would not be true, at least for “most of funding coming from <10 donors.” If there were more than 10 donors giving the majority, I think people would be significantly less worried about centralization of funding in EA.
I think Will’s statement is mostly correct with the background of who the existing donors are. How much billionaires (and near-billionaires) donate as a percentage of their wealth in general is much less important to assessing his claim than what the specific billionaires and near-billionaires on board intend to donate.
Even for GiveWell, which has a significantly easier road to being a mass movement than most of EA/EA-adjacent work, over half of its revenue came from 18 donors out of 41,862 [p. 18 of https://files.givewell.org/files/metrics/GiveWell_Metrics_Report_2021.pdf] even before one considers that over half of its impact came from direct-to-charity grants from Open Phil not included in those numbers. Over half of the total donors were in the under-$1,000 bucket, so it’s not that small donors weren’t present.
Of course, the centralization of funding would be less pronounced in a true mass movement. But mass movements take a lot of time and energy to cultivate all those small/mid-size donors . . .
I agree that Will’s statement is correct for the near term. But Will also said that his vision is that, like science is the agreed way of getting to the truth, EA should be the agreed way of getting to the good. I think that would imply that EA has become a mass movement.