Question about One for the World: the average American donates about 4% of their income to charity. Given this, asking people to pledge 1% seems a bit odd â almost like you are asking them to decrease the amount they donate.
One benefit of OFTW is that they are pushing GiveWell-recommended charities, but this seems directly competitive with TLYCS, which generally suggests people pledge 2-5% (the scale adjusts based on your income).
Itâs also somewhat competitive with the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a cause-neutral 10%.
Iâm curious what you see as the benefits of OFTW over these alternatives?
Copying something I wrote in response to a similar question about OFTW:
FWIW, I donât think [the average giving level] is a great reference point. The 2015 Money for Good study found a median gift of ~.4% of income in their sample (which overweighted high income households), and 1% giving would be something like to top quintile. So getting young people to (initially) donate 1% to effective causes seems like an excellent win.
Very interesting! This highlights a number of issues. They mention 2% of GDP is charity. But I believe not all GDP shows up as gross household income. And typically EAs use pretax income (adjusted gross income in the United States), which is lower than gross household income. Some surveys use âdisposable incomeâ, which is probably even lower than pretax income. So there could easily be a factor of two difference here, and indeed this study found 3.6% average giving (though it was only of people with household income greater than $80,000 per year). There is also the question of whether mean % donations should be person-weighted or donation-weighted (the latter would agree with the GDP number better). But in other studies, I think Iâve seen that even in low income groups, average giving is still over 1%. Some have even claimed that higher income people give a lower percent of their money, but I am skeptical of this. So Iâm not sure whatâs going on here.
Thanks for writing this up!
Question about One for the World: the average American donates about 4% of their income to charity. Given this, asking people to pledge 1% seems a bit odd â almost like you are asking them to decrease the amount they donate.
One benefit of OFTW is that they are pushing GiveWell-recommended charities, but this seems directly competitive with TLYCS, which generally suggests people pledge 2-5% (the scale adjusts based on your income).
Itâs also somewhat competitive with the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a cause-neutral 10%.
Iâm curious what you see as the benefits of OFTW over these alternatives?
Copying something I wrote in response to a similar question about OFTW:
(I work at TLYCS, OFTWâs fiscal sponsor).
Very interesting! This highlights a number of issues. They mention 2% of GDP is charity. But I believe not all GDP shows up as gross household income. And typically EAs use pretax income (adjusted gross income in the United States), which is lower than gross household income. Some surveys use âdisposable incomeâ, which is probably even lower than pretax income. So there could easily be a factor of two difference here, and indeed this study found 3.6% average giving (though it was only of people with household income greater than $80,000 per year). There is also the question of whether mean % donations should be person-weighted or donation-weighted (the latter would agree with the GDP number better). But in other studies, I think Iâve seen that even in low income groups, average giving is still over 1%. Some have even claimed that higher income people give a lower percent of their money, but I am skeptical of this. So Iâm not sure whatâs going on here.