One of the benefits of patient philanthropy is that it allows you to select the people to receive your money in, say, 50 years.
Assume the poorest people in the world are in Ghana. There is no guarantee that the poorest people in the world will be in Ghana in 50 years. If we want to help people in Ghana in 50 years, your two arguments strike me as quite plausible. However, if we want to help the global poor in 50 years, donating to Ghanans seems much less likely to maximize this.
On the other hand, there is also no guarantee that the global poor in 50 years will (i) be as poor as some people from Ghana you might be able to help today and (ii) have as many low hanging fruit interventions that can help them.
Give What We Can currently assumes that the cost of saving a life today is ~$4k. It’s not obvious that the cost of saving a life will be as low as ($4k x compound interest on index fund) in 50 years’ time.
(Also, if the philanthropist’s timelines are as long as 50 years it may not be them doing the cause selection, which may or may not be a consideration)
It seems very implausible that there will be any low-income countries (~$1,100 per capita GDP or less) in 50 years that are not currently low-income countries. So, donating to people in low-income countries now is a sure thing.
You can make a slightly more complicated version of the rational preference argument to also answer this objection, but that added twist seems like an unnecessary complication, given what I just said above.
What about counties that exit low income in the next fifty years? Under your assumptions and framework, we can be sure that we won’t accidentally exclude a future low income country, but we can’t be sure we won’t fail to select a future low income country.
One of the benefits of patient philanthropy is that it allows you to select the people to receive your money in, say, 50 years.
Assume the poorest people in the world are in Ghana. There is no guarantee that the poorest people in the world will be in Ghana in 50 years. If we want to help people in Ghana in 50 years, your two arguments strike me as quite plausible. However, if we want to help the global poor in 50 years, donating to Ghanans seems much less likely to maximize this.
On the other hand, there is also no guarantee that the global poor in 50 years will (i) be as poor as some people from Ghana you might be able to help today and (ii) have as many low hanging fruit interventions that can help them.
Give What We Can currently assumes that the cost of saving a life today is ~$4k. It’s not obvious that the cost of saving a life will be as low as ($4k x compound interest on index fund) in 50 years’ time.
(Also, if the philanthropist’s timelines are as long as 50 years it may not be them doing the cause selection, which may or may not be a consideration)
It seems very implausible that there will be any low-income countries (~$1,100 per capita GDP or less) in 50 years that are not currently low-income countries. So, donating to people in low-income countries now is a sure thing.
You can make a slightly more complicated version of the rational preference argument to also answer this objection, but that added twist seems like an unnecessary complication, given what I just said above.
What about counties that exit low income in the next fifty years? Under your assumptions and framework, we can be sure that we won’t accidentally exclude a future low income country, but we can’t be sure we won’t fail to select a future low income country.