You say you take (1) to be obvious, but I think that you’re treating the optimal percentage as kind of exogenous rather than dependent on the giving opportunities in the system. In fact with the right opportunities even a maximally patient longtermist will want to give 100% of capital (or more, via borrowing) in a given year. (If those opportunities will quickly enough return more capital that’s smart+aligned with their values.)
So the argument really feels like:
Maybe in the future the community will give to some places that are worse than this other place [=saving]. If you’re smarter than the aggregate community then it will be good if you control a larger slice of the resources so you can help to hedge against this mistake. This pushes towards earning.
I think if you don’t have reason to believe you’ll do better than the aggregate community then this shouldn’t get much weight; if you do have such reason then it’s legitimate to give it some weight. But this was already a legitimate argument before you thought about saving! It applies whenever there are multiple possible uses of capital and you worry that future people might make a mistake. I suppose whenever you think of a new possible use of capital it becomes a tiny bit stronger?
It’s quite possible I’m mischaracterising your argument somehow! But at present I’m worried that this isn’t really a new argument and the post risks giving inappropriate prominence to the idea of earning to save (which I think could be quite toxic for the community for reasons you mention), even given your caveats.
[My own views here, not necessarily Ben’s or “80k’s”. I reviewed the OP before it went out but don’t share all the views expressed in it (and don’t think I’ve fully thought through all the relevant considerations).]
Thanks for the comment!
“You say you take (1) to be obvious, but I think that you’re treating the optimal percentage as kind of exogenous rather than dependent on the giving opportunities in the system.”
I mostly agree with this. The argument’s force/applicability is much weaker because of this. Indeed, if EAs are spending a higher/lower proportion of their assets at some point in the future, that’s prima facie evidence that the optimal allocation is higher/lower at that time.
(I do think a literal reading of the post is consistent with the optimal percentage varying endogenously but agree that it had an exogenous ‘vibe’ and that’s important.)
“So the argument really feels like:
Maybe in the future the community will give to some places that are worse than this other place [=saving]. If you’re smarter than the aggregate community then it will be good if you control a larger slice of the resources so you can help to hedge against this mistake. This pushes towards earning.
I think if you don’t have reason to believe you’ll do better than the aggregate community then this shouldn’t get much weight; if you do have such reason then it’s legitimate to give it some weight. But this was already a legitimate argument before you thought about saving! It applies whenever there are multiple possible uses of capital and you worry that future people might make a mistake. I suppose whenever you think of a new possible use of capital it becomes a tiny bit stronger?”
I think this is a good point but a bit too strong, as I do think there’s more to the argument than just the above. I feel pretty uncertain whether the below holds together and would love to be corrected but I understood the post to be arguing something like:
i) For people whose assets are mostly financial, it’s pretty easy to push the portfolio toward the now/later distribution they think is best. If this was also true for labour and actors had no other constraints/incentives, then I’d expect the community’s allocation to reflect its aggregate beliefs about the optimum so pushing away from that would constitute a claim that you know better.
ii) But, actors making up a large proportion of total financial assets may have constraints other than maximising impact, which could lead the community to spend faster than the aggregate of the community thinks is correct:
Large donors usually want to donate before they die (and Open Phil’s donors have pledged to do so). (Of course, it’s arguable whether this should be modeled as such a constraint or as a claim about optimal timing).
Other holders of financial capital may not have enough resources to realistically make up for that.
iii) In an idealised ‘perfect marketplace’ holders of human capital would “invest” their labour to make up for this. But they also face constraints:
Global priorities research, movement/community building, and ‘meta’ can only usefully absorb a limited amount of labour.
Human capital can’t be saved after you die and loses value each year as you age.
[I’m less sure about this one and think it’s less important.] As career capital opportunities dry up when people age, it will become more and more personally costly for them to stay in career capital mode to ‘invest’ their labour. This might lead reasonable behaviour from a self-interested standpoint to diverge from what would create a theoretically optimal portfolio for the community.
This means that for the community to maintain the allocation it thinks is optimal, people may have to convert their labour into capital so that it can be ‘saved/invested.’ But most people don’t even know that this is an option (ETA: or at least it’s not a salient one) and haven’t heard of earning to save. So pointing this out may empower the community to achieve its aggregate preferences, as opposed to being a way to undermine them.
“But at present I’m worried that this isn’t really a new argument and the post risks giving inappropriate prominence to the idea of earning to save (which I think could be quite toxic for the community for reasons you mention), even given your caveats.”
I agree this is a reasonable concern and I was a bit worried about it, too, since I think this is overall a small consideration in favor of earning to save, which I agree could be quite toxic. But I do think the post tries to caveat a lot and it overall seems good for there to be a forum where even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post., so I thought it was worth posting. (Fwiw, I think getting this reaction from you was valuable.)
I’m open to the possibility that this isn’t realistic, though. And something like “some considerations on earning to save” might have been a better title.
On reflection I realise that in some sense the heart of my objection to the post was in vibe, and I think I was subconsciously trying to correct for this by leaning into the vibe (for my response) of “this seems wrongfooted”.
But I do think the post tries to caveat a lot and it overall seems good for there to be a forum where even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post., so I thought it was worth posting.
I quite agree that it’s good if even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post. I think the issue is that the tone of the post is kind of didactic, let-me-explain-all-these-things (and the title is “an argument for X”, and the post begins “I used to think not-X”): combined these are projecting quite a sense of “X is solid”, and while it’s great that it had lots of explicit disclaimers about this just being one consideration etc., I don’t think they really do the work of cancelling the tone for feeding into casual readers’ gut impressions.
For an exaggerated contrast, imagine if the post read like:
A quick thought on earning-to-save
I’ve been wondering recently about whether earning-to-save could make sense. I’m still not sure what I think, but I did come across a perspective which could justify it.
[argument goes here]
What do people think? I haven’t worked out how big a deal this seems compared to the considerations against earning to save (and some of them are pretty substantial), so it might still be a pretty bad idea overall.
I think that would have triggered approximately zero of my vibe concerns.
Alternatively I think it could have worked to have a didactic post on “Considerations around earning-to-save” that felt like it was trying to collect the important considerations (which I’m not sure have been well laid out anywhere, so there might not be a canonical sense of which arguments are “new”) rather than particularly emphasise one consideration.
That’s fair—I was aiming to write it in a crisp way to make it easier to engage with, but I agree I could have given the argument crisply with a better introduction.
ii) But, actors making up a large proportion of total financial assets may have constraints other than maximising impact, which could lead the community to spend faster than the aggregate of the community thinks is correct:
Large donors usually want to donate before they die (and Open Phil’s donors have pledged to do so). (Of course, it’s arguable whether this should be modeled as such a constraint or as a claim about optimal timing).
Other holders of financial capital may not have enough resources to realistically make up for that.
Thanks for pulling this out, I think this is the heart of the argument. (I think it’s quite valuable to show how the case relies on this, as it helps to cancel a possible reading where everyone should assume that they personally will have better judgement than the aggregate community.)
I think it’s an interesting case, and worth considering carefully. We might want to consider:
Whether this will actually lead to incorrect spending?
My central best guess is that there will be enough flow of other money into longtermist-aligned purposes that this won’t be an issue in coming decades, but I’m quite uncertain about that
What are the best options for mitigating it?
Earning to save is certainly one possibility, but we could also consider e.g. whether there are direct work opportunities which would have a significant effect of passing capital into the hands of future longtermists
Hmm, this argument feels confused to me.
You say you take (1) to be obvious, but I think that you’re treating the optimal percentage as kind of exogenous rather than dependent on the giving opportunities in the system. In fact with the right opportunities even a maximally patient longtermist will want to give 100% of capital (or more, via borrowing) in a given year. (If those opportunities will quickly enough return more capital that’s smart+aligned with their values.)
So the argument really feels like:
I think if you don’t have reason to believe you’ll do better than the aggregate community then this shouldn’t get much weight; if you do have such reason then it’s legitimate to give it some weight. But this was already a legitimate argument before you thought about saving! It applies whenever there are multiple possible uses of capital and you worry that future people might make a mistake. I suppose whenever you think of a new possible use of capital it becomes a tiny bit stronger?
It’s quite possible I’m mischaracterising your argument somehow! But at present I’m worried that this isn’t really a new argument and the post risks giving inappropriate prominence to the idea of earning to save (which I think could be quite toxic for the community for reasons you mention), even given your caveats.
[My own views here, not necessarily Ben’s or “80k’s”. I reviewed the OP before it went out but don’t share all the views expressed in it (and don’t think I’ve fully thought through all the relevant considerations).]
Thanks for the comment!
I mostly agree with this. The argument’s force/applicability is much weaker because of this. Indeed, if EAs are spending a higher/lower proportion of their assets at some point in the future, that’s prima facie evidence that the optimal allocation is higher/lower at that time.
(I do think a literal reading of the post is consistent with the optimal percentage varying endogenously but agree that it had an exogenous ‘vibe’ and that’s important.)
I think this is a good point but a bit too strong, as I do think there’s more to the argument than just the above. I feel pretty uncertain whether the below holds together and would love to be corrected but I understood the post to be arguing something like:
i) For people whose assets are mostly financial, it’s pretty easy to push the portfolio toward the now/later distribution they think is best. If this was also true for labour and actors had no other constraints/incentives, then I’d expect the community’s allocation to reflect its aggregate beliefs about the optimum so pushing away from that would constitute a claim that you know better.
ii) But, actors making up a large proportion of total financial assets may have constraints other than maximising impact, which could lead the community to spend faster than the aggregate of the community thinks is correct:
Large donors usually want to donate before they die (and Open Phil’s donors have pledged to do so). (Of course, it’s arguable whether this should be modeled as such a constraint or as a claim about optimal timing).
Other holders of financial capital may not have enough resources to realistically make up for that.
iii) In an idealised ‘perfect marketplace’ holders of human capital would “invest” their labour to make up for this. But they also face constraints:
Global priorities research, movement/community building, and ‘meta’ can only usefully absorb a limited amount of labour.
Human capital can’t be saved after you die and loses value each year as you age.
[I’m less sure about this one and think it’s less important.] As career capital opportunities dry up when people age, it will become more and more personally costly for them to stay in career capital mode to ‘invest’ their labour. This might lead reasonable behaviour from a self-interested standpoint to diverge from what would create a theoretically optimal portfolio for the community.
This means that for the community to maintain the allocation it thinks is optimal, people may have to convert their labour into capital so that it can be ‘saved/invested.’ But most people don’t even know that this is an option (ETA: or at least it’s not a salient one) and haven’t heard of earning to save. So pointing this out may empower the community to achieve its aggregate preferences, as opposed to being a way to undermine them.
I agree this is a reasonable concern and I was a bit worried about it, too, since I think this is overall a small consideration in favor of earning to save, which I agree could be quite toxic. But I do think the post tries to caveat a lot and it overall seems good for there to be a forum where even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post., so I thought it was worth posting. (Fwiw, I think getting this reaction from you was valuable.)
I’m open to the possibility that this isn’t realistic, though. And something like “some considerations on earning to save” might have been a better title.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
On reflection I realise that in some sense the heart of my objection to the post was in vibe, and I think I was subconsciously trying to correct for this by leaning into the vibe (for my response) of “this seems wrongfooted”.
I quite agree that it’s good if even minor considerations can be considered in a quick post. I think the issue is that the tone of the post is kind of didactic, let-me-explain-all-these-things (and the title is “an argument for X”, and the post begins “I used to think not-X”): combined these are projecting quite a sense of “X is solid”, and while it’s great that it had lots of explicit disclaimers about this just being one consideration etc., I don’t think they really do the work of cancelling the tone for feeding into casual readers’ gut impressions.
For an exaggerated contrast, imagine if the post read like:
I think that would have triggered approximately zero of my vibe concerns.
Alternatively I think it could have worked to have a didactic post on “Considerations around earning-to-save” that felt like it was trying to collect the important considerations (which I’m not sure have been well laid out anywhere, so there might not be a canonical sense of which arguments are “new”) rather than particularly emphasise one consideration.
That’s fair—I was aiming to write it in a crisp way to make it easier to engage with, but I agree I could have given the argument crisply with a better introduction.
Thanks for pulling this out, I think this is the heart of the argument. (I think it’s quite valuable to show how the case relies on this, as it helps to cancel a possible reading where everyone should assume that they personally will have better judgement than the aggregate community.)
I think it’s an interesting case, and worth considering carefully. We might want to consider:
Whether this will actually lead to incorrect spending?
My central best guess is that there will be enough flow of other money into longtermist-aligned purposes that this won’t be an issue in coming decades, but I’m quite uncertain about that
What are the best options for mitigating it?
Earning to save is certainly one possibility, but we could also consider e.g. whether there are direct work opportunities which would have a significant effect of passing capital into the hands of future longtermists
Could you say more about what you might have in mind here?