One thing I consider important for altruistic career is that it should be both productive and altruistic itself.
if I find the way for 1 million people just to pay me one dollar each (without them getting anything good), I will get 1 million dollar, which I may use for my altruistic goals, but the price is that one million people will not be able to spend this dollar in their needs. Many of these people have good understanding what is good in their life. And for some of them marginal value of this 1 dollar may be high like one day more survival. My spending of this million will be better, in two cases: if I am cleaver in understanding human needs or if I use effect of concentration of capital.
It is clear that such estimations are subject of many biases. And in result collecting money from people will make more harm than good.
Many financial careers are not productive, but just clever instruments to find hidden ways of taxation of ordinary people.
Isn’t one purpose of effective altruism to be “clever in understanding human needs”? If we aren’t spending dollars in any more effective ways than regular folks are when they spend their paychecks, we have failed miserably. In the current climate, it is still quite possible to do a tremendous amount of good with relatively few dollars. There are probably several organizations that can either save or drastically improve a life for less than $5,000. I can’t imagine that ordinary people are spending their money during the course of their day in a manner that even approaches this sort of highly leveraged effectiveness.
The purpose of charity in the first place is to do more good than we would normally do when spending our money. Otherwise, we would have no good reason to ever donate to any charities. The purpose of effective altruism is to identify the very best ways of spending money in order to do the most good. If we aren’t even beating the average Joe’s personal spending habits, why are we here?
One other thing to keep in mind is that “taxation of ordinary people” is only true for a very specific (and to me, bizarre), definition of people who are “ordinary,” ie, people making at least an order of magnitude above the median world income, and quite possibly two:
One thing I consider important for altruistic career is that it should be both productive and altruistic itself.
if I find the way for 1 million people just to pay me one dollar each (without them getting anything good), I will get 1 million dollar, which I may use for my altruistic goals, but the price is that one million people will not be able to spend this dollar in their needs. Many of these people have good understanding what is good in their life. And for some of them marginal value of this 1 dollar may be high like one day more survival. My spending of this million will be better, in two cases: if I am cleaver in understanding human needs or if I use effect of concentration of capital.
It is clear that such estimations are subject of many biases. And in result collecting money from people will make more harm than good.
Many financial careers are not productive, but just clever instruments to find hidden ways of taxation of ordinary people.
Isn’t one purpose of effective altruism to be “clever in understanding human needs”? If we aren’t spending dollars in any more effective ways than regular folks are when they spend their paychecks, we have failed miserably. In the current climate, it is still quite possible to do a tremendous amount of good with relatively few dollars. There are probably several organizations that can either save or drastically improve a life for less than $5,000. I can’t imagine that ordinary people are spending their money during the course of their day in a manner that even approaches this sort of highly leveraged effectiveness.
The purpose of charity in the first place is to do more good than we would normally do when spending our money. Otherwise, we would have no good reason to ever donate to any charities. The purpose of effective altruism is to identify the very best ways of spending money in order to do the most good. If we aren’t even beating the average Joe’s personal spending habits, why are we here?
One other thing to keep in mind is that “taxation of ordinary people” is only true for a very specific (and to me, bizarre), definition of people who are “ordinary,” ie, people making at least an order of magnitude above the median world income, and quite possibly two:
https://80000hours.org/2015/07/is-wealth-inequality-so-extreme-that-its-ok-to-be-a-ruthless-trader/