Intuitively, I’d expect this to matter somewhat, all else being equal—but all else is rarely equal.
In the nonprofit world, a promising organization might succeed or fail based on the amount it can raise within a few months. These org-specific timing considerations will, I suspect, usually overwhelm macroeconomic considerations. If you decide to wait until an economic slowdown, and it takes two years, you might see a dozen promising organizations emerge or fade away in the process. Heck, if you had decided in 2009 to wait until the next recession to give, you’d have missed… essentially the entirety of the EA movement.
At this point, with a recession being more likely to happen within a few years than was the case in 2009 (maybe?), it could make sense to save money. But I don’t know how much EA giving lines up with economic cycles, for a few reasons:
A lot of donated EA money comes from very wealthy donors who have already set aside tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in safe places that a recession won’t impact much
Another good chunk of EA money comes from people who made a pledge to donate a fixed percentage of their income, rather than seeing charity as one of the first things to cut back on when times are tough (as I’d guess is the case for many donors outside of EA)
A lot of people in the EA community have jobs that are fairly “recession-proof”. They tend to be highly educated and work in growing sectors (as opposed to, say, construction)
All in all, I’m moderately confident that EA giving during a recession would drop much less than the general public’s giving, though we aren’t wholly immune to the larger economy.
I’ll guess that EA giving is a bit more sensitive to the economy than other giving, because a disproportionate amount of EA giving comes from IPO-related wealth and cryptocurrency bubbles.
But how closely are IPOs and cryptocurrency activity linked to broader macroeconomic trends? It felt like the Bitcoin bubble inflated and popped with little impact on, say, the conventional stock market (but I could be wrong about that).
Intuitively, I’d expect this to matter somewhat, all else being equal—but all else is rarely equal.
In the nonprofit world, a promising organization might succeed or fail based on the amount it can raise within a few months. These org-specific timing considerations will, I suspect, usually overwhelm macroeconomic considerations. If you decide to wait until an economic slowdown, and it takes two years, you might see a dozen promising organizations emerge or fade away in the process. Heck, if you had decided in 2009 to wait until the next recession to give, you’d have missed… essentially the entirety of the EA movement.
At this point, with a recession being more likely to happen within a few years than was the case in 2009 (maybe?), it could make sense to save money. But I don’t know how much EA giving lines up with economic cycles, for a few reasons:
A lot of donated EA money comes from very wealthy donors who have already set aside tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in safe places that a recession won’t impact much
Another good chunk of EA money comes from people who made a pledge to donate a fixed percentage of their income, rather than seeing charity as one of the first things to cut back on when times are tough (as I’d guess is the case for many donors outside of EA)
A lot of people in the EA community have jobs that are fairly “recession-proof”. They tend to be highly educated and work in growing sectors (as opposed to, say, construction)
All in all, I’m moderately confident that EA giving during a recession would drop much less than the general public’s giving, though we aren’t wholly immune to the larger economy.
I’ll guess that EA giving is a bit more sensitive to the economy than other giving, because a disproportionate amount of EA giving comes from IPO-related wealth and cryptocurrency bubbles.
But how closely are IPOs and cryptocurrency activity linked to broader macroeconomic trends? It felt like the Bitcoin bubble inflated and popped with little impact on, say, the conventional stock market (but I could be wrong about that).
IPOs are strongly dependent on an expanding economy. Cryptocurrency bubbles are somewhat more likely in an expanding economy.
The impact of IPOs and Bitcoin on other markets is much smaller than the impact of the economy on IPOs and Bitcoin.