Giving now vs giving later, in practice, is a thorny tradeoff. I think these add up to roughly equal considerations, so my currently preferred policy is to split my donations 50-50, i.e. give 5% of my income away this year and save/invest 5% for a bigger donation later. (None of this is financial/tax advice! Please do your own thinking too.)
In favor of giving now (including giving a constant share of your income every year/quarter/etc, or giving a bunch of your savings away soon):
Simplicity.
The effects of your donation might have compounding returns, e.g. field-building gets more people doing great stuff, this can in turn build the field, etc., or be path-dependent, e.g. someone does some writing that establishes better concepts for the field.
Value drift: maybe you don’t trust your future self to give as much, or to be as good at picking good stuff. (Some commitment mechanisms exist for this, like DAFs, but that really only fixes the “give as much” problem, and there are lots of opportunities that DAFs can’t fund, such as 501c4 advocacy organizations, individuals, political campaigns, etc.)
Expropriation risk: you might lose the money, including via global catastrophe.
In favor of giving later:
Value of information: especially in a fast-changing field like AI, we’ll continue learning more about what kinds of interventions work as time goes on.
Philanthropic learning: basically the opposite of value drift: you specifically might become a wiser donor, especially if you’re currently young and/or new to the field.
Returns to scale: it’s probably better to make e.g. a single $150k donation than ten donations averaging $15k, because orgs can act pretty decisively with an amount like that, like hire somebody or run a program. (Eventually you hit diminishing returns, but not for most individual donors.)
Tax bunching (only applies to donations that you can write off): in my understanding, at least in the US, there’s a threshold below which you effectively can’t write off donations (the standard deduction), so there’s effectively a fixed cost in any year that you make donations. This makes donating a fixed amount every year a pretty suboptimal strategy, other things equal; if you’re donating an amount below or not that far above the standard deduction to c3 orgs every year, you might be able to save or donate significantly more if you instead donate once every few years.
Another important consideration in favor of giving now—if you earn a steady income—is that your donations this year only represent a small % of your lifetime giving.
In fact, if you think the giving-now arguments strongly outweigh giving-later but you expect to earn most of your income in the future, then it might make sense to borrow money to donate and repay the loans out of future income. But that’s difficult in practice.
Giving now vs giving later, in practice, is a thorny tradeoff. I think these add up to roughly equal considerations, so my currently preferred policy is to split my donations 50-50, i.e. give 5% of my income away this year and save/invest 5% for a bigger donation later. (None of this is financial/tax advice! Please do your own thinking too.)
In favor of giving now (including giving a constant share of your income every year/quarter/etc, or giving a bunch of your savings away soon):
Simplicity.
The effects of your donation might have compounding returns, e.g. field-building gets more people doing great stuff, this can in turn build the field, etc., or be path-dependent, e.g. someone does some writing that establishes better concepts for the field.
Value drift: maybe you don’t trust your future self to give as much, or to be as good at picking good stuff. (Some commitment mechanisms exist for this, like DAFs, but that really only fixes the “give as much” problem, and there are lots of opportunities that DAFs can’t fund, such as 501c4 advocacy organizations, individuals, political campaigns, etc.)
Expropriation risk: you might lose the money, including via global catastrophe.
In favor of giving later:
Value of information: especially in a fast-changing field like AI, we’ll continue learning more about what kinds of interventions work as time goes on.
Philanthropic learning: basically the opposite of value drift: you specifically might become a wiser donor, especially if you’re currently young and/or new to the field.
Returns to scale: it’s probably better to make e.g. a single $150k donation than ten donations averaging $15k, because orgs can act pretty decisively with an amount like that, like hire somebody or run a program. (Eventually you hit diminishing returns, but not for most individual donors.)
Compounding returns on investment.
Tax bunching (only applies to donations that you can write off): in my understanding, at least in the US, there’s a threshold below which you effectively can’t write off donations (the standard deduction), so there’s effectively a fixed cost in any year that you make donations. This makes donating a fixed amount every year a pretty suboptimal strategy, other things equal; if you’re donating an amount below or not that far above the standard deduction to c3 orgs every year, you might be able to save or donate significantly more if you instead donate once every few years.
Another important consideration in favor of giving now—if you earn a steady income—is that your donations this year only represent a small % of your lifetime giving.
In fact, if you think the giving-now arguments strongly outweigh giving-later but you expect to earn most of your income in the future, then it might make sense to borrow money to donate and repay the loans out of future income. But that’s difficult in practice.
Another one you missed is that the world is getting better over time, so we should expect donation opportunities in the future to be worse.