I previously estimated that 1-2% of YCombinator-backed companies with valuations over $100M had serious allegations of fraud.
While not all Giving Pledge signatories are entrepreneurs, a large fraction are, which makes this a reasonable reference class. (An even better reference class would be “non-signatory billionaires”, of course.)
My guess is that YCombinator-backed founders tend to be young with shorter careers than pledgees, and in part because of this will likely have had fewer run-ins with the law. I think better reference class would be something like founders of Fortune 500/Fortune 100 companies.
The YCombinator search also appears to have focused on individual young and apparently successful companies rather than all their founders’ activities. Branson’s conviction pre-dated the Virgin businesses that actually made him rich, and his alleged sexual misconduct on his private island wouldn’t show up in a company search either. I’m not sure the YC search was sufficiently in-depth to uncover founders guilty of yacht license violations, a day in jail for non-business-related offences or alleged sexual misconduct outside business hours.
A 10% conviction rate for financial misconduct still looks very high though.
Yep that all seems believable to me. I also noted the age thing as possible explanation (c):
Giving Pledge signatories are older, and have had more time to accumulate charges.
I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that giving pledge signatories have a lower rate of misconduct than some reference class, so I don’t want to make a strong claim here; I’m mostly just noting that “altruistic people don’t commit crimes” doesn’t seem like a likely hypothesis.
I agree with your meta point (even though I half expected to read the opposite, in which case, I’d have had a point to make about the list being curated)
One thing I will say is that the list probably isn’t at all representative of “altruistic people” or “people who join EA groups”. Not only is it a set of extremely wealthy people, but there’s no actual obligation of anyone on the list to follow through with their pledge or do anything genuinely altruistic at all. I’m sure many are sincere about it, probably including the likes of Branson with actual convictions to their names, but for others it may just be relatively straightforward form of reputation laundering without the expense of actually giving the money away!
Fair point about the company age, and yeah I agree that this list is not representative of “people who join EA groups” (for many reasons), but my intuition is that these people actually are relatively altruistic by commonsense morality standards. Anil Agarwal stuck out to me as arguably the most egregious person on this list, and he pledged 75% of his wealth to charity. Milken is maybe number two, and he’s given > $1B. And of course SBF is probably high in the list of egregiousness, and seemingly was sincere in giving lots of money to charity. (Though note that SBF wasn’t in my data set because the giving pledge kicked him out.)
I would be interested in someone filtering this list by “people who have actually given >$X” and seeing if that changes the results though.
My guess is that YCombinator-backed founders tend to be young with shorter careers than pledgees, and in part because of this will likely have had fewer run-ins with the law. I think better reference class would be something like founders of Fortune 500/Fortune 100 companies.
The YCombinator search also appears to have focused on individual young and apparently successful companies rather than all their founders’ activities. Branson’s conviction pre-dated the Virgin businesses that actually made him rich, and his alleged sexual misconduct on his private island wouldn’t show up in a company search either. I’m not sure the YC search was sufficiently in-depth to uncover founders guilty of yacht license violations, a day in jail for non-business-related offences or alleged sexual misconduct outside business hours.
A 10% conviction rate for financial misconduct still looks very high though.
Yep that all seems believable to me. I also noted the age thing as possible explanation (c):
I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that giving pledge signatories have a lower rate of misconduct than some reference class, so I don’t want to make a strong claim here; I’m mostly just noting that “altruistic people don’t commit crimes” doesn’t seem like a likely hypothesis.
>I’m mostly just noting that “altruistic people don’t commit crimes” doesn’t seem like a likely hypothesis.
I think your data is evidence in favor of a far more interesting conclusion.
The companies are even younger than the founders!
I agree with your meta point (even though I half expected to read the opposite, in which case, I’d have had a point to make about the list being curated)
One thing I will say is that the list probably isn’t at all representative of “altruistic people” or “people who join EA groups”. Not only is it a set of extremely wealthy people, but there’s no actual obligation of anyone on the list to follow through with their pledge or do anything genuinely altruistic at all. I’m sure many are sincere about it, probably including the likes of Branson with actual convictions to their names, but for others it may just be relatively straightforward form of reputation laundering without the expense of actually giving the money away!
Fair point about the company age, and yeah I agree that this list is not representative of “people who join EA groups” (for many reasons), but my intuition is that these people actually are relatively altruistic by commonsense morality standards. Anil Agarwal stuck out to me as arguably the most egregious person on this list, and he pledged 75% of his wealth to charity. Milken is maybe number two, and he’s given > $1B. And of course SBF is probably high in the list of egregiousness, and seemingly was sincere in giving lots of money to charity. (Though note that SBF wasn’t in my data set because the giving pledge kicked him out.)
I would be interested in someone filtering this list by “people who have actually given >$X” and seeing if that changes the results though.