I was mostly interested in establishing the base rate; I only included the comparison because it was easy. So I am unlikely to look more into comparisons, but I published my data above and others are welcome to do more analysis!
The base rate seems tricky to interpret without a real comparison. 3 out of 5 points in the summary say that the rate is high, but it doesnât seem like the evidence exists to support that claim. The implied reference class is ânon EA super-rich peopleâ, but that class isnât actually examined in the data.
The rates do seem subjectively very high. Way fewer than 10% of people I know have been convicted of financial crimes! But I wonder if founders and CEOs are being blamed for financial crimes that their companies commit, and approximately all successful companies commit financial crimes, defined broadly.
Overall great data though! It raises real concerns.
Iâm curious, do you think the Giving Pledge should have higher standards? My hot take is that we donât want to help launder reputations, but that I would personally be very happy if e.g. the Sacklers donated all their money to a real charity.
Strong downvote on the OP because the counting is done in a HIGHLY misleading way. If I were the moderators I would take the post down or demand SUBSTANTIAL corrections.
For Claim 1. (25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]), the info provided in the footnote renders this claim outright false. Beyond the fact that many civil violations of the law are not even crimes, civil judgments are not convictions, require a substantially lower standard of proof, and from a legal strategy standpoint, there is often no reason not to settle a case that requires no admission of wrongdoing and where the legal consequences of a criminal conviction are not triggered and itâs just not worth the opportunity cost of spending time and money litigating it.
Using the experience of non-US billionaires is also extremely misleading without evidence about base rates of crime in those countries. My guess would be that India, for example, has historically had such high rates of corruption that virtually every Indian over ~50, and certainly those in business, have done things that would result in jail time if done in the US. But thatâs not morally blameworthy; itâs just the system they have to operate in.
Beyond that issue, some more mundane ones:
No evidence is presented for the idea that white collar criminals are less likely to be punished than other criminals. It is probably the case that rich people are less likely to be punished for the same crime than poor people. But the nature of financial crime in publicly traded companies is that the evidence is just way more accessible to the government than the evidence of stealing toothpaste from Target. So financial crimes in publicly traded companies are likely prosecuted at much higher rates than other types of crimes.
Overall the rates listed appear to generally be lower than the general population, which is extremely impressive considering that most billionaires are men, who tend to have much higher rates of criminality. So I would expect billionaires to have almost double the population base rate of criminality just by virtue of that! I donât know why Y-combinator funding is a remotely appropriate reference class.
Letâs review the individual claims now:
25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]
4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison
Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise
Claim 1. is blatantly false, as noted at the outset. Beyond that, we have only an explanation, hidden in the footnote, of what constitutes a âconvictionâ. No definition of the meaning of allegation. Based on the stated methodology I assume at least a criminal charge or the filing of a lawsuit to count. No indication on whether e.g. a public allegation with no suit counts, and no indication that a lawsuit needs to be credible to count.
Were it to be true, this would be lower than the overall % of Americans with criminal charges, which is about 1â3 of adults. This doesnât include those whoâve been defendants in a civil lawsuit, which I canât find good statistics for. I canât find overall statistics for criminal convictions but 8% of American adults have felony convictions. Based on my experience as a lawyer, itâs surprising what kinds of minor bs count as a felony but Iâd still be surprised if misdemeanor convictions donât outnumber felonies (with substantial overlap), so Iâd guess at least 16% have some kind of conviction. Miscount civil judgments as âconvictionsâ and tons more people get thrown in.
Claim 2.--the population base rate is about 5% over a lifetime.
Claim 3. In addition to the problems noted with 1., itâs unclear what constitutes âsubstantial misconductâ. Crimes at least have a clear definition. Civil violations of the law have a clear-ish definition.
âBlatantly falseâ feels a bit hyperbolic but sure, if you have an alternative word for âconvictedâ that covers both criminal and civil cases I would be much obliged. I asked some lawyers and looked around online and couldnât find anything, but I agree it would be better if this information was in the main text instead of a footnote, all else equal.
I donât know but I would feel pretty conflicted about working on a grant from the Sackler family. I am even a bit unsettled about a lot of EA work being funded by Meta who is facing lawsuits e.g. about child addiction to their platform. I even feel uneasy writing this, but when I do, I feel an even stronger urge to say it publicly. I think if fairly criticizing our donors get us in trouble I kind of want to be in trouble.
Thanks for writing thisâI think everyone needs to at least be asking those questions to themselves, no matter what their funding source is! Some questions that might help clarify the conflictedness:
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta? Would it matter if those services were product-focused (e.g., as a programmer) vs. background in nature (e.g., landscaping)? This is intended to help dissect whether youâre describing a general conflictedness versus something more specific to accepting donations from an organization.
Does the exact nature of the funding affect your sense of conflictedness? On a continuum, you might have funding by Meta itself, funding from a controlling shareholder, funding from someone whose wealth significantly flows from Meta stock that they currently hold, someone whose wealth was significantly made in Meta stock but sold it (+/â- significant management control in the past), and so on. The answer might help identify how much of the conflictedness arises from concerns about whitewashing reputation and similar factors that are more prominent on one side of the continuum.
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta?
To me, selling services to a bad actor feel significantly more immoral than receiving their donation, since selling a service to them is much more directly helpful to them.
(This is not a comment on how bad Meta is. I do not have an informed opinion on this.)
Yeah those are good questions. I have already helped build wind farms to power the data centers of various big tech companies so my conscience is by no means âcleanâ! Moreover, I own stock, especially via index funds in Meta and other organizations. I also use and even rely on Meta, Alphabet, etc. for a lot of good in my life and make other purchases that are far less ethical. In the end, I think my analysis would show that no matter what, I am embedded in this super connected and complex society where a lot of different interests are pulling in different directions and I am part of that intricate web trying to nudge, in a very miniscule way, our shared future towards something a bit more hopeful and a bit more secure. Still, I would be worried if I get in trouble from being honest about this, and publicly honest about my uncertainty about whether my sources of funding might make my philanthropic endeavors net positive or not. I think for now it is net positive, but I am quite uncertain about this, especially if e.g. I would receive substantial funding from Meta due to an increase in its share price due to its push for open source, risky AGI. It would be fantastic if there was some rating of philanthropic sources that indicated the likelihood that using such funding would be ok or not. But I think thatâs a big ask and with the amount of risk and suffering around us perhaps it is better to just try to do something good.
Thanks for the feedback! The point Iâm trying to get across is something like âif you take donations from an ultra high net worth donor, you probably shouldnât be that surprised if they end up having committed misconduct.â I would like to mostly remain agnostic as to the question of whether you should be more or less surprised about UHNW donors committing misconduct than some other reference class (with the exception of the YCombinator thing that I included).
Is there a better way to phrase this? I understand the assumption that âhighâ is relative to some other reference class rather than just being high in absolute, but Iâm not sure what other word to use.
That makes sense! After SBF, Iâve wondered about the causality around charitable giving and criminality. If GP signatories are more criminal than other billionaires, that would suggest that individuals may be accepting criminality that they can justify with altruism. But if theyâre similarly criminal to other rich people, and rich people are more criminal than other groups, then that suggests a broader societal problem that we should adjust our legal system to properly disincentivize criminality.
I was mostly interested in establishing the base rate; I only included the comparison because it was easy. So I am unlikely to look more into comparisons, but I published my data above and others are welcome to do more analysis!
The base rate seems tricky to interpret without a real comparison. 3 out of 5 points in the summary say that the rate is high, but it doesnât seem like the evidence exists to support that claim. The implied reference class is ânon EA super-rich peopleâ, but that class isnât actually examined in the data.
The rates do seem subjectively very high. Way fewer than 10% of people I know have been convicted of financial crimes! But I wonder if founders and CEOs are being blamed for financial crimes that their companies commit, and approximately all successful companies commit financial crimes, defined broadly.
One interesting comparison is that the percent who have ever spent a night in jail is similar to the rate for the overall American population.
Overall great data though! It raises real concerns.
Iâm curious, do you think the Giving Pledge should have higher standards? My hot take is that we donât want to help launder reputations, but that I would personally be very happy if e.g. the Sacklers donated all their money to a real charity.
Strong downvote on the OP because the counting is done in a HIGHLY misleading way. If I were the moderators I would take the post down or demand SUBSTANTIAL corrections.
For Claim 1. (25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]), the info provided in the footnote renders this claim outright false. Beyond the fact that many civil violations of the law are not even crimes, civil judgments are not convictions, require a substantially lower standard of proof, and from a legal strategy standpoint, there is often no reason not to settle a case that requires no admission of wrongdoing and where the legal consequences of a criminal conviction are not triggered and itâs just not worth the opportunity cost of spending time and money litigating it.
Using the experience of non-US billionaires is also extremely misleading without evidence about base rates of crime in those countries. My guess would be that India, for example, has historically had such high rates of corruption that virtually every Indian over ~50, and certainly those in business, have done things that would result in jail time if done in the US. But thatâs not morally blameworthy; itâs just the system they have to operate in.
Beyond that issue, some more mundane ones:
No evidence is presented for the idea that white collar criminals are less likely to be punished than other criminals. It is probably the case that rich people are less likely to be punished for the same crime than poor people. But the nature of financial crime in publicly traded companies is that the evidence is just way more accessible to the government than the evidence of stealing toothpaste from Target. So financial crimes in publicly traded companies are likely prosecuted at much higher rates than other types of crimes.
Overall the rates listed appear to generally be lower than the general population, which is extremely impressive considering that most billionaires are men, who tend to have much higher rates of criminality. So I would expect billionaires to have almost double the population base rate of criminality just by virtue of that! I donât know why Y-combinator funding is a remotely appropriate reference class.
Letâs review the individual claims now:
25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]
4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison
Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise
Claim 1. is blatantly false, as noted at the outset. Beyond that, we have only an explanation, hidden in the footnote, of what constitutes a âconvictionâ. No definition of the meaning of allegation. Based on the stated methodology I assume at least a criminal charge or the filing of a lawsuit to count. No indication on whether e.g. a public allegation with no suit counts, and no indication that a lawsuit needs to be credible to count.
Were it to be true, this would be lower than the overall % of Americans with criminal charges, which is about 1â3 of adults. This doesnât include those whoâve been defendants in a civil lawsuit, which I canât find good statistics for. I canât find overall statistics for criminal convictions but 8% of American adults have felony convictions. Based on my experience as a lawyer, itâs surprising what kinds of minor bs count as a felony but Iâd still be surprised if misdemeanor convictions donât outnumber felonies (with substantial overlap), so Iâd guess at least 16% have some kind of conviction. Miscount civil judgments as âconvictionsâ and tons more people get thrown in.
Claim 2.--the population base rate is about 5% over a lifetime.
Claim 3. In addition to the problems noted with 1., itâs unclear what constitutes âsubstantial misconductâ. Crimes at least have a clear definition. Civil violations of the law have a clear-ish definition.
âBlatantly falseâ feels a bit hyperbolic but sure, if you have an alternative word for âconvictedâ that covers both criminal and civil cases I would be much obliged. I asked some lawyers and looked around online and couldnât find anything, but I agree it would be better if this information was in the main text instead of a footnote, all else equal.
I donât know but I would feel pretty conflicted about working on a grant from the Sackler family. I am even a bit unsettled about a lot of EA work being funded by Meta who is facing lawsuits e.g. about child addiction to their platform. I even feel uneasy writing this, but when I do, I feel an even stronger urge to say it publicly. I think if fairly criticizing our donors get us in trouble I kind of want to be in trouble.
Thanks for writing thisâI think everyone needs to at least be asking those questions to themselves, no matter what their funding source is! Some questions that might help clarify the conflictedness:
How does the conflictedness compare to the conflictedness (if any) you would feel if you were a business performing services for Meta? Would it matter if those services were product-focused (e.g., as a programmer) vs. background in nature (e.g., landscaping)? This is intended to help dissect whether youâre describing a general conflictedness versus something more specific to accepting donations from an organization.
Does the exact nature of the funding affect your sense of conflictedness? On a continuum, you might have funding by Meta itself, funding from a controlling shareholder, funding from someone whose wealth significantly flows from Meta stock that they currently hold, someone whose wealth was significantly made in Meta stock but sold it (+/â- significant management control in the past), and so on. The answer might help identify how much of the conflictedness arises from concerns about whitewashing reputation and similar factors that are more prominent on one side of the continuum.
To me, selling services to a bad actor feel significantly more immoral than receiving their donation, since selling a service to them is much more directly helpful to them.
(This is not a comment on how bad Meta is. I do not have an informed opinion on this.)
Yeah those are good questions. I have already helped build wind farms to power the data centers of various big tech companies so my conscience is by no means âcleanâ! Moreover, I own stock, especially via index funds in Meta and other organizations. I also use and even rely on Meta, Alphabet, etc. for a lot of good in my life and make other purchases that are far less ethical. In the end, I think my analysis would show that no matter what, I am embedded in this super connected and complex society where a lot of different interests are pulling in different directions and I am part of that intricate web trying to nudge, in a very miniscule way, our shared future towards something a bit more hopeful and a bit more secure. Still, I would be worried if I get in trouble from being honest about this, and publicly honest about my uncertainty about whether my sources of funding might make my philanthropic endeavors net positive or not. I think for now it is net positive, but I am quite uncertain about this, especially if e.g. I would receive substantial funding from Meta due to an increase in its share price due to its push for open source, risky AGI. It would be fantastic if there was some rating of philanthropic sources that indicated the likelihood that using such funding would be ok or not. But I think thatâs a big ask and with the amount of risk and suffering around us perhaps it is better to just try to do something good.
Thanks for the feedback! The point Iâm trying to get across is something like âif you take donations from an ultra high net worth donor, you probably shouldnât be that surprised if they end up having committed misconduct.â I would like to mostly remain agnostic as to the question of whether you should be more or less surprised about UHNW donors committing misconduct than some other reference class (with the exception of the YCombinator thing that I included).
Is there a better way to phrase this? I understand the assumption that âhighâ is relative to some other reference class rather than just being high in absolute, but Iâm not sure what other word to use.
That makes sense! After SBF, Iâve wondered about the causality around charitable giving and criminality. If GP signatories are more criminal than other billionaires, that would suggest that individuals may be accepting criminality that they can justify with altruism. But if theyâre similarly criminal to other rich people, and rich people are more criminal than other groups, then that suggests a broader societal problem that we should adjust our legal system to properly disincentivize criminality.