Upvoted for bringing in a lot of cool research! Didnât strong-upvote because I felt the conclusion was a little too strong (âactively discourageâ, especially), and I wish youâd linked to some examples of EA promoting egoistic giving.
2. Is there a particular case of EA communication that you think actively goes against the science you cite? I vaguely remember seeing writing in a few places along the lines of âgiving can make you happierâ or âgiving effectively can make you more confidentâ (and by implication, happier), but not âgiving more can make you happierâ.
3. It would be good to see one of these studies specifically take on EA-style giving, where people often have an unusually strong sense of what their money is buying and can feel unusually confident that it will actually help. Most charities donât have anything nearly as immersive as GiveDirectly Live, a website which (to me) makes every additional dollar I give pretty darn salient.
4. âActively discouragingâ people who want to use effective giving to become happier seems far too strong. For one, the studies you cite generally look at large numbers of people; even if giving doesnât make the average person happier, it still seems like it could make any given individual happier.
If we want to give maximally accurate information, we could say âthere are a lot of different things that might work, giving is one, saving your money might be betterâ, but our ability to advise individuals seems really context-dependent. Iâve known people who I thought would actually be a lot happier upon donating more; Iâve known other people for whom âget financially secure so you can have FYM ASAPâ was better egocentric advice.
5. Finally, if someone comes up to us and says âI just want to make myself happy, should I give more?â...
...maybe we should, instead of saying ânoâ, say âwhy not consider trying to want other people to be happy, too?â
Becoming more altruistic in spirit/âpersonality seems to be pretty helpful for a lot of people. I donât know how much the science backs that up, so I wouldnât recommend it as an official response, but âcaring about other people makes you happyâ does seem like one of the strongest cross-cultural âcommon senseâ lessons in all of human experience.
Re: this part of 4 in particular â âthere are a lot of different things that might work, giving is one, saving your money might be betterâ
I think Jebb et al. 2018 gives evidence that saving your money would be better than making greater-than-nominal donations, at least until you achieve financial independence.
Re: 4 & 5 â itâs kind of an edge case, because I think everyone is motivated by both egoistic & altruistic drives to some degree.
I donât know of any evidence that donating effectively makes someone happier than just donating.
Similarly, I donât know of any evidence that the donations<>happiness link scales linearly with donation size. (My guess is that the link is heavily sublinear.)
I agree that the link is probably heavily sublinear. But I wonder if it becomes less sublinear if one is more conscious of impact-per-dollar.
Iâve had this experience myself, sort of, in that I began to enjoy giving more after I found EA and my previous âwell, I hope this worksâ feeling resolved into âyes, I found the best deal on helping!â. And since I know that Iâve found a good deal with high-EV returns, giving more does feel better, just as it would if I were depositing more money into a high-yield investment. Meanwhile, because I have enough money to be materially comfortable, the idea of â$1000 in savings lets me skip working for another two weeks in 40 years, assuming I even want to stop workingâ doesnât hold much appeal, compared to âspending $1000 on one of the worldâs best productsâ.
I think there are many other use-cases for savings than just retiring earlier (e.g. Jeff & Juliaâs mercury catastrophe, which cost $50,000 to clean up).
This is certainly true! Money can buy almost anything, including security against future disasters. Iâm only making a personal claim about myself and my own use of money. I personally often feel like giving is the form of spending that will make me âhappiestâ, because it feels like a direct path to me getting a sense of personal satisfaction in a way that saving often doesnât.
People are more likely to give when certain markers of âeffectivenessâ are satisfied (e.g. you tell them exactly how the money will be spent, you tell them the charity is relatively low-overhead, you tell them how much progress youâve made toward solving a problem).
âMore likely to giveâ =/â= âmore happy after givingâ, but it does seem to represent something like âanticipates being happier after givingâ (thatâs a reasonable interpretation for why people do almost anything with money).
These claims come from what I remember about writing a thesis on giving behavior. The relevant material starts on p. 59, items (1), (4), and (6), though Iâm synthesizing a broader base of evidence here (plus a bit of intuition from my experiences talking about EA with people outside the community).
The 80000 hours article you cite notes in its summary only that:
Giving some money to charity is unlikely to make you less happy, and may well make you happier. (My emphasis)
The GWWC piece reads thus:
Giving 10% of your income to effective charities can make an incredible difference to some of the most deprived people in the world. But what effect will giving have on you? You may be concerned that it will damage your quality of life and make you less happy. This is a perfectly reasonable concern, and there is no shame in wanting to live a full and happy life.
The good news is that giving can often make you happier.⊠(My emphasis)
As I noted in prior discussion, not only do these sources not claim âgiving effectively will increase your happinessâ, Iâm not aware of this being claimed by any major EA source. Thus the objection âThis line of argument confuses the effect of donating at all with the effect of donating effectivelyâ targets a straw man.
Regardless of which career you choose, you can donate 10% of your income.
Normally when we think of doing good with our careers, we think of paths like becoming a teacher or charity worker, which often earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the private sector, and may not align with your skills or interests. In that sense, giving 10% is less of a sacrifice.
Moreover, as we saw in an earlier article, once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income wonât affect your happiness that much, while acts that help others like giving to charity probably do make you happier.
To take just one example, one study found that in 122 of 136 countries, if respondents answered âyesâ to the question âdid you donate to charity last month?â, their life satisfaction was higher by an amount also associated with a doubling of income.5 In part, this is probably because happier people give more, but we expect some of the effect runs the other way too.
(Not persuaded? Read more on whether giving 10% is better or worse for your happiness than not donating at all.)â
Right, the only disagreement I have with that piece is this part: â⊠once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income wonât affect your happiness that muchâ
From my current understanding, extra income will continue to affect happiness quite a bit up to at least $115,000 /â year (on average for college-educated people in Western Europe and North America, in terms of subjective evaluation of oneâs life quality).
And achieving an income of $115,000 /â year is much harder than achieving one of $40,000 /â year.
I donât know if itâs more or less reliable than past research suggesting a lower satiation point, but taking the paper Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% increase in income, from $40k to $105k:
In North America, life satisfaction goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on positive affect (effects on positive affect/âhappiness are always lower and itâs the measure I think is more reliable, which is why we chose the term happiness in that quote). Negative affect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.
Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.
Whether this counts as âextra income continuing to affect happiness quite a bitâ or âextra income not affecting happiness that muchâ I guess is for readers to judge.
For myself, I would regard those gains to be sufficiently small that I would think it irrational for an egoist to focus much of their attention on earning more money at that point, rather than fostering strong relationships, a sense of purpose, or improving their self-talk.
Personally, I also expect even those correlations are overestimates of the actual effect of higher income on happiness, because we know the reverse is also happening: for various reasons happiness itself causes peopleâs incomes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both happiness and higher incomes, increasing the correlation without increasing the causation. (Though as I describe in my income and happiness article, if you have a different causal diagram in mind, you could also try arguing that itâs an underestimate.)
Whether this counts as âextra income continuing to affect happiness quite a bitâ or âextra income not affecting happiness that muchâ I guess is for readers to judge.
I notice I have some difficulty thinking through the implications of a 0.5 bump in life satisfaction on a 0.0 to 10.0 scale, especially when the 0.5 increase is in aggregate across an entire lifetime.
On one view, 0.5 doesnât seem like that much. â7.5 instead of 8.0? Thatâs a negligible effect. Once youâre at 7.5 life-satisfaction-wise, time to focus on other things.â
On another view, the 0.5 bump is quite a lot. If 10.0 on the scale is âmost satisfying life possibleâ, going from 7.5 to 8.0 could be a big frickinâ deal. Also could be a big deal if the 0.5 bump cashes out to something like âone less terrible day per month, for the rest of your lifeâ.
This consideration is probably dominated by measurement problems though. When I subjectively assess my life satisfaction, I have trouble discerning the difference between a 7 and an 8 on a 0-10 scale (though Iâm benchmarking on 10 being âbest out of the ways my life has tended to goâ, not âmost satisfying life possibleâ).
Iâve started using a 0-5 scale because of this granularity consideration. Itâs much easier for me to tell apart the difference between 3 and 4 on a 0-5 scale than it is to tell apart 7 and 8 on a 0-10 scale.
This is all to say that a 0.5 bump on a 0.0-10.0 scale might not be subjectively detectable at all to most people. (Though a 0.5 in-aggregate effect could still cash out to large subjective gains for many people.)
For myself, I would regard those gains to be sufficiently small that I would think it irrational for an egoist to focus much of their attention on earning more money at that point, rather than fostering strong relationships, a sense of purpose, or improving their self-talk.
I agree with this.
The main takeaway Iâm pushing here is something like:
âAfter a certain point, making more money has severe diminishing returns re: your happiness, as does donating lots of money.
So donât lean on making lots of money to make you happy, and donât lean on giving away lots of money to make you happy.â
Thereâs a temptation to use âdonate a lot of money to effective causesâ to scratch the âsense of purposeâ itch, which I donât think works very well (due to the diminishing returns).
Iâm not trying to target a straw man. Iâm trying to speak to a line of thought that feels alive in the EA community â something along the lines of âgiving effectively is a project worth expending substantial effort & resource on.â
Alongside this view is a corollary, something like:
Giving effectively will be good, both for you and the people youâre helping.
I think this corollary is often conveyed implicitly, but feels real regardless.
This corollary seems underspecified. I think giving effectively (and giving a lot) will be roughly as good for you as doing any giving at all. I think a more accurate version of the corollary would go something like:
Giving effectively will be about as good for you as other types of giving, but giving effectively can be more demanding than other types of giving. So thereâs often a tradeoff between your personal happiness & effective giving, especially if youâre giving large amounts out of an income less than $115,000.
Itâs quite possible that EA leaders already agree with this amended corollary, in which case all Iâm advocating for is being clear about the happiness<>giving tradeoff.
(And in the case where folks disagree with the amended corollary, Iâm advocating for something like âthis tradeoff is real & we shouldnât paper over it.â)
Upvoted for bringing in a lot of cool research! Didnât strong-upvote because I felt the conclusion was a little too strong (âactively discourageâ, especially), and I wish youâd linked to some examples of EA promoting egoistic giving.
----
1. I sense a really fantastic opportunity here to trick Buzzfeed into donating a lot of money: â$10 charitable donation vs. $1000 charitable donationâ.
2. Is there a particular case of EA communication that you think actively goes against the science you cite? I vaguely remember seeing writing in a few places along the lines of âgiving can make you happierâ or âgiving effectively can make you more confidentâ (and by implication, happier), but not âgiving more can make you happierâ.
3. It would be good to see one of these studies specifically take on EA-style giving, where people often have an unusually strong sense of what their money is buying and can feel unusually confident that it will actually help. Most charities donât have anything nearly as immersive as GiveDirectly Live, a website which (to me) makes every additional dollar I give pretty darn salient.
4. âActively discouragingâ people who want to use effective giving to become happier seems far too strong. For one, the studies you cite generally look at large numbers of people; even if giving doesnât make the average person happier, it still seems like it could make any given individual happier.
If we want to give maximally accurate information, we could say âthere are a lot of different things that might work, giving is one, saving your money might be betterâ, but our ability to advise individuals seems really context-dependent. Iâve known people who I thought would actually be a lot happier upon donating more; Iâve known other people for whom âget financially secure so you can have FYM ASAPâ was better egocentric advice.
5. Finally, if someone comes up to us and says âI just want to make myself happy, should I give more?â...
...maybe we should, instead of saying ânoâ, say âwhy not consider trying to want other people to be happy, too?â
Becoming more altruistic in spirit/âpersonality seems to be pretty helpful for a lot of people. I donât know how much the science backs that up, so I wouldnât recommend it as an official response, but âcaring about other people makes you happyâ does seem like one of the strongest cross-cultural âcommon senseâ lessons in all of human experience.
Re: this part of 4 in particular â âthere are a lot of different things that might work, giving is one, saving your money might be betterâ
I think Jebb et al. 2018 gives evidence that saving your money would be better than making greater-than-nominal donations, at least until you achieve financial independence.
Re: 4 & 5 â itâs kind of an edge case, because I think everyone is motivated by both egoistic & altruistic drives to some degree.
I donât know of any evidence that donating effectively makes someone happier than just donating.
Similarly, I donât know of any evidence that the donations<>happiness link scales linearly with donation size. (My guess is that the link is heavily sublinear.)
I agree that the link is probably heavily sublinear. But I wonder if it becomes less sublinear if one is more conscious of impact-per-dollar.
Iâve had this experience myself, sort of, in that I began to enjoy giving more after I found EA and my previous âwell, I hope this worksâ feeling resolved into âyes, I found the best deal on helping!â. And since I know that Iâve found a good deal with high-EV returns, giving more does feel better, just as it would if I were depositing more money into a high-yield investment. Meanwhile, because I have enough money to be materially comfortable, the idea of â$1000 in savings lets me skip working for another two weeks in 40 years, assuming I even want to stop workingâ doesnât hold much appeal, compared to âspending $1000 on one of the worldâs best productsâ.
I think there are many other use-cases for savings than just retiring earlier (e.g. Jeff & Juliaâs mercury catastrophe, which cost $50,000 to clean up).
This is certainly true! Money can buy almost anything, including security against future disasters. Iâm only making a personal claim about myself and my own use of money. I personally often feel like giving is the form of spending that will make me âhappiestâ, because it feels like a direct path to me getting a sense of personal satisfaction in a way that saving often doesnât.
People are more likely to give when certain markers of âeffectivenessâ are satisfied (e.g. you tell them exactly how the money will be spent, you tell them the charity is relatively low-overhead, you tell them how much progress youâve made toward solving a problem).
âMore likely to giveâ =/â= âmore happy after givingâ, but it does seem to represent something like âanticipates being happier after givingâ (thatâs a reasonable interpretation for why people do almost anything with money).
These claims come from what I remember about writing a thesis on giving behavior. The relevant material starts on p. 59, items (1), (4), and (6), though Iâm synthesizing a broader base of evidence here (plus a bit of intuition from my experiences talking about EA with people outside the community).
Re: 2 â I included a couple examples:
Neither of your examples backs up your point.
The 80000 hours article you cite notes in its summary only that:
The GWWC piece reads thus:
As I noted in prior discussion, not only do these sources not claim âgiving effectively will increase your happinessâ, Iâm not aware of this being claimed by any major EA source. Thus the objection âThis line of argument confuses the effect of donating at all with the effect of donating effectivelyâ targets a straw man.
While that piece on income and happiness seems solid, Milan might not like the vibe of this section in our article No matter your job, hereâs 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact. Iâve just tinkered with the wording to make it harder for anyone to misunderstand what weâre claiming:
âHow much sacrifice will this involve?
Regardless of which career you choose, you can donate 10% of your income.
Normally when we think of doing good with our careers, we think of paths like becoming a teacher or charity worker, which often earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the private sector, and may not align with your skills or interests. In that sense, giving 10% is less of a sacrifice.
Moreover, as we saw in an earlier article, once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income wonât affect your happiness that much, while acts that help others like giving to charity probably do make you happier.
To take just one example, one study found that in 122 of 136 countries, if respondents answered âyesâ to the question âdid you donate to charity last month?â, their life satisfaction was higher by an amount also associated with a doubling of income.5 In part, this is probably because happier people give more, but we expect some of the effect runs the other way too.
(Not persuaded? Read more on whether giving 10% is better or worse for your happiness than not donating at all.)â
Right, the only disagreement I have with that piece is this part: â⊠once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income wonât affect your happiness that muchâ
From my current understanding, extra income will continue to affect happiness quite a bit up to at least $115,000 /â year (on average for college-educated people in Western Europe and North America, in terms of subjective evaluation of oneâs life quality).
And achieving an income of $115,000 /â year is much harder than achieving one of $40,000 /â year.
I donât know if itâs more or less reliable than past research suggesting a lower satiation point, but taking the paper Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% increase in income, from $40k to $105k:
In North America, life satisfaction goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on positive affect (effects on positive affect/âhappiness are always lower and itâs the measure I think is more reliable, which is why we chose the term happiness in that quote). Negative affect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.
Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.
Whether this counts as âextra income continuing to affect happiness quite a bitâ or âextra income not affecting happiness that muchâ I guess is for readers to judge.
For myself, I would regard those gains to be sufficiently small that I would think it irrational for an egoist to focus much of their attention on earning more money at that point, rather than fostering strong relationships, a sense of purpose, or improving their self-talk.
Personally, I also expect even those correlations are overestimates of the actual effect of higher income on happiness, because we know the reverse is also happening: for various reasons happiness itself causes peopleâs incomes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both happiness and higher incomes, increasing the correlation without increasing the causation. (Though as I describe in my income and happiness article, if you have a different causal diagram in mind, you could also try arguing that itâs an underestimate.)
I notice I have some difficulty thinking through the implications of a 0.5 bump in life satisfaction on a 0.0 to 10.0 scale, especially when the 0.5 increase is in aggregate across an entire lifetime.
On one view, 0.5 doesnât seem like that much. â7.5 instead of 8.0? Thatâs a negligible effect. Once youâre at 7.5 life-satisfaction-wise, time to focus on other things.â
On another view, the 0.5 bump is quite a lot. If 10.0 on the scale is âmost satisfying life possibleâ, going from 7.5 to 8.0 could be a big frickinâ deal. Also could be a big deal if the 0.5 bump cashes out to something like âone less terrible day per month, for the rest of your lifeâ.
This consideration is probably dominated by measurement problems though. When I subjectively assess my life satisfaction, I have trouble discerning the difference between a 7 and an 8 on a 0-10 scale (though Iâm benchmarking on 10 being âbest out of the ways my life has tended to goâ, not âmost satisfying life possibleâ).
Iâve started using a 0-5 scale because of this granularity consideration. Itâs much easier for me to tell apart the difference between 3 and 4 on a 0-5 scale than it is to tell apart 7 and 8 on a 0-10 scale.
This is all to say that a 0.5 bump on a 0.0-10.0 scale might not be subjectively detectable at all to most people. (Though a 0.5 in-aggregate effect could still cash out to large subjective gains for many people.)
I agree with this.
The main takeaway Iâm pushing here is something like:
âAfter a certain point, making more money has severe diminishing returns re: your happiness, as does donating lots of money.
So donât lean on making lots of money to make you happy, and donât lean on giving away lots of money to make you happy.â
Thereâs a temptation to use âdonate a lot of money to effective causesâ to scratch the âsense of purposeâ itch, which I donât think works very well (due to the diminishing returns).
Iâm not trying to target a straw man. Iâm trying to speak to a line of thought that feels alive in the EA community â something along the lines of âgiving effectively is a project worth expending substantial effort & resource on.â
Alongside this view is a corollary, something like:
I think this corollary is often conveyed implicitly, but feels real regardless.
This corollary seems underspecified. I think giving effectively (and giving a lot) will be roughly as good for you as doing any giving at all. I think a more accurate version of the corollary would go something like:
Itâs quite possible that EA leaders already agree with this amended corollary, in which case all Iâm advocating for is being clear about the happiness<>giving tradeoff.
(And in the case where folks disagree with the amended corollary, Iâm advocating for something like âthis tradeoff is real & we shouldnât paper over it.â)