″...these incredible rates of compounding must decline over time. Otherwise these small charitable acts would quickly become responsible for all of the good in the world. What sustainable level of compounding can they achieve in the long run? The global economic growth rate...”
“High-risk business investments by nature compound more quickly than the global economic growth rate. This is the classic ‘r > g’, which has become widely understood due to Piketty.”
Maybe I’m missing something, because I see this pair argued a lot, but when phrased this way this pair of arguments seem to be in tension.
I understand the argument that donations earning even 2% above the global economic growth rate in the very long run would result in a single small donation eventually being responsible for virtually all good done (a seemingly absurd conclusion), but by the exact same token that means a high-risk business investment earning even 2% above the global economic growth rate in the very long run would eventually be making annual returns greater than annual world GDP (an equally absurd conclusion). So in fact both must eventually decay to the world growth rate.
It must be said that Paul, AFAIK, doesn’t frame the argument this way. From the post you linked to:
“Here’s the problem: if you give your money well, it might compound much faster than it would have in your bank account—but only for a while. Over time the positive effects will spread out more and more, across a broader and broader group of beneficiaries, until eventually you are just contributing to a representative basket of all human activities. Eventually, my investment will compound at the rate of world economic growth, rather than at the particularly promising interest rate I was able to originally identify.”
In other words, with an investment the return keeps coming in to you and you can continue to direct it to activites which are above-average promising (or above-average risky). But with a donation you essentially lose control over it immediately and so you shouldn’t expect it to stay in above-average promising territory for very long at all; the timeline on ‘eventually’ is short. If you could somehow capture a fraction that initial high social return and maintain control of it, e.g. if from that initial 20% return on cash transfers you received 6%, then donating would dominate, but in practice that’s very difficult. Microfinance is arguably an attempt to do exactly this, but unfortunately doesn’t appear to have the great social returns we’re looking for.
Off-topic, but thinking about it in terms of control also highlights why meta-activities might well be in a different category. If you give money to a meta-activity that generates ‘EA dollars’ at a high enough multiplier on a short enough timeframe, then while you’ve lost control of your money the control has been passed on to people who you might reasonably expect to also be searching for above-average promising activities.
Hey AGB, I remember thinking of the same point years ago and Robin Hanson explaining to me how it works. Basically it is the case that if someone left all their wealth in business equity to accumulate without any interference, they would slowly converge on owning all the wealth in the world (at least assuming a stable investment environment).
The difference is that social impacts like better health or education are not recaptured by the donor, and instead just diffuse outwards until the gains are spread across a wide range of people and projects. However a business investor gets to invest in whatever looks most likely to compound rapidly, then takes the surplus back as dividends or capital gains, and can then shift their investment to whatever other new project looks likely to compound most rapidly. They keep repeating this cycle indefinitely.
However, this never actually happens and in fact there are legal restrictions on trusts and endowments that make it unlikely. Instead, accumulated wealth is eaten away by withdrawals for consumption, ‘wastrel sons’, being divided between many heirs who eat it, destruction due to revolutions/inflation, and so on.
However, this never actually happens and in fact there are legal restrictions on trusts and endowments that make it unlikely. Instead, accumulated wealth is eaten away by withdrawals for consumption, ‘wastrel sons’, being divided between many heirs who eat it, destruction due to revolutions/inflation, and so on.
Is this a reason to be against the invention of anti-aging technologies, since they might result in a particular patient, long-lived investor with a midas touch swallowing the entire economy?
Basically it is the case that if someone left all their wealth in business equity to accumulate without any interference, they would slowly converge on owning all the wealth in the world (at least assuming a stable investment environment).
It’s actually pretty easy to see that this happens. If you buy and hold some stock and you always re-invest dividends, you will not lose stock unless all your companies go bankrupt, and you will slowly gain stock as you buy more from the dividend payouts.
I agree with you that the positions are not actually symmetric, and I think your second paragraph is close to word-for-word what I said in my penultimate paragraph. However, if you phrase it as you did in the OP (and this isn’t just you by any means), then your arguments are symmetric and so you’ve proved nothing. I think it’s worth explaining what makes actually these two cases different.
The reason I think it’s worth explaining is highlighted in my last paragraph; what might seem like me being pedantic actually has very significant implications for how you evaluate meta-activities, and indeed I’ve clashed with Robin Hanson on that exact issue.
I was only targetting this for donors focussed on global poverty—if you’re thinking about x-risk or movement building, I think other considerations dominate entirely.
″...these incredible rates of compounding must decline over time. Otherwise these small charitable acts would quickly become responsible for all of the good in the world. What sustainable level of compounding can they achieve in the long run? The global economic growth rate...”
“High-risk business investments by nature compound more quickly than the global economic growth rate. This is the classic ‘r > g’, which has become widely understood due to Piketty.”
Maybe I’m missing something, because I see this pair argued a lot, but when phrased this way this pair of arguments seem to be in tension.
I understand the argument that donations earning even 2% above the global economic growth rate in the very long run would result in a single small donation eventually being responsible for virtually all good done (a seemingly absurd conclusion), but by the exact same token that means a high-risk business investment earning even 2% above the global economic growth rate in the very long run would eventually be making annual returns greater than annual world GDP (an equally absurd conclusion). So in fact both must eventually decay to the world growth rate.
It must be said that Paul, AFAIK, doesn’t frame the argument this way. From the post you linked to:
“Here’s the problem: if you give your money well, it might compound much faster than it would have in your bank account—but only for a while. Over time the positive effects will spread out more and more, across a broader and broader group of beneficiaries, until eventually you are just contributing to a representative basket of all human activities. Eventually, my investment will compound at the rate of world economic growth, rather than at the particularly promising interest rate I was able to originally identify.”
In other words, with an investment the return keeps coming in to you and you can continue to direct it to activites which are above-average promising (or above-average risky). But with a donation you essentially lose control over it immediately and so you shouldn’t expect it to stay in above-average promising territory for very long at all; the timeline on ‘eventually’ is short. If you could somehow capture a fraction that initial high social return and maintain control of it, e.g. if from that initial 20% return on cash transfers you received 6%, then donating would dominate, but in practice that’s very difficult. Microfinance is arguably an attempt to do exactly this, but unfortunately doesn’t appear to have the great social returns we’re looking for.
Off-topic, but thinking about it in terms of control also highlights why meta-activities might well be in a different category. If you give money to a meta-activity that generates ‘EA dollars’ at a high enough multiplier on a short enough timeframe, then while you’ve lost control of your money the control has been passed on to people who you might reasonably expect to also be searching for above-average promising activities.
Hey AGB, I remember thinking of the same point years ago and Robin Hanson explaining to me how it works. Basically it is the case that if someone left all their wealth in business equity to accumulate without any interference, they would slowly converge on owning all the wealth in the world (at least assuming a stable investment environment).
The difference is that social impacts like better health or education are not recaptured by the donor, and instead just diffuse outwards until the gains are spread across a wide range of people and projects. However a business investor gets to invest in whatever looks most likely to compound rapidly, then takes the surplus back as dividends or capital gains, and can then shift their investment to whatever other new project looks likely to compound most rapidly. They keep repeating this cycle indefinitely.
However, this never actually happens and in fact there are legal restrictions on trusts and endowments that make it unlikely. Instead, accumulated wealth is eaten away by withdrawals for consumption, ‘wastrel sons’, being divided between many heirs who eat it, destruction due to revolutions/inflation, and so on.
Is this a reason to be against the invention of anti-aging technologies, since they might result in a particular patient, long-lived investor with a midas touch swallowing the entire economy?
It’s actually pretty easy to see that this happens. If you buy and hold some stock and you always re-invest dividends, you will not lose stock unless all your companies go bankrupt, and you will slowly gain stock as you buy more from the dividend payouts.
I agree with you that the positions are not actually symmetric, and I think your second paragraph is close to word-for-word what I said in my penultimate paragraph. However, if you phrase it as you did in the OP (and this isn’t just you by any means), then your arguments are symmetric and so you’ve proved nothing. I think it’s worth explaining what makes actually these two cases different.
The reason I think it’s worth explaining is highlighted in my last paragraph; what might seem like me being pedantic actually has very significant implications for how you evaluate meta-activities, and indeed I’ve clashed with Robin Hanson on that exact issue.
I was only targetting this for donors focussed on global poverty—if you’re thinking about x-risk or movement building, I think other considerations dominate entirely.