I definitely except that there are people who will lose out on happiness from donating.
Making it a bit more complicated, though, and moving out of the area where it’s easy to do research, there are probably happiness benefits of stuff like ‘being in a community’ and ‘living with purpose’. Giving 10 % per year and adopting the role ‘earning to give’, for example, might enable you to associate life-saving with every hour you spend on your job, which could be pretty positive (I think that feeling that your job is meaningful is associated with happiness). My intuition is that the difference between 10 % and 1 % could be important to be able to adopt this identity, but I might be wrong. And a lot of the gains from high incomes probably comes from increased status, which donating money is a way to get.
I’d be surprised if donating lots of money was the optimal thing to do if you wanted to maximise your own happiness. But I don’t think there’s a clear case that it’s worse than the average person’s spending.
I definitely except that there are people who will lose out on happiness from donating.
Making it a bit more complicated, though, and moving out of the area where it’s easy to do research, there are probably happiness benefits of stuff like ‘being in a community’ and ‘living with purpose’. Giving 10 % per year and adopting the role ‘earning to give’, for example, might enable you to associate life-saving with every hour you spend on your job, which could be pretty positive (I think that feeling that your job is meaningful is associated with happiness). My intuition is that the difference between 10 % and 1 % could be important to be able to adopt this identity, but I might be wrong. And a lot of the gains from high incomes probably comes from increased status, which donating money is a way to get.
I’d be surprised if donating lots of money was the optimal thing to do if you wanted to maximise your own happiness. But I don’t think there’s a clear case that it’s worse than the average person’s spending.
Makes sense, though I think you can realize most of the “being in a community” benefit without making large donations.