The School For Moral Ambition is hiring people to work on Tax Fairness!
There are also several orgs working on UHNWI advising/fundraising.
In theory, if we could move from these people donating say 3% of their wealth, to say 20%, I suspect that could unlock enormous global wins. Dramatically more than anything EA has achieved so far. [...] in fairness, I think there was little dedicated and smart effort to improve it.
20% would be absurd, but even moving the average from 3% to 3.5% would be more than anything EA has achieved so far. But there are millions of people with strong incentives to do so (including every single charity relying on donations), so it would be surprising for EA to have such a huge effect. I’m glad that many people are trying and I hope that they succeed.
Perhaps advocating for higher taxes on extreme luxury goods (e.g. yacht fleets and luxury private jets), if done in a tractable way, could get more universal traction.
10 years ago, I assumed that as word got out about effective giving, many more rich people would start doing that.
In terms of giving more, I don’t understand why you would assume that. I imagine that billionaires could always see that there was a huge number of people that they could have helped relatively cheaply. I wouldn’t expect changing the effectiveness by a couple of orders of magnitude to change things much. A typical GiveDirectly donor is closer to a typical GiveDirectly beneficiary than to a 10-billionaire, even on a log scale of income. In terms of giving more effectively, GiveWell recently commissioned a report to explore why other funders don’t fund opportunities GiveWell does, but they haven’t published it yet. (I imagine because of everything going on with USAID right now)
Small point, but I feel pretty uncomfortable with this statement, which I’ve heard before a bunch of times (in various forms):
Billionaires don’t hoard wealth, but they invest it in companies and lend it to governments.
I very much know that billionaires don’t keep their wealth as literal cash.
But I feel like it’s generally fairly clear that: 1. These Billionaires are doing this just because it’s in their best interest. Investing and lending is not done altruistically, it’s done for profit. If these actions wound up producing zero or partially-negative global impact, I suspect Billionaires would still take them. (Related, I expect that at least several of these companies they invest in are net-negative) 2. It would be dramatically better if these people would donate this money to decent causes instead.
I wouldn’t value “$1 that a Billionaire is investing in the stock market” as literally having zero value, but I think most of us would place it quite low.
I assume that as with many annoying debates, this is an issue of semantics. What does “hoarding” mean, or how would it be interpreted? I think it’s fair to classify a situation such as, “I’m going to keep a bunch of money for myself and try to do the conventional thing of maximizing it, which now means putting it in the stock market” as “hoarding”, but I realize others might prefer other terminology.
I think a main argument related to that perspective is that you shouldn’t tax wealth but you should tax consumption (holding billions in stocks and bonds has positive externalities, buying a yacht fleet has negative externalities)
I obviously don’t agree with it, so I’m likely not presenting the strongest version of the arguments, but you can see an example of people holding this view in the twitter screenshot above, and I think it’s not uncommon
The School For Moral Ambition is hiring people to work on Tax Fairness!
There are also several orgs working on UHNWI advising/fundraising.
20% would be absurd, but even moving the average from 3% to 3.5% would be more than anything EA has achieved so far. But there are millions of people with strong incentives to do so (including every single charity relying on donations), so it would be surprising for EA to have such a huge effect. I’m glad that many people are trying and I hope that they succeed.
Possibly a tangential point, but lots of people in many EA communities think that accelerating economic growth in the US is a top use of funds. Billionaires don’t hoard wealth, but they invest it in companies and lend it to governments.
Perhaps advocating for higher taxes on extreme luxury goods (e.g. yacht fleets and luxury private jets), if done in a tractable way, could get more universal traction.
In terms of giving more, I don’t understand why you would assume that. I imagine that billionaires could always see that there was a huge number of people that they could have helped relatively cheaply. I wouldn’t expect changing the effectiveness by a couple of orders of magnitude to change things much. A typical GiveDirectly donor is closer to a typical GiveDirectly beneficiary than to a 10-billionaire, even on a log scale of income. In terms of giving more effectively, GiveWell recently commissioned a report to explore why other funders don’t fund opportunities GiveWell does, but they haven’t published it yet. (I imagine because of everything going on with USAID right now)
It sounds like we largely agree on a lot of this.
Small point, but I feel pretty uncomfortable with this statement, which I’ve heard before a bunch of times (in various forms):
I very much know that billionaires don’t keep their wealth as literal cash.
But I feel like it’s generally fairly clear that:
1. These Billionaires are doing this just because it’s in their best interest. Investing and lending is not done altruistically, it’s done for profit. If these actions wound up producing zero or partially-negative global impact, I suspect Billionaires would still take them. (Related, I expect that at least several of these companies they invest in are net-negative)
2. It would be dramatically better if these people would donate this money to decent causes instead.
I wouldn’t value “$1 that a Billionaire is investing in the stock market” as literally having zero value, but I think most of us would place it quite low.
I assume that as with many annoying debates, this is an issue of semantics. What does “hoarding” mean, or how would it be interpreted? I think it’s fair to classify a situation such as, “I’m going to keep a bunch of money for myself and try to do the conventional thing of maximizing it, which now means putting it in the stock market” as “hoarding”, but I realize others might prefer other terminology.
Yeah I don’t quite understand that line of argument. Naively, it seems like a bait-and-switch, not unlike “journalists don’t write their own terrible headlines.”
I think a main argument related to that perspective is that you shouldn’t tax wealth but you should tax consumption (holding billions in stocks and bonds has positive externalities, buying a yacht fleet has negative externalities)
I obviously don’t agree with it, so I’m likely not presenting the strongest version of the arguments, but you can see an example of people holding this view in the twitter screenshot above, and I think it’s not uncommon
Hmm I think the link does not support your claim.
Yes that’s a fair point. Do you think the claim itself is false?
I was under the impression that many YMBY/Abundance/Progress Studies-minded EA communities were operating with that theory of change, am I wrong?