I’m trying to decide on a time preference to use to guide my charitable giving (currently for tax optimization reasons, but that’s not the only time-amount tradeoff I can imagine facing). Can anyone point me to useful discussion that might help me work out a time preference function?
We cover the main things which would affect the time preference rate to use, but we don’t produce explicit estimates. This is something I’d like to see the community doing over the next few years.
For an EA, another consideration is that I’d expect a movement of people who give as they earn to be more persuasive and grow faster than a movement of people who invest-to-give or borrow-to-give. I think if you’re public about your giving (and you should be!) this is a very large factor.
If you’re talking about bunching donations or giving regular installments you have to take a view given the nature of the project and how much you’re giving I think.
By time preference you mean Friedman style lifetime consumption smoothing??
No, not really. I mean “give now or give later”, which doesn’t seem significantly related to consumption smoothing. Is there a connection between EA and consumption smoothing that I’ve missed?
nope, probably not, just the way you said time preference function. Casually, we’re at the age where we should be borrowing for consumption smoothing, so we might be able to expect having a lot of resource to give in later life—this is the only like I can think of.
I’m trying to decide on a time preference to use to guide my charitable giving (currently for tax optimization reasons, but that’s not the only time-amount tradeoff I can imagine facing). Can anyone point me to useful discussion that might help me work out a time preference function?
Ben Todd and I investigated the drivers of this in a report published earlier this year. The conclusions are summarised in a flow-chart.
We cover the main things which would affect the time preference rate to use, but we don’t produce explicit estimates. This is something I’d like to see the community doing over the next few years.
For an EA, another consideration is that I’d expect a movement of people who give as they earn to be more persuasive and grow faster than a movement of people who invest-to-give or borrow-to-give. I think if you’re public about your giving (and you should be!) this is a very large factor.
Obligatory link: To Inspire People to Give, Be Public About Your Giving
By time preference you mean Friedman style lifetime consumption smoothing??
EA links on this topicre: giving now vs later
re: consumption smoothing
re: practically, reducing consumption over the longer term to allow bigger generosity
If you’re talking about bunching donations or giving regular installments you have to take a view given the nature of the project and how much you’re giving I think.
No, not really. I mean “give now or give later”, which doesn’t seem significantly related to consumption smoothing. Is there a connection between EA and consumption smoothing that I’ve missed?
nope, probably not, just the way you said time preference function. Casually, we’re at the age where we should be borrowing for consumption smoothing, so we might be able to expect having a lot of resource to give in later life—this is the only like I can think of.