I do not know whether taxing people with higher income more heavily would increase human welfare. I agree it would nearterm, as 1 $ results in a greater increase in welfare for people with lower income. However, my sense is that economists tend to agree that income and capital taxes decrease the growth of real gross domestic product (real GDP) per capita, which is strongly correlated with median income across countries. At least in the US, there has also been a strong correlation between mean and median income. So I expect taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would lead to a slower growth of the median income, which may decrease welfare longterm.
An example below is a comparison between the United States and Sweden.
I would need a more comprehensive analysis to be persuaded. Singaporeās tax revenue was 11.5 % of its GDP in 2022, less than USā 26.8 %, and much less than Swedenās 43 %, but Singapore is much closer to Sweden than the US in terms of social outcomes.
There is a good correlation between self-reported life satisfaction and real GDP per capita across countries. So, since I think taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would slow down the growth of real GDP per capita, I worry it may lead to less welfare longterm.
Zooming out, I also care about the effects on animals. So I would want to know how taxing people with higher income more heavily would affect the consumption of animal-based foods, and development of alternative proteins to come to an overall view about whether people with higher income should be taxed more or less. I believe the 3 animal-based foods which account for the most animal suffering, ordered from the least to the most expensive, are chicken meat, fish, and shrimp. In high income countries, where even people with low income eat lots of animal-based foods, I guess taxing people with higher income more heavily would tend to decrease the consumption of chicken, but increase that of fish and shrimp (and beef, but I am not worried about this one).
Given my large uncertainty about how taxes affect welfare, I am currently deferring to the libertarian intuitions described in another post from Michael Huemer, Tax Breaks for the Rich.
The current system is like this: Five friends go out for dinner. Say they have some expenses that are common to the group (e.g., a shared appetizer) plus some items ordered by and for specific individuals. At the end of the meal, someone suggests that one of the friends, the one with the most money, should be forced to pay for everyone, even though he doesnāt want to.
In the US, āThe top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019ā. So, if each of the 5 friends corresponded to one quintile, the richest one would pay for 90.1 % of the meal. I agree with Michael that:
Intuitively, a fair division would be like this: Everyone pays for the items that he himself ordered, plus 1ā5 of the common items.
I am happy to answer if you have any questions.
Thanks for that! I think donations are the best way for people to increase their social impact. So, instead of discussing the effects of taxes, I would be curious to know your thoughts on my cause prioritisation. In particular, myviewthat the best animal welfare organisations are over 100 times as cost-effective as the best ones in human welfare. Have you considered donating to animal welfare?
Thank you very much, Vasco! I am glad that you liked my comment. I will try to answer all your questions as good as I can. I havenāt replied to long post before so I donāt know how to do the cool paragraphs that you do, so sorry if it gets a little confusing.
I updated the link, so it should work now. Thank you for mentioning this!
I didnāt find any good data for how much the top quintile funded governement transfers in other countries, but it would have been very interesting to look at. Thank you for the interesting information.
I think one reason for Singapore being closer to Sweden when it comes to social outcomes might be annual working hours per employed person, where Singapore has 2 255 and Sweden has 1 609. I donāt know much about the welfare system in Singapore, but I guess it might be less expenses in some areas. Their healthcare system is 5,5 % of GDP for example. The United States has a very ineffective healthcare system that costs much for both individuals and the state.
United States
Sweden
Per capita national health expenditures: 11,582 USD. 16.6 % of GDP.
Military expenditure: 14 % of GDP.
Per capita national health expenditures: 6438 USD. 10.7 % of GDP.
Military expenditure: 1.3 % of GDP.
There are studies that shows the correlation between income equality and life satisfaction as well.
Growth isnāt always good, since growth also increases from bad things. According to the IPBES Nexus Assesment, there are 7 trillion in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and damages to nature for 10-25 trillion in unaccounted costs. There are 35 times more resources going to causes that destroy our planet than supports our nature. Instead of growth, it would be possible to use national income, by Thomas Piketty, would be a good global measurement instead of GDP. For example: āIf you take 100 billion euros of oil from oil reserves underground or you take 100 billion euros in fish from the ocean, you have 100 billion euros of GDP, but you have zero euros of national income. And if in addition when you burn oil or gas you create global warming and you reduce the durability of life on earth, then if you put a price on the negative impact of these emissions you should have negative national income instead of positive GDP.ā When it comes to growth, the World Bank Group has some projections about growth, inequality and poverty:
I think it is wonderful that you care for the animals as well. I only have numbers (from 2023, I think) for Sweden and United States when it comes to meat consumption and different types of meat consumption. So I think you might be right about less chicken= more seafood instead:
United States
Sweden
Meat consumption per capita: 102 kg.
Poultry 51 kg. Beef 26 kg. Pork 23 kg. ___________________________ Fish and shellfish consumption: 8,7 kg.
Meat consumption per capita: 77 kg.
Poultry: 23 kg. Beef: 23 kg. Pork 29 kg. _________________________________
Fish and shellfish consumption: 14 kg.
I think one reason for these numbers are that vegetables and vegetarian food are easily accessible in Sweden, and harder to find in the US.
Thank you for your good example about the dinner! I will try to come up with an example myself based on an Oxfam report: There is a dinner party with 100 people (where one person represents 1 % in the income ladder). One person has as much food as 95 of the other people. Nine of these people are going hungry (extreme poverty) and risk starving to death. Since these people already are in a bad situation, they will not be able to get food for themselves (an article about the mechanisms behind poverty). The people who have most of the food, can share their food so these people wonāt starve. 99 people at the table gets 16 new plates of food (trillion dollars of all new wealth), while the richest person gets 26 new plates of food. If the richest person is a billionaire, it gets 1.7 million plates of food for each plate of food that the 90 poorest people at the table gets.
Another example is that the 2 781 billionaires in the world owns $14.2 trillion. One million seconds is 11.57 days, one billion seconds is 31.71 years, one trillion seconds is 31,710 years, 14.2 trillion seconds is 450 282 years.
I think your thoughts about cause prioritisation are very interesting, and they have made me talk about animal suffering and effectiveness when I hold a lecture for my students in public health. I have considered donating to animal welfare. I donate money to Happier Lives Institute, since I am volunteering there and they have given me much joy. I donate money to Cool Earth because they address biodiversity, climate change and poverty. I am more of a āsystems changeā person and I think they address most areas so far, which was our input to the UN.
Thank you again for your interesting reply! I hope that I replied to everything! :)
I think your thoughts about cause prioritisation are very interesting, and they have made me talk about animal suffering and effectiveness when I hold a lecture for my students in public health.
I worry efforts to preserve biodiversity may be harmful due to encouraging wildnerness preservation, and therefore increasing wild animal suffering. I also think fighting climate change may be harmful due to increasing wild animal suffering. I would even say helping people in poverty may be harmful via increasing factory-farming. I believe the effects of Cool Earth on animals can easily dominate those on humans, and there is lots of uncertainty about whether the effects on animals are positive or negative, so I do not know whether Cool Earth is overall beneficial or harmful. Relatedly:
I believe the large uncertainty about the effects of human welfare interventions on wild (and farmed) animals should push one towards prioritising:
Animal welfare interventions improving the conditions of animals instead of decreasing the number of animals with negative lives, or increasing the number of animals with positive lives. I recommend donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), which I estimate has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GWās top charities (neglecting their effects on animals).
Learning more about helping invertebrates, whose total capacity for welfare vastly exceeds that of vertebrates. I recommend donating to (I ordered the organisations alphabetically):
The Arthropoda Foundation. Their research priorities are humane slaughter protocols, stocking densities and substrate research, and automated welfare assessment.
They intend āto use current and new fundingā for, among other activities, āConducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions ā first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill themā.
I estimate paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects is 23.7 k times as cost-effective as GWās top charities.
Thank you for another insightful and interesting comment as well, Vasco! It was really nice to discuss with you and want to say that I have great respect for you and your texts. You gave me a lot to think about. I am very curios about how you would like the world to look like, what would your utopia be? I understand that it might be much to write (if you havenāt written about it already), so it is no rush, and you donāt need to reply if you feel that you want to use your time in other ways instead. But thanks again for giving me new perspectives and knowledge, I hope that I was able to return the favor. :)
I am very curios about how you would like the world to look like, what would your utopia be?
Thanks for the question! I strongly endorse expectationaltotalhedonisticutilitarianism (maximising happiness, and minimising suffering), so my ideal world would have as much expected total hedonistic welfare as possible.
Nearterm, I would like people to consider digital sentience, factory-farming, and wild animal suffering the most pressing issues of our time (I have ordered them alphabetically). More importantly, I would like people to donate more to the Arthropoda Foundation, SWP or WAI. I think these are the organisations which more cost-effectively increase welfare. In addition, I believe increasing the donations to those organisations is the best strategy to maximise impact for the vast majority of people, even among people working in impact-focussed organisations.
Longterm, I would like the world to be filled with beings which have the most welfare per energy consumed. I estimate bees can experience 4.88 k times as much welfare per calorie consumption as humans. My estimates for the 5th and 95th percentile are 0 and 31.7 k, so I am not confident filling the universe with bees would be better than filling it with humans. Moreover, there may be other species or non-biological beings which experience even more welfare per energy consumed than bees. However, I would be surprised if humans were the beings experiencing the most welfare per energy consumption.
I believe the effects of Cool Earth on animals can easily dominate those on humans
I estimate the harm a random person caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals in 2022 was 217 times the harm their GHG emissions caused to humans.
Thanks, Ulf! I appreciate you sharing relevant links too. I strongly upvoted your comment.
I cannot open the above link.
Even then, in the United States (US), āThe top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019ā.
I do not know whether taxing people with higher income more heavily would increase human welfare. I agree it would nearterm, as 1 $ results in a greater increase in welfare for people with lower income. However, my sense is that economists tend to agree that income and capital taxes decrease the growth of real gross domestic product (real GDP) per capita, which is strongly correlated with median income across countries. At least in the US, there has also been a strong correlation between mean and median income. So I expect taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would lead to a slower growth of the median income, which may decrease welfare longterm.
I would need a more comprehensive analysis to be persuaded. Singaporeās tax revenue was 11.5 % of its GDP in 2022, less than USā 26.8 %, and much less than Swedenās 43 %, but Singapore is much closer to Sweden than the US in terms of social outcomes.
There is a good correlation between self-reported life satisfaction and real GDP per capita across countries. So, since I think taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would slow down the growth of real GDP per capita, I worry it may lead to less welfare longterm.
Zooming out, I also care about the effects on animals. So I would want to know how taxing people with higher income more heavily would affect the consumption of animal-based foods, and development of alternative proteins to come to an overall view about whether people with higher income should be taxed more or less. I believe the 3 animal-based foods which account for the most animal suffering, ordered from the least to the most expensive, are chicken meat, fish, and shrimp. In high income countries, where even people with low income eat lots of animal-based foods, I guess taxing people with higher income more heavily would tend to decrease the consumption of chicken, but increase that of fish and shrimp (and beef, but I am not worried about this one).
Given my large uncertainty about how taxes affect welfare, I am currently deferring to the libertarian intuitions described in another post from Michael Huemer, Tax Breaks for the Rich.
In the US, āThe top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019ā. So, if each of the 5 friends corresponded to one quintile, the richest one would pay for 90.1 % of the meal. I agree with Michael that:
Thanks for that! I think donations are the best way for people to increase their social impact. So, instead of discussing the effects of taxes, I would be curious to know your thoughts on my cause prioritisation. In particular, my view that the best animal welfare organisations are over 100 times as cost-effective as the best ones in human welfare. Have you considered donating to animal welfare?
Thank you very much, Vasco! I am glad that you liked my comment. I will try to answer all your questions as good as I can. I havenāt replied to long post before so I donāt know how to do the cool paragraphs that you do, so sorry if it gets a little confusing.
I updated the link, so it should work now. Thank you for mentioning this!
I didnāt find any good data for how much the top quintile funded governement transfers in other countries, but it would have been very interesting to look at. Thank you for the interesting information.
I think one reason for Singapore being closer to Sweden when it comes to social outcomes might be annual working hours per employed person, where Singapore has 2 255 and Sweden has 1 609. I donāt know much about the welfare system in Singapore, but I guess it might be less expenses in some areas. Their healthcare system is 5,5 % of GDP for example. The United States has a very ineffective healthcare system that costs much for both individuals and the state.
Per capita national health expenditures: 11,582 USD. 16.6 % of GDP.
Military expenditure: 14 % of GDP.
Per capita national health expenditures: 6438 USD. 10.7 % of GDP.
Military expenditure: 1.3 % of GDP.
There are studies that shows the correlation between income equality and life satisfaction as well.
Growth isnāt always good, since growth also increases from bad things. According to the IPBES Nexus Assesment, there are 7 trillion in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and damages to nature for 10-25 trillion in unaccounted costs. There are 35 times more resources going to causes that destroy our planet than supports our nature. Instead of growth, it would be possible to use national income, by Thomas Piketty, would be a good global measurement instead of GDP. For example: āIf you take 100 billion euros of oil from oil reserves underground or you take 100 billion euros in fish from the ocean, you have 100 billion euros of GDP, but you have zero euros of national income. And if in addition when you burn oil or gas you create global warming and you reduce the durability of life on earth, then if you put a price on the negative impact of these emissions you should have negative national income instead of positive GDP.ā
When it comes to growth, the World Bank Group has some projections about growth, inequality and poverty:
I think it is wonderful that you care for the animals as well. I only have numbers (from 2023, I think) for Sweden and United States when it comes to meat consumption and different types of meat consumption. So I think you might be right about less chicken= more seafood instead:
Meat consumption per capita: 102 kg.
Poultry 51 kg. Beef 26 kg. Pork 23 kg.
___________________________
Fish and shellfish consumption: 8,7 kg.
Meat consumption per capita: 77 kg.
Poultry: 23 kg. Beef: 23 kg. Pork 29 kg.
_________________________________
Fish and shellfish consumption: 14 kg.
I think one reason for these numbers are that vegetables and vegetarian food are easily accessible in Sweden, and harder to find in the US.
Thank you for your good example about the dinner! I will try to come up with an example myself based on an Oxfam report: There is a dinner party with 100 people (where one person represents 1 % in the income ladder). One person has as much food as 95 of the other people. Nine of these people are going hungry (extreme poverty) and risk starving to death. Since these people already are in a bad situation, they will not be able to get food for themselves (an article about the mechanisms behind poverty). The people who have most of the food, can share their food so these people wonāt starve. 99 people at the table gets 16 new plates of food (trillion dollars of all new wealth), while the richest person gets 26 new plates of food. If the richest person is a billionaire, it gets 1.7 million plates of food for each plate of food that the 90 poorest people at the table gets.
Another example is that the 2 781 billionaires in the world owns $14.2 trillion. One million seconds is 11.57 days, one billion seconds is 31.71 years, one trillion seconds is 31,710 years, 14.2 trillion seconds is 450 282 years.
I think your thoughts about cause prioritisation are very interesting, and they have made me talk about animal suffering and effectiveness when I hold a lecture for my students in public health. I have considered donating to animal welfare. I donate money to Happier Lives Institute, since I am volunteering there and they have given me much joy. I donate money to Cool Earth because they address biodiversity, climate change and poverty. I am more of a āsystems changeā person and I think they address most areas so far, which was our input to the UN.
Thank you again for your interesting reply! I hope that I replied to everything! :)
Kind regards,
Ulf
Thanks for another insightful comment, Ulf!
Great to know!
I worry efforts to preserve biodiversity may be harmful due to encouraging wildnerness preservation, and therefore increasing wild animal suffering. I also think fighting climate change may be harmful due to increasing wild animal suffering. I would even say helping people in poverty may be harmful via increasing factory-farming. I believe the effects of Cool Earth on animals can easily dominate those on humans, and there is lots of uncertainty about whether the effects on animals are positive or negative, so I do not know whether Cool Earth is overall beneficial or harmful. Relatedly:
Thank you for another insightful and interesting comment as well, Vasco! It was really nice to discuss with you and want to say that I have great respect for you and your texts. You gave me a lot to think about. I am very curios about how you would like the world to look like, what would your utopia be? I understand that it might be much to write (if you havenāt written about it already), so it is no rush, and you donāt need to reply if you feel that you want to use your time in other ways instead. But thanks again for giving me new perspectives and knowledge, I hope that I was able to return the favor. :)
Thanks a lot, Ulf!
Thanks for the question! I strongly endorse expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism (maximising happiness, and minimising suffering), so my ideal world would have as much expected total hedonistic welfare as possible.
Nearterm, I would like people to consider digital sentience, factory-farming, and wild animal suffering the most pressing issues of our time (I have ordered them alphabetically). More importantly, I would like people to donate more to the Arthropoda Foundation, SWP or WAI. I think these are the organisations which more cost-effectively increase welfare. In addition, I believe increasing the donations to those organisations is the best strategy to maximise impact for the vast majority of people, even among people working in impact-focussed organisations.
Longterm, I would like the world to be filled with beings which have the most welfare per energy consumed. I estimate bees can experience 4.88 k times as much welfare per calorie consumption as humans. My estimates for the 5th and 95th percentile are 0 and 31.7 k, so I am not confident filling the universe with bees would be better than filling it with humans. Moreover, there may be other species or non-biological beings which experience even more welfare per energy consumed than bees. However, I would be surprised if humans were the beings experiencing the most welfare per energy consumption.
I estimate the harm a random person caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals in 2022 was 217 times the harm their GHG emissions caused to humans.