“I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall. I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.”
I’m not entirely sure what the answer is here either, but one thought I had today was “I should make a Facebook post for Thanksgiving/Christmas telling my friends why I think it’s so important to donate to GiveWell—your marginal donation can save a life for $3-5k! Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.”
I do think from an optics perspective, when the draw from GiveWell is that your marginal dollar will actually help save someone’s life, it’s discouraging to see “you’re marginal dollar will help save someone’s life—in 3 years when we no longer need to roll over funds”. It pushes me in the direction of “well I’ll donate somewhere else this year and then donate to GiveWell in 3 years”. And I know that’s not the right calculation from a utility perspective—I should donate to the most cost-effective charity with little-to-no time discounting. But most people outside EA who might be attracted to effective giving have a yearly giving budget that they want to see deployed effectively in the near-term.
Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.
That’s incorrect; GiveWell will in fact disburse the marginal dollar you donate this year. The only donation GiveWell doesn’t expect to disburse this year is part of Open Philanthropy’s donation.
I’m curious how you got the impression that GiveWell won’t disburse donations other individuals donate to GiveWell this year? Was it from GiveWell’s communications or from this GiveDirectly post or other content you’ve read (e.g. on the EA Forum)?
As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.
“I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall.
I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.”
I’m not entirely sure what the answer is here either, but one thought I had today was “I should make a Facebook post for Thanksgiving/Christmas telling my friends why I think it’s so important to donate to GiveWell—your marginal donation can save a life for $3-5k! Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.”
I do think from an optics perspective, when the draw from GiveWell is that your marginal dollar will actually help save someone’s life, it’s discouraging to see “you’re marginal dollar will help save someone’s life—in 3 years when we no longer need to roll over funds”. It pushes me in the direction of “well I’ll donate somewhere else this year and then donate to GiveWell in 3 years”. And I know that’s not the right calculation from a utility perspective—I should donate to the most cost-effective charity with little-to-no time discounting. But most people outside EA who might be attracted to effective giving have a yearly giving budget that they want to see deployed effectively in the near-term.
That’s incorrect; GiveWell will in fact disburse the marginal dollar you donate this year. The only donation GiveWell doesn’t expect to disburse this year is part of Open Philanthropy’s donation.
I’m curious how you got the impression that GiveWell won’t disburse donations other individuals donate to GiveWell this year? Was it from GiveWell’s communications or from this GiveDirectly post or other content you’ve read (e.g. on the EA Forum)?
Very late response, thank you for catching this!
As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.