Thanks for writing this Nick, I’m sympathetic and strongly upvoted (to declare a small COI, I work at Open Philanthropy). I will add two points which I don’t see as conflicting with your post but which hopefully complement it.
Firstly, if you’re reading this post you probably have “EA resources”.
You can donate your own money to organisations that you want to. While you can choose to donate to e.g. a CEA managed EA Fund (e.g. EA Infrastructure Fund, EA Animal Welfare Fund) or to a GiveWell managed fund, you can equally choose to donate ~wherever you want, including to individual charitable organisations. Extremely few of us have available financial resources within two orders of magnitude of Open Philanthropy’s core donors, but many of us are globally and historically rich.
It’s more difficult to do well, but many of you can donate your time, or partially donate your time through e.g. taking a lower salary to do direct work on pressing and important problems than your market value in another domain.
Secondly, and more personally, I just don’t think of most of my available resources as being deservedly “mine”. However badly my life goes, save civilizational catastrophe, I will not die because of lack of access to low-cost medication. I will not be slaughtered painfully and then processed into a chicken nugget, or a fish cake, or shrimp paste. My relative wealth is not deserved, and justice calls me to use it well to make the world better.
My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. Both my children and I won what I call the ovarian lottery. (For starters, the odds against my 1930 birth taking place in the U.S. were at least 30 to 1. My being male and white also removed huge obstacles that a majority of Americans then faced.)
My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.
The reaction of my family and me to our extraordinary good fortune is not guilt, but rather gratitude.Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.
Thanks for writing this Nick, I’m sympathetic and strongly upvoted (to declare a small COI, I work at Open Philanthropy). I will add two points which I don’t see as conflicting with your post but which hopefully complement it.
Firstly, if you’re reading this post you probably have “EA resources”.
You can donate your own money to organisations that you want to. While you can choose to donate to e.g. a CEA managed EA Fund (e.g. EA Infrastructure Fund, EA Animal Welfare Fund) or to a GiveWell managed fund, you can equally choose to donate ~wherever you want, including to individual charitable organisations. Extremely few of us have available financial resources within two orders of magnitude of Open Philanthropy’s core donors, but many of us are globally and historically rich.
It’s more difficult to do well, but many of you can donate your time, or partially donate your time through e.g. taking a lower salary to do direct work on pressing and important problems than your market value in another domain.
Secondly, and more personally, I just don’t think of most of my available resources as being deservedly “mine”. However badly my life goes, save civilizational catastrophe, I will not die because of lack of access to low-cost medication. I will not be slaughtered painfully and then processed into a chicken nugget, or a fish cake, or shrimp paste. My relative wealth is not deserved, and justice calls me to use it well to make the world better.
Warren Buffet’s giving pledge letter explores a similar theme: