I try to take my moral obligations seriously.
Please chat with me about donation opportunities.
Denise_Melchin
Karma: 4,150
Hi Jeff, yeah, I didn’t have those expenses in the nursery/gear category. We either had the things you mentioned already or didn’t use them.
My daughter never napped in the bed when she was a baby or slept alone at all in the bed, for that matter. When she was sleeping and I wasn’t going to bed yet, I always had her in the baby wrap for sleeping. Glad those times are over! The advantage of that was that she didn’t awake from me moving, though. Have you tried playing background noise when she falls asleep, so she gets used to it not being silent?
Yeah, the daycare/private schooling thing is really different in Germany. Daycare here is very cheap, private schools are a bit more expensive, but still very cheap by UK and US standards. I want to keep the homeschooling option open too, that’s why I intend to move away from Germany soon-ish (homeschooling is illegal here).
For almost the first 2,5 years I stayed home with my daughter and homeschooled myself until I was done with schooling. That was pretty exhausting and I don’t particularly recommend it. After that, I started my degree and first had my daughter in daycare until the afternoon, it was a group setting for about eight children aged 1-3 and three child-care workers. She stayed there for a year and now she is in what we call kindergarden for children aged 3-6 with about 15 children in one group and again 3 child-care workers. Both solutions were private institutions and expensive in comparison, especially where she went to first, but I got reduced fees.
We’re having our first Meetup in Frankfurt soon :)
http://www.meetup.com/Frankfurt-Effective-Altruism-Doing-Good-Better/events/219428935/
Julia, thank you so much for this!
I’m seconding your recommendations. I often wished I had help when my daughter was smaller (now that she is older people offer it a lot more). It always made me extremely uncomfortable when she was fussy and I felt like I was bothering everyone else.
Frankfurt again:
http://www.meetup.com/Frankfurt-Effective-Altruism-Doing-Good-Better/events/220271726/
Edit: I just noticed one can add meetups to the EA forum...
“It’s worth noting that this was in the context of direct mail campaigns. It’s not clear if the finding translates to fundraisers from a personal network.”
Thank you for pointing this out, I hadn’t checked the details (which I should have done!). Sorry about that. I’ll edit the post accordingly.
“Did the people who donated to the fundraiser know this? If not, it seems a bit disingenuous.”
I’m in the same camp as Tom Ash here. I had always assumed that at least EA-people knew this would be the case, and non EA-people would guess so—otherwise we might be morally not so great people after all. (“We, the privileged rich, want you to donate money too, otherwise we won’t.”)
Do you think this is something to worry about because it might put people off?
Thank you for writing this! It had a lot of useful suggestions. (E.g. I’ll take away from this post that I should also publicise our meetups on Facebook.)
I’m not sure whether “30min a month” translates that well to the time when you’re just starting as well as smaller cities than London.
I’ve recently started a meetup in Frankfurt (we had one so far and the next is already planned) and I think I’ve invested about five to ten hours already, not even counting the meetup itself. Those went into creating a meetup account and getting familiar with the website, creating a mailinglist and curating it, preparing a talk for the first meetup, writing texts to be inviting, etc, then opportunity costs (I couldn’t manage to organize the LW meetups as I usually do, so I was trying to get other people to do that and so on).
But for me it’s not so much the time as the mental energy which is the problem here, in the sense that it grabbed a lot of my attention. This might be my own personal problem that others don’t have, but I don’t know what to do about it.
The other point is that I live in a much smaller city where “just post an event” doesn’t seem to work very well, when I look at my experience organizing the local LW meetups for the past 1,5 years. To get people to show up, I need to think of an interesting programme that is the biggest time sink. For what it’s worth, maintaining the LW meetups costs me a lot less time than starting EA meetups costed me.
Whenever I am in London and visit LW or EA meetups, I can see how it can easily work differently just by the fact that you have lots of people showing up—they’ll always find something interesting to talk about in smaller groups. In a smaller city we have fewer attendees and they need more deliberate entertainment.
In general, I’m strongly in favor of encouraging people to start meetups, I wish I had started ours sooner. A clear outline of what to do can help a lot with that!
I wasn’t aware that other matching campaigns use the “Double your impact” line frequently, that’s helpful to know. I think our match wasn’t advertised with phrases like that; I consider this to be pretty dubious and wouldn’t really feel comfortable with it. (This is why I would be a terrible salesperson.)
But point taken, if they are matches advertised like that, then it’s seems like a reasonable assumption that the donation wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It’d be good to know how much assumptions like this from other matches influence recipients of ads for other matches which aren’t advertised like this.
This is something I’d be interested to see research on—is the average donor aware that the money would have been donated anyway?
nods
If people knew that most matches weren’t actually matching, we’d expect saying “I plan to donate £60k to AMF, please join me!” to have about the same effect as donation matching
Hm, I don’t think I agree. Isn’t it a pretty standard psychology finding that people react very differently to the same facts depending on how they are phrased? (Genuine question.) Though I couldn’t quote any offhand.
No worries. I probably should have titled the post “Did Donation Matching Work in Two Direct Mail Campaigns in Minnesota?”, but then nobody would have read it.
:) I really appreciate all the work you put into it!
LessWrong, a community dedicated to improving “rationality”. It has a decent overlap with the EA community.
I want to add that having organized the second and third meetup which were quite successful, it shows it actually doesn’t require many resources to keep the minimum level up.
Sorry for not having responded to any of this yet, will take me another couple of days at least.
EA Switzerland did something similar, I think it might be useful to contact them for advice. AFAIK it was a very successful strategy.
Seconding this. I think people might underestimate this.
Hi Ben,
thanks for your comment. As it looks like, we’ll talk to GiveWell tomorrow (mostly to decide which kind of format the project should have), before we decide how to proceed. We’ll update everyone on this thread then.
We’ll keep your other concerns in mind and will bring up some of them with GiveWell, especially whether RCTs are worth it. The details should be left for the intern to investigate, though. We think it’s very likely to be valuable to at least talk to experts from the prospective areas as well.
We aren’t necessarily intending to start a new charity then ourselves, since as you said, we might not be the people best suited to it (though of course it might be better than noone doing it, but then again we have to look at opportunity costs.) Right now we’re mostly keen on closing the gap between where the EA movement at large is now and a situation where EAs could just look quickly at the data and start a charity. It would also be possible that I fund someone who’s willing to do this and/or they could apply to EA Ventures.
Best, Denise
Thank you for pointing this out. I had expected them to be a lot cheaper. If GiveWell, as Ben said, has decided against funding RCTs, I’m not very likely to be convinced of their usefulness either.
Thanks Owen. I agree with you on every point. Re. the possibility it might be too much to do all of them at once—this is why I want to focus now on having general research done that is needed before an EA could start a direct charity, before we focus on actually founding a charity.
Especially agree with your last paragraphs—this is why we’re (very likely) trying to fund someone to do this research. (I’d love to do it myself, but unfortunately won’t have time for a project this size within the next year. If we can’t find someone willing to do it in that time frame, I might end up doing it myself.)
I’m not sure what you mean—where does EA Ventures come into this?
Yes—this is (before doing more research) what we want our intern to do. :-)
We considered this as well, but ultimately decided that it would be easier for one person to dig into this issue deeply than many more shallowly.
Thanks for highlighting this option. In general, we’d expect conclusions on what would be a useful intervention to be reached further down the line in the research project.
Thank you, my experience has been similar (in the comparable aspects) to Julia’s and Bernadette’s. My daughter is 4,5 years old by now, so I don’t really remember how much exactly I spent during the first year, but I can give general information: Food, diapers and clothing can be acquired pretty cheaply if done right and doesn’t pose the main cost. Health insurance outside of the US is not much of a problem. I spent a lot less on gear/nursery. (I didn’t feel like I really needed anything besides a baby wrap.)
Housing costs might increase in the first years already if you lived in a not-so-nice area before and want to move or if your previous housing situation was already very crowded. I personally don’t consider it necessary for children to have their own room or something like that before they hit schooling age.
The cost is more to be found in daycare/private schooling and opportunity costs career-wise. One part of the latter is lost wages directly due to working fewer hours, others are less obvious. (Foregoing promotions, less time for additional qualifications, etc.)
What you should take into account is that children get a lot more expensive as they age. A baby is pretty cheap. After a while, it’s not that easy anymore to find second-hand-clothing, they eat a lot more, you might want to spend a lot on educational expenses (mainly that).
Since I don’t earn a wage (and get scholarships for my degree which are a lot higher because I have a child), I didn’t lose any money there. Or any money at all, for that matter, since I wouldn’t have had the additional money if it hadn’t been for my child.
For me, the costs of a child have mainly been opportunity costs. I can’t easily put a number on those, though. This stems mostly from the unusual situation that I had my child very young (<20 years).