Robert_Wiblin
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My positive experience taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin / Bupropion, & why maybe you should try it too
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I don’t know if it’s more or less reliable than past research suggesting a lower satiation point, but taking the paper Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% increase in income, from $40k to $105k:
In North America, life satisfaction goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on positive affect (effects on positive affect/happiness are always lower and it’s the measure I think is more reliable, which is why we chose the term happiness in that quote). Negative affect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.
Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.
Whether this counts as “extra income continuing to affect happiness quite a bit” or “extra income not affecting happiness that much” I guess is for readers to judge.
For myself, I would regard those gains to be sufficiently small that I would think it irrational for an egoist to focus much of their attention on earning more money at that point, rather than fostering strong relationships, a sense of purpose, or improving their self-talk.
Personally, I also expect even those correlations are overestimates of the actual effect of higher income on happiness, because we know the reverse is also happening: for various reasons happiness itself causes people’s incomes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both happiness and higher incomes, increasing the correlation without increasing the causation. (Though as I describe in my income and happiness article, if you have a different causal diagram in mind, you could also try arguing that it’s an underestimate.)
Thanks, much appreciated Milan! :)
While that piece on income and happiness seems solid, Milan might not like the vibe of this section in our article No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact. I’ve just tinkered with the wording to make it harder for anyone to misunderstand what we’re claiming:
“How much sacrifice will this involve?
Regardless of which career you choose, you can donate 10% of your income.
Normally when we think of doing good with our careers, we think of paths like becoming a teacher or charity worker, which often earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the private sector, and may not align with your skills or interests. In that sense, giving 10% is less of a sacrifice.
Moreover, as we saw in an earlier article, once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income won’t affect your happiness that much, while acts that help others like giving to charity probably do make you happier.
To take just one example, one study found that in 122 of 136 countries, if respondents answered “yes” to the question “did you donate to charity last month?”, their life satisfaction was higher by an amount also associated with a doubling of income.5 In part, this is probably because happier people give more, but we expect some of the effect runs the other way too.
(Not persuaded? Read more on whether giving 10% is better or worse for your happiness than not donating at all.)”
My own view here is:
i) Like Greg I’ve only ever seen the claim that donating some can be better for one’s own welfare, compared to a baseline of not giving at all—not that the EA approach to giving is actually the optimal for happiness (!).
Giving small amounts regularly to a variety of emotionally appealing causes is more likely to be optimal for one’s selfish welfare, at least if you don’t have an EA mindset which would render that dissatisfying. As you say, ‘give 10% once a year to the most effective charity’ is likely worse than that.
ii) Unfortunately I don’t have time to look into whether your source on income satiation points is better than the older one I used in my article. Personally, I think a focus on a ‘satiation point’ at which income yields literally zero further welfare gain is the wrong way to think about this. I am skeptical that the curve ever entirely flattens out, let alone turns back around. Rather I’d expect logarithmic returns (or perhaps something a bit sharper), up into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of income. Given the difficulty of measuring satisfaction, especially in the upper tail of income, I would trust this more common sense model over empirical measurements claiming otherwise. Above ~$100,000, additional gains in welfare are probably just too small for our survey methods to pick up.
For this reason 80,000 Hours use more modest language like “any extra income won’t affect your happiness that much”, rather than claiming the effect is nothing.
Nonetheless, at high levels of income, further raising one’s income gradually becomes a minor issue, before it becomes an entirely unmeasurable one. At that point, many people will better accomplish their life goals by focussing on improving the world—thereby giving themselves more community, higher purpose, sense of accomplishment, and indeed actual accomplishment—rather than eking out what limited returns remain from higher earnings, and this seems important to point out to people.
iii) So, while I say from an egoist perspective ‘give 10% once a year to the most effective charity’ is probably dominated by a ‘fuzzy-hacking’ approach to charity, that’s not completely obvious.
Giving larger amounts, and giving them to the best charities one can find, often becomes a core part of people’s identity, probably raising their sense of purpose / satisfaction with their work at all times, rather than just via a warm glow immediately after they donate a small sum. I don’t think any of the evidence we’ve looked at can address this issue, except the observational studies, which are hopelessly confounded by other things.
Furthermore, being part of effective altruism or Giving What We Can can provide participants with a community of people who they feel some connection to, which many people otherwise lack, and which seems to have a larger effect on happiness than money. Finally, giving to the best charities allows people to show off to themselves about their uncommon intelligence and sophistication as a giver, which can also contribute to a positive self-conception.
We know that involvement in a religious community is correlated with large gains in welfare, and involvement in any philosophical community like effective altruism seems likely to bring with it some—though not all—of the same benefits.
Of course there are downsides too. In the absence of any actual data, I would remain agnostic, and act as though this were more or less a wash for someone’s happiness. I wouldn’t want someone to start being altruistic expecting it to make their life better, but I’d also want to challenge them if they were convinced it would make their life worse.
From this perspective, articles saying that giving or other acts of altruism are not as detrimental to someone’s welfare as one might naïvely anticipate, seem to me to be advancing a reasonable point of view, even if future research may yet show them to be mistaken.
“EA sometimes advocates that giving effectively will increase your happiness. Here’s an 80,000 Hours article (a) to that effect. … This line of argument confuses the effect of donating at all with the effect of donating effectively.”
This article you link to (by me) does not mention giving large amounts, or the effectiveness of charities, or advocate for giving to charity, so it’s hard to see how it could be confusing that issue. I would appreciate if you could edit the article to clarify that.
It also doesn’t claim that giving necessarily makes you happier than spending the money on yourself, only that in a given case it is possible—which it certainly is—and that giving likely provides more satisfaction than not having the money in the first place:
“Giving some money to charity is unlikely to make you less happy, and may well make you happier. … donating money could easily make you happier than spending it on yourself… there’s good reason to think that giving away money will lower your subjective well-being significantly less than not having it in the first place.”
In fact, the article only tangentially discusses donations at all. Nonetheless, I have added some further text to clarify my view.
I think the link here has been ‘miscopied’ and goes to a different unrelated article:
“80,000 hours goes into the multitude of reasons you should do this here”
I expect you meant to link to this one:
Why even our readers should save enough to live for 6-24 months by Ben Todd
I largely agree with this though 12-36 months is perhaps a bit high. When I’ve told newcomers to save more and donate less, I’ve usually gotten the response that they really want to donate now because it makes them feel happier and more fulfilled. That’s because they want to do good, but don’t see an opportunity to contribute through ‘direct work’ yet, so giving is their main way to feel useful.
Inasmuch as the goal of giving now is to make someone feel good about themselves and motivated to continue, my objection is weaker. Though perhaps they should try to get that sense of accomplishment some other way while they save.
I’ll just add that I always read it as a highly tentative recommendation that you’d expect to be overturned if serious resources were put into investigating climate change charity—though I’m unusually in-the-know.
I wrote ‘most relevant’ to contrast that group with people who know they’ll never be able to do direct work at the organisations surveyed, for whom those figures are largely irrelevant. As you say, they’re still not quite right for that group because you’re only part way through the process (I think by the time you’re offered a job, about half the costs have been paid, though that depends on whether you had a trial period).
They would be even more relevant to someone considering quitting—but as they can talk to their colleagues, they probably wouldn’t be using this survey.
The costs of hiring makes applying to join a project look worse, but it also makes earning to give to fund the salaries of new staff look worse too. If you’re expecting to donate hoping the money will be used to fund new hires, it seems like it should cancel out.
The three ways around bearing those costs that I can see at first glance are i) earning to give to prevent a group from laying off staff for lack of funding, ii) earning to give to buy capital goods rather than hire people, iii) staying in your current direct work job rather than switching.
Hey Peter—it’s partly for you, but also many other people who have the same questions.
I can comment on the choice of question in the survey as I’m the one who wrote it.
The reason we went for an ex post assessment rather than an ex ante one was that we thought people would be able to more reliably assess how they feel about a previous hire today, than remember how they felt about a previous hire in the past.
Asking people to remember what they thought before runs the risk that they will substitute a hard question (what they thought months ago before they knew how someone would work out) for an easy question (what do they think given what they know now). Then we’d get a similar answer, but it would look ex ante when it actually isn’t.
It also seemed quite difficult for organisations to forecast how much they’ll value a typical hire in the future because, among other reasons, it’s difficult to anticipate how successful future searches will be.
In retrospect I think the framing we chose was probably a mistake, because the two assessments are much more different than most readers understand them to be. I agree with your suggestions for improvements and, indeed, we concluded our blog post with our plans to ask new questions next year or else interview a smaller number of people in more depth.
Hopefully a different approach next year will help us avoid this confusion going forward.
As for the article being misleading, we’ve:
i) Commented that these roles are hard to fill at the point when these figures are first mentioned.
ii) Explained the ex post, ex ante distinction in the relevant section, and now added a link to this post.
iii) Noted we don’t have much confidence in the answers to that question and would not recommend that people update very much based on it.
Tackling just one part of this:
“It may be worth having a separate survey trying to get opinions considering talent gaps in priority areas whether they are led by people involved in EA or not.”
Ultimately our goal going forward is to make sure that we and our readers are highly informed about our priority paths (https://80000hours.org/articles/high-impact-careers/). About six out of ten of our current priority paths get direct coverage in this survey, while four do not.
I agree in future we should consider conducing different surveys of other groups—including people who don’t identify as part of the EA community—about opportunities they’re aware of in order to make sure we stay abreast of all the areas we recommend, rather than just those we are closest to.
“Most people selected the “Other (please specify)” option (14%).” --> “The single most common answer was “Other (please specify)” (14%).” :)
If you look at these graphs ending in January 2017 I think you’ll agree that a polynomial of degree 3 (cubic) seems like the best fit: https://imgur.com/a/9SlFZd9 .
If that’s right we would expect something like 5,000 members by now.
It occurs to me now that all of these trend-lines are a bit biased towards forecasting rapid growth, as they finish right at the end of the 2016 holiday campaign which absorbed substantial resources. This was the highest period of growth, and likely not sustainable. It might be more reasonable to put the end-date in ~April and then we can fit the trend-line to a less cyclical curve.
Giving What We Can is still growing at a surprisingly good pace
Giving What We Can is still growing at a surprisingly good pace
The effort required to set up a non-profit trading account, go through KYC, make it secure, teach everyone in the org how it works, and do the necessary legal, budgetary and accounting compliance each year make this much more than a few minute job. Things that are easy for individuals are often less straightforward for organisations.
I can second this. I prefer to download long pieces of text to my phone to read on Pocket/Instapaper. In addition, putting this report up as a web page will make it much more likely to be passed around on social media, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on.
Do people who try to give huge amounts run the risk of the transaction being rejected by their bank (as fraudulent), and then not giving in time to be matched?