Epistemic status: I don’t really understand Kantian deontology.

Summary: According to the rules of Kantian deontology, an action must be impermissible if it has any probability of resulting in an impermissible outcome. But all actions have some probability of resulting in such an outcome. Therefore, all actions are impermissible.

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Altruists often would like to get good predictions on questions that don’t necessarily have great market significance. For example:

• Will a replication of a study of cash transfers show similar results?
• How much money will GiveWell move in the next five years?
• If cultured meat were price-competitive, what percent of consumers would prefer to buy it over conventional meat?

If a donor would like to give money to help make better predictions, how can they do that?

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Update 2020-01-04: This essay contains a number of important mistakes. See Correction on Giving Now vs. Later.

Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor and nothing in this essay serves as investment advice.

Introduction

Robin Hanson: If More Now, Less Later

The rate of return on investment historically has been higher than the growth rate–or, as they say, r > g. If you save your money to donate later, you can earn enough interest on it that you eventually have the funds to donate a greater amount. Because r > g, you should invest your money for as long as you can before donating¹–or so the argument goes.

Traditionally, we’d apply a discount rate of g to future donations, because that’s the rate at which people get richer and therefore the rate at which money becomes less valuable for them. But this ignores some important factors that affect how much we should discount future donations, and we can create a much more detailed estimate. This essay will explore that in detail. Exactly what factors determine the investment rate of return and the discount rate on poverty alleviation? Can we gain any information about which is likely greater?

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Some people have observed that small and large donors follow different giving patterns. Small donors who give out of their salary—that is, most people—tend to donate money more or less as soon as they earn it (usually within a year). Large donors—e.g., extremely wealthy people and foundations—tend to slowly distribute their money and hold on to most of it¹. For example, large foundations typically donate little more than the legally required 5% of assets each year. Why do they behave differently?

I don’t believe this difference is surprising, and actually it’s not really even a difference.

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Summary: The stock market can be modeled as Omega in Newcomb’s problem. On average, an asset will only outperform if the market predicts that you won’t buy it. So you cannot say “if I had bought that, I would have made a lot of money”, just as in Newcomb’s problem you can’t say “if I had taken both boxes, I would have gotten more money than if I only took one”.

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Summary: All expected value distributions must either (1) have a mean of infinity, or (2) have such thin tails that you cannot ever reasonably expect to see extreme values. When we’re estimating the utility distribution of an intervention, both of these options are bad.

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Summary: Large donors may create better incentives for both charities and small donors if, rather than providing fixed funding to a charity, they offer to match all donations to that charity over a relatively long time horizon.

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Summary: Investment advisors typically recommend that you put somewhere between 50% and 75% of your stock investments into US stocks and the rest into international markets. Most individual investors have 70% or more of their stock money in the US or their home country, a phenomenon that’s aptly called home country bias. But there are reasons to believe that even 50% is too much, and most people might prefer to hold more like 0-30% of their stock investments in the United States.¹²

Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor and this should not be taken as investment advice. Please do your own research or seek professional advice and otherwise take reasonable precautions before making any significant investment decisions.

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Part of a series for My Cause Selection 2016. For background, see my writings on cause selection for 2015 and my series on quantitative models.

Introduction

In my previous essay, I explained why I am prioritizing animal advocacy as a cause area. In this essay, I decide where to donate. I share some general considerations, briefly discuss some promising organizations I did not prioritize, and then list my top candidates for donation and explain why I considered them. I conclude with a final decision about where to donate.

This year, I plan on donating $20,000 to the Good Food Institute (GFI), which primarily works to foster the development of animal product alternatives through supporting innovation and promoting research. I believe it has an extraordinarily large expected effect on reducing animal consumption and contributing to improving societal values.

My writeup last year persuaded people to donate a total of about $40,000 to my favorite charities; if I move a similar amount this year, I believe GFI will still have substantial room for more funding even after that.

I will donate a few weeks after publishing this, so you have some time to persuade me if you believe I should make a different decision. Another donor plans to contribute an additional $60,000 AUD (~$45,000 USD) to GFI and is also open to persuasion.

This essay builds on last year’s document. Usually, unless I say differently here or in one of my previous writings, I still endorse most of the claims I made last year. Last year, I discussed my fundamental values and my beliefs about broad-level causes plus a handful of organizations, so I will not retread this ground.

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This essay could perhaps be called, “is improving people’s economic station good?” because all the arguments presented here apply just as well to people in the developed world as to people in the developing world. But my readers generally don’t spend a lot of effort trying to make people in developed countries wealthier, and lots of them do do a lot to make the globally poor better off.

When people calculate the effects of efforts to alleviate global poverty, they tend to report figures in terms like QALYs/dollar. I believe this is misleading; it gives a reasonably precise measure of the direct first-order effects, while ignoring the other complicated consequences of interventions. These other complicated effects include some negative and some positive ones, but they tend to significantly outweigh the first order effects. Instead of evaluating global poverty interventions by the magnitude of their first order effects, we should look at their indirect effects as well.

Let’s divide the effects into three categories: direct, medium-term, and long-term. We have the most certainty about direct effects, but long-term effects matter most.

Direct effects

Donating to global poverty¹ has one important direct effect: the people you’re donating to are better off. In the case of GiveDirectly, this happens because they have more money; for deworming charities, people are better off because they don’t have worms anymore, which likely substantially improves their quality of life². We have better evidence about these direct effects than about anything else, and when people talk about the benefits of GiveWell top charities, they almost exclusively talk about these effects.

Medium-term effects

Global poverty interventions have some indirect effects that are still easier to quantify and reason about than their long-term effects on economic or technological progress (which I discuss in “Long-term effects” below).

1. Making people wealthier causes them to eat more factory-farmed animals.
2. Making people wealthier causes them to consume more environmental resources, reducing wild animal populations.
3. Making people wealthier worsens climate change, increasing existential risk.
4. Global poverty interventions (probably?) decrease fertility.

Kyle Bogosian’s calculations suggest that increasing someone’s income in the developing world by $1000 causes about 15 days of land animal suffering, which probably means that a donation to GiveDirectly does more harm via creating factory farming than it does good via making a human financially better off. His calculations rely on uncertain estimates and I do not consider it robust, although it does draw on some hard data and it would probably be possible to substantially reduce the error bars on this estimate.

Additionally, making people wealthier causes them to consume more environmental resources. This has lots of effects, but the most direct one is that it reduces wild animal populations. If wild animal lives are net negative on balance, we should want to reduce the number of wild animals. I have not seen any adequate estimates of the effect size here so I cannot say how much it matters, but I suspect that it outweighs both the direct effect of making humans wealthier and the effect of increasing factory farming.

At the same time, if people consume more environmental resources, that contributes to climate change. This has an unclear effect on wild animal suffering but certainly increases the risk of extinction from severe runaway global warming.

Global poverty interventions probably decrease fertility. Unlike the other topics discussed in this section, lots of research has actually been done on this question, although I haven’t read it so I can’t make any confident claims about it. But what I know suggests that making people healthier and wealthier probably causes them to have fewer kids, which reduces population size after a generation. This could be good or bad for all of the many reasons that people existing could be good or bad. Most directly, this means that fewer people get to live decent lives, which is bad. But it also means more suffering on factory farms. Fewer people possibly means less converting wild habitats and therefore more wild animal suffering, but at the same time, wealthier people consume more environmental resources, and I’d expect the increased-wealth factor to matter more than the reduced-population factor (wealthy countries consume way more environmental resources than poor countries).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, promoting global poverty attracts more interest in effective altruism and possibly has spillover effects into other cause areas. Many people get into effective altruism by learning about how much good they can do by donating to global poverty efforts, and later

Long-term effects

Improving people’s standard of living has lots of potential long-term effects. Of the plausible effects I’ve thought of, these look the most important³:

1. It could increase international stability by reducing scarcity/competition.
2. It could decrease international stability by adding more major actors, making coordination more difficult.
3. It probably increases research on dangerous technology⁴.
4. It probably increases research on beneficial technology.
5. It becomes harder to make differential intellectual progress.
6. It causes humans to consume more environmental resources.
7. It could decrease international stability by making arms races more likely.

Increasing international stability could be beneficial or harmful. Greater international stability reduces the chance of war, which reduces existential risk from nuclear or biological weapons (or other existentially threatening weapons of war that have yet to be developed). In a more stable world, nations probably have an easier time creating cooperative agreements to avoid arms races. Additionally, increasing stability probably increases technological research, which could be beneficial or harmful.

Technological research both increases our ability to avert catastrophes and increases the potential danger arising from of powerful technologies. I suspect that improved technology generally increases the probability of an existential catastrophe. Right now our greatest existential threats arise from technologies developed by humans, and our technological development has done comparatively little to alleviate natural existential risks. I would expect this trend to continue.

If we increase global technological development, that probably makes it harder to make differential intellectual progress, which means that we have a more difficult time accelerating existential risk research to the point where it moves faster than research that increases existential risks. Helping poor people in countries like Malawi and Kenya probably doesn’t have much effect on technological development, but we should expect it to have at least small effects in the long run, at least in expectation.

Consuming more environmental resources could be either good or bad. As discussed before, it reduces habitats which reduces wild animal suffering, and this is a good thing if wild animals’ lives are net negative. (Although climate change could increase wild animal populations.) It probably reduces existential risk by reducing the chance of runaway global warming, which is probably but not definitely good.

Confidently claiming that global poverty has either good or bad long-term effects requires making conjunctive claims about uncertain effects: for global poverty reduction to be beneficial, it must increase international stability and this must reduce arms races and the chance of a major nuclear war and preventing human extinction must be good; or it must reduce international stability and this must slow technological development and it must be beneficial to slow technological development (and, again, preventing human extinction must be good); or it must increase climate change and this reduces wild animal populations without substantially increasing existential risk and wild animal lives are net negative; etc. Claiming that global poverty does long-term harm requires making similarly complex conjunctive arguments.

Although I cannot make any confident claims here, I lean toward expecting these effects, in order of confidence:

1. Global poverty alleviation accelerates dangerous technology more rapidly than beneficial technology, which is bad.
2. Global poverty alleviation increases international cooperation, which is good.
3. Global poverty alleviation increases climate change, which is bad.

I tend to think that this first effect outweighs the second and I am more confident that it occurs, so I am weakly confident that making people wealthier has net negative effects in the long run.

Conclusion

Alleviating global poverty has second- and third-order effects, some of them good and some of them harmful; these effects are significant and hard to quantify. Without serious engagement with the long term effects of global wealth, we cannot confidently claim that global poverty interventions do net good or harm.

The evidence tends to point weakly toward the conclusion that making people wealthier does net harm. This makes me wary of supporting efforts to alleviate global poverty. On the other hand, the evidence is nowhere near strong enough to justify trying to prevent people from helping the global poor. Any arguments in this essay about the long-term effects of global poverty should be treated as highly speculative. Nonetheless, this suggests that we cannot confidently claim that global poverty prevention helps the world in the long run.

Notes