Comments
Something to be careful not to do here is: if you have people who are either earning a lot or doing equivalently valuable non-earning work, consumption can boost productivity, both:
- in very obvious direct ways, e.g. if you order takeaway, you don't have to spend time on meal prep, if you can improve your sleep by buying a fancy bed that might be worth it, etc
- in a more indirect sense, being frugal is hard work and will wear you down. If you find that attention or mental effort is a limited resource for you, trying hard to minimise costs may be false economy. In general, it may be easier to get $X of value by increasing your income / useful work by $X than by decreasing your costs by $X. All else equal, you should prioritise these two things the same.
I'm not saying this is obviously incompatible with the levels of consumption or saving that you suggest, just that the best level of consumption is dependent on local circumstances, and I don't think there's any particular reason to expect it to line up with per capita GDP particularly well.
I think a compelling reason for not doing this is mostly that it is past what I would guess the optimal level of demandingness would be for growing the movement. I would expect far fewer high earners would be willing to take on a prescription that they keep nothing above that sort of level than that they donate a substantial fraction.
I for one would find it too demanding, and I think it would be very bad if others like me (for context, I will be donating over 50% of my income this year) bounced off the movement because it seemed too demanding.
Thanks for answering, Charles!
I guess the demandingness can be adjusted (downwards or upwards) by adapting the annual consumption and total savings. The numbers I provided are not supposed to be an iron rule. As I said:
I tend to agree with you that:
However, maybe a small minority happy to do it would gradually build momentum over time.
Happy to know you will be donating over 50 %! It would indeed be sad if people bounced off because of that. That being said, I would expect people to continue to see donation norms as non-binary. In the same way that it is fine to donate less than 10 %, it would be fine to have an annual consumption per person greater than 41.3 k$ (or other), or total savings per person greater than 82.7 k$ (or other).
"However, maybe a small minority happy to do it would gradually build momentum over time." This seems possible, but if the goal is to maximise resources, I would be quite surprised if e.g. the number of billionaires willing to give away 99.99%+ of their wealth was even 1/10th as high as the number willing to give away 90%. Clearly nobody truly needs $100m+, but nonetheless I would be very wary of potentially putting off a Bill Gates (who lives in a $150m house ) due to being too demanding, when 99% of his wealth does approximately 99% as much good as all of it would (maybe even more, as he serves as an example to other billionaires which they might be more likely to follow than if he gave it all away).