Keynesian Altruism

25

Would 'countercyclical altruism' also capture this view?

1

Yes, I think it would. My only slight hesitation is that it may not be immediately obvious what cycle it refers to. But thank you for the suggestion.

MichaelDickens

11

This article seems to be making two distinct claims:

The standard arguments for giving later don't hold up.
"Keynesian Altruism": It's better to give when the economy is weaker.

I believe these can be true or false independently. I want to expand a bit on the first claim.

You identify a lot of relevant concerns that I agree need to be addressed, and that often get ignored. I think that even after addressing them, giving later may still look better than giving now.

Are you familiar with the Ramsey equation (e.g., see this SEP entry)? The Ramsey equation states that, in an efficient market, where r is the risk-free rate, $δ$ is the rate of time preference, $η$ is the rate of risk aversion, and g is the consumption (GDP) growth rate. The claim in RPTP Is a Strong Reason to Consider Giving Later is that most market actors use a value of $δ$ that's too high, which pushes up interest rates, and therefore "patient" actors should prefer to invest. (Right now, it looks like r < g. I don't know how to explain this. I did a little bit of reading on the matter and my impression is economists believe it shouldn't be true and it's a bit of a puzzle as to why it's true currently, but there are some potential explanations.)

You point out that donors need to worry about taxes and expropriation. That basically means $δ > 0$ . This is true for both altruists and non-altruists. But as long as most people have a pure time preference and altruists don't, altruists will have a lower $δ$ than most people, and therefore will relatively favor investing. (I made an attempt to estimate the philanthropic discount rate here.)

Another thing you brought up is that most people don't invest exclusively in risk-free assets. The Ramsey equation does use the risk-free rate, but there's an extended version of the equation that allows for risk. The extended Ramsey equation (taken from here) is $r = δ + η g - η (η + 1) σ^{2}$ where g follows a normal distribution with standard deviation $σ$ , and r and g are perfectly correlated. When accounting for risk, the same basic theoretical argument holds: impatient actors will push up interest rates, making investing look more promising to patient actors.

Of course, there's a case to be made that this theoretical model doesn't hold up (e.g., current risk-free rates seem incompatible with a positive pure time preference). I haven't seriously studied economics but my impression is economists generally believe this is a good model.

7

From a personal point of view, iff my utility curve is linear (i.e. losing 50% of my wealth would have a similar magnitude of utility change as gaining 50% additional wealth) and I know my date of death, then it would make sense to invest for as long as return on capital remains below GDP growth. I would be careful about saying "most market actors use a value of δ that's too high" because I think you can argue what they are doing is perfectly rational; if you're not sure if you'll reach retirement, you'll be less inclined to contribute to a pension (from a purely selfish point of view). Now we as altruists don't have to worry about the date of death because we are helping a pool of people into the future, who don't have to be alive today. However, we do have to worry about utility. To achieve the return on capital, we do need to take on risk. In general, wealthier people are able to take more risks than poorer people (utility functions are more linear at higher wealth). Altruists represent these poorer people (this point is more relevant to global health and development than animal welfare and long-term future), so should be sensitive to undiversifiable risks. In other words, I don't think it's obvious that we should be more patient (I'm talking in general terms, not about the specifics of economic conditions right now).

You can divide δ into (1) r or real risk-free rate and (2) - ηg or (beta * MRP). My subjective view is that the risk-free rate is too low and the MRP is too high. I think very few people think about their investments in the right way: "What level of return am I willing to accept to compensate me for volatility with standard deviation of x% (typically around 20% for the stock market)?". Most people subscribe to: "I'll do x% equities, y% corporate bonds and z% government bonds because that's what everybody else is doing". I personally invest 100% in equities for this reason. Furthermore, people are not flexible in how they behave (if you are familiar with the IS-LM model, I'm basically saying IS is steeply negative). In today's investment environment, everyone should be spending a lot more (including on charity) and saving a lot less, but that's not how people behave in practice. This is the reason why the real risk-free rate is so negative at the moment. Either way, the consequence is that you have to 'pay' a lot for a risk-free rate. Typically your money will grow not too different from inflation (and currently less) if you are not prepared to take any risk.

Finally, I do think value drift and diminishing marginal returns are very important points. Value drift is major simply because the world changes so fast. And in terms of diminishing marginal returns, I think the most important thing is that what we do today impacts the future. When you deworm a child, that's not just an "expense" for benefits in that year, it potentially improves their school performance and stimulates economic growth. I prefer to think of it as "investment". I think it's much more important to build out a safe framework for AI now than try doing it in 100 years' time (even with more resources).

Karl...

4y

1

"In general, wealthier people are able to take more risks than poorer people (utility functions are more linear at higher wealth). Altruists represent these poorer people (this point is more relevant to global health and development than animal welfare and long-term future), so should be sensitive to undiversifiable risks. In other words, I don't think it's obvious that we should be more patient (I'm talking in general terms, not about the specifics of economic conditions right now)."

I think there is a mistake in here. I suppose that the utility function of altruist is even more linear than the utility function of wealthy people. This is because the return in utility units for every poor individual we (as altruists) are donating to declines really strong but there are so many poor individuals (at least yet) that the good we can do is an almost linear function of the amount of money we can spend, so altruists should be nearly risk neutral.

Despite this, I agree that it is not obvious that we should more patient.

Robert_Wiblin

10

The idea that charities should focus on spending money during recessions because of the extra benefit that provides seems wrong to me.

Using standard estimates of the fiscal multiplier during recessions — and ignoring any offsetting effects your actions have on fiscal or monetary policy — if a US charity spends an extra $1 during a recession it might raise US GDP by between $0 and $3.

If you're a charity spending $1, and just generally raising US GDP by $3 is a significant fraction of your total social impact, you must be a very ineffective organisation. I could not recommend giving to such a project.

I'd think such a gain would be swamped like other issues like investment returns, us learning about better charities in future, or the worst problems getting solved leaving us worse giving opportunities, and so on.

An exception might be if you independently thought something like GiveDirectly was the best option and wasn't going to be beaten by another option in future. Then giving money for dispersal during a recession in the recipient country might be, say, twice as good as giving it outside of recession.

There's a bunch of discussion of these issues in my interview with Phil Trammell.

14

Thanks for your comment.

I'm not advocating it because of the fiscal multiplier. That would be the cherry on the cake.

The first simple step is simply to say don't cut back expenditure because shrinking and regrowing an organisation is costly. Most charities (though EA ones are somewhat atypical) see their income reduced during bad times. And since most charities think in bland terms of x months of reserves, this means their expenditure fluctuates as well. This is an not efficient way to manage an organisation. In good times, build a buffer, so you can keep going during bad times. Just keeping expenditure flat would be a major step in the right direction.

Of course you can take it a step further. There is another cost argument, which is that it is cheaper to do stuff during bad times. When unemployment is high, you can get talented people more easily. So even if the benefits are the same, the benefit/cost is higher. The fact the benefits may be higher, not just that the fiscal multiplier may be higher, but that fulfillment of basic human needs may be worse, is a bonus, though it probably only applies to Global Health and Development causes. I wouldn't use a Keynesian altruism strategy simply for this.

Robert_Wiblin

9

Yep that sounds good, non-profits should aim to have fairly stable expenditure over the business cycle.

I think I was thrown off your true motivation by the name 'Keynesian altruism'. It might be wise to rename it 'countercyclical' so it doesn't carry the implication that you're looking for an economic multiplier.

Ramiro

7

I wonder if exchange rates volatility during global recessions (usually, the US$ dollar and the Euro rise in relation to national currencies in developing countries) would add another point, at least for charities located in the developing world.
(Personally, since my job is very stable and opportunities for investments scarce, I have been increasing my own donations to account for my declining consumption)

2

That's a very interesting point I hadn't considered. Yes, if the expenditure is in emerging markets, your money likely goes even further during global recessions

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

2

Thanks for writing this! I would be curious to know what you think about this 4 years later, and now that interest rates are much higher.

4

I think all the points still stand albeit the numbers in the example look dated now! Anything you think should be changed?

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

2

Sorry for the very late reply, basically my understanding is that interest rates now are high, so this post implies that we should consider investing now and donating later.

Is that a correct interpretation? Are you following that strategy yourself?

4

Interest rates are much higher, which is partially offset by inflation (it’s real not nominal that matters) but not entirely. Today, US Treasuries have a +1.79% yield over 5 years in real terms, so higher than the -1.28% I mention in the article but still within the long-term range of -1% to +2% that I mention in the article. Importantly, that’s still below real GDP growth expectations, so over time the amount you can buy as a proportion of global wealth declines.

ShayBenMoshe

3

Thanks for posting this, this is very interesting.

Did you by any chance try to models this? It would be interesting for example to compare different strategies and how would they work given past data.

3

I haven't. I think the key debate is whether the theory could work in practice, rather than whether the theory holds. In terms of modelling, I think it would be hard to quantify the benefits as the variables (in particular: (1) the cost of downsizing and then re-scaling an organisation, and (2) change in marginal CPLSE with respect to a change in GDP) are inherently difficult to measure. Do you have any thoughts about how we could do it?

ShayBenMoshe

1

I agree that it isn't easy to quantify all of these.

Here is something you could do, which unfortunately does not take into account the changes in charities operation at different times, but is quite easy to do (all of the figures should be in real terms).

Choose a large interval of time (say 1900 to 2020), and at each point (say every month or year), decide how much you invest vs how much you donate, according to your strategy (and others).
Choose a model for how much money you have (for example, starting with a fixed amount, or say receiving a fixed amount every year, or receiving an amount depending on the return on investment in the previous year).
Sum up the total money donated over the course of that interval, and calculate how money you have in the end.

Then, you can compare for different strategies the two values at the end. You can also sum the total donated and the money left, pretending to donate everything left at the end of the interval. Or you could adjust your strategies such that no money is left at the end.

PeterMcCluskey

3

Cash sitting in a charity bank account costs money, so if you have lots of it, invest some;

But the obvious ways to invest (i.e. stocks) work poorly when combined with countercyclical spending. Charities are normally risk-averse about investments because they have plenty of money to invest when stocks are high, but need to draw down reserves when stocks are low.

1

That's a good point and I don't think I was particularly clear in my post. I will have a think about whether I can rephrase in a way that keeps it concise.

I'd like to separate my response into two issues: (1) liquidity (cash vs. Treasuries) and (2) risk tolerance (Treasuries vs. stocks). On liquidity, I think it's a good idea to keep a few months of expenditure in cash to ensure you can access it in an instant. Depending on your size, you may get some interest paid by the bank, but it's very unlikely to keep pace with inflation. However, anything you don't need at short notice can be invested in risk-free assets (e.g. short-dated US Treasuries), which have a better chance at keeping pace with inflation (with the usual caveat that the benefits have to outweigh the added admin).

Risk tolerance, i.e. whether to invest in stocks (maybe even with leverage) rather than Treasuries, is another topic and lots of smart people have written previous stuff on this, e.g. here. This is where the practical difficulties I mention come in. You need to be willing for income (including potential gains and losses on investments) and expenditure to be going in opposite directions, potentially over a number of years. Certainly, if a charity has 6 months' expenditure in the bank, I wouldn't recommend putting 3 months worth in stocks. But if a charity has 10 years' expenditure in the bank, I think it needs to realise how much that is costing it. If it puts 9 years' expenditure in stocks, then with even a bad market crash, it will still have 5 years' expenditure.

PeterMcCluskey

1

10 years worth of cash sounds pretty unusual, at least for an EA charity.

But part of my point is that when stocks are low, the charity won't have enough of a cushion to do any investing, so it won't achieve the kind of returns that you'd expect from buying stocks at a no-worse-than-random time. E.g. I'd expect that a charity that tries to buy stocks would have bought around 2000 when the S&P was around 1400, sold some of that in 2003 when the S&P was around 1100 to make up for a shortfall in donations, bought again in 2007 at 1450, then sold again in 2009 at 1100. With patterns like that, it's easy to get negative returns.

Individual investors often underperform markets for the same reason. They can avoid that by investing only what they're saving for retirement. However, charities generally shouldn't have anything equivalent to saving for retirement.

5

I think what you are referring to is an Anti-Nightingale. If you always sell after a market crash, you will most likely (as in mode, not mean) have poor returns, but that doesn't change the expected value from investing. The odds of a roulette wheel never change, but you can change your strategy to give you a >50% chance of coming away with a profit. My strategy will give you a >50% chance of coming away with an underperformance of the market, but will not change the underlying odds.

Another trap some people (including professional investors) fall into is "buying the dip". It feels natural to expect that when the market is low, the future expectations must be higher and it must be a good time to invest. In a perfect market (not a given!) this is not the case. In fact due to government responses (lowering the interest rate), returns should actually be lower. In very practical terms, this time last year you might have expected a 6% return from investing in the S&P 500 for one year. Right now, that 6% might be 5.5% because interest rates are lower.

Ramiro