Why I donate: seems easy, seems obvious, I rarely think about it

Later crossposted to my experiment of a new blog, here.

I’ve been reading the other Why I Donate Week posts with interest. One of the main things that struck me reading them was something like: it seems like giving is a big part of these people’s lives – which is beautiful and I love it. But I mostly don’t relate to it in a very similar way myself, so I thought I’d write this for a different perspective!

I took the 10% Pledge in 2017, and have been giving at least 10% since then.^[1] Currently I give in a vaguely Further-Pledge-like way, i.e. everything above a threshold that’s currently about £34k/year after tax. That currently works out to giving around 40% of my gross/pre-tax income, though that might change in either direction in future.

The main way I relate to giving is honestly that I don’t think I relate to it very much at all. If I ask myself how it feels, the main things that come to mind are like: feels easy, feels obvious, doesn’t feel dramatic.

If I ask myself why I give, or how I feel about giving, the thing that feels most true is:

• With my current level of giving, I feel like I have a nice life. I rent a nice house with my partner, I buy things when I want them, I go on holiday. I do not feel very frugal; I spent about £2000 on travelling for fun this year. I save about 20% of my post-donations net income per year, I’m satisfied my pension contributions have me on a reasonable track for retirement, and my partner and I should be able to buy a house in a few years. So overall, I just don’t feel very held back by money.
• EA has taught me that there are very effective giving opportunities. My money can expectedly save a life for £4000.^[2] And to the extent I’m giving to other cause areas, it’s because I think it helps even more.
• So: I have a nice life, don’t feel constrained by money, and giving away money can literally save lives. It just… seems extremely obvious that I’d want to give away a lot of money? What on earth else would I want to do with it, given these facts?

(Of course, by this I don’t mean that it would be obvious for everyone! Everyone’s situation is different, people have different needs, and I love the diversity of different approaches to giving in this community.)

There are other perspectives which seem true to me, which I can inhabit if I think about it, and which I expect are underlying that “seems obvious” if I interrogated why I believe that. E.g.:

• If I can help others by a huge amount, by sacrificing only a small amount myself, I think I have an ethical obligation to do so.
• I have a high income by UK standards, and an extremely high income by global standards. This is ~solely due to luck and privilege, and that’s unfair. The right response to privilege is to use it to help others who don’t have it.
• I don’t think there’s an especially important sense in which “my” money is mine; I think the state would be justified in expropriating and redistributing way more of my income.^[3]

But they don’t feel like very salient reasons to me. Giving just doesn’t feel like a notable aspect of my life to me. It’s something I think about occasionally when I decide where to donate, or decide how much I’m donating next year; and otherwise isn’t very relevant to my experience.

Historically speaking, I expect it’s way easier for me to feel this way because I decided to give while I was a student. I’ve been giving for as long as I had an independent income, and I’ve never seen my disposable income drop because of giving.^[4] So that’s something to speak for starting early!

Many thanks to those who organised Why I Donate Week: seems great, plus you successfully got me to actually write a Forum post for the first time ever, after about 10 years of reading!^[5]

1. ^{^}

   The full version is that, for the first few years of earnings, if I only had money from my own earnings, I would probably have suspended my pledge for a few years until I had a year of runway saved or something. But I had some ~inheritance / family money, so I kept giving. I'll be receiving a big chunk of ~inheritance next year, which I intend to ~entirely dedicate to giving, and large enough to greatly increase the amount I'm giving. So I'll need to think about what to do with that. My main feeling about this is that it feels like a lot of work...

2. ^{^}

   I didn’t look up that number, don’t quote me, but I know it’s not extremely far off.

3. ^{^}

   Yes, I acknowledge that some versions of it might not be for the overall good due to second-order effects on incentives for wealth creation or whatever. But at least, to the extent that that’s the case, that feels like a sad fact to me: if the money it’d take to solve all the world’s problems is just sitting right there in the bank accounts of rich people like me, but we can’t take it because that’d be even worse in the long run? Maybe true, but sad.

^{^}

I currently decide my threshold for each year by letting my post-donation-post-tax income grow a bit each year – currently using the probably-overcomplicated approach of taking the midpoint of UK inflation and earnings growth since a baseline year. Plus I’d adjust it for any big changes in costs that seem either ~altruistically justified (e.g. if I took an impactful job that increased my commute costs a lot, or if I stopped doing that) or like a big life thing that I think it makes sense to accommodate (e.g. if I had children). But I might change that in future, e.g. I’ve considered having a somewhat lower threshold but donating e.g.  80% of my income above it rather than 100%.

^{^}

possibly of reading unhealthily much… 

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