All of Pablo_Stafforini2's Comments + Replies

Hi Austen. You write:

Those "philosophers" wouldn't find it too demanding if they were the ones who were had to endure the suffering of the Third World. It's so wrong that people only put themselves in the shoes of the haves, rather than the have-nots when formulating their "morals".

Yes, Singer makes this same point in a reply to criticism from Colin McGinn (from Dale Jamieson (ed.), Singer and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 304):

I disagree […] with the conclusion McGinn draws from his imaginary world in which a Charity Channe

Thanks for those clarifications, Owen. I understand your position better now.

Thanks, Martijn! Will is currently writing a book on effective altruism and is giving a lot of thinking to ways in which we can make EA ideas more appealing to a wider audience, without sacrificing precision or accuracy. Making such ideas more personal is a key way of accomplishing this, and for this reason the book will feature interviews with many prominent EAs and top researchers.

Hi Toby,

However, they are distributed over twenty years of that time and I think the amortization calculator you used assumes it is all paid as a lump sum on year one.

Yes, this is what I assumed. As I note at the end of my previous comment, I took the £150-200,000 figure to represent the present-value cost of having a child, rather than the unadjusted sum of payments that parents are expected to make over a 20-year period. I think I made that assumption because Brian's own estimates are adjusted for the time value of money. I agree that, if this assumption doesn't hold in this case, then the cost per parent per year is £3,000 (excluding opportunity costs).

Thanks for the reply. You write:

I'm not familiar with the theory behind the time value of money to appraise it, but it looks to me like your calculation here has taken my per parent figure and come out with a per couple figure, which (I'm sure unintentionally) makes it look at first read like my estimate is <50% of the true cost). But the figure of £4700 per couple is not wildly different from £4000 per couple per annum, given the uncertainty bounds I'd put on it.

No, sorry: I took the middle value of your £150-£200,000 estimate (£175,000) then divided ... (read more)

This is a very interesting essay addressing a very important decision EAs face. Thank you for writing it!

I think your estimates for the annual financial cost of having children underestimate the real costs, because they don't account for the time value of money and because they omit opportunity costs.

To account for the time value of money, we can use the formula used to calculate amortization in business. Assuming a present-value cost of £175,000, an interest rate of 5% and 50 periods, the annual cost for each couple turns out to be about £4,700 per pare... (read more)

Sorry about that. I'm currently working on fixing this problem.

Paul Christiano discusses this consideration in The best reason to give later:

I think the most important impact of giving now is probably that it accelerates the process of learning. At the level of the EA movement, the main reason to be optimistic about better giving opportunities emerging in the future is that we will actively seek out such opportunities, and discover through experience what directions are most fruitful to explore. (As an individual you can expect your money to go further if you wait and do nothing, but only because you can benefit from

"Why not make a long odds bet with a wealthy counterparty or use high-risk derivatives to get a chance at making the large donation? In principle, economies of scale like this should always be subject to circumvention at modest cost."

Yes, as Paul Christiano writes,

In principle some opportunities might only be accessible for big donors. $1B might go more than a thousand times farther than $1M. But if we are really only interested in expectations, then we can always just take a 1000:1 bet and turn our $1M into a 1/1000 chance of $1B. This guarantees that there are no increasing returns to money.

See this post by Jeff Kaufman for a list of names that were in use before 'effective altruism' became established.

This expenditure is also pretty lumpy, and I don’t expect them to get all their donations from small individual donations, so it seems to me that donating 1/50th of the cost of a program manager isn’t as good as 1/50th of the value of a program manager.

Carl Shulman explores the implications of this claim in this post.

animals and plants have as much right to exist on this planet as humans do, and we have a responsibility to ensure their continued survival and coexistence with us.

I'm not sure the idea of recognizing rights to insentient entities is compatible with effective altruism. It seems to me that a key element in this movement is that of helping others, where 'others' is most naturally understood to refer to some kind of subject of experience--someone for whom things can go well or badly.