“Trump is pressuring the Fed to adopt policies that would cause inflation.”

That’s more cleanly expressed as a curve steepener (front lower, back higher), so bullish short end vs bearish back. 

“AI-induced job loss might cause the Fed to be less concerned about inflation.”

This sounds more bullish bonds because low inflation concerns -> fed can cut. Also (more importantly) the fed has a dual mandate so low employment -> cut. 

I personally like CTA style trend following strategies but generally advise people who are not very familiar against that exposure. If you think about leverage in percentage terms and not eg in volatility units I would be a bit nervous. 

Levered risk parity (bonds + equities) can get very spicy if correlations break (eg high inflation), but it has worked well in the secular declining rates environment from the 80s to 2010s. 
 

I think Corey Hoffstein’s work and podcast are great!

 

I think it’s a bit tricky to reason about “the ecosystem” on a global level. 
Directionally I’d say earning-to-give deserves more popularity (perhaps even as a default, given direct work seems oversubscribed) and more community support and, yes, it’s hard and can feel less rewarding to find a well paying job and to donate a large fraction of your income!

Some of these people should probably consider earning to give? This has perhaps been de-emphasised more recently, but the counterfactual impact can be very good if there’s not clear match in direct work. 

Additionally I suspect that the “structural issue” is often simply funding constraints. 

Is there a running list of small, impactful & very capacity-constrained giving opportunities somewhere?

How do people think about investing vs donating over time in practice?

When coupling investment and optimal donation problems, there is an apparent paradox if we consider:
* expected utility (EU) is pretty much linear in donations
* risk aversion with respect to own impact is non-altruistic
--> one should allocate everything to the best donation opportunity

* if there are positive EV (above risk free rate or above market beta or similar) investment opportunities one can invest and therefore increase the EU because EV translates linearly into EU
--> one should go all in on the best investment
--> seemingly there is a moral obligation to invest imprudently in order to donate with max EU

This is clearly wrong and suspiciously close to SBF-type (double+epsilon)-or-nothing scenarios. 

The way I currently think about is that a one-period problem is a very poor approximation (eg if I hit an absorbing barrier down the line the outcome is bad in EU terms, my future income stream is time-varying and uncertain and a function of my liquidity), therefore risk averse investing is still optimal, even when risk averse donating is not justified.
Additionally (and hand-wavingly), I think that somewhat risk averse & diversified donations are also good because of beyond-quantifiable and moral uncertainty, diversification generating new future donation opportunities, multi-period-ness, and game theory around adverse selection & because it's reasonable not to be completely altruistic.

What are other good ways to think about the coupled donation and investment problem?

Thanks for the good write up!

I feel folks who are sympathetic to “hinge of history” type arguments should really think about whether this is the one during their lifetimes not because of AI but because of US democracy. 

It’s reasonable to be somewhat skeptical based on priors given the statistical power of this (very worthy and interesting!) study? I didn’t dig deeper, but back of the envelope if you draw from 10000 iid households with an infant each and a 4% probability you’d expect a standard deviation around 0.2%, so there’s not much room for slicing the data a lot finer or additional correlation creeping in without a decent amount of sampling error. Obviously, with smarter analysis you can do a bit better and it’s hard and expensive to get more data, but it’s easy to believe the results are biased upwards a bit. The study is a great step in the right direction. 

Thanks for sharing, this is cool!

Is it possible to see the code and/or maths somewhere? It would be pretty neat make a  standardised implementations of different allocation methods broadly accessible! Additionally, many results are quite sensitive to subtle choices like default parameters, scales and non-linearities used to express marginal diminishing "returns", right?

(At first, I was a bit confused that the "Maximise Excpected Choiceworthiness" solution did not end up with 100% on one option, but then I saw that "Diminishing Marginal Returns" was switched on in "Settings". Is there any philosophical support for this non-linearity in the case of intertheoretic comparisons?)

edit: found it here: https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/moral-parliament/tree/master/server/allocate