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The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

nytimes.com

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Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#61

Post by betenoire »

jimbokun wrote: post #54
jtbigwoo wrote: post #37

I talked about this on HN a few years ago, but my friends and I planned to be this guy. In college we talked about all the money we'd make and how much we'd be able to donate. We all had a job offers for $32 - 42k/year. That was amazing! We were living on less than $1k/month in college. We had plans to give away 20%, 30%, or 50% of our income. We would barely even notice. Some of us even managed to do it for a few ye…

The muscles you use for giving are the same muscles you use to save or pay down debt. Know what your expenses are and how much you are spending. Know which of the things you spend money for are really important to you, and what you wouldn't actually miss that much. Know how to keep your spending in check as your income grows, not just increasing spending because the money is there. People tend to react emotionally to…

You are saying it's just as easy to save/donate as it is to spend because the muscles and underlying principles are the same? I wish I'd heard about this sooner.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#62

Post by scottjad »

willmacaskill wrote: post #21

Matt is a friend of mine, and someone who got career advice from what ultimately became 80,000 Hours, a startup non-profit I cofounded. I'm really happy to see the positive response on here; we've advised a lot of people to 'earn to give' and some people... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career. Anyone, if anyone feels inspired by the story and thinks they mi…

Are there any good techniques for a programmer/small business owner to be able to deduct charitable contributions more than 50% of one's adjusted gross income?

> From http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organi... Generally, you may deduct up to 50 percent of your adjusted gross income, but 20 percent and 30 percent limitations apply in some cases.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#63

Post by JacobLBryan »

mikemajzoub wrote: post #47
jrlocke wrote: post #6

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I've always felt it selfish when people of means partake in 'aid trips' over sending money to an appropriate organization. If you care to help, leverage your abilities efficiently; make the money doing what you're best at, and let others administer the aid.

I used to agree with this view, until I participated in an aid trip in college. When I personally saw what extreme poverty was, it changed the course of my life and future career decisions. So, the $1000 plane ticket and 10 days in a rural, high-need area allowed me to look outside the bubble of American extravagance I had grown up in. It is one thing to rationally know that people are without food and basic medicine…

It's about recognizing that you aren't a perfectly rational person, and then taking steps to maximize your altruism in ways that may not have been strictly optimal if you hadn't taken that into account. If seeing poverty firsthand is going to give you the motivation to do something about it when you return, then that's the action you should take, as long as you're being honest with yourself.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#64

Post by jessriedel »

iamfbpt wrote: post #10

We all almost do through taxes. He goes further and donates 50% more from the remaining money.

This is a rounding error. Altruistic foreign aid (i.e., development aid) is a miniscule fraction of government spending in all countries. Norway tops the list with 1.07% of national income, and the US gives 0.19%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governments_by_develop...

Even if you count "non-altruistic" foreign aid (i.e., aid given to a recipient government by a donor government who also benefits, e.g. military aid), this barely budges the numbers. The US goes up to about 0.3%.

Throwing in private aid, like Wage's, makes the US look comparable to Europe because the US gives more money privately than Europe. But this is still within a factor of 2.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#65

Post by drcube »

This is the same Peter Singer who told parents not to send their kids to college and instead send their tuition money to Africa. But apparently, if you send your kid to college anyway, he could make enough to send half his salary to Africa every year, far outweighing his parents' initial college fund. So who is right?

I like that Singer holds this guy up as an example, for doing the exact opposite of what Singer actually claimed was morally right.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#67

Post by krstck »

jimbokun wrote: post #60
willmacaskill wrote: post #21

Matt is a friend of mine, and someone who got career advice from what ultimately became 80,000 Hours, a startup non-profit I cofounded. I'm really happy to see the positive response on here; we've advised a lot of people to 'earn to give' and some people... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career. Anyone, if anyone feels inspired by the story and thinks they mi…

"... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career." Well, it's at least worth having a discussion about. If you are in a career where you honestly think damage is being done by your activities, you need to weigh that against whatever good is being done with the money you earn and give away. What about the traders involved in the near-collapse of the global economy i…

From http://effective-altruism.com/ea/54/show_me_the_harm/:

"Finance is often taken to be the legal high earning career that’s most harmful to society. The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman and donated half of his earnings to Against Malaria Foundation, that would be about enough to save 100 lives per year (or more accurately, saving 4000 QALYs), plus likely have substantial positive flow-through effects. For Earning to Give at Goldman to be net harmful, the marginal employee would need to be causing the death of a hundred people each year. This would mean that Goldman Sachs employees are several orders of magnitude more deadly than American service people in Iraq.

Goldman has 32,000 employees. An upper bound for the harm caused by the marginal employee is thus the total harm caused divided by 32,000. For the harm to outweigh the good, Goldman would therefore have to be killing at least 3.2 million young people each year, or doing something else that is similarly harmful. That would mean that Goldman Sachs would need to be responsible for around 5% of all deaths in the world. Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs only makes up 22% of American investment banking, and 3% of the American financial industry - if the rest of finance is similarly bad, then it would imply that finance is doing something as bad as causing all the deaths in the world."

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#68

Post by JacobLBryan »

jimbokun wrote: post #60
willmacaskill wrote: post #21

Matt is a friend of mine, and someone who got career advice from what ultimately became 80,000 Hours, a startup non-profit I cofounded. I'm really happy to see the positive response on here; we've advised a lot of people to 'earn to give' and some people... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career. Anyone, if anyone feels inspired by the story and thinks they mi…

"... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career." Well, it's at least worth having a discussion about. If you are in a career where you honestly think damage is being done by your activities, you need to weigh that against whatever good is being done with the money you earn and give away. What about the traders involved in the near-collapse of the global economy i…

One of the arguments regarding this is that employment in the sort of higher level careers we're talking about is fairly inelastic, so if you don't take the job then it will go to the next best candidate who applied. The impact is less about the total damage/good done by your position than it is about the difference between you and the next person in line (or basically the average person in that industry). If you're the sort of person who is concerned with maximizing impact in this way you'll probably do at least a bit better on the margin, and any money that you earn to donate is pure benefit since that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#69

Post by jimbokun »

betenoire wrote: post #61
jimbokun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The muscles you use for giving are the same muscles you use to save or pay down debt. Know what your expenses are and how much you are spending. Know which of the things you spend money for are really important to you, and what you wouldn't actually miss that much. Know how to keep your spending in check as your income grows, not just increasing spending because the money is there. People tend to react emotionally to…

You are saying it's just as easy to save/donate as it is to spend because the muscles and underlying principles are the same? I wish I'd heard about this sooner.

I was comparing saving to donating, and contrasting with spending. So the exact opposite.

Was I really that unclear?

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#70

Post by cmdrfred »

jtbigwoo wrote: post #37

I talked about this on HN a few years ago, but my friends and I planned to be this guy. In college we talked about all the money we'd make and how much we'd be able to donate. We all had a job offers for $32 - 42k/year. That was amazing! We were living on less than $1k/month in college. We had plans to give away 20%, 30%, or 50% of our income. We would barely even notice. Some of us even managed to do it for a few ye…

I completely agree. It seems to me that this is a problem of nationalism more than anything. In the United States we give many people many thousands of dollars a year in benefits, most for legitimate reasons. That said, If your end goal was the biggest net cut in human suffering wouldn't you get much bigger bang for your buck in the third world? I make exactly the low end of your range there and yet the government takes nearly 30 percent of my income each paycheck. Wouldn't the solution be for me not to give more(I can't really, my asthma medications wipe me out each month), but for the money I do give(taxes) to be used more effectively?
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