The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay • Hacker News Board

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#131

Post by bboreham » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:26 PM UTC

krstck wrote: post #67

jimbokun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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 hav…

> The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman

... then they wouldn't be earning $500,000. That figure is averaged out between a few people who make multi-millions and the masses on more ordinary numbers.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#132

Post by hmate9 » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:27 PM UTC

a3voices wrote: post #96

Should you also donate money to save hypothetical aliens in a far away galaxy, if we find out they exist? What about a fund to help people relocate from flooded cities from global warming 200 years in the future? What about donating to keep A.I. simulations from being shut off? Why donate to help people and not animals or bacteria? What about the fact that the universe is going to die from entropy, and all people die…

Because some people are not as lucky. Some people don't have the basics such as water which we take for granted and it is all because of LUCK.

What's the point of life if not to help each other survive and enjoy life?

Sure, you need to keep yourself and your family comfortable but to actively distance yourself away from ANY kind of donation is just sub-human imo.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#133

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:28 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #127

dragonwriter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I think the government employees (federal and, because much of the federal entitlement spending is joint state/federal programs like Medicaid) and contractors paid to work directly in the administration of those programs (or, in the case of companies running Medicare Advantage plans, working in for-profit businesses directly subsidized by the entitlement spending) are receiving at least as direct a benefit f…

Government employees and administration are overhead.

> Government employees and administration are overhead.

The only way you get close to the claimed 66% number is if you are including all spending, including overhead, of the programs identified.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#134

Post by wanderingstan » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:28 PM UTC

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #128

hkmurakami wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is 5% of one's income a rather high number, even the average amount that people give in the United States is far higher than the corresponding amount in other countries (ex: Japan). It may be the country's Christian leanings that contribute to this, but to be charitable is seen as a virtue and absolute good in this society. This is not necessarily the case in other societies.

I'm not trying to make this political, but I sometimes wonder how much of our charitable exceptionalism is related to the US having a weaker social safety net than many industrialized countries. Whereas an American might donate to a food bank, homeless shelter, disaster relief, etc., a European might consider those activities the proper role of government and expect their (higher) taxes to go towards remedying the si…

I would second this interpretation.

When I lived in Germany I wanted to do some volunteer work and read up on the possibilities. A local explained to me, "Offering to volunteer at the library or a school sounds as strange to a German as someone in the US offering to volunteer with street sweeping, or with the IRS. That's the job of the government. That's what taxes are for."

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#135

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

krstck wrote: post #67

jimbokun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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 hav…

> The average Goldman Sachs employee earns around $500,000 per year. If someone joined Goldman

They probably wouldn't be making the average salary of a Goldman Sachs employee, which is probably the arithmetic mean of salary of all current employees, and not the median or mode of new hires.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#136

Post by mod » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #94

nashashmi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much how they become brighter. These kinds of hands-on experience are far more transformative and contribute to higher efficiency than if they were to simply donate more money.

At least they could acknowledge that they're going abroad to help themselves, rather than the beneficiaries of their "charity."

Nothing is altruistic.

I'm not sure why you're picking on these guys in particular.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#137

Post by cbr » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

jcarpio wrote: post #112

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…

Ah, you wrote the piece: http://qz.com/57254/to-save-the-world-dont-get-a-job-at-a-ch... What did you think of Brook Allen's response: http://qz.com/57807/dont-come-to-wall-street-for-the-money-e... His point was that the actual making of money might actually cause more harm (fraud, etc) than the good your donations would do. I don't agree; objectively weighing the harm with the benefits is possible, as other comment…

Ben Todd, Will's co-founder, responded to Brook's response with: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/

I like their estimate #1. For earning to give in finance to be net-negative then finance would have to be causing net harm approximately equal to all the deaths in the world.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#138

Post by jefftk » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

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…

My wife and I are also trying to do this, and I suspect a big part of why we've been able to stick to it is the growing effective altruism community. We commit to donating 50%, post our income and donations publicly [1], and we know people would hold us accountable if we started backsliding.

Still, 20 years is much longer than I have experience for, so I definitely respect people like you who have been working at this much longer!

[1] http://www.jefftk.com/donations

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#139

Post by tomjen3 » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

krstck wrote: post #93

tomjen3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that it only works if you believe that 10% makes sense. For me it doesn't - it is either 0% or whatever several 100% of my current income it would take to do my part (I don't see how not currently earning enough to repay would be enough to get me of the hook, certainly car payments are not payed in percentage of income). Thus, for me, the only answer that makes sense is that we have no obliga…

> Thus, for me, the only answer that makes sense is that we have no obligation to save the world, but we are allowed to donate whatever we want. That's the status quo. The whole reason we're having this conversation is because not enough people are donating X% in order to fix global poverty. So, what's your burden? What's my burden? 10% is a handy figure because it's small enough to be doable for most people, but lar…

That would be handy, granted. However having looked your argument over I don't think it ads up. Thus I maintain that my burden is 0%, so if you want to fix global poverty you will have to do it without my donations.

The real problem isn't that we are not giving enough to Africa, the problem is that we don't buy enough from Africa.

If you try to solve that problem instead the Africans will be much better of, you won't have to worry about convincing me, and you can make yourself rich in the process.

Re: The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay

#140

Post by Mickydtron » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #117

krstck wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

This is a false equivalence. Even assuming Goldman Sachs causes ongoing significant financial damage (something I'm not convinced of), you can't compare that directly to saving lives with an equivalent amount of money. Apples and oranges.

Actually, that is the entire purpose of the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Keep in mind, no one is really intrinsically concerned with the economy as an abstract concept. The things that we really care about are how this complex system affects real humans, and once we're talking about a change in quality of life for humans, we can compare them to saving lives via the QALY. It's the sort of process that's more statistical in nature, but you can get an idea whether you're doing more harm than good. The point above is that a back of the napkin calculation indicates that it is rather unlikely that someone working at Goldman Sachs is causing more harm than good if they donate half their income.