2021-01-01
Starting today—January 1st, 2021, I’m taking the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of my pre-tax income to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to improve lives.
I’m sharing this to publicly commit myself to this, and to nudge you, the reader, in the direction of doing the same.
It’s difficult to find a moral framework that can clearly indicate a particular fraction of one’s income to donate to charity. Consequentialism (and more specifically Effective Altruism when taken to its logical extreme) points to a world where we donate absolutely everything that doesn’t reduce our potential to earn more (in order to donate it). This doesn’t feel right, but it’s difficult to navigate the space between this extreme and the opposite extreme—donating nothing—in a principled way.
Attempting to navigate this space (“how much should I give?”) is yet another way in which it’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis and wind up with inaction. The Giving What We Can Pledge is a simple hack for this, pending future discovery of the One True Framework of Moral Philosophy.
The Giving What We Can Pledge is a pledge to give 10% (or more) of one’s (pre-tax) income, for life (or at least until retirement) to charities selected explicitly for their impact per dollar.
While this is far from a perfect answer to the moral question of how to behave as a relatively lucky citizen of a relatively wealthy country, it’s a far better approximation than inaction.
In the past, I’ve struggled to determine which charities were actually doing the most good, and often this analysis paralysis led me to simply not give. GiveWell makes this much easier. They competently identify charities with high leverage to actually effect positive impact on lives.
However, I’m Canadian, and while some of the charities indicated by GiveWell have presences in Canada, many do not. And, while money paid as taxes to the government isn’t wasted per se, it can likely be put to better use (for example, in rationalizing a higher rate of giving). Without compromising on the effectiveness of the charities, it’s useful to find charities that can issue Canadian tax receipts.
RC Forward solves this nicely. They accept donations as a registered charity in Canada, and forward these donations to charities selected according to similar principles to principles (in some cases, simply mirroring GiveWell’s choices). They keep a 4% cut of these donations, however, helping RC Forward to grow is beneficial in itself: Their 2019 Annual Report estimates that each dollar spent on their operations allows them to move six dollars to these evidence-based selections that otherwise would likely have gone to less-impactful charities.
So, why write this? Well, though I’ve been mulling for a while how I should think about charitable giving and how I might go about it better, it was only after listening to a podcast on this topic recently that I decided to take this leap, and I’m aware of how speaking openly about this is an effective way to encourage more people to take this pledge, or at least to engage with the topic in a more principled way.
Posting this publicly also makes it much harder to change my mind later!
So, here goes:
I, Burke Libbey, recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good.
Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from now for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least 10% of my income to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, now and in the years to come.
I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
What will you do?