Effective Giving
I got inspired by Raising for Effective Giving to think about charitable donations. I don’t give a lot to charity – I have a couple of direct debits set up and was more or less content with that. Via their site I stumbled upon a TED talk about effective altruism. Like a lot of people, I’d say I don’t give much thought to charity, problems elsewhere in the world, and diseases/illnesses that are common (or uncommon) but I or someone I know don’t have.
My goal for charitable giving having thought about it is something along the lines of raise the quality of living for the most amount of people as much as possible per dollar spent. Be this through survival, better food/medicine, cure for illness etc. The thing is, poker is a capital intensive business. Players have their bankroll and make a return on that capital which eventually diminishes when you reach the nosebleeds and you have all the money. Now it would be arrogant and foolish of me to suggest my hypothesis is correct in anyway, so I’m just sort of throwing it out there. In the long run, would it not be better to allocate 2% of our poker earnings in our wills rather than per quarter? Problems are going to exist in 60-100 years. Our bankroll will show much stronger growth if we weren’t taking out 2% of profits every quarter. Therefore more money in real terms will be donated when we die. [1]
I suppose the problem with this idea lies in credibility. The loss of income the charity takes by not recommending the individual accumulates a ton of wealth in the most efficient manner before they donate is effectively a risk premium on them donating at all. It is up to the individual to insure them against this risk by an en masses trend of people shifting towards charitable giving in their will.
I’d be interested to hear any compelling chat either way. For now, I don’t think I’m going to make any substantial donations, and contemplate modifying my will. Hopefully I won’t die for another 80 years at least in the meantime.
[1] It’s obviously better for the charity if we give 2% every quarter as we will sometimes have losing quarters that are not required to be made up before giving. But for the sake of argument assume every single quarter is a winner, like it is for nanonoko.
The post “Effective Giving” was first posted on Rupert Elder’s Blog.
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