= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Larks comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (182)
It isn't zero sum either. I'm fairly certain Warren Buffet creates quite a lot of it. I'm also sure the marginal value of yet another school teacher pales in comparison to it.
My inner anthropologist from Jupiter is confused by this sentence, what is this "fair pay" thing. Please elaborate on it.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Warren Buffet is a vampire squid on the face of the world ... why not? You have humans routinely buying liquor and cigarettes instead of malaria nets for their own children, or wasting dollars on negative sum games like jostling for positional goods.
And to be avoid misunderstandings I do think you can make a good case that some people & institutions probably are vampire squids in the sense I used here.
We aren't talking about what billionaires tend to support. We are using a thought experiment of primary school teacher vs. efficient charity donating rich dude to help you decide whether you where on the curve you want to go.
I'm pretty sure that being a pirate in Somalia and donating to efficient charity is probably justified by utilitarian calculations. If you can't possibly imagine this being the case, pause to consider that a criminal is just a start up government, a local bandit who ideally would want to have the monopoly on violence that a real state has but just isn't good enough for now. The best approach for the pirate would be to just stay in port and have passing ships pay him protection money. We accept some taxation of the trade routes can produce better results than not taxing it at all. I think it clear most government spending is much worse in its impact per dollar than efficient charity. If you disagree why in the world aren't you donating money to say the US government or writing up an argument for it? Model piracy by me and my merry armed band in Somalia as a tax on the trade route, then judge them as you would a government program with the same bang for buck.
To give another controversial example, I find it plausible that selling Marijuana and several other kinds of drugs (but not all) full time and donating the money to efficient charity beats out being a primary school teacher or working in kindergarten on utilitarian grounds.
Unless you're using "can" in a very weak sense - as in "if the revenue was donates to efficient charity", I don't think that's true, because they cause additional wasteful substitution to intra-national trade. Taxes should fall on income (or negative externalities).
You are taking the quote in a too narrow context. Replace pirates preying on internal or international shipping with a bunch of thugs that show up in the market and take every tenth apple for themselves. Or robbing local farmer and craftsman and taking some of their stuff. Or road warriors enacting an environmentally friendly carbon tax on fuel.
I don't understand what you mean. Is your point that taxes can be justified, and that sufficiently advanced piracy is indistinguishable from taxes? Or that taxes are better than pirates? Or that taxes on trade routes are better than other taxes? I agree with the first two, and was objecting to the last one.
Yep.
Generally they are because taxes tend towards efficient banditry at the Laffer maximum. A pirate spending a fraction of their income on efficient charity probably beats out taxes. Naturally a better utilitarian solution is to give that pirate more and more power so he can better and better approximate taxation and spend more on efficient charity, until the marginal gain of efficient charity drops to that of other government spending. Now of course maybe taxes are already too high and do more harm than good, in which case the pirate should stop earlier.
I didn't mean to claim this.