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Osuniev comments on Earning to Give vs. Altruistic Career Choice Revisited - Less Wrong
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10% is the charitable giving limit. There is another thing to be asked about, and that is the impact of the job. If I were to be a tax lawyer, I would be directly harming the ability of the US government to spend on social welfare programs. If I worked on Wall Street anywhere but Vanguard I would be bilking people out of their life savings, and at Vanguard I wouldn't be making $100 K a year. Someone working as a tobacco farmer to raise money for cancer research has some misplaced priorities.
THIS. Although I`m unsure about the particulars you mention here, being an European, people and effective altruists need to realize that your job is INSIDE the world you live in. Estimating how much good you're producing is not just about how much money/time you're giving to effective charities, but also how much your way of life is helping/damaging the world.
I'm not convinced. The amount of saved lives, QALYs, or whatever you are counting that the US government welfare program gets per dollar is (or seems to be to me) quite a bit less than the amount that, say, the AMF could get with that money. I don't know how many dollars per QALY US government welfare manages to get, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the order of $1000-$10000 per QALY. And that's not even counting the fact that even if the US goverment had that bit more money from you not being a tax lawyer, that money would not all go to welfare and other such efficient (relative to what else the government spends money on) projects. I would imagine a fair portion would go to, say, bombing Syria, or hiring an extra parking-meter enforcer, or such inefficent stuff, that get an even worse $/QALY result.
And that is still not to mention the fact that some of that money would go to, say, funding the NSA to spy on your phone calls and read your email, or to the TSA to harass, strip-search, and detain you, which are net negatives.
And even that is not counting that MIRI may end up having a QALY/$ result far, far higher than anything the AMF or whoever could ever hope of possibly getting.
I'm not saying you're flat-out wrong, and it is something to take into consideration when figuring out the altruistic impact of your job, but taking into account these objections, it seems highly unlikely that the marginal dollar from the government goes far enough to weigh very heavily in ones analysis.
On the topic of how much it takes to save a QALY in the US:
-from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1497852/
The first paragraph of this gives more on the cost of QALYs in the US. So, kidney dialysis is an intervention that is paid for by the government in the US, and it comes in at more than $100,000 per QALY saved.
Since marginal funding generally goes to pay for interventions which are no more effective than those already being paid for, I wouldn't expect the cost of a marginal QALY to be below (say) $50,000.
I'm not sure if you were answering my comment or wubbles's one. What I was saying was that you need to take into account the negative impact your job and way of life have on the world.
I agree that the US government probably is terrible at using tax money to better the world.