gjm comments on Proportional Giving - Less Wrong

10 Post author: gjm 02 March 2014 09:09PM

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Comment author: gjm 04 March 2014 09:18:24AM 1 point [-]

"indefensible" is a pretty strong claim.

That would be why I put "possibly" in front of it.

For the avoidance of doubt, I agree that it's simple and works pretty well in practice. That's why I'm curious whether there's a good theoretical justification for something like it.

Comment author: Punoxysm 04 March 2014 04:56:43PM 0 points [-]

I think you won't find anything without a lot of assumptions and caveats; Any concave utility function will simply never lead to proportional giving.

But certainly, many people will scale up their own expectations of lifestyle along with their income until a pretty high point: that is, they'll try to tell you or at least behave as if they don't have a concave utility function, until they're well into the six figures (sometimes more). Since income changes are slow and tend to co-occur with many other life changes, this, along with psychological biases, complicate any earnest attempt to sit down and say "I'll be best off giving X portion of my income this year".