Keep in mind that money is not a good way to buy happiness.
Furthermore, while technically paying for school tuition and medical expenses are "buying happiness" in the sense that if you don't pay for them you won't be very happy, the arguments against using money for happiness don't apply well to alleviating specific needs.
Note that both graphs have a log scale as their x-axis. It's pretty standard for economists, psychologists, etc. to suggest that humans have a logarithmic utility for money (i.e. your happiness is proportionate to the number of digits in your bank balance, so giving away 90% of your capital and reducing that number of digits by 1 has only a marginal impact on your happiness level). I think the statement "money is not a good way to buy happiness" captures the intuition behind logarithmic utility for money fairly well.
(Also note that the article does not dispute my claim that money is not a good way to buy happiness. It just notes the lack of an asymptote in the utility curve.)
I'd like to hear from people about a process they use to decide how much to give to charity. Personally, I have very high income, and while we donate significant money in absolute terms, in relative terms the amount is <1% of our post-tax income. It seems to me that it's too little, but I have no moral intuition as to what the right amount is.
I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money, so that's not a problem.
Background: I have a wife and two kids, one with significant health issues (i.e. medical bills - possibly for life), most money we spend goes to private school tuition x 2, the above mentioned medical bills, mortgage, and miscellaneous life expenses. And we max out retirement savings.
If you have some sort of quantitative system where you figure out how much to spend on charity, please share. If you just use vague feelings, and you think there can be no reasonable quantitative system, please tell me that as well.
Update: as suggested in the comments, I'll make it more explicit: please also share how you determine how much to give.