You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gjm comments on Proportional Giving - Less Wrong Discussion

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (86)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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".