Yes, well it would be unethical to repeat that experiment with people.

There are two questions here. The first is how you trade off the value you place on your own welfare vs the value you place on the welfare of distant others. And the second is how having extra cash will benefit your mental health, energy levels, free time, etc. and whether by improving those attributes of yours you'll increase the odds of doing more good for the world in the future.

I consider myself a pretty hardcore EA; I gave $20K to charity last year. But this year I'm saving all my money so my earning-to-give startup will have a bigger cash buffer. And I spend about $100/month on random stuff from Amazon that I think will make my life better (a weighted jump rope for exercising with, an acupressure mat for relaxing more effectively, nootropics, Larry Gonick's cartoon guides to the history of the universe so I can relax & educate myself away from my computer, etc.)

So I guess the point I'm trying to make is you don't even have to deal with the first values question if you decide that investing in yourself is a good investment from a long-run EA perspective. Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish... your mental energy is limited and if you find wet feet at all stressful, it's worth considering replacing your shoes even before personal welfare gets added in to the equation.

In other words, I personally am more optimistic about you spending all of your money on yourself and spending some of your time and energy on a credible plan for significantly increasing your future EA impact than I am about you donating spare cash to charity and not spending any time and energy and such a credible plan. (In general, I suspect that the potential EA impact of time and energy is underrated; this article gives a good explanation.)

You can ask, but why the answer would be anything else other than someone's personal opinion?

It's a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it's a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?

Do you have a link?

Nope. Just a lot of handwaving. Sorry.

But, e.g., if you get old and sick and it costs $100k to cure you in the USA, then the utilitarian optimum is probably to let you die and send the money to save 20 or more lives in sub-Saharan Africa. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that you should endorse that policy; but if you bite the bullet that says you should send all your spare money to Oxfam or GiveDirectly or whoever, then I think you should probably also be biting the bullet that says you should be prepared to give up and die if you get sick and curing you would be too expensive.

On the other hand, if you're young and get similarly sick, it might (on the same assumptions) be worth curing you so that you can carry on earning money and pumping it to the desperately needy. In which case it might indeed be worth spending some money first to stop that happening. But I'll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income because of ill health isn't terribly large.

I suggest that unless you're seriously inclined to really heroic charitable giving, you would do better not to worry about such things, and take decent care of yourself as I'm sure you would rather do, and give generously without impoverishing yourself. Especially at present -- if you don't have a lot of money, the difference between heroism and ordinary giving is going to be pretty small. Once you're in a better situation financially, you can reconsider how much of a hero you want to be.

I don't think there is a general answer to the question "How much should I consume?"

The idea that your free cash flow should all go to save the world is generally based on a pretty straightforward utilitarian calculation, and it seems pretty clear that the same calculation would put saving lives in poor countries ahead of the small adverse consequences of drawing more on one's own country's social safety net. So I don't think there's much "disconnect" there.

In practice, very few people are quite so heroically altruistic as to reduce themselves to (what locally passes for) poverty so as to give everything to help the global poor. I bet the few who are are already largely neglecting saving; the rest of us, I think, first decide how much we want to give away and then how we want to balance saving and consumption. So a tradeoff between saving and giving, as such, doesn't arise.

For the avoidance of doubt, i very much don't think of myself as any sort of heroic or expert altruist (effective or otherwise). My only role here is Some Guy Who Got Into A Thread About Effective Altruism :-).

I don't think "allowed" is the right way to think about it (and your quotation marks suggest that probably you don't either). If you mean something like "what position do other reasonable people take?" or "what is the range of options that won't make other people who think of themselves as EAs disapprove of me?", I have no information on anyone else's positions but my own is something like this:

• If you are having difficulty feeding yourself healthily, paying for somewhere to live that isn't falling down, etc., then feel free not to give anything.
• Otherwise, I think it's psychologically valuable to keep up the habit of giving something, even if it's very little.
• If you expect to be substantially better off in the future than you are now, there's a lot to be said for optimizing lifetime income and aiming to give some fraction of that rather than feeling guilty about not giving a lot now. If hoarding some for now gives you more stability later, that's probably better for everyone.
• Once you're reasonably comfortable financially, I think the traditional figure of 10% is a reasonable benchmark; you can answer the question "10% of what?" in various different ways, all somewhat defensible and leading to substantially varying levels of giving.
• There are people who give quite a lot more. No one will think ill of you for not being one of them.

4 and 5 are anecdotally true for me, as a trained practitioner of two artforms (music and theatre); I often find that I can appreciate something greatly for its technical expertise and novelty of style or content at the same time as acknowledging that some things that achieve greatly in those areas actually fail at being accessibly entertaining.

I also definitely think 2 and 3 come into play a lot, especially when it comes to considering the monetary difference people are willing to pay artists (in terms of the price of paintings/sculptures, ticket prices, grant money etc) depending on whether they are famous or considered excellent by influential critics. We certainly don't consider the artistic quality of a newly discovered piece by a famous artist entirely on its own merits compared to a new or newly discovered piece by someone who isn't a big name.

Most of the EA stuff I've seen doesn't appear to me to assume vast amounts of disposable income; merely enough to be willing to give some away. Then EA is about what to do with your charity budget, whether it's large or small.

How you prioritize helping others versus helping yourself (and your family, if any) is a more or less orthogonal question.

(I might suggest, snarkily, that for someone who requires "vast amounts of disposable income" before being willing to give any away no term with "altruism" in it is very appropriate. But that wouldn't be fair because e.g. your intention might be to secure yourself a reasonably comfortable life and then give away every penny you can earn beyond that, or something.)

I have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like 'at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn't have an emergency fund'. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don't have a lot of resources to begin with?