60 Comments

I'm sure he could've done that and done a lot of good, but how on earth was he supposed to know?

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I was never a big advocate of the insincerity hypothesis. I just think your statements here and more recently are unreasonable. But asking Robin Hanson not to call his audience hypocrites is like asking Nietzsche to stop bringing up that "will to power" concept. :-)

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Sometimes people don't show much interest in a suggestion that they should be interested in, given what they say are their interests. Sometimes this is because it takes time to assimilate a new suggestion, and sometimes this is because they aren't actually interested in what they say. I've spent decades making such suggestions, and trying to discern which explanation best fits their behavior. Then I use that insight to make predictions about how new suggestions will be treated. So how is my behavior insincere?

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How are the six answer hypocritical at all? Why not presume that bland charity does more harm than good? Or to put it another way: if welfare is so bad than why is charity so good? Both create dependency and helplessness. Africans have no incentive to be farmers when charities are giving food away for free. Warlords would much rather steal the proceeds of charity to support their conflicts than let it reach the starving if the warlords get the chance. I would argue buying African-made products from a business is far more helpful than buying local products of which the owners will donate some of their profits to charity. The former creates wealth and self-reliance whereas the latter keep the poor trapped in poverty.

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That argument is fairly true if your body didn't degrade, reducing your chances of experiencing intense pleasure later in life. If your body is unchanging,(for eg. in the short term), you do wait for the next week for a good restaurant meal or unhurried lovemaking or the next month for a vacation.

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Professor,I don't think you answered my question last time: what is the point of my giving a millionaire gift to someone if that implies that someone will have to pay for that person? I am creating a huge credit for someone and a huge debt for someone else. How is that moral?As I said last time, increasing savings does increase the steady state, but not indefinitely, and there is a savings rate which maximizes comsumption. I may be getting this completely wrong, but I don't think you've addressed this objection (or this misconception).

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Rather than have to guess if there will be poor people, better to just bet your money that there will be. If the market odds of poor folks are 25%, then if there are poor folks you win your bet and your money will increase by a factor of four, while if there are no poor folks your bet loses and you have no money to disperse anyway.

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This is a good argument, I never really thought about how you could target the poor in the future, in theory.

In fact, it might be easier to target the poorest of the poor in the future because we'll better understand who "the poor" are--or better yet, be able to target the suffering directly instead of using the proxy of poverty.

But consider how world GDP growth is rapid, and within a hundred years (what it would take to make their contributions even just 10x larger) nearly everyone might have a living standard of around $20,000. After that point having more money does people little good, the research suggests. So in terms of increasing total utility we might be better off spending today, or soon.

I'd compare this to donating a kidney. I plan to donate a kidney within a few years. I know it's the right thing to do, but I don't feel like I need to do it today to save a life because some other equal life will be around in a year to save. And I might be able to make a deal with someone in their family to donate a kidney to some compatible stranger if I wait long enough to find a family like that. But if I wait 50 years they may have invented kidney printers or changed the laws on donating kidneys, and the marginal value of my donation will fall to zero.

So maybe it's best I put all my money in the bank and wait for RCTs to clarify what the best uses of aid are and let the money compound, but don't wait too long that there will be very few extremely poor people.

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Central banks set short term rates, not long term rates.

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current interest rates are not equilibrium prices but set and controlled by Central Banks. This complicates the analysis, as you cannt argue with an equilibrium model any longer, unless you argue CB's will be abolished within that time frame.

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(wish you could edit comments after you post them, feel free to delete the above comment)

I didn’t say they were illusory either. If returns from interest aren’t completely from inflation then there is no other possible source of them than some combination of another investor’s loss and the productive gains (like a company turning discovering, processing, and selling a resource) of a firm. In other words, zero sum (the trading of financial products) plus real productive work. Does that sound illusory?

Do you care to defend your claim that a thief stealing the fund still counts or are you just going to cherry pick what criticisms you reply to?

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I didn't say they were illusory either. If returns from interest aren't from inflation then there is no other possible source of them than some other investor's loss and/or productive gains (like a company turning discovering, processing, and selling a resource). Does that sound illusory?

Do you care to defend your claim that a thief stealing the fund still counts or are you just going to cherry pick what criticisms you reply to?

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Further, this all seems to be trumped by the ability to donate toward existential risk mitigation.

Seconded. This seems to be a case where answer-type #4 is actually correct.

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Interest is a price, set by supply and demand. I say that if supply is bigger, the equilibrium price falls. You say that at a lower price there would be less supply, and demand would exceed supply. You seem to interpret me as arguing for an out-of-equilibrium price, whereas I'm actually talking entirely in terms of equilibrium prices.

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Robin, it is not necessarily a good thing for interest rates to fall (especially to zero). This would shut down savings and spur current consumption. Perhaps this would not be the most appropriate course of action, in terms of solving significant "charitable" problems.

It seems that you are advocating current saving (investment), in hopes that the compounded funds would be better able to solve key problems. If interest rates fall in the future, this would reduce future saving to solve then future problems. Ultimately, there is likely to be an equilibrium level of saving for the future. Maybe we're there, now.

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Perhaps you're right. Let him choose a "good science fiction" author, as opposed to a great one, like Ray Bradbury. Can you imagine the rewrite of "A Sound of Thunder"?

Robin would want to change the core of the plot. In the story, a tiny change in the prehistoric environment had profound changes in that of the present day. Using the same logic, small changes, today, could have tremendous benefits in the future. It appears that Robin is advocating a deferral of small changes, today, in the hope that large changes could be made "tomorrow". Kind of ruins the story.

Not a book I would wish to purchase.

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